590: Buy Your Car an iPhone
06 Jun 2024A strange but useful new product, how LLMs can learn, and our hopes and expectations for WWDC next week.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s fans
- Follow-up:
- Snapdragon X actually runs at 45 TOPS (via sciwizam)
- Justin Long shills for Qualcomm
- Windows Recall is a security “disaster”
- AMD enters the AI chat
- Intel’s new Lunar Lake CPUs
- When Apple said “The M2 iPad Air has 10 GPU cores” they really meant “9 GPU cores”
- How LLMs learn
- Retrieval-augmented generation (via Adeiko)
- On ∞ context (via Stephen Tierney)
- WWDC Preview
- Ask ATP:
- Any chance the expected late-2024 M4 MacBook Pro gets Thunderbolt 5? (via James)
- Any chance we’ll get 16GB RAM in the eventual M4 MacBook Air? (via David Martin)
- Could the lack of cellular Mac be because there’s no Apple modem? (via Winnie Lewis)
- Post-show Neutral: Kid cars, revisited
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s in-car dreams are a bit of a 🎢
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Chapters
- Phone coolers
- Snapdragon X: 45 TOPS
- Justin Long’s weird ad
- Windows Recall security
- CPU corner
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- How LLMs can learn
- WWDC hopes and expectations
- Sponsor: Factor
- #askatp: Thunderbolt 5 for M4 MBP?
- #askatp: 16 GB standard?
- #askatp: Cellular-Mac excuses
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Kid car revisited 🖼️
Phone coolers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a ridiculous product category that I would like to briefly review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is gonna be interesting, carry on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you remember a few, maybe six months ago, it was a while ago, I remember exactly when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, it was when the new iPhones came out. Remember they ran a little warm and we were discussing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefly how, isn’t it annoying when you first get a new iPhone and it has to like re-index everything as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s being all set up and everything, it’s indexing all your photos and it gets really hot and maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slows down and throttles its performance as a result. And we jokingly discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Razer, the gaming PC company, they make a like magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clip on, like a MagSafe mounting cooling fan with a thermoelectric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco element slash Peltier, however you pronounce those, with one of those in it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help cool phones while gaming. You’re about to
⏹️ ▶️ John pull a Casey. What does that mean? Talk about something that we’ve talked about past episodes already.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, fair. That is 100% pulling a
⏹️ ▶️ John say let’s say let’s sit back and watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just said that we spoke about in the past, so he’s clear. He’s acknowledged
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Go ahead. And also, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought I have to try this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why we would slow down? Why? Why would you need? Why do you need to cool your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about once a year? I need that because when I’m like setting up a new iPhone, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really kind of terrible. So I thought, you know what? What the heck? Let me let me try. I could and talk about it on the show. I placed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an order on Amazon, like shortly after we recorded that episode. It was backordered immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just has never arrived. Like it never will arrive at this point. In the intermediate times, random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon sellers with those vowel combination names that, you know, they last about six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they disappear and make new vowel combination names. They have come up with entries in this product category.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at the same time, I’ve been facing a problem as I am using my iPhone 15 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the dashboard of my car, like in the dash mount on road trips, as it’s getting warmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s starting to become a problem that my phone is really getting like quite hot in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while being used this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you use CarPlay?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm. You should.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You definitely should use CarPlay. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John gonna say that every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey time you bring this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. You should. So anyway, so I, and it’s getting so hot that, you know, like the screen starts dimming and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery can’t keep up with the charge and everything, so I’m like, I’m like, this is kind of annoying. It’s also probably not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the phone, for its battery life and et cetera, and for its components to be like super hot for hours and hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing like a long road trip.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should buy your car an iPhone. Remember when you bought your car a watch?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just an iPhone that’s just for the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I ordered two product entrants in this category.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One is just like basically a direct copy of the Razer thing. So it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fan with a thermoelectric plate in it to chill below ambient temperature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just has a USB-C input, and it mounts via MagSafe. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t charge the phone. I was a little wary, like, you know, because the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermoelectric plates work, it’s incredibly power consuming. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing like a heat pump, like an air conditioner, where like you can get pretty cool temperatures that are not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much energy. No, like those Peltier plates use a ton of power to make a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooling. And so I thought, how much could I possibly get out of like a USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powered fan for 30 bucks on Amazon? Like how cool could it possibly get? Let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, surprisingly cool. Like it’s cool to the touch immediately upon plugging it in and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually cools the phone pretty well. That being said, the one that just mounts to the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just like a standalone thing, it’s not really made to be used in a car. What I wanted for the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a MagSafe charging puck some kind of mount that could like stick to the dash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way that also had cooling built in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does this actually exist? I’m assuming you’re about to tell me it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course it exists because of Amazon. So it not only does it exist, there’s like 25 of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all again from these weird, you know, no name brands. So of course I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two of them to try because they like I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would fit my car. There’s not a lot of options that will that have like a stick on mount. Usually they require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the vent mounting, which The placement of the vents in Rivian’s it’s like it’s only look down low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s not really anywhere to put something like that. Anyway, so I try one of these and I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took my last road trip with I went upstate about a week ago and it worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastically. So let me let me just set expectations accordingly. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of it that has like charging and a cooler in it, the phone does not get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. It is not strong enough, it just can’t keep up. it’s that’s a huge thermal load. It does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep up, it does not keep the phone cool. However, it does keep the phone a lot less warm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it keeps it from overheating. It keeps the screen from dimming. It keeps it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slowly charging. And so it actually does serve a pretty useful function
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here like in the summertime when my phone was getting so hot in like regular car rides, it was like hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the touch. It actually works. So this ridiculous thing in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car that was from some no-name brand that has a thermoelectric plate and a cooling fan behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone and MagSafe charges it, actually works and is totally worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whatever 35 or $40 it was. So I gotta say, if you have this problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check out this category of products. You don’t think it would work, it shouldn’t work, and yet it does
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you already mentioned this, like the Rivian Vance to download or whatever, but the regular car version of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in my cars where my MagSafe, my charging mag safe magnetic mount is clipped
⏹️ ▶️ John to an air vent, I just turn the AC on and it blows AC air on the back of my phone the whole time I’m driving and my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally cold. Yeah, I mean, that is the better approach if you have that option.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not, I don’t know if that’s, it’s not intentional. I don’t actually like it that it’s blowing air on it because in the winter it blows hot
⏹️ ▶️ John air, but you know, the fact is my phone doesn’t overheat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you put a link to this, certainly in the show notes, can you share it with us so I can laugh at how ridiculous this is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it’s bad. I mean, because it’s hideous. I mean here let me show
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Hold on. So you said like the Rivian vents, like you can’t clip anything to them? They’re just too weird, like weird electric car-y
⏹️ ▶️ John type vents and they’re down too low?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are weird electric car-y vents, but yeah, the bigger problem is they’re mounted down like at the bottom of the dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s actually, it’s not a great place for them even just to be vents, although Hops loves them. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I just put a link in the chat. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It does look like a gigantic tongue.
⏹️ ▶️ John tongue licking an ice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hockey puck. So I have that, I mean, I’m using that mount with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this second one, with this charging pad, because this one was a little bit, it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit stronger cooling.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love that the artwork makes it look like it’s gonna make frost form on your phone, which I think would not be good. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Truthfully, it’s not as bad as I thought, but it’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, look, it’s ugly, but you don’t see it. And one thing I was surprised by, the fan really is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loud. Like you don’t, you really don’t hear the fan in a car. Cars are loud. Like it’s going to be drowned out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John by the sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the car. Yeah, electric cars aren’t. I was actually concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like the wind noise and tire noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alone. Yeah. I mean the tire noise. Yeah, for sure. Like you do hear that, but I was, I was very pleasantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised that it actually is really not too loud. Here, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this one, if you just want a cooler, not a charger, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other one that actually cools it substantially better. I think they’re all kind of limited by how much power they’re going to draw from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB. Like I have one of those little USB power meter things. The one that the Lysen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one draws the most. That’s about 20 Watts while charging a phone and cooling. And that seems to be the max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone else was around like 12 to 15 Watts. So like they could theoretically use USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power delivery to have like even higher rates, but for some reason they don’t do that. And I haven’t looked into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that further, but like I haven’t found one that does for whatever reason. But this, look, these are fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they work fine. It’s a bit of a, and look, this is ridiculous. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t need to do this. Our phones shouldn’t be overheating when just operating in a car, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do. And here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t know if you can blame it on the phone. I mean, I would blame it on the car maker for making you use your phone in that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, because the car is like, even when you’re driving, I know it’s like air conditioned or whatever, but it’s like in direct
⏹️ ▶️ John sunlight, right? That’s pretty much, and it’s like a little greenhouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a difficult situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m using wireless charging, which of course generates some heat. And I have a case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the phone, which of course also basically insulates the heat on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a lot of factors working against it, but it is kind of a ridiculous problem, but a ridiculous problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deserves a ridiculous solution, I found one!
Snapdragon X: 45 TOPS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up Cy was am or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wrote with regard to the snapdragon X10 whatever this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trillions of operations per second and that person wrote While 40 tops is the minimum spec
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for something to be called a copilot plus PC all snapdragon X elite and plus chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are actually rated at 45 trillion operations per second
⏹️ ▶️ John apologize for underselling the Snapdragon X 45 tops.
Justin Long’s weird ad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. I am glad to hear it. Justin Long has come back around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I actually really liked him when he was very popular like 15 years ago, but he is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actor that you would know as the Mac to the foil of John Hodgman’s PC. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came back to promote Qualcomm powered Windows PCs. I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what to make of this, but The Verge writes, Apple’s former on the Mac actor Justin Long defected to Intel a few years ago, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now he’s looking to switch to a Qualcomm powered Windows PC during Qualcomm’s Computex 2024 keynote today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long appeared in a brief 30 second skit where he was bombarded by MacOS notifications and nag screens causing him to start searching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a Snapdragon-powered PC instead. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but a link to Ruber’s post about this, which covers pretty much everything I wanted to say about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But yeah, the main thing that’s really baffling is like, okay, so you know, you get the actor that was in an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ad campaign, you try to ride an Apple’s coattails, you do a thing, Intel has done it before. Apparently he’s done this for Huawei
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, whatever, but like you have to have some motivation for the person in
⏹️ ▶️ John the ad to be saying, I’m dissatisfied with Apple, so I’m gonna get a Copyle Plus PC
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, right? But the reason he’s dissatisfied is he gets
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications, like the email has arrived and stuff. I mean, you can turn off notifications, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they should have asked an actual Mac user, what’s annoying about Mac OS? We can tell you, like there are things you could put in the ad that
⏹️ ▶️ John are legit, but what they had in the ad I was like, why does this make him want a new computer? It
⏹️ ▶️ John is just not a sensible ad. And it shows like real, just not, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John just ask anyone who has a Mac. They’ll tell you what’s annoying about Mac OS. For example, like the, I think that people have
⏹️ ▶️ John done ads on this, all the stupid permission things, right? The pop-up, you know, that we’ve been complaining about for ages. Jason Stahl
⏹️ ▶️ John had a big post about when he had set up a new computer. That’s actually annoying. Show those flying in his face
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, boy, I just tried to set up a new computer and I had to give a million different versions to a million different apps. I’m gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John a Snapdragon X co-pilot plus PC because then I won’t have to deal with that. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a sensible ad showing an actual pain point but this failed to do that. So anyway, I’m glad he’s getting paid to do
⏹️ ▶️ John ads and it is really just a,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, I don’t know, embarrassing move to
⏹️ ▶️ John be trying to play off of a very, now very old Apple ad campaign rather than making your
⏹️ ▶️ John own ad campaign, but you know, advertising is what it is.
Windows Recall security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Windows Recall, everyone seemed to be really worked up about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how this was going to be a security nightmare. And I’ll actually admit that I assumed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, no, Microsoft knows what they’re doing. This surely can’t be as bad as everyone fears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s as bad as everyone fears, if not worse. Recall is part of the—this is reading from The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge—recall is part of the new Copilot Plus PCs that are debuting on June 18th, but experts who have tested the feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are already warning that recall could be a quote-unquote disaster for cybersecurity. Kevin Beaumont writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. Kevin’s post has a big like, you know, mock Q&A about the way it’s implemented.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as we said in the last show that, or maybe it was a show before that, that the people who are have not
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of mentally prepared for the idea of a feature like this by, you know, knowing about rewind
⏹️ ▶️ John or live streams or whatever, it’s just blowing their mind that something’s is going to be recording their screen all the time, and it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John really terrible, and they don’t want it. And now that people see the actual implementation,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, the implementation does have problems. But a lot of the freaking out about it is about sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John policy decisions. So one of them is that it’s on by default, and apparently during the
⏹️ ▶️ John setup process for a new PC, you can’t opt out during the setup process. You have to
⏹️ ▶️ John finish the setup process and then go in settings and turn it off, right? So you can turn it off, but it’s on by default, and you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to hunt down the thing to do it, just mind-boggling. Everyone has like all the enterprise admins for Windows PC, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, enterprise IT people are already paranoid. They’re, I’m sure they’re slamming
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft saying we need a way to turn this off by default because we don’t want everything recorded on our computers because
⏹️ ▶️ John during legal discovery, during lawsuits, we don’t want to give a lot of information, all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then as you alluded to Casey, there’s the okay, but how is actually implemented? Some
⏹️ ▶️ John aspects of it are unavoidable. If you are recording everything that’s on the screen and those recordings are accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John to the logged in user, then those recordings are accessible to the logged in user. You know what I mean? Like people
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be recorded, but they’re like, yeah, but I don’t want bad people to see it. Well, guess what? Bad people can gain
⏹️ ▶️ John access to your account as you. And then if you can see it, they can see it. So the mere existence
⏹️ ▶️ John of a treasure trove of recordings of everything you’ve done is in itself a security problem, no
⏹️ ▶️ John matter how quote unquote secure it is. There’s no way you can make it so secure that it can’t be hacked
⏹️ ▶️ John because then the user wouldn’t be able to see it either. Like for it to be useful, you have to be able to be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John go back in time and look at stuff. If you take away that ability, you can make it real secure. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a very usable feature, right? So that I think is just, that’s never gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed. It’s just people are just gonna have to live with it and deal with it and be fine. But the second part is, okay, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you should at least make it so that other people can’t see it easily. Like it should be encrypted on disk and stuff like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t even do that. It’s like a plain unencrypted SQLite database that’s accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John to, of course, the logged in user. Apparently it’s also accessible to any admin user on the system. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a plain text file. They didn’t even encrypt it at rest. So implementation of this does not look great
⏹️ ▶️ John and turning it on by default does not seem great. And it’s basically giving the Copilot Plus PCs kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John a marketing black eye before they have a chance to impress people with all the good things about them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like this is not the fault of the Snapdragon X processor. This is not the fault of the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the fault of Windows, including this feature and turning it on by default and apparently implementing it poorly. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Microsoft, they’ve got a lot of work. By the time you hear this episode, presumably Microsoft will have issued an apology and said they’re not gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John it on by default and yada yada, but right now things don’t look good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I assume they will have it off by default before it’s released because there’s way too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many problems. And we talked about all this when Rewind AI came out, whenever we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that like months ago. and then again on our overtime a couple weeks ago, you know, as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, like, there’s really no good way to have this data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, like, you know, quote, only accessible to good reasons or good people or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the ultimately, like, as long as this data is being collected somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your computer or on some service, like whatever it is, like even if you have it all local, all encrypted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still being collected. And there will be ways to exploit that People will find security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes. Malware will try to access it. Some malware will succeed in accessing it. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are also things like legal discovery risks and things like that, that will make a lot of companies not want to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just plain old social engineering, because again, the user can access it. So if you can convince the user to do something,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s most of hacking and malware is based on tricking people into doing something, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s, again, there’s no way to collect this and have it be totally safe. If the user
⏹️ ▶️ John has access to it, the user is the weakest link.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and there are so many practical and privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerns and just legal concerns with this. How are they getting around things like wiretapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laws? There’s so many problems with these kind of approaches. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s interesting that these tools exist. They make for fantastic demos and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people will use them and will love them. It is so far from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being appropriate to be on by default. Like that is, we are nowhere, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nowhere near that universally good that it should be on by default. This should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something that it’s fine for companies like Rewind to have products that do this. It’s interesting that Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it at the OS level now. It’s wonderful to have it as an option for those like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power productivity users who know about it, who know exactly what it’s doing and who will opt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it. It has to be only for them though. It cannot be everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opted in by default. that is just irresponsible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, not good, Bob, but here we are.
