635: An Effective Operator
15 Apr 2025Chaos in the government, chaos in the Siri group, chaos in Casey’s AirPods case… and new T-shirts!
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey’s lightly boken his AirPods Pro 2
- 🗣️ ATP WWDC 2025 STORE IS UP!! 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- 12 April: Trump excludes some electronics from tariffs
- 13 April: …except maybe not?
- Cross-platform photo management
- Nintendo Switch 2
- 4K 120Hz (via Kyle McMahon)
- Kickstand lumps (via Stuart Gibson)
- Other open-world racing games
- Console games price history
- Dropbox & File Provider
- John’s daughter’s college laptop
- Folding aspect ratios
- iPhone Mini… tri-fold? (via Peter Wagoner)
- MKBHD on the Huawei Mate XT
- Reverse-engineered Mac mini SSDs (via Jonathan Claydon)
- How Apple fumbled Siri’s AI makeover
- MacRumors summary
- More on JG’s Siri leadership
- On Robby Walker
- Cross-towngroup tensions
- That fateful demo
- NIH syndrome
- New York Times on Apple GPU purchases
- Post-show: AI mind-share
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Sony announces its 2025 TVs
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Chapters
- A weird problem
- ATP Store
- More Trump inept chaos
- Sponsor: BetterHelp
- Cross-platform photo syncing
- Switch 2 tidbits
- Dropbox and File Provider API
- John’s tariff laptop
- Foldable aspect ratios
- Mac Mini SSDs
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- Siri/AIML woes
- Sponsor: HelloFresh
- Siri/AIML woes (cont’d.)
- Ending theme
- Looked it up on ChatGPT
A weird problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a weird problem. I have many problems, lots of which are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve come to the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one specific problem that I’d like to discuss. So I have what I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called, and I know it’s not an official name by any capacity, an AirPods Pro Mark II. So what I mean by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is, there were the AirPods Pro, and then there was the second iteration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the AirPods Pro, where it’s still a lightning charging case, but it got, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the buds themselves got a lot more smarts. I forget the actual delineations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the AirPods Pro 2, but the twos, they had like a quiet 2.1 version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they called it 2.0 in OpenAI notification.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the AirPods Pro 2 have had two versions, the Lightning Port case version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the USB-C case version. You can’t just buy a USB-C case for the Lightning Port version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s actually like a slightly different hardware revision, and the USB-C version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is still called AirPods Pro 2, but has the USB-C case, that version has that special like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower latency mode for the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, I know exactly what you’re talking about. So I have had these AirPods Pro Mark 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that again, not the right name, but I’m just gonna call it that because that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John think of it as. Well, wait, which one do you have? Do you have the first revision of the twos or the second?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The lightning charging case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one. Okay, so the first, they’re called
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods Pro 2, the first ones. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why you wanna put Mark in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I drive a Volkswagen, and that’s how we talk. Anyways, so my AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark II, I’ve had them for a year or two. I forget exactly when I got them. I believe it was a Christmas gift a couple of years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. I think, it doesn’t really matter, but I’ve had them long enough that it’s not entirely unreasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to replace them. You know, it’s been a couple of years or whatever. The buds themselves still work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. The battery is still lasting sufficiently long for my needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am gonna be traveling this week, so maybe I change my tune if I have them in for like four or five hours at a time, which is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual for me, but generally speaking in day-to-day stuff, the batteries are great, no worries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I am having the first worldiest of first world problems. The charging case doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to want to Qi charge anymore, which is okay, but it gets worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because remember what I just told you, it is what kind of charging case, gentlemen? A lightning charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, I’d replace them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so here’s the thing. I concur with your assessment. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we keep getting these rumblings that there’s gonna be a Mark III, I know not the right term, a Mark III coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon. It’s gonna come any day now, it’s happening, it’s happening. And so I feel like is now really the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to do this? I don’t know what to do. So we’ll see how grumpy I get while I’m traveling over hooking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the lightning cable, which I can already tell you, I’m getting pretty grumpy about it. And maybe I’ll just like Insta buy some
⏹️ ▶️ John trip or whatever. You’re gonna be more upset about missing out on when the III’s come out, because then just plug
⏹️ ▶️ John them in, plug them in for a few months, you’ll be fine. People plugged in their iPod cases for years and we all survived. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was terrible, John. It was terrible, I tells you. I still plug mine in. I mean, I do have the wireless charger
⏹️ ▶️ John next to my bedside, but every other place in the house, I plug them in and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The funny thing is, is that it does occasionally work. So I don’t know what the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. I did try, I looked up like a KBase or whatever about it. And one of the things they said was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like disown it from the iOS side, you know, disconnect and forget it from the iOS side. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mash down on the button on the back something like 10 seconds or whatever, and that’ll effectively clear them out and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set them up as new, which I did assuming it would not make a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it made no difference. So, uh, every great, like one out of every 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will charge via Chi, but it generally doesn’t. And I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreasonably annoyed by it. And my brain knows that John, you are right that I should wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my heart is listening to Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John saying, your heart’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be sad when the threes come out anyway, unless Unless you’re signing up now to also buy the 3s when they come out, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna feel so much worse when the 3s come out and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t get them because I just bought new 2s. You are right, you are right. You can just get the case replaced. Isn’t that like 80
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks or something? That’ll satisfy your need to buy something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a need to buy something. That’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this stuff to work. As a quick aside, I think we talked on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe we talked on the show, that I’ve discovered that electric cars, the market for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric cars here in America is kind of bottoming out right now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve noticed that the really unaffordable Porsche Taycan, or whatever you call it, the electric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Porsche, that is almost affordable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used. Here it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is how it begins. Speaking of having a need to spend money, I don’t need to spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money on a stupid car. My car has under 30,000 miles on it, and I’ve had it for eight years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It gets driven at least every other day, but I go nowhere. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no reason to get rid of my car. I love my car. I don’t want to lose the third pedal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet I see that the electric life is kind of calling my name and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can feel, I feel like there’s, I see this with other people. I can’t remember. There was some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast that was going through the same thing and I was like, Oh, I know exactly what this feels like. But, um, anyways, I can feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like my subconscious trying to like convince my conscious brain that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s time. It’s time. And it’s not. This is a terrible decision. I know, intellectually, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible time. Our country is crumbling. And I’m like, oh, yes, I’m going to buy an electric Porsche because I’m a jerk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just such a terrible decision. And yet I can’t help myself. I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk you out of this last episode. I don’t forget if it made it to the air or not, but I’ll try again. The reason they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap is because the second revision, and the Mark II, as you would call it,
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, and it’s so much better. That’s why you can find the quote unquote Mark Is for less money, because nobody wants them. Don’t buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I can buy one by the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey revision, which will cost way more money. No, I can’t. Oh God, I cannot afford no matter how many shirts we hawk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we will be doing momentarily. I cannot afford a new Ticon Tican. I’m so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really should figure out how to pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not the one you should get anyway. Like you don’t, what should I get? You should get some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like more normal electric car.
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW i3 based on your driving habits, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco an i4. floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t think I can do another BMW. Not only do I don’t, I don’t think I can do another BMW and leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me out of it, I’m pretty sure the historical commission will 100% veto any future BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a prayer since it’s electric and hypothetically much less to go wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I don’t, I think she would poop all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John over that idea. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like I know you soured on BMW for a bunch of good reasons, but Porsche repair bills
⏹️ ▶️ John and maintenance costs are not good. ruin my moment, John. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you’re not saying, I want to stay away from those expensive cars like BMW. Hmm, Porsche.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s so true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when you said, you know, I have a need to spend money. I don’t have a need to spend money on an AirPods case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am, I can feel within me the need to spend money on a stupid car growing and I need, I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I need you to convince me not to because you’re the voice of reason. We all know Marcos didn’t say just do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re the voice of reason. You need to tell me not to because I know you’re right. Intellectually, I know you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I already do. I already did. I told you, this is not the time to buy that particular car. You just need to wait, and you need to save
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot more money based on your apparent taste in cars. It’s so true. We need to sell a lot more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Make a separate fund that is the Casey Car Fund and put money into it for like five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That won’t be enough, but I hear you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the thing, too. You already have the big family car. And what you’ve described
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the role of your car is shorter range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not usually hauling everybody around. Correct. So you shouldn’t have a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Porsche. Like, you know, ideally you would get like, you know, something reasonable. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a big fan of the Ioniq 5, at least the way it looks. I’ve never actually been in one. There’s all sorts of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable, like small-ish EVs that are not that much money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, again, I can say from like what I said last episode on before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW’s EV drivetrain is awesome and very mature. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think you should maybe look at an i4 if you’re itching to buy a car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey The problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you had with BMW were largely because you had a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the higher end engines in the engine time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it was out of warranty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so there are ways you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. You can get one in warranty. You can get one that doesn’t have an engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s ways to do this that would be less of a risky experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and would limit your potential cost. There’s ways you can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wouldn’t, and certainly as John said, I’m not going to like, I wouldn’t recommend that you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in fleeing BMW for reliability concerns, go over to Porsche. Forget
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. Oh, not the reliability thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just the maintenance costs. And the parts and maintenance are just so expensive for those brands. Like, you stare at the
⏹️ ▶️ John dealership for two seconds, hundreds of dollars fly out of your wallet. Everything is expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, the reason, no joke, no snark, no exaggeration. The reason I got rid of the BMW was because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was going to the dealer every month, every other month, something like that. And every time it entered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dealer’s parking lot, it didn’t leave without me being at least $1,000 poorer. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not an exaggeration. It was literally $1,000 every single time, sometimes many thousands of dollars. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was bananas. It’s absolutely a terrible idea to get a Porsche. Leaving aside the fact that I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t afford it, I just, it’s like just barely outside of what I consider to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable. And so I feel like I can afford it, even though I really can’t. But no, Marco, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re both right. The IONIQ 5, I think I would maybe go a different route, like one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other cars that shares the same platform. But we’re saying the same basic thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The IONIQ 5 is great for my needs. This is what you were talking about a minute ago, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For my needs, what I really want, or excuse me, What I really need is a Chevy Bolt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what my parents have. And it’s not a particularly pretty car, and it’s not a particularly luxurious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car, but it is the perfect car for the sorts of driving I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But because I’m a car guy, I don’t really want one. So I’m just gonna continue to drive my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dino Juice Mobile until it falls apart.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when that happens, go test drive an i4.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you should, at this point, you should keep driving your current car until it gets old enough that you won’t mind
⏹️ ▶️ John teaching your son to drive on it, and then he’ll crash it and then you’ll get a new car.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s the thing. If you think that I need a new car, which I don’t, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should get an expensive car, which I shouldn’t, then one thing you can do to help that process is go to atp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is such a great job. I am an expert and a professional. So here’s the thing. The ATP store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is back and it is back until Monday, April 28. And this is the second episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve talked about it. So now I get to do my little speech. Here’s the thing, every single time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we do a time limited sale like this, every single time, there’s at least one, usually three to five people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that reach out and say, oh no, oh no, I’m that guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I’m that person. Really? I’m that person. I’ve done it. I’m the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that missed it. I thought I would remember and I didn’t. So if you’re driving your Porsche Taycan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if you’re driving your BMW i4 or whatever you may be driving, uh, then you should pull over and go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hp.fm slash store and John John will walk through at least very quickly some of the wares that we have on offer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re walking, pull over to the side of the sidewalk or get out of the way of the people that are still walking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go to atp.fm. John, what is up for grabs?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a reminder of what we’ve got. The new shirts this time, we’ve got M3 Ultra shirts, including our joke
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Ultra shirt. And that brings me to the most common question since we announced the sale last episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John People are always asking about this, but then are asking even more now that the store is up. I usually say something
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I just got a new Mac and it’s got an M whatever processor in it. And when you were
⏹️ ▶️ John selling the shirts for the M whatever processor, I didn’t have this Mac, but that Mac broke and
⏹️ ▶️ John now I have this one and I wanna get a shirt that matches my processor. And I always tell those people, buy the shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John for the chip that you want, not the chip that you have, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco homage to the
⏹️ ▶️ John dress for the job you want, not the job you have, advice back when people used to dress up for work and like in the eighties and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Anyway, that’s what that is. The idea is that, you know, if you, you know, don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you can buy a shirt for the chip that matches whatever computer you have, but say, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say you don’t have an M3 Ultra, which you probably shouldn’t, you can still buy the shirt for it because it’s Apple’s most powerful,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, chip that they make. The reason I give this advice is because we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell these M shirts forever. There is lots of chips and lots of variants. The usual way it works
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple announces the chip and puts it in a Mac. and then whatever the next sale we
⏹️ ▶️ John have is, whatever chips were announced in that period, we sell
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point. And we usually don’t sell them again. So if you’ve seen people like on YouTube or whatever, wearing like a beat up
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Ultra shirt, that’s because we sold it when the M1 Ultra, like shortly after the M1 Ultra was released,
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least announced, and we haven’t sold it since. So don’t think you’re gonna be able to buy an M3 Ultra shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John three years from now, because you probably won’t. I mean, thus far we haven’t brought back, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John like the fancy variants. We do have in the on-demand store in between sales, we sell like the M1, M2, M3, M4,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just the plain ones with no modifier. And those are on-demand stuff, that’s not for you. You’re listening to the show. You shouldn’t buy it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco time-limited sale because the
⏹️ ▶️ John printing quality is much better on these ones. That, you know, we have to take the orders, then they
⏹️ ▶️ John print them, then they give them to you, and that’s it. The on-demand ones, they print as soon as you order them, but the printing quality is not as good.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we sell them in between if you’re desperate for a shirt in between, but really, this is your time to shine if you’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ John listening to the program. So if you think you might ever want an M3 Ultra shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the time to buy it because the next sale we have, the M3 Ultra shirt will not be on sale. And unfortunately for the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, what about the M4 Max? That’s in the Mac Studio too. Yeah, but it was in a bunch of computers before and we already sold
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So yeah, we have no M4 Max or M4 Pro or any of those shirts available.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just M3 Ultra and the Joke M3 Ultra. So that’s our system. It’s not ideal for some people who like, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know I was gonna buy a new computer and now I want the M shirt to match it. The only solution obviously is to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy every M shirt and then whatever computer you buy, you’ll always, unless you bought an M2 Ultra, sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We never made that shirt. Anyway, we’ve got a Mac Pro Believe shirt, which is very important for certain disciples
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac Pro. We are trying to, as the kids would say, manifest a decent Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John If not, we’ll just get a crappy Mac Pro with an M3 Ultra and it’ll all cry together. The Pro Max Triumph shirt is
⏹️ ▶️ John back. Very popular, as we’ve sold it many times in the past, then it went on a long break and now it’s back
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s still very popular, so check that one out. We’ve got our performance shirt in a bunch of colors and our usual MTV stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and the mugs, which it seems like we’re gonna have for the rest of our lives because no one is buying them. Oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also a hat. Anyway, that’s the M chip situation. That’s the store. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John second show we’re talking about this. There’ll be one more show, which I believe we are also recording on a Monday, one
⏹️ ▶️ John more show where we announce this and that’s it. So don’t think you can, as Casey said, that you’re like, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John trailer remind me of it again. Yeah, we will remind you one more time. This is your second to last warning. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John anything from the store, get it now. And especially if you actually are going to WWDC, please buy a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Believe shirt and wear it to WWDC and find John Ternes and make him look at your
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt until he gets it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, please. Also, John, one clarifying question for you. Are there chip designs on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back of any of these that are being sold right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John No chips in the back of anything. Someday I may be inspired to do another chip, but the M3 Ultra wasn’t it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good deal. All right, well, let’s do some follow-up and let’s start with.
