568: The Year of Romance
04 Jan 2024Our 2024 year in preview.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Time-shifting
- Follow-up:
- AI Agita
- Masimo Mess
- 26 December: Biden administration does not overturn ban
- 27 December, 11:55 AM: Ban temporarily paused by US Court of Appeals
- 27 December, 5:21 PM: Apple Watch sales resumed
- Apple 2024 Preview
- Post-show: Yearly Themes
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Chapters
- HLS DRM
- More Apple LLM efforts
- NYTimes suing OpenAI, MS
- Apple-Masimo status
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- 2024: Vision Pro
- 2024: OLED iPads
- 2024: M3 Ultra
- 2024: iPhones 16
- 2024: Apple Watch X
- Sponsor: Notion
- 2024: AirPods 4
- 2024: AirPods Max 2
- 2024: EU side-loading?
- 2024: HomePod?
- Ending theme
- 2024: Themes
HLS DRM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I’m sorry. I’m a little bit hoarse tonight, and I wish I had a good reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like being sick or Having to shout to you know save a child
⏹️ ▶️ John shouting save children.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John how I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The the truth is that I am I am alone in my house tonight and therefore a lot of singing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has occurred Yeah, and I regret to inform you that I have neither the singing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range of Paul Simon nor our garfunkel That’s the real reason why I sound slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say, if you’re listening to the fish, how are you doing any singing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also listen to other music sometimes. I mean, not a lot, if I’m honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sometimes. Oh man, it’s funny to me how you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tactically deploy your executive assistant for media acquisition purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. Whenever I want to pirate anything, I always ask Casey how to do it. it because like I haven’t pirated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in mass in a very long time, like since high school, really like, so all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern ways to do it, I don’t really know about them and I’m certainly not like set up for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, so I always have to ask my other friends like, Hey, there’s this like concert I want to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s only letting me do like a video on demand. How do I download it? Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, but yeah, uh, I got a text message out of the blue saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s this time-limited thing I really want to download, what can I do? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gave some pointers as to hypothetical things that one could try, but we would never do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you could try them. And it turns out that you didn’t need my help because you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found it by a mechanism all your own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone else said it to me, basically. But I think it’s interesting, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in the history of like things that can be shown in a web browser,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically there are tools that were pretty reliably able to download those things. You know, because it’s like at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some level it would be like, you know, a bunch of MPEG-4 files in a series on a server in a playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that. But now there appears to be pretty widespread use of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever kind of DRM, I think maybe Widevine is one of them, but whatever kind of DRM exists now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on HLS streams, it seems like it’s everywhere now and so all the tools like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know YouTube DL or YTDLP or whatever like all these tools basically don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore on a lot of like paid video services because they all use this DRM which I’m not I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a fan of DRM as a technologist so you know that irritates me on a lot of levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m also just kind of surprised that like none of these tools have caught up yet because like it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I don’t know how this stuff works these days I’m sure there’s a lot of OS level integrations but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow every web browser including stuff like Firefox like they can all play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the DRM streams just fine and screen recording software can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like that is still loop all you can still like a run a screen recording not with not with all apps like QuickTime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player will just give you like a black square but some apps will just record the screen in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that includes the content so you can do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way which is terrible to do I know but like I’m just I’m kind of amazed at all these tools are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not able to break this DRM for something that is common enough that it can play in every web browser.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, I don’t know. We live in kind of a sad time that there’s just that much DRM everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our computing lives now and we don’t even blink an eye. It’s just considered normal. It’s kind of sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you talking about the fish stuff? I thought all that was free, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not. And I don’t need it to be free. I buy the MP3. You can buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio downloads that are all DRM free.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was saying, like you pay the money and you get a bunch of files, but they’re DRM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free. That’s audio only though. If you want to see the video streams, you pay per show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like 40 bucks and then you can watch the stream for like 48 hours or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, end or live. But then the real problem is you can’t buy it afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can watch it for only the 48 hours like after the concert has occurred, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to watch it next week or next year, you just can’t. Like you can’t rebuy it. no way to watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s just gone. So and it was this fish new year show was a really important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show like it was important.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explain explain yourself use more words. Why was this an important show?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not even going to try to explain but basically there was a ton of fan service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco references that go back 30 years in the band like that were brought together in a big way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it was a very important show for fish fans. And so I wanted to really make sure like I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to have a copy of this because look I don’t know what the band’s archival situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I assume that they are saving all of their videos and at some point in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might make them available in some way maybe I hope but I don’t want to rely on maybe I hope for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really important concert for my favorite band of my life
⏹️ ▶️ John like I want to actually have it this is where the community comes in though like wouldn’t it wouldn’t can’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John just rely on the fact that this is a popular band and you You don’t have to do this. All you gotta do is wait for the people who already know how to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this to upload the stream that they ripped from the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but upload it where? That’s the problem. I don’t know all the places that people go now. I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adam can help you in your old age. I know, he’s gonna have to. Right now, Casey is my video piracy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistant. Eventually Adam will take over and help both of us. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not piracy if you paid for it and you’re just time shifting it. I think we already had several court cases about
⏹️ ▶️ John that and the VCR was allowed to exist. So if you pay for something, like you pay for cable television and they air it and send it
⏹️ ▶️ John to you and you record it on a device, I know you’ve got the DMCA with the you’re not supposed to crack encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. But I feel like you’re at least ethically, if not legally in the clear here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think it’s a little questionable and we’ll get to copyright stuff later, actually. But I think it’s a little questionable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like, I’m not paying 40 bucks to own it forever. I’m paying 40 bucks to watch it
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but it’s the same thing when you pay for cable. You’re not paying to own all those shows that are broadcast to your house forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John but you do pay the cable company to send you video. And if you have a device in your home
⏹️ ▶️ John that records that video for time shifting purposes, like a video cassette recorder, that turns
⏹️ ▶️ John out to be legal, according to all the court cases. The only wrinkle in this entire scheme is now we have a thing called DRM
⏹️ ▶️ John that stops you from recording it. And because of the DMCA, it’s illegal for you to try to crack DRM.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think there is no distinction between paying for cable to be broadcast in your house
⏹️ ▶️ John and then time shifting with ECR and then paying for a video of a concert to be streamed into your house and then time shifting
⏹️ ▶️ John it with FM peg. The only difference is that stupid law that says you’re not allowed to even try to crack encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is incredibly stupid. And we should get rid of. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is. I mean, there’s a whole lot of this that’s stupid, but I don’t I don’t think that necessarily would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold up to legal scrutiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John no, because because of the DMCA, because because it’s illegal to try to crack encryption. But aside
⏹️ ▶️ John from that one thing, it is exactly the same as the time shifting with the VCR case, because
⏹️ ▶️ John in both cases, like, well, You just paid to have it sent to your house once you didn’t pay to keep it forever But the courts found
⏹️ ▶️ John no if you have a device that can record it. It’s yours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mmm, I does that is that really what the decision I don’t know enough about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is that really? Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point was like you can’t have a video cassette recorder in your house because then when we air Star Wars on ABC and You record it No, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a copy of Star Wars and you didn’t pay for that and the the the decision was you’re allowed to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John You know how to resell it, you know to pay sell tickets to it or whatever, but you were allowed to time shift
⏹️ ▶️ John It was called time shifting you take something that aired and you put it on some storage medium So you can watch it at a different
⏹️ ▶️ John time and the only legal thing stopping you now is they made a law that says okay If we put some magic pixie dust
⏹️ ▶️ John DRM on this even if it’s trivial easy to crack if you do that You’re breaking the law. That’s why you had the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the DCSS t-shirts with the pro code on it That was you know illegal and all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that crap the one prime
⏹️ ▶️ John number that broke the key or whatever Yeah, it’s absurd. But that’s that is the legal
⏹️ ▶️ John system. Yeah, that’s why I said ethically I think you’re in the clear if not legally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if like if a screen recording method might actually sort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Not be a DMCA I don’t know because you didn’t try
⏹️ ▶️ John to crack the encryption probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could argue like the software might have cracked it even though it’s not is not is not compliant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording the screen content. So like that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s probably fine because I think that is it’s like the analog loophole Remember that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whole yeah of
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh the way to record it is you know? You’re not cracking the encryption on the DVD. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just playing the DVD over a an analog video cable and intercepting it there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I mean and even I mean all of the You know machinations now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like how having these secure video paths with that are supported by the hardware and HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything and try to try to ensure DRM so that you can’t do stuff like screen recording or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just HDMI capture of protected content
⏹️ ▶️ John or take a screenshot because you want to tweet something funny about a TV show Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know like but and I frankly I don’t actually know how certain screen recording methods somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get around it and others don’t but that’s I’m glad they do but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of grief this causes legitimate users all the time. Like I can’t tell you how many times I’ve like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, you know, it may be like traveling and trying to output something over HDMI to a TV or something. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some part of the chain doesn’t fit the DRM standards. And so it like, it just refuses. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I can’t watch this movie that I just, that I paid for, like stream from my laptop onto the, onto the hotel TV or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s, it’s so annoying. I hate DRM so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s dumb because as we all know, none of that stuff actually stops the stuff from being available illegally.
⏹️ ▶️ John All it does is frustrate legitimate users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We I think we talked about this just a couple months ago because I just ran across this recently But there is a website a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave Matthews fan fan website where it has a Q&A with the crew now this very this very well Maybe maybe very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very old But as somebody asked you have listed a 24 track hard disk recorder under the recording equipment But 39
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inputs to the board D mix channels are record on multiple, you know, 24 track recorders blah blah blah blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The answer is we actually have eight test cam 24 or 24 three pairs working in main and backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modes with two spares 46 tracks are recorded every day, which includes the band’s input list, plus several audience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mics and other inputs. The hard drives get sent back to an archivist in Charlottesville, who then dumps each track to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a separate CD-R for permanent storage in a vault. Each show will generate about 138 CD-Rs. And that’s audio, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even video. Did we discuss this already? And did we freak out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about CD-Rs?
⏹️ ▶️ John We did, indeed. Yeah, they better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I really think putting them on a
⏹️ ▶️ John and then putting them in a vault are two sentiments that are a little bit at odds with each other. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally agree with you, but my point is, you know, Marco had justifiably asked, you know, is this a flash in the pan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, this video recording? Does Phish keep a copy of this video recording, or is this a one and done?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I assume someone is archiving all this stuff, I hope, but I don’t know. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t usually release archival videos. Like, they release archival audio sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they tend to release archival video much, if at all, so I don’t know. That’s why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s a little unnerving And that’s why I, you know, and I think I have a lot of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot, a lot of sympathy from the two of you on this. I want to be a digital pack rat for stuff that I can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco re like easily just get off the internet again. Like stuff that’s really important to me. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually want to have my own copy because we all know from the, from the tech world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything out there, that’s like, especially DRM stuff through streaming services or whatever. It’s all so temporary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You think you own it, even when like when you buy it and you think you quote own it. Then you know Sony pulls a fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or something like that a story and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s just gone the stuff you quote bought Is gone or unavailable or whatever like so that and that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoys me so much I think we live in a time where a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of modern culture in the form of you know both media and also like software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and games and everything that a Huge amount of it is going to be basically inaccessible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to historians in the future because of you know technological means or encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, SSL breaking or whatever. Like there’s so many things that the previous eras of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media that we’ve had decades ago, we can all still access those today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the stuff that we are making and using and, you know, enjoying today, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to have a very hard time, you know, reenjoying or reexperiencing that
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s probably mostly the trend line is upward still because all the stuff before Recorded medium is totally lost
⏹️ ▶️ John people sang and there was nothing to record them on for most of human history And then we had this period where it was recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John with no DRM and now we have recorded with DRM But we have so much more storage now I think we’re saving
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more stuff and it’s gonna be a lot easier for historians to find that old stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if I mean, maybe we’re not saving a DRM encrypted, but you know if they are it will be eventually trivial
⏹️ ▶️ John to break that DRM encryption, so I think we’re doing better overall, but there is definitely a hiccup in the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John introduction of DRM that’s gonna cause some headaches, but it’s still better than wax cylinders and it’s still way
⏹️ ▶️ John better than no way to record performances at all.
More Apple LLM efforts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. And we have a paper about Apple’s on-device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LLM. LLM in a flash, efficient large language model inference with limited memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell me about this, please, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was last episode we were talking, maybe it was an Ask ATP question, about what we thought Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John do to run LLM stuff on-device with wimpy devices like the
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod. And we referenced this, alluded to, I alluded to this paper,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we didn’t have a link to it. link to it. So now we will in the show notes. This is a summary from someone on threads
⏹️ ▶️ John says apples propose an inference cost model that coordinates with the behavior of flash memory usage, guiding
⏹️ ▶️ John optimization in two key areas, reducing the amount of data transferred from flash memory and reading data
⏹️ ▶️ John in larger, more continuous blocks. These methods collectively enable running models up to twice the size of available
⏹️ ▶️ John D ram with four x to five x and 20 x to 25 x increase in inference speed
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to naive loading approaches in CPU and GPU So this is you can
⏹️ ▶️ John read the paper to see but it’s like hey Apple has a bunch of devices that have Limited DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you wanted to run one of those better models Then you can’t fit it in DRAM is there a way you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable forms out of it while essentially Overflowing your RAM and using flash
⏹️ ▶️ John as a backing store and they have some techniques to speed that up and that is extremely relevant to pretty much everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple makes With the exception of Mac’s where you are probably going to be RAM limited
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of these large language models I know the first L is for large, but you can size them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can even, in a lot of the cases, take a really big honking model that takes a huge amount of resources
⏹️ ▶️ John and take that exact model and cut it down in some way, like without like making a new model, to
⏹️ ▶️ John size it to fit within whatever your constraints are. And it sounds like this approach in this paper would let Apple use
⏹️ ▶️ John models a little bit bigger than they otherwise would be able to on their wimpy hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is also exploring AI deals with news publishers. This was in the New York Times. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has opened negotiations in recent weeks with major news and publishing organizations seeking permission to use their material
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the company’s development of generative artificial intelligence systems. According to four people familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the discussions, the technology giant has floated multi-year deals worth at least $50 million to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey license the archives of news articles, said the people with knowledge of talks. For the record, Apple, for 10% of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a mere $5 million, you are welcome to use caselist.com in its entirety in training
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to offer up the ATP archives. I think we need to collectively negotiate with Apple for those, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they’re already publicly available. We may, we may have, uh, started at a disadvantage in this negotiation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already. Fair, but I have your people call our people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this, this is something that a few companies are doing. Adobe is the other one that comes to mind
⏹️ ▶️ John where they have a bunch of generative AI stuff in the latest version of Photoshop that I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe has claimed, hey, we trained all of our models on images that we own
⏹️ ▶️ John or have the rights to. So they’re essentially legally in the clear. If I’m not if it’s not Adobe and it’s actually some other
⏹️ ▶️ John like stock photo company, I forget. But anyway, companies are doing this where they’re like, we want to be able to provide a service
⏹️ ▶️ John to our customers with no doubt, no legal doubt about however this whole, you know, court stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out with the training. It’s like we trained our models on stuff that we own because some companies
⏹️ ▶️ John own a large volume of images, for example, like a stock photo company or whatever. It might be the stock photo company
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking of. Not a, what is it called? Shutterstock? Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s a- Something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Getty Images, they’re the big one. Getty Images, yeah. Anyway, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is totally an Apple move to say, we can solve this problem with money. If there’s any kind of questions about legality,
⏹️ ▶️ John how about we just give people millions of dollars in exchange for them letting us train
⏹️ ▶️ John their, and our AI model on their content.