CPU corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AMD’s next generation of AI laptop processors have been announced. Reading from The Verge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AMD announced at Computex 2024 that its next generation of Ryzen laptop processors for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generative AI workloads. The Ryzen AI 300 series. It’s a rebrand of its top-tier Ryzen 9
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chips. The new Ryzen AI chips are built on AMD’s latest architectures for neural, integrated graphics,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and general processing. The first two processors in the series are the Ryzen AI 9HX370, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rolls right off the tongue, and the similarly eloquent Ryzen AI 9 365.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both have 50 trillion operations per second on their NPUs, but the HX variant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the higher end of the two. You know that because it says HX.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we mentioned in the last episode, or whenever we talked about the Copilot Plus PCs, that AMD, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Intel also have processors that they’re going to be rolling out that are going to qualify as Copilot Plus PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just an ARM thing. So they’re behind, but they’re catching up. And look, there’s AI right in the processor
⏹️ ▶️ John name. I’m sure they’ll never regret that branding, and it won’t look dated when we look back on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But 50 tops, hey, better than 45, right? So good job, AMD.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. All right. Intel has also detailed its new Lunar Lake CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will go up against the aforementioned AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple. Reading this time from Ars Technica, Lunar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lake will be Intel’s first processor with a neural processing unit, or NPU, that meets Microsoft’s Copilot Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC requirements. Intel rates Lunar Lake’s NPU raw performance at 48 tops. Lunar Lake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has two functional tiles. The compute tile combines all of the processor’s performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and efficiency cores, the GPU, the NPU, the display outputs, and the media encoding and decoding engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the platform controller tile handles wired and wireless connectivity, including PCIe and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Another big packaging change is that Intel is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integrating RAM into the CPU package, just like Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John So does this sound familiar? This is, you know, the Apple sort of led the charge here in the mass market
⏹️ ▶️ John PC for the market for mass market PCs, right? They they’ve made their system on a chip. It’s got the RAM in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John package. It’s got the whole thing in a giant SoC. Here’s Intel finally catching
⏹️ ▶️ John up with that philosophy. I think the AMD one is similar with a chiplet type thing. But this is
⏹️ ▶️ John I really feel like this is Apple leading and people are going to say, well, Apple isn’t the first one to do that. Lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John done it before. So on and so forth. But Apple showed that it can perform very well in personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computers That they sell millions of to regular people put it all on one chip put the GPU on
⏹️ ▶️ John there Put the neural processing the media encoder engine everything and so here’s Intel Basically
⏹️ ▶️ John many years later saying let’s do that now. They have things separated. I think we’ve talked about this before I think they’re using like different
⏹️ ▶️ John processes for different parts of the chip I think the like the the connectivity thing is not
⏹️ ▶️ John built on the same Three nanometer processor or whatever. I think they might I forget what the details are if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using TSMC to fab this or whatever But so taking a slightly different approach to Apple because Apple can afford to just put it on all
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing which is has some Efficiency benefits, but of course is also more costly,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s really kind of weird to see the PC world Essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John following Apple’s lead and deciding you know what that thing Apple decided to do with the m1 We should
⏹️ ▶️ John make all our PCs like that to Snapdragon, AMD, Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John all seem to be moving in that direction. At least for like the low-end and medium-end laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John type things. When it comes to big desktop PC and gaming PCs, they still have just giant discrete GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John that use a ton of power and giant chips that aren’t SoCs. So in that respect,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not following Apple down that path, but boy, even if I had predicted that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when the M1 came out that by the time Apple has the M4, Intel, AMD, and the ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John things will be following. That’s, I feel like that’s unexpected. I would have been more likely to think,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, maybe the whole PC world will go ARM as discussed in past episode. Doesn’t look like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all going ARM, especially since the Copilot Plus PC thing isn’t firing off like gangbusters,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m still holding out hope. And anyway, in the meantime, Intel and AMD are in the game too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Apple and M chips, Apple says the M2 iPad Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it doesn’t have 10 GPU cores. We actually meant nine. Cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, we’re cool, right? Reading from Mac Rumors, Apple has seemingly updated its tech specs webpage for the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M2 iPad Air models to indicate the M2 chip has a nine core GPU rather than 10 cores as previously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stated. The change was first reported by a 9to5Mac based on available web snapshots. The update to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey US website was made within the last 10 days. This was written two days ago as we record. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the equivalent webpage on many of Apple’s regional stores still lists the M2 iPad Air as having a 10-core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPU. Eventually, a statement was provided to 9to5Mac, and Apple said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the details it shared with the iPad Air’s performance were always based on a nine-core GPU. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, and I’m quoting, we are updating apple.com to correct the core count for the M2 iPad Air. All the performance claims
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the M2 iPad Air are accurate and based on a nine-core GPU. Whoopsie-dupsies.
⏹️ ▶️ John What a weird flub. Like, I mean, it doesn’t even seem like it’s a last-minute decision. This is something
⏹️ ▶️ John that had to have been decided long ago, but like maybe there was a miscommunication. Like they decided to go with the nine core
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of the 10 core to save money on the iPad Air and just the web team didn’t hear about it even though that decision
⏹️ ▶️ John was made four months ago. Like it’s not like they started manufacturing the iPad Air on the day of the announcement or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very strange. Not a big deal for the iPad Air, that’s fine. but I don’t know what’s going on over there.
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How LLMs can learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about LLMs and how they can learn. Adeko writes, there’s some quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new tech that aims to enable LLMs to learn in context in production, avoiding the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of relying solely on RAG or retrieval augmented generation. While promising, this approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is significantly more expensive. Here’s a paper explaining, and we’ll put in the show notes, the methodology from earlier this year and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a video discussing the current limitations you mentioned on the episode and a potential solution that is clearly explained. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of these links in the show notes. John, care to summarize and or dissect for us?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so there’s one video that says, what is RAG? What is retrieval augmented generation? And
⏹️ ▶️ John my summary of it would be, you take what the person typed into their chat bot, and you stick
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of text in front of it. And then you send that to the chat bot. And picking the
⏹️ ▶️ John text you stick in front of it, you, I mean, they’re not actually doing this, but like, you can imagine if they
⏹️ ▶️ John ask some question about cars, you would do a Google search based on what they asked
⏹️ ▶️ John and take the results of that Google search and stick it to the front of their text and then take that whole lot of text and
⏹️ ▶️ John throw it through the LLM, right? It’s taking more than what you said, but trying to augment
⏹️ ▶️ John it with some context. Okay, LLM, maybe you weren’t trained on any data about cars, but I’m going to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John the latest up-to-date information about the car they mentioned in their prompt, and I’m going to put that in front of their prompt,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I’m going to shove all that text, their question, plus all the text I grabbed about the latest cars, and I’m going to chuck that into
⏹️ ▶️ John the LLM because you know the LLMs are like, oh, I don’t know anything after 2021, right? Like the old versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of chat dbt would say that because they were trained on older data. But what if someone’s asking about something that’s more recent that the
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM could not have been trained on or maybe just wasn’t trained on because it’s really narrow interest. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what rag is, right? But of course, that has lots of limitations. We’ll put the second video says, what are the
⏹️ ▶️ John limitations of rag and you learn all about that. And then the final thing is continual learning for large language models
⏹️ ▶️ John that the paper, um, scientific paper that we’ll link and this is the I think from the abstract
⏹️ ▶️ John it says large language models are not amenable to frequent retraining due to high training costs arising from their massive scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John However, updates are necessary to endow LLMs with new skills and keep them up to date with rapidly evolving human knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ John This paper surveys recent work on continual learning for LLMs right so the idea is you know we said before when
⏹️ ▶️ John you throw things through an LLM the weights the little numbers inside the LLM don’t change right
⏹️ ▶️ John they take input they produce output but the inside of that LLM never changes so you can’t teach it anything all All you can do is
⏹️ ▶️ John make your prompt bigger and bigger and hope that the information in your prompt influences the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does influence the answer, but not as much as training the LLM on a whole bunch of that information.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so that’s RAG.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So then Stephen Tierney writes that Sundar Pichai’s infinite context window claim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Google I.O. seems to stem from this paper, which is entitled Leave No Context Behind, Efficient Infinite Context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Transformers with Infinite Attention. This work introduces an efficient method to scale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transformer-based large language models to infinitely long inputs with bounded memory and computation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A key component in our proposed approach is a new attention technique that incorporates a compressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory into the vanilla attention mechanism. The attention mechanism in transformers exhibits quadratic complexity in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both memory footprint and computation time. Compressive memory systems promise to be more scalable and efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for extremely long sequences. Instead of using an array that grows with the input sequence length, a compressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory primarily maintains a fixed number of parameters to store and recall information with a bounded storage and computation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost. In the compressive memory, new information is added to the memory by changing its parameters with an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey objective that this information can be recovered back later on. John, translate that for me, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the scaling thing, for people who ever took a computer science class with big O notation, it’s like, how does this
⏹️ ▶️ John algorithm scale with the size of the input? For example, linear scaling would be, if you asked me to process 20
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things, I’d take twice as as long as if you ask me to process 10, right? That’s linear scaling. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John have other kinds of scaling where it scales to the square of the input, and that’s worse, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And quadratic, like that’s what they’re getting at there. The point is, if you make longer and longer
⏹️ ▶️ John inputs to the LLM, it just, the time goes like a hockey stick
⏹️ ▶️ John graph, it gets really, really bad. It doesn’t even scale linearly. And even linear would be bad because Sundar Pichai
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying, you’re gonna have infinite context. We have a limitation now of like two million tokens, And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. You can put a large wallet of text through our LLM. Pretty big, right? But you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I was mentioning, like the infinite context, open the door to the idea of like, can you actually teach an LLM? Well, if
⏹️ ▶️ John your context is infinite, you can just keep typing stuff until the LLM gets it. No LLM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me tell you more about this thing. And let me tell you more. Like essentially, you’re not training it. You’re not changing the weights,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, anytime I type anything, you know, the last billion characters I’ve written to it over the past
⏹️ ▶️ John five years get sent through the LLM, plus the question I just asked stuck at the end. And that’s, as you can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine, incredibly inefficient because of the way it scales. So this infinite context thing is like, well, we’re not gonna do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead, we’re gonna use this thing where we kind of like, we try to do with a fixed amount of memory and computation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand how they’re doing it, but it’s like, I feel like they have some sort of block that the input goes into and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it modifies the values in that block. And it just keeps doing that over and over again. And finally
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets the final block and sends that through the LLM after it’s been modified by all the input. but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much less compelling. Like many people who wrote in about this is like, yeah, it’s not really infinite context. It’s more like
⏹️ ▶️ John taking an infinite amount of input and squishing it down to a small finite size and sending that through the LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John and hoping you’ve preserved enough information to get a useful answer out of it. And by the way, the
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing, the previous link about the continual learning is that
⏹️ ▶️ John some people are looking into the idea of what if we did change the weights when you sent a question or something
⏹️ ▶️ John through? If you talk to an LLM and you try to tell it something, can we retrain based on what you
⏹️ ▶️ John put in and change the weights of the model? And that’s an area of research or whatever. And as I mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John that opens the door for people to screw up the LMs and make them terrible. You could tell it a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of bogus stuff. And now your LM just gets dumber and worse and tells more lies. It’s like children.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can teach them whatever you want. You hope you teach them good things and teach them how to read and write
⏹️ ▶️ John and do math correctly and be a nice, polite person or whatever, and what
⏹️ ▶️ John you will get out of all that effort is hopefully a good adult, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are terrible to them and do terrible things and tell them lies, the results will be worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So the ability of, as you can imagine, if you allowed anyone on the internet to
⏹️ ▶️ John type anything they want that would actually change your LLM, that would be bad instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John We already saw that with the non-trainable LLMs. Remember when Microsoft put their chatbot up and it was like spewing Nazi
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. That’s just because it’s trained on the internet and it’s filled with all sorts of terrible things. So they’re trying to tamp that down. But this would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, no, it will be retrained based on the things you tell it. Nightmare fuel.
⏹️ ▶️ John But of course, if you had your own independent LLM and you were sensible, then you can mess up yours and other people
⏹️ ▶️ John would have their own and they can mess up theirs. And you know, it’s an interesting idea. But the infinite contact went, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, the LLM doesn’t change until we release a new version. The weights are unchangeable, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John allow you to type an infinite amount information in your prompt and maybe that’ll make it do something sensible.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of these approaches seem super great to me but I’m glad people are trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to get around the current limitations because the current limitations are crippling for some use
⏹️ ▶️ John cases like they just basically make it impossible to do certain things reliably. Doesn’t mean they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John useful, they’re useful for other things but certain use cases it becomes completely useless so
⏹️ ▶️ John I will look forward to this research advancing but when it’s appearing in in scientific papers and stuff, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John me think it’s many years from being practically implemented, but we’ll see.
WWDC hopes and expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, as we sit here, it is the evening of Wednesday the 5th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in just a few short days, we will all be flying west to these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey greater San Jose area in order to go to WWDC, Apple’s annual worldwide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer conference. As we mentioned last episode, all three of us will be there barring any plane catastrophes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all three of us are super excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what, I, you never know what will happen. So I just mean like a delay for the record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I didn’t that’s not what it’s about. Please, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not getting any better. Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in post. So yeah, WDC is coming up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should probably talk about what to expect. And honestly, I I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very surprised, well, maybe not surprised, but impressed with the lack of like concrete leaks. And let me go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through a few things here. Unless one of you has an opening statement, we go through a few things that we haven’t really talked about that we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use as jumping off points. But by and large, I feel like it’s pretty,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty well under lock and key what we’re gonna see on Monday. LAZARTE
⏹️ ▶️ John Why do you think that? It’s just because the things we’ve talked about have been rumored. I believe most of the things will come to pass, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s what they’re gonna show. But we’ll say, we’ll go through the items we have here. Again, we’ve talked about a lot of things on past episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John that have been rumored for WWDC, and I don’t think many of them have been debunked. They’re just sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John out there for us waiting to see if they’re true or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey COWEN Yeah, so we’ll start. Mark Ermerin has said, read my lips, no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new hardware. And so, there’s apparently not gonna be any hardware. hardware this year, which I don’t think is particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprising, but Mark has stated it is definitely not happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that sometimes happens. We have the no hardware WWDCs. Sometimes Apple itself kind of leaks it to control expectations.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this case, I don’t think there were any particular expectations that Apple needed to leak to tamp
⏹️ ▶️ John down other than my unrealistic expectations about the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s cold water on that. My expectations about Siri not sucking. Well, yeah, but no hardware, no
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware WWDC. You know, we just had a bunch of hardware There’s the only hardware that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should be updating right now are the ones they apparently can’t update because the chips aren’t ready and that would be the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John I Mean, you know, he was pretty definitive and when he comes out this close to the W2VC and says no hardware I just have to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s gonna be no hardware. So I’m sad about it, but perhaps not surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, let me jump in and go a little off script here Do you think John that this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year that the the forthcoming Mac OS release whatever it may be called? Do you think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the year that they start really hammering down or, you know, like taking away stuff for Intel?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because you have, you aren’t missing out on much on your ancient ass Mac Pro, right? Performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John but we didn’t talk about this, like what year we thought the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mac was going
⏹️ ▶️ John to stop. I forget what I predicted, but whatever I predicted back then, I stick by because I think that was
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a reasonable prediction. Maybe this year. I don’t know. I feel like it’s a little bit early, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’ll see. Like I don’t, and here’s half the reason I think it’s not gonna come this year is
⏹️ ▶️ John because that would require extra work by Apple to deal with that. And they’re like, oh, Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John do we really wanna put that much effort in? Let’s do it next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, so speaking of Mac OS and also iOS, allegedly, according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Mark Gurman, the settings app is getting revamped with a cleaner interface, better organization and much improved search.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s both iOS and Mac OS, like I said. I’ll believe it when I see it in so far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I don’t doubt that they’ve touched and maybe rejiggered some stuff in settings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know, I am not as offended by settings as most people, but I can absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you it is a mess. And although I haven’t looked at it in a little while, I feel like they’ve kind of given a hint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this on the Vision Pro, because the Vision Pro settings are vastly different than any other platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to my recollection, they do make a modicum of sense in there. So maybe we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see that getting cribbed and put into iOS and macOS. but one way or another, we’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this rumor doesn’t have enough detail to be that interesting, either because it’s just a vague rumor and they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have details, or because the person conveying this rumor doesn’t understand what’s wrong with settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. I was revamping it to get a cleaner interface. I don’t think the complaints were that the interface was not
⏹️ ▶️ John clean. I mean, I don’t feel clean using it. Yeah, Jason had a good article of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, you can use hierarchy to arrange information visually and conceptually,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that can make things easier to find. And just, we don’t wanna re-litigate everything that’s wrong with settings,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like there’s no concrete things about what are they fixing? They’re like, oh, well, they’re just rearranging stuff. Some things, they’re putting things in different places
⏹️ ▶️ John and the search will be better. Those are all good, like improvements are welcome, but I haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone say they’re totally overhauling it and it’s gonna be good now. It’s just, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John minor improvements. And, you know, I guess if you do minor improvements many years repeatedly, you’ll get better and better and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be fine. I’m still not jazzed about the setting up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s still full of bugs even. Setting aside the design, which is I think still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poor, I don’t really necessarily need them to massively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revamp the design if it’s still going to be this buggy. If they only do one thing to improve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I’d rather they make the current design actually work correctly. But that being said, a new design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would also be welcome. But I’m hoping, whatever this rumor is, I’m hoping that what they’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying is it’s been worked on a lot. And maybe that will include some bug fixes also. But it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels like a broken web app version of something that’s trying to imitate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iOS setting screen. It does not feel like anything that would ever have come from Apple if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have shown people, even five or 10 years ago, like, hey, this is current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple software. In the year 2024. David, look at him like, are
⏹️ ▶️ John you serious? Yeah, we’re talking about Mac OS settings, but this rumor is actually primarily about
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS settings, which, you know, we all are familiar with and doesn’t need as much attention as Mac OS settings, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re rearranging stuff, splitting out some things that were previously combined. iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John settings, the search has always, has had many years of work in it. So that’s how a lot of us navigate settings because you can’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly where something is. But, you know, in all cases, I feel like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the general philosophy of settings in both Mac OS or on iOS is being maintained to be the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just like, maybe we could arrange things better. And I think on iOS, the design is reasonable. On Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should have better information, organization and hierarchy, given the larger size of the screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and the more sophisticated input methods. And as for the bugs, we’ve said this before, when settings were first redesigned, how much of it
⏹️ ▶️ John is the settings app? How much of it is SwiftUI bugs? I mean, I know it’s all the same company and they can complain
⏹️ ▶️ John directly to the SwiftUI people, But when stuff like text fields, like don’t stay editable or lose focus
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re in the middle of typing, I worry, I wonder about that. And sometimes they’re using like, quote unquote standard controls
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think are bad standard controls. The settings team didn’t define those controls. They’re using the standard controls
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of this form thing in SwiftUI. And I think those controls are bad. I think they look
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I think they don’t work well. But the settings team didn’t make those, right? They’re just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, using the OS level controls. So to the extent that they’re buggy, I think a lot of it is probably on
⏹️ ▶️ John the frameworks teams. And to the extent that those controls are bad, that’s all on the frameworks team. Like one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John drives me up a wall and I just can’t believe this is not, I guess it’s in settings, but you know the
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords pain in settings when you edit like a password and it makes you edit text in like
⏹️ ▶️ John a right aligned thing. I feel like I’m writing in a right to left language or left
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever, whatever the opposite of the way English is. Right to left. Have you done this and seen it?
