576: Quiet Little Leech
29 Feb 2024The cancelation of Apple’s car project, excitement for potential AI applications, the wonders of email clients, and starting a car in fifth gear.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco is many things, but patient is… not one of them.
- Blackbox
- Crouton
- Television (App Store link)
- ForeFlight Voyager
- Flight Control
- Follow-up:
- Vision Pro demand
- Clarification about Apple’s new iMessage encryption
- Extracting data from iCloud (via John Males)
- Magnets and compasses
- …in ✨ space ✨ (via Adam Wuerl)
- …can be canceled out by Core Motion (via Zev Eisenberg)
- Vision Pro & motion blur (via Orlando Herrera)
- Meta’s “Pixel Codec Avatars” vs. Personas (via Gottfried Chen)
- CrackGate
- Application Submission Feedback regarding Project Titan
- Ask ATP:
- What email clients do we use? (via Joe)
- Why hasn’t Marco
fallen off the deep endexplored a DIY mechanical keyboard? (via Warren Bakay) - How interested are we in LLMs & generative AIs?
- Post-show: WWDC wish-casting
Chapters
- A super-exciting story
- Starting in fifth gear
- Vision Pro demand
- Follow-up: Quantum crypto
- Takeout couches
- Magnets vs. compasses
- visionOS motion blur
- Become an ATP member!
- Pixel Codec Avatars
- Crackgate
- Car project canceled
- Join us!
- #askatp: Email clients
- #askatp: DIY ergo keyboards
- #askatp: AI interest
- Ending theme
- Apple-AI excitement
A super-exciting story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I’ve been using your Vision Pro a lot this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you asking genuinely or you, I feel like I’m walking into something and I don’t know what, I’m a little scared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’ve been using it a medium amount. I feel a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bad because I haven’t really been using the Vision Pro and I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m being a bad Apple fan and a bad developer and a bad podcaster by not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really using it much
⏹️ ▶️ John You think we haven’t talked enough about Vision Pro, is that what you’re worried about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe that’s, I don’t know. Cause like I, so, so finally like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, so I’ve been in this, you know, we’re doing our house renovations that’s taking forever. Um, so we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this rental. I don’t want to like buy my new desk and set it up here only to move it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few weeks or whenever we actually finally get out of here. Any day now, any day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I interrupt you? Can I interrupt you right there? So I’m guessing the end of the story is not only have you bought a desk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you have somehow ended up with a bespoke monitor just for this, just for this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not entirely wrong, but not right. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here we go. All right, settle in everyone. Let’s hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had all these hopes of like, okay, when the Vision Pro comes out, I’ll use the Mac mirroring mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And cause like I had, the rental has this like, you know, crappy basic, you know, one of those particle board staples, $50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desks. It’s fine for most people, but it’s too high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like desks for me, one of the reasons I get standing desks is because they’re also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjustable height desks easily. Most desks are too high for comfortable computer use for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. And I would argue correct ergonomics for almost anybody, but that’s a separate discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so I’m at this like particle board rectangle and it’s too high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my wrists are all hurting and I’m not able to use my good keyboard and I don’t have space to like lay everything out on the tiny little thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, I should just, should I just order my new desk early and just, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be heavy. I don’t wanna like move it, just in a few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but Marco, the desk is too damn high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. And then secondly, the monitor situation, like not having my giant monitor, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna try the Vision Pro thing and just work on that for like a month. And again, it’s kind of just not compatible with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyes much. I realized, like, wait a minute, somewhere in our garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of stuff that we moved out of the old house that’s still all in boxes and moving blankets, somewhere in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s an old Ikea desk frame. And somewhere else in there, there’s a big plank of wood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that tip was using as like a fake desktop on top of some other stuff like if I can find those two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I can have an lightweight easily moved desk that will be the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size and the right height like so anyway long story short dug through the garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was an adventure but I got it and I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few months back because we were about to move into to our new house in the fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also ordered another Pro Display XDR because that’s the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mailed you the LG UltraFine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very thankful for. I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally as we speak. It is plugged into my computer right this very moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so the reason I mailed it to you is that I intended to, once we moved, to replace it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with another XDR. And I was hoping they would update the XDR in the meantime. They haven’t. And I was also hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have been moved in five months ago. that hasn’t happened. So it’s been sitting in the box, like waiting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be used. Again, same rationale. Like, do I wanna like unpack this giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor from its giant box and set it up just to have to move it again in a few weeks? I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just use the Vision Pro Max screen sharing mode. That didn’t pan out. The desk ergonomics sucked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A few days ago, I finally was like, you know what? I think we’re gonna be in this house for like three more weeks. I am just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna set this stuff up, even though it’s only for three weeks. Like, I’m just gonna set up the stupid desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and set up a stupid giant monitor. Maybe I’ll waste an afternoon and have to waste another afternoon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking them all down and moving them in three weeks, but maybe it’ll be worth it. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it. This is not surprising at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a thousand percent worth it. I wish I would have done it weeks ago or a couple of months ago even. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, working on a correct height desk with a giant monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so happy for the people out there for whom the Vision Pro Max screen sharing mode is working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, that’s wonderful for you, I’m so happy for you. It’s not the case for me. And so now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have, like, the real thing again, oh my god, what a difference!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Night and day in terms of comfort, ergonomics, my productivity, my eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working. Oh my god, it’s fantastic! So, long story short, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally moved some furniture around and it was really worth it. It’s a super exciting story.
Starting in fifth gear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To answer the question that you were originally asking, perhaps as an excuse to tell this story, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t begrudge you for, I have been using my Vision Pro. I have certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been using it less than I had in the first couple of weeks I had it, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actively working on the Vision Pro version of CallSheet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just in the last week, I don’t remember if we brought this up last week or not, but in the last week I’ve gotten to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve gone from actively embarrassing to, well, this kind of sucks, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least workable. And so for the select few that are on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the test flight, and I am not looking for more at the moment, but thank you for asking. The select few that are on the test flight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do have a Vision Pro version. My hope, not a guarantee, in fact, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t happen, but my hope is that I’ll have it done before my birthday, which is in just a couple of weeks now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I am actively working on it. And I tell you what, the easiest way, in my personal opinion, to do Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro work is to do it using Mac virtual display in the Vision Pro environment, with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Vision Pro on your face and so on and so forth. I still like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I maybe even like it plus plus. I certainly don’t like it more than three physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K monitors that are staring me in the face right now, giving me a sunburn, but I do like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t find it burdensome or bothersome in the ways that you do. And as we’ve covered before, like that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to imply that, that your feelings or story is wrong and mine is right or vice versa, you know, just like you said, a moment ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some people it does work and for you, it doesn’t. Um, I’m one of those people that does work for. So anyways, uh, I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using it. Some I’ve gotten sidetracked with other professional, nothing bad, but other professional responsibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I haven’t been doing as much work this week as I usually do. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I will say that last night, Aaron had her monthly, uh, book club, which happens in the evening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. And so I had a couple of hours to kill, you know, once the kids were in bed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by myself and I started by looking at my repertoire within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or my, my, uh, my collection within Apple, you know, the Apple TV app in terms of movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve bought, which really amounts to, you know, movies that I connected with movies everywhere, movies, anywhere, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s called. And well, of which there are not many, to be honest with you, but heat is one of them. And so I watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the scene from heat. Marco, you have not seen heat. I assume. I think I might’ve. Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a miracle. It’s a great movie. But, um, anyways, I watched the, uh, Bank Heist scene from Heat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, which was amazing. And then I just, I didn’t want to watch the whole movie cause I’d seen it relatively recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve been having an itch recently to rewatch, uh, Tron Legacy or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sequel is called. I forget what it was called, but it was like 10 years ago now. And I watched the first like half an hour of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not 3d or anything like that. It’s just a regular 2d movie, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, the version I have is not 3D. I think I was watching from Disney+, I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I was looking at the wrong one.