NYTimes suing OpenAI, MS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The New York Times, speaking of, is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the two companies built their AI models by copying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and using millions of the publication’s articles and now, quote-unquote, directly compete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with its content as a result. As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which power ChatGPT and Copilot, can generate output that recites Times content verbatim,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style. undermines and damages the Times relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with readers, the outlet alleges while also depriving it of subscription, licensing, licensing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advertising, and affiliate revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ John That, uh, that nicely ties in about the previous story. Uh, if Apple is offering these people millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars for the content, but Microsoft is taking it for free and then getting sued over it, you can see where
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple might’ve thought this is a wiser move in the short term. We’ve talked about this many times in the past, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John about the, whether it is, is, again, ethics, morals, and legalities, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it is right to train a large language model on, for example, the publicly accessible web pages
⏹️ ▶️ John containing content of New York Times stories. People can make arguments that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s transformational and it’s fair use or whatever legal precedent you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John use for it. It’s an entirely new thing. We have to have a new set of laws governing or whatever. But clearly, the New York Times thinks, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you train your large language model on New York Times articles, And now people use your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t ever go to the New York Times because they essentially get the article summarized or excerpted
⏹️ ▶️ John in your thing or whatever. That’s under current law. That’s illegal. And now we’re suing you or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I said in many past times when we discuss this, I continue to think
⏹️ ▶️ John that it should not be legal to train a large language model on content that you don’t own
⏹️ ▶️ John because your large language model is worthless without that content. empty large language model
⏹️ ▶️ John that has not been trained on anything is worth $0. And you say, well, we can make this valuable by feeding it the
⏹️ ▶️ John contents of the New York Times. Well, the New York Times should either let you do that, or
⏹️ ▶️ John they should be compensated for it, or we need to figure out some other thing. But I don’t think you should just get it free just because.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the type of thing that is going to be hashed out in court. And again, Apple is neatly sidestepping this
⏹️ ▶️ John by saying, I don’t care whether it’s legal or not. Here’s millions of dollars. Can we use your articles? Yes, no. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a much more straightforward arrangement of value exchange. What is the right amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ John for that? Is it like, you know, a penny per article or like even less or like what, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, how people who are training large language models negotiate with people who own the content that they’re being trained
⏹️ ▶️ John on? We’ll see. There’s always sort of publicly available things like I think Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ John says you’re allowed to train on it, but whether they do or not, everybody does. So yeah, this is entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John in a big legal gray area and I think Apple’s approach is the right
⏹️ ▶️ John one for now and Adobe and whatever company I can remember that’s also doing the same thing. Train on data that you own
⏹️ ▶️ John or have licensed. And then if it turns out that, oh, actually the courts say you’re allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to get this for free, then don’t pay them next year. But if it turns out that the New York Times wins their
⏹️ ▶️ John case and gets millions of dollars in damages, you were always on the right side of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So kudos to Apple for using its money for,
⏹️ ▶️ John using its money wisely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is a case to watch because there’s been so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions about AI training and its relation to copyright law.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And is training in AI on public material that’s owned by somebody else, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that copyright infringement? I don’t know if that’s a clear cut argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either way. It is. It’s definitely a new area. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what happens with the law over time. new problems arise or new conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or new, you know, distinctions need to be made. And that’s what the law
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the legal system is made to sort out and decide. It remains a huge open question mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, can you just train AI models on whatever you want? I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe that that is not copyright infringement necessarily, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if you look at, you know, the New York Times is making some pretty strong claims here that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these LLMs that they tested were able to output Times articles verbatim. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what kind of prompts they had to give them, the way it worked was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the New York Times would feed it the first few paragraphs of an article and say what comes next.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the way LLMs work on a general high-level overview of the way LLMs work is basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco statistically speaking, what comes next given this prompt. And so when they give it a few paragraphs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a story from the New York Times verbatim and say, what comes next after this, there is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no other statistical influence on what the model could draw from. So of course, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, OK, well, the one source I saw that contained everything you’re asking for, this was
⏹️ ▶️ John I think part of that demonstration, part of the point of that demonstration, is to do something that is otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do, which is essentially to prove that they did train on your data. Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like when you see an LLM, you can ask it, hey, tell me all the stuff that you ingested. It doesn’t work that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t answer that question. It’s not like they’re trying to keep it a secret. A large language model does not contain within it
⏹️ ▶️ John a complete exhaustive list of all the data that it was trained on, right? I mean, it does in sort of a smooshed up fuzzy way, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not like in a literal way. So if as part of the case, if, I don’t know if this is in this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John case, but if as part of the case, the people with the LLM said, we never trained on your data, you can pull this out and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s pretty unlikely that it would produce these verbatim seven paragraphs. So there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know in this case. Again, Microsoft could freely admit that they trained for New York Times, and that’s a moot point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the language in the little summary we excerpted from is directly trying to tie it to existing law, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they have to do in a court case. If there are no laws directly addressing this, you’re going to come
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, I think you are in violation of these existing laws. And so one of those is
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole fair use doctrine of like is the thing a substitute for the thing that it is taking
⏹️ ▶️ John from and like saying like a two-second clip of a movie is not a substitute for the movie no one is saying I was gonna watch the movie
⏹️ ▶️ John but instead I’m gonna watch this two-second clip and they’re saying that these LLMs directly
⏹️ ▶️ John compete with its content saying it is a substitute it is it is directly competing with our stuff it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Google search result where you see a headline you see like a link and then like two
⏹️ ▶️ John sentences but you have to click through to read the story no one is looking at that and saying well I I felt like I’ve read the whole story. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John here, they’re saying, within existing copyright law, you do not
⏹️ ▶️ John fall under this section of fair use because you are directly competing with us rather than just
⏹️ ▶️ John not being a substitute or whatever. So we’ll see if they succeed in that strategy. Because to your point, Marco, the existing
⏹️ ▶️ John laws don’t address this because it’s a new use case. But when you bring a case, you have to say, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John some existing laws you’re already in violation of. And we’ll see how that works out legally. My point has
⏹️ ▶️ John always been, regardless of what the current laws say, I think it shouldn’t be legal
⏹️ ▶️ John so that, that to do what they’re doing just willy nilly. So there should be some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John law made governing this or if no, if laws aren’t made governing it, then at the very least, what we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John is precedents in court cases. I don’t like things being determined by precedents in
⏹️ ▶️ John court cases because I figure what they’re saying is I always get it backwards, but like hard cases make bad law or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s better to just say what you actually want to happen through legislation and and to the
⏹️ ▶️ John degree that our government can actually function that would be the more desirable thing but anytime any laws are made
⏹️ ▶️ John surrounding technology we all kind of you know grit our teeth a little bit so we’ll see how this goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean I don’t honestly I don’t think it’s that clear-cut you know like their claims
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know they say that it can recite times content verbatim okay we covered that like but there’s already laws against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that reciting times content verbatim is copyright infringement. That’s direct because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is these are this is a copyrighted work that we have on our site and you are serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it over here. We already have laws that make that part of it illegal. They also say it closely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summarizes it. Well, who cares? That’s not illegal. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I’m not sure if it depends on close to summary is I think existing laws listing takes laws
⏹️ ▶️ John probably covers cases where it’s like, well, it’s not exactly verbatim one or two words are changed here. But
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I don’t have exhaustive knowledge of copyright law. But that seems like something that would have come up before. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John a newspaper essentially stealing another newspaper story and reproducing it high school student
⏹️ ▶️ John style where you change a couple words around.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I bet there have been
⏹️ ▶️ John cases about that. And again, in all those cases, here’s the tricky bit and the part I always keep trying to focus on.
⏹️ ▶️ John In all existing case law, it’s humans doing things like this. Like it’s a reporter
⏹️ ▶️ John at one newspaper closely summarizing an article in another newspaper and changing the words around,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Whereas here, it’s not a human doing this, it’s human setting a machinery into motion,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the machinery spits out the New York Times article that it was fed in this series of things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the laws governing what machines are allowed to do are much more sparse and
⏹️ ▶️ John less well-tested because they’re all necessarily newer because we haven’t had machines that could do anything like this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s hard to say how this one’s gonna go, but I applaud Apple for
⏹️ ▶️ John just sidestepping entirely and Adobe and all these other companies while these guys
⏹️ ▶️ John fight it out. But I do fear what the outcome of these cases are going to be because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what, you know, whatever the details of this specific case are, are probably so
⏹️ ▶️ John weird and so specific that they shouldn’t be like the placeholder for everything for all
⏹️ ▶️ John time. It would be much better for us to all sort of think about this as a society
⏹️ ▶️ John and come up with some kind of guidelines that we think will be beneficial going going forward, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the more I outline that scenario, the more fantastical it sounds. So maybe we’ll just get a series of legal
⏹️ ▶️ John precedents and hope for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and there’s also other ways this could be sorted out. So for instance, the market might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go in a direction where big companies like OpenAI and Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and certainly as we’re seeing with what Apple’s allegedly doing, big companies might decide, you know what? It’s not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the risk for me to train my models on data that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come back and bite me in the butt as a copyright infringement lawsuit later. So let me just buy stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from known sources that I’m allowed to buy from anyway and train on that. Or they’ll settle
⏹️ ▶️ John out of court. Like this will never actually go to a verdict. They’ll settle. They’ll settle once they see you have the lay of the land in the court. And whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John is losing will be compelled to come to the table. And they’ll find a settlement. And basically what they’ll end up with is a
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite as amicable version of what Apple has, which is Microsoft has agreed to play the New York Times x, y
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of dollars in exchange for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that becomes the precedent, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can steal it if you can get away with it, but if they notice and sue you, then you have to settle for millions of dollars, which is also not
⏹️ ▶️ John a great way to do business, see also patents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but also like, you know, the models, again, I know shockingly little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how these new models work, so forgive me. Trying to figure that out in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the coming year, but anyway, the models could also potentially be tweaked to just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of keep track of like how many original training inputs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are being served for a given output, maybe? That’s not how
⏹️ ▶️ John the models work at all right now, like at all. It’s much more like a one-way
⏹️ ▶️ John hash mash, you cannot reverse it. You could keep track of what did we train it on, but maybe either accidentally or on purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of these companies say, oh, well, we can’t give you an exhaustive list of what we
⏹️ ▶️ John trained, like just humans, like, hey, we’ll just make a list of all the stuff we feed to the LLM, like all the URLs,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the content, essentially we’ll catalog it. And so if anyone asks, we can show them the list. But what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John asking for is what a lot of people ask for, is like, oh, when I give you a prompt and you give me your result,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you tell me what contributed to that result? Because the answer is always everything I was trained on. Like that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. There’s no like, oh, tell me which part, which part did this word come from and what URLs
⏹️ ▶️ John and what documents contributed to this. That is absolutely not tracked in these things. And if you think about it, if it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s, you know, it’s not, if it was, these models would be even larger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now there, it could be that legally, we have to come up with some kind of tagging method to be able to incorporate that
⏹️ ▶️ John into the model. So it can tell you, but I bet the answer would be these 17 million documents contributed to that
⏹️ ▶️ John result. And it’s like, that’s not useful to me. How is that useful? So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, this whole lawsuit of like, oh, New York Times is suing OpenAI, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Whichever way this goes, those large language models at OpenAI, were not just trained on the New York Times.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were trained on millions and millions and millions of pieces of data. Is this the system now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can figure out that it was trained on your data and you can hire lawyers for millions of dollars, you can sue them and
⏹️ ▶️ John hope to win something? Like that’s also a ridiculous system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think my general opinion on it now is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it shouldn’t be illegal for AI models to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what will be legal for humans to do. But why do you think that? I think a lot of this is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions about fair use, which of course is a famously squishy, imprecise doctrine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is totally legal for a human to read a bunch of New York
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Times articles and summarize them for other people if they ask them. It is legal for a human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, like what the Times says, that the models, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mimic its expressive style. Well, it is totally legal for a human to mimic the New York Times’
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style when creating other content. The Times does not have a monopoly on style.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure it is legal for humans to closely summarize. But anyway, my whole point of this is like, yes, our