More Trump inept chaos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we just skip the tariff stuff? How?
⏹️ ▶️ John We wish we could skip it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We wish we could all skip it. We wish we could skip this entire presidency, but unfortunately that’s not the reality we live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seems not. All right, so let’s just dig in. Let me put on my big boy britches and let’s just talk about it. All right, so Trump has decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just bear with me here, Trump has decided to exclude smartphones, computers, and chips from higher tariffs, reading from the New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Times on the 12th of April. As we record this, it is two days later on the 14th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, on the 12th, the New York Times wrote, after more than a week of ratcheting up tariffs on products imported from China,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Trump administration issued a rule late Friday that spared smartphones, computers, semiconductors, and other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electronics from some of the fees and a significant break for tech companies like Apple and Dell and the prices of iPhones and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other consumer electronics. A message posted late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey included a long list of products that would not face the tariffs President Trump imposed in recent days on Chinese goods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as part of a worsening trade war. The exclusions would also apply to modems, routers, flash drives,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and other technology goods, which are largely not made in the United States. The exemptions are not a full reprieve. Other tariffs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will still apply to electronics and smartphones. The electronics exemptions apply to all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey countries, not just China. Still, any relief for the electronics industry may be short-lived, since the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trump administration is preparing another national security-related trade investigation into semiconductors. That will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also apply to some downstream products, like electronics, since many semiconductors come into the United States inside other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices. A person familiar with the matter said, I didn’t realize you needed a person familiar with the matter to know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular tidbit, but that’s all right. Uh, these investigations have previously resulted in additional tariffs. Again, this was this past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friday. We are recording on a Monday evening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at that. Uh, Tim Cook’s butt kissing has finally paid off.
⏹️ ▶️ John They, he gets another exemption. Apple is saved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, and that’s the thing. Like, this is why, like, look, look, Tim Cook’s obviously a smart guy. He knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to play the system. When you are the CEO of any major tech company today, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially one as big and important as Apple, the job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of being a CEO at that level is somewhat technical, but it is largely diplomatic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook is basically serving as a diplomat between his massive company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and countries around the world, including our own country that he’s in. This is the job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, you know, obviously we’ve had lots to say about how he’s been doing that job and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his other job over the course of the last few years. But I think in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he is probably playing this game as best as he can given the circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re in, which are largely his fault. But people who try to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Trump always get burned. He probably knows that, but he also probably knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least he is able to talk to him sometimes, But Trump is not working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on any kind of long-term strategic level. He’s impulsive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he’s a compulsive liar, and he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He basically governs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook is doing the best he can to try to have his foot at the table and get what he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants done. And by the way, this is not just about tariffs. It’s also about getting the government out of Apple’s affairs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop suing us, stop regulating us, etc. It’s not all flowers over there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what happens with Trump. He turns against everyone. We are here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet again with more chaos. This is how Trump governs. Inept chaos. JS –
⏹️ ▶️ John After this announcement, one of the celebratory posts I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw someone make, which was again short-lived as we’ll get to in a moment, was that Tim Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John two primary – top two skills that Tim Cook has is number one, supply chain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Number two, desperate management. Yeah, because like he’s been dealing with China for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for just decades, right? And so dealing with China is very similar situation where there’s someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who is, you know, who is going to do things that don’t make sense to you, but you have to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John kiss up to them, but you don’t really agree with them. And he’s been doing that for years and years, which should have been his clue
⏹️ ▶️ John to maybe hedge his bets against China. But we are where we are anyway. So he made his
⏹️ ▶️ John play for it as he did in the last Trump administration. How’d that work out for him, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it depends on who you ask, but I would say not great, personally. All right, so moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on with regard to the last few days, smartphone tariffs are coming back in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month or two, says Trump admin. This is yesterday, so you record this on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday the 13th. I’m sorry, I’m reading from Verge. Smartphones, laptops, and other products are exempt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Trump’s April 9th tariffs, will be lumped in with duties on semiconductors in a month or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl on this week. This is not like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey permanent sort of exemption, Lutnick told Karl, saying that they will be subject later to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a special focus type of tariff applied to the semiconductor industry, similar to automotive tariffs Trump has already issued.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When asked if the new tariffs will include products like iPhones, many of which are built in China, Lutnick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that’s correct and that the goal is to encourage them to reshore to be built in America. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not like you can open a factory tomorrow to build iPhones, Karl said. Yeah, you really can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best and brightest, uh, in this administration. So this is the, Oh, you’ve got an exemption. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then it was, I think it was like, was it a day later, less than 24 hours later, the, the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s supposedly in charge of something, you know, the commerce secretary comes in and says, Oh, well, those are coming back in
⏹️ ▶️ John a month or two, because we know you can’t just, you know, we want those to be built in America, but we know it’s not like you can build a F
⏹️ ▶️ John open a factory tomorrow to build iPhones, you can’t open a factory in a month or two either. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know. So anytime they try to provide any kind of rationale, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John rationale that they think will be acceptable to people, other than like, we’re enjoying insider trading, or we want
⏹️ ▶️ John over people, so they will come and beg us for things. Whenever they try to explain it in a rational
⏹️ ▶️ John way, it’s like, we want to reshore manufacturing. If you let them talk, they either reveal that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have no idea how anything works, saying, oh, well, we’ll put these tariffs, and then next month, iPhones will be
⏹️ ▶️ John built in the United States. Or they can’t bring themselves to say that, because they realize how ridiculous it is. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I feel like we need a date and timestamp every time we say anything about this, because as Marco said, it’s chaos. And just
⏹️ ▶️ John because they said this in the most recent story that’s in our show notes, does not mean that by the
⏹️ ▶️ John time you hear this episode, there won’t be some new news related to this. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know how anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John is expected to run a business or live a life with this level of uncertainty and chaos on a day-to-day
⏹️ ▶️ John basis, but this is where we’re at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the thing is, obviously as an economic policy, you know, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Trump took one econ course ever, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s be honest, he probably saw it on TV. But like, you know, he took like, you know, intro macroeconomic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lessons and was like, oh, we can adjust prices with tariffs. Okay, great, that sounds awesome. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can screw people and they can negotiate with us. And okay, well, that’s, you know, as with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all macroeconomics, like it’s pretty complicated and there’s a lot of other factors to consider and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of side effects that you might not be considering. And if you’re going to do tariffs well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ways that tends to be done are, you know, A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat predictable, and B, usually a little bit gentle, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with subtle tweaks. Like, most economic policy actually does best when it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially at the large US government level, slow, subtle, predictable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaks. That’s not what this is. So even if, even in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Republican fantasy world where this actually makes any kind of sense whatsoever, even if that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they were going for, having it be both large,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sudden tariffs that are seemingly nonsensical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on literally impossible math that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no sense and that partially was generated by Chad GPT for them, and to have them be erratic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have them be changing like every day or every few days, like, oh, now this, oh, now this, oh, there’s gonna be this exception,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that exception. Even if it was a good idea to put these tariffs in, which it’s not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it was, you undermine that by having them change constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because even, again, even if you, suppose you were gonna build a factory in America because of this. First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, Trump’s term is only four years long and he’ll be dead soon. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you only have a certain rings that you even have to worry about this guy even being able to spout stuff off in public.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And his time range of power is probably even shorter than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are you gonna do? Move all iPhone production to America? Invest in all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factories only for him to say like tomorrow, oh, nevermind, it’s different now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one’s gonna invest in moving stuff over here if the environment is so unpredictable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and chaotic. No one’s gonna make long-term investments. All they’re going to do is try to wait Trump out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they know that before too long, either he’ll be out of office or he’ll change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his mind again. So the entire concept of this makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no sense, will not achieve what he wants, and all it’s doing is causing chaos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our country and the financial markets around the world, even. Which may be what he wants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think he wants the chaos. I think he doesn’t know how to govern any other way.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, anyway, we don’t want to get too far into it, but like the stated goals of these things are so
⏹️ ▶️ John disconnected from reality, include up to and including the constant refrain that tariffs will increase prices
⏹️ ▶️ John and that other countries pay for them, like just flat out on unreal things that are not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just what what he’s going to say is usually not why he’s doing the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s as you said, like the uncertainty is the worst part of this. And I’ll just add that
⏹️ ▶️ John as a reminder, they’re like the amount of years and money it would take to build
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones in America is double digit years and a vast amount of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s assuming anyone ever wanted to do it. But certainly, they’re not going to go down that path because we all just assume this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a temporary situation that will be rectified by the next
⏹️ ▶️ John sane person to hold office. But you never know what the future holds. But anyway, this is not the type of environment that attracts
⏹️ ▶️ John investment. So there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s worth kind of drilling into something you just said a moment ago. And I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really think about this at first. I can’t remember who I heard talking about this, I apologize. But you had said a moment ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, that nobody really wants to build the iPhones here anyway. And I think that that’s important to note that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re, and maybe I’m out of touch, I don’t know, but I feel like the average American that I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t particularly want to be screwing in the same screw for eight to 13 hours a day, five days a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that most Americans I know would find that sort of work to be or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey labor to be below them. And, and so even if you could stand up the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physical factory in, and even if you could do that in a timely manner, which I don’t think you really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could, where are you going to find the people? And this is what you were saying, John, like, where are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to find the people to do it? It’s not just the people who are screwing us screwing over and over again. That’s the skilled labor that does all the fancy machines
⏹️ ▶️ John that, uh, you know, machine all the parts. We don’t have them either. We don’t have anything to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you might have seen one of my reposts in MassDown or something. Someone did a survey of, a recent survey,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in like a couple days ago, of Americans saying, do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be better if we manufactured more things in the United States? And 80% of the American public said yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the second question was, would taking a job manufacturing things in a factory
⏹️ ▶️ John be an improvement in your job situation? And only 20% said yes. So 80% think we should do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but 20% say, oh, well, I’ll do it. Everyone always assumes that someone else will be working in the factory. Yeah, we should totally
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacture more stuff, but I don’t want to do it. Yep. I mean, and the thing is like, cause they’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of the factory job like, oh, I’m on a assembly line doing a boring thing. And that is part of the job. But also
⏹️ ▶️ John the other reason we can’t do it is we don’t have people with the skills and the smarts and the experience to do the complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. All those CNC milling machines that carefully, you know, make all the little
⏹️ ▶️ John parts that go into the thing. And then we don’t have the supply chain of all the companies that make the screws that go into the business.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re so far behind. We just, we don’t have the capacity to do that in this country at all. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John just because people don’t want the job screen and the screws, every aspect of it. The only thing we have is the land
⏹️ ▶️ John to build the factories on and probably the power to power them, but everything else having to do with the factory,
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Cross-platform photo syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we had an ask ATP with regard to cross-platform photo management and Kevin Militello writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my wife and I are split household. We use Synology Photos with Smart Albums. It backs up in charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see photos of her and my daughter without my wife tagging. She sees photo of me and daughter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I take without me tagging. The only manual thing I seem to have to do is tag people in video, which I rarely do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And BAPT writes, I would like to recommend Image app as a cross-platform photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey syncing solution. Let me jump in here. I have been, as you guys know, getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeper and deeper into the self-hosted rabbit hole, which is, I think, mostly okay and healthy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing me, I’ll take it too far. Image seems to be one of the darlings of the self-hosted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey community, and I’ve not tried it myself, but I’ve heard many, many, many very, very good reviews of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is kind of the same thing until the end. Let me go back to BAPT. It’s open source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and self-hosted and its mission statement is basically to offer a Google photos alternative. It’s amazing. It’s not as simple to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use as Google photos because you have to host it yourself, but you do get to keep ownership of your library and pretty much guarantee that it will keep running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forever. It’s also ahead of Google photos in terms of features in some places. The one big caveat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it warns you pretty explicitly about is that it’s still under heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey development and you must keep backups of your photo library, but you should already to be doing that anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I hear what Baptist saying. I totally get it. But if image is explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, Hey, uh, you really want to have another copy of a copy of all your photos, because bad things may happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m out. No, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The self-hosted ones. I didn’t recommend any of those just because it seemed like the person was saying like, if there’s anything manual I have to do, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do it. But they also said they were willing to spend money. So maybe a Synology type solution would be there, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the, all the sort of like host your own cloud stuff in your own house, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that just seems like a a lot, if for someone who wants kind of a handoff solution or like, I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be bothered with it, self-hosting is not that. Like that’s why you have other people hosting for you. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud is so attractive. Let someone else run the servers. But I thought it was worth mentioning. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are solutions, Synology is one, and this image thing is another one. If you want to run the cloud thing
⏹️ ▶️ John inside your house and take on that responsibility, you may be more likely to find cross-platform solutions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and just to be clear, it’s pronounced sort of kind of image as far as I’m aware, but it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spelled I-M-M-I-C-H. And obviously there’ll be a link in the show notes. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image, which is I think a, not a portmanteau, but a play on image.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was like a German word or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Porque no listos. I mean, maybe both, who knows?
Switch 2 tidbits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you have some Nintendo Switch 2 follow up for us. Let me start reading to interrupt when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ready. Kyle McMahon writes, The Switch 2 is not capable of 4K 120. I believe all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the games that have announced a 120 FPS mode, Mario Kart World, Metroid Prime 4, etc.,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have specified that they run at 1080p 120. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I misspoke on the last thing I said, 4K 120, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John so excited that it can output 4K to the TV and can do 120 frames per second, but not at the same time, which makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John because that is a current generation console capability and Nintendo just doesn’t do the current generation
⏹️ ▶️ John console thing anymore. But anyway, we’ll put a link to in the show notes to the spec page, which tells you Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John spec page for the switch to, it says that does a maximum of 4k at 60 frames per second in quote TV
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, like when it’s docked and connect to your TV. And it says it supports 120 frames per second in 1080p, but also in 2560 by 1440. So it can do 120 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory at higher than 1080. We’ll see if any games actually use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And with regard to the kickstand, like elbows or lumps or whatever they are, Stuart Gibson writes regarding the Switch 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand nubbins, those exist on the improved stand on the current Switch OLED 2. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do act as a touch point when fully opened, but also have a multi-point hinge, which allows it to sit fully flush to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back of the console. See,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco should have told me this because I’ve never actually even seen a Switch OLED, but yeah, the Switch OLED has the exact same things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the two-point hinge is to, you know, again, help if you know how a two-point hinge works to help it fold out more.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess people might be familiar with them from kitchen cabinets, where you open the cabinet and it has a two-point hinge inside it to let the doors
⏹️ ▶️ John open up more. Anyway, there you go. That’s the nubbins explained.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, apparently, there existed open-world racing games before Mario Kart, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard of all of these except one, but I don’t think I knew that these were open-world racing games. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve gotten word from many listeners, Burnout, Need for Speed, The Crew, which I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never heard of, and Forza Horizon are all open-world racing games.