⏹️ ▶️ John They might not offer a 3D version of it, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a 3D version. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Well, whatever ended up happening, be that user error, which it very well could have been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the one I was watching was not 3D, but it was pretty delightful. You know, this is not the sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I would do if Erin was with me. I mean, she would be happy to watch the movies I watched, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would not be sitting there with the goggles on my face watching a movie while she’s next to me. But when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by myself, it’s pretty great. And I did enjoy it quite a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before I forgot, we got a great feedback email from Sam’s dad, who has a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good theory about maybe why it’s not working out so well for me with the Mac stuff in the Vision Pro as other people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sam’s dad says, like a few of us, Marco was blessed with perfect vision until his 40s. Because he didn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rely on glasses, he’s probably more accustomed to moving his eyes than someone like Casey or John, who have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been burdened with glasses their entire lives. Because I think it is more natural for native eyeglass wearers to change their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field of view by moving their head instead of their eyes, I believe the foveated rendering is less evident to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than someone like Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can test this. Why would I not move my eyes? It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t have glasses where I can’t look through the
⏹️ ▶️ John edges. I can look, like I’ll do right now. I’m looking straight ahead, my head is not moving. I can look at the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John menu through my glasses and the Apple menu is not warped or bent or broken or blurry or anything like that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly crisp and clear. Maybe it’s because because I don’t have progressives, maybe it’s because my prescription isn’t that bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t, the part where this logic falls apart is the idea that because you wear glasses, you’re more likely to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John your head. I think multi-monitor people are more likely to turn their head because they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John their head, otherwise they can’t see the stuff that’s on the far left of their far left monitor, but I’m a single monitor person, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, so I thought it was an interesting theory, but maybe John is more right than not. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as, like, we’re still in such early days, like, you know, we keep seeing some, you know, various doom and gloom things about Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, like, oh, it’s, you know, people are returning or whatever, We had a little bit of that last week and, you know, a couple more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stories trickling out here and there. I personally, honestly, I have seen a somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frightening decline in the number of people using Overcast on Vision Pro over the last two weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Using the iPad version of Vision Pro, to be clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the iPad version of an audio-only podcast player in a virtual reality headset. So obviously, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not the ideal test case. But I’ve seen, you know, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the week after launch is about twice as many users as I currently have this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now really quickly, is that basically how many people, and check-in is not the right turn of phrase,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but how many people checked in and opened the app each day? Is that how you’re computing this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and no matter how I smooth it out, if I do a weekly rolling average, it’s the same pattern.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost half the users already. But we are still in such early days of Vision Pro, everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still figuring out what it is and what they want to do with it and what it’s for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really start finding its legs and finding the really great things and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having those great things mature into actual developed app markets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and content markets. If we all buy Vision Pros and then half of us decide, eh, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not doing what I wanted it to do, or it turns out this thing I wanted to do and this doesn’t work very well or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not like a failure of the product. That just means our expectations were a little off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now we have to figure out what is it good for, if anything. And I think every other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major new tech product category, they’ve all gone through similar arcs. There have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very few exceptions that were just instant hits and instant perfect market and usefulness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fits right at the door. We’ve had a few complaints. I’ve seen a few complaints from people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m so down on Division Pro. Why am I such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evil person insulting the work of all these hard engineers or whatever? And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really see it that way. I think this is a product that has a lot of potential,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of which is unrealized so far, not because it’s a flop or a failure, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s brand new. We try, you know, I’ve said this many times, like we always, whenever a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco category is coming out, we always project our needs from the current things we know onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So, oh, the watch will replace the smartphone or whatever. I’ll get all my work done on my iPad. I won’t have to buy a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever again, like that kind of thing. And what we see over and over again is that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be true for some people, but not for most. And then we figure out what it is good for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it finds its market. We’re in the very early stages of this. It’s way too soon to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco declare anything great or terrible for any particular use, and it’s going to take time to sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel as though, and maybe, maybe I am over indexing on my own personal experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I feel as though I didn’t hear a lot about revolutionary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a bit dramatic, but like revolutionary apps that were available at launch day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had the chance to try black box for example, but I’ve understood black box is one of those apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and certainly it was amazing on iOS and I loved it. Um, I haven’t had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a chance to try it on the vision pro yet, but I’ve heard it’s very, very good. But there wasn’t too much like crouton is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another one that I’ve heard is that’s a recipe app that does some really cool and great stuff with like timers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and placing a timer, like over the pot, you’re cooking. You saw this in Joanna Stern’s video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t forget the television app by Sandwich. That’s really cool. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that’s what I was, that’s exactly where I was going with this is that television, I don’t think was available at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launch, although honestly, you know, we’re a month later or whatever. So it’s not, not even a month later. So it was available shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thereafter. And television is definitely very, very cool. And my understanding is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a YouTube support for it is coming out soon. So I’m sorry, I should back up. Television allows you to put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of of what feels like an infinite number of TVs, like set top TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you would see in a house like when you or me or John was growing up, you can just stick that in your space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have it on as like an ambient background noise, which John has talked quite a bit about how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much he hates that, but I don’t mind it. And so you can stick a TV somewhere, put your own video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file in it or presumably a YouTube soon and just have that play in the background. And it’s spatial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio, so you hear it off in the corner of your room if that’s where put it in so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t have to be in the background. I don’t think that’s part of the app. You could just put it right in front of you and watch it. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that is true. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey very strange that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve decided this is the, this is the app to put on a television in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s fair. Um, but in any case, another great example of this, I don’t remember the name of the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offhand, but I just tried earlier today, uh, some app by ForeFlight that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lets you see, it puts like a disc with a mildly 3d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the landscape around an airport and we’ll show you real-time flights coming in and out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that airport. It’s one of those things that’s kind of silly and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t really need the Vision Pro, but damn if it isn’t cool, the Vision Pro, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what I mean? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John should be able to trace the paths for the planes to land with your finger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. Oh man, I loved flight control so much. That was my favorite. To this day, it might be my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John That would have been actually a good Vision Pro launch app if the people who currently they own that IP,
⏹️ ▶️ John they like flight control, and it was basically just flight control, but in 3D, really hard to do with the hand tracking that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John offers now though, I imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very true. But anyways, my point that I’m getting at slowly here is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I feel like we’re starting to see a bunch of much more interesting apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come out. And like, take CallSheet for an example. I’d like to think it’s gonna be pretty good on Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, but there’s nothing especially unique about the Vision Pro build. all I’m really doing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making the iPad build fit in in the platform and follow the platform conventions and things like that. There’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s unique about it for the vision pro in terms of like, you know, uh, having it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be particularly spatial or anything like that. It’s just, it’s just an, a very fancy iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. And, and I feel like things like television, like this foreflight app, whose name escapes me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I think the, and crouton and black box, I think those apps are better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey examples of thinking outside the box with vision OS. And I suspect over time, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is basically what you’re saying, Marco, over time, we’re going to see more and more of that as we discover, what is this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is this device really good for? And to quickly answer the question that you’ve kind of implied,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you sort of asked before, like, I mean, obviously I didn’t return mine, but I don’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have spent the money on one originally, if it wasn’t for, you know, the professional obligation that I feel like I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do like having it. Like if you, if you consider that obscene amount of money, a wash at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like having it and I am probably going to be taking some plane travel next month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and assuming I have the gumption to be that guy, you bet I’m going to be watching a movie on the plane or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing work or whatever the case may be. So yeah, it is an extremely cool device and if any of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem down on it, and I think I speak for Marco in saying this, if we’re down on it or we sound like we’re down on it, I don’t think we mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to at all. It’s extremely cool and extremely fun. It’s just everyone, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of us slash two of us are trying to figure out where it fits in our lives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s going to be very much like, you know, to bring it back to our roots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, like starting a car in fifth gear. Like you can do it. It’s going to be a slow start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s a little bit challenging, but it is possible to do. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get something, you can get to a pretty great place. And I think this is just going to have a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow buildup. We don’t know what to do with it. Apple doesn’t know what to do with it, but we can tell it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cool. Some people have found some things to do with it already, and we’re going to just grow them from here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is largely a dev kit for developers right now. Again, I don’t think there’s much of an app market to speak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of yet, but again, it’s so early days. We’re not going to know yet. No one’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to declare this like, oh, this thing is great or this thing is terrible because there’s just so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far unrealized potential that will just take a long time to develop. I’m talking on the order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of probably years, not months. Like it’s probably going to be a couple of years before there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like a decent amount of stuff on Vision Pro, a decent amount of reasons to buy one for most people, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and certainly it’s going to take longer than that for the prices to come down and for the capabilities to get better. So it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a slow process, but I think it is going to move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward. It’s just going to, you know, it might be, it might take a while for us to really see that. Yep. Agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we’re not talking about Vision Pro this week. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John no we’re not. Anyway, good afternoon and goodnight.