⏹️ ▶️ John laws give humans lots of rights. But this is not a human doing this. Well, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John tools that humans are making. Right, but that’s like making it sort of a rights laundering machine, where it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I make a machine and set it into motion, I wash my hands of it, and now I didn’t do it. The computer
⏹️ ▶️ John program did it. But computer programs have no rights. They’re not sentient conscience beings that have legal standing in the legal
⏹️ ▶️ John system. They are computer programs, right? There are no laws saying, and if a computer program does this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine, because the computer programs are allowed to do that because here are the rights, here’s the Bill of Rights for computer
⏹️ ▶️ John programs. It’s not a conscious entity. It’s not a, you know what I mean? Like, so, and if you make it so like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if a human kills someone, that’s murder. But if a human pushes a button that makes a machine kill somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine, the machine did it. And this is just a much more complicated version of push the button,
⏹️ ▶️ John machinery happens, copyright infringement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I actually don’t think this is like, you know, liability laundering at all. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s on the contrary, the people who create the machine become responsible for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it does. But I think it should be allowed to do what people are allowed to do. Because the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the ones creating the software that does this. The people are the ones creating the tool. So like it is right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, it is legal for me to read a bunch of articles and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about them in summary or make a satirical imitation of the New York Times’ style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is all legal for me. However, what is not legal for me is to replicate an entire article
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my own site that someone else’s, they can hit me for copyright infringement. Well, that I think is fine. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some ways, I think the Times actually has a case for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copyright infringement in the sense that if these models can output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copyrighted content in whole part, or in whole, I guess that makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a possible case there, but I don’t think they could then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also say you aren’t allowed to train on our data. The problem is you are reserving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our data, and that becomes OpenAI and Microsoft’s liability then. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to decide what they wanna do with their models and whether they can tweak them in such a way that it can’t do that anymore. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the models existing and having been trained on that data, I don’t see that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a clear-cut copyright violation. They can create copyright violations afterwards. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the model just having been trained on it, I don’t necessarily see that as a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a clear-cut copyright violation. Because copyright is a law that’s been extended to do so many
⏹️ ▶️ John weird things. But I think it’s not tenable for us to have a system where you
⏹️ ▶️ John can extract all the value from someone else’s content and make something that
⏹️ ▶️ John was previously worthless, a worthless pile of code, suddenly becomes incredibly valuable because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the input of the work of others that they’re not compensated for, you know what I mean? And that’s why I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that shouldn’t be allowed because it makes for a system where
⏹️ ▶️ John one party with these LLMs can exploit the work of others with no compensation and then
⏹️ ▶️ John make huge amounts of money off of it. And that seems like it’s not a, it doesn’t set a great precedent. I’m not sure what the system should
⏹️ ▶️ John be, but that doesn’t seem like a great system. And the closest thing that we have legally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think there’s probably cases about this, but I don’t remember them, is like Google search results. Is it illegal for Google
⏹️ ▶️ John to scrape the entire web and to make a search engine? Google is worthless without the web that it’s scraping. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if there were cases about this, which I imagine there were, because there’s cases about everything, I think the side we’ve come down to
⏹️ ▶️ John is, we’re okay with you essentially indexing and allowing access to and showing search
⏹️ ▶️ John results for, because in the end, you are providing a service that is like a catalog
⏹️ ▶️ John that leads you to the links that you then click on. But as time has gone on and Google has
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten more and more towards the side of like, well, we don’t really wanna send you to the links. We
⏹️ ▶️ John links, but actually what we’re doing here is summarizing links, you don’t need to click through, we’ll just summarize
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I mean, they were doing that long before LLMs, right? And that starts to get more into, okay, Google, now
⏹️ ▶️ John are you a substitute for the websites? because previously we said it’s fine for Google to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a billion dollar company and sell ads because they’re they’re providing a service, a catalog, an index. They are not
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing all of those Web pages. Google itself contains no information. If you want to see what’s on those Web pages,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to click through them. Oh, well, they do have summaries. And I guess they do show the headline. Oh, now they’re now they’re summarizing
⏹️ ▶️ John them at the top and not showing you what that came from. Hmm. That’s where you start to push into this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re going to look at like for close at the closest case law and the closest argument for you could say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you think it’s OK for Google to do what they’re doing, then how is this not okay? Cause this is just a better version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Largely. Yes. I mean, I think that largely is the case that I’m making. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see this as being that different from what Google is doing and what Google is doing, like you can look at it and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, this is not ideal. You can say this is kind of a jerk thing to do, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s very different from whether it should be legal or not. Again, we already have sufficient laws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to protect against, you know, full scale copyright infringement. Like Google in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their little info box answers they give on their search results pages, they aren’t allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replicate an entire copyrightable work on there. That would be copyright infringement. We already have laws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against that. They are allowed to stay within whatever is considered fair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. And again, that’s a kind of a squishy broad thing, but there are established standards for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including like how much of the work are you replicating. So if you are just like if you have an AI model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is able to give you a one-sentence summary of a five paragraph article,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. That I think is clear fair use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah well that’s those are the ends of the spectrum but I feel like what the LLMs are doing is far beyond the summary
⏹️ ▶️ John of the top of Google results but that’s that’s they’re creeping towards each other right so Google was going that direction LLMs took this
⏹️ ▶️ John huge leap to say actually no search results I mean the old bar does still provide them but like I said I’m is
⏹️ ▶️ John from it’s my understanding that is you can’t back it out of the result. You can show the
⏹️ ▶️ John documents that you trained on if you bothered to keep track of them, which you probably didn’t because your lawyers probably said just don’t keep
⏹️ ▶️ John track of it. But you can’t show exactly where this stuff came from. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs, we’ll see how this case goes. The direct competition, like saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a substitute for our service, that is an attempt to nullify fair use. To say, even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John just saw an excerpt or whatever, if you show sufficient information that it is now a substitute
⏹️ ▶️ John for the thing that you trained on, you’re essentially stealing value from us. No one’s going to go to the New York Times if all the knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John of the New York Times is contained in your large language model. And right now, they’re not that good, right? And so really,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the language isn’t contained in the LLMs, and a lot of it is filled with BS or whatever. But if they could figure out how to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John not spew BS, or at least spew plausible enough BS that no one ever goes to the New York Times again,
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes the New York Times unviable as a business. And why? Because the LLMs stole all their value, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually there’s no more New York Times. I know this is a silly scenario, but eventually there’s no more New York Times and then what is the next LLM trained on? Which
⏹️ ▶️ John is why I think just allowing it to go hog wild is not viable.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to come to some kind of arrangement that allows all the things that the LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John are trained on to continue to exist for the next hundred years for the next set of LLMs or whatever to be
⏹️ ▶️ John trained on. Otherwise, there’ll be just LLMs with nothing for them to be trained on except for each other’s BS and that’s not an ideal system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, there’s a question of what should be illegal Also, you know, versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s ideal for the market or ideal for how we think things should be righteous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or best. And those are very different questions. Lots of things are legal that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think are kind of unfortunate. Lots of things are legal that are pretty, you know, strong competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other companies. So if new technology creates competition for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone else, that’s generally legal and usually for the benefit of the public.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what you want is for laws to guide this, because if there are no laws governing
⏹️ ▶️ John it and people think it’s free for all, there’ll never be a market solution. What you want is there to be enough laws
⏹️ ▶️ John that say, these parties need to discuss things with each other because one of them just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take everything and ignore the other, right? In the absence of any kind of laws or precedents or whatever, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can do whatever we want. Everything we’re doing is 100% legal. You can’t stop us at all. It’s better to have some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John laws governing the bounds of this such that it brings them all to the table and they come to a market solution. Because the market solution is not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be you pay New York Times $1 for every article you trained on, because that’s like billions of dollars, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t make any sense. That’s not a viable market solution. Then it’ll be like, OK, well, I guess we just won’t have LLMs, and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll never train in the New York Times, right? If you have enough guidelines, the parties will come together and come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John something that is feasible to say, well, if we don’t talk to each other and figure something out,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are these laws that say, again, kind of like patents for the fran stuff, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, You can have this patent, but you have to license it to people under reasonable terms You can’t just charge them
⏹️ ▶️ John a bazillion dollars or whatever I would hope that there be some kind of laws that make the LLM companies
⏹️ ▶️ John Figure out a compensation model kind of like the what are the ASCAP thing or whatever when you want to do like a cover of? A
⏹️ ▶️ John song or whatever you can’t just cover a song for free But also there is a system in place
⏹️ ▶️ John that has come up with a market value for doing covers such that covers still are allowed To happen but people are still
⏹️ ▶️ John compensated for them And I don’t know a lot about that whole system, but that’s, in my mind, that’s kind of the ideal
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, it’s not a free for all, but it’s also not so onerous that no one can ever sing covers
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. And it’s also, you know, people do get paid, right? So again, maybe wishful
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking, we’ll see how this works out in the court case, but I do like the idea of there being some kind of value exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere here. And I’m happy to let the market figure out that value exchange, but in the absence of any guidelines,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not happy to let people just say, everything is free and we’re taking it all and we’ll suck every ounce of value out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean that’s capitalism isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s unbridled capitalism. We need capitalism with regulations right? That’s laissez-faire capitalism.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah it tends not to work
⏹️ ▶️ John tricky part is figuring out what should those guidelines be and who should they accidentally favor?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually rich people. And everyone has a different answer.
Apple-Masimo status
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of, let’s talk Massimo. So on the 26th of December, the Biden administration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, eh, we’re not going to do anything about this. And the Apple Watch sales
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ban did indeed land in the US. Apple had a statement again, this 26th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of December, Apple says, at Apple, we work tirelessly to create products and services that meaningfully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impact users’ lives. It’s what drives our teams, clinical, design, and engineering to dedicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years to developing scientifically validated health, fitness, and and wellness features for Apple Watch. And we are inspired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that millions of people around the world have benefited greatly from this product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hang on just a moment, just a moment here. Keep in mind, what you’re reading is a statement after the Biden
⏹️ ▶️ John administration said, no, we’re going to let this go through. You’ve got, we’ve got more than halfway through this
⏹️ ▶️ John statement and Apple has said, we’re pretty great. Like it wouldn’t be like a statement. We are very disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Biden administration. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s fully, you know, over
⏹️ ▶️ John one half of this statement is like, we just worked so hard this and we’re so wonderful. Anyway, now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We strongly disagree with the US ITC decision and resulting exclusion order and are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking all measures to return Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2 to customers in the US as soon as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, 26 December. I bet they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to pay Massimo a bunch of money, right? All measures. Let’s see what happens next.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Surely that’s what they’ll do. 27 December at 11 55 AM, Apple Watch ban is then temporarily paused.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Woohoo! So the Verge reports that one day after the Apple Watch import ban went into effect, In fact, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey U.S. Court of Appeals is instituting a brief pause while it considers a longer pause.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the answer is, what avenues are still open? Still plenty of things they can do in the courts, and they are. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, that’s always been Apple’s play here is they’re going to exhaust every possibility asking Biden
⏹️ ▶️ John to help them, appealing. They’ll do all those things. We’ll see if they get to
⏹️ ▶️ John a termination condition, which involves giving Massimo money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that was the 27th at 1155 a.m., the 27th at 521 p.m.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resumes Apple Watch sales after the ban is paused. With the sales and import bans on hold, Apple’s resumed sales of Series 9
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Ultra 2. So, and that’s where we stand. We’re recording this on, what’s today, the 3rd?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We still have Apple Watch on sale in the United States from Apple. So all’s well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s pretty amazing considering they halted sales like
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of days after Christmas, and then one day later, they turned them back on. I mean, again, it’s still winding
⏹️ ▶️ John its way through the court system, but if you had to, If Apple could have picked this timing, I’m not sure they could have picked
⏹️ ▶️ John anything better. We get all our holiday sales, we get one or two days where we
⏹️ ▶️ John file paperwork, we have our last ditch effort, Biden save us. He’s like, nah, don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it gets pulled from the stores and then one day later it’s back and now we wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, it worked out pretty well for Apple, not so great for Maslow, but I mean, we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is not over yet. So further updates as events transpire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately I think they’re just gonna have to settle and they’re gonna have to license this, whatever this patent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they can’t get passed.