⏹️ ▶️ John Italians want you to say forza. Um, yeah, I think the thing that’s notable is that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess maybe I never thought of Mario Kart as was I’ve heard of all these games. I’ve heard of Mario Kart as a type of game because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, what is the world? Like in these things, they’re generally set on earth with cities and highways
⏹️ ▶️ John between them and stuff. And so it’s like, yeah, there’s a world, but Mario Kart is like, you’re in space on an ice cream cone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like lend itself to like there, you know, what would the world be in between? But I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is it’s the Mushroom Kingdom. Anyway, we’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then one of the things that broke a lot of people’s brains, including very much my own,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that Mario Kart has been stated as being $80 MSRP. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all thought that was kind of bananas because $80 is a lot of freaking money. But as it turns out, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I referenced this graph in the last thing. I just didn’t have the link for it. So I just wanted to put the link in the show notes. This is the graph
⏹️ ▶️ John I was talking about that shows the inflation adjusted price for video games. And you can see $80 is
⏹️ ▶️ John not out of line with what they have historically been. Uh, I remember buying Ocarina of time
⏹️ ▶️ John for $70 when it was released. So whatever year that was, what was that? When was Ocarina of time? Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think it was high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school for me. So late nineties.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, $70 in the late nineties. I can tell you that $70 in late nineties does not equal $80 today.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re still doing okay, but yeah, some people are angry about it, but you know, uh, if you look at this graph,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it seems reasonable. Now some people complain. I, we got one email that said, yeah, inflation adjusted. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re trying to trick you because you always have to buy a DLC and you have to subscribe and you have to buy the battle pass
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to do this and it’s like live service games are a totally different Ball of wax like World of Warcraft was charging
⏹️ ▶️ John people subscriptions ages ago But you know and maybe they’ll sell DLC tracks for Mario Kart
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever but the bottom line is especially for a sort of like, you know when you pay $80 for Mario Kart world you
⏹️ ▶️ John get what you get and If you want to buy DLC later fine, but you don’t have to it’s a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John game in and of itself Same thing with like Breath of the Wild you buy it and you get the whole game So if they sell
⏹️ ▶️ John the next Zelda thing for 80 bucks or whatever again I bought an ocarina of time for $70
⏹️ ▶️ John in a gold card for the Nintendo 64. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I had that too
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I will gladly play similar prices. But yeah, you know, it’s it’s difficult because
⏹️ ▶️ John Quote-unquote triple-a games are expensive They always have been when you look at this graph look it back at the early
⏹️ ▶️ John days of home consoles with like the Atari 2600 and stuff and look at those prices inflation
⏹️ ▶️ John adjusted $140 for like, I don’t know, Tapper or something. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what game that’s supposed to be represented there, but, uh, it could be worse. That’s all I’m saying.
Dropbox and File Provider API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of it could be worse, hey-o, Dropbox and file providers. Eric DeReuter writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Dropbox file provider API update is not tied to the app version and is not an account level change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either. So you can have one Mac with file provider API version and another Mac without it. It does require a minimum Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS version of somewhere between 12.3 and 12.6, as well as the Dropbox app from late 2022-ish or newer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What triggers your eligibility beyond the app and OS versions is not clear. Dropbox support was not helpful in clearing up how you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey become eligible for the update.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now this next item will tell you how I ran across this, but I have confirmed that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are eligible, not only is it not a separate download, but you can change
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Right. So I recently installed Dropbox on a fresh account and it did the file provider
⏹️ ▶️ John one sort of by default. But if you Google for it, which I had to, because it’s not clear, there is a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, I don’t want the file provider thing anymore. And it doesn’t involve reinstalling app. It just involves signing out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the app and signing back into the app and then during the onboarding clicking some advanced link and then going to this thing and opting
⏹️ ▶️ John out and You know, anyway, it is is silly The process is silly, but it is nice that
⏹️ ▶️ John you it’s not tied to your account the you know So watch it So you’re switching back and forth and you don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to re-download a second version of the app And I’ve never heard anyone tell me that
⏹️ ▶️ John the file provider one is better in any way So as long as they keep giving you this option
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the one I’m choosing. So yeah, I took the account that I had installed on it on and I signed out and signed back in and
⏹️ ▶️ John opted out of file provider and it just switched to the other version and I’m much happier.
John’s tariff laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then several people wrote in, you have bought your daughter a laptop because of tariffs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for school in the fall and lots of people wanted to know, what did John do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that actually, that’s what I was getting at earlier. I got that laptop today and I’ve been setting it up
⏹️ ▶️ John and setting up Dropbox for people and putting accounts on and stuff. I’m actually setting it up now to essentially be
⏹️ ▶️ John the photo laptop for my Long Island vacation because I always take whatever our best laptop is to be the photo laptop for
⏹️ ▶️ John a Long Island vacation and that is now the M4 MacBook Air that I got my daughter, but I’m also putting her account on
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John um, the specs are boring. Like there are really no bad specs for this machine
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you have more data than will fit on the SSD. Uh, what did I do? Not probably what you
⏹️ ▶️ John should do. I maxed out the Ram because I don’t know. I just did. It wasn’t that expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need that much ramp. She’s, she’s going to be writing papers and browsing the web. She doesn’t need 32 gigs of Ram, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes with 16 stock, which is plenty. You can get 24, but her current one has 24 because that
⏹️ ▶️ John It used to be the max, you kind of see how this goes here. I get max RAM a lot on machines
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s reasonable. So I pick 32 gigs of RAM. I don’t know why, it just makes me feel
⏹️ ▶️ John better. And then for the SSD, she doesn’t have much data at all. Most of her stuff is cloud synced,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for my Long Island vacation, I like to have enough space to put a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ John portion of my photo library on the laptop, just so sometimes you like slideshows of like previous vacations
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, you know, I don’t know. I like having access to at the very least, favorites from my big photo
⏹️ ▶️ John collection if we ever do like photo slideshows or whatever. So I got a terabyte SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John if the prices didn’t go up ridiculous amount after that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, there it is. M4 MacBook Air with all the parts working on the chip again because I’m me. I do not
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend this. You can just buy the stock one. 16 gigs of RAM, whatever size
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD you can fit that you can stomach because their prices are insane and you’re fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John people wanted to know what I got. So there you go. 32 gigs, one terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that you are so petulantly against having a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop that you now enlist the rest of the family to meet your laptop related needs.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s so many laptops in this house. I just, I don’t need to have one for myself. I just need one for one week a year and there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John to choose from. And I, you know, I bring the best one. When I had a work laptop, I used to bring that as my vacation laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was the best one in the Bye.
Foldable aspect ratios
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Peter Wagoner writes with regard to folding phone to aspect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ratios. If you take an iPhone mini and make it a tri-fold like the Huawei Mate XT, you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearly the same dimensions as an iPad mini. So this is MKB… There’s a video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on MKBHD that MKBHD did on the Huawei Mate XT, which I watched,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was very interesting. Like this is not for me, I don’t think, but it was a much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more compelling video than I Expected it to be I I left that video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking how that maybe that’s not that bad after all So it’s worth a few minutes of your time if you have some time to kill yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was like the problem we were talking about in his last video of like if you just have a Phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that opens and closes like a book a foldable phone that opens and closes like a book when it opens It’s not well
⏹️ ▶️ John proportioned for 16 by 9 video, which is most TV and movies is around those that aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John ratio And so if you compare it to an iPad mini, maybe it’s the same in area But
⏹️ ▶️ John because the aspect ratio is so much more square if you try to watch a video on your quote You know, I unfold I unfolded
⏹️ ▶️ John my folding phone. I have such a big area to watch a video. It’s not actually that big Like it’s compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to an iPad mini so you can solve that by having a trifold because now you have
⏹️ ▶️ John you know one extra Vertical strip instead of is opening like a book take another one of those quote-unquote pages
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it alongside The problem is now you have a trifle phone It’s incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John thick like you can look at the video to see when you fold all three pieces up
⏹️ ▶️ John They did a good job of making the individual pieces thin but boy, that’s big So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s quite a trade-off to get a screen that is Larger than a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and also well proportioned to watch video and if you’re not watching video on it I guess you know
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use that space for all of the great Android apps to take advantage of tablet proportions
Mac Mini SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, Jonathan Clayton writes with regard to Mac Mini SSDs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some company from Malaysia of unknown reputation called IBOFF, I-B-O-F-F, claims to have reverse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineered the SSD modules found in the Mac Mini. They are taking pre-orders for 250 gigs, 500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs, 1 terabyte, and 2 terabyte modules for way cheaper than official upgrades. According to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve made a quote, legally distinct quote board layout that will be recognized by the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They claim to have shipped a batch of orders to people with a new batch coming off at the, or coming offline at the end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of April. I watched this YouTube video that they themselves have put up. So I mean, you know, take this with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serious amount of salt but I see what they’re going for here and it is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reasonably compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s super compelling to me money-wise because I’m thinking of my future computer and it’s like, oh, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since this, I’m pressing up against the four terabyte drive that I have. So the next jump
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably to eight and you know what happens if you try to buy eight terabytes of SSD from Apple. It’s just, it breaks the bank.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, been there. And so like, I just, I mean, granted, these modules for Mac minis,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’ll do them for the studio, like who knows, and who knows how well they work or whatever, but it just, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like the technology involved should be within the
⏹️ ▶️ John reach of companies like this, you know? Like I kind of wish ODBC would do them, but they would probably
⏹️ ▶️ John get sued by Apple or whatever. Like it’s kind of fly by nighty, because we’re like, oh, where do they get the NAND modules?
⏹️ ▶️ John We did talk down a past episode about how those NAND modules are not readily available. And if you do get them, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly some kind of gray market leftover thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows where this stuff is coming from, but technology-wise, it is indeed a printed circuit board with components on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a known technology. And if you could get essentially the same components as Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is using and put them on a board that connects them in the same way, but doesn’t have exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John traces, so Apple can’t sue you for taking their proprietary, you know what I mean? Like they’re trying to sort of clean room reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John engineer this, because they can take one out of a Mac mini and they could look at it. It’s like, I see all these components. I can buy these off
⏹️ ▶️ John the shelf from whoever Apple is buying them from. The only thing I can’t copy is the layout
⏹️ ▶️ John of the traces on their board because that’s work that somebody did on contract for Apple. So
⏹️ ▶️ John do your own work to do that. And that’s what these people are saying they’re doing. But if you go to their website, they’re all sold
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Who knows if this company will be here in a week. Who knows, you know, do you really want to spend, even though it’s cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple, it may be a lot of money. They don’t even offer an eight terabyte. They only offer
⏹️ ▶️ John two terabyte, but I’m keeping my eye on this because I tell you, whatever next Mac I get,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can get third-party storage for sane prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John I may actually risk it, especially if Apple offers them at insane prices. What I would do is
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to the good old days of buying Macs when we all said, get the lowest amount of storage you can get, get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lowest amount of RAM you can get, and then just
⏹️ ▶️ John swap it when you get the computer, back when you could do that. You can’t do that anymore, but I would love to be back
⏹️ ▶️ John in those days because I could get a quote unquote cheap Mac with the lowest amount of storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then if I buy one of these third party ones and it’s a disaster, oh well, I’m out that money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I could just buy the first party one and put it in there. That’s only possible, I believe, on the Mac Pro right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, maybe with the parts program on the Mac Studio as well and the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini. But I’m thinking about it. I’m looking at it. I can’t vouch for this iBof thing. We’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ John the links in the show so you can look at it and see what you think anyway. And like I said, they’re all sold out. It’s kind of like reading reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John of these hypercars where at the end they always say, and by the way, they’re all already sold out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? Yeah. Now, like I said, the video, I think it was like five or 10 minutes, and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey required viewing by any stretch of the imagination, but they made a pretty compelling argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and case for themselves. And again, I mean, obviously the company who put up the video about themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to say that they’re amazing. I mean, I get that this is self-serving or whatever, but I thought it was an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video. And they went through kind of the behind the scenes to the choice, some of the choices they made, why they made them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how actually they could have done better, but you know, then it would have been a lot more money and blah, blah, blah. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have some time to kill, I definitely recommend spending a few minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, like I said, like the thing that gives me encouragement about this is it’s just a printed circuit board with surface mount components
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Like there’s no magic, there’s no like thing that can only be fabbed by TSMC, because it’s some super,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it is just NAND and a bunch of components and a board that goes with it. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems, it’s so tantalizingly close. It’s not a standard, it’s not, it’s like it’s proprietary. We get it, like there are lots of barriers
⏹️ ▶️ John to making this, but I feel like it’s plausible that you could get one of these and not have it be a disaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re so much cheaper. That’s what’s tempting.