Vision Pro demand
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, while you were talking, I pulled this item, which I was going to save for next week’s follow up, but it is very relevant to
⏹️ ▶️ John what you just discussed. So new top item,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new top item, breaking news. Vision Pro demand is higher than expected returns down to 1% reports 9
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 5 Mac Ming-Chi Kuo writes the US shipments are expected to be between 200 and 250,000 units
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year, better than Apple’s original estimate of 150 to 200,000. Apparently, according to 9 to 5 Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has asked suppliers to increase production, which quote, which Ming-Chi Kuo believes is due to a mix of relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high US demand and plans to roll out sales in other countries in the coming months.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what Ming-Chi Kuo would know about Apple’s return rates, but I would expect him to know about
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has asked suppliers to increase production because that’s his beat, Apple supply chain.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like this is very counter to the, you know, the very predictable story of like, people are returning
⏹️ ▶️ John them, no one wants them, sales are down or even Marco was saying you could get one immediately. That means they’re doing badly but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s estimates were apparently they either did a conservative first order and now are
⏹️ ▶️ John asking for more or they just really didn’t think they would sell this money. So I think it’s doing fine. doing
⏹️ ▶️ John as expected for year one sales of an expensive weird thing.
Follow-up: Quantum crypto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, I work as an applied cryptographer and have been researching this stuff for several years, including deploying it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into production systems at my jobby job. One minor correction to how the PQ hybrid scheme was described,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not that the data would be encrypted twice, once with classical crypto like ECDH and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twice with PQC, rather two separate shared secrets are established, one classical, one PQC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then combined cryptographically to form a single session key that inherits the security properties of both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crypto systems with a single encrypt operation. That’s pretty neat. The reason for this is not entirely to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hedge against potential bugs in the PQC implementation, but also to hedge against the selected PQC algorithm itself becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken by continued cryptanalysis. And that’s not such a crazy notion. In 2022, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finalist algorithms for NIST’s PQC selection process, the algorithm is called Psyche, S-I-K-E,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I love, was broken with a 10-year-old laptop. Whoopsie-dipsies. So keeping the classical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crypto in the equation means that you at least fall back to the security of today, which is battle-hardened from millions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hours of research attempting unsuccessfully to break it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought that was neat. Like the, because post-quantum cryptography is so new,
⏹️ ▶️ John it hasn’t really been battle-tested. So people have ideas. We think this will be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John protected against quantum computers and oops, it’s not protected against a 10-year-old laptop. Well, let’s try,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s try again, right? And so that’s, you know, I thought it was like, okay, bugs in Apple’s implementation,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if they messed it up or whatever, but it could just be they implemented it perfectly. but the algorithm is so new
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t perform as expected. And that happens with all, you know, cryptography things, like all the
⏹️ ▶️ John weaknesses that were found in things that were once considered a state of the art, like, you know, the original RSA,
⏹️ ▶️ John MD5, all these things that are much less strong now than we thought they were back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John day. And that could happen with Apple selection of their post-quantum cryptography thing. So underneath it
⏹️ ▶️ John all is the cryptography they’ve been using up till now, which has, you know, thus far stood the test of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing, another peculiarity I wanted to call out was the choice of security levels in Apple’s hybrid construction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are using the PQC algorithm Kyber1024, which is roughly equivalent to the security level of an AES-256,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or in NIST’s parlance, a level 5. But they’re combining it with the elliptic curve algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey P256, which is roughly equivalent to AES-128, or level 1 in NIST’s parlance in IST.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The level terminology is confusing because Apple seems to have invented their own leveling system that is unrelated to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mentioned here. But what that tells me is that they are really skeptical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Kyber, so they are going with the highest security level possible while keeping the lower classical crypto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level. Presumably, this is so that they continue doing their comparatively more efficient per-message
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rekeying on the classical portion of the hybrid construction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if there’s doubts about the post-quantum thing and you have a choice of strength, just pick the strongest one and cross
⏹️ ▶️ John your fingers and, you know, just keep doing the the classical one in the
⏹️ ▶️ John way that’s efficient and doesn’t burn more resources and take more time. I think the Apple’s post-quantum
⏹️ ▶️ John cryptography approach for messages is very sound and well-considered.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t mean that they’re not gonna have to take a second or third pass on it, but it’s better to
⏹️ ▶️ John move now for the reasons we talked about last week. We’re not, there’s no quantum computers out there
⏹️ ▶️ John now that are able to efficiently crack Apple’s systems. But if someone’s storing a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of iMessage data now by intercepting it and they’d have this pile of encrypted stuff that they think they can’t read You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want them cracking that open 10 20 years from now when they can read it So the sooner
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple starts the big conversion of like sort of silently in the background kind of like they did with APFS silently
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background all your iMessage conversations will start converting to this as long as everyone who’s Participating them has at least
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 17.4 or whatever the other equivalent versions of yeah, it’s good to get this transition
Takeout couches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Males writes, something I discovered recently, you can download your data from Apple in Google takeout style,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including Apple Notes from privacy.apple.com. The notes are downloaded in a format that includes the data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Importing the data back into Notes would be tricky, I presume.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I knew about this already, or I forgot about it. But as soon as I saw this, I’m like, I’ve been looking for something to export
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. I think maybe last time I did it, I was using some app or script that exports them as PDF, or just exports the text or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I took a look at it, and the privacy.apple.com thing is structured
⏹️ ▶️ John very much like Google Takeout, which is just sort of like a little, you know, form that you fill out. What do you want to export?
⏹️ ▶️ John How many files do you want it in? You can pick like a maximum size, give it to me in files no bigger than five gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever you want. And just like Google Takeout, you finish filling out the form and then it says, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re working on your export. We’ll send you an email when it’s done. Unlike Google Takeout, this seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to take a long time. I requested my notes archive, just my notes archive, which is not that big. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe a thousand notes, not a lot of attachments in them, not a lot of images, two days ago, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still working on it. So Google Takeout, I mean, Google Takeout does take some amount of time, but I don’t think I’ve ever waited more
⏹️ ▶️ John than 24 hours for my Google Takeout of my like gigs and gigs of Gmail. So I’ll tell you how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did the Takeout thing because I wanted to see what format does it give it to me in. Any format is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John better than nothing. So I may add this to my sort of annual like paranoid data dump
⏹️ ▶️ John backup of online stuff, because at this point I have a lot of stuff in notes And I would be sad if it all went
⏹️ ▶️ John away due to some weird bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this going to be a better alternative than just having some app like read the SQLite file in MacOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dump it for you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I will say, like, I mean, part of what’s in the notes is I have these nicely formatted documents with like photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and text coloring and like inline images and style text and you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re nice documents. And so if I just had like, you know, if I just dumped the text file from some
⏹️ ▶️ John blob and SQLite plus a bunch of attachment images, that’s not the same thing, you know what I mean? But
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see what format this is in. It could be equally useless. I’m hoping it is something that preserves some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John fidelity of the work I’ve put into some of the more complicated documents, like the one where I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John pick out a new couch that’s like seven years old and we still haven’t bought a new couch. But there’s a lot of pictures of couches in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and URLs and informations and measurements and images and map locations for stores
⏹️ ▶️ John that have stuff. And yeah, I would want that to be preserved. Wait, are you gonna actually buy a new couch? That’s major news.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, signs say no, but for many years now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been trying to buy a new couch and failing. Most recently, we did a tour of like five local furniture
⏹️ ▶️ John stores to sit on candidate couches and we still bought nothing. So I’ll keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you updated. Yeah, cause you know, remind the listeners, how many new couches have you bought in your entire life? Never
⏹️ ▶️ John bought a couch, never. I’m using my grandparents’
⏹️ ▶️ John hand-me-down couches currently. They bought them, these are their new couches. So they bought them probably in the late 80s, early
⏹️ ▶️ John 90s. Good grief. They’re both sleepers and they weigh a ton.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. You’re never getting out of your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I carried them into my house. I carried them from my grandmother’s house in New Jersey into a into a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you haul like rental truck and then accidentally drove it on the parkway. Sorry, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve all been there. Yeah, I just I just didn’t think I’m in a truck now. It’s so, you know, you don’t you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like I know. Parkways aren’t for trucks. But what kind of idiot would take a truck on the parkway? Everybody knows that. Oh, I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a truck now. Whoops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know we’ve been also looking to get a couch, not particularly actively in the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sounds like you are, and we have not done so in the last few years. And we need to not we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have couches from late 80s, but we are in the market as well. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I just I haven’t found the one that sticks for me. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John couches are tough. I should write something about how hard it is to find couches. But yeah, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just and you have to you have to go sit in them like you have to find them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in a store. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did one on the sitting tour. I was like, this is it. I’ve candidate couches. They’re all like roughly the right measurements. They have all the
⏹️ ▶️ John things I want about them. I’m going to sit on them and you’d sit on them and you’d be like, what I’ve said to myself was grandma’s couch
⏹️ ▶️ John that is like torn to shreds and incredibly ugly is more comfortable than this. It’s sad to say that, but it was true.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not going to pay all this money for a couch that is. I mean, it’s going to be less ugly, but not as comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John as the current one we have. It’s rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is shocking how difficult it is to find a couch that fits you comfort wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you have to just go to a big furniture store and sit in a whole bunch of them. And usually at the end of that, you’ll have either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or zero that you like.