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2024: Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, uh, we should probably do a little bit of a preview as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what we think is coming in 2024. Uh, John, you’ve been kind enough to put a bunch of links
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, uh, items in the show notes for us to discuss. Uh, did you want to do this top to bottom or are you going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to let us just round Robin and pick what we think is interesting?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, you go through the items. And what I put in the list is things. Well, it’s in our typical Charlotte’s fashion. It’s things that we
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less know are coming and what we think about them or we’re looking forward to them or whatever. And then things start getting question
⏹️ ▶️ John marks after them as we get towards the end of the list where it’s like, maybe these are coming. So we just go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro. It sounds like I don’t have links to put in the show notes handy, but it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is eminent. It probably, if I were to wage your guess sometime this month, will be at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a formal announcement as to like when it’ll go on sale and whatnot. So Vision Pro could be any time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. And I am I’m excited for it. I’m curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what the response will be. I’m curious to see how one goes to buy a vision pro. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know there’s been a lot of talk and chatter, if not official statements that you’ll have to pick it up in store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I understand that, although I have a lot of problems with it, which we can explore if we really want. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I’m very curious to see how this looks. I’m curious to see what the gray market looks like. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that there’s a lot of people, including many of our friends that live overseas that are very keen to have their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vision pro. So how does that work? You know, if you’re willing to fly yourself to New York or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Richmond and want to pick up a vision pro, is that something that Apple will sell to you? Or does it work with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-American, uh, Apple ID? Like, how does that look? But all that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really excited and really interested to see what this looks like once it’s in the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not excited for the work I need to do to get call sheet working better on it, which I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of, but not enough. Uh, but I am excited overall. I don’t know, Marco, how do you feel about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Man, I’m going to have a lot to say about it once I’m allowed to talk about experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I will have with it. Going to a lab was amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a developer, not so great as a podcaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to characterize your experience, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Please strike that from the record.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I went to a lab, period. But it is kind of unfortunate that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for me to discuss the Vision Pro and my expectations. and thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it because I have some experience with it that I’m not allowed to talk about. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully that will be over soon. I’m with you Casey, I think it is probably coming within probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month, I think it’s very close. And I am excited about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also, I’m trying to keep my excitement in check. You know, as I figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out like what am I doing for Overcast for it, looking at the market for it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going to be a very slow burn. Like it’s gonna be a very slow buildup because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the volume is just not gonna be there for a while. You know, there was those rumors from the supply chain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the little screens they’re using inside, they can, that like Sony can probably only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make, you know, one or two million of those screens in a year. And so there are some speculation from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the supply chain, like they might not be able to make and sell more than maybe a million
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pros in the first year. And if there’s any truth to that, if you figure like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approximately a year from now, maybe there’s a million of these in active use, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an app developer, how many of those million people are going to have my app?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I’m lucky, maybe a few hundred. Like it’s gonna be a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of people. From an app developer’s perspective, there is gonna be no good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason, I think, to port your app over to this, unless you have a way to capture a huge portion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its users, I don’t think as a podcast app, I don’t think I have that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should make an app that looks like when you tilt the glasses upward is like you’re drinking a beer. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s the type of app, but like that’s what I’m thinking of with this launch of like, you’re right, there’s there,
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the supply issues, Apple is capped in how many of these they can physically make no matter how many people want
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And keep in mind, they’re $3,500 to start. So it’s probably not going to be them anyway. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to, there is the kind of gold rush of like, well, people are going to get their Vision Pro. And you’re like, well, I’ve got this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What kind of apps can I get for it? And if you have some general purpose app, like it looks like we’re talking about the iPhone app that
⏹️ ▶️ John showed like basically a beer on your phone and use the accelerometer when you tilted your phone, the beer
⏹️ ▶️ John liquid level would say level so like you’re drinking a beer. Everyone who had an iPhone got that app
⏹️ ▶️ John because you get an iPhone and you’re like, what’s available for this thing? And it was like seven, you know, not seven things in the store, but
⏹️ ▶️ John relatively speaking, there were very few apps in the app store. And if you were one of those apps and you were a general purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like, I’ll try it. try a fun thing for my thing, you could get a massive market share
⏹️ ▶️ John of the first batch of people who bought an iPhone and make a lot of money. And that is probably going to be true on the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, but I’m not sure a podcast player is that app. That’s going to be the impulse purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John that you really want to just try out the Vision Pro. When I think Vision Pro, I don’t think podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly a visual medium, but someone’s going to make that app. So I think there is going to be a mini gold
⏹️ ▶️ John rush to try to sell to 50% of the million people who get Vision Pros. And Casey, to your
⏹️ ▶️ John point about the gray market stuff, this has gotta be Apple’s nightmare because Apple hates gray
⏹️ ▶️ John market stuff to begin with. And the worst thing, the thing Apple always will tell you they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want and they really, really don’t want, which is we don’t want people to have our product and have a crappy experience
⏹️ ▶️ John because they didn’t get it the Apple way. And nothing could be more problematic when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John to that situation than a thing that fits on your face that has different size things,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco different size light shields and
⏹️ ▶️ John the prescription glasses and all, like there is no way that the gray market is going to give
⏹️ ▶️ John the buyers of those gray market things what Apple thinks the experience should be. So you’re gonna have developers
⏹️ ▶️ John overseas who are using uncomfortable, blurry looking headsets because it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing they could get and they picked the prescription wrong and they don’t have the right light shield thing and it doesn’t fit their face
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just, and Apple’s gonna be like, that’s not how it’s supposed to be. We want you to have this experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you have to wait for us to launch in your country. come to the Apple store, we’ll scan your face, we’ll make sure we find the right,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, but it’s like, well, I didn’t do that. Instead, someone got it for me and I bought it on eBay
⏹️ ▶️ John and I just hope that the Fait Shield like wasn’t too painful after 30 minutes. And that’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John experience Apple wants you to have. I mean, they hated gray market iPhones. They don’t like when you use non-official
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple parts. They don’t, you know, just like, this is their worst nightmare because the experience of Vision Pro can be so
⏹️ ▶️ John much worse. Like the floor is so low. If you get one that doesn’t fit right, you know, and doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look right with the prescription lenses. And so many people need prescriptions. Like I still think about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John and not that I’m planning on getting one, but it’s like, when I heard Casey, when I heard you talking when you were on the talk show, talking about like the
⏹️ ▶️ John prescription lenses and stuff, setting aside the price, I was like, what prescription would
⏹️ ▶️ John I tell Apple? Cause Gruber’s like, oh, I came to the thing and they just asked what my prescription was. Because I have two sets of glasses now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t moved to bifocals or progressives, but I have my computer glasses that I’m wearing now to look at
⏹️ ▶️ John my screen. And then I have my TV watching glasses and my driving glasses that are my distance glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know which prescription I should give them. What distance, because my computer glasses are made to be comfortable for
⏹️ ▶️ John me looking at my screen that’s like an arm’s length, right? And my driving glasses are basically 20, 20 at infinity,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like for distance stuff. What prescription would I even give Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John And believe me, I’m not the only old person with two different prescriptions for up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco close and far away.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are a lot of us. And so that’s gotta be part of the experience. It’s not like you’re gonna go into the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple store and they’re gonna say, oh, what’s your prescription? Because that’s not an easy question. You have to say, what’s your prescription
⏹️ ▶️ John when viewing things from X distance? And I don’t even know what that distance is. Is it the distance
⏹️ ▶️ John that they typically hang windows by default in front of you? Is it the distance the screens are from your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco eyes? Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think yes. I mean, remember we talked about that whole convergence effect thing earlier in the fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it does seem like they are optimizing for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equivalent distance of, whatever it is, like a few meters in front of you, like wherever the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot is, they put windows and kind of like on this axis around you. Meters?
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm. How far is that in feet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, yeah, it’s something, it’s something like eight or 10 feet in front of you, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John but like this is all, all this is saying that getting the experience Apple wants you to
⏹️ ▶️ John have from their Vision Pro is going to be trickier than any other Apple product, even more so than the
⏹️ ▶️ John watch. And gray market is just going to exacerbate that. You know, that’s just part of being an early adopter and people will
⏹️ ▶️ John suffer through it. but boy, it’s got to really eat Apple up because they spent so long trying to make this product and get the right
⏹️ ▶️ John set of face shields and they know how it should work like internally or whatever, just to know that like 20%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the, basically everyone outside the US who has this thing is having a substandard
⏹️ ▶️ John experience. You know, what can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Vision Pro is going to be the story of the first few months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the year at least. I’m a little concerned for Apple that the press
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the hype won’t stick as much as they want it to because it’s gonna be such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a slow buildup of a market, I think. They have put so much into this product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in terms of their time and resources and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when was the last time Apple launched a really high profile brand new product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was not expected to be a massive volume hit at the start? Well, it was the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s it. And that was a long time ago and that was a very different company. And now, you can say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like, oh, the Mac Pro, but that’s not nearly the resources that went into the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. They haven’t launched anything that they’re fully behind as like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a new paradigm. The watch was the closest you could say, as like, this is a new way of computing or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is fine for Apple, because I think they’ll weather it fine, because it’s almost kind of a relief
⏹️ ▶️ John to essentially be supply constrained in the first year, give them time to get their feet under them, kind of like with the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has an idea of what they think this thing will be good for, but what does the market think? And so this will
⏹️ ▶️ John be a big story in early 2024. And I think it will settle down and people will forget about it and move
⏹️ ▶️ John on. And that will give the product time to grow into itself, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, either they all sell out or the story is Apple couldn’t even sell a million of them and it’s too expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. Like- With that voice too. Yeah, Apple’s not gonna be scared, but Apple’s not gonna go, oh my God, forget it. We did so badly,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just gonna cancel this product. No, they’re gonna ride out 2024 no matter what happens, they’re gonna learn from what’s out there in the market and 2025
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll regroup and continue on. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not worried about all the inevitable stories and the low sales due to
⏹️ ▶️ John either supply constraints or lack of demand or whatever. And even if it’s best case and we’re like they sell it instantly
⏹️ ▶️ John and people are spending huge amounts of money for them in the gray market and everybody wants them
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just so exciting, but they can’t make them. And they make the stories like, oh, Apple should have found another supplier for those
⏹️ ▶️ John screens or whatever. even if the very best happens in that scenario, it’s still gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John like just a rookie year for the Vision Pro. Don’t expect it to take over
⏹️ ▶️ John the world. The iPhone, even the iPhone didn’t take over the world in its first year of sales. It was a curiosity, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a thing that people who could tolerate AT&T used, and it was like, I’m not so sure about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the iPhone is like the best Slenk and Super product ever. So do not expect the Vision Pro to do
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the iPhone in its first year. And if it does 10 times worse, don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I feel like Apple is pretty dedicated to this. Even if it 100% flops, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they’re gonna keep plugging away at this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think we’re going, like I don’t think Apple’s gonna have any trouble selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as many as they can make this year. Like that’s, they’re gonna sell every single one they can make. Because they can’t make that many.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, it’s going to be back-ordered. It’s going to be hard to get. Like, it’s gonna be, they’re gonna sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all. That’s not gonna be the problem. But what I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco envisioning is that people are going to buy it with a set of expectations about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re going to be able to use it for, and then that will change. Because that’s what happens with new tech categories.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It happens with the Apple Watch, it happened before that with the iPad. Remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone didn’t have apps, didn’t have an app store when it launched. So talk about changing the way people use the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John People who had their first iPhone are using it differently than we are because there was no app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store. And this is gonna go through the same kind of hype curve. of like, you’re gonna have, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it’s actually out, but after it’s been announced, you have people saying, oh my God, we’re gonna have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rethink cities. I’ll be able to get all my work done in this headset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll never have to buy a computer or monitor again. And you’re gonna have those people go out and buy it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna fulfill that expectation for some percentage of those people. The expectations are gonna crash saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried living my entire life in a Vision Pro for a month and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what happened. And my face is all sweaty and my nose hurts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So then the expectations are going to crash. You’re going to have people like Federico who actually will figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to get all their work done in it. It’s going to be a whole bunch of complex hacks to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it work for you. And then you’re going to have people say, actually, I traveled only with this device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this trip, and here’s how I did it. So there’s going to be this big roller coaster of press for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from people who are kicking the tires, trying it out, tech enthusiasts, people who are trying to live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it and do way too much stuff in it. Then you’re gonna have all the people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried this and it was bad for reason X, and then all that’s gonna crash. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are gonna try it again and try different things and some new app will come out for it that’ll make it better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s gonna be that kind of roller coaster for a while. It’s gonna be a fun year in the sense that that kind of experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always find really fun and entertaining for both myself to try to do it but mostly to listen and watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what other people are doing with it, and kind of experience it vicariously through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people who have more time than I do. But at the end of that roller coaster,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this product is gonna be really great for the market that it finds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s not gonna be a big market for a while for lots of reasons, price, supply,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. It’s gonna be, there’s lots of reasons why it’s not gonna be a huge market yet. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope that everyone, including Apple, is able to keep perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that when it comes out and does not set the whole world on fire, that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily a failure, it’s just the early part of its lifetime and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the earliest part of this market. But ultimately, I’m very excited for that market. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s a lot of good uses for it, but it’s gonna be a slow start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, do you plan on buying one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, immediately. Because here’s the thing, as a developer of these platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My app will be there, whether like people will use it. Now, you know, I was looking earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I allow people to run my iPad app on Apple Silicon Macs. That has now accumulated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very large number of Mac users. I have more Mac users than I have iPad users,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which that’s not what I would have guessed. But that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality. I plan to allow my app to run as long as it doesn’t have major problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I will see what kind of usage it gets. And I will make decisions from there about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when and whether to make a native version. But I have some ideas for a native version I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think are good. I’m gonna wanna try them. I’m gonna wanna try them immediately. Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, even though my likely market of vision pro owners in their first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year is probably going to be like, you know, fewer people than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use like the large widget. It’s going to be like some slice of a slice of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slice. Numbers wise relative to my entire product and my entire audience for my app, it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be nothing. But it’s important for me to be there for other reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s value in the people who are the influencers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the press. There’s value in them seeing my app there and using it and knowing it’s there. There’s a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of demand there that I want to address from that kind of person. value to Apple and therefore value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me indirectly through, you know, favor with Apple. So there’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reasons why I would probably want to be there anyway. Numbers are not one of them. And I expect the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Overcast app for it to be a massively money-losing operation for me for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I absolutely will be buying one the second I can get my hands on one. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a large portion of the early buyers will be developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and companies that are buying it to test their stuff on and to develop for. But we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. I mean, that being said, like a lot of small developers are super uninterested in paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $3,500 for this. Hi. Right. Like I think there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not as much of a slam dunk for every developer out there to buy this as say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the first iPad was because we had different expectations and it was way cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is very expensive and anyone who’s like running the numbers is like, well, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much money am I going to make with my software and Vision Pro? And is that going to help pay for the $3,500? No, no, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Not for a while at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s going to impact the market to some degree. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be purchased by every iOS developer out there. Like that’s not, that’s not going to happen for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of reasons, but they will be bought by some developers. It’s, and some, you know, YouTubers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and influencers and just, you know, people want to try it. Business travelers, rich people, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to, there is a market for it and it’s, it’s going to be really fun and amazing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to be the next iPad or Apple watch for, for a while, if ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I don’t know what I’m going to do because I don’t know that I have an overabundance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of interest from a user’s perspective, but I do feel, I feel some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of responsibility as the developer of CallSheet. I feel a fairly considerable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of responsibility as one of the three hosts of this program. And since John doesn’t want to take the fall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s always up to you and me to take care of this, then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I bought this
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. You’ve got a lot of spending to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a few Vision Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though. Yeah, right. Well, then again, he did option that Mac Pro. So we’re looking at like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, 10 Vision Pros. How much did you spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on that damn thing? I just matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe three or four. Yeah, but anyway, it’s certainly more, it covers both of your Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pros. So go ahead. Oh, I see. Plus you both have apps that legitimately could be on the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like you’re just doing it for the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, Call Sheet, it probably has a much bigger audience on Vision Pro than Overcast does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly, you’re watching a movie, you look to your left and you say some voice thing and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John who is that? And then your app captures the video. No, forget it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You can’t do that. Anyway. You can’t do any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was during the talk show that Gruber and I were talking this out. And it occurred to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don’t think CallSheet can run side by side with a video player. Because the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my understanding, a video player is an immersive experience. You know, there’s three different experiences. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the windows, I forget what they call them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Spaces, volumes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s it, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I will remind you what the early versions of iOS and watchOS and iPadOS look
⏹️ ▶️ John like and what their limitations were and how long those lasted. So don’t worry too much about it. I feel,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, I know that the limitations that they have now but this is like the 1.0-iest of 1.0s. And
⏹️ ▶️ John inevitably, once this product comes in contact with developers and apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and users, that is all gonna change so fast. It even changed on the iPad eventually. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ John much faith that applications like yours will eventually be able to do same things. But I do agree with you that right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s probably a bunch of annoying limitations that make it difficult for you to do what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John then you should give that feedback to Apple and they’ll incorporate that into the next version of the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, honestly, I think, first of all, I think you’ll be in the clear. Second of all, if you’re not, app switching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists and people figure it out pretty quickly. So, I think you’re fine either way. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is probably gonna be a device that gets a lot of movie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and TV watching done on it. So the market for a call sheet is, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more direct than the market for people who want an audio-only podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John player. Well, they could be
⏹️ ▶️ John listening to podcasts while they’re working on their spreadsheets and their Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco headset. They can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s why people use the Mac app. It’s hard for me to understand the needs of that market because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not a listen to podcasts while working kind of person. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t ever use Overcast on my Mac, but I use it constantly on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when I’m out and around doing stuff and walking the dog and washing dishes, that’s when I listen to podcasts. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t understand how people listen to podcasts while working because my brain doesn’t work that way. So I don’t know how people are going to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it necessarily in Vision Pro, but it’s not like, I can envision,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can envision a situation where you might want an experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Vision Pro where you’re transported to some place. Like you wanna hang
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out on top of a mountain and maybe just put a podcast on and listen to it. I can envision that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a market, again, I don’t know how big of a market, maybe a few hundred people in the first year. It’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a big market, but I can envision use cases like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Vision Pro is a very broad product. It can do a lot of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t really know yet what is going to be its most popular uses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I can hazard a guess that it’s gonna be very consumption focused,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in practice. So very, very much like the iPad, where I think there will be people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who will do productivity work on it, but I don’t think that’s going to be the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common case. I think it is much more likely that people will use it more for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media consumption and like immersive experience consumption than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing your spreadsheets and email. Like I think, again, you will be able to do your spreadsheets and email in it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see that being a huge part of its use case. So then like, are people going to listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio podcasts? I mean, while they watch videos, probably not. Uh, but while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sit on a mountaintop, maybe. So again, like this all remains to be seen. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a very clear cut case for call sheet because there’s going to be, I think a lot of video watching in this device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, mostly, but I am not looking forward to spending 3,500 plus dollars on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on something that it’s use as a person to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I’m not entirely convinced yet, but again, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know, you’re going to have on a day one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m going to, I, I’ve, I’ve convinced myself I need to, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco probably need to, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to buy it and you’re going to grumble about the price and you’re going to love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am. I’m going to buy it. I’m going to grumble about the price. I think I’ll say it’s extremely cool. The question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, will I pick it up after, you know, completing whatever I need to do with call sheet? I don’t know. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I don’t know. But, um, we’ll see. I was, gosh, I wish I could talk about what happened at the labs. Anyway…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, me too. I’m dying here. you
2024: OLED iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell us about OLED iPads. What do we think is happening there?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, you know, we just both talked about Vision Pro, but OLED iPads are the product that I’m most excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about for 2024 from Apple, believe it or not, because I’m for sure going to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy these if they are OLED iPads, because I use my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch video all the time, and an OLED iPad would do a better job of showing video
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would have better black levels. I want this so bad, And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it hasn’t been that long since I got my iPad, I have an M1 iPad, it’s not that old, but the OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is a reason enough for me to upgrade. For the wider market, as we’ve discussed in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John we hope that they’ll rationalize the iPad line, update the pros to have the landscape camera, figure out what they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do with the pencil. After taking the year off, essentially, 2023, the iPad took that whole
⏹️ ▶️ John year off, all we got was the weird pencil. 2024 is the year of
⏹️ ▶️ John actually releasing iPads some of which we hope are good. And the only reason I highlight
⏹️ ▶️ John this as item number two is because this is the one I’m definitely gonna buy. You too are gonna try to get Vision Pros if you possibly can if they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell out in the first 30 seconds. I am absolutely buying an iPad and I think I’ll have an easier time getting one and it will be cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to be more expensive. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John if you got the eight
⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte model, maybe it would be the same price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, you know, Vision Pro starting at $3,500. We don’t know the details of that statement yet. All they said was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting at 3,500.