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Siri/AIML woes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So I think we’re only going to have time for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one topic today because it’s going to be a doozy. And that is there was a report on the information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few days ago as we record about how Apple fumbled series AI makeover.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a few different, there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this article and you can see a summary of it on Mac Rumors. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John has done the yeoman’s work of splitting this into different topics. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so John entitled this particular section The Blame Game, which I think is perfectly apt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it says in the information article, some of Apple’s struggles in AI have stemmed from deeply ingrained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company values. For example, its militant stance on user privacy, which has made it difficult for the company to gain access to large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quantities of data for training models. But an equally important factor was the conflicting personalities within Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More than half a dozen former Apple employees who worked in the AI and machine learning group led by JG,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which that group is known by AI ML for short, told the information that poor leadership is to blame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for its problems with execution. They singled out JG’s lieutenant, Robbie Walker, who oversaw day-to-day operations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Siri as lacking both ambition and an appetite for taking risks on designing future versions of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the voice assistant. Among engineers inside Apple, the AI group’s relaxed culture in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey struggles with execution have even earned it an uncharitable nickname, a play on its initials
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aimless, a I M L E S S, uh, which is almost a, I M L I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S S, which would have been very funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John good sign by the way. Like just when the group that’s responsible for Siri is like
⏹️ ▶️ John other people in the company are like snickering at it behind its back. That’s not usually not a good sign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I kind of took that as promising that like, you know, that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always felt from the outside, like, serious, so bad, does Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not realize how bad it is? So it is kind of comforting to know, like, no, lots of the company did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize how bad it was. Like, it isn’t just us. Well, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, it was like corporate infighting, though, it’s like, the group that’s responsible for it, like, those people stink, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, well, anyway, you can continue, you’ll see, but like, remember that, the org chart diagram,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe early 2000s, that was like, how each company is organized, Do you remember
⏹️ ▶️ John this image? I was gonna say it’s a GIF, it wasn’t animated, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco might’ve literally been a GIF as in
⏹️ ▶️ John a single image. The only two I remember were the Apple one had
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs in the middle. He was like the hub of a wheel with lines radiating out from him,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, yeah, no, that seems right. You know, it’s like a star, starburst coming out from Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs. And the Microsoft one was a bunch of different divisions all holding guns on each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yes, I do remember this now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John like some amount of rivalry within your company is healthy, like everyone wants to do better than the other groups,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it shouldn’t be to the level where maybe they’re undermining
⏹️ ▶️ John each other, or maybe there’s a group that everyone knows is low performing and the other groups get angry about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that seems like what’s happening here. You can continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The dim internal view of the group in many parts of Apple is a stark contrast to that of Apple’s software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineering team, which Federici has overseen since 2012. It has built up a reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for efficiency and execution with its work on Apple’s operating systems and messaging photo, mail, and other apps. Former
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple employees have served Siri as a hot potato, continuously passed between different teams, including those led by Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey services chief at EQ and by Federighi. However, none of those reorganizations led to significant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improvements in Siri’s performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is another thread of this. It is something, obviously, when you have these stories, the information sources this
⏹️ ▶️ John to a bunch of people who used to work at Apple, but don’t anymore. So anytime you’re talking to ex-employees, you have to wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ John do they have an ax to grind? What is their perspective? Were they coming from the AIML group? Were they coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from the groups that were mad at AIML? What are their biases? But it is interesting to see that
⏹️ ▶️ John Federighi’s group actually within the company seems to have a reputation for getting things done. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John can see that. We have complaints about what they’re doing with software and the quality and all sorts of other things. But the bottom line
⏹️ ▶️ John is they do ship stuff. And if you’re complaining about the AIML, this thing is they’re aimless
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re not accomplishing anything. Federighi, it seems when given
⏹️ ▶️ John a task, do this thing every year, have a new revision of these operating systems with these features and so on
⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth, seems to actually be executing on that and producing results.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the quality of the results? We get this steady drumbeat of email. I don’t know if it’s the same three people who have just
⏹️ ▶️ John a grudge against Federico, but they’re always like, why doesn’t anyone ever blame Federico? Is it because he’s in the videos and he’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John nice hair and everyone thinks he’s funny? It’s like, oh, it’s like our fun uncle. We never say anything mean about him.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he’s in charge of all software. So anytime you have a software complaint, shouldn’t you be blaming Federighi? Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we tend to focus our blame more on like, well, what about the people who do the UI stuff? Like that’s not Federighi’s
⏹️ ▶️ John specific job. He may oversee that. But there is a dedicated group for interface design. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John save most of my ire for them when they do something that I don’t like in the interface or whatever. But in the end, yes, he is responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for all software, but not all all software. For For example, until recently, he wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John in charge of Siri, although he had been at some point in the past and so had any queue. So it’s not always clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you think, well, he’s in charge of all software, you know, like Siri, therefore it’s his fault. It had you not known that there was this AI
⏹️ ▶️ John ML group. Same thing with Vision Pro that was often to its own little corner before it sort of got reintegrated.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the internal structure of how Apple arranged things is not always clear from the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, this is just another data point. Again, maybe these are people from his groups, or of course, they’re going to say, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Craig’s We are in our group. We always did everything perfect. It’s those AIML people that are terrible. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to take all this with a grain of salt. We don’t know what their biases are, but I have personally
⏹️ ▶️ John not heard anything about Federighi that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John align with this, that essentially he does get things done according to what he thinks he should do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could disagree with his tastes in decision-making, but he is an effective operator
⏹️ ▶️ John within the organization of Apple. Like he is not, he does not struggle to accomplish the goals
⏹️ ▶️ John that he sets out for himself or the people set before him within Apple. Again, you could say
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the goals that he’s setting or that are being set for him are the wrong goals, but he is actually executing
⏹️ ▶️ John them, which is part of the job of someone at his level. So that’s why I personally usually don’t come
⏹️ ▶️ John for Federighi because it’s not because of his hair. It’s because it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like he is, he can get things done. if I like for someone like that, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I could persuade him to get the things done that I think should be done. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, I think he’s an effective executive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know, I don’t know and I don’t want to get too caught up in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tangent that I’m now starting, but I’ve heard mixed about Federico, mostly very good for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And certainly his whole like stage persona, I, I just adore. Like he,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think he said this a moment ago, he’s like everyone’s favorite, you know, a funk, funk, fun uncle. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John he’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in meetings. No, from what I gather, he’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John meetings. Unlike JG. You have to try to say his full name at least once per episode, Casey. Do you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try? Yeah, so it’s John G. and Andrea, I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe. Yeah, and we just got reports from people who’ve worked with him that he’s just the nicest person. He’s very good. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not saying we’ve discussed this at length, and there’s actually a recent New York Times article on this very topic
⏹️ ▶️ John that I didn’t bring the link for, because I didn’t think we’d go off on this tangent. But like, oh, you’re such a nice guy, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t be a nice guy to be effective within an organization. No, I haven’t heard that Craig is not a nice guy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you also have to be… Ruthless. People, you have to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John be a serious person. To quote, what’s it called?
⏹️ ▶️ John The HBO show with the billionaires who are smarter than
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey real billionaires.
⏹️ ▶️ John Succession. Yes, thank
⏹️ ▶️ John Succession. I love you all, but you’re not serious people. Craig Federighi is a serious person. It doesn’t mean that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John You shouldn’t be mean and cruel to people, but you do have to be firm and clear
⏹️ ▶️ John in your direction and decisive and so on and so forth. And again, everything I’ve heard is that Craig is
⏹️ ▶️ John smart, technical, decisive. Going to make wrong calls occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ John but again, an effective operator within the organization of Apple and JG. All I’ve heard about him is that he’s a really nice
⏹️ ▶️ John guy, very smart, very knowledgeable, and all I’ve seen from the outside is not able to effectively operate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s very true. The people I’ve spoken to within Apple have almost universally said good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things about Federighi, and not to say that he’s perfect by any means, like you were saying a minute ago, but that he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very smart. I’ve heard several people say that he is one of the smartest people that they know and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has an uncanny ability to understand really complex technical problems almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately. It’s apparently incredibly impressive, which I don’t really know Federighi. I met him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once for two seconds and he had no idea who I was, which is what I would expect and did expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But he seems like a genuinely nice person. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, I’m not saying, someone who’s worked in big companies with big executives, whenever I hear those stories of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Craig, he really knows his technical stuff, blah, blah, blah, this is how I take it, because I’ve experienced this.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it means is that he’s not entirely clueless, which is like the normal.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s been out of it, like he used to be a programmer, but he’s been out of it for so long or whatever, that he’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely clueless and that he understands that sometimes it actually is important to know
⏹️ ▶️ John like the broad outlines of what the deal is. But also I
⏹️ ▶️ John think he is the type of person who would feel the urge to, as he said in various interviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John to like dive into the code himself. And he should absolutely never do that. Correct. Because because his skills are not up to date,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s not effective use of his time, because better programmers work for him. And because that’s not his job.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think he does that, like, to be fair, but I just people are amazed when an executive knows And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Craig mostly understands that it’s good that he has that background, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that background should be part of his decision-making. Because you see so much in big companies where there’ll be a technical
⏹️ ▶️ John executive who will become an executive for enough time that they no longer think technical matters
⏹️ ▶️ John should be part of their decision-making at all. And they should be. They should always be. It doesn’t mean he needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand everything from top to bottom. It means he needs to ask smart questions to people who know
⏹️ ▶️ John the real answers, who give him information that he then incorporates into his decision making process. And people read that as like, he knows
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. He could do all of our jobs. He could not. He can’t do all of your jobs like that’s never the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s not supposed to do all of you. He’s supposed to do his job. But there’s a little bit of a hagiography of like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s so technical and understands everything. It just means that he is properly
⏹️ ▶️ John using, probably taking into account technical considerations that worse
⏹️ ▶️ John executives discard, like, well, I don’t need to understand that at all. And in fact, no one needs to understand that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact, that’s not even important. All I need to know is the finished product. And you don’t need to understand anything about how it comes to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Craig, uh, luckily does not subscribe to that theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. With regard to John G and Andrea’s, uh, Siri leadership in 2018, when JG arrived
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Google to run the newly formed AI group, he was, excuse me, his hiring was seen by the tech industry as a coup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple. And I remember this, we talked about this, that, oh man, they pulled like the king of AI from Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never would have expected it. And I mean, I stand by that from what we knew at the time, even actually from what we know now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even before Dean Andrea took control of the Assistant, members of the group working on Siri felt like second-class citizens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Apple. Siri’s engineers were frustrated by the software engineering team’s control over iOS updates, feeling they weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prioritizing fixes for Siri. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a problem of when you’re not in the one big software group, like, wasn’t everything under software
⏹️ ▶️ John at various times? No, and so Siri, for whatever reasons, was off to the side. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that means that like, if, you know, I can understand the frustration of like, well, there’s this train going every
⏹️ ▶️ John year where they release a new version of iOS and a new version of Mac OS or whatever. And is the Siri team even
⏹️ ▶️ John in the meetings leading up to that? And what does the Siri team want out of the platform? Or do they just kind of have to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are they just getting shoved along by the freight train that is iOS N plus one that’s coming down the line?
⏹️ ▶️ John When you see stuff, I mean, everything in this article is kind of like organizational dysfunction, but it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John is Siri an important part of iOS? Then maybe it should be better incorporated
⏹️ ▶️ John in the process that produces a new version of iOS every year if the Siri group feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t get what they want out of the iOS updates and their complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John go unheard. It’s like, well, you know, Craig’s in charge of iOS and Craig’s not in charge of you and so talk to your executive and your
⏹️ ▶️ John executive talked to Tim, then Tim talked to us, like, are you up the chain to try to get Tim Cook’s attention to go back down
⏹️ ▶️ John the org chart, back into Craig to get what you want is never going to work. And so this is maybe not the correct shape for the organization.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you consider Siri to be an integral part of iOS, which it seems like organizationally Apple did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is kind of crazy. Like it’s Siri is it’s a foundational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology. It is as foundational as many other foundational technologies and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS is things like the code, like foundation at the code level, you know, Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core libraries, networking libraries, like Siri is on that level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, like iCloud, iCloud is also integrated in everything. Like it should be treated in a similar fashion
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just wild that they have been outside for so long, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was an acquisition, right? So it kind of makes sense they’d be off in their own little corner, but if anything, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John has become more integral to Apple’s products because we just got done talking about this in a couple of past episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple keeps introducing products that essentially hinge on Siri to be any good. Starting with like the HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ John but continuing to like this HomePod with a screen thing and other like other things that you can just talk to or
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro, we’ll get to that in a second. Like things that don’t have a screen or that it’s convenient for you to use
⏹️ ▶️ John with a verbal interface, end up, you know, who knows if they’re using quote unquote real Siri, whatever they use it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the point is Apple’s branding for like a voice thing that you can talk to to do stuff is Siri. And
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point now, the bad quality of Siri is literally holding up products. They can’t release
⏹️ ▶️ John the home pod with the screen until they get the better Siri because it’s been designed with that in mind and that’s not ready yet. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a really bad situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The software engineers for their part felt the Siri team couldn’t keep up with supporting new features that came out of Federighi’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey group. In some ways, Gideon Andrea stood out among his colleagues at Apple, those who have worked with him described
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as relaxed, quiet, non-confrontational, a contrast to many other members of Apple’s executive team, some of whom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were known for their demanding type A personalities. Federighi’s tough and demanding management style contrasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with JG’s laid back approach. When they’re in meetings together, Federighi is known to bombard his colleagues with questions while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JG tends to do more listening. After he joined, some of his colleagues told Gina Andrea that he should shake up Siri’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leadership, but he didn’t do so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So, uh, Federighi being described as type A and demanding, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like maybe that, uh, personality type is more, uh, successful
⏹️ ▶️ John within Apple, especially like JG was joined up and he’s put in charge of Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like he didn’t read the moment like, Oh, you’ve just come in from the outside. You’re a hired gun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your job is essentially do the thing that we couldn’t do. We have had Siri for a while. We haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John done well with it. You know, a Google assistant is better. We’re hiring you come fix things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not shaking up the leadership. It’s reads like, Oh, do I really want to rock the boat? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll settle in here, figure out where things are, which kind of makes sense. You don’t come into fire everybody. Cause you don’t know which person, you know, who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John responsible for what, but But coming in and having your colleagues say, well, of course, here you are, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a big executive, you’ve worked directly to Tim. What’s your plan for shaking up series leadership?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the plan is, oh, I don’t plan on doing that. Maybe he just thought it was the right call,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it reads as in this narrative of like, well, maybe he was just a little bit too nice to do the shakeup that was required.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe he didn’t know what needed to change. I don’t know. But that’s a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John situation. Coming in as the fixer. hired a big, uh, important person from outside who’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to come fix the thing that we haven’t been able to fix internally, in some ways you expect that person to
⏹️ ▶️ John rock the boat. And it seems like JG didn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Robbie Walker, one Siri leader often criticized by colleagues was Walker who joined Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2013 and became responsible for its daily operations at the end of 2022. In the eyes of his critics, Walker was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unwilling to take big risks on Siri and focused on metrics that didn’t move the needle much on its performance rather than having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a grand vision for overhauling the voice assistant. For instance, he often celebrated small wins, such as reducing by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute percentages the delay between when someone asked Siri a question and when it responded. Another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pet Walker project was removing the hey from Hey Dingus voice command used to invoke the assistant, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took more than two years. Let me read that one more time. Another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pet Walker project was removing the hey from the Hey Dingus voice command used to invoke the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assistant, which took more than two years to accomplish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, that is a funny headline. Obviously that’s not the only thing they were doing for two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But wow, I mean, I think this, what this reporting shows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, obviously we have to disclaim that like this is obviously being reported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by like, you know, employees with an axe to grind. So you know, I’m sure there’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different opinions on how this team should be led and what it should be doing. And the people who were on the losing end of those fights are the ones talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the and saying like this is how this is why they were all wrong or they’re all idiots or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that being said it sure does seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the priorities of the Siri team have been focusing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on features that are like really kind of service level you know paint job kind of features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without really fixing the underlying problem we’ve seen that on the outside like that seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems right to us because what we’ve seen on the outside is like great this year Siri has you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know say a new voice okay I mean or new animation right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new animation okay that’s nice you know but it still doesn’t work a lot of times and gives bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answers and is slow and unreliable and like none of those things like seem like they were getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly enough work on them whereas the Apple will come out and say like, hey, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say hey anymore. Okay. Well, first of all, that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really a problem. Second of all, now that you don’t have to say hey anymore, it actually triggers itself automatically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco erroneously way more often than it did before. So you’ll be doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has nothing to do with it, you know, in the next room over and your home pod will say, hmm. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, it’ll start playing random music when you weren’t talking to it or it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of your conversation with someone else but it and say I’m sorry I don’t I can’t look at that right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like look at your iPhone or whatever like it so they’re doing things like okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are minor kind of you know cosmetic or interface types of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t be spending that much time on that if the fundamentals are bad and if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you know if you’re tight for engineering resources or you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money from the higher ups which we got to. Like, if we’re tight from that, maybe things like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not the best use of your time. Maybe like, you know, making Siri look and sound a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or improving the interface, you know, in some relatively minor way, like dropping the hay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to me shows bad leadership. Like that just shows like the leadership is not properly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allocating time and resources. They’re not prioritizing the big problems. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, moving around some, you know, titanic deck chair, like instead of actually fixing the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And hopefully that’s all changed now. But this, I mean, this article, the reason why this hit so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard is because this kind of confirms what we’ve all suspected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this time, which is what is going on in Siri and why won’t it ever actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get better in meaningful ways? And I think here’s a bunch of reasons why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I agree with you about the Hey Dingus thing, removing the hey, like, oh, it took two years. Like, that’s just how long projects
⏹️ ▶️ John take. It doesn’t, again, it’s not the only thing they were doing. They tried to do it for one release, it missed. They said, we’ll schedule it for next year because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not pressing. That seems perfectly normal to me. I don’t think that is damning evidence. And anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John although the most damning evidence against, hey, dingus, is that they made it optional because it does cause
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental things. So maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to begin with. But anyway, the two-year timeline on that is fine. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bother me at all. That’s just, everything they do, they try for one year. It doesn’t make it, they go for the next year, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Increasing the, like reducing the delay, making Siri respond faster? That’s important. We complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about that all the time. But as Marco pointed out, yeah, okay, do that. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the ship is going down, right? Like, sure, by all means, do rearrange the deck
⏹️ ▶️ John chairs. But like, there is another problem that is much bigger. So I don’t think any of these things shouldn’t have been done. They should have
⏹️ ▶️ John been doing stuff like, in the meantime, can we get, you know, cause Siri doesn’t respond that fast, can we increase that?