Magnets vs. compasses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving right along. Adam Wuerl writes that, Marco is right!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can prevent a magnetic watch band from throwing off the compass. I’m an aerospace engineer and satellites can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use magnetometers, I hope I pronounced that right, to figure out which way they’re pointing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even with magnets and ferrous metals nearby. The key is that those disturbances are fixed with respect to the satellite or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch, while the Earth’s magnetic field is locked to the Earth. Use GPS to look up the local magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey field, take measurements while rotating the device, and solve for the calibration parameters. Normal watch behavior involves a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movement and rotation So this could be entirely transparent to the user or it could be a prompted swirling motion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPhone compass app sometimes asked for
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is the key bit we’re missing I was missing in the last one is like oh What about third-party watch bands and
⏹️ ▶️ John they have? Magnets that Apple doesn’t know the strength of that doesn’t matter because the Earth’s magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ John field is always in the same place, right? So even if you put different strength magnets or whatever that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t anticipate the key is is whatever those things are, pick any strengths you
⏹️ ▶️ John want, they’re going to be attached to the watch, but the Earth’s magnetic field is not attached to the watch. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as the watch moves in your normal usage or if you’re asked to swirl it or whatever, the Earth’s magnetic field will still always be
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing in the same direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Zev Eisenberg writes, regarding magnets messing with the magnetometer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aka the compass in watches, the core motion framework can cancel it out. And it’s not just about calibration of onboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnets at the factory. All iOS devices with magnetometer, except the original iPad, also have a gyroscope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CoreMotion takes them both into account to cancel out magnets moving with the device. See, MagSafe car mounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t break your compass. Guessing the watch already does the same with the same two sensors.
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it, or in theory, there is even a framework to do it. So this seems, I mean, not that this makes it any
⏹️ ▶️ John more plausible that the straps are gonna be attached with magnets, but we’ll see, at least it doesn’t cancel it out.
visionOS motion blur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Orlando Herrera writes, I’m a professional cinematographer and camera operator, and I dabble with iOS and now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VisionOS development as a hobby. Based on my observations, the pass-through cameras are at the heart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the color and motion blur issues when using pass-through. I suspect the shutter speed of the cameras is slower,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibly to reduce the risk of triggering adverse reactions in individuals who are sensitive to strobing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can see the degree of motion blur change based on whether or not you are in a well-lit environment versus a dim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey environment. You can also observe that the pass-through video motion blur is different than the motion blur of Vision OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows, which further indicates it’s the cameras, not the OLED screens that cause this behavior. Similarly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think the vibrancy, saturation, and depth of colors when viewing Vision OS Windows and content is higher
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the pass-through because the pass-through color bit depth is lower to reduce processing time so the device can maintain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its low latency target. I imagine an improved pair of processors and a future device could increase the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey color bit depth while maintaining low latency so the pass-through experience could gain HDR and a higher percentage of
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you find this rings true to you because I’m asking about the motion blur which I didn’t notice myself Is the
⏹️ ▶️ John the the pet does the pastor have different motion blur than like window contents?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re asking the wrong person. I can’t I don’t see it either. So I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure I mean this makes sense to me because like that the cameras on the vision Pro are I mean, they’re they’re fine
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re Not going to be you know the the fidelity of things that are being drawn in vision
⏹️ ▶️ John OS is obviously going to be as perfect as it can be because they’re not passing through a camera and a sensor or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, cameras with sensors that small, especially if the room is dark, they’re gonna have to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John the shutters open for a longer period of time to get enough light, and that’s definitely gonna cause blur. But what I had heard is
⏹️ ▶️ John some people complaining that there was a blur on things when they move their head, including things like Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision OS applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, in my experience, I think any kind of motion blurring is true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Vision OS Windows as well. I noticed it in particular when trying to like scroll text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and read it in Safari, just within the Vision Pro Safari app. Again, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unusable, but if you notice the motion blur in other areas, you will notice it there too.
Become an ATP member!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week exclusively by ATP members.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco always buy it because what they usually offer is an ad free version of the show and usually also
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then we also do bonus episodes. These are episodes exclusively for members that come out about once
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Pixel Codec Avatars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got free chin rights. I recently saw an interview using meta’s version of personas called Kodak avatars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are basically photorealistic, but the scanning process is highly complex and not feasible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with consumer hardware. I think it shows that the current technical challenge is the high quality scan. The interview was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done using quest pro, which I assume is inferior division pro regarding device sensors. So I wonder if Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer high quality persona scanning stations in Apple stores so you can do an optional HD scan if you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know one way or the other, but I will tell you that I saw, you know, a couple of stills from this video and my goodness,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the quality is night and day better than the personas. And I say this as a persona apologist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so here’s the thing about the, the, the, the avatars, these Kodak avatars, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, setting aside the fact that I don’t know what they use to scan them. Maybe they use like the fancy laser scanner or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as we said, the last time we discussed this, the miracle of the personas is you take the headset that you bought and you just
⏹️ ▶️ John point at your face for two seconds and it gives you one. This is something else. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John uncanny valley, which people just throw out that phrase without re-explaining it, just assume everyone knows what it is. But the uncanny valley
⏹️ ▶️ John is the idea, which I don’t think has ever really been proven out, but people just accept it because it feels right to them. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea is that as you make something more and more realistic looking, it gets more and more appealing
⏹️ ▶️ John to you until you get really, really close to it being like perfect. Like, wow, this is totally convincing
⏹️ ▶️ John as a human. And then you get really, really close to it. And then it takes a huge dip. And that is the uncanny valley. It was like, boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was liking these avatars more and more as you made them better and better. But then all of a sudden, right when you got close to
⏹️ ▶️ John them being perfect, now I don’t like it at all because it’s a scary death mask, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of questions with this. How close do you have to get to being perfect for the uncanny
⏹️ ▶️ John valley to take place? If you look at the original paper or whatever, it’s just kind of like a wavy line graph and it’s like, they don’t really make any strong
⏹️ ▶️ John stances about how close you have to get. It’s just a general trend. It’s like, things look better right up until
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t, but then after you’re perfect again, people like them. And this is all about how does it feel to a person? How does it,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it appeal to a person? Because you want your avatar to be appealing, not repulsive to a person.