⏹️ ▶️ John It breaks my brain how like backspacing and forward spacing and moving text goes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re editing right aligned text for like the password. I don’t want any
⏹️ ▶️ John surprises or unexpected behaviors when I’m editing the text of a password in plain text,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Just, that’s not a good way to let me edit
⏹️ ▶️ John information. It’s name value pairs, username, password, website. Don’t make it
⏹️ ▶️ John right aligned in a text field that has no borders, that’s the same color as the background that just behaves in bizarre
⏹️ ▶️ John ways. That’s the stuff that really needs to be fixed. And the settings team, well maybe for the right-aligning
⏹️ ▶️ John thing they have control over that, but I’m not sure how much control the settings team has over that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but this is like maybe not their fault, but it is their problem, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, they were building this app on what seems to have been definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shaky design concept of let’s just make it look like iOS. And that didn’t go so well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Building it on top of SwiftUI for Mac, which is not the greatest platform for SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to date so far. But at the same time, nobody was forcing them to do this. Nobody was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least, the SwiftUI team doesn’t run the company. So the SwiftUI team was not forcing the rest of the company to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, you better rewrite all your stuff in SwiftUI right now. And even if they were,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not our problem as the customers. This is a self-created problem internally to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. So what we see, we don’t care what it’s written in, We don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what team dynamics there were or what they wanted to do on a technical level to make it more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idealistic. All we see is the Settings app is really weird and sucks now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, it was not in perfect shape before, but it’s bad now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like they did a whole bunch of work and came out with something that was just still very bad, just in new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and different ways. You know, the example you gave with the typing in a right-aligned text field,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of what I see in the settings app feels like no one has ever used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I feel like I’m trying out some code that I just wrote for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and I’m running it in the simulator and I’m trying it out and like, oh, this doesn’t work. Okay, back to the drawing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco board. But they shipped it that way. Like it just seems like it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a design concept that they showed in a meeting one day and someone hit the wrong button and shipped it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, the reason I think they’re sticking with design, it did solve a bunch of the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John they had with the old fixed layout. Like, the old fixed layout just wasn’t scalable. You couldn’t add more stuff easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything was sort of hand laid out. And it was hand laid out over like a decade and a half by different people. So you could sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of see the different. One preference pane was different than another, was different than another, based on when
⏹️ ▶️ John it was made, and who made it, and what they decided to do, and what mood they were in. And this is uniform, and scalable, and scrollable, and extensible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the building blocks that they use to achieve that, they’re bad building blocks, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The individual controls, the way it scales, the way it looks, the way it works, that’s all bad. So they did solve
⏹️ ▶️ John their problem. Hey, now we have a scalable solution for settings in macOS. But they’ve brought
⏹️ ▶️ John on themselves, to your point, Mark, many new problems by using these new controls that either weren’t ready
⏹️ ▶️ John or buggy or just bad ideas. And that is a shame. So we’ll see. Again, I welcome any kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of improvement, but there is no rumor that it’s a complete overhaul that adds information hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John and visual hierarchy and restores some of the hand laid out things for the most common controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s what they should really do. Like the old hand laid out one, like the good ones, the nice preference panes that were
⏹️ ▶️ John hand laid out and beautiful, they were nice and easy to use and you could remember what they look like and you could remember where
⏹️ ▶️ John controls were spatially and it was like being in a place, in a room, with furniture arranged and all my wonderful things that
⏹️ ▶️ John I love, but it was just nice, right? And you can’t do that for every single one. So you do need a scalable solution for more settings,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You got to have that and they should have a better system But for the most commonly used screen like the
⏹️ ▶️ John five most commonly used setting screens And I’m sure Apple knows what those are Hand lay them out make
⏹️ ▶️ John up bring in an actual good UI designer who remembers what Mac years of innocent user interfaces Oh bring someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s ever used a web form because I can’t remember any time I was asked to like update
⏹️ ▶️ John my passport on a web page and the text field was right aligned in English It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sense. Who thought of that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the labels were like massively far away from the values. Just disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an adventure in there, but we’ll see what happens. Vision OS 2.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There haven’t been very many rumors about this. Somebody pointed out, I don’t have the toot in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but somebody pointed out that, hey, Vision OS shipped in the middle of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software lifecycle for Apple. And so it would not be surprising if Vision OS 2.0 is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just getting all the low hangers, some of the low-hanging fruit that didn’t ship for 1.0. But one of the things that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been rumored maybe is that some or perhaps even all of Apple’s iPad apps that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are running in compatibility mode on the Vision Pro, perhaps those will become real honest-to-goodness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro apps. So things like Home, Calendar, Podcast Pages, etc. Which I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible, although it would not surprise me if that was issued in favor of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing something more whiz-bang. But we’ll see. Maybe we would be able to rearrange the home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So if these apps, if the things that shipped as iPad apps are native, it makes me think that they
⏹️ ▶️ John were already being developed. They just weren’t ready for launch, right? Because I don’t feel like they would launch
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro and then say, okay, now all those things we had to ship as iPad apps, let’s get teams on those
⏹️ ▶️ John to make them. Like it seems like they would have to be in progress already and just didn’t make the deadline. But either way, this is embarrassing when
⏹️ ▶️ John you launch a new platform and a whole bunch of your really important apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are the iPad versions. But, you know, Apple has done that in the past, like with the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John not getting versions of Apple’s own pro apps for years and years and years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it takes the Apple a really long time to get around to doing stuff. And it was the iPadOS rumor that’s going to get a calculator
⏹️ ▶️ John now. It’s just they just never got around to it. Right. And so, I mean, if they do this, at least it shows if they have
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re all if all the iPad apps are now native. I think that does show some level of commitment that they
⏹️ ▶️ John realized it was embarrassing not to have that and it was just a timing thing and now they’re fixing that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with you Casey that I don’t expect Vision OS 2.0 to be massively different. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just so many obvious things they need to fix and enhance, fix bugs, add minor
⏹️ ▶️ John features. I don’t even expect them to have a big home screen rearranging thing. If they do, it’ll be very rudimentary because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is really just kind of like the, You know make it what we wish 1.0 could have
⏹️ ▶️ John been if we had an extra, you know six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s really all it’s been like, you know You think about every year you think about these platforms going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up by one whole version number and there being a certain kind of minimum amount of improvement but keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mind like vision and vision Pro was a half-year release and so it really hasn’t been that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long since 1.0 and From all we’ve heard it seems like software was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like gating factor of when it could be released not hardware So like it’s not like they have a bunch of software work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saved up for years, you know waiting to be released Like no that you know what we got so far like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they have so far And so I’m not expecting a lot of movement on the vision Pro software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side yet It’s just it’s too soon and that being said like keep in mind, too This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very like distant forward-looking platform for them this is not going to be a big seller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time if ever and so I I think the level of improvement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to expect for Vision OS releases, even going forward, even when they have full years to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m expecting something more like watchOS releases or tvOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases. I’m not expecting major new changes and major new features to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be coming out every single year. I think it’s gonna be a slower update pace. I think this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long game they’re playing with Vision Pro. I think, honestly, I would love to see them step on the gas a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder, but what we’re seeing so far shows a different strategy. But regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t expect a lot of movement on this platform every single year. I think it’s gonna be a very
⏹️ ▶️ John You did get that immersive environment for working in Xcode with the wavy neon lines and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, from the developer app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that’s cool. I guess I actually haven’t tried this out yet, but that’s a thing, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is neat. But yeah, I don’t know. I would love to see, even before I see a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software motion on Vision OS, I really would prefer to just see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content more than anything else. Like that’s what I feel like I want. And we’re just not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it right now, which is too bad, but you know, it is what it is. I will say though, I was briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the Vision Pro in using the Mac virtual display mode with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the developer strap on with a high-speed USB cable plugged into my Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do really like that. I mean, I was at home, so I only needed it for a minute or two because I was working on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something, but it is pretty cool when it works, particularly when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done via a cable, because then latency is much, much lower, and I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the crispness of the display is also considerably better, which I enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I mean, I just want content. Give me more content, because I’m not using this thing for work a whole heck of a lot. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone really is. So I would really just love more content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that would also, I think, significantly drive sales, too. Like, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first, because you’re right, like, it’s going to be a long time before there’s meaningful software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on here, if ever. So again, like Apple TV, like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we had gone to the thing in November that we can’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about, the one thing I was dying to talk about in the intervening months between that and release was it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very obvious to me, even from some past time, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very obvious to me that this feels like computing on a virtual Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an infinitely sized screen. And like it does kind of physically feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are you are kind of manipulating these giant apps in your giant space with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of indirect mechanisms of like your eyes and pinching and flinging things around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. And it kind of like, it felt a lot like computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on an Apple TV, but just in a much bigger way. And obviously better in some ways, worse than others. But like for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most part, it felt like it was closer to that than using a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an iPad or something like that. And so I think what I would expect here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going to end up being a lot like the Apple TV as an app platform, which is most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps will not find much reason to be there or and most users won’t want to use most apps there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But with the right content and with the right specialized apps, this could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something people use frequently. It just needs that content to be there. Like I never even think about making an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV app, but I use my Apple TV almost every day. What do I use my Apple TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like four apps, but I use them almost every day. So the Vision Pro, I think, could be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it could reach that point where people are using it for lots of for mostly content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumption, and maybe occasional specialized uses or like very kind of narrow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, productivity uses for certain people. I see that being possible. But I think to get there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first, we need to install base to grow. And the only thing that’s really going to meaningfully grow it I think at this point is content. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I’m really watching for is like, where where are the content deals? Where’s the content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming from? Like how much how much can there be, how quickly? That’s what will actually move these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then we can talk about computing possibilities down the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But I tell you what, if you are traveling and want a huge-ass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen that doesn’t take a whole lot of space, it is without peer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there are some uses, as few and far between as they may be. OpenAI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey According to Mark Gurman, Apple picked OpenAI as its inaugural AI partner for a few reasons. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got better business terms than Google was offering, and Apple believes that open AI technology is the best available on the market. Apple is expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to offer its new AI features as an opt-in service, according to people familiar with the matter. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I think everyone’s expecting the AI dust to be sprinkled all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s yet to be seen if somebody in the C-suite got a burr up their butt to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put AI on everything, or if Apple will take what I hope, if Apple does what I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ll do, which is take a more mature approach and ask, where are we actually helping?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s not do this just because we can. Let’s do it because we should. And honestly, I think that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far fewer places that AI should be used than where AI can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be used. And we’ll see what happens. But I’m hopeful they’re going to be mature about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking at this German article. I’m doing the search for like the Bloomberg style guide says when you’re attributing
⏹️ ▶️ John anonymous sources, you have to say the people said, right? So you just search for the people,
⏹️ ▶️ John that string, because that’ll find you the tidbits that he’s saying are sourced. My sources say
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this. And everything
⏹️ ▶️ John you read there was one of those, the people said things. I removed that text from some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John snippets because it’s awkward. Anyway, the reasons for picking, it was that we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google and other partners or whatever. Apple thinks that they’re the best, that they’re the market leader, and that they
⏹️ ▶️ John gave better business terms to Google, which kind of makes sense because OpenAI is younger and hungrier. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? And the OpenAI thing is interesting because everything you said about
⏹️ ▶️ John the AI features, right? We assume that there’ll be a bunch of those like, oh, you can now do a useful thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, we’ll say it’s AI or whatever. It’s the same stuff we used to say that was ML, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John the chatbot style, hey, you talk to an LLM as if it’s like a little person
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth, all the OpenAI rumors are like, that’s what OpenAI would
⏹️ ▶️ John be providing. Because Apple has an internal one that they’re working on to have their own kind of LLM chat bot named Ajax or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever but it’s not ready and open AI’s things are better so let’s do a deal with them
⏹️ ▶️ John but I still like the fact that it would be opt-in like what does that mean does that
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that when you’re setting up your computer and says oh and by the way we have a partnership and open AI do you want to enable
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that puts like a menu icon in your menu bar that you can click on that props up a text box and now you’re talking to chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like what is opting into this where how does how does a chat bot fit into the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John We can see how all the other stuff fits in. And like I said last week, the rumors that come down from on high
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s telling every single team, find a place to put AI into your product. That’s bad. And that’s, you know, kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of the worst of corporate, like, oh, it’s a buzzword. Let’s just find a place to shoehorn this into our product. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I, to some degree, I trust the product teams to think, what can we do with AI that is useful
⏹️ ▶️ John in the notes app, in pages, in the finder? Like I don’t think any of them are going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how we can use AI in our app. put a text box up and they’ll send the message to
⏹️ ▶️ John chat GPT. Like they’ll think of something better, right? It’s bad that they’re asking all teams to do that because maybe it doesn’t make sense to some
⏹️ ▶️ John teams to add AI features, but the mandate, we keep seeing this rumor that the mandate came down from on high. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John team, you better find some way to add AI because this is the AI year, right? But that is entirely separate from
⏹️ ▶️ John this open AI deal, which is like, oh, you can opt in somehow in Mac OS or in iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John to like an iOS, does it just install the chat GPT app? Like, what does this mean? This is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m looking for the most in this presentation, that they’re gonna be on stage, they’re gonna say, we’ve partnered with OpenAI,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe they won’t say that, and somehow, some way, they’re going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John in our operating systems that we’re shipping, there’s a way for you to start talking to the Chat GPT and having a little conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little window somewhere. I don’t even think that’s that useful a feature. There’s already a Chat GPT app. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac one with SwiftUI, there’s a native iOS one, you can use it on the web. Like, what is this? I don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And this is the thing that’s baffling me, because as we said, I think this is the highest potential
⏹️ ▶️ John for badness because it is such a
⏹️ ▶️ John non-Apple, non-controlled, non-careful, just like Wild West, talk to JatGPT, good luck,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not our thing. How is that a selling point? How are you going to promote
⏹️ ▶️ John that as like a new feature of your operating systems? Non-hardware WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s probably gonna be a developer story unless Apple’s gonna like pay for your API tokens and now you can
⏹️ ▶️ John write an iOS or a Mac app and use their framework and get free access to chat GPT because Bapple did some multi
⏹️ ▶️ John million dollar deal with them or something. This baffles me. That’s why I added this thing of the whole opt-in. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does that mean? What are we opting into? What are you providing? I have red flags
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I, I don’t know. I I’m so turned off by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sam Altman and OpenAI. I don’t know. It’s funny, the dude who we all snickered about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wearing, you know, the two popped collar polo shirts. It wasn’t at WWDC? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey time ago, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And we all laughed and had a good laugh at his expense. And, you know, oh, look at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Silicon Valley bro, just being the world’s bro-iest bro. And fast forward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, 10 years, and it seems like same as it ever was. Nothing’s ever really changed. Like it’s, you know, move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast, break things and have no consequences. And, uh, I don’t know. Like, again, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what happens. Like I am cautiously optimistic. And again, I like to think of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as generally one of the more mature in adult organizations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Valley. I’m sure there’s exceptions. I’m sure that’s not always true, but broadly, I think that to be the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know, I feel, I hope, and I, I so desperately want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple to be deliberate, be considered, be mature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not just put the AI dust on everything they see, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I like, I don’t, I find chat to be useful. I use it’s in my rotation
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that I do. I do. I, all the chat bots, I do Google searches. I did like, it’s, it’s, I get useful things out
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. There is used to be had there, but I’m doing that already. Like I don’t need Apple to add any features to Mac iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to do this. I can have a free account on open AI. I can have a paid one. I can use Google Gemini.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can do it on iOS. I can do it on a Mac. Like all of that is already there. I don’t think I need any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of OS integration to make that experience better. I can open a web page. I can have, let’s be honest,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s already opened in a tab somewhere. Right? It’s like, you know, maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not on my phone or whatever. Like, I guess they could use voice thing. Like it integrates with Siri and you talk to Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John and it sends it out. Like, I’m not saying there’s no room for OS integration, there is. But I just, this just seems such an
⏹️ ▶️ John uneasy partnership. But also because, you know, like the sources in this essentially seem to indicate,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the sources are not inside the Apple. on their ex-Apple people or whatever. Like, this is a stopgap. Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have anything chat-GTP caliber. They don’t have anything Google Gemini caliber. They want to have something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want to have a story for that for W3C, therefore they have to partner. We talked about this before, but they are working on stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does have its own internal OLM. It does have its own internal chatbot that its own employees have been
⏹️ ▶️ John using. It’s just not up to snuff yet, which makes sense because they got a late start, right? But they’re doing research
⏹️ ▶️ John in that area. So presumably if this turns out to be useful, Apple would want to pull a Google Maps
⏹️ ▶️ John here and say, yeah, we’ll partner with this other company because they’re the market leader, but eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll roll out our own thing. And eventually our own thing will be, if not better than good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And hopefully they’ll do it better than they did with maps roll out, but you know, we’ll see how it goes. But still like
⏹️ ▶️ John I, this is what I’m looking at the most, like what’s the pitch here? How is it integrated? How
⏹️ ▶️ John is this presented? If it’s opt in, like what does that look like? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so weird to sort of, if this ends up being a tentpole feature and not just like an off to the side, because I can imagine just being like, oh, and by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, we partnered with them and blah, blah, blah, and that’s all they say about it. It’s like quick, right? But if this is a tentpole feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John usually tentpole features aren’t like, and we’re so confident in it that it’s not on by default. It’s kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows recall thing, right? That’s a sign of something like, we think it might be okay, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there are some danger here. So if you just hit, you know, okay, okay, okay, during setup,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever we’re doing, you won’t be exposed to, right? But if you opt into it
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow, then, you know, again, when you talk to Siri and it can’t figure out the answer, instead of telling
⏹️ ▶️ John you to check the web, it’ll ask chat GPT or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I mean, that’s all the items that we had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. I just, I really don’t know what to expect. And I am so very, very interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what the AI story is. It seems that Apple’s previous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedication to ML or machine learning, as we’ve talked about in many other shows and blogs have talked about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, they finally embraced AI as a term. And so we’ll see what happens. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s tough because, you know, Apple is a publicly held company and publicly traded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company. And, you know, I think investors and, you know, rank and file shareholders are going to expect them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have that AI dust sprinkled everywhere, you know, like a graffiti cannon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, or not graffiti, a glitter cannon of AI dust just shooting all over everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC touches, but I don’t know that that’s appropriate or reasonable. So we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happens. And I’m just curious to see, you know, now that we’ve got a whole new platform, I’m so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what Vision OS 2 is. If history tells us anything, it will be disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ John think Vision OS will have AI dust sprinkled on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it? Oh, no. At all? Anywhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be surprised if iPad OS even has it. Like, keep in mind, like, you know, again, we’re still dealing with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of hierarchy of platform importance. iOS is gonna get all the cool stuff first. I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised if we see it anywhere else. I think it’s gonna be iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly first, and then maybe they’ll put some of the basics into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad and Mac. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the cross-platform stuff will get it. Like the whole like removing people from the background of photos, that’s just gonna be everywhere because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a common framework. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, of course, yeah. But like, you know, in terms of like features like specific to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say like the Vision Pro or the watch or like I would be surprised to see anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that this soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of like sprinkling AI sparkles everywhere and everyone expects it to do it, at this point though,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is what everyone expects, but at this point it’s true that the only way for Apple to really