⏹️ ▶️ John Each individual prescription lens is $1,500. These are Porsche
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you’re joking, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they are hilariously expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, blue stitching, an extra $400.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just hope that you can adjust the storage at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but like, what is the storage gonna be used for? How many people buying it will even know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet? Like, I don’t know how much storage I need on my Vision Pro. I have no idea. Better get the big one, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, or like, do you wanna invest that much extra money in like version 1.0 that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be obsolete, you know, first. I
⏹️ ▶️ John get the big Apple TV. It’s a little bit less expensive, but you know. Yeah, it’s like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it, 50 bucks, 30 bucks? Exactly. Yeah. No, but so the iPad, I think, is going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve kind of fallen out of using the iPad for almost anything. But I go in phases. I go up and down. I’m sure when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they launch, I’m going to be like, oh, I want that, because it’s new and shiny and OLED. And I’ll rationalize myself buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially if it’s dual layer OLED screen that some of the rumors are interested. super
⏹️ ▶️ John bright really amazing quality, it would essentially be the best quality screen available on an Apple product because
⏹️ ▶️ John it will surpass the LCD, mini LED things on the MacBook Pros and certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that would be great. But I’m mostly just curious to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what they do with the iPad Pro especially because the iPad Pro has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not seen a meaningful update redesign since 2018. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty long in the tooth now. I really wanna know, do they address things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pencil attachment mechanism, any kind of pencil charging changes, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s rumors that there’s gonna be a new Pro Pencil as well. What do they do about where the camera is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the biggest annoyances of using the iPad Pro for me is that the camera’s still on the short side, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m almost 100% using it in the little keyboard flappy thing. Not the Magic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trackpad equipped one, the one before that, the straight one that Craig Federighi uses. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that one. And so the camera’s always right under my left hand. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as when you pick up the iPad, it is directly
⏹️ ▶️ John it up by. And it warns you about it, which is when you have to add a software feature to compensate for a hardware thing, that’s when you
⏹️ ▶️ John know the hardware thing has outlived its useful life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and they did update one of the lower end iPads to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera like on the long edge, like a laptop. So if you’re holding it in landscape, it’s in the top middle. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is the clear answer for where it should be on the iPad Pro and probably on all iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, but it interferes with where the pencil attaches right now on the current iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is a question, like, where do you put the pencil? If you put it on the short side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has other downsides. You can still put it on the long side, but like change where the magnets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so you can fit the camera between them or something. Like, there’s options. Yeah, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone assumes they’re gonna do. That’s like the whole reason for the new pencil. I’m sure the pencil will have new features, but the main reason
⏹️ ▶️ John is, oh, we have to rejigger the internals to make room for the camera that’s on the long side and that’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Pencil 3 or whatever. So, and I just wanna say that if they come out with a new iPad and it has
⏹️ ▶️ John a lit screen and they change nothing else about it, I’m still getting it. Cause I’m not gonna be like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna wait until they have the landscape camera. That’s not what I’m using the iPad for. I do have a pencil and I do use it and
⏹️ ▶️ John it is annoying that my hand covers the FaceTime camera and everything like that. But still, no matter what
⏹️ ▶️ John they do, if it is just if they do like the, you know, the new Mac Pro that
⏹️ ▶️ John launched this very podcast. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John same iPad as we have now, but the only difference is a new OLED screen, I’m still getting it. I mean, that would still be a huge upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ John but- And it would be incredibly disappointing to everybody but me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I do hope there’s more. I mean, as you mentioned, 2023, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were literally no new iPads released and the state of the iPad lineup, as we’ve discussed previously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really messy right now because it seems like they’re like halfway through multiple different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important transitions. Things like moving the camera, unifying the pencils, like stuff like this. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of like half done transitions in the iPad lineup. There’s way too many iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The differentiation between them is odd and confusing. There’s lots of like, you know, little nitpicks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, well, you can use this keyboard with this one, but not with this very similar one. They have three different iPads that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all like within a half-inch screen size of each other. Like it’s really, it’s a weird lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I expect and hope from 2024 for the iPad is for us to finally get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer of like, where is the iPad going and give us a coherent lineup that puts us there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I really hope for, and I think is likely to actually happen. I’m sure they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the thing where they keep around an old model of the cheap one, but they’re already still doing that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they currently have two base models basically, like the more modern design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and the one that still has the home button and the forehead and chin. And so, hopefully they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to get rid of the home button one, finally, move the more modern one down to that slot, and then give us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new base model, you know. So, there’s a lot to do in the iPad lineup. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they’re slated to do all of it this year, basically, because I think every iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approximately, is due for an update. So, we will see. I hope they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they do a good job. And I hope whatever changes are coming to the iPad Pro were worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wait from 2018. Fair enough.
2024: M3 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, M3 Ultra, maybe in the Mac Studio, perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a new Mac Pro. What do we think about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess really this could have been inverted, but it shows where my interest lies. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are due to be updated this year. They will presumably get the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, which is a chip that we assume will exist, and it will just be two M3 Macs that are stuck together in the usual way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, the M3 Macs is amazing, and two of them will be twice as amazing. So that will be a really good chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John And despite the fact that the Mac Studio will surely come with the M3 Macs, it will also come
⏹️ ▶️ John with the M3 Ultra and that’s gonna really differentiate it from the rest of the product line. Don’t expect any other, I don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John any other changes to these products other than them just existing and getting the new chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the Mac Studio, I think that’s fine. And for the Mac Pro, it is exactly as disappointing as last year’s Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John no change there. In particular, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like is becoming increasingly essential for Apple’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John ambitions in gaming. They have a long way to go there, but it is nice to be able to have
⏹️ ▶️ John something that they sell that has more GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John than a laptop, right? And the Mac Studio is gonna have twice as much GPU grunt as their fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, because it’ll have two M3 Maxes in there with twice the GPU grunt. Does that make a difference
⏹️ ▶️ John for the tiny amount of games that exist? No, probably not, but it’s, you know, at the very
⏹️ ▶️ John least, again, we’ll see how it performs in the benchmarks, but something better than a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of one of those like really low bar that Apple needs to clear
⏹️ ▶️ John to start taking itself seriously as a gaming company. And we’ve discussed as many times as the best. It’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ve raised the floor, that none of their computers stink anymore. They’re all pretty good,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you gotta have at least one really good one, one pretty okay one, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? And that is the role of the MT Ultra. It’s not the Mac Pro, it owns by nothing for games,
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac Studio is small, cheaper than the Mac Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be close to twice as fast when running game stuff, because it’s got twice
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU. So I’m looking forward to it. I’m not planning on buying that. I’m still,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, the clock on my 2019 Mac Pro is mostly dictated by Apple. I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John over the holiday that how long would I be willing to keep using this Mac Pro after
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stops supporting it with the latest version of macOS? And I think that is a non-zero amount of time for
⏹️ ▶️ John me because I do wanna wait to buy at the right time. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I want, I’m impressed by the M3 series, especially the M3 Max. The M3 Max is
⏹️ ▶️ John often benchmarking it higher than the M2 Ultra in certain tests, right? So I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re pressing on the high end. I wanna see what an M4 or an M5 looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can hold out that long. So that’s all. I just, I look forward to these computers existing
⏹️ ▶️ John and I look forward to seeing the benchmarks And I’m ready to continue to be disappointed by the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is, what is the current plan as of the beginning of 2024 when Apple says no more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Mac OS releases for Intel, do you immediately buy a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Silicon Mac Pro? Do you, do you slum it and buy a studio?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. Like I said, I’m, I’m willing, I’m willing to be in, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck in Amber of like, okay, uh, there, it’s not supported anymore, I’m just gonna keep using it
⏹️ ▶️ John after the version is released that I can’t run anymore. How long will I last
⏹️ ▶️ John in that state? I don’t know, if you’d asked me before, I’d say, well, as soon as that happens, I’m gonna buy one, so I’m never gonna be in that
⏹️ ▶️ John state. But now I’m thinking that I’m willing to be on the previous year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John OS that Marco can never remember the name of for a non-zero amount of time. Is that gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John six months? Is that gonna be a year? It’s gonna be like me and buying TVs, like I wanna pick the
⏹️ ▶️ John right time to buy. Ideally, I would like to wait to see them
⏹️ ▶️ John do something more than the current Ultra strategy with their top end chip. You know what I mean? Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if I buy it in a Mac Studio, I would love to see, as we discussed in the past, a different packaging arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ John or something different than we seem to do with M1 through M3 with respect to the Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can hold out that long, I will. If I can’t, then I’ll just get an M4 Ultra Mac Studio. Like that’s my plan, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like whatever, whatever that, if when the time comes, when I just can’t hold that any longer and it’s just untenable
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, maybe I need to update it to do dev work on my apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the situation is, when I get pressed to do it, if assuming there’s still, the Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ John still like it is, I’m gonna end up getting a Mac Studio with whatever the best ultra is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because we’ll all, I know we’re going off on a tangent, it’s my fault, but what do you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Mac Pro is uniquely good at that the studio isn’t? I know the obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer is gaming now, but that won’t be the, that’s not likely to be the case in any future Mac Pro. So like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, you don’t have 340 hard drives in there, do you? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I do have a bunch. I have, I have all my storage is internal, well, except
⏹️ ▶️ John for my Windows drive, which is external, but I do like my, I have an internal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that external if everything else is internal?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have an internal time machine drive, an internal SuperDuper clone, and then I have the regular boot disk
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have swapped video cards many times. And I know what you’re saying, like, well, you’re not gonna be able to run PC games because it’s not x86, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada. But I do want to buy something with GPU grunt that essentially is going to be sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John there idle in the hopes that Apple’s gaming strategy bears fruit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or at the worst case, that I can boot into Linux and play like Steam games that are for the Steam Deck. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? I want the GPU grunt to be there speculatively. Like I don’t, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John as sure thing as, hey, I can boot this thing into Windows and play Windows games. That is a sure thing, right? It’s easy to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why am I getting, why do I want a Mac with more GPU grunt? That’s speculative. That’s me
⏹️ ▶️ John crossing my fingers and saying, boy, I hope I can do something gaming related with this extra GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John grunt. And you know, maybe I’ll get burned. Maybe it’ll turns out that for the millionth time, Apple’s gaming strategy won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work out and I can’t run Windows and I can’t run Linux games with Proton and stuff. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why won’t you put your Windows boot drive in the machine? You feel like it’s tainting it, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s a yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Windows boot drive, yeah, it probably should be inside the machine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the tainting is not the reason I did it, but it’s kind of, it goes on one of my crappier SSDs, because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it doesn’t really matter, and I think it’s changed a few times, and it was such a pain to get it working on the external one that it was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a sunk cost fallacy, but anyway, yeah, I’m probably, I think this thing is probably in its final arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ John of components after many, many swaps and stuff where it’s all solid state, it’s got that one external,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know what I mean? When I did the Sonoma drive, that was also external, because that’s like a throwaway one that I’m constantly erasing
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, and I use it on different computers, so.