⏹️ ▶️ John I say all this because these much more finely detailed, much more photorealistic
⏹️ ▶️ John avatars, the Kodak avatars from Facebook, are I think further
⏹️ ▶️ John into the uncanny valley than personas because they are closer to being perfect. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John better, like in that uncanny valley graph, I think they are like over the edge of the roller coaster thing
⏹️ ▶️ John screaming down the middle of it. So the personas
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, what they have going for them is that their blurriness and sort of slight cartoonishness
⏹️ ▶️ John helps keep them, in my opinion anyway, in my personal uncanny valley graph for these, farther up
⏹️ ▶️ John the hill, farther up the big dip that is the uncanny valley in that graph. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can take a look, we’ll link to the paper about this in Facebook’s video about it from a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, a couple months ago. You can decide whether you think that is farther
⏹️ ▶️ John into your uncanny valley or not. But part of the problem with doing like actual photorealistic humans where
⏹️ ▶️ John there is not a bunch of like fuzzy Gaussian blur around everything and sort of, you know, a little bit of caricature
⏹️ ▶️ John is that as you know, people who make 3D movies and games have known for many, many years, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do convincing humans because we know what they look like. And things like subsurface scattering underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John translucent skin, a technology that was sort of pioneered maybe 15 years ago and is now pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John commonplace, is necessary for you to not look like you’re not made of plastic. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is doing that, but doing that well gets expensive real fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then if you see these things in motion, they’re not… you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John the video of it, but you can see the actual human wearing the headset and then you see their avatar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like if you look at the motion of the human, the avatar seems
⏹️ ▶️ John stiffer, like maybe they’re not moving all the parts of it, like maybe the mouth doesn’t move quite as
⏹️ ▶️ John much. And when the mouth moves like the earlobe doesn’t move and you might not think those are connected, but on a person like when
⏹️ ▶️ John you talk more than just your lips moves, and that’s very difficult to do unless you carefully
⏹️ ▶️ John model or observe that, which is why I think Apple’s personas, when you look at this Apple’s persona starts to
⏹️ ▶️ John look a lot more like Memoji’s because they Apple has chosen the three or four or
⏹️ ▶️ John five most important parts that need to move. And they’ve probably put in some simple heuristics of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, we can’t tell when the earlobe twitches. But basically every time they make this noise at this volume with this
⏹️ ▶️ John mouth sound, move the earlobe a little bit or whatever. And I think they’re doing a little bit more of like what animators
⏹️ ▶️ John do, which is just give me the gist of it and use what you know about how people talk to make it convincing.
⏹️ ▶️ John These ones look a little bit more death masky to me, but hey, everyone has their own opinion on these. So you should take a look.
⏹️ ▶️ John As for the question though, should Apple have high quality persona scanning stations? Well, I think not if they end up looking like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but either way, it’s not feasible. Like if they ever end up selling a whole bunch of Vision Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t have people lining up at the Apple store to get their scans. The whole point is the device should do it for you so
⏹️ ▶️ John that they should continue to work the solution the way they have. You buy the device, you take it home, you do the scan in the privacy of your own
⏹️ ▶️ John home after you’ve done your hair and makeup the way you like it, tweak it to your heart’s content, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they should just keep making that better rather than saying you need to come in for a three-hour session in our laser scanning booth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree with you with regard to these Kodak avatars. I think these look incredible. I really, really do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to me, the personas, which again, I am a defender of the personas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that they are a pretty good idea, and they work pretty well. I think the Kodak avatars look way, way better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think they’re on the other side of the uncanny valley, or they haven’t dipped into it yet? Do you know the uncanny valley chart
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m talking about? I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that the Kodak, or I’m sorry, the personas are dipping into the uncanny valley.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I certainly don’t think they’re at the bottom of the uncanny valley by any stretch, but I think they’re dipping in.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you think the personas look better than you, it’s like the personas aren’t even in the uncanny valley for you yet. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would agree with that. I would agree with that retelling of my opinion. I don’t want to, I don’t want to imply that you feel the same
⏹️ ▶️ John This is kind of like a Bezos trot. I just put a link from the Wikipedia page to the uncanny valley thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess like where, where is the dip? Is it like at 90 ish percent? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, no, to me, I feel like the personas are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting down the cliff, but they haven’t fallen yet. And I feel like this is comfortably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the upswing, if not the top on the other side of the valley
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. You’re going to think other side. Hmm. All right. Well, maybe you need to play more video games.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually, that’s probably true. That’s actually a really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really good point. Cause these look about as good as like, you know, the cut scenes and, uh, last of us part two, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s a really good point, actually. I think you were saying it kind of tongue in cheek, but I think you’re right. Because I very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rarely play any video games. I don’t know what the state of the art is on this sort of stuff yet. Um, but kind of tangentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related to this, uh, recently I did a podcast, um, with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wojciech, uh, I’m not even going to try to pronounce his last name. I’m so, so sorry, but, uh, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a Polish podcast, which obviously I don’t speak Polish, but, uh, you know, he speaks phenomenal English. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did this in the same style as, um, as Gruber in Sandwich, uh, with, uh, Adam Lissagor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the talk show. And we were doing this just with our personas. And I’ve never met him in person. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I don’t know what he looks like. And to me, his persona looked completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, like completely great even. But I think that’s in no small part, in fact, entirely because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what he actually looks like. Like I’ve seen photographs of him from time to time.
⏹️ ▶️ John his hair is not blurry in real life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair. But I think you get the point I’m driving that, is when you don’t have a relationship,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a physical relationship with this person, And insofar as you never been in the same space before it, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought the personas were great, actually, it didn’t feel unnatural to me at all. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s probably, that would be very different if I was talking to you or Marco or Mike or Jason or what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you. But, um, but for, for an instance where this person who was not a stranger,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but is sort of kind of a stranger, like I’m, I’m underselling our relationship. You get my point. Um, it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was very passable to me. And then there’s a video, uh, their YouTube video, which will include show notes if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see this for yourself. But I thought it was really good. and teach your own. All right, moving
Crackgate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a gate now for the Vision Pro and it’s crack gate some Apple Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro units develop an identical crack in the cover glass reports Mac rumors a Small number of Apple Vision Pro owners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have claimed that their headsets developed a hairline crack right down the middle of the front cover glass Despite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never having been dropped or mishandled and there’s a link in this article that makes it pretty clear what they’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean this kind of thing like it looks like you know, it’s kind of a standard, you know manufacturing defect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or weakness with like a certain stress point in the glass that probably is no fault of the people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are using it. Again it’s unfortunate but it’s a version one product and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a very very complicated design so this kind of stuff happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll fix it it’ll be fine in a long world.
Car project canceled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there is breaking news. This was just today, wasn’t it, as we record? Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has officially cancelled Project Titan, ending a decade-long and allegedly $10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion efforts. This was reported by Bloomberg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also the New York Times. We’ll put links in the show notes. From Bloomberg, Apple Inc. is cancelling a decade-long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in in the history of the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lyle Troxell, Chief Operating Officer, Apple Wasn’t really that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprise, though, I guess. Jim Collins Fair, fair. The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effort. The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the team working on the car, known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG, will be shifted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Artificial Intelligence Division under Executive John Gianandrea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an interesting confluence of events here because this, you know, the fact that they’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ John some employees, I mean, first some employees are going to be leaving, the people who knew how to build cars, I’m not sure Apple needs those people, but
⏹️ ▶️ John shifting the other employees to AI projects made me think of exactly, you know, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John even thinking of blogging this, but I didn’t have time because it just came out today. How would sum up this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 10 year foray into the car project as we always called it, Titan
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple. And it’s related to AI. When I was a
⏹️ ▶️ John kid, I read a lot about computers and stuff. And I used to read a lot about AI, because who wouldn’t?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s cool. You watch 2001. You learn about computers. You want to learn about
⏹️ ▶️ John computers that are like HAL 9000, but don’t kill people. Spoiler alert. Yeah, seriously, I’ve never seen
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Sorry. When are computers going to be smart and talk like people? That’ll be so
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. It’s all in all the science fiction. Let me learn about where computers are today. And let me tell you, when I was a
⏹️ ▶️ John kid in the 70s, you’d see stories on PBS and books
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’d check out of the library and stuff that would say, like, look, here’s this computer they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John made, and here’s what it can do. And people were super
⏹️ ▶️ John excited. Like, look what we’ve made this do. I know it doesn’t seem that smart to you, but I can talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and ask it questions, and it understands the sentence, and it knows what the different parts of the sentence mean, and it can reason about things
⏹️ ▶️ John and make inferences, and respond to me. And people were so excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. And I’d say, and you know what, look at computer chips. It’s 1974, but in 1975, computer chips are gonna be even better. In the 1976, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be even better. And if you extrapolate on this graph, you can see that in the year 2000,
⏹️ ▶️ John computer chips are just gonna be massively more powerful than they are now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you look at this AI thing and look what we’ve done now. And it’s kind of dumb now, but we’re on the right track,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so if we just follow this graph by the year 1988, computers should be smarter
⏹️ ▶️ John than any human on the planet. And this is what I read about when I was a kid. And when I got a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John older, you kind of realized that since the 60s or the 50s or whatever, they first tried to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody thought how 9000 is going to be like, you know, at most 20 years in the future, because
⏹️ ▶️ John just look at this graph, right? I mean, I didn’t know the term Moore’s law then or whatever, but I was experiencing the advance
⏹️ ▶️ John of technology, which was my computers were getting faster and faster all the time. and the video
⏹️ ▶️ John games I played in the 70s were so much worse than the video games I played in the 80s and 90s or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I was living the progression and yet artificial intelligence before the current AI trend.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is in a computer that thinks and talks like a person, like again, Hound 9000 but not murderous
⏹️ ▶️ John or any other things you see in sci-fi. Very smart people
⏹️ ▶️ John really believed that, although what we have now is not great, in five to 10 years it’ll be better
⏹️ ▶️ John And in 20 years, it will be the most intelligent thing on the planet Earth. And as part of my,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I talked about this in Rectifs ages ago, discovering the parameters of the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you move things with your mind? How big is the universe? Are we going to make computers that think?