⏹️ ▶️ John And say you’ve got a team trying to get rid of the hay because they think that could pay dividends for a more conversational product,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a thing with a screen or we could make home pods better. Like, by all means, do all those things. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think that’s what the entire team was doing. But whatever they were doing, it was not what they needed to do, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John seriously overhaul Siri. And to that end, there’s more to this section, believe it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And last year, Walker dismissed an effort by a team of engineers to use LLMs to give Siri more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emotional sensitivity so it could detect and give appropriate responses to users in distress.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Walker told colleagues he wanted to focus on the next release of Siri rather than commit resources to the project. without his knowledge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the project’s engineers bypassed him to continue working on those capabilities with the software engineering group’s safety and
⏹️ ▶️ John Warning, warning, another giant red flag. If someone in charge of some important
⏹️ ▶️ John group of things tells some part of their group not to do a thing and they go off and do it anyway in cooperation
⏹️ ▶️ John with another group, that is major organizational dysfunction. They’re essentially disobeying
⏹️ ▶️ John the person who’s supposed to be leading them and going over to like, it’s like when, you know, your,
⏹️ ▶️ John your, uh, dad says no. So you go to mom to try to get a yes. That’s not a healthy organization.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. The fact that this even was allowed to happen, right? Cause this is the thing I believe what they’re referring to is the thing that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned on the show and Casey brought it up. Like, have you noticed that Siri is more emotional now?
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a thing that shipped.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did actually appreciably change something. And again, maybe that wasn’t the thing they should have been working on, but it’s, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a dysfunction when they want to do it and that Walker’s getting a lot of crap in a lot of these reports saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like he was because you know I assume he’s under JG and more directly in charge of Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently not setting appropriate priorities. Now were these his priorities or were they given to him by
⏹️ ▶️ John his management? Who knows? But yeah, when you say don’t do this and they go
⏹️ ▶️ John do it anyway with like you know with Craig’s group or whatever like that’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John is is going wrong. And I feel like, like Walker should have been telling
⏹️ ▶️ John his boss, like, Hey, this is what’s going on here. I told him not to do this and they’re doing it anyway, but they’re doing with another group. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are we in charge of Syria? Are we not like, maybe the current organization is not right. And this should bubble up to the level
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, I don’t know, companies that do like reorgs every year, that’s not healthy either. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you do have to occasionally look at your org chart and say, in light of our current
⏹️ ▶️ John and our future plans, does this organization make sense? And I think for years and years, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John has not been correctly homed. It is referencing it as a hot potato that had been bouncing around that doesn’t reflect
⏹️ ▶️ John its importance to the company’s current products and certainly doesn’t reflect its importance to future products. And then when
⏹️ ▶️ John the advent of LLMs definitely doesn’t reflect like the future direction of the company. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, to Apple’s credit, they did eventually figure this out and rearrange things and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John the new arrangement is better. But yeah, like anytime I’ve ever seen that happen, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, my boss says no, but this other person over here says yes. So we’ll do it. Like I don’t think it’s secret or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll do, we’ll do it with them. And then just everyone grudgingly allows it. Someone needs to be noticing this
⏹️ ▶️ John is happening and saying, this is a sign of an unhealthy organization. We need to fix this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it’s weird too, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am in, And we are so dissatisfied with the state of Siri today that the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was made earlier is true. And it is worth remembering that there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a time that Federighi had Siri. There was a time that Eddie Q’s team had Siri and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was trash during those times too. So I do think Craig has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well-earned reputation for delivering and certainly Rockwell does after delivering the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro because whether or not you think the Vision Pro is a good product. It is a very, very impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey product and he, he got it done and we’re going to talk about more about him in a minute. Um, but just because Federico
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is pulling this back under his wing, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to get any better.
⏹️ ▶️ John it is better aligned with like, if he’s in charge of all the software and it’s an incorporated thing, it makes sense. And like, I don’t know how long he
⏹️ ▶️ John had it and how long Eddie had it. And the most important thing is when Siri was homed at various other places,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not quote unquote obvious what should be done, which the advent of LLM is like, oh, we
⏹️ ▶️ John totally need to. They’re their capabilities are a good fit with what we’re trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with Siri. And so now the direction is clear. Something something LLM. Now it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ John clearer than before when we bought this company. We don’t even know this technology. They produced this voice assistant for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s OK, I guess. And we can try to improve it. But it wasn’t so clear. Like, I mean, obviously, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Assistant was doing better and Alexa was doing better. So arguably, Apple should have hired away
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s person like they eventually did or someone from Amazon earlier and ask them, hey, why are
⏹️ ▶️ John your systems so much better than ours? And they probably would have said, oh, because it’s structured nothing like Siri and the company you bought had a good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea back in 2008, but we have better ideas now, but they didn’t do that. They said, well, we’ve got this product, we’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuck with it. It’s, it is what it is. It’s not entirely clear how it could be, how it could make like a quantum
⏹️ ▶️ John leap to be better than it is. So it got bounced around, but yeah, once JG appeared and once LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John appeared, it’s like, now we know how we can make Siri better. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John failure to do that is why this article exists.
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Siri/AIML woes (cont’d.)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cross-group tensions. We’ve kind of bounced off this so far. Other resentments between JG’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AIML group and Federighi’s software engineering group also built up. Some in the software engineering group were annoyed by the higher
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay and faster promotions their colleagues in the AI group were receiving. And they were bitter that some engineers in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI group seemed to be able to take longer vacations and leave early on Fridays while they in the software engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey group faced more punishing work schedules. Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of Gianandrea’s deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it failed, Federighi’s group couldn’t scapegoat the AI team. It didn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco MATT ROWE Can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey for a minute here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DEVON CAREY Yeah, yeah, yeah. MATT ROWE We’re going to, this is going to keep showing how terrible the AI team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably, but I do want to step back by one paragraph and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the workaholic culture is not helpful. DEVON CAREY No. The idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software engineers in Federighi’s org resented the AI org because they were able to have weekends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and evenings? That’s just healthy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon Valley has this workaholism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sickness and obsession. There is this culture of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re doing either really important work or you’re in some kind crunch mode like you can’t take a weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got to work all the time and and if you don’t you’re not a team player or you’re not good enough or you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devoted enough that’s just I mean first of all I find that incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unethical and second of all it’s unnecessary and and tends to produce worse output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the idea that like the AI team was like lazy or whatever because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were taking weekends and occasionally vacations and and leaving early on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fridays. Oh my God, what it like. If the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only way you can get good output is to overwork your people, you have a management problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a serious management problem and a cultural problem. So, you know, I won’t stand up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Syria team on a lot of things, but I’ll stand up to them for this. Like this is something that like, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a major deficiency. They have many, many, many other problems. This is not one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this, uh, the kind of this type of work culture, this aspect of work culture does exist
⏹️ ▶️ John on a spectrum. And I think the one problem that Apple has had probably forever, but certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John in the jobs to error and onward is kind of the same problem that the game industry has. Game industry
⏹️ ▶️ John is even more notorious for crunch and burning through people and just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not so much workaholics, but just like, uh, you know, a wood chipper that you throw employees into. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, And part of the reason the game industry has that reputation is the thing that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John holds victim to a little bit as well. People really love games.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, someone who’s like, I grew up playing Doom. I want to work in the games industry. I want to work for id
⏹️ ▶️ John software. I mean, that’s a dated reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, acquired many times over by this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John People who get into the game industry, much like the entertainment industry, like they Really want to be there and
⏹️ ▶️ John not only do they really want to be there. There’s not an infinite number of slots It’s not the same as Hollywood
⏹️ ▶️ John where there’s a tiny number of slots or whatever But like it’s the games industry is big enough to absorb
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people But it is not trivial to break into especially if you wanted to be doing something That’s not menial like
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be the designer for the next big triple-a game Well, how many jobs are there that is the designer
⏹️ ▶️ John of the next big triple-a game? There’s not hundreds of those jobs in the world because there’s not hundreds of triple
⏹️ ▶️ John next big triple-a games every year Um, so you have an industry that people really, really want to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John and you take these employees often young and very enthusiastic and you hire them onto a company. And the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is they want to work their butts off. They want to be workaholics. They want to stay on the weekends.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want to like make friends at work and do all this stuff where like they don’t, these people don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John work life balance and they want to do that. And the manager’s like, Oh, they want to do it. Yeah. We’ll just make that the
⏹️ ▶️ John culture I guess. And then boy, look at this. we get our games out sooner and we can just if we’re missing a date, we’ll just make them
⏹️ ▶️ John work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and and we’ll call it crunch and it’ll just be part of the industry and it’ll be great and
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the worst things about the games industry that it grinds people up like that Apple has that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John a smaller version People really want to work in Apple because they admire Apple and they like its products and so they get there
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re enthusiastic And they’d be like we’re working on the next version of iOS and it’s amazing We’re doing this amazing thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John they care about it so much that they want to come in weekends and they want to work on it. And it seems like the culture at Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, well, these people really want to work on it. I mean, I’m not going to tell them, no, they can’t come in. And so they come
⏹️ ▶️ John in and they work their butts off and they burn out. And as Mark pointed out, that’s bad management.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s tempting to do that because you have these people who are enthusiastic and who really, really want to work there. But like so
⏹️ ▶️ John much of Apple culture is sort of based on the premise that of course everyone wants to work for us because we’re Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re a great company and everything about our company, our buildings are great and beautiful and our products
⏹️ ▶️ John are great and beautiful. don’t you want to just be a part of that? And no, you’re not going to get any credit. No, your name won’t be in the credits. There’s jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John to get rid of that too or whatever, but don’t you just want to be a part of it so much so that you’re just going to work your butt off. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to figure out a way to balance employees
⏹️ ▶️ John enthusiasm for doing their job, which is a good thing with not grinding through
⏹️ ▶️ John them like human meat. Cause it’s not good longterm for anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s so tempting. Even if you’re a good manager, even if you mean well, like your incentives are
⏹️ ▶️ John aligned to be like, well, one or two weekends shouldn’t hurt. And when it comes time to review people like, well, that person does come
⏹️ ▶️ John in a lot. And so into that environment, you add someone like the AIML group, which is from a more like, let’s say academic
⏹️ ▶️ John background, or let’s say a more Google like background. Google historically, maybe if not today,
⏹️ ▶️ John had a much different reputation, which was like, come work here and you won’t have insane hours. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we won’t expect you to be crunching on the next big release of whatever. And you’ll be able to just kind of float around
⏹️ ▶️ John and follow your interests and go from group to group. and it’s much more like a college campus type of atmosphere,
⏹️ ▶️ John much more relaxed. And Apple people probably look at that and say, look at those people, that’s why they can’t ship any products.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re so much more serious here. I’m gonna say that the correct position to be is somewhere between the
⏹️ ▶️ John lackadaisical early Google things and the current Apple philosophy. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I can understand how a group like AML inside Apple looks to the rest of Apple like a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John like floofy head in the clouds college kids, especially if they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re, you know, Apple’s needs to hire people who know AI stuff. So they’re giving them more initial pay,
⏹️ ▶️ John giving them big promotions, and they work less than we do. That’s where the resentment comes from. It’s like, well, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the, you know, someone at Apple recognized, if you want people who understand this AI stuff, you’ve got to, we need to
⏹️ ▶️ John hire them away. We need to give them a lot of money. We need to get them to come here. And we can’t grind them up like meat because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re trying to attract them. Like we need to get them here, right? And the poor Apple engineers who are just grinding away at some
⏹️ ▶️ John objective C code are like, you know, we’re making the actual product here. Like, yeah, but there’s a million that you wait. If you leave, there’s 20
⏹️ ▶️ John more kids coming out of school who want to do the exact same job you do. So keep working hard. But anyway, over here at
⏹️ ▶️ John AIML, we give promotions freely and big pay packages and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s so much more relaxed. You don’t have to worry about shipping a product. Just work on these big problems and publish your papers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that can lead to cross-group tension. And it is another, like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that documenting what you’re doing so that when the thing fails, you know who to blame. you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want anyone in your organization spending any amount of time on essentially butt covering.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s what that is. It’s like, I am already thinking that this project is probably gonna fail, and when
⏹️ ▶️ John it does, I wanna make sure no one can blame me, so let me write down everything that happens in every meeting so when they
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, look at here, it wasn’t our fault, how about you try to make the product succeed instead? How about you work
⏹️ ▶️ John together to make a success instead of planning for a failure? This is
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly unhealthy. just incredible, like being instructed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that or like having that take place, like someone in management could go, wait a second, you told them to
⏹️ ▶️ John do what? Same team guys, like how about we make the product not fail? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is maybe like from bitter history, it’s like, well, when we tried to do that last time, we got blamed for all the failures and everyone called us aimless.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’re gonna make sure that we don’t get blamed this time. And it’s just so unhealthy, like this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John org needs to be in like family therapy together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they really do. Uh, all right. So continuing on from the article, it didn’t help the relations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the groups when Federighi began amassing his own team of hundreds of machine learning engineers that goes by the name intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems and is run by one of Federighi’s top deputies, Sebastian Marino Ness.
⏹️ ▶️ John again. Here we go. He did what? He hired his
⏹️ ▶️ John own team of hundreds of machine learning engineers because he didn’t like AI ML.
⏹️ ▶️ John How, how, how does that happen? How is there, does he have enough discretionary
⏹️ ▶️ John budget that he’s like, you know what, the Siri team’s not getting a job. I should hire some of my own machine learning engineers.