⏹️ ▶️ John make news is to do something different than everyone else does. I mean, they can make news by saying we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John doing any AI stuff and that would be news, but that’s obviously not what they’re doing, right? But they’re not gonna do what every other company did,
⏹️ ▶️ John is like AI everywhere, sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, like, you know, and because that was like, everyone else did that, like, you know, throwing
⏹️ ▶️ John spaghetti against the wall, right? Like Windows did. So anything we could think of, we’re just going to do. The
⏹️ ▶️ John only way Apple can actually make news is by saying, we’re doing AI, but we’re doing it the Apple way
⏹️ ▶️ John where everything is useful and blah, blah, blah, you have to present it that way. That is a marketing decision. We already know they’re already doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about that last week, there’s tons of features that I used to call ML, that are just features of our phone, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If they do that this year, and And they present it as, we’re not doing AI like everyone else. We’re not thrown speedy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we don’t have a thing where you draw a picture and AI draws along with you because we didn’t think that was that useful yet. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t put it in. Right? That’s the story. That’s the Apple story. And the news would be Apple, WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John rolls out a bunch of AI features. But unlike other people’s AI features, they only introduce the ones that are useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And also, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the wild card. I don’t understand that. Right? That is the way to make news. Otherwise, the story will be
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple catches up with everyone else and does what everyone else has already done. Which is, I guess, better than the bad story,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is Apple doesn’t do any AI stuff and they’re doomed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Well, I think that’s the most likely. I think by far the most likely reaction by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the overall press and business and Wall Street communities is going to be they didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as actual Apple users, for me, like what you were saying earlier, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would rather they do things that are useful to me. I don’t need them to do the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid things with AI, because other companies will gladly do the most stupid things that they have. Apple doesn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. They are, as you were saying, they are the more grown-up company. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is their style to be the spaghetti against the wall, cutting edge. Let’s do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of stupid stuff. That’s not Apple’s style. Apple is very conservative in that kind of approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to some degree, that’s just in their DNA. To another degree, they need to be, because they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more scrutiny on them. And their moves have, they make bigger waves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And their brand, it’s not that they’re Disney, but their brand is very kind of like, let’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John be hasty and do the radical stuff just because everyone else is doing it, right? And I honestly think if they market
⏹️ ▶️ John this well, the story won’t be Apple didn’t do enough. The story will be what Apple wanted to be is that Apple took
⏹️ ▶️ John a more considered approach. Everyone else has just been like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, made all their features useful. Here are the things that it does. It only does things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are provably useful, right? Kind of like they did last year, and the year before and the year before, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John OS wide, you can OCR text. Like that’s an AI feature, but it’s useful. Like, and it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that is the story Apple presents, I think most of the stories from outlets that don’t have it in for Apple will be,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple decides to take a different approach to AI. Unlike its competitors, Apple says that it’s only rolling out
⏹️ ▶️ John features that are provably useful. And I’m not gonna use that term because that’s not a good marketing term, but you know, some marketing person will come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John a two or three word phrase that distinguishes Apple’s approach to AI, which again is gonna be no different than
⏹️ ▶️ John what they did last year. The only difference is the magic of marketing, right? And I, you know, you’re right that there will
⏹️ ▶️ John be some stories like Apple’s not doing enough. They’re falling behind. Microsoft has 40 LLMs running in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John in Windows 11, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole Windows co-pilot PC thing is just so wrapped up in the recall disaster
⏹️ ▶️ John that no one is even talking about the draw along or whatever, or the OS wide like translation,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think actually is useful. So door is open for Apple to do something smart here. And again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John wild card is what the hell is OpenAI? Because OpenAI is not that. OpenAI and ChatGPT,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not, we only do the things that we are sure are useful and safe. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the uses that ChatGPT has, it’s not conservative. It’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the floodgates. It’s like, type anything you want, hope it works, fingers crossed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would be very happy with, take most of the basics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we already know, that quote AI stuff can do, even take a lot of the stuff the phones already do and just make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it better, make it more reliable, give it better results. As we were saying last episode, like basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictation, like text or speech to text kind of APIs. You know, like I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it all Android phones or just the Pixel phones that have supported like system-wide closed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco captioning? You can just have like constant transcription showing on screen of whatever audio is playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone. Like we added to Windows. Right, like why is it, why haven’t iPhones been able to do that yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s such low hanging fruit for Apple. Like that should be a feature. Of course it should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a feature. And that’s, again, things like removing people from photos that shouldn’t be there, or, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of stuff. This is, these are not cutting edge new ideas. These are features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the rest of the industry has done. And yes, Apple will be playing quote catch up, but that’s fine as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do a good job of it. The reason why some of these features stand out to us as things Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is because they are good ideas. We are not saying Apple should do everything everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else has done. Most of the other things people have done with quote AI are weird and useless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and creepy or something. But there are a few really cool killer features that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be nice if Apple had good versions of. And then beyond that, what we’ve already talked about, things like, obviously the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is make Siri better. Like that is the big one. Please, for the love of God,
⏹️ ▶️ John better. It makes it interesting. Make Siri better, but don’t turn Siri into chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, there’s a fine line there because you want Siri to be better. It’s like all the things that Siri’s supposed to do now,
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine if it did them reliably and with lots of flexibility and sophistication, and maybe you could do one or two new
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But that is very different than, hey, guess what? Now you can just ask Siri anything and it will do something. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not what we want, right? Because that is just throwing spaghetti against the wall because you can get yourself into trouble real fast
⏹️ ▶️ John with just, especially since Siri has essentially control over your phone. And when it gets wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are consequences, bad consequences. So that is something, I mean, there’s no rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, you know, that Siri’s suddenly gonna become chat GPT, right? Apple needs to, it’s kind of like what
⏹️ ▶️ John you were saying, things that the phone already does just make it do them better. But that is different than
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri is now an all-knowing wizard that you can ask anything and cross your fingers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I don’t need Siri to become a chat bot. I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri to generate images that don’t exist already for me. Like many of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we think of as modern AI apps, I don’t need Siri to do those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we need Siri to do is what the promise of Siri has always been promising,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has just never reliably delivered on that promise. That’s what we want to do. And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at modern AI techniques and models, I think this gives them the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tackle what really is a pretty old set of problems in a new way that should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretically be substantially better. So that’s what I’m most looking for. And everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’ve talked about, like being able to control apps without configuration and stuff like that, that’s all gonna be great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the road whenever that comes together. I don’t even need that right now. I just want Siri to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’d be great. And maybe give me a good captioning model on the phone that I can use. And otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that could be enough for us. It’s not gonna be enough for the press, it’s not gonna be enough for the analysts, It’s not gonna be enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Wall Street, but I think that would be enough for Apple’s actual customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have an addendum to an earlier statement. I meant to correct myself immediately and then the time passed and I couldn’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about when they’re dropping Intel support. I forgot about all the AI stuff. The whole requirement to have
⏹️ ▶️ John an NPU, like that’s why Rewind doesn’t work on my computer. That may push
⏹️ ▶️ John the schedule forward. I mean, that wasn’t really a glimmer in anyone’s eye when back when we were talking about this years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, but now the whole like, you know, the Co-Pilot Plus PCs requiring a 40
⏹️ ▶️ John tops NPU, blah, blah, blah. You know, my CPU doesn’t have NPU in there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John every single one of these quote unquote AI, if they bothered to add quote unquote AI features, yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could just make them not work on Intel, but they could all just not make Mac OS, also just not make Mac OS work on Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like that nudges the possibility that this is the year my Mac isn’t supported, nudges it a little bit. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it makes it a slam dunk. I’m thinking it’s a sure thing. I still think I’ll probably be supported and just won’t have features
⏹️ ▶️ John visible, but the LLM stuff is a problem for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you reprogram the Afterburner card to be an NPU? It would still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That is funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not spending any time optimizing any of this stuff. It’s like, well, it runs on the neural engine, and also someone
⏹️ ▶️ John did an implementation for like the SIMD instructions on the Xeon. Nope, not happening. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, you’re out of luck on that one. Yeah, so it’s really just, I mean, like what Mac has going
⏹️ ▶️ John for it is like, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t care that much. Oh, sorry, Intel Mac users, you don’t get these new features, right? Just be glad Mac OS still,
⏹️ ▶️ John we still ship it for your CPU. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I feel like that has a likelihood because Apple’s like, yeah, it’s just Mac, it’ll be fine, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they really, it was the old Apple where it’s like, everyone on the same page, they’d be like, no, we’re cutting them off this year because
⏹️ ▶️ John we got so many of the AI features and they all require the neural processor and Intel doesn’t have that, so tough luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see. I, the worst case scenario for me, it’s like, I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John ask you too, what you’re most looking forward to WWDC, but the thing I’m fearing the most
⏹️ ▶️ John is that I won’t be able to run this version of macOS or the feature that I want
⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS doesn’t run on my thing. So for example, the photos features that use quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John AI to do cool photos stuff. Granted, there’s ways I can use other AI tools to edit my photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need this to be built in, but if I can’t even access those features, Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if the person removal thing is built into the Photos app, like this is great, saves me a lot of time, it’s right built in, I don’t have to edit
⏹️ ▶️ John it in an external editor, I don’t have to go to a webpage. Oh, but not on Intel. That’s a big fear for me because
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I would still, it’s like, look, Mac OS still supports your system, no problem. I’d be like, oh, but I really wanna use
⏹️ ▶️ John the new AI-powered photo editing features on my Mac, and now I’m sitting at my wife’s computer to do photo editing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and she’s complaining that I’m hogging her computer, and that hastens the timeline for
⏹️ ▶️ John me getting a new Mac. Yeah, which which Apple hasn’t shipped yet, like M4 based
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio or something. But anyway, that’s I want to throw it anyway. So what what things are you most looking forward to? Mark, you already said
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri, but is there anything else like speaking of developer stuff, like, you know, developer tools, Xcode, Swift, like
⏹️ ▶️ John what, what is what big thing are you looking forward to a WWDC assuming there’s no hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mean, for me, like, you know, I really want to see what kind of what I was talking my last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want there to be good models that developers can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone for free with no limits. Like, that’s what I really want. Like, give us built-in AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SDKs that we can just use the same way we can use almost every other API on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone. Like, that would be game-changing in so many ways. And so that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big thing I want in terms of capability. Now in smaller ways like you know other there’s other like developer tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type stuff. Xcode is has had a lot of bugs for me this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past couple of years. A lot of like issues that don’t clear that I’ve actually cleared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of having to do clean in clean builds just to clear weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compiler bugs. My rewrite of overcast I use a couple of packages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I do locally and every time I change anything in the package, I have to go like resolve package caches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because otherwise it just won’t pick up the change. Like there’s all sorts of weird straight up bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Xcode or at least things that’s like behaviors that sure seem like bugs that I would I think Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really could use some help in that area. I don’t I don’t think they’re going to be working on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they are working on that. It is the question of whether they’ll fix more bugs than they introduce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like because I’m sure that what you know whatever they’re doing with AI stuff, I’m sure there’s obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been massive demand for integration into Xcode of some kind of AI-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tooling, whether it’s an AI-based autocomplete, like the old version of what Microsoft called Copilot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or other stuff. There’s obviously a lot of demand for that in recent years. And there’s rumors for
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, but yeah, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Xcode will help you write your code for you using AI. I’m assuming that’s going to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can Xcode write around its own bugs using AI, maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically clear the issues for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t have to do it. When Xcode makes SwiftUI view, the preview also won’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. There’s a lot in Xcode, a lot of the basics that I think could use some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention. But otherwise, in terms of the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs and the language, this is going to be a big year for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift concurrency safety. This is the year of like Sendable really getting its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moment, because I presume they’re going to introduce Swift 6, and that brings with a whole bunch of strict concurrency checks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and theoretically, some language enhancements that make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complying with strict concurrency easier. Like right now, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been writing the Overcast rewrite, and as I wrote Blackbird, I have tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make them comply with the strict concurrency checks as they’ve existed in the pre-6 Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages. So you’ve been able to opt into these warnings that will tell you like, hey, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that you’re doing over here with this mutable state in this object, this will be an error in Swift 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are, I’ve been trying to comply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the requirements, you know, before it’s even out. And it’s pretty hard. And there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things where, like, this object here clearly is not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mutable state. And it’s like losing its state right here before this is even returning from its init or whatever, like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of things like that. And there’ve been various proposals in Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Evolution to make some of that stuff automatic and detect it so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to jump through hoops to go around it. I haven’t followed in detail of whether those things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually in Swift 6 or whether they will be. A bunch of them are. Yeah, I’m sure a bunch of them are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what I wanna know is right now, all of the stuff that will be in error in Swift 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concurrency checking mode, A lot of that’s pretty hard to work around. And so what I want to see is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have they made it easier to work with for the actual release of Swift 6?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s what most of these proposals were aiming to do. So let’s see it, that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to know, is like, as we go into this new era of Swift concurrency and Swift strictness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how easy is it to do the right thing? I’ve seen a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of languages over time that make it hard to do the right thing. So far, Swift has been pretty good about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let’s see. And then beyond that, as you know, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been writing this whole rewrite using Swift UI and using Swift async
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern concurrency wherever possible. And there are still a lot of system APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do not play well with Swift concurrency. I’m still having to write callbacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there. I’m still having to, you know, like shell out to like tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something in a function. Like there are still areas in the system frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have not been updated yet for Swift Concurrency. I would love to just see more of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please. Give me as much more as you can, whatever you’ve gotten done this year. Every year it gets better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just wanna see like, make all, have everyone work on the frameworks throughout the year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they have time. And here and there, I get updates that make things easier for me as a Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Async programmer. So that kind of stuff is mostly what I’m looking forward to. in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of like the boring tooling and API stuff. But that’s what actually improves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our lives as developers day to day in the following year. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one new hotness that we must use. It’s like some cool new API or something like no, usually it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of small life improvements that they made to the rest of the system and the rest of the tooling and the rest of the APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I’m looking forward to mostly. But also yeah, give me some of that cool transcription model, please. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. You know, I’m glad you brought up Swift stuff because that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here today, that’s what I think I’m most excited for is what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new hotness within Swift and Swift can get on my nerves from time to time, but by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and large, 10 years on, because the announcement was 10 years and a few days ago, 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, it is a really, really great language. It is not without problems. It’s not without faults, but it is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really great language. And I do think it is mostly moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a positive direction. And I feel like now that there’s big and exciting things happening like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift concurrency, I feel like a lot of the, what is the term of phrase, like bike shedding, is that what I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for? That was going on in the like Swift 2.3.4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey era where we were worrying about really, really useless and dumb arguments that were happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the time. And I don’t know, John, you’re more plugged in. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know if they were
⏹️ ▶️ John useless and dumb, but yes, there was some sort of, you do have to hash that stuff out. And it is important
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it right. So it might have seemed like a lot of kind of like, well, who cares what that keyword is called? It’s not that important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just do stuff that actually is kind of important because you get stuck with that stuff. So I don’t have many complaints about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But either way, like, you know, spending a whole bunch of time bickering about whether pre and post increment, you know, the plus plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operator should or should not be in language, like, whatever, y’all just move on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, you guys really messed up substrings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, substrings are such a pain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, there’s some lousy things, but the thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they come up with better ones, you can just abandon the lousy ones and never use them. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve not painted themselves into a corner, which is really what you want to avoid with language design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Everything they’ve done with substrings and various array index stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God. Every time I have to manipulate an index
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a string, I have to look up code examples.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I cannot figure out how the heck do I do this. I just want…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not strings. It drives
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes sense if you know why they’re doing it for implementation efficiency,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but I don’t want to have to see that. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretend it’s not like that. Exactly. But we’re getting off on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tangent. A lot of that bike shedding and yak shaving and whatever the turn of phrase you want to use is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insofar as like, I don’t pay attention to Swift evolution, even though maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should. But a lot of that, that navel gazing was bubbling out into my world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I haven’t seen much of that recently in at least a couple of years, which I think is a good thing because that means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever’s happening instead of people going, ah, look at this ridiculous argument, you know, instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimate arguments are happening, good ones. And so I’m excited to see what Swift 6 brings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am petrified. I cannot begin to, to, to tell you how scared I am of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turning on the warnings warnings for strict concurrency checks, because I’m sure it’s going to be a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not knowingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing anything wrong, but I bet you I’m doing a lot wrong. You got
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not necessarily wrong. It’s just like, I mean, I’ve made several runs of this, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it more after
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC and following episodes, but like in the absence of concurrency, before it existed,
⏹️ ▶️ John we all did our own things using the technologies that Apple did offer at the time. Grand Central Dispatch,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, callbacks, async await, like that’s all kind of like, it’s not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John precursors to the big strict concurrency checks, right? So if you have an application
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s already written, it’s like, OK, but I already did a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with concurrency. Maybe it’s not as good, but then you turn on the strict concurrency checks and it’s like everything you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is a violation of strict concurrency.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is what I had to do before you existed to do things concurrently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s like, yeah, that approach, you should use a different approach to do that. Our approach is safer, but you end up having to like
⏹️ ▶️ John rethink stuff. It’s not like, I’ll just add an annotation here and it’ll fix it. It’s like, I mean, this sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb, but like the Swift concurrency strict checking thing
⏹️ ▶️ John wants you to use Swift concurrency features, right? It doesn’t want you to use
⏹️ ▶️ John Grand Central Dispatch and queues, right? You can, you can like satisfy it if you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, if you just use these R features, like use strict concurrency, use what we want you to use,
⏹️ ▶️ John use actors, right? That’s why they exist. And it’s like, but I already did it a different way. And it’s like, well, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have real problems trying to make me, the compiler satisfied about that. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure there will be much discussion about that. I mean, the good thing about Swift, the Swift Illusion process, it happens in public.