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the parameters of the world was people always kind of think break-even fusion and artificial
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence are much closer than they actually are. And as excited as I was about it, as the
⏹️ ▶️ John years went by, and you saw the same stories, and everyone said, it’s probably five to 10 years in the future. You,
⏹️ ▶️ John you figured out that these people hadn’t yet found the right approach to fit
⏹️ ▶️ John to this problem. We found the right approach to flying, which is like fixed wing aircraft with engines.
⏹️ ▶️ John We found the right approach to doing math because we’re getting really good at that with our computer chips, that, that approach,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just like that, that’s the way just start scaling it, you know, and that’s served us well up until today,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we haven’t yet found the right approach to computers that can think.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, uh, with the car project, Apple, like, like all those excited scientists in the seventies
⏹️ ▶️ John that I was reading about, and like so many other companies in the world decided
⏹️ ▶️ John that cars that drive themselves are probably right around the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look what we can do now. It’s pretty impressive. And if we just extrapolate and say, if we just continue along this
⏹️ ▶️ John path and our computing resources get better, like in, you know, five to 10 years,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our are going to have no steering wheels and they’re going to be driving ourselves. Because look at our progress and look what
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re already able to do in such a short time. Surely, by insert
⏹️ ▶️ John year that has already passed here, all the cars will be self-driving and driving will
⏹️ ▶️ John be obsolete. And that’s why Apple embarked on this project. Because if that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a thing, that is a big disruption to the transportation world. And Apple should probably be in on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were focusing on making a car that was autonomous in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re wondering why Apple thinks they should make a car, it’s not because, you know, they just wanted to make something in an industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in a low margin industry, they wanted to get a part of, they’re like, well, this industry is about to be disrupted.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Tim Cook, an interview in 2017, where the interviewer was
⏹️ ▶️ John asking him essentially about the car project or about automotive stuff. And Tim Cook flat out says, I think there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John disruption coming and it’s because of autonomy. And, you know, Apple wants to be in on
⏹️ ▶️ John that in whatever vague way he said it to not, you know, mention unreleased products. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people thought that, Uber thought that, you know, we hire drivers now, but kind of like Netflix sent people DVDs
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while, that’s just how we’re gonna start. Eventually we’re not gonna need the drivers, the cars will drive themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many companies looked at what they had and just like the AI people said,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is amazing and in five years, it will be so much better. Turns out they did not have the
⏹️ ▶️ John right approach. No one has the right approach yet. No one knows how to make a car that can
⏹️ ▶️ John drive itself as well as humans can drive in all conditions. It’s not like it hasn’t gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John better. It’s gotten way, way better. Waymo has cars that can totally drive themselves in limited circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ John and limited areas, doing a pretty good job. But even Waymo
⏹️ ▶️ John is approaching the limits of the techniques that it has been using. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John failing on this project is just a consequence of us collectively
⏹️ ▶️ John as humans having not yet found the correct approach to make a car
⏹️ ▶️ John that drives itself. We can make a car that helps you drive a little bit better and the jury’s still out on whether it helps you
⏹️ ▶️ John or not based on, you know, you actually paying attention or not. But haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John found the right approach where it’s like, if we just do this for five more years, we’ll be there. Unlike,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, you know, adding numbers together in your CPU. We found the right approach for that, right? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John planes or whatever. And that’s disappointing for everybody involved. It’s if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering why Apple spent $10 billion in 10 years doing this Important
⏹️ ▶️ John people at Apple like Tim Cook or if you read the New York Times story Johnny Ive Had
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced themselves or had been convinced by the hype or the other people they respect in the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John That this was a thing they thought they could do like they said look look at look at what Tesla’s for example been
⏹️ ▶️ John able To do now we’re smarter than them and they’re already almost there. Let’s get on this
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we can beat them to it because surely one of us is going to crack this problem in the next five years. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer was no. No
⏹️ ▶️ John going to crack it in the next five years. No one’s going to crack it in the next ten years. When are we going to crack it? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the current approach the right one? Seems like not. But maybe it is and we just have to do it for 20
⏹️ ▶️ John more years? But like talk to the AI people. Everyone thinks what we’ve done is amazing. What we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John achieved is amazing. Extrapolate and we’ll get there. there and this is yet another disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John instance in my adult life of lots, large portions of smart people in the world thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that a thing was right around the corner and it wasn’t, which is weird because most of the time if you listen to a tech podcast or you’re interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John tech, most of the time tech does sort of fulfill our dreams even more so like computers
⏹️ ▶️ John really did get way better. Video games got so much better, like so much if you if you
⏹️ ▶️ John could take like child me and show them like to mention again, The Last of us part two, it would have exploded my
⏹️ ▶️ John brain. Right? That really did happen, just like everyone thought it do. In fact, maybe even faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John The internet, the internet, look at that. It happened so much faster than people thought it was. People underestimated
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But sometimes, if you think something is around the corner, sometimes you’re going to be wrong. Because it turns
⏹️ ▶️ John out you’re barking up the wrong tree. And I think all of humanity so far
⏹️ ▶️ John has been barking up the wrong tree and getting cars that can drive themselves as well as humans in all conditions. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sad for the little versions of me who are seven years old checking books out of the library about self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ John cars now. And they’re gonna have to learn that I guess they just didn’t figure it out. Doesn’t mean we’re never gonna figure it out. We might eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple, let’s say Apple is taking a break for a few decades
⏹️ ▶️ John can another run at this. Because if it does become plausible, they should probably dive
⏹️ ▶️ John back in and participate in this industry. But right now, I think even Waymo had a big thing where they were like, yeah, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of giving up on the whole self-driving everywhere thing. and we’re just concentrating on limited circumstances. Everyone who has
⏹️ ▶️ John tried this has, as they say in Dune, they tried and failed. They tried and died. Well, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John die, but the projects died. So I think this is unsurprising,
⏹️ ▶️ John but disappointing for little kids everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think the car project, we’ve been saying for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time now that we didn’t really understand why they were doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, it’s very hard to judge with something that’s this secretive. We don’t really know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much progress they were making. But it sure has seemed like over time, this project has not been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going well. We’ve heard of a number of reboots and reorganizations and changing directions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s been so much change in the project trying to, I guess, get it to go in
⏹️ ▶️ John on that, though, in the 2017 video, Tim Cook flat out says, we think there’s going to be disruption in the automotive
⏹️ ▶️ John industry, and it’s because of self-driving and automation, essentially. But then the most recent reboot that
⏹️ ▶️ John we heard about and talked about on the show was Apple said, yeah, forget about self-driving. We’re just going to do like, we’re still going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do a car, but it’ll just be like current sort of driver aid type stuff. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John was not the vision, according to Tim Cook in 2017. It’s not like, oh, we just want to make a car because we want to make a car.