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple hundred would do it. Don’t you think? What? How many are in AI ML?
⏹️ ▶️ John How much money does Federighi have? Does Tim Cook know that there’s a team being made with hundreds of machine
⏹️ ▶️ John learning engineers in Federighi’s org, none of whom are working on Siri, but also there’s the Siri group. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is, you know, famously sort of tight with money internally in terms of they don’t give the
⏹️ ▶️ John highest salary. They don’t like hiring tons of people. Their teams are small and get somehow Federico gets a hundred,
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds, multiple hundreds of machine learning people. Because I mean, obviously there’s machine learning stuff. That’s part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS group. It’s not all Siri. Like I’m not saying he shouldn’t have any machine learning people, but this seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a duplication of effort that should have been another huge set of red flags of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t like having machine learning expertise and stuff. shouldn’t, shouldn’t we have them all kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, we’re, aren’t we a functional org? Why should Craig have his kingdom of them and JJ have his
⏹️ ▶️ John kingdom of them? And just, it’s just as this article went on, I just, it was a, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a head forehead smacker. You’re like, Oh my God, this, this like, and setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John people with access to grinding grudges or whatever, just like explaining like a intelligence systems or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I think there’s a perfectly good reason for that group to exist. Not saying it shouldn’t exist at all. I’m saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s Siri over there. Like, shouldn’t the intelligence system people have lunch with them and say, what are you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John doing? Hey, what do you guys do? Maybe should we, should we work together and like, should we be cooperating more closely
⏹️ ▶️ John than we are? Should we have the same boss as you go up the org chart before you get to Tim Cook?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s really not great. Um, it, uh, let’s see. Okay. Over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intelligence systems has trained its own models and built demos that enabled users to control apps with voice commands, often without the help from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Siri team that created tensions with within the Siri group, you don’t say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In one internal Apple presentation, a member of intelligence systems showed a slide depicting an animation of two mountains smashed together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and flattened, which some saw as a subtle dig at G and Andrea’s hill climbing philosophy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I cut that one out because he’s been a fan of hill climbing, which is a machine learning term of art. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not sure how two mountains smashed together is saying hill climbing is dumb. You shouldn’t do it, but snarking
⏹️ ▶️ John at each other across the organization and your slide presentations, is it another sign that things are going wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, I can understand how like, it’s just, teams feel like they’re not getting what they want out of Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do want to control things with the voice, so they sick their private little team on it and show a demo
⏹️ ▶️ John of voice control, and then JG’s like in the room, and someone was like thinking that’s part of Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not part of Siri, that’s just, I can imagine the Siri team being territorial and saying, anytime you talk to a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple that you’re calling Siri, it should be going through our group, and they’ll say, well, we can’t go through your group because you guys stink, so we did
⏹️ ▶️ John it all ourselves, and not healthy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and this is the kind of thing like when you have groups fighting with each other like this at this at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same level You know you have like you know Federico’s you know organization versus JJ’s organization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like This is a problem that Tim Cook should Need to handle like this like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have these two orgs fighting like if they can’t work it out amongst themselves Then the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above them has to step in and say hey quit it. This is ridiculous and wasteful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead let’s let you know let’s make some changes to do this right Like that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of the problems with like, Tim Cook generally seems like he does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like to get involved with things like this. What we hear a lot is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook’s approach to conflict management is, don’t bring me conflicts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what we hear many, many times. So what happens? The conflict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just gets pushed downward in the organization into areas like this, where like, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear, obvious dysfunction. Like when these two orgs are both kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fighting to do the same things because they don’t like each other and don’t like the way that each other are doing things, like that’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s obvious dysfunction. It’s not good for the products, it’s not good for the company, it’s not good for the orgs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yet, because conflict cannot be managed correctly above them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pushed down into these little fiefdoms and fights within them. And that’s on Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook. That is 100% on Tim Cook. I don’t think it’s 100% because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think don’t bring me conflicts is a valid philosophy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point is it’s supposed to breed people below
⏹️ ▶️ John you that can resolve conflicts because they know they can’t bring them to you
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to solve, so they have to solve them. And that’s why I think some of the failures also with Federighi and JG,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they both reported to Tim Cook and Tim Cook says don’t bring me conflicts, they should understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John to me that means that we have to resolve this conflict ourselves. And they simply failed to do so. And you could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, Tim should figure out that they’re failing there and help them. But like that’s, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John delegation and organization. And the one, like the one thing I think about Tim Cook in conflict is one of his
⏹️ ▶️ John very early moves was in fact to resolve a conflict, which was Johnny versus Scott forestall.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he went for the more harmonious agreement, which is like, if I get rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of forestall, everyone else agrees that they can get along. if I keep him, people are still going to be angry. Therefore, let’s go
⏹️ ▶️ John for group harmony. That was an extremely high level decision that involved Johnny Ive, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is as close as you could get to like an important employee who’s not Steve Jobs or the CEO. And so I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John he participated there, but I can also understand his philosophy of don’t bring me conflicts. And so that’s why I
⏹️ ▶️ John leave some of the blame for this to, in fact, be with Federighi and JG, because
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s not them that were having the disagreement, but it was the underlings and whatever. Like, you can chase it down. In the end, obviously, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook’s fault. in the end, everything is Tim Cook’s fault in the end because he’s the CEO, he’s in charge of everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the don’t bring me conflict is a non-workable strategy. It’s just, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a trust but verify. You have to also occasionally check in to
⏹️ ▶️ John see that the conflicts are in fact being dealt with at a level below you and you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John just being shielded from them. Like that’s, we don’t know how much communication goes up and down the chain or what people discuss,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can totally see it. Like, cause it’s such a big organization. if everyone who, when they’re meetings with Tim, just
⏹️ ▶️ John complained about the other groups, like you, the whole meeting could just be about which groups think the other group is letting them down
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And he just wants to hear how you’re succeeding. And so they should be motivated to work together. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just, this seems like a failure of that system to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Indeed. But I would also say like the, the whole idea of don’t bring me conflict,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are right. That like that should breed the, you know, the people under them to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, work things out amongst themselves. But I think it’s it’s based on a fantasy that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will always be fine or that is even the best approach I think what happens in reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you say at the top don’t bring me conflict that doesn’t prevent conflicts from Happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just prevents them from being resolved by the top which means that they have to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Shove solutions together below that level not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a good way like what happened here This was a conflict that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly could not resolve. So what happened was they solved it in a terrible way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they kind of worked around the conflict, kind of exacerbating it, making worse outcomes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, less efficiently. This was a terrible solution. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do feel like the, this should have involved higher levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stepping in, and they didn’t, and that’s a failure on their part.
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually did, as with so many things. As I think you’ve said on past episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of times, Apple will eventually, assuming it stays alive, figure out what it’s doing wrong and correct it, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really slow. And so, I mean, look, this is an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of presumably Tim Cook stepping in and resolving a conflict years, years too late.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not even close to, in a timely manner. Yeah, and it’s the other Ed
⏹️ ▶️ John Catmull book, Success Hides Problems. It’s also very difficult to deal with these things when everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going gangbusters, even if it’s not these particular things that are going gangbusters, but just, oh, the company is successful, everybody loves iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ John stock price going up. That hides a lot of this stuff because that can lead people
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the things that they’ve done here, where it’s like, well, I’ll just hire my own machine learning team and we’ll work it
⏹️ ▶️ John out and blah, blah, blah. And it’s just, it’s difficult. This is part of the difficulty of being, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, one step down the org chart from a CEO who says, don’t bring me problems because I’m sure Craig
⏹️ ▶️ John tells his lieutenants the same thing. It is a reasonable system and the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ John is way worse, which is all, all you ever do is that people complaining about problems. Like the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John of you being getting the bazillion dollars is like, solve it. That’s what we’re paying you for. Don’t bring, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bring every problem to your parents to have them resolve it. That’s not a functional organization either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but yeah, this was a misstep and the, like, it’s one of the difficulties of being
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook is how thin your attention is spread. There are so many more things that he has to
⏹️ ▶️ John think about besides the quality of Apple’s products, which is a weird thing to say, but when you’re the CEO,
⏹️ ▶️ John things like where are we manufacturing them and what are we doing financially and uh, how
⏹️ ▶️ John are we hiring things and antitrust and government? Like there’s just so much to think about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this one can sneak up on you in a few, in a few dozen years if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pay attention to it. So yeah, That’s why we’re again, that’s why we’re talking about this is this is definitely one of the ones that did faster
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get addressed in a timely manner. Finally, did do something about it. Now we get to see
⏹️ ▶️ John the, uh, the postmortem or the, the, uh, the glimpses of the postmortem from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the one of my mom’s flight arrived demo during WWDC, uh, during an onstage demo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at WWDC 2024, when Apple executive asked Siri when her mom’s flight would land the voice assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access her email and real-time flight data to provide the current arrival time. She then asked Siri to remind her about their lunch plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the assistant plucked the details from her iPhone’s messages and plotted a route from the airport to the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Among the members of the Siri team at Apple though, the demonstration was a surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They had never seen working versions of the capabilities. Woof. At the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only new feature from the demonstration that was activated for test devices was a pulsing colorful ribbon that appeared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the edges of the iPhone screen when a user invoked Siri. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is some interesting wording from the information here and you can read it in a way that is not as in
⏹️ ▶️ John Ridiculous as it sounds because what they’re saying is like the Siri team was surprised by this demo because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d never seen it working It doesn’t mean they weren’t working on it It just means they knew it didn’t currently
⏹️ ▶️ John work And so they didn’t expect to see it demonstrated because why would you demonstrate a thing that doesn’t work? So all of a sudden you see it in the demo
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’ve been working on it for a year for two years but you know, it’s not in a state where you can demo it and so they
⏹️ ▶️ John show the demo and you’re like Like we’d never seen that working. And then this other part here, I thought it was straight
⏹️ ▶️ John from the information from the author of the article saying at the time, the only new feature demonstration that was activated for test
⏹️ ▶️ John devices was the pulsing colorful border. Doesn’t mean the only thing that had
⏹️ ▶️ John been developed was the pulsing colorful ribbon thing or whatever. It’s that the only thing that was activated
⏹️ ▶️ John for test devices again, within Apple or whatever. So I think this is just basically an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of the team being blindsided by a demonstration that essentially put them behind the eight ball to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, we know you’ve been working on this. We know it’s not ready where we can actually demo it, which is why we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to show it to the press at all, but we are gonna put it in the keynote. And as I said in past episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is a type of thing that has happened many times at Apple. Not that I’m endorsing it or saying it as
⏹️ ▶️ John a good thing, but from the famous Steve Jobs saying, we’re gonna open source the FaceTime protocol and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John on the FaceTime team going, wait, what? It’s all the way down to half the other demos we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John where we know the software is not ready to be shipped, but they demo it anyway and they say,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is shipping in iOS 5 or whatever. And the team is like, oh God, I guess we have to, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to get this thing working in time for iOS 5, cause Steve Jobs is still on stage and said it’s gonna come out on iOS 5.
⏹️ ▶️ John This smells to me like that, but in case you needed confirmation that that demo was
⏹️ ▶️ John way out ahead of where the product was. And that also that the team responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for the feature was not apparently intimately involved in giving a go, no-go decision,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I guess product marketing does that or it’s above their pay grade to decide, is this going to be in the keynote or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John But can you imagine being the audience and being on this team and going, you know, as Mark would say, bleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to not invented here syndrome, despite the company’s experimentation with open AI models,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s managers told their engineers in 2023, they couldn’t include models from outside companies in final
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple products and could only use them to benchmark against its in-house models. Building
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large Apple models meant to compete with OpenAI was the responsibility of JG’s group. However, they didn’t perform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearly as well as OpenAI’s technology, according to multiple former Apple employees who used the models in 23 and 24.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In his new role overseeing Siri, Federighi has already shaken things up. In a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey departure from previous policy, he’s instructed Siri’s machine learning engineers to do whatever it takes to build the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI features, even if it means using open source models from other companies and its software products, as opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s own models.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is not shocking that Apple would only want to use its own models. It totally seems like an Apple-y thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also setting aside whether it’s an Apple-y thing, I think it’s actually a fairly prudent thing
⏹️ ▶️ John because especially back, you know, a couple of years ago, but even today, there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ John uncertainty about the stuff that goes into models and people getting sued over the things the models were trained
⏹️ ▶️ John on or whatever. It’s prudent to be able to have an answer
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone says, hey, what’d you train that model on? That’s, it’s one of the reasons Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John makes such a big deal out of training all of its models that are part of Photoshop on content that Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John owns or licenses. Because they have an answer. If someone says, what did you train that on? They’ll say, look, I can show you. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John this, and we paid for it all. And we like, we have license to it all. Like it’s not, we didn’t like pirate a bunch of books or
⏹️ ▶️ John throw a bunch of movies. Like I think that is a prudent thing to do. And of course, Apple being
⏹️ ▶️ John like, of course we’re gonna use our own stuff. We’re not gonna use their things. It’s we’re Apple, we’ll do everything ourselves. So it makes sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and let’s we’ll get to in a little bit, the whole idea of, okay, well you did that, but your models aren’t as good at opening
⏹️ ▶️ John the eyes. So now what? And so in this crisis situation, Federighi being more pragmatic and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, well, we’ve, this has been gone on long enough that so far no one has been sued out
⏹️ ▶️ John of existence. So if we use an open source model, I guess worst case
⏹️ ▶️ John to whoever’s responsible for building that open source model, like they get sued or maybe we like, And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, at this point, we can’t, we have lost the ability to be as
⏹️ ▶️ John prudent as we want to be. It’s more important now to fix things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that means taking on more risk. That means using open source models. So be it. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John again, it seems like Federighi being pragmatic, but it is not a situation Apple really wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agree. I think this is not, like, this was not the wrong call.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the stage Apple was in, Like, you know, you gotta figure like the position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s in in the market. If anything goes wrong, they get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raked over the coals. Like, they have so many eyes on them. If anything is possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that somebody could sue them for, you know, any kind of infringement. They’re on the line for, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the hook for that. You know, they wouldn’t want probably to involve themselves with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people’s models shipping in their products. Like, that is just the reality of their position in the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risky for them. So I even though like I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right thing to do would have been for Apple to have developed their own models earlier than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did and what seems to have happened is they realized too late that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of product was a big deal and they need to have something in this area and so they rushed and put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them together and in a rush you might think which maybe we’ll get to later in a rush you might think maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we should use other people’s models to speed this along. But I understand why, given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s position and the way they usually do things, I understand why they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do that at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then on the 11th of April, which was Friday, The New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey York Times had its own article. And I don’t have the title in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ John The title was much broader than this, but the only part that I thought was interesting or relevant was this tidbit, which is specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John about what we’ve just been discussing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. The title of the article, there we go, is, What’s Wrong with Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Kind of a big
⏹️ ▶️ John And they went all over the place. And I didn’t think most of it was worth repeating, but this part was relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. This is Trip Mickel, who had recently written a book about the design team after Johnny Ive, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally didn’t really care for, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyways, reading from his article, the AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stumble was set in motion in early 2023. JG, who was overseeing the effort, sought approval from the company’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chief executive, Tim Cook, to buy more AI chips, known as graphic processing units, or GPUs. At the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s data centers had about 50,000 GPUs that were more than five years old, far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being bought at the time by AI leaders like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta. Mr. Cook approved a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan to double the team’s chip budget, but Apple’s finance chief, Luca Maestri, reduced the increase to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than half of that. Mr. Maestri encouraged the team to make the chips they had more efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lack of GPUs meant the team developing AI had to negotiate for data center computing power from its providers like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google and Amazon. The leading chips made by NVIDIA were in such demand that Apple used alternative chips made by Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some of its AI development. I should also add that after the article was published, well, they added the following
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later on. After this article was published, Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said the company had fulfilled Mr.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey G and Andrea’s budget request for GPUs over time rather than all at once. She said Mr. Maestri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had never asked the team to make its chips more efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you’re in the New York Times, you actually get Apple to respond. Isn’t that interesting? Funny how that is. If you’re anybody who’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John New York Times, good luck. Yeah, so the earlier bit about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple wanted to make its own models, but people inside Apple said that the ones the JDS group were making weren’t as good at open
⏹️ ▶️ John AIs. Seems like he was trying to do the right thing, which is like, look, everyone else who’s making their own models,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re spending tons of money buying GPUs. We have to do that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we do that? And Tim Cook said, yeah, but not as fast or as
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive as you want. And I also imagine the CFO probably is not telling people what they should do in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John chip efficiency. But it is an interesting contrast with DeepSeek, which was forbidden from getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the best of the best GPUs due to like import restrictions and stuff. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John had to figure out a way to essentially do what the CFO, the former CFO was saying here,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, can you just be more efficient with the GPUs that you have? DeepSeek said, yeah, I think we can figure that
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Apple did not figure that out. But this is, I don’t blame JG for this at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. It seems like he was trying to do the right thing. It seems like the organization though was like
⏹️ ▶️ John not ready to commit the amount of money that other companies work. So OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, this is the only reason we exist. We were raising money and we burned all on GPUs. Like just
⏹️ ▶️ John where we are in the phase where we’re like gathering as much investment as we can and we dump all that investment
⏹️ ▶️ John into training models. And if we fail, we fail, but like that’s the state we’re at. And Apple is like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not really currently our business. We have another business that works really well. Have you seen our services chart? We sell
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of iPhones. Then these people over here telling us we need to spend $200 billion on, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs in the data center. Can we not do that or do it more slowly?