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift is open source. Like there should be no, for the most part, there should be no secrets revealed to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Swift language, right? About what they’re doing with it, that’ll be revealed. Like, cause you know, if you looked at like all
⏹️ ▶️ John the Swift language things, and it was like, and then SwiftUI appeared. SwiftUI wasn’t developed in public, but Swift was,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So, you know, we’ll see what kind of surprises Apple has for us, but the Swift features they’re adding,
⏹️ ▶️ John they know the pain people have trying to, you know, comply with Swift concurrency, and they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it easier, but fundamentally, I think the problem they have is that they want people to use
⏹️ ▶️ John Actors and Swift concurrency as a way to manage concurrent processes, and that supersedes
⏹️ ▶️ John and replaces a bunch of things that people had used in the past, and figuring out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that without like changing your approach to concurrency, Like Casey, I know you love to use the, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is it? The publisher thing with the source and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey syncs and the events, what is that called?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I don’t, it’s combined. I don’t use that much of it in CallSheet. I do use some, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to just a couple of years ago, I use very, very little. And I only use it in a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of places where it makes the most sense. Generally speaking, the concurrency and stuff that I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is async await, which is good insofar as it’s new, but it’s bad insofar as I’m probably doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rudimentary version.
⏹️ ▶️ John your stuff is not sendable, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, yeah, for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Nor should you make it sendable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for whatever, I can tell you that I use a lot of combine and async await
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the rewrite. There is places for both of it. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they actually play somewhat nicely with each other if you don’t do two ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things with them. But those things do solve different problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the solution is not like, oh, I’m going to take all my data, and I’m going to make everything sendable,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s That’s not how to fix this problem. You can’t. Like, you have to have mutable
⏹️ ▶️ John state somewhere. It should be protected by actors. But, like, very often you’re sending OS objects back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those aren’t sendable. And you don’t have a way to change that because you don’t define that class. Nor can you make it
⏹️ ▶️ John sendable or lie about it being sendable. And it’s just… Anyway, I’m sure we’re going off on a big tangent here
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re developers and we’ve all struggled with this. But, like, I think the way Apple presents this story is interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John to like the idea of, you know, the warning Marco mentioned, this will be an error
⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift 6. Does that mean you can’t use Swift 6 unless you have strict concurrency
⏹️ ▶️ John compliance? Or is there a mode in the Swift 6 compiler that lets you run Swift 5
⏹️ ▶️ John code? And do you lose out on any features in Swift 6 if you decide that like that’s, that’s a story that Apple will tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and has been has been telling in the open, but they’ll see how marketing presents that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift concurrency, it’s great. But if you’re not ready for it, don’t worry, you can still use Swift 6, you just won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John turn on the strict concurrency thing, kind of like it is in Swift 5 now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I think that’s the case. I could swear, and I’m probably getting the details wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially because my memory, as John makes fun of me, justifiably is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad, but I could swear that Ben Cohen or someone on the Swift team has publicly stated, hey, Swift 6,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to be opt-in for the concurrency checks, and you still will be able to do the rest. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what you just said, John. You’ll still be able to do the rest of the Swift 6 hotness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without buying or going all in on these strict concurrency checks.
⏹️ ▶️ John can just download the Swift 6 compiler right now and try it like and you can see how these features work or whatever but like it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it in open source and having the developers talk about it is kind of separate than from how Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will present it how Apple marketing will present this when it shows the new version of Xcode you know what I mean like
⏹️ ▶️ John how it manifests in Xcode what the defaults are for a new project in S code these are things that
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t actually strictly related to the Swift open source project, but have huge effects on how
⏹️ ▶️ John this change is perceived by the people who are not following Swift W Illusion, which is most developers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like when they do new project, like does it default to Swift UI? That is kind of like an important political thing. Does it default
⏹️ ▶️ John to strict concurrency? Does it default to adding tests, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ John The defaults matter in Xcode and policy changes like that. So that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John for developers, I mean, it is a developer conference. It’s more esoteric and you’re not going to see big news stories about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the Swift6 story is going to be interesting. And like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John to most people, it’s entirely new to them. It’s public information. They could have been looking at it all since
⏹️ ▶️ John last year, but most people, that’s not their hobby to keep up with language evolution. They just wait until the day
⏹️ ▶️ John we see and see what Apple has to offer them, even though you could go download it right now and try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And so for me, that’s what I think I’m most interested in right now. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m interested in the iOS changes and, oh yeah, iPadOS is still an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operating system in our lineup. I’m very curious to see what the, we’ll get a second data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point for VisionOS so we can start to draw a line between the two data points. But more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything else, I’m very curious what my development life will look like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the next year plus. And I think some of that will probably be me ripping all my hair out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to get this concurrency stuff working properly. But I think some of it should be fun and exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As much as I will in one breath whine about SwiftUI and tell you that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neuters me here and there, and there’s nothing you can do to put a search bar anywhere, but in a navigation bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and things of that nature, that it makes it very, very stodgy and difficult and unwavering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ll also tell you that it’s just such a joy to work with, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much nicer, and so much faster than UIKit, And so I’d love to see what new SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff is happening. It certainly seems like Apple internally is spending more and more time and putting more and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more energy into consuming SwiftUI, which makes me think they’re doing the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within SwiftUI itself. The best way for Apple to make a good API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for developers is for them to dog food it. And they seem to be doing that more and more. So I’m excited for that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. I’m really excited, leaving aside the fact that I’m going to see you too, leaving aside that I’m going to be there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m going to be on at Apple Park. All of that is, of course, incredibly exciting. We covered that last week. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just really excited to see what’s coming because there’s so little that has leaked out, like we said, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I and what we what’s leaked out is more of a, oh, there’s a dust to come in. You know, there’s a dust storm of brewing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think the leaks have covered a lot. I don’t I don’t expect to see tons of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t leaked. It’s just that the stuff that’s leaked is, I don’t know, obvious or like not not shocking.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also a bit vague, particularly around the AI
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it is vague, but we won’t get the details. But I don’t think, well, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Will there be something that was totally not rumored that is shocking? I think it’ll just be
⏹️ ▶️ John in the details of how things work. And by the way, speaking of testing, I forget, I think there’s a bunch of open source projects that do
⏹️ ▶️ John this, and I kind of hope Apple adopts one of them or takes one under its wing or makes it official. But the XC test
⏹️ ▶️ John framework, which Casey may be familiar with, it’s not great. It’s kind of stodgy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever used a modern testing framework in a language like Node or whatever, you kind of, or even, I mean, obviously all my
⏹️ ▶️ John testing experience comes from Perl, the great, great, great grandfather of good testing and programming languages.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just the fundamental stuff that you expect from a test framework either doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exist or is very awkward in XCTest, because it’s old. And so what does the Swift UI
⏹️ ▶️ John for testing look like? And there are a bunch of open source projects that try to do this, like make a sort of Swifty type
⏹️ ▶️ John API that looks kind of like the popular testing packages for
⏹️ ▶️ John Node or, you know, like just a nicer testing framework. I would love
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to bless one of those and adopt it or to come out with its own. I mean, this kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of falls into the category of a market-based thing. It’s like, hey, we’ve got a bunch of old APIs. Some of them aren’t really swifty,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They don’t match the language well. They don’t take advantage of the features. They look kind of old. They’re kind of awkward to
⏹️ ▶️ John use. We know better ways to do things now. Test framework is one of those things. I think that would be a big quality
⏹️ ▶️ John of life improvement for people. Of course, they have to keep supporting the old one basically forever because people use it and make
⏹️ ▶️ John huge test suites. But Swifty testing, again, there’s been no rumors about that. I’ve just been looking at a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the open source ones. I’m like, these are all good ideas. Pick one, Apple, and do it. Or, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I miss Fluent Assertions is one that I use to my.NET days. And so, you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at the About page trying to remind myself how it works. And basically, you know, say you have a string that’s an account number is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example they use. And the code you write is account number should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And so it’s written almost like plain English.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s not too dissimilar from…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco – Are there dots between every word?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco – Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Account number dot should, paren, paren, dot be, paren.
⏹️ ▶️ John – Ugh. – I hate that. – That’s a little bit… That’s a very popular trend.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco – I know. It’s awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s code that looks great on slides and examples and it’s totally unwritable.
⏹️ ▶️ John – Well, it’s not terrible and that is a common thing. But really what you’re looking for is the convenience
⏹️ ▶️ John of being able to essentially, you know, to just give one example, and I know XCTest has ways of doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but it’s awkward and weird. You have a bunch of nested data structures and objects and you wanna diff
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna have to do that manually. I just want it to be able to use reflection to traverse them and to give me like a really cool looking diff
⏹️ ▶️ John of where they differ, you know what I mean? Right? As opposed to comparing properties manually
⏹️ ▶️ John one at a time at each level and having messages so you know which part differed or whatever. every modern
⏹️ ▶️ John testing framework has a way to say, this is thing like that thing, and they’re both kind of deeply nested structures.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the good ones say, oh, and by the way, I don’t care about these differences and ignore these properties, and I don’t care about white
⏹️ ▶️ John space. And like, just, it’s all just, it’s like, oh, that’s just convenience method. You can do that all yourself. Yeah, you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just annoying as hell, right? So it’s not so much the whole, it looks like English, this should be that, and has this
⏹️ ▶️ John and does this and whatever. I just want, like, especially in a, you know, a language like Swift that’s so,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, really on board with static checking. And so you really just can’t, oh, just chuck these two things
⏹️ ▶️ John over the fence. They look like they’re the same. It’s like, Swift’s like, whoa, whoa, these are totally different classes. I can’t compare
⏹️ ▶️ John these two things. What are you talking about? I don’t have those kinds of reflection. It’s like, you really need
⏹️ ▶️ John convenient support from the framework to satisfy the Swift compiler to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to just say, is this thing like that? Expect this thing to be like that. That’s gonna be like this, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John That stuff is tedious in testing. It makes people not want to write tests.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s not why. But
⏹️ ▶️ John write tests, he would say, boy, it sure is tedious comparing these deeply nested object trees to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other. And then if you get lazy, when the test fails, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why did it fail? What was the problem? And you basically got to step through it in the debugger because there’s no automatic
⏹️ ▶️ John diffing of object trees to tell you exactly where it failed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else you’re looking forward to, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned the photos feature because that’s what I’m thinking about a lot. Again, when I edit
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, I have many tools, I’ve purchased many other external editors, I have Photoshop, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have PhotoMator, PixelMator, I have Raw Power, I have access to web tools
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but there’s something to be said for having stuff built in. And Photos does have
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff built in, but it’s so outdated now. Like the quote unquote healing brush in the Apple Photos app
⏹️ ▶️ John is just barbaric compared to what the good apps can do. But I don’t always wanna edit
⏹️ ▶️ John an external editor. I certainly don’t wanna export and edit it on the web and bring it back or whatever. So to the
⏹️ ▶️ John extent that Apple can catch up and add those features to photos itself, and I can actually run them on my Intel Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John that will have be a big quality of life change for me. I will really appreciate that, not this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John but next year when, you know, for my Long Island Beach vacation pictures. I want it to be in the Photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the Photos app to get better. This is not the year, it seems like. If there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John something about Apple’s platforms that you want it to get better that doesn’t have to do with AI, this is not the year. All the bugs that
⏹️ ▶️ John report in the Finder, all those things that are annoying you, the apps that you feel like are neglected
⏹️ ▶️ John and haven’t had any attention paid to them, this is not the year they’re gonna fix that. I mean, you know, usually it’s never
⏹️ ▶️ John the year that they’re gonna fix that, but definitely not this year. What they’re gonna do, those teams spent time adding AI features or whatever, and so
⏹️ ▶️ John I will appreciate those when I have them, but like, you know, we’re all still hoping for that year when the bug that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been in your favorite operating system for 10 years finally gets fixed, but it just does not seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is the year for that. And it wasn’t last year, and it wasn’t the year before that, and it wasn’t the year before that, wasn’t the year
⏹️ ▶️ John before that and it’s a big systemic problem that we’ve discussed in the show but definitely not this year because everyone’s been off doing
⏹️ ▶️ John AI stuff so that’s kind of a shame but yeah I if I had a wish list it would be like oh they fix all my long-standing
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs that’s not gonna happen I’m looking forward to the photos editing features I am kind of looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John the better Siri like I rarely use Siri but the things
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it for I find useful, the, you know, remind me to do whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John use that all the time, almost daily, right? Because I know how to do it, I know the syntax
⏹️ ▶️ John it wants, I know how it works for the most part, it could be better, but it just shows the
⏹️ ▶️ John utility. If you can give me something that I can, that works enough for me to use it, it has a big effect
⏹️ ▶️ John on my life. So if they just take something that Siri has supposedly been able to do for 10 years,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they make it good enough for me to wanna use it, that could potentially have a big impact. So I’m kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John looking forward to that as well. And I was looking forward to hardware, but that doesn’t seem like it’s gonna happen. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and the Swift 6 stuff, like I said, I’m mostly looking forward to how Apple presents the stuff that I’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John been reading about in Swift Evolution for an entire year. Like what is the pitch? What is the,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are the ergonomics of it? How does it manifest in Xcode? How do they present it to the world? Because there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a potential for pushback, let’s say, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, for everyone who has tried it, It’s an obscure flag that you have to know about, like, oh, strict concurrency, all caps,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, equals whatever, and you’re built. It’s not obvious how to do it in the existing
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode, but the people who try it, they’re like, oh, 50,000 warnings. I’m like, wow, I reduced that to 100
⏹️ ▶️ John after just changing two lines of code. And then I spend a week trying to get that 100 down to 10. And then I spend a month trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get that 10 down to zero, depending on how much of their app they’re willing to rewrite.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a tough story to pitch to people. And I’m setting aside the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and the actual features, how do you present that to a room full of developers and make them excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John and not dreading it? Like, you know what I mean? And that is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a challenge this year, I think.
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#askatp: Thunderbolt 5 for M4 MBP?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do at least a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Ask ATP. It’s been a little while since we’ve done it. And let’s start with James, who writes, any chance that the now expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late 2024 M4 MacBook Pro gets upgraded to Thunderbolt 5?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my question to James is, why do we care? Not to say that we shouldn’t. I’m not saying that the question is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreasonable, but I genuinely don’t even know what Thunderbolt 5 brings. So, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John speed. That’s what we talked about on the show in the past. Unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt three to four, which didn’t increase the speed at all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Thunderbolt five does.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, is there a chance? Yes, there is a chance. I think there is. I don’t know enough
⏹️ ▶️ John about the M4 and the iPad if anyone has examined it and see if there’s any vestiges of Thunderbolt five or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, there’s always a chance. It’s not a good chance. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has not really been known for being on the late. We talked about this when we talk about the copilot plus PCs and how they just all have the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of every standard latest version of Bluetooth latest version of Wi-Fi like Latest version of Thunderbolt right
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t really do that when they do it’s notable Apple’s current
⏹️ ▶️ John line of stuff have won back from the latest version of most of this stuff Is that’s just the way Apple tends to roll.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think it’s highly likely but absolutely it is possible keep hope alive for those
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt 5.