⏹️ ▶️ John He thought there was going to be disruption related to automation. And that basically turned out to
⏹️ ▶️ John not be the case in the time frame that they cared about. And so changing the project,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, well, let’s reboot it. But now we’re just going to make a plain old car that’s like everyone else’s car.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not an exciting project. And I am very glad that Apple chose not to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if they had gotten the self-driving part to progress further, and that was still the plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the project, even then, I still don’t think Apple is the right company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that for lots of reasons. It doesn’t really fit a lot of their business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shape and style and principles. We discussed recently how it seemed to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost impossible to fit that into their new carbon goals, for instance. Like, their goal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with carbon neutrality is to have their products be carbon neutral end to end over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their entire lifetime, including the energy they use during their useful lives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s really hard
⏹️ ▶️ John for a car. Well, the rumor is it was going to be like 100 grand. So maybe they’d sell so few of them that they could carbon offset
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one they sold because
⏹️ ▶️ John the volumes would be low. But yeah, I do really wonder, maybe when they made that
⏹️ ▶️ John commitment, they kind of knew that the car project was going to get canceled because you either don’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of cars and do a lot of carbon offsets, or you can’t meet your goals because they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John transform the world’s energy infrastructure to be carbon neutral, to power all their cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. And so that, that, I feel like the, the carbon plan was always at direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odds with the car project. And I don’t know how they could have possibly ever resolved that. And then the other thing is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve heard through a few different channels about Tim Cook really believing very strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Allegedly even saying directly Apple products don’t kill people period like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does not make products that kill people at least You know directly obviously you can text in your phone and crash But they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel very strongly about that And I think that’s that’s a very good thing both for the world and of course on a small level for their brand
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a luxury. It’s a luxury for their is their company that currently doesn’t sell things that
⏹️ ▶️ John can directly kill you, right? And so they’re thinking of getting into a business where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t avoid that, cars, people die in car accidents, right? So I don’t know how he
⏹️ ▶️ John would square that stance, or that’s just like a soundbite really, but like the idea is we don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John be a company that does that, but we also wanna get into the car business. Well, I have some bad news for you about cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no such thing as a car that doesn’t sometimes kill people due to car accidents,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least not yet. Maybe they thought they could make one, again with the self-driving thing, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that’s, that’s kind of like you’re making that choice. Like you could just keep making phones and computers and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to like crash into you and kill you. Right. But you’re choosing to try for a car and that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s changing things up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, we’ve, we’ve been wondering for years why this project was still going on. It seemed like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty long shot from the start and it seemed like it was never going super well. So I’m glad to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they finally axed it. You know, Obviously, for all the tumult this is going to cause the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people working on it, including probably a bunch of lost jobs, that’s not great. But for the company strategically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for the leadership to have chosen a direction, I think they made the right call. I kind of don’t know why they didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it years ago, but I’m sure they had their reasons, whatever the reasons were. Now they’ve made the right call. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco project is seemingly really finally dead. And I think it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they don’t continue to waste all of this experimental money and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opportunity cost on a project that’s very unlikely to ever be very good for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because now they have freed up that capacity. Maybe not the exact people because it’s different specialties,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’ve at least freed up like that organizational capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John That money, how about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, you know the money is a big part of it of course, but also just you know focus talent, you know like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other other limited resources they have. Now they can focus that on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products and you know improvements to their other products that are much more likely to actually benefit them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their customers. The car project was always kind of this, you know, massive moonshot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was very, very expensive. And so if they are now redirecting that towards things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better Siri, you know, which is, you know, you know, whatever we’re going to call all their new efforts, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more likely to both a succeed and be to actually benefit their customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in useful ways and to benefit the rest of their products together. Like we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple does. They share a lot of tech. They share a lot of advancements. They share a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software between all the different platforms. They share parts. They share techniques that like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share manufacturing, you know, strategies and things between all the different platforms. They share supplies and suppliers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the car. It was always kind of like, does this have any chance of benefiting their other products? Not much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, how would it even fit into the retail strategy? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not even clear from the outside how much car play was shared with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco project. It seemed like not at all. Um, so like, except maybe like some dashboard design
⏹️ ▶️ John concept, maybe some underlying stuff. Like it’s, it’s so hard to tell on this topic, by the way, not to get back into vision pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, this is something that’s come up with all the demos. Like when you see obviously AR kit and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John we saw all that coming out to iOS and Mac OS and it’s like, Oh, that’s going to be for the headset. Right. And I’m, yeah, there’s a connection
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Right. But now that a vision pro is out and you see universal control,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s easy to just retcon it and say, I don’t I bet they did universal control for the headset
⏹️ ▶️ John and it just came out earlier on Mac and iOS. That could be true or it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John the reverse. They did it on Mac and iOS and the headset team adopted it. But that’s the nature of things
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple. They will share things between their projects when it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense to get the most value out of it. And from the outside, it’s very difficult to tell, did for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John universal control start with the headset team and trickle down to iOS and Mac OS or was
⏹️ ▶️ John it the reverse? It doesn’t really matter. Either way, they’re getting the most bang for the buck
⏹️ ▶️ John out of that technology they developed. They developed universal control and it has broad applicability across their
⏹️ ▶️ John products. And so now you look at the car project. What things in Mac OS, iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad OS or whatever have broad applicability to the car and vice versa? And
⏹️ ▶️ John you go for CarPlay, it’s like, well, CarPlay, that’s gotta be a thing. But because we know so little about the car and because
⏹️ ▶️ John CarPlay is such a odd duck, it’s like maybe not even that was shared. So the best you can come up
⏹️ ▶️ John with is like maybe like whatever real time operating system and tooling and stuff they came up with the car they’ll find a use for.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s so hard to tell from the outside and the synergies are not quite as obvious as
⏹️ ▶️ John like universal control or AR kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think there’s probably just fewer of them in general and that like that’s why I think acting this project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the right move strategically for the company because now whatever the special projects group can work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on can be things that the company might have actual other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use for in on much larger scales. Because we see with Apple, they historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were very bad at multitasking. They’ve gotten a lot better in recent years. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, you don’t really want them, like as a fan of their products and as a customer of their products, you don’t really want them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have massive distraction projects that don’t benefit the products you use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With Vision Pro, we actually see that there is a decent amount of shared innovation between Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and their other products probably that we as customers were able to benefit from. With the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car, it seems like whatever we would benefit from that would be much more limited with the
⏹️ ▶️ John That was kind of an advantage though, because you felt like, well, they hired a lot of new car people to work on the car, so those
⏹️ ▶️ John people weren’t even at Apple to begin with, so you’re not stealing that many people from other teams. And because there’s so little
⏹️ ▶️ John crossover, I think for the 10 years that this project ran, it was a money pit,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe it did suck in some important talent, but it was less of a drain than, for
⏹️ ▶️ John example, iOS and the iPhone were. Or where jobs came out on stage and said, yeah, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a new version of Mac OS because we put all those people on the phone because it’s more important, sorry. I’m sure that did happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John but to a lesser extent, just because so many more people had to be hired from the car industry. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that was one blessing. And I think that’s part of the reason this project lasted so long, like the open secret that they were doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this, and it didn’t sideline the whole company for a decade. The
⏹️ ▶️ John company continued to do what it was doing. Yes, there was some impact, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone shoved the whole company off of its previous track, and eventually it found a
⏹️ ▶️ John new track. Project Titan didn’t do that. Project Titan was just like a $10 billion