2024: iPhones 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, iPhone 16. I don’t know too much of what to expect from this. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve talked about the capture button, which I think could be very interesting, and I’m optimistic about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I’m slightly terrified about dropping the 5X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tetra Prism thing into the regular size phones because I don’t know which one I would buy then because I both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like and dis- What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you mean you don’t know? You would come back to the medium side?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially since the rumor is that the 16 is going to be actually be a little bit bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than the 15.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Again, they’re doing it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think what they’re, I think the thing that they’re doing, remember that the 15 shrunk because
⏹️ ▶️ John they shrunk the bezels all around it and everything. I think they’re essentially not undoing
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but making the screen bigger by an old bezels width, just to give themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John more room internally for the tetraprism camera and a bunch of other stuff. And honestly, I’m fine with that because I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ John a 14 Pro now and the 14 Pro is bigger than the 15 Pro. So like 15 Pro shrunk a little bit. it sounds like a 16 is gonna be the same size as my current
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. And keep in mind that I am buying the 16 because that’s my phone year. So from my perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 16 will be the same size as my current phone. But from your perspective, it’ll be a little bit bigger than your 15 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And from Casey’s perspective, it’ll be way smaller than that stupid pop socket thing you’ve got. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. No, I mean, there are some things I like about this phone, but I do miss having a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can legitimately without worry, without a dongle on the back or a wart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the back, use one-handed. You know, I, I don’t have gigantic, gigantor hands like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Mike Hurley does. And so I, I really do need some sort of afford affordance on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I am cautious, cautiously, intentatively optimistic that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I would be able to go back to the human size phone again, which I think would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be kind of nice. I’ll miss the real estate and I’ll miss maybe the battery life, although that hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as night and day as I had expected, but it would be nice to have a phone I could use one handed again. So, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, Marco, what are your thoughts on the iPhone 16?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know a ton about it yet, but if the rumors are true that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be, you know, add in capture button and give me the 5X lens, that’s great. I am looking forward to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the 5X lens I am super envious of. Whenever I have a moment to see tips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to use it, I’m always like, man, I wish I had this in my phone, but I don’t wish enough to get the giant phone. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, hopefully I get that. And otherwise, I don’t really know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very, this is what happens every year. I’m very happy with the iPhone I have now. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I’m sure they’ll find a way to make me wanna buy the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John This will have the realigned cameras on both of them, by the way, on both the 16 and the 16 Pro, like the realign cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John for spatial video, because they’ll both be able to do it. And the rumor is also that they’ll both have the capture
⏹️ ▶️ John button, like it won’t be a Pro only feature. So, and there are some, I mean, we talked about this a million
⏹️ ▶️ John times when we were talking about the SoCs, like what are they gonna do? Is there gonna be a 18 Pro and an A18? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John they going to be unified? Are they going to be divert split? Is there going to be one that’s like last year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John model, but with GPU things that we don’t know what they’re going to do with the SOCs, but it seems like from the physical feature sets,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re both going to have the aligned cameras and they’re both going to have the capture button. I still at this early stage, I still feel like the capture
⏹️ ▶️ John button is kind of like a solid state volume buttons. And it’s the type of thing that we could be hearing plans
⏹️ ▶️ John from back in time. And really that decision was reversed and we won’t know about it until the next round of rumors comes out. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know what I mean? And maybe there just won’t be a capture button and we’ll wait till next year, but from what I’ve heard, it
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like the 16 line will be more unified and coherent than the 15 one was.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’ll see, it’s a long ways off. But you know, the iPhone is, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with no rumors about anything radical, it’s just like, oh, it’s a year where they’re consolidating gains
⏹️ ▶️ John from the previous phones, and you know, it’s not, every year the iPhone is good. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s any chance of it being terrible, but I don’t think there’s much chance either of it being something like an iPhone 10 type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Actually, and I’m glad you brought up the special video thing, John, because that I think would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge motivator. If it can take spatial video better than 1080p 30,
⏹️ ▶️ John very restrictive. Yeah, that might be a differentiation on the Pro. Like they’ll both have the aligned cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John for spatial video, and the rumor is that the ultra wide that is aligned with it is gonna be 48 megapixel,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe only on the Pro you’ll get better frame rates, better resolution, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And look, I know this decision’s already been made 15 years ago, but if you have to raise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either the frame rate or the resolution and you can’t do both, give me the frame rate, please. Like 30 FPS
⏹️ ▶️ John I think with the Vision Pro, I think the resolution may have more bang for the buck because it’s so big in your field
⏹️ ▶️ John of vision, you know what I mean? I’m not allowed to tell you whether I know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Okay, anyway, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey and Gruber discussed it with like, it’s not as big as Panorama’s. Panorama’s is where it suffers the most according to Gruber, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the spatial video is apparently but still, it’s pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I definitely can’t tell you any of that. However, I can tell you I really want more resolution out of my cameras now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco More frame rate, you mean? Both. Well, I would suggest for panoramas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would probably want a lot of resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like one of the things that I am really looking forward to in the Vision Pro, Merlin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco introduced me to this Polycam app where it basically, it’s one of these apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that uses like the LiDAR and the cameras and everything and you can make like a 3D, You can 3D capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make a floor plan or a whole 3D map of a room. As
⏹️ ▶️ John as your room is not filled with junk, I know from experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that’s a really cool thing. I’m looking forward to just like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if you can even do this yet on Vision Pro, but I’m sure it will come fairly soon if you can’t. Like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard USDZ scene formats that these kind of things can output, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to be able to capture a place with my iPhone using something like Polycam and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to be in it in the Vision Pro at a later time. Like, oh, what was it like to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my room in this one apartment that I captured and then I don’t live there anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of thing. That would be so cool to me. What was it like on this vacation? What was our hotel room like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was my kid’s room like when he was this age? I would love to be able to capture that kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then kind of just experience it in the Vision Pro. And I think one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will probably wants, if we see that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the most resolution possible on those captures. Because what you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing in the Vision Pro, the field of view it is simulating is massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to a phone or a computer screen. So the pictures that we take today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our little iPhone camera sensors or whatever, a single picture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that looks great on your phone. If you’re lucky, it might look okay on your laptop screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you put it onto like a 50-foot tall virtual screen or something, that’s a different experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s also when people complain that I’m nitpicking when I say, well, iPhone photos are fine
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you’re quote-unquote pixel peeping. Well, guess what? Everyone inside of Vision Pro is pixel peeping. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everything is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much bigger. It could be the side of a billboard. And suddenly you see, I mean, we talked about it last time
⏹️ ▶️ John with the picture of you towing your car on the beach and
⏹️ ▶️ John mess it made of your face because it was low light. That’s not, you’re not gonna need the pixel peep to see that
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s 50 feet tall in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, so I think the rise of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headsets, whether it’s the Vision Pro or the Quest series or whatever, the rise of these headsets, I think is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increase the demand for much higher resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone cameras, basically, that can actually capture a lot more detail of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our surroundings and our experiences that we go through in life. And maybe even big cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have a small resurgence because they’re so much higher resolution, but I think ultimately it has to go in the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has to be, and maybe they’ll just do it with a bunch of combination capture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, okay, we’ll take this. Yeah, even
⏹️ ▶️ John big cameras do that. Speaking of big cameras, cameras with huge sensors, with
⏹️ ▶️ John huge, big mirrorless cameras with 60 megapixel sensors also have a mode where they will take 75
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures and stitch them together for massive resolution. and the phones should, I mean, that’s what panorama is. It’s taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of captures and stitching them together. That kind of technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can’t just keep adding megapixels. It’s not gonna work, especially with a phone. But what you can do is get more
⏹️ ▶️ John and more intelligent modes of taking a whole bunch of 48 megapixel captures and weaving them together into something
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks better and better inside Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you know, talking about like, you know, as the Vision Pro market very slowly grows over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will give the iPhone a chance to have its cameras grow too, because if the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro takes off, and if it sticks around for the long haul and becomes something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of us really want and enjoy, you’re gonna want the highest resolution capture as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And current phone stuff, again, looks great on the phone, but when you blow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up, like it doesn’t, most phone pictures don’t even look that good on my Pro Display XDR. And that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the scale of what the Vision Pro is giving us, the XDR is like a relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny app window for the Vision Pro. So, it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different scale that we’re talking about of experiencing our media, and there’s gonna be just demand for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infinitely higher resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why as a consumption device is another thing in its favor, because in the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ John professional companies that can take very expensive, huge cameras and actually capture massive
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution, they’re the only, that’s the only content that’s going to be available that can truly take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Vision Pro with all the resolution that’s available as you turn your head around.
⏹️ ▶️ John And regular people won’t be able to make that, certainly not with their iPhones. And most people aren’t going to buy like the
⏹️ ▶️ John weird 360 camera rigs that stitch together these high megapixel images. But some companies will be able to, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and other companies who can essentially ship an app that is the equivalent of the single app
⏹️ ▶️ John ebook. Remember those days on the,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like, what is this? It’s an app that just shows you a bunch of places, but we captured them with our camera equipment cost as much
⏹️ ▶️ John as your house. Yeah, it’s 60 gigs. You can’t capture this, but we captured it and it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing and you’re just gonna want to sit here and listen to podcasts and Marcos out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I should do that. Maybe that maybe that’s my app. Maybe it’s like I create an immersive experience that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, you know, I like film some mountains somewhere with some crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John It gives you an excuse to buy another $200,000 worth of 3D video capture
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment and then go on top of a mountain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I definitely have not recently purchased a very high resolution camera.
2024: Apple Watch X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch 10. I’m excited to see I got to imagine they’re going to make this look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different and I’m excited to see
⏹️ ▶️ John what that looks like. I mean, some people keep saying with the Roman numeral X 10, right? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s it’ll be like the iPhone 10 or Mac OS 10. It’ll be the time they change the form factor. But what if they’re not ready to
⏹️ ▶️ John change the form factor? Then it’s just going to be Apple Watch 10 with the one and a zero. And we’ll worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John it next year. Like this would be a convenient time, but sometimes convenient times don’t always line up. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope it is a new form factor. It is a reasonable time for it to be one, but there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no like pressing need like they have to do it or whatever And if it doesn’t line up, it doesn’t line up. Hey, look what they
⏹️ ▶️ John did with the iPhone. They were ready early And so they just skip nine Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean I guess that’s true but I I I just have a gut feeling that’s gonna happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be cool if they use the X to I think we’re ready for it And I’m honestly like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little scared because the Apple Watch is what I wear most days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m a huge watch snob and I’m currently, I’m happy with the Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t super love it, I don’t super hate anything about it. We’re in a nice stable place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m a little worried if they’re gonna take some big moves, I’m a little worried they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might mess some stuff up. Like, I gotta say, I still don’t love watchOS 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s a story for another day, I guess. So, you know, we’ll see what they do with the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m a little nervous, but their track record with the Apple Watch hardware is really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the exception of, you know, the first one just being so darn slow and everything, but that wasn’t really their fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Recent generations of the Apple Watch hardware have really just been amazing. It’s been a little boring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception of the Ultra, which was a huge hit. But like, you know, the regular series Apple Watch, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change much in recent years, but every year bring some kind of like little incremental changes that over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add up. And so the recent Apple watches are great. But as I said last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time this came up, like I would like to see some refreshing and variety happen in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple watch line just because it is still jewelry. So, you know, some updates and refreshing over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time are a nice thing to have. So I’m looking forward to that. The whole strap attachment rumor things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has me a little nervous. But again, you look at Apple’s track record and making straps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re amazing. Like Apple has the best watch straps in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch industry by a huge margin, generally speaking. Like, yeah, one or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice ones from other vendors exist, but like Apple watch straps on the whole, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really mostly or only talking about the ones by Apple, not by third parties, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are largely garbage, but Apple’s own Apple watch straps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only are amazing today, but have been amazing for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run of the Apple Watch. Like even the very first ones, they launched with the very first Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those straps were all amazing. Like they were super good straps. So they’re really good at this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they’re gonna redo the strap mechanism, I trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re probably gonna come out with some really nice straps to go with it too. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to this rumor of this, you know, big Apple Watch revamp, I think it’s time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I trust that they will probably do a really good job with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this strap rumor is the one that I’m most willing to believe, ah, I couldn’t get that one done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, if I had to rank them, like, new shape redesign for 10 is higher ranked for me than
⏹️ ▶️ John new shape and also new strap, because, you know, that’s a previous discussion. Maybe they couldn’t figure out something better,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so it goes in the back burner for a few more years or whatever, but having them both would be great. That would really
⏹️ ▶️ John be an Apple Watch 10. new design, new strap, new everything, it would be very much like the iPhone X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but the thing is, like, you know, according to the rumor that like one of the reasons they were looking at a new strap attachment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanism is because the current one takes up a lot of space in the case, which is true. It might be that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to get a new case shape design, they had to change the strap mechanism to get that
⏹️ ▶️ John If they tied them together, then yeah, then either both of them pushed off or neither one, but it’s so hard to tell from these rumors because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, see previous Apple Watch rumors, they have not been entirely reliable about form factor changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So we’ll see. No, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been comically unreliable. But, you know, if you think about what Apple could do with more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interior space of an Apple Watch, the answer is very obvious. Add more battery and therefore give the watch more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capabilities and make it, you know, raise the specs basically, and or make it thinner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both of which would be wonderfully welcome for the Apple Watch. I would actually say that they’ve come far enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the thinness department in recent minor revisions. I actually don’t think it needs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be that much thinner. I’m happy with it where it is. A little bit thinner would be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little more elegant, but it’s not screaming for being thinner, but it is screaming for resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you still have to fight the thinness one because I think we would all agree an Apple Watch that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one quarter of the thickness could be amazing. It opens up a whole new design possibilities, like a really thin one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we know we just can’t do that with current technology. I feel like we need to keep, much more so than the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not something that you hold in your hand. thin watches exist and are good look
⏹️ ▶️ John and are cool and Apple should pursue that. It is now, it is still thicker than if you
⏹️ ▶️ John said Apple, we have a magic battery that can be any size and give you the same amount of energy. They wouldn’t choose to make it this big.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is thicker than Apple would choose to design. It’s thicker than anyone would choose to design. We just know it has to be that big. So I get
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re saying that it’s not so big that it’s an impediment, but watches, unlike phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we know them today, can tolerate being a lot thinner than these things are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but it like it doesn’t look like a thick watch. It looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a kind of regular range of a watch thickness. It doesn’t need it. You’re right that it would be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s thinner but like if they’re going to gain a decent chunk of internal volume to use for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to spend somehow. Oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying this year. I’m saying like 20 years from now Apple shouldn’t stop pursuing thinness
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re never going to get to the 20 years from now really thin watch if they don’t continue to pursue it and and The flip side of that
⏹️ ▶️ John is there is obviously the style on the watch industry of like, it is ridiculously thick because that is the style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s a style. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not universal. Well, I mean, the Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Ultra fulfills that, but there are very thin watches and there are also very thick ones. And the thick ones are not thick because
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to be that thick. It is a style. And I feel like the Ultra, that’s where the Ultra lives right now. And I’m happy with that one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for the regular watch, I would love to see it be thinner in a decade rather than the same size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, what I wanna see for the watch is anything that can raise its limits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it is such a, the entire watch software platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so extremely limited by its need to conserve power very aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to have useful battery life. And if they can give it 20% more battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space, whatever it would be, if that would then allow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to let the watch loose a little bit more with its own resource usage, that opens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up much more software potential, that opens up potentially like more responsiveness for the user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, more on-device features. Like it makes the entire watch experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially much better if they can lift some of those limits. So that could pay off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a much bigger way than making it a millimeter thinner, in my opinion.