#askatp: 16 GB standard?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Martin writes, do you think Apple will finally ship 16 gigs of RAM in the MacBook Air when the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets put into it? I don’t but no I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John We I mean you can hope now’s the time you can have this hope. I don’t think so Just
⏹️ ▶️ John they should they 100% should but I don’t think so I mean that do they even is
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro Pro started 16? I forget I think the pros do even the low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John one. That’s like barely a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro. I don’t know It wouldn’t surprise me either way I mean, they’re going to keep shipping the for the MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a computer that is extremely important for it to hit a price point for its sales.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple will not sacrifice its margins. So they’re going to get their, you know, whatever 38% whatever the margin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, they’re going to get their margin somewhere. And so they, you know, if, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make more money on average by skimping on the RAM on that base model, they’re going to keep doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. They’re going to keep doing it as long as they possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, on the MacBook Air though, I think that is, I mean, of all the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sells, I feel like the MacBook Air is probably the least likely to
⏹️ ▶️ John have its specs bumped, because people just want the cheapest laptop they can get.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, like, on the MacBook Pro, like what percentage of MacBook Pros are purchased with the base RAM versus the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of MacBook Air? The MacBook Air has got to be so much bigger than the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. I don’t know, because in both cases, huge amounts of them were purchased by businesses and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schools and stuff like that. So like, and I think usually when you’re talking about those big bulk buys,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very, very frequently it is either the base model or like the next stocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up config that is normally stocked, like not a custom build. So but there’s tons of base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model sales sold in any case. So I bet it is a pretty high ratio for both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the air and the pro. Although I think you’re right, it probably is higher for the air.
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t stay at eight forever, just like they couldn’t stay at four forever. Do they have to double? Do they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John go from eight to 16? I mean, the iPads apparently come with 12, but they’re only using eight
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. You can go up. You don’t have to double it every time. It’d be nice. They’d be catching
⏹️ ▶️ John up. I think it would be a good idea, but 16 seems too generous for their lowest end laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. The M4 version of their lowest end laptop. It’s 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They absolutely should
⏹️ ▶️ John because the 16 versus the eight costs them five extra bucks. The only way it would
⏹️ ▶️ John hurt the margins is why Barker was was mentioning it is it will stop people from buying the more expensive model where they charge you
⏹️ ▶️ John a bazillion dollars for that RAM, right? That’s how it hurts margins. Not because like, oh, that’s not hurting margins. That extra
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM cost them nothing. That’s true. But it stops you from buying the one where they overcharge for the RAM upgrade. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is the that is the problem that Apple is trying to work. But yeah, they they need to bump their RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they if they’re gonna do this thing where they just only will only ever double it, and we’ll wait until it
⏹️ ▶️ John is incredibly embarrassing before they do the doubling. That’s not a good dynamic and I hope they should fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I think they will upgrade the MacBook Air Ram once the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever type of RAM chip the MacBook Air uses is no longer available in 8 gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips. That’s when they will finally update it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean like it was in the iPad. Maybe hey, you know, maybe they those ones aren’t available. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think they’re ever not going to be available like but it’s just when is the someone
⏹️ ▶️ John had a similar question, I think I cut it out of this is like, which do you think will happen first, the MacBook Air get 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM or some other highly unlikely thing. And it was like, you know, a rock and a hard place, two things that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John just does not want to do. But you know, they, they can’t hold the line on RAM forever, they will have to bump but eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just maybe not this year.
#askatp: Cellular-Mac excuses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Woody Lewis writes, Could Apple’s reluctance to put cellular on the Mac be due to their failure to produce an in-house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modem? Considering Apple’s reluctant dependence on Qualcomm and the exorbitant rates Qualcomm charges, I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why Apple’s holding off on adding cellular to high-priced devices like the Mac. This argument is undercut somewhat with the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro costing the same as a MacBook Air, but MacBook Pros can still greatly increase in price over an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. And if customers have waited this long, what’s the harm in making them wait longer? Yeah, that’s fair. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we’ve talked about this a couple of times in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to debunk this again, because we’ve talked, we’ve mentioned this years ago, and then we corrected ourselves. And some people
⏹️ ▶️ John are still going with the outdated information, the idea that Qualcomm charges you a percentage of the purchase price of the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because Macs can be so much more expensive, that Apple would be charged a ton more. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how it works based on our most recent looking into this, like there is a cap, and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John already at the cap, like Qualcomm, whatever, they’ll charge you a percentage up to whatever the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John is. And basically every Mac is already at that maximum cap. So Apple is not avoiding
⏹️ ▶️ John cellular and Macs because it would be too expensive relative to putting cellular
⏹️ ▶️ John in iPads and other devices. They could be doing it for whatever their reasons are. That’s not it. Like, it’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, they can’t do it because you can buy a $5,000 Mac and then a Qualcomm will get $500 of that. That’s not how it works. At
⏹️ ▶️ John least, you know, it used to be. And then we were corrected. And then we aired the correction.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it is still the case that there is that a monetary cap for this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every possible argument people put up for why cellular maybe is being held back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the laptops for some kind of weird business reason, it’s in every iPad. It’s in the $350
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model. You have to pay a little more for the cellular. It’s been available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on every iPad ever since 2010. So every iPad model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has had cellular as an option that has cost between usually $130 and $200 extra. And it is great, it just works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, and the only thing I can think of is like, in some various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forms of their deals with carriers or their pricing with Qualcomm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure there are differences in like how the devices are categorized. Like I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have different agreements and different rates for if somebody’s considered a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a wearable or a tablet or a PC. I’m sure those are like different categories for some kind of licensing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deals or whatever. But again, like cellular laptops have existed in the PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world for a very long time now. So obviously this is not something that’s that difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to navigate with the carriers and the royalty holders like Qualcomm and things like that. This isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a difficult problem. And this isn’t a problem that no one has solved. This is just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a choice that they’ve made. that they just don’t care. And I’m sure if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple person was here, I’m sure we’d get a wonderful PR answer of how important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is to serve our customers and what we show, blah, blah, blah. But look, actions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speak louder than words. Apple does not care about cellular on the Mac. They have not prioritized it. They seem to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no path to get there from where… They seem to be in no rush to do it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are so far past the point where it can’t be It’s just like, oh, they’re working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, but it’s not done yet. No, we’re so far past that point. They don’t care. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, iPad Pro being so expensive, being so, you can make an iPad Pro more expensive than a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty easily by configuring it. It’s the same, you know, they’re using the same SOC as all Apple Silicon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like every excuse has fallen away. Winnie’s question here is though, is actually vaguely plausible
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple has been planning to bring cellular to the Mac just as soon as they’re done with their in-house modems.
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately, they pinned that feature to the timeline of a product that is terminally behind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s been trying to, they bought that modem business from Intel and they’ve been trying to make cell modems and they wanted to do this for
⏹️ ▶️ John their phones, obviously, but maybe they said, we’re not even thinking about cellular in the Mac until
⏹️ ▶️ John we get our modem stuff. And the modem stuff should be ready by 2022, right guys? And it hasn’t worked out. Even that theory, like why?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s literally been in every single iPad. That’s totally an Apple thing to do though. It’s totally an Apple thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But why? How different is the hardware in a MacBook Air versus the hardware in an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, well, this is definitely a business thing. If you worked in a big company, someone will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna do this, it’s been a longstanding thing that people want, and we’re gonna tie it to this other thing. And then the other thing gets delayed, and then the people
⏹️ ▶️ John will say, can we just untie these two things now, and just do, like you said, just do what we do in the iPads?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we just stick the Qualcomm thing? And there’s just tremendous institutional
⏹️ ▶️ John resistance to untying two things that have been tied to each other, especially when it comes to a product
⏹️ ▶️ John line that is not the top priority. Like if you tie something in the phone and it turns out, oh, you know, now one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is delaying another, untying that is easier because the phone is so important. But on the Mac, I’m sure it’s like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve already started down this path. We’re working on the modems. Let’s just wait until they’re done. I think they’re gonna be done this year. And they’re not done. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then the next year you have the same conversation and with the same result. That is plausible. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ John common dysfunction of businesses. But you know, us out here as customers, like we don’t care what the reason is. We
⏹️ ▶️ John just want it. And you know, I think Apple’s answer would be like, well, you may want that, but you’re in the minority,
⏹️ ▶️ John so tough luck. Eh, it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But how many iPad owners choose it? How many Apple Watch owners choose it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we feel like iPad owners prioritize it differently. When we survey Mac users, a very small percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to want it, and our tethering solution is so amazing, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco blah, blah, blah, blah, that’s what they would say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that there’s any reason that they’re not doing it, but that it’s like, well, we have to prioritize it, even though you super-duper want it,
⏹️ ▶️ John not everybody is like you. I think that’s what they’d say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, if tethering is the answer, why do iPads have it? Why does every
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad forever have it? And why is tethering so bad? You know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s the thing, no argument against it holds any water once you say, well then why is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it available on every single iPad they ever made? It just makes no sense when you consider that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God. I’m kind of glad that the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mania is passing now from the iPad Pro, because I’m so annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the thought, How amazing would it be if the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was released with an OLED screen and cellular? We would be flipping our minds.
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED screen, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is a pro product, Marco. People with iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Airs cannot handle a faster than 60 hertz refresh because that is also a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John And they cannot handle OLED screens. Don’t even talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for at least five more years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like why, why is it, I’m just, I shouldn’t get all mad. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does the iPad Pro in even an 11-inch form factor have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an M4, a great OLED screen, cellular, in a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small package that costs around a little over a thousand bucks if you put the keyboard on it and stuff, and the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air with most of those same guts at about the same price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not only does it not have those features at those price, but those features are not attainable at any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price on that product. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, part of that is that the iPad you were describing is the most expensive iPad and the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John you were describing is the least expensive and Apple wants to segment its product line. But yeah, I mean, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can’t even get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same people are looking at both of those
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even get the old ads on the Macbook Pro. So it really hurts that argument for now, but we’ll see how it goes. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, the old old, it’s brand new. Like I understand that that’s going to be a process of like, you know, bring it to everything slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. Cellular is not. Oh my, it’s so not new. Like, I was using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cellular modem to tether my laptop in 2006. This is not new!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I hear you and I agree, but if we continue this any further, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn this entire show into a Marco and Casey Wein about cellular Macs power hour. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like at this point, We should probably call it, even though I would like to agree with all your grumbling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whining, because I am right there with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just making so many people write in to say how little they care about cellular on their Macs, and it’s a useless feature, and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should never add it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please don’t. And if it’s so useless, why is it never added? Thank you so much to our sponsors this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace and Factor. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get an exclusive after show topic every week called overtime. This is an extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus topic that we do every week now. Members exclusive. You can hear it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself by joining atb.fm slash join this week on overtime. We are talking about an update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Apple’s car integrations, things like, you know, the latest car play and things like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be an update on Apple in cars and overtime. This episode for members join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to everybody for listening and we will talk to you live from California next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin, Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to. Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check podcast so long
Neutral: Kid car revisited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we’re going to do a little post-show neutral today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’re going to talk about our member special. There’s the most recent member specials we were recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, which was, um, talking about cars and car related things. And so John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess you would like to revise your statement with regard to buying cars for your kid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I just have updates. Like I threw at the end of our discussion, the discussion was like, if you had to buy a new car now, what would you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy? And we had all the sorts of conditions and caveats and whatever, and we and we got increasingly ridiculous. At the very
⏹️ ▶️ John end, I said, what about buying a car for a kid? Which, you know, neither one of your children are
⏹️ ▶️ John driving age, but mine are, so I’m like, maybe this will come up. Anyway, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about it, and it’s a difficult problem, and yada yada, but the problem has continued to exist
⏹️ ▶️ John in my household. We have four licensed drivers and two cars. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a difficult situation. And it’s made more difficult, honest, by me, because I don’t want my children to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right? So now we have
⏹️ ▶️ John four licensed drivers, and two of them can only drive one of the cars. So it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the whole bring in the goat and the chickens and the wolf across the river or whatever, of like, OK, well, if
⏹️ ▶️ John this person wants the car on this day, then I will let my wife use my car. Right? So that means
⏹️ ▶️ John she’d have to take my car when she goes to work. So her car is here for the kids to use, and then it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a pain. Right? And we talk about it on the show is, if you had to buy a car for your kid, what would you buy?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m because I’m faced with that problem. We were considering trying to get a kid car, not a car
⏹️ ▶️ John for a kid. They can buy their own car eventually. And maybe one of these cars eventually will be given to slash
⏹️ ▶️ John sold to the kid when they graduate college and move out of the house. But we just wanted to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John car that the kids can drive that like if they bang it up or hit a curb or get into a fender bender, we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care about it. And they’re not driving our cars and we know how to do this car shuffle thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve been working on this problem since we recorded that member special.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as again, as you can imagine, I make it so much more difficult for myself because of
⏹️ ▶️ John what I want out of this. So here’s the difficulty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, let me guess. The end of this discussion is you have bought or will buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either an Accord, which is my guess, or a Civic, because I cannot fathom you owning any other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car manufacturer’s product other than Honda. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John so here’s, I’m looking for cars and getting frustrated. Here’s the frustration. First one, let
⏹️ ▶️ John me find a crap box. Well, I’m trying to use the kind word for that, right? Let’s find a kid car, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a $2,000 thing. Like it’s junky, you don’t care, you know what I mean? Like- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was even looking at old Volvos. I was like, you know, trying to find a Volvo or whatever. And I was looking at like the safety ratings and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not that Volvos aren’t safe, they are, but like the safety rating information
⏹️ ▶️ John available to us is not granular enough for me to distinguish how much better a Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ John is than like some other car of similar vintage, you know what I mean? Like, cause everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John games the system, like they all want to get five star crash rating or whatever. And so two five star cars, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not the same. They both got five stars, but one of them is probably better than the other, but how much better and how can I tell?
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I’m looking for crap boxes. And there’s a lot of them available,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Hence the name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. I mean, they have like 200,000 miles in them. They’re filled with rust because it’s New England, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like any car that you can buy for a very small amount of money, it has huge amount of miles. This is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be rusted out. It’s gonna have so many mechanical problems. I don’t wanna leave my kids stranded. I do want it to be safe, but
⏹️ ▶️ John any car that’s like $2,000 is gonna be old and older cars are less safe. They have less safety
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment. They’re safe in crash testing, you know what I mean? And it’s like, do I want
⏹️ ▶️ John my kid to be in an unreliable car that’s gonna cost me like $1,000 in repairs
⏹️ ▶️ John once I bring it home and realize it, like the engine is dead or it needs a new water pump or all the brakes are shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you get yourself a new car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly what I was wondering. Are we pulling a Marco and buying ourselves a new car? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just talking about the crap boxes now, right? It’s like, oh my God, he did.