⏹️ ▶️ John And can you just like use Google TPUs? I think we had a story many months ago about Apple using
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s resources. You know, instead of buying your own stuff, buying your own GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John rent time on somebody else’s. And you can do that as well, but that is less money efficient and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not what most of the big players are doing. Google uses its own, they probably get really good rates
⏹️ ▶️ John on using TPUs because they’re their own things. OpenAI is buying tons of stuff itself
⏹️ ▶️ John and using stuff from Azure that Microsoft is letting them use. So I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is sort of like evidence of Apple Apple not correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John prioritizing, not prioritizing Siri, AI, ML,
⏹️ ▶️ John LM stuff to the degree that it would produce a successful result.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause I’m not going to say they didn’t invest enough to do it because again, DeepSeek figured out a way to do it with
⏹️ ▶️ John older hardware. Apple could have done that, but didn’t. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not as bad as everything else that we saw, even though the things
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, he wanted to buy stuff that Tim Cook wouldn’t let him. You know, like the company didn’t invest
⏹️ ▶️ John as heavily or as quickly as in hindsight it seems like they should have. But if all that other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that we just went through about organizational dysfunction didn’t exist, they still would have done way better with the resources they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. To me, like it’s hard. Look, I’ve said before, I don’t wanna drill in too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much here, but like I really think this is like when Microsoft missed mobile. Like Apple missing LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other similar modern AI techniques. I really think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as big, and he will be judged harshly, Tim Cook will be judged harshly in the future for like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they missed AI. Apple missed AI, the same way Microsoft missed mobile. And this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, is a good example of maybe why that happened, or the mindset that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was going on when it was happening. Apple should have been investing in this way earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think what’s going to end up happening is their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products will be uncompetitive in lots of important ways that will grow in importance over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And they will either have significant losses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their market share in the future, potentially, or they will have to spend a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of money buying AI companies or buying a big AI company down the road
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make up for what they’re lacking here. And either way, that’s gonna be way more expensive than it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been for them to get on this earlier. But it just seems like their heads were not in the right place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last two years to realize that this is an area they should have been investing very heavily in. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seemed dismissive. They seemed like they were fully hubris
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were dismissive. They thought there’s no use for this stuff. This is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jokes. This is all useless BS generating machines. and I think they’ve missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot here. They are still missing a lot. Now they are scrambling to catch up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like Microsoft missing mobile, Apple missed AI, and who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows when it will be if they ever catch up. I’m guessing it’s going to be a while. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this Times article about like, you know, the look at my street denying them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU budget. If Apple knew what they were dealing with back then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should have put all their, like they should have put as much money into it as it took. Certainly they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the money and instead they’re, you know, they were being stingy because they didn’t respect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this as a problem. I hope they respect it now as a problem, I hope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re already really far behind for reasons like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of the most difficult decisions for a big company to make because there’s always gonna be some
⏹️ ▶️ John industry fad or things that are getting a lot of startup investment And it’s easy in the beginning to look at those
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, nah, we’ll see how that turns out. Like if it ends up to be a thing, then we’ll look at it, but we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go chasing after every startup. So when you see like how much money OpenAI was investing in its efforts,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s gonna look at that and say, well, of course you’re investing in that OpenAI because this is literally your whole company.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, this is your shot, you’re taking it, but like we shouldn’t be investing the same amount that OpenAI is because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a bet the company thing for us, it is the whole company for OpenAI. So they shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be the model for us Because look at all the other companies doing things. Like we can’t invest at that level.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anytime there’s a startup or a bunch of startups in a thing getting tons of money, we can’t chase that and say, well, we need to
⏹️ ▶️ John be investing the same amount as they do because maybe they’ll fizzle out or maybe it won’t be that big a deal or maybe we can just buy them the
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s successful or whatever, right? So it’s so hard as a big company to know
⏹️ ▶️ John which ones you should pay attention to and actually which ones you should invest and like how, like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t do it the second they do, but like how long do you wait to decide, okay, well, OpenAI has been putting
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of money in this. And actually they’re kind of getting results. And I think that’s kind of what Craig Federer
⏹️ ▶️ John is like the story of his revelation about Chats GPT of like, oh, they’ve made a product out of it. And the product is good. We need
⏹️ ▶️ John to get on this train. And turning the ship is not, I mean, he’s not the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John but even if he was like, maybe at that point you already have already waited a little bit too long. And it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John they just have been slow to react to this and have been reacting in a
⏹️ ▶️ John more prudent big company kind of way of like, oh, you need more GPUs. Okay, you can have more, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you need them that fast. And maybe you can rent some out. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as like, like Bill Gates with the internet tidal wave memo, right? When
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s sufficiently high up in an organization has that eureka moment, which by the way, you know, lower
⏹️ ▶️ John level employees are constantly having eureka moments about things they think the company should do. And sometimes they’re right and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re wrong. But we only notice when an executive of sufficient high level has that eureka moment and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God, the internet. We need to turn the whole company around because guess what? I’ve just realized
⏹️ ▶️ John that the internet is gonna be a really important thing and we should get on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Arguably Apple was even slower than Microsoft in that regard, it just didn’t matter because they were so small and in the process
⏹️ ▶️ John of dying. So no one cared what they did. But Microsoft was like all hands on deck. Bill Gates went
⏹️ ▶️ John away on a vacation, came back and says, internet, go. And he did that for security.
⏹️ ▶️ John He did that for mobile. And like, you know, sometimes you’re too late. Sometimes you’re too early, sometimes you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just on time, but like there’s that time before that where it’s so hard to know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John is this gonna be the next big thing or is this not? Or what should we be doing? And like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple, we’ve always talked about the car program of putting all that money into the car. It’s like make big bets that are all gonna pay
⏹️ ▶️ John off like, oh well, right? Or even a Vision Pro, like it’s a big bet, it’s not currently
⏹️ ▶️ John paying off. It’s not even entirely clear that that’s gonna be the next big thing, but it is kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John when we think of Apple as this big giant sack of money that they are, right? And we say, well, you’ve got all this money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s doing you no good just, you know, sitting there accumulating. Like you might as well make these
⏹️ ▶️ John big bets. I do wonder like in the pitch to say, okay, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John is convinced that actually, you know, have you seen chat GPT, Tim? Like we, they should put money in this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It only seems like a lot of money because we don’t have Apple money, right? If you’re looking at the percentage of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John money and do that math, like they always do have like a, you know, a billionaire spends a
⏹️ ▶️ John hundred million dollars. It’s the same as you spending $5, right? It’s just like, should we do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I know you don’t get rich by spending all this money, but it’s so like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was so late on this. And from this reporting, even when they had decided that was the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they wanted, they were still kind of acting like they needed to pinch pennies. And it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John spent like billions of dollars on a car that never shipped. You’re going to slow roll the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John rollout. Come on. Just, uh, it is frustrating, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is hard. Even when you have so much money, maybe especially when you have so much money.
⏹️ ▶️ John To, uh, get out of the mindset of like the dragon on the horde of like, yeah, I have all this
⏹️ ▶️ John money because I don’t spend it on every single thing that people want me to spend it on. But anyway, um, unlike mobile,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still continue to think that, um, so far, this is not guaranteed, but so
⏹️ ▶️ John far it doesn’t seem like a thing that threatens Apple’s platform because in theory, if they get off their
⏹️ ▶️ John butts and do something more sane they could be quote unquote the best platform for hosting voice assistants.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are not currently that, but technically they could be. And ChatGPT does not seem to be threatening them as a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John or any other company threatening them as a platform yet because they don’t have a platform or a product other than
⏹️ ▶️ John like a webpage that you can talk to and type things into. But that’s not guaranteed to be true forever and so
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope the dragon slumbering on its hoard of money has now woken up and we’ll see some better
⏹️ ▶️ John results in the coming years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think ChatGPT has amazing products. And I think it’s way beyond a
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t replace the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t replace the iPhone, but I think they have the ability to replace a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone apps and a lot of iPhone features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, Apple would take 30% from all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. Yeah, true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my car, like whenever I’m like driving and I want to, I need some knowledge, I have a question about something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will, I will say, you know, Hey, Hey thing, ask chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then my question, I say that every single time now, because it’s so much better than Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now at least Siri has the hook where it can just shell stuff out of chat GPT, you know, not always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, not always at the right time.