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2024: AirPods 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods 4. I don’t, I don’t have too much to say about this. We have a, in the show notes that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re supposed to be getting a new design and updated case and potentially even active noise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cancellation, which I think would be great for non AirPods Pro things. Apparently the case will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have speakers for find my alerts. It’ll have USB-C, obviously. And then apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a higher end version of the AirPod, AirPods 4, not the Pro, but the AirPods 4 will have ANC, like I said, and then the AirPods 4 will have a built-in mic. So we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens. AirPods 4 plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. It’s 4 max. I think AirPods 4, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds good. I mean, I don’t have any particularly strong thoughts about this. I think I’ll probably stick with the AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forevermore because they are so freaking good. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of that tech flowing downhill to regular stuff, I’m here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sounds good to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John 2024 is the year of stuff for me. OLED iPads that no one’s really interested in. in AirPods 4
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that no one’s really interested, but I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s also my iPhone year. I’m a little bit confused by the AirPods 4 rumor with there being two versions,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of which has noise canceling or whatever. I’m only confused because they haven’t come right out and said, oh, by the way, the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ John noise canceling will be shoved into your ear canal, which is not what I want. Right? The reason I use
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods 3 is I don’t want things shoved into my ear canal. If they have two versions of the AirPods 4,
⏹️ ▶️ John surely one of them will not be shoved into my ear canal. I don’t know what the word is for this that I keep saying, but anyway, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? The little soft squishy tips that go into the hole in your ear. I don’t want that
⏹️ ▶️ John So if there are two of them one of them’s gotta be not like that But are they also trying to say that the
⏹️ ▶️ John other air pods for will also not go in your ear But have a noise canceling you could do
⏹️ ▶️ John noise canceling like do the same thing, but not be shoved into your canal But it’s not gonna work
⏹️ ▶️ John as well at all right just for many many reasons But you know the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John are still vague anyway If there are new AirPods, I will probably get
⏹️ ▶️ John them unless both of them go into your ear canals, in which case I’ll just ride these out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to believe that I can be converted. If Apple just stops selling the ones that don’t go into your ear canals, I’ll just have
⏹️ ▶️ John to get used to it. I’ll probably survive, but it’s not what I prefer. Again, my wife has AirPods Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John now she’s had two pairs of them, and I’ve tried them and I know what they’re like. And it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t do it, I just don’t prefer it. I could get used to it if I had to. And I’m sure if I did get used
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, I’d be like, wow, noise canceling is great. Isn’t this wonderful? Yeah, you know, all the things everyone else already knows. I just still
⏹️ ▶️ John prefer the other one. So I’m hoping the AirPods 4 with two different models, one or both of them still
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t go into your ear canal. And that’ll be the one for me as I watch my OLED iPad. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big year for John. Yeah, all the boring products.
2024: AirPods Max 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods Max 2 potentially? I mean, I’ve- Question mark time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never tried the AirPods Max, so I don’t have any thoughts on this other than-
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, do they make a USB-C model? Do they actually revise it so they’re changed
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way? Do they fix the condensation issue for people with sweaty ears? Do they make them more comfortable?
⏹️ ▶️ John I find them, granted, I’ve only worn them in Apple stores or whatever, but I do not find them comfortable. The top of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it hurts the top of my head with that stupid mesh thing. and it’s not what I prefer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the AirPods Max are really great in certain ways, but they could really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a revision. Like they could really use a version two tackling of this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They definitely need to get rid of lightning, of course. We know that. They need the updated processor to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all the newest features of the AirPods Pro, especially at their price. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I would hope is, what John was alluding to, I would hope they would address comfort a little bit better. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current ones, as talked about many times in the show, They’re very heavy because they use a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of metal and almost no plastic anywhere in them. And that makes it very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to achieve good comfort with headphones. Like you can have comfortable heavy headphones, but you probably won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes it much harder. You really need to spread, what you’d have to do with heavy headphones, you have to spread the weight over a large
⏹️ ▶️ John area and that looks clunky. And it also means there’s more crap in contact with your head, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John hotter and sweatier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so it is much easier to make comfortable headphones when they are lightweight, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much easier to make lightweight headphones when they use a lot less steel and aluminum than Apple used on theirs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, and it’s, you know, generally that means plastic. Like there’s, that’s why when you look at the other, you know, if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the competitors to the AirPods Max, the main competitors are the Sony and Bose noise canceling headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both of which use large amounts of plastic in their construction. In part, yes, you could say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s cheaper. No, the real reason is because it’s better for headphones to be plastic because it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter and that makes them much more comfortable. Also, of course, the AirPods Max have that terrible case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t have a power button, there’s all sorts of little other things that I think a revision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this product would be very needed and very welcome. Because the other thing about the AirPods Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they sound incredible. They sound really good! Their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise cancellation is also really good. They compete well on those factors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just all the like physical design factors that they really need a lot of help with. So I hope Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing and able to do the kind of update that the product deserves because again it’s the they sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good that it’s kind of a shame right now that they are held back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these other factors to a lot of people because sound wise they’re amazing.
2024: EU side-loading?
⏹️ ▶️ John We try to speed run these last four, especially since we’re in the question marks here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomePod, don’t care. Apple TV, yes please. LLM, Howard stuff and Apple OSs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, why not? Inside loading in the EU, we’ll see what happens. Done.
⏹️ ▶️ John A little bit faster than I expected, but yeah. So for the HomePod and Apple TV, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s just a collective shrug. Like I mostly agree with what Casey said. With the LLM stuff and Apple OSs,
⏹️ ▶️ John this probably should have been hoisted up farther because 2024 could be the year that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John rolls out some of the stuff that it’s doing. We mentioned at the top of followup, they are doing LLM stuff. We know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. Is this the year some of it comes out? We all hope so because Siri’s crappy and we think the
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM stuff could make it better. For all the problems with the LLM stuff, anything is better than current
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri. Like, really constrain it. Like, have it only help out in certain
⏹️ ▶️ John scenarios. We just want it to work and be smarter than it is. Like, we’re so tolerant of
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri’s, you know, disloyalty, I don’t know, betrayal,
⏹️ ▶️ John non-functionality, that all of the problems that we know are inherent with LLMs will still not
⏹️ ▶️ John be as bad as what Siri does, right? So I really hope that this is the year that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t have to be just Siri, that’s why I say LLM-powered stuff in Apple OSes. There’s tons of stuff they could do with it. It could
⏹️ ▶️ John help out with autocorrect, it could try to summarize things for you, and I say on all Apple OSes, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could roll it out on the Mac, on the iPad, like I’m willing to, I’m ready for Apple to roll out
⏹️ ▶️ John something interesting using LM technology on all of its platforms, even if it’s a small
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, because we know that technology has uses. Like it is, it is, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John solve the world’s problems. It’s not an quote unquote AI. It can’t even do everything that Siri can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not even ready to step into those shoes, but can it help out a little with autocorrect or search
⏹️ ▶️ John and photos? Yes, I think it can do that. And so whatever those little areas are, especially,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, for something like photos, they could roll that out across all their platforms that Photos exists on,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it wouldn’t replace the Photos app. It would just be an existing feature of the Photos app, like search, that
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly works a little bit better than it used to, thanks to LLM technology that runs locally on your Mac. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m looking forward to. And then the side loading and the EU stuff, if nothing comes
⏹️ ▶️ John of that, then we just, whatever. But if something comes from it, it could be potentially very interesting because we’ve speculated
⏹️ ▶️ John about what would happen if there was ever side loading the iPhone, and actually seeing it happen, even if it’s not in our country,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s time to get some popcorn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, what’s interesting about the side loading is I bet it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be that big of a deal. Like it’ll be a big deal for like, you know, podcasts and the press and legally, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a big deal for that, for talking about it. But the actual market for like, who’s going to actually do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? I think it’s gonna be much like the, you know, the whole like, you know, Netherlands dating app thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was thinking of that scenario and I think there’s a big difference between like the dating app scenario where it’s like, well, you just have to charge money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will just charge you anyway. I think, again, I don’t know the details, but I think this is a scenario
⏹️ ▶️ John where once the side loading door is open, like granted, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John go through it the way Apple says you have to, but I don’t think Apple can extract any money from side loading. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be like an inlaiding app. It’s gonna be constrained by what Apple does, like whatever hoops
⏹️ ▶️ John they make you jump through. But once you’ve jumped through those hoops, Apple doesn’t get a cut of anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t, like it’s all sidestepping Apple entirely. If that’s not true, then you’re right. It’s just gonna be like no lens
⏹️ ▶️ John to any app, who cares. But if- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we know that? Do we know whether that’s true? Like whether they’re allowed to charge a commission or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know? I don’t think- See, we’ll see. I don’t know the details, but I would imagine that the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John of this is side-loading is different than using a different payment method when you’re selling an app through Apple’s own app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like, no, I’m not even using Apple’s own app store. The whole point of this is people want to have their own app stores, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which by the way, as a developer, I really don’t want this to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. I know, how can having your own app store make any sense if Apple’s allowed to take a cut. So I have to think that
⏹️ ▶️ John once you jump through whatever hurdles that Apple is going to surely put in your path to sideload
⏹️ ▶️ John anything, that Apple is out of that thing. And if that is true, the reason this is interesting is,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s see what happens when the iPhone is open to all the
⏹️ ▶️ John very hungry, sometimes unscrupulous, but sometimes just plain, like people who are boxed
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the iPhone before. Is there some market need that Apple has not been addressing
⏹️ ▶️ John that will quickly be addressed besides porn, right? But even if it’s just porn, like even if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a giant flood of porn coming in the side loading door on the iPhone, that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John still be interesting because we haven’t seen this platform exposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual market. It’s always been mediated through Apple severely. So we don’t actually know what’s out
⏹️ ▶️ John there and what might come in through the side loading door. I’m kind of glad it would be happening in the EU and not here in case
⏹️ ▶️ John bad things happen, But I’m actually interested in something coming of that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows, with these things, you don’t know how long they’re gonna wind on or whether Apple thinks they’re already in compliance
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other shenanigans. So it’s hard to make any hard and fast predictions. But when I was thinking about this, I immediately thought
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, oh, Apple’s just gonna take their cut. And I’m like, wait a second, what if they can’t? What if that’s the whole point of this thing, that
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s gonna be allowed to have an app store? Like maybe Steam will be on there or Epic App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe like, what will gaming be like on the iPad if you don’t have to go through Apple to launch your game? Maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way that Apple actually, you know, gets a hold in AAA gaming instead of just their existing mobile gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John is through the side door of, you know, Steam, the Steam store and Epic Game
⏹️ ▶️ John Store, side loaded for EU people only, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My doomsday scenario that I really don’t want to happen is if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no restrictions for side loaded stuff, and if you can have side loaded app stores, then I’m afraid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, some major must have app provider like Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say, you know what, Instagram, which we know you’re all gonna install, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer on the app store. You have to download the Facebook app store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and let it like root your phone basically. Like that, and you know, have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to only go through them. They have no more protections from Apple’s rules and they only have technical protections which are much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weaker than technical and policy protections. So like, and then me as a developer, do I have to put my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff in the Facebook store? Like it’s just-
⏹️ ▶️ John Only if you want to sell it to people in the EU. That’s the whole thing about this being limited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but so I hope that outcome doesn’t happen. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will help keep that from happening is if this stays as small as possible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’ll just be like, you know, I’m sure Apple will, if they do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure they’re going to do it in the most reluctant way possible. They’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only do the bare minimum to satisfy whatever regulation is forcing it. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to challenge it at every step. They, you know, they might, as you said, like, they might say we’re already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in compliance with some like little piddly crap and they’re still taking a 27% commission or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. And then the EU might like, you know, sue them or whatever they have to work, work through all that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this could be a huge fight for a long time. I don’t for a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe that Apple is going to give any ground that they are not forced to give.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, I would not expect that they would allow side-loading anywhere else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides the EU. Like if they don’t have to, they won’t do it. And whatever the EU mandate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for side-loading, they’re gonna do the bare minimum to qualify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that, and they’re gonna make it as hostile as possible for people to actually do it, to ensure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one does it. whether it’s the customer side of like, you know, scary warnings, or whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the legal developer side of you got to give us 27% or both, they’re going to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s really unpleasant for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is that, that Google case that they lost against Epic that actually is in the US. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John are other legal precedents potentially rumbling towards Apple, maybe not next year, but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the year after that. So this being confined to the EU for now, is not
⏹️ ▶️ John does not mean it’s going to be that way forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I’m hoping that sideloading on iOS ends up being as much of a nothing burger as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sideloading on Android has been. And you know, yeah, maybe we’ll get a flood of porn. Maybe we’ll get like, we can probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get emulators maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but the sideloading on Android has been not a big deal, partially for the
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons that Google just lost that case.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t naturally that way. Google sort of put its thumb on the scale to ensure that, oh, you can sideload,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you really don’t want to do that, do you? That’s why they lost that case. So things may
⏹️ ▶️ John change in the future.