⏹️ ▶️ John always hoping to find like the car that was just driven like to church on Sunday every day and kept
⏹️ ▶️ John in an air conditioned garage. And you know, like it has a small number of miles on it, but that just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exist. And then, so I’m looking for used cars like that. And then I go up, okay, well, what if I say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a crap box? What if I look for a decent used car? Then what happens with my philosophy is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I go right from crap box on Craigslist or whatever, right? I go from that, I immediately go to a,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t want a crap box. I don’t want to worry that this car is unreliable. I want a car
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t have a lot of miles, that’s probably pretty reliable. And you get into the whole land of like
⏹️ ▶️ John certified, pre-owned with warranty from dealer type things. And guess what? those cars
⏹️ ▶️ John cost as much as a new car. I was like, what the hell? And you’re gonna say, is there
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing in between? Yeah, there are things in between, but I don’t want what’s in between. I either want a crap box that costs me nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John or a very reliable car. And guess what? If you want a very reliable car with not a lot of miles, it’s basically the price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, wait, hold on. I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said, although I have not gone car shopping in like six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re always going car shopping, come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes and no. But anyways, I haven’t done serious car shopping. I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no more than kick some tires. But anyways, first of all, and I just leave this be because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll get on a huge tangent, but you should be buying a lightly used electric car for your kids because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John A lightly used electric car? Yes. Point me to those. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get like a Leaf or something, or even like an old Model 3 at this point. There’s so many out there now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna buy a Tesla, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we can just take that off the table right away. And a Nissan Leafs, I did look
⏹️ ▶️ John at them, but they don’t have like conditioned batteries. So all their batteries, and again, in New England are so
⏹️ ▶️ John hosed. It’s not even funny, like the used ones, you know what I mean? Because they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t even do like temperature-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s your own fault for living somewhere with shitty weather.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you expect?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Nissan LEAF is, it’s not an unsafe car, but I just, I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There are options other than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, even a lightly used electric car, they’re expensive. They’re very, they’re not, you can’t buy, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John such thing as a crap box version of that. And then all of a sudden you’re getting into new car territory prices, right? It’s like, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a lightly used Nissan Leaf for $22,000. That’s new car territory. OK, that’s fair. OK, so the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I was going to say is there is an in-between that I’m sure you will thumb your nose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at for some reason or another. And maybe it’s that you just don’t have these where you are. But it’s Local
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hero CarMax, which I think I’ve mentioned many times. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John spent a lot of time on their website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s headquartered here in Richmond. And they, to the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my recollection, not only do they typically sell decent used cars, No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s always a crap shoot. I’m not saying they’re guaranteed to be perfect, but they’re usually pretty decent. But a, they do have like a one week return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey policy on freaking automobiles, which is pretty cool. But secondly, you can, you can choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy into their like extended warranty. And so you can basically like create your own CPO
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation. Granted, it does cost extra money. It’s not free, but you can basically create your own CPO situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by giving them some money up front. And then they will do a bumper to bumper warranty on this used car, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be the best of both worlds for you. Although I suspect that they’re probably still more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than you would want to spend.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I spent a lot of time on CarMax, AutoTrader, AutoTempest, Cars and Bids even,
⏹️ ▶️ John where I’ve had to save searches for months on Cars and Bids just out of my own curiosity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cars and Bids is more of like an enthusiast site, and I have saved searches for the last six shift Accord
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, to go back a step, I’m embarrassed I forgot about this because my parents have one. D-Temp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the chat brings up, why not a used Chevy Bolt? They weren’t that expensive new. They can’t be, but so expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John They used EV things, like a lot of things keep me away from the used EVs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t get them cheap. They have old, cruddy batteries. The NCAS thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John out there, too. And it’s like, do I want to buy an electric car with a connector I know is not going to be the connector I want it to have and
⏹️ ▶️ John wire my house up for that kind of, like, oh, it’s so easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John adapters aren’t that big, but it’s like this the main thing is there’s no electric cars that I like
⏹️ ▶️ John like at this point that I can afford right There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not for you. It’s for your kids and Chevy Bolt is the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s all thing It’s not it’s not it’s a kid car, but it’s not for the kid. It’s like What
⏹️ ▶️ John the title is going to be in our name? It’s not gonna be the child’s car. It doesn’t matter who’s driving
⏹️ ▶️ John this I know that the ones driving it But like the thing is if I’m gonna spend like five digits
⏹️ ▶️ John five five digits at ten thousand to twenty thousand whatever dollars in a thing. I want it to be a car that I like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe that’s just a me thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know. It’s like, well, it’s not for you. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s a kid car. I, I can’t buy a car I don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on the plus side, now I understand why you give me so much about Aaron’s about me driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an automatic, even though I drive Aaron’s car, maybe 100 miles a year. But now I get it. Aaron’s car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Aaron’s car. Yes, it is our car, legally speaking, but I almost never drive that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s her car. If she wanted something that I really disagreed with, I would have a conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with her about it. But that’s what she But she’s your wife, not your child. Well, even still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand why you’re hanging your hat so much on it needs to be something John approved. Like, who freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cares? As long as it’s not an absolute disaster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s not for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has to be me approved. It has to be me approved. There’s no electric cars that I like. They’re very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m worried about the battery life and the battery health. There’s not a lot of good cheap ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, half the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bolt batteries have been replaced under warranty. Like, most of them have. You really are doing yourself a
⏹️ ▶️ John The Bolt is probably the best contender in that category, because like I said, the Leaf doesn’t have the conditioned batteries. The Bolt did have
⏹️ ▶️ John that battery problem and they’ve been replaced. They are still kind of expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that is actually a good possibility. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of unknowns there with having it be our first electric car and having it be for the kids and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re coming up with excuses, Darwin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but whatever you have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like I said, it’s not the shape of the market that’s forcing these two polar things. it’s my desires that
⏹️ ▶️ John are forcing them that it either has to be a crap box or a reliable car and the crap boxes are too crappy and the reliable ones are too expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John and the EVs are too expensive or I don’t like them or I think it’s not the right time to be an EV especially for kids.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? So that got me into that situation and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like there are options that will solve this problem which you are it is well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within your right to say I don’t care and they’re not for me but I do think there are options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out there for you, that would work. But carry on. What did you what car did you buy yourself?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, so that’s the it’s not me. That’s the problem here. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s you. It is. It is 100% you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John With respect to like getting a car. Once my wife got wind of the idea that I was looking for a third car
⏹️ ▶️ John for the kids to drive. You know what happened? She’s the Marco in this situation. She’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re looking at cars. Does Does she want a new car? You know, my car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She is right, isn’t it? No, no, no, hers is newer than yours. Hers is the newer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a 2017. It’s not that old. But she gets the seven-year itch.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Literally, the seven-year itch. Better here than other places, John. I’m not looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for a car for you. You already have a car. I’m trying to get the kids out of your car so they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wreck it and give them a car. And she’s like, why not just let them continue to wreck it and get her a new one?
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re looking at cars. I like cars. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gosh. Oh gosh. Before you say anything, I’m going to wager,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how this is going to turn out, I really don’t, but I’m going to wager that Tina has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided she would like something new and thus will want something that only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has two pedals. Not necessarily because she prefers that, but because there’s no other choice at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now you have a marital issue as to whether or not Tina will have a two pedal car. That’s what I’m going to guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further, I’m going to say Tina wants an EV. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know her driving taste. Apparently, that’s the thing I forgot to mention before is that, you know, all our cars are stick shift,
⏹️ ▶️ John or my kids both learned on stick shift. They’re not stick shift enthusiasts. My daughter in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John real hatred for stick shift. And she’s like, when are you going to get a good car? She just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey deep down. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, that’s that’s their taste, right? Like all my friends have good cars with just two pedals in them or whatever. She’s come around a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John on it since like getting more comfortable with it. But my son, he can drive stick fine. But he’s he’s also just not into it. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John into it at the very least. So the whole idea with the kid car is we would get an automatic. The kid car would be automatic,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because they both don’t like it. And the whole point is that they would drive
⏹️ ▶️ John it and whatever, right? Because I mean, if they’re not enthusiasts, stick shifts will have
⏹️ ▶️ John no place in their future life.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, this is what we had. They had to learn on it, whatever. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. See, but in my recollection of Tina was, of her preferences, was that she actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimately does prefer three-pedal cars, but I feel like she has more, she’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more willing to give on that issue than you and probably I are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when she started saying, when you’re looking at cars, I would like a car. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think she also eliminated EVs along with me because they’re just very expensive, especially if she’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for a car for
⏹️ ▶️ John herself. And she’s not, I don’t think there’s any EVs that she really likes either. So there’s nothing out there that that she’s like pining
⏹️ ▶️ John for, desires or whatever. And when it comes to non EVs, she wants a stick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which I mean, yeah, I love that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I love that, but good luck. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, there’s a reason, I’m not forcing her to buy stick cars. Every car we’ve owned has been stick because that’s what she wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John She’s driven automatic. She drives rental cars. We’re watching our friend’s car now and they asked us to drive her once in a
⏹️ ▶️ John while and she drives it. She wants a stick. And you know, she knows they’re being rare and she knows eventually we won’t have one and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have an EV or whatever. But she’s out there saying, and
⏹️ ▶️ John she doesn’t know what’s available, what’s out there, but I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, maybe the GTI already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R is briefly still available.
⏹️ ▶️ John We went from, let’s buy a kid car and have it be automatic to let’s not do that
⏹️ ▶️ John and let’s get a third stick car, which would make my children’s head explode. It’s like, what, you got
⏹️ ▶️ John another car and it’s also stick? And it’s like, I have news for you about the cars we’ve purchased in our life.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we can’t drive it. Anyway, I know it’s out there with stick. Obviously Accord doesn’t have stick anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ John eliminated. My wife does know that. I’ve told her about it so she could begin her mourning period many years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John But many other cars do have stick shifts in them. But since getting her 2017, she has, 2017 Accord with stick
⏹️ ▶️ John shift, she has some new requirements that have been added to the I want a new car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you guess what her new requirements are? Car play. That’s one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John how did she get that requirement? None of our cars have CarPlay. We’ve never owned a car with CarPlay. How did she get that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John she knows it exists and she’s used it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey exactly. She’s
⏹️ ▶️ John seen the forbidden fruit. And so, and not only does she want CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she wants wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, good frigging luck. You’re either getting like a Kia, which there’s nothing wrong with that, or a BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ John choice. I have personally never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used CarPlay. By the way, I can tell you, Tina, the latency really sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on wireless car play. It is convenient though. Like Tiff’s car has it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in her i3. It is convenient, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the latency never stops being annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not great, but I don’t personally get as offended by it as you do, but I mean, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entirely wrong. All right, but don’t worry, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting sidetracked. So I was trying to pitch her, I was saying like, wireless, like I have to say, I have to preface this by saying I’ve never used
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but in my, like, you know, I have suspicion that maybe you would actually prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John wire just because of the reliability and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or whatever. But whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There’s that. And what is the other, there’s one other thing that she’d want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on for the record, because I know Tina is or will listen to this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is listening or will listen. Wireless CarPlay, if you do the kind of driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I do, which maybe she does not. So take this with the appropriate amount of caveats and salt and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatnot. I tend to be in the car 10, maybe 15 minutes at a time. It is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual I’m in the car for more than about 15 minutes. And so it’s a lot of shorter trips. And because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, I realize how entitled I sound right now, but it’s very burdensome to take my phone out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my pocket, or in her case, purse, perhaps, and plug it in and then take, you know, unplug it, put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it back in the pocket slash purse, whatever. I find if you’re doing a lot of short trips like I am, I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that even with the higher latency, that juice is worth the squeeze. And furthermore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these little boxes like the one I have, they’re not phenomenal, but they work just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is more than sufficient, if you’re not a complete snob about it, that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will get the job done. And you can retrofit wireless into a wired only car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wouldn’t go too bananas on insisting wireless, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think on the surface there’s anything necessarily wrong with it. I would just, I would cave on wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car play long before I would cave on many of the other things that I’m sure are requirements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I will say too, like what you said about like your driving pattern of like frequent short trips,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless CarPlay is very good for that. Like it is very convenient for that, as long as you don’t actually really like interact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the screen that much, because the interactions, like the latency will annoy you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is nicer than the alternative of just like Bluetooth controls. Like it’s nicer than that at least. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most cases, so yeah, I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what is the other feature she wants?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Other than a stick shift, I don’t think you guys do a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John highway. These
⏹️ ▶️ John are new features. So obviously, it’s a stick shifter. But this is the thing. The request that she’s never had for any previous car that she suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John has. Wireless CarPlay is one. She’s the biggest. It didn’t exist last time she bought a car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the cool new adaptive cruise features, most of those are not available on sticks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You say that, but my car has radar cruise. And it won’t come to a complete stop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it will slow down. So that’s actually exactly what I was going to say. I was going to say some sort of radar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I forget the industry standard term for it, but basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adaptive cruise control?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go, thank you, adaptive cruise control. That was gonna be my guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a great feature. Like, that’s something you want if you don’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, she’s never had it. And unlike CarPlay, apparently she hasn’t experienced it enough to wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John know. The thing that she demands, that is a hard requirement now,
⏹️ ▶️ John because she’s had it once, heated seats.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I didn’t think about that. I know it
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds boring to you people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who get fancy cars all the time. No, not at all. We’ve never purchased a car for more than $25,000. We
⏹️ ▶️ John have the very first car we have ever owned with heated seats is her current car,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a 2017 Honda Accord. Oh, no, 100% it is a requirement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, don’t stop there. Get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heated wheel, too. Trust me. I was going to say the same thing. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car does not have a heated wheel. Erin’s car does. And every time I get in her car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the winter, it annoys the crap out of me. Because even in our protuned winters, John, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still delightful to have a heated steering wheel. So again, I wouldn’t make that a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey requirement in the same way I wouldn’t require wireless CarPlay, but I would strongly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strongly encourage it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the things I’ve outlined to you, stick shift heated seats, wireless CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John and given both of our tastes in cars, you will not be shocked
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn that, I mean, if I just said manual transmission alone, like if you go like CarMax
⏹️ ▶️ John or AutoTempest or something, it just eliminates every car in the country. You could check that check.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You go to transmission, like, we
⏹️ ▶️ John found 80,000 matches. Check the manual transmission checkbox, two matches. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John before you do wireless car play and heated seats. And then before
⏹️ ▶️ John you consider our taste in cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and the problem that you’re having is, I don’t think a brand new car is necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to fix your problem. It might, but it won’t necessarily fix your problem because-
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m not shopping brand new cars at this point. Those things will search used cars. I like, you know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not being like, oh, you have to, I’m going to these search sites to try to find like the big mega ultimate
⏹️ ▶️ John meta search, try CarMax, try AutoTempest, try Cars and Bids, try like just
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. And if some, the best thing is if you do any search terms first, if you put anything in first, like
⏹️ ▶️ John heated seats, it just removes the manual transmission option from the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they know there’s zero matches once you’ve selected that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I mean, that’s the thing is that I don’t think even going new would help you. going used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, again, I’m tunnel visioned on it because it’s sitting below me in the garage, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a GTI or a Golf R, that would do the trick. I’m trying to think of others, like a couple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a handful of year old BMWs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John She’s listening
⏹️ ▶️ John now and she’s trying to claim that she never actually required wireless carplay, but I contest this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Honestly, I’m team Tina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on this one. Your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco contesting is noted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, your contesting is noted and ignored.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say a several year old BMW, you’d be insane to do it, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s an example of a car that exists that would fulfill most of her requirements, especially if you let
⏹️ ▶️ John go of the wireless car play. The very last stick shift Honda Accord,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could get with these features on it. That was like the 2022, like the previous generation, like the last one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but there are like four of them in the country. Right. So here’s the problem. There’s a lot of those cars, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the only ones that have, I don’t know if she demanded leather, but she wanted leather. the only one
⏹️ ▶️ John that has leather heated seats and a stick shift. At the end of every Accord generation for many
⏹️ ▶️ John years now, they do the Accord Special Edition. So they’ll have like, you know, whatever generation of Accord,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be the 2018, 19, 20, 21, 22. Only the 22 model year, the very last model year,
⏹️ ▶️ John will they even offer a Special Edition, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the only Accord that you can get with a stick shift, with leather heated seats, is the Accord
⏹️ ▶️ John Sport Special Edition in 2022. That car does not exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just, like, it doesn’t exist for sale. The
⏹️ ▶️ John people who bought them are keeping them. They don’t come up on any searches. Cars and bids, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John one will pop up every once in a while and get snatched up for some ridiculous price. Forget about that car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nowhere, nowhere in the entire continent. You wanna get shipped from New Mexico? Sorry, it doesn’t exist anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John How large of a radius would you like to search? 3,000 miles? Sure, zero matches. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that eliminated that. So I was looking for stuff. I’m like, is there any car
⏹️ ▶️ John that satisfies these things? Can I find it? And it just, it narrowed down so much to this tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John aperture of acceptable, makes, models, and trim levels. Oh, and by the way, I
⏹️ ▶️ John often have a requirement about cars that I’ve mentioned that you’ve heard me talk about. No sunroof. You’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ John that one, right? Oh, you are,
⏹️ ▶️ John Not because I’m against sunroofs, but because I’m for having headroom. and most
⏹️ ▶️ John of my height is in my neck, my upper body. And when I sit in the car, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John my head to hit the headliner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re losing all your hair anyway, don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it. It is true,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m losing a lot of it, but it’s enough of it there that when my head hits the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco headliner, it is annoying, right? Yeah, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John really bad for you. Try adding that into the mix. Leather, heated seats, stick shift,
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless car play, no sunroof?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, get out of here with the slick top. You’re gonna have to cave on the slick top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, the Accord Sport Special Edition 2022, I believe, fulfills these requirements, minus maybe the wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John car play, but that car doesn’t exist. And so, I’m doing all the research, I’m bringing it back to her saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, well, you know, this, that, the other thing, whatever. I had to bring her, I said, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John a car exists that fulfills a lot of your requirements,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s got a sunroof. And she’s like, great, buy that. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, but the sunroof and my head, and she’s like, I don’t care, it’s my car, what do you care? I’m like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, even if I never drive your car, I passage in your car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And my head will be hitting the
⏹️ ▶️ John ceiling. Is that a verb? Yeah, I’m making it one right now. And so I went to
⏹️ ▶️ John the car dealer. We went shopping ourselves and went to some car dealers. One of them was closed
⏹️ ▶️ John on Sunday, which I didn’t understand. Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco drives me. Service department closed
⏹️ ▶️ John on Sunday, fine. The showroom, people shop for cars on weekends. Anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, we’re gonna, I’ll sit in the car. I’ll sit because you know, you can say, Sunroof takes up headroom
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever blah blah blah and what by the way the crush we looked at not that we were gonna buy So we looked at the Integra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that is a good answer. That’s such a good answer. Why didn’t I think of that? Well, it’s expensive, but it’s such a good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John not we’re not it’s a $50,000 car We’re not getting that. But anyway, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey since it’s Tina not worth it to you
⏹️ ▶️ John Since it’s basically a civic. I’m like, well, let me check this for headroom Head was hitting hard in the Integra with the
⏹️ ▶️ John just it’s not made for me with the sunroof or whatever but that’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. So like, okay, there’s one model and one trim level that fulfills your requirement. It’s got a sunroof.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will go sit in it. I went by myself to a car dealer to sit
⏹️ ▶️ John in a car to see if it fit my head. And I don’t like car dealers. No one likes car
⏹️ ▶️ John dealers. What I was hoping is, you know how you go in and they got a bunch of cars like indoors and you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like wander around
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the door and sit in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I wanted to happen because then I can get in and out in five minutes. That didn’t happen. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was the car that I wanted was parked out front that wanted to sit in. I went in and I asked the receptionist
⏹️ ▶️ John and I said, can I just go sit, like it wasn’t one of the inside ones, it was outside, can I just go
⏹️ ▶️ John to that car out there? Can I just go sit in it? And she’s like, yeah, sure, go ahead. I don’t know if it’ll be unlocked though. I go, of course it’s locked. I come
⏹️ ▶️ John back in, I said, oh, it turns out it was locked. And she says to me, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have to get a salesperson. And she says it with that look,
⏹️ ▶️ John knows. She knows what happens when you get a salesperson. Because now you’ve got a car salesperson.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, I just want to, so. Because they come and they attached you like a leech and they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell you a car. It’s their job. I get it, right? She gets a salesperson, salesperson come over, opens
⏹️ ▶️ John the door for me. I sit in it. Headroom’s not great. Better than the Integra though. But the headroom’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not great. I try the passenger seat. I lean the seat back a little bit. You know what I mean? You try to do all the tricks. Like, of course the passenger
⏹️ ▶️ John seat does not go up and down at all, right? The driver’s seat does go up
⏹️ ▶️ John and down, but it doesn’t go down that far. But I’m like, whatever. So I spent
⏹️ ▶️ John way too long with the salesperson. They did not sell me a car. They tried real hard though. I went back
⏹️ ▶️ John and I said to my wife, I said, I think I can live
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Sunroof since it’s your car. It’s not as bad as the Integra. I will suffer
⏹️ ▶️ John with my head hitting the headliner. This is what you want. And she said, yes, it was. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John did the search. How many cars with these features in the color
⏹️ ▶️ John that we wanted exist within, let’s say 500 miles. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the color that you want, I mean, at this point you’re looking for a needle in a haystack and then you’re gonna say, I want a blue or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever red needle.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, right. Color matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, if I’m spending new car money, I want a car that I like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, did you tell us what car it is? Did I miss this? Not yet, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to it. Okay, all right. And how many existed? Two.