⏹️ ▶️ John is that by the way, the reports have shown that asking chat GPT directly has way
⏹️ ▶️ John better results than asking Siri to ask ChatGPT, which doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the only thing we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a, you know, a man bites dog type of story. We don’t see the other ones, but like it boggles my mind that should ever be
⏹️ ▶️ John the case. Like, shouldn’t it be the same, but somehow it isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but regardless, like, you know, like ChatGPT, like via CarPlay, via Siri, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than Siri ever was. You know, the, when, if you’re actually on the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the device and able to use it directly, you know, mapping ChatGPT to like the action button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty common thing on iPhones, on the Mac, of course, you can just tab open with the web page, or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a Mac app that you can have a shortcut key to and it can integrate with other stuff. Like, I think of all the AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies, you know, the different whatever model is on top changes week to week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost. But chat GPT, or open AI consistently has the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products in front of their model. Usually, like, they really do well with like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how can we take this technology, this amazing, you know, model that we have and actually make useful user facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features and compelling user facing features. Usually chat chat is the leader in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really do not think it’s out of the realm of possibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe down the road, Apple buys open AI for just a ridiculous massive amount
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s after opening I buys Johnny Ives company, right? Because together, that’s another story maybe we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John in a future episode. But that seems like it’s coming down the pike to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God, I sure I sure sure hope that isn’t how we get Johnny back into Apple. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John no, I think he’ll just take the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’ll he’ll take the money and be gone by then. But, uh, you know, cause that they’re, they’re working on whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like presumably it’s something that’s like the AI pin, but not crappy. Uh, but yeah, open AI buys his company. He becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John even more fabulously wealthy, disappears into the wilderness and then Apple buys open. I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. It’s open AI at this point is Apple shouldn’t buy it at current valuations, but probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see. We’ll see how that goes, but Apple still trying to do it on their own. And honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is plausible that they still can do it on their own, because as you noted,
⏹️ ▶️ John like OpenAI has good products, but the products they have, I was gonna say, Apple should have no problem doing products
⏹️ ▶️ John just as good, but these days, who knows? But anyway, it’s not out of sight. Apple’s pretty good at making software products
⏹️ ▶️ John too. So maybe they could do that. And the question is, all right, but what about the model part? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not entirely clear that OpenAI’s lead over the rest of the industry is insurmountable, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still in the grand scheme of things early days, so we’ll see how this turns out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think it’s less, I mean, I think the lead is more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insurmountable than I think a lot of commentators to give it credit for. Because yes, other people can indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go, you know, train a model and, you know, give somebody enough money, they can train a model from scratch and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do okay so far. That has happened a few times. But we are already very rapidly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving past just the model itself being really good into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of different ways to use the models, to hook them up in different ways, to engineer their prompts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in different ways, to do all sorts of things with what you’re feeding them and how you’re feeding it to them, and then what your steps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are that you’re taking to call them multiple times. There’s all these different techniques. It’s getting more and more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very rapidly. This is a rapid development happening, huge advancement happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and OpenAI is pretty, it’s usually the head of the pack. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to, you know, before too long, their lead is going to be pretty large in ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not easy to replicate. So things like mindshare among people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, you know, habits, apps, you know, actual like integrations they have, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re growing, growing, growing. I hope. Apple can do a good job themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I fear that for all the same reasons that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri has sucked all this time, it seems like they don’t have the culture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the talent to properly enable something like this to grow in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their company. For in many, many ways, AI companies and the development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AI type stuff seem at odds with Apple’s culture. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple as a company doesn’t seem to give it the respect that I think it deserves. And so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Apple will ever do a really great job with AI. What I think is most likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is similar to, you know, things like, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music. Apple Music is not an amazing music service.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just about to bring that up to say that I no longer had confidence that Apple can make a digital jukebox style
⏹️ ▶️ John application. That’s competent. Remember when they used to be good at that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple Music is fine. It’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not say it’s fine. It’s sub-fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fine. We’ll call it that, whatever it is. But like, Apple Music is not great. It’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the biggest music services. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re talking about the service. I was talking about the app. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Yeah, the service is, again, it’s fine. It’s not great, but it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Apple gets by with that because of their lock-in. They have so much lock-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infrastructure now that they can get by with a series of mediocre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offerings, and the lock-in keeps us all using them and gives them the user base they need. Their 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it hard for other people to compete. Their technical boundaries make it hard for other apps to even integrate in the same ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, they don’t really need a great AI story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just need a functioning AI story. Just like, you know, Apple Music is not a great music service, it functions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a functioning music service. And that lets them compete really effectively against others in the area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because they have the best offering, but because they have unfair advantages they give themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how this is going to work too. I don’t see any outcome here where Apple has a great AI company. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t see it. I hope that through various forces, internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and external, I hope they are forced to let companies that are good at it, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OpenAI, put their models into different places in iOS. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, replace Siri or integrate better, like the way the current one’s done, like maybe more extended.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I hope that becomes the direction they go when Apple becomes more of the platform company that it’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple as a platform is a very, generally a very good situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when Apple, Apple makes really good OSs, they make really good developer frameworks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they make really good APIs, like they’re really good at that stuff. It’s when they start getting into all the services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and all the, you know, gatekeeping and rent seeking and anti-competitive behavior, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we see the worst of Apple. I don’t think AI is going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well for them. Like I think it’s going to be a second rate feature, just like Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been. Like it’s been okay at best and usually pretty bad. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you see in Apple’s culture that’s any different now compared to the last 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years that will enable this to become a great AI company? I see nothing different. I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it being the exact same handful of people running the company, the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handful of people in all these leadership roles who don’t really understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI that well, who don’t tend to do very well at big data problems and machine learning types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problems or big services. These are not Apple’s strengths. They do an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay job sometimes, but then Google and other companies usually totally outclass them in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these areas. That’s probably what’s gonna happen here. But at least it’ll be better than having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no AI features and no AI models, or the first round of Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff so far has been like, you know, barely there. But I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they would do something a little bit bigger and actually try to make something really great themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you’re gonna become, if you’re gonna own the whole platform and lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out everyone else in lots of different ways, you gotta do a really good job yourself in every possible area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a great strategy, but if you choose to do that strategy, please do a better job. And so I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they like, you know, really, I hope I’m totally wrong about this. I hope like in, you know, in two years we do an episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we, and somebody points out how down I was about their AI prospects and it turns out they turn out awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’d be amazing. I would love that. I don’t see any evidence that they’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it would, that they would, that they’ve changed anything that it would take for them to change to get from here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to there. It seems like moving AI stuff under Federighi is good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s better than where the, wherever the heck it was before. Like it’s better than this situation but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not really making like they’re really big like cultural changes or leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes at larger levels to really to really make them a different kind of company you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we get with Tim Cook being a diplomat as we were saying as I was saying earlier in the show like he’s a diplomat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is what the company needs a lot of the time but he’s really not a product person at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people keep apologizing for that and people keep saying like, oh well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he doesn’t need to be a product person. He delegates that. But I don’t think he delegates that very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well because he fundamentally doesn’t understand or respect it enough. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re seeing issues like missing AI. We’re seeing things like, don’t bring me conflict.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We see things like that that are just like, I don’t know if Apple is too big to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product person at the head now. It might be. But I wish it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a product person again. I really miss having Apple have that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spirit in it. I’m not saying it had to be Steve Jobs forever, but we lost a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we lost Steve. And one of the things we lost is a really good product person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who is the head of product at Apple right now? I don’t know. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Craig Cavetti Regis situation where you it’s, it is good to have a, an executive who,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, doesn’t have to, you know, know how every technical thing works, but has
⏹️ ▶️ John had, it comes from a technical background and incorporates that into his decision making because he considers
⏹️ ▶️ John it an area where he can have insight and something to add.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Tim Cook, again, as I always said, to his credit realizes that he doesn’t really have anything to add
⏹️ ▶️ John on the product front because it’s just who he is, right? Ideally, if you build your own CEO construction kit,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You’d pick one that has product knowledge and if you’re building your VP, you pick one with technical knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can’t have everything. Like you got Tim Cook’s amazing skills in certain areas
⏹️ ▶️ John that led him to become the CEO, but he has deficits as well. And this is one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so every time I see him, and this is a story for maybe next week, every time I see him trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John introduce product opinions, I think that he should not. Oh yeah. So he is who
⏹️ ▶️ John he is. But yes, it would be better if we had a CEO who had all of Tim Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good qualities, but also a bunch of good qualities that he doesn’t have. And, you know, that’s, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John he, he does the only thing he can do, which is, or the only thing I think he should do, which is delegate that. Not because
⏹️ ▶️ John the CEO should always delegate that, but because Tim Cook personally has no choice but to delegate
⏹️ ▶️ John that because it is not one of his strengths. And yeah, that’s, there are so many things. There’s increasing
⏹️ ▶️ John number of things that are wrong with Apple that you look at. you think this is never going to change
⏹️ ▶️ John until there is until a bunch more people retire, which will happen. Time marches
⏹️ ▶️ John on, there will be new leadership, but there’s so many things that are that you just see that you just don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly happening with the current leadership because they just don’t believe in it and you wouldn’t want them to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something they don’t believe in because the heart’s not in it. But sometimes that means they’ve kind of outlived their usefulness to the company and you need somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John who has a different opinion and maybe we could have a whole show on that at some point of just like all the things that require
⏹️ ▶️ John new leadership for Apple to change and what they should be. And they’re so big and so counter
⏹️ ▶️ John to everything every person on the Apple leadership page believes in that you just know they’re not going to happen to those faces
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Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
Looked it up on ChatGPT
⏹️ ▶️ John So speaking of all this AI stuff and getting to what Margaret was talking about in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of like mind share of like among people who are not listening to tech podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do they come to think of? What becomes the Kleenex of voice assistants
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point among, you know, the non-tech enthusiasts? Siri does
⏹️ ▶️ John have mind share as the one that’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it’s the punching bag.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And so that, you know, it’s not like these things aren’t penetrating to the mass market,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re penetrating in a bad way when it comes to Siri. But anyway, I was reminded of this when I was watching one of
⏹️ ▶️ John my many for, I watch car rebuilding channels and I watch channels about
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are either rebuilding boats or live on boats or are sailing on boats, which is very strange for someone who gets
⏹️ ▶️ John massively seasick and will never be on a boat. But anyway, that’s what I watch on YouTube. And I’m watching this
⏹️ ▶️ John one, one, uh, channel that I’ve been watching for years and years. And they used to be like, Hey, we live in a boat. How does
⏹️ ▶️ John that work? And I was like, oh, that’s cool. How does that work? Anyway, that was years ago. Um, now they’re at the
⏹️ ▶️ John stage where they are, they’re upgrading their boat. They’re building a new boat. They have their
⏹️ ▶️ John old boat is just, they docked it somewhere and they’re constructing a new boat from scratch, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very fascinating thing. Doesn’t involve a lot of being on the water of also a lot of being in a workshop, but that’s what they’re doing. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John watching mostly to to see if they all die because they don’t know what they’re doing when they’re building their boat. There are videos
⏹️ ▶️ John that I watch and I just shake my head and I go, you’re all going to die. It’s like the scene in the draws that YouTube can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John recall because you probably hadn’t seen the movie or can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey remember it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never seen it. Yeah. Anyway, setting aside whether they all die on their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco boat that’s been shuttle
⏹️ ▶️ John constructed. In a recent episode, they were faced with the problem where they were just, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, they were putting a tube inside another tube and filling the gap between them with like epoxy to put it in a
⏹️ ▶️ John tube for like the prop shaft or whatever. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the YouTuber, the person running the channel, made it a point to
⏹️ ▶️ John have an entire episode saying, here’s how I decided to solve this problem and the tools I used or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ve made videos like this for years, but this time AI was in
⏹️ ▶️ John the mix. And so they used both ChatGPT and DeepSeek, which kind of surprised me
⏹️ ▶️ John that DeepSeek had enough sort of mind share to even come up as an option.
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they made this video when it was like all in the news, because there’s a big delay when the videos come out, right? It’s not happening in real time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So deep sequence in there as well, but also chat GPT. And this is a person like
⏹️ ▶️ John fabricating real things. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they’re like a screencast sort of like the conversation with chat GPT and asking like, if I have a tube this diameter and then
⏹️ ▶️ John another tube with this diameter inside it and it’s this long or whatever, what’s the area of the thing? Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John math that a middle schooler could do, right? It’s not complicated math, But their solution to doing that math was
⏹️ ▶️ John to ask chat GPT. And anybody who has used LLM powered things to do math knows in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not their strength. They are large language models, not large math models. As Marco pointed out recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not as simple as that anymore. There’s a million different things being orchestrated. And most of these
⏹️ ▶️ John things have some kind of math engine behind the scenes that they will feed the math stuff to. But still,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were asking it to do things and then going, huh, okay, I’m writing it down. And similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was another episode a little bit later, which is like, I have something that I have a electric motor and
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets hot and I need something to cool it. Uh, and I want to build it out of aluminum.
⏹️ ▶️ John How big of a, like essentially heat sink do I need to dissipate this amount of heat in this amount of time? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re having this conversation with JatGPT and DeepSeek saying, okay, here’s the thing. Tell me what this is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it would say, okay, well, I made these assumptions about the temperature of the water and the temperature of
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing coming from the engine. Here’s what the area you need, blah, blah, blah. Not surprisingly the two different
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM products came up with wildly different answers off by like a factor of three or four the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John bothered me about this whole thing is I’m watching this waiting for the point where they say but of course This is all just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a fun exercise And I’m not gonna actually build something based on what chat GPT told me to do especially since as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just proven by asking two different LLMs and getting wildly different answers I Can’t just go by what they say
⏹️ ▶️ John because which I don’t know which one to pick and the fact that they’re so different makes me think that I don’t know enough of what I’m doing to
⏹️ ▶️ John make use of these tools. And yet I saw some starting to cut aluminum. I’m like, well, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John did we skip a step here where you talk to someone who knows what they’re doing? Like, don’t here’s my thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I worry that people think chat GBT is the same as Googling
⏹️ ▶️ John something, which is not helped by the fact that the top, you know, above the fold thing on Google search results is
⏹️ ▶️ John now, you know, has been for years. The thing where Google tries to get the answer for you. but with the advent of LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John is much more prominent and much more likely to, you know, look like it’s giving you the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was some, uh, an article I read ages ago, which I had the link. It was like, um, if you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t try to use chat GPT to win an argument. Like if someone says, I think Tom Cruise is, you know, 60
⏹️ ▶️ John years old. I think he’s 50 years old and we’ll settle this by asking chat GPT. That
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t settle anything. Right. All you did was put some words into a machine. the
⏹️ ▶️ John new words came out of, but you’re exactly where you started off, which is like, well, it’s plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it right? Maybe we should look up somewhere where we think has a, a slightly higher chance of
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing Tom Cruise’s age, Wikipedia, IMDB, call sheet, like, are they necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John right? No, but you kind of know in general, how frequently does Wikipedia know
⏹️ ▶️ John the age of famous people? You have no idea in general, how frequently does Chanty know the
⏹️ ▶️ John age of famous people because it’ll say all sorts of things. And so if you’re trying to figure out the area between
⏹️ ▶️ John two cylinders or how big a heat sink you need for the cooler for your boat or what Tom Cruise’s age
⏹️ ▶️ John is, if you’ve asked you chat GPT and said, well, there you go, I figured it out. It feels so
⏹️ ▶️ John much like when we all first got smartphones and someone would ask them a question and we would just Google it and say, look, I got the answer, I just Googled
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But that, even though the actions are the same, I took out my phone from my pocket, I typed in a thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ John hit a thing and I read a result, it’s not the same. And is
⏹️ ▶️ John it because, oh, people need to know how LLMs work, they need to know like the intricate details of LLMs? I just feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s a disconnect between what LLMs are actually good for and what
⏹️ ▶️ John people are using them for. And that disconnect may be dangerous, kind of in the same way that there’s a disconnect
⏹️ ▶️ John between what driver assistance functions are actually good for and what people use them for and why they end up dying
⏹️ ▶️ John by going under a tractor trailer because they’re not using the tools correctly, but the tools are essentially designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to tempt them into not using them correctly, sometimes advertised in ways that are tempting them to not. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re at that stage with LLMs and I really don’t want this person to build anything on their boat based on something Chad Chappity said because
⏹️ ▶️ John Chad Chappity doesn’t know what a boat is or how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to build anything, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not saying that the first non-AI search result on Google is also the right
⏹️ ▶️ John answer all the time. I’m saying maybe you have to do more research than Googling to figure out how big the heat sink
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be on your boat. That’s all I’m saying. Have you, have you seen
⏹️ ▶️ John this in real life? People saying, I just looked up and chat GPT, my kids do it. And I sternly say no,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, that’s not surprising. Bad child. No, you have not looked it up. That’s, is that right? I don’t know. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you spray them with a water bottle too?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, it’s like, Oh, like studying for a test. Like, Oh, I, you know, they, everyone uses like the notebook LM type things where you took
⏹️ ▶️ John your notes into it and it makes a study guide. Like that’s, that’s actually pretty cool. But it’s like, they show me things
⏹️ ▶️ John like that and And they say, well, what does it say there? I’m like, well, but I don’t know if this is right.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just what chat GPT said. I’m like, oh, it’s fine. I’ll probably be OK for the test. And they’re probably mostly right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John again, don’t fabricate things on your boat. I would say don’t put that answer on a test unless you actually know it’s right. Like maybe study from
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual study guide materials instead of running through the LLM and hoping it doesn’t mangle them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it extremely bothersome. And I know you think, oh, you’re a crotchety old man. Eventually, LLMs will get it right. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they will, but they’re not getting it right today. So right now, my crotchetyness is correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I mean, like, is that that different from doing a random web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search and landing on some random web page?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s that different. Because the random web page, I think people have better instincts for its sketchiness. Not as good
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, people think you think people know web pages are good. Well, that’s kind of what we gave Google, like what Google
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to do, like how many people linked to it and blah, blah, blah, and knows SEO and so on and so forth. But reputation wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people have heard of Wikipedia and understand its reputation. That’s why we have institutions
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, as crappy as we may complain about them, the New York times, Wikipedia, IMDB,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Like it’s the reason why if we landed on some person’s GeoCities pages,
⏹️ ▶️ John his home cruise is 50 years old. We trust that less of landing on Wikipedia. And I know people aren’t good at making that
⏹️ ▶️ John determination, but it’s something to hang your hat on people understand institutions. And the problem is to get back to your earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John point, Marco is that I think people are taking, starting to think of chat GPT as the institution
⏹️ ▶️ John that has reputation in the same way that Wikipedia or the New York Times does. And that is unfounded
⏹️ ▶️ John because JETCPT is many things, but it is not like they, CHATGPT, the open
⏹️ ▶️ John AI, the company or the product, they don’t have any information. They are just gathering information from elsewhere, compressing
⏹️ ▶️ John it, grinding it up and spitting it out to you in some form that looks plausible. But it is not the same thing as
⏹️ ▶️ John what Wikipedia or the New York Times are doing with their information. And so even though you may trust the brand JETCPT
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has never steered you wrong, eventually you’re going to be putting glue on your pizza and not knowing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was Google. Sorry. Sorry, OpenAI. I know you didn’t do that one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you do say some
⏹️ ▶️ John very bad things and you do make people with three hands. So there’s that.