2024: HomePod?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as for the HomePod, I’ve finally reached Casey level. Don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m slowly replacing my HomePods with Sonos Gear and I’m much happier for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They work a lot better. The HomePod is smaller and looks nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in some situations sounds better, but it has broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my heart too many times. The Sonos Gear is really reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Alexa assistant on it is rock solid, fast, and reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hadn’t used Alexa in a while because I threw away my last Echo, the ball one that kept dying and being weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Amazon’s own devices have ratcheted up the annoyance level over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much it’s like, by the way, did you know I can annoy you in new and interesting ways if you say this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of that seems to be absent on the Sonos version of it. It seems to be like a more limited version of Alexa, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those ways I think is a feature on a bug. I have been extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressed with the Alexa assistant’s ability to answer general knowledge questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Questions that I think are somewhat difficult for a voice assistant to answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Knowledge like one of the recent things was from Adventure Time we couldn’t remember Marceline’s dad’s name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I asked it from across the room, is the name of Marceline the Vampire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Queen’s father?” And it got it. It didn’t waffle, it didn’t say, well, on the web I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found this thing that might be it. No, it just gave me the answer. It was directly correct. The other day I asked something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what was the outcome? Oh, my son was asking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Michael Jackson, because one of his songs was on, and it was asking like, oh, how did he die? And we mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, well, there we had this drug thing, and his doctor was put on trial. And I asked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, how old was Michael Jackson when he died? it got that instantly, you know, gave me the straight answer, perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then as Adam was asking about, you know, what happened with his death, I asked something along the lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, like, what was the outcome of the trial for Michael Jackson’s doctor?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Figuring, like, that’s a pretty tricky question for it to parse. Like, it got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was perfect. And I was thinking, like, man, asking Siri this kind of question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Siri can’t even reliably play music when I ask it to play music. Like, it, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Alexa for all of its faults of, you know, by the way, did you know, it as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a voice assistant is really solid. It is fast, it is reliable, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprisingly good at general knowledge questions. Not to mention the fact that it kicks butt on like timers and all that other stuff too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So while it feels kind of gross to like Alexa right now, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find a lot of the other stuff they do with it kind of distasteful with their own products, as the voice assistant on the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices, I’m fine with it. I’m totally fine with it. And, you know, AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so much better on Sonos. The sound quality is really great. The sync, the multi-room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff is rock solid. Like, I am super happy with the Sonos gear. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry HomePod. I gave you lots of chances. You blew them all. And I’m done with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, this is what you get for using Siri all this time. I’ve always been telling you that both Alexa and the Google thing are so much better. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Google is the best one. Alexa is clearly second, and Siri is so far distant. third is not even
⏹️ ▶️ John funny. And I still do it. It’s the game we still play. I still ask all three. And it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John we always ask Siri for comic relief. Let’s see what Siri does with this. And it’s always hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Alexa and Google, depends on what you’re asking. I think Alexa knowing, having the IMDB database
⏹️ ▶️ John probably helps a lot with those kind of specific questions that it can answer more directly. But the Google Home, I mean, it’s essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s all it’s doing is essentially running the Google search and reading you that aforementioned top summary thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is often close to being the answer. although as both of these things start to get LLM powered,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I start to go, it would be nice, you know, the Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, if you told me whether you used LLM to come up with that Michael Jackson age of death, because I would prefer if you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t, because I’m sure you can give me a plausible age, but now I have to go to the Wikipedia page to check
⏹️ ▶️ John what the actual age was. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t wanna not trust it because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM stuff, because LLM can give you a plausible answer to all sorts of stuff, but I wanna know, Is this an answer
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes from, it’s not even, I can’t even characterize it. It’s like, in the days before LLM, the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John you could give that answer is by pulling it off some well-known web page or a database that you have. But now,
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs can give you that answer with zero knowledge. They don’t have to know it, and if they do know it, they don’t have to give it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just produce something that is plausible, statistically plausible, and lots of answers could be statistically plausible, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you as the user are like, oh, great, it gave us the exact age. The whole point is you didn’t know the age. That’s why you
⏹️ ▶️ John asked. So you have, unless it tells you like two or 97, if it’s within a plausible range, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be like, I guess that’s the answer. And pretty soon that’s not gonna be as true as it is today, which is kind of sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we are lucky in that, I think running LLM inference is still much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive than running like a search index, like look up. So like whatever they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already built that didn’t use LLMs is probably so much cheaper to run queries against.
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ask something about like movies or TV or whatever, doing a reasonable search of the
⏹️ ▶️ John internet movie database, database and giving you the answer that way with a little bit of intelligence is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much better than saying we threw a bunch of crap into this LLM and stuff comes out sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that cool? Just do the database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lookup. All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Notion and Trade Coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long.
2024: Themes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you do any kind of New Year’s resolution or Cortex style themes?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Nope. Definitely not. Well, I mean, I listen to the show where they talk about them. Does that count?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ John counts a little bit, yeah. I listen and think, boy, how unlike me that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re very regimented. I’ve often felt like I frequently align with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gray’s theme. So for listeners, if for some reason you don’t listen to Cortex, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gist of what we’re talking about is that it’s a thing Cortex does every year where rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a New Year’s resolution, and our friend Merlin has very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successfully argued against New Year’s resolutions over time of being like fairly dysfunctional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and generally, you know, considered harmful in the sense that resolutions are usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting yourself up to fail pretty, pretty effectively and pretty shortly. And then you just feel bad about yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as opposed to what, you know, Gray, Mike, and Cortex do is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more setting a theme for the year to kind of guide your thinking and work over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year as opposed to a resolution that’s like, I’m going to, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so as an example, instead of saying like, I’m gonna lose 20 pounds by June, you know, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a specific goal, you can call it a resolution, but that’s the kind of thing that’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very easy for that kind of thing to fail. You also tend to know early on in the year how much you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failed ahead of it. And you might then like fall off the wagon and go back to your old habits or whatever, uh, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a theme could be more like health. Like I’m going to make this the year of improving my health.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is something that it’s hard to distinctly fail at. I mean, unless you die, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, you know, like it’s hard, sorry. Like it’s, it’s hard to like outright fail to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point where you’re discouraged from continuing. And it’s more like, I’m going to make decisions throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the year, thinking of this as a guiding. principle. And so it seems to be much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more effective. And my apologies to the Cortex podcast if I have any of this wrong or if I’m mischaracterizing it, but I think it’s the gist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. There’s a YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John video that explains it pretty well. We can find that for the notes. We’ll put it in. But if not, just search YouTube for
⏹️ ▶️ John Cortex yearly themes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think it’s a really nice system. It’s a really nice reframing of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of thing that we do, like getting away from the resolution thing. Because again, resolutions are so
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you two ever do resolutions?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, I’ve done them here and there and I usually forget like by the second week of January I even forget
⏹️ ▶️ John You forget or you fail them or like or you lose interest like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of the above. Generally both. All three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah it’s uh I like the idea of the themes and uh and I oftentimes line up with Gray’s themes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But but do you do your own thing you like the idea of them and you when you hear Gray’s themes you’re like oh that seems like a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ John but do you actually ever like say this this is going to be my theme for the year. Even if you’re saying I’m going to adopt
⏹️ ▶️ John Gray’s theme and I’m going to do that this year too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Generally, for the last few years, generally yes, I have kind of set a theme.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But sometimes I forget what it is and it might change at like six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John later. Wow. You gotta write it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a great theme. But generally speaking, like last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of had the guiding principle of closing open projects because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my life was full of open projects. It’s not anymore though, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right. Yeah, I know. It’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like moving, house renovation, like all that stuff. Like it just was so there was so much going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and it was very overwhelming. This year, I’m making it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the year of overcast because overcast has really suffered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last couple of years in that, like I’ve had all this other life stuff going on. I have not been able to give it a lot of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually have turned that around substantially in the last few months. Like I’m giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast way more time in the last few months and I’m not only am I making good progress on the big rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m also just much happier like it had been so long since I really had a lot of good programming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work done So I’m much happier doing this now So I’m really making this year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the year of Overcast that I’m going to get the rewrite out this year It’s gonna be a ton of work. There’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton to do. I can’t tell you when this year it’s coming out because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am no better at estimating software timing than anyone else.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing about themes. The theme doesn’t say that it’s the year I’m going to ship the new version of Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just says the year of Overcast. And I would say, based on listening to all the theme episodes over the years, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a little bit too specific for a theme. But still, it not being so specific to say the
⏹️ ▶️ John year I launched the rewrite of Overcast, it is more general than that. But I bet you could go one level more
⏹️ ▶️ John general if you needed to. But since you’re not, this is not an official Cortex brand theme. This is just a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco blockers adoption. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John knockoff. Now you have re you have recorded it in a place. You haven’t written it down
⏹️ ▶️ John in a theme system journal or even a notes document, but you do have recorded it on this podcast and Casey will
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about it. But I won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s correct. Themes, the theme system journal looks like a really nice product that I would not use because I don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper. It looks really nice though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. We have computers, people who like paper, like paper. But every time I see those things, it’s like, this is the whole reason
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t have to do things on paper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish I liked paper and pens. It looks so cool Like the whole world looks so cool and you got all these nice notebooks.
⏹️ ▶️ John just see my own handwriting. That’s not cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s like I said, it’s a problem like every time I hand write anything now like god this sucks I just want to type
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re writing everything in graffiti. I know it’s terrible. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nice pull my palm 5x is already broken by the way
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t your a’s not have crosses on them. I don’t know how to write anymore graffiti I write all the letters
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same spot on top of each other and then I can’t read it later Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but you know, with like setting the goal as or setting the theme as overcast, I’m intentionally being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little too specific with that because that’s that’s the level of focus it needs this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. If I if I would instead say something like the year of work, that is a valid thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that was great last year one. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a year of new decades. Dawn sequel. Whatever. So like it
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t actually, this is an inside joke. Their their theme, the titles of their themes have had varying quality over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but in certain years you might wanna like, you know, open new opportunities. In certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years you might wanna focus on closing opportunities or focus on the ones you have. Like, there can be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broad themes. For me, this year, the theme needs to be overcast. Like, it is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of my income. It is like my main business. It is also my main product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I craft. Like, it is the only, it’s the main thing I work on as a programmer, because you know, I don’t work on the CMS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s very important to me, and it has been neglected. I have neglected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because I have been spending too much time doing other work or other needs in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this year is when I need to get back to it. And it makes me confident that I can do it, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve already been swinging back to it for a month, and it’s been going very well. A month
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ve been doing it? I think you’ve been swinging back to it for a while now. Although this theme,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously Cortex is about productivity people’s work lives or whatever, but themes don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be focused on work life, which is another reason that Overcast is maybe a little bit too specific. And you will hear themes
⏹️ ▶️ John from the two of them that are not absolutely confined to one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the many things they do as part of their work. Obviously, health would be an example of that because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not work related. It’s something you’re focusing on yourself. But I’m always waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ John a yearly theme that has nothing to do with any of their jobs, right? Like year of romance.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could apply that to some of their work as well, but like always the themes are like a thing that applies
⏹️ ▶️ John to one of my businesses and also my life. And I guess health is the closest they’ve come, but like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, uh, this is not, not going to be the year of romance for me any more than any previous years were because I don’t do themes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I would suggest that for people, someone, someone should pick that up. Your romance is out there. Who’s going to be brave enough to pick it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I, I, all kidding aside, I really like the idea of a yearly theme, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I don’t feel like I have ever, ever, ever landed on one that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can really grab onto and say, yes, this was what I want for this year. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not their fault. That’s my fault. But I just, I can’t, I can’t get there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m also not disciplined enough. So let’s say that this year was the year of work. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I decide that I just want to get distracted by, I don’t know, wiring the house for Ethernet and fiber and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there goes a year of work.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could, you could have had past themes like that again, themes that are not focused on work. You could have had year of reproduction.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have had multiple years of reproduction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Well, in that sense, I
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you did. I think you did have multiple years.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes. Production.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had probably what, like five years of reproduction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not all yearly themes. I mean, it is aspirational. And that is, is a thing that you went through that
⏹️ ▶️ John is difficult, that would guide all your decisions for a long period of time. You just didn’t write it down in a little book.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I guess that’s true. But I view, even though I agree with everything you’re saying, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the yearly theme by no means has to be work-related, I do view it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it should be work involved, even if it’s not specifically for work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know. I don’t feel like I am good enough and disciplined enough to stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. And I think that if they were here to argue with us, they would say, well, it’s not about discipline. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about guiding your actions and guiding your thoughts. And that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s what you make of it, I think, largely. Like, and that’s by design.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know. I just, I feel like if this year was the year of, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfecting Kalshi, which is again, too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the year, I don’t know. I can’t even think of a good example because I just, I can’t, I can’t think of
⏹️ ▶️ John Year of living dangerously. There’s one for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, how would you live dangerously, John Syracuse? Would you leave the house every once in a while?
⏹️ ▶️ John Coke instead of Sprite? I’m leaving the house all the time. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you won’t come to New York when two-thirds of the podcast is there. I’m still grumpy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still grumpy, John. You were there for a reason. Mm-hmm. Not that I want to get stuck in the sand.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You know what your reason could have been?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To see some of your great friends that you haven’t seen in five friggin’ years. Four, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, just wait until we all get invited to an Apple event.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’d like you to go anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You would go anyway. There’s no chance. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John go. I’m ready. Apple. I’m out here. I’m ready to go to Apple events.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would you… So if they have a Big Vision Pro event and invite all of us, which I guarantee you is not going to happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if that’s for some reason happened, would you go?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no. Ever since I’ve been out of my jobby job, I’ve been prepared to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John things that I get invited to by Apple. And the one time it happened, I had to demur because
⏹️ ▶️ John I had my son’s high school graduation. And then since then, I’ve never been invited. So I’m just out here waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m sorry, I wanted to go to my son’s high school graduation, so sue me. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter’s going to graduate soon too, and not this year but next year, I’m going to go to that graduation too, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John so don’t invite me on the day that she’s going to have her high school graduation. But barring that, I’m ready to go to Apple events.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still haven’t even been to Apple Park, I still want to go.