⏹️ ▶️ John 500 mile or two. Okay, stop right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please, please, John, for the love of everything that is good and holy, if that car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is anywhere near or even better on the other side of Virginia, I will give you all of my money if we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey road trip that bad boy back to Boston. I will do anything to be on that trip
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they do like the, you know, you would assume that if it’s far away that you could do some kind of dealer trade with a local dealer or whatever. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John two cars. So I’m like, all right. So I, we’re just noodling. We’re just thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, well, whatever. I’m not buying a car. We’re visiting car dealers. I’m sitting in them. We’re not buying a
⏹️ ▶️ John car, I’m just looking around. But then it was like two. And so I send emails to
⏹️ ▶️ John people. I contact them through their various websites or whatever and I say, hey, I’ve got VIN numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John now, right? I say, hey, do you actually have this car? That’s question
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey number one. Yeah, that’s good, yeah. Fair, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you may be shocked to learn that car dealers are anxious to get back to you about cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John They get back to me and say, yeah, I have this car. I ask them a second question, which is, can you just tell me what color it is?
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t want to give them the answer. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John want them to tell me, I want them to go and look at it, right? And they tell me the
⏹️ ▶️ John correct answer. And they’re all like, this is the big thing with car dealers. This wasn’t last time I, they were like, when should
⏹️ ▶️ John we schedule a test drive? When do you want to schedule a test drive? Do you want to schedule a test drive? Let’s schedule a test drive. When are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to come and look at this? I’m like, I’m just asking you questions over email, person. Chill out, right? Be
⏹️ ▶️ John in sales person. Right? And then, I forget what day this was. This was like Monday of this week. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, there’s two of these cars. I really don’t like any of the other colors. She really seems to want a car.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve already given up on giving the kids what they want. So one of the dealers, the one that’s closer to
⏹️ ▶️ John her work, I call her at work and I say, don’t come home. Rather than going
⏹️ ▶️ John home, do you want to just go to the car dealer that is near your work and look at this car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, did you impulse buy a car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John Syracuse?
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t call this impulse buying if you based the amount of research I’d done up to this point. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m at the point now where I know there’s two. So we go, I drive up there to her, we both drive together to the dealer, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, further up from where her work is. We look at this car,
⏹️ ▶️ John she test drives it, she likes it. You know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John headroom is better than the Integra. I can live with it. We go
⏹️ ▶️ John back and I’m like, well, I think we should get this car. Oh my word. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, I had spent like a month on this. Like we know when we recorded the member special, I was already looking into this then, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is why I brought up the question. And I was like, I don’t have any other answers. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best answer to this problem. And if we don’t get this car,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so like here I am in a situation where I’m gonna negotiate the price of a new car
⏹️ ▶️ John with a salesperson, trying not to let them know that according to my searches, two
⏹️ ▶️ John of these exist within 500 miles. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like you’re buying this car
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco make you pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of my research was, I’d mentioned that, a person who asked about new
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, and I mentioned that Car Edge service, I had signed up for that a little while ago, and one of the things they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John give you is there’s a lot of services, it’s like, what is the invoice price, what would be a fair price for
⏹️ ▶️ John this car, that type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John so I had, before I went to this deal, this would be a fair price for the car, minus any kind of incentives
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It’s like, it gives them a little bit of profit to the dealership, they’ll probably accept this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not getting ripped off. I had that price in my mind. Went into that negotiation, I’m very proud of myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got within $100 of that price. A hundred, a higher. Well done. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey $100, within $100
⏹️ ▶️ John of the quote unquote fair price for the thing. Part of it was by saying, well I have
⏹️ ▶️ John two other cars, two other dealers I can go to. And I listed the one in the color that
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t like, because of course I never told them I didn’t like the color. Don’t tell the dealer what colors you like, right? I was, you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a blue one. I was like, you know, well there’s a blue one and another white one. And the dealer was pushing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey back. Wait, wait, wait, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white car just happened to you? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my god. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is getting more and more delicious.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was like, well, is that other car? Are you sure that’s not the same car as this? Because we got a call
⏹️ ▶️ John from a dealer about this car and they wanted to take it from us or whatever. I’m like, no, no, these are other cars. I can show you the emails. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s whatever, like basically let him think there are other, there are other places where I could go for this car, even though I would never buy the blue
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Right. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And so anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got within a hundred dollars of the price. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He’s very proud
⏹️ ▶️ John of myself. He’s going through the thing. Okay. We agreed on this price. And then, you know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John tax title and blah, blah, blah. Like that’s, you know, that’s the thing about the car. I just think they don’t include tax title or whatever in the fair price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. We agree on the price. And then he says, and then, of course, one hundred twenty nine dollars for the locking wheel nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, absolutely. The locking wheel nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, I don’t want locking wheel nuts. It’s like, well, they’re already on the car. Well, take them off. I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, well, I’ll take them off. Well, but they’re already on the car. I was like, I’m sorry. No. And I was like, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John was going so smoothly. And I basically got into a shouting match with this guy. I was like, look, when we agreed upon this price,
⏹️ ▶️ John when we agreed like this is gonna be the price before tax title and fees, it was the price for the car that’s sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. Whatever’s on that car, that was what we were negotiating, this number.
⏹️ ▶️ John We weren’t negotiating this number plus other things. And he takes me out to the car and he’s like on the sticker, it has like $129 locking wheel nuts
⏹️ ▶️ John as a separate line item. I was like, I don’t care. We were negotiating for that car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything that that car is. Not parts of that car, not partial. That car
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was this number. And then we would add tax tiles and fees. And so like, I’d never gotten so angry at a car dealer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, he went back to his manager and took the $129 off. Damn right he did. Good for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey John. And he
⏹️ ▶️ John made some big excuse of like, you know, we can’t take it off the price, but we’ll just subtract it. I was like, I don’t care what you subtracted, dude.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just subtract it, right? Oh, and then by the way, the incentives of like, is there any
⏹️ ▶️ John incentives? Can we do any blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The one incentive that we were eligible for was the Honda
⏹️ ▶️ John loyalty program thing. And yes, now you’re revealing everything about it. Guess what? We are loyal Honda
⏹️ ▶️ John customers. And I got another $500 off just because I already own a Honda.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You bought a Civic?
⏹️ ▶️ John As you should have already guessed by now, what is the only car that could possibly be? It is a Honda Civic
⏹️ ▶️ John in the most expensive trim level the Honda Civic is offered in. Because that is the only one that
⏹️ ▶️ John has wireless carplay, leather seats and heated seats. Oh my God. And a stick shift and a sunroof.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot believe you just bought yourself a white, well, bought Tina a white Civic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This line in the show, in our internal show notes, kid car revisited, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has sat there for like two weeks. If I had known that this was the direction this conversation was going,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we wouldn’t have even done the… This happened this week. We should have done an emergency episode, damn it. I picked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the car today. Oh my god. Wait, so is it a Civic Si or a Civic
⏹️ ▶️ John Civic? No. but the specs, the requirements that I just gave you
⏹️ ▶️ John are not available in the Si. And also the Si is more expensive. We could have saved $5,000 if
⏹️ ▶️ John she didn’t want heated seats. We could have got the sport trim. And with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the $5,000, just a $5,000 heated seats. Especially like you live in New England, like winter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a big part of your life. My car
⏹️ ▶️ John have heated seats, I think it’s fine. But she wants them, so she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes. After this, she deserves the heated seats, damn it. Anyway. Oh, and this is a turbocharged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. I don’t think you’ve owned a turbocharged
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they’re all turbos now, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m just saying. We’ve got a white Honda Civic
⏹️ ▶️ John hatchback. A hatch? You got a hatch? The hatchback and sedan look so similar
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Civic. And I wanted a hatchback because we don’t have a hatchback. And as you know, as Marco knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John hatchbacks have a lot of utility. I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am I making this up? Didn’t you give me boatloads of crap for not having a car-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want a Volkswagen Rabbit or a Golf. I don’t want that kind of hatchback. Look at the car. It looks exactly like
⏹️ ▶️ John the sedan. It’s just like, it’s barely different in profile.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It looks like a sedan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks a lot like Casey’s car. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it sure does. And why did I pick white?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the best color for this car. Absolutely. The SI also, not the SI, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Civic Type R also looks best in white.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even see white as an option here. Oh, no, there I do. Never mind. Sorry. I have the, what is it, Noir,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it is, that darkens, that synthetically darkens websites. And so I had that on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the white paint swatch was colored black because dark mode by mistake. This doesn’t look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. This looks nice. But I mean. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John people wondering, you know, our recommendations for buying cars and the services we offer and the advice we have, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John followed all of that and this is what I ended up with. So can’t say we don’t put our money where our mouth is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So a white car, a white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hatchback happened to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I intended, I wanted the hatchback. I absolutely wanted it because I, It’s useful to have something
⏹️ ▶️ John with a hatch for like taller items. Especially since this is obviously, this is smaller than the Accord, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m gonna get a small, like if the sedan version of this, the trunk is very confined.
⏹️ ▶️ John The opening is confined, it is very confined. The hatch really helps with that. It
⏹️ ▶️ John gives you way more space than you get with the sedan version. And it looks almost like the sedan. So all my,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, hatred of hatchbacks that look like a Volkswagen Rabbit doesn’t apply to this car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows if I ever get to drive it anyway? It’s my wife’s car. So anyway, the kids are driving her old car as
⏹️ ▶️ John they have always been. They have always been driving that car and they will continue to drive it. And now we have three stick shift cars. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just to review my history of car purchases, go like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John Civic, Civic, Accord, Accord, Accord, Accord, Civic, all stick shift. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consistent at least. You are consistent, which is funny because I have never bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than one car from the same company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And I have never bought cars
⏹️ ▶️ John from any other company except for Honda.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you even look at like a GTI or anything like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John We like Hondas. We like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but it doesn’t mean that there’s not other better things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John. We looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at other things. It’s just, I mean, we’re a Honda family and we got $500 off for being a Honda family.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they are good cars. Like I’ll give you that. And even the things like, they haven’t screwed themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John up. Like they haven’t gone like all touchscreen or done anything weird. The interior is the, I think my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John mix of physical and touchscreen type controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The real question is, are you going to, for your future car purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convert to hatchback once you realize how good it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, hopefully I’m gonna convert
⏹️ ▶️ John to EV. That’s what’s gonna happen to me, but not anytime soon. But you just crapped all over every
⏹️ ▶️ John EV on the market. I know, but eventually all the EVs will change to NACS and there’ll be EV sedans
⏹️ ▶️ John that I like. Like, this is gonna be years in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is, congratulations to really Tina for getting what she wanted, because I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine the amount of bickering and grief that you gave her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over heated seats and most especially a sunroof.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I just tried to convince her and she didn’t want to be convinced. So there was no heated arguments.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just needed to sit in it and be able to say, I can tolerate this. I can passage and not
⏹️ ▶️ John die. That’s a glowing refusal. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Integra, I was really surprised. The Integra was worse. It did feel like they’re basically the same car.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I was part of the reason I was showing her the Integra. She’s like, why can’t I get a fancy car like Integra? I’m like, A, the good one is $50,000,
⏹️ ▶️ John and B, this is just a Civic. When you see the Civic, you’d be like, oh. You sit inside them,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re very, very similar. And by the way, finding sticks with Integra is talking to the dealer who was there
⏹️ ▶️ John is also very difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John packaging is better on the Civic. The Civic is just a better car than the Integra, unless you get the Type S. And those are very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Integra Type S, you mean? Or the GT?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, the Integra Type
⏹️ ▶️ John S. Oh, yeah. They’re very hard to come by, and they’re very expensive, much more than we wanted to spend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m very curious. Well, again, congratulations. You’ve done this well. You’ve done it right. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proud of you for sticking to your guns about the locking wheel lug nut, whatever things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny, when we bought the Volvo, I’m sure I’ve told this story, but when we bought the Volvo, I told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dealer, I do not want any stickers on that car. I do not want a plate surround.
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally forgot. I do that same thing. And I totally, after we came home from the dealer, after negotiating
⏹️ ▶️ John the price and saying we’re gonna buy it, I’m like, I forgot to tell them all those things you just said. No
⏹️ ▶️ John sticker, no plaque, no dealer branding. Whatever, whatever. I was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid me. I buy a car once every seven to 10 years. But I totally forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was so mad at myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, so when we bought the Volvo, which was seven years ago, and like a week or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, I think it was July, so a few weeks, July of 2017. Anyways, I vividly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember going to the car and saying, oh, the sticker’s there. And the salesperson looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at me like, yeah, we’re not going to buy this car. And he’s, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I told you I will not have the sticker on this car. And he rolled his eyes so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think they fell out of his damn head. But then he had a mechanic or who knows, or a detailer or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come over with a heat gun and pull the sticker off the car. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to sign any paperwork until he did. And I stand by it. And I will stand by it forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s pretty nice of him, considering you’d already agreed to buy that car and signed all the paperwork for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. No, I don’t think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had signed it at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John point. I think I was just looking at it. If you hadn’t signed it, then yes, you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John power there. But yeah. But the good news is, because even though I totally forgot about this, this dealer was great. Not only did they not put anything
⏹️ ▶️ John on this car, he pointed out to me. I noticed this already. But he pointed out to my salesperson, pointed out to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even put a license plate surround on for you. Nice. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thank you. That’s good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just literally like, no. I’ve never seen this. Everyone always does license. It’s easy to take that off and just unscrew it or whatever. But he didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even put that on. And he pointed it out to me. because he could tell based on me yelling at him about the lug nuts that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want that. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thank you, I appreciate that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is Massachusetts a barbaric commonwealth like we are?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Front plate states, it is. It’s the worst. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate it, I hate it so much. Virginia is a front plate barbaric commonwealth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t think it’s barbaric, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve got the front plates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, congratulations to Tina. I’m glad she stuck to her guns and got what she wanted. See, she did the negotiation with you, So you would do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the negotiation with the dealer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, she doesn’t deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with the dealer. She just watches me do it. I think she was a little bit upset when I was yelling at her. And by the way, all of our cars have locking lug
⏹️ ▶️ John nuts. It’s just that I’d never want to pay for them, because I didn’t ask for them. So if you’re going to put them on there, I’m getting them for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to concede. I am a little upset at Tina, because I would have given infinite dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a video recording of you yelling at this dealer, and would have given nearly infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars for a voice memos recording of you yelling at
⏹️ ▶️ John dealer. As listeners to this podcast would know, It’s not angry yelling, it’s incredulous yelling. Like when you hear me
⏹️ ▶️ John on the podcast talking about some
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bad software
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, it’s like, no, it was like, we just negotiated the price for that, I was literally
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing, for that car. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the number we agreed on. Remember that
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing where we were talking about the numbers and you’re going to ask your manager or whatever and we agreed on a number, we said yes, this is the number we can both agree, it was for
⏹️ ▶️ John that car. Everything that’s in that car, that’s the number we agreed on. It was just, I was incredulous. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, are you kidding me? You can’t add, you can’t say, and also other parts of that car we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John now going to itemize and add to the price. And so I was, I mean, would I have not bought the car
⏹️ ▶️ John with the hundred, at that point I probably would have, oh, here’s the final kicker, right? When I came home and
⏹️ ▶️ John like reloaded one of my tabs that had that search in it, zero matches. So guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what? That car that was listed twice, there was one of these cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John 500 miles and I just bought it because you can say, impulse bought it after a month of research.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw that it was available. I saw it had been on the market for 29 days, and I found the one that was near.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was lucky we picked. They both said they had the car, but only one of them really had the car,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we randomly picked that one because it was close to my wife’s work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when I bought that car, it disappeared. Now there’s zero of these cars within 500 miles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s incredible. I’m a little sad that we didn’t get to do a road trip together, but ultimately I’m glad that a white car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a white hatchback happened to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was ready to ship a car from New Mexico in CarMax, But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like, oh, rest free. It’ll be great.