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet little leech off in the corner, but Apple continued to be able to function in its main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. I mean, and it’s a very different company in that decade than it was before that as well, so obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a different scenario. But I do think it’s interesting, though, to consider, For years, we had heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about these two giant Skunk Works projects, the car and the headset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, now the car is dead and we have the headset. What do you think is the next big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Skunk Works project that we, that isn’t out yet? Like, I guess, you know, AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general could be something like that. And I’m sure we’re going to see more of that, as the rumors indicate, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably this summer. And honestly, I’m very much looking forward to whatever this ends up being. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we know of any other like large rumored skunkworks projects that seem at all plausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple has been working on? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the time maybe to talk about this, which I think will very clearly probably quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John not happen and we don’t have to think about it. about it, but because of this announcement,
⏹️ ▶️ John people who really want Apple to make a car have been saying, you know, Apple, if you’ve decided
⏹️ ▶️ John that disruption in the automotive market is not imminent due to self-driving, which I think is the correct conclusion,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you still want to be in the automotive market because you think
⏹️ ▶️ John people in your team know how to make cool dashboard things like the new CarPlay, or you just want to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want a new platform that you can own, like you want to own the infotainment stack or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s still a way for Apple to be in the car business. And part of the thing when we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John the car project in the past, we were like, Apple’s good at making electronic gadgets. And if you squint, you can call a car
⏹️ ▶️ John an electronic gadget. But honestly, there’s a whole bunch of parts of that that are not electronic gadgetry, like suspension
⏹️ ▶️ John and brakes. And Apple just doesn’t really make anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s kind of like saying like, my of an electric gadget because it has a control panel on the front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, things that you sit inside that travel, like the whole,
⏹️ ▶️ John the skill set of how to do that. And that’s before you even get to stuff like the batteries, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John know Apple has some knowledge about from all of its gadgets, but it’s a different scale entirely there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And electrical motors, which, you know, there are some in the Vision Pro, I guess, but not Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John area of expertise for sure. But if Apple still wants to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in the electric car business, they could buy Lucid and
⏹️ ▶️ John Rivian and have some cars, SUVs, and trucks
⏹️ ▶️ John that would suddenly support CarPlay. And they would have
⏹️ ▶️ John instant expertise. Lucid has the best powertrains in the entire industry and the best EV packaging in the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, we’re gonna get so much email. Please don’t do that, John. You’re just tempting them
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a questionable, I think is 100% defensible. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John Just based on the numbers. How big is the engine? How much power does it produce? How efficient is it? Lucid has the best
⏹️ ▶️ John electric powertrains in the industry. They might not have the best batteries, but their batteries are pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rivian is really the only game in town for sort of non-mainstream,
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy, Apple-style pickup trucks and truck-like SUVs,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the mainstream makers make them, but Rivian is the froofy kind of Apple-ish brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the important thing about Apple buying both of those, one, it will probably cost less money than they already spent on Project Titan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two, everything those companies do is stuff that Apple, as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, does not know how to do. Like all the rumors of like, they’re gonna build their own car, they’re like, oh, here’s who they’re gonna build
⏹️ ▶️ John it for, I’m like, do you think Apple’s gonna get the kind, like the people who started
⏹️ ▶️ John Lucid were all, like the lead engineer for the Tesla Model S started Lucid. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John cut their teeth at Tesla and then they came over and did Lucid. Apple has done none of those things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they think out of the gate, they’re gonna come up with an electric car that they
⏹️ ▶️ John solve all these manufacturing problems before. Everyone else has such a bad start on them. I know they said the same thing about the cell phones. You know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John PC people aren’t gonna walk in, but let me tell you, a cell phone is much closer to a personal computer than
⏹️ ▶️ John a car is. It’s a big gap there, right? So if they wanted to be in this business because they think,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t know. I think they shouldn’t because it’s a low margin business and Apple products don’t kill people and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’re not gonna be self-driving, there’s no real point. But if they really want to, a much
⏹️ ▶️ John faster and better way to spend that money is to save these two companies that are currently
⏹️ ▶️ John having some difficulties. Harvest all the people and technology that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John and voila, now you have a line of Apple cars. If Tim Cook decides, he’s the CEO, and if
⏹️ ▶️ John he and the board think that Apple should be selling EVs, That is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, the only reasonable way to do it in a reasonable time frame. If not, again, let’s just revisit,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, making a car in 20 to 50 years and maybe the self-driving thing will have, will be more plausible
⏹️ ▶️ John then. But yeah, like I’m with Marco that I’m relieved that they’re not doing this because
⏹️ ▶️ John once they’re not making a self-driving thing, which has been obvious that they’re not gonna do for a while now, to everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John except for apparently Apple, just making a car is not something
⏹️ ▶️ John I have any faith that Apple would be any good at, at all. Like nothing they’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me think, boy, if only Apple would make a car, they’d be great at it. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John making car is, ask Rivian, ask Tesla, ask Lucid, making cars is
⏹️ ▶️ John very, very difficult. Like it’s not something that you
⏹️ ▶️ John get right on the first try or the second try or the third try. Car companies have been around for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve had time to work out a lot of this stuff. And even they get stuck in their ways, which is why people can innovate around them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like just the first several years of Tesla, the first several years of Rivian and
⏹️ ▶️ John Lucid, manufacturing big, important things like that, complying with regulations,
⏹️ ▶️ John making them safe, reliable, like just, it’s really hard. And Apple has never done anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that at that scale. And it is so different than cell phones and computers that I don’t think they could pull it off. So if they
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really wanna do this, make some acquisitions, buy this drug. They’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy Tesla. You can read the story. They tried to buy Tesla way back when, so it’s clear that they were open
⏹️ ▶️ John to that idea. But if the car dream is still alive at Apple, they should buy Lucid and
⏹️ ▶️ John Rivian. I hope the car dream is not alive at Apple and they should just ignore this for another 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if anything, first of all, I think you’re right. That would be probably the best way for them to get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it at this point. But if anything, that shows why they shouldn’t get into the car business. is suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tomorrow Apple buys Lucid and Rivian. Okay, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what? Like why did they do that? And then how do they integrate that into the rest of their business? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still a massive question of like, now Apple’s a car company, great. Now, why do they wanna be a car company?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now they have to deal with being a car company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but they already had, they would give them two car companies that are already car companies. And they’re car companies with problems. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s a lot of growing pains, but they jumpstart it. Like, we don’t have to worry, like, will we make a car that people want?
⏹️ ▶️ John Will we make a good car? Those two companies have already made cars that people want that are good. They’re just not making money
⏹️ ▶️ John making them. So Apple has the runway, has
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more runway than those two companies do to figure out a way to start making them profitable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously they would integrate with them. And I think Jeff Johnson had a good snarky tweet about this whole thing, which is snarky,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also I think there’s kind of a point in that why Apple might want to be in this historically low margin
⏹️ ▶️ John business. He says, bemoaning the end of the car project,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I so wanted a car that demanded 30% of every shopping trip and refused to travel to destinations unapproved
⏹️ ▶️ John by the manufacturer. Got him. But that’s the thing. That’s kind of the reason Apple was interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in this thing, is like, oh, the automotive market is being disrupted. And if the automotive market is being disrupted,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is an opportunity for us to find another place for one of our platforms. And modern
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, when they find a place for one of their platforms, they’re like, we need to have a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John which we will then leverage to extract 30% from everybody, right? That’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John MO. Hasn’t been going that great, but they hit it out of the park once with
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone. And so they’ve used that model for every other new
⏹️ ▶️ John platform they’ve tried to roll out. Apple TV, Vision Pro, iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know those all kind of look like you squint and like, oh, that’s just an extension of the iPhone, right? But the inside of the
⏹️ ▶️ John car, The inside of any sort of, inside of cars are becoming more, looking more
⏹️ ▶️ John and more like a platform that Apple could participate in. The problem is if Apple doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t literally a car company, it might be difficult to pull a Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and become the platform, the software platform for everybody else’s hardware. Apple’s trying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s a little bit of pushback contention there. So why would Apple want to be in the car business at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think cars will continue to be low margin, But I think there is a potential
⏹️ ▶️ John future to, you know, using the terminology, extracting rents from
⏹️ ▶️ John the software platform that lives inside cars. Certainly every car manufacturer wants to do that. Just ask
⏹️ ▶️ John GM. That’s why they don’t want a car playing in the car. They want to be the one, you know, skimming off the
⏹️ ▶️ John top of everything that happens inside the car that they can. I’m not sure there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John business plan there. Apparently it’s not selling, renting heated seats to people like BMW tried. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, I think that’s, in the absence of self-driving disruption, another place
⏹️ ▶️ John for a platform is, I think, what would still have a chance to attract Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to cars. But who knows? Like maybe the CarPlay project is that and they don’t need to make a car. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it’s too early to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I’m going back to what you were saying about Lucid and Rivian, and the co-host
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Neutral in me says, heck yeah, that sounds amazing because I think Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is arguably more spiritually similar to Apple than Tesla. Um, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lucid to your point has some of the best and most advanced technology, please don’t email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us Tesla people, we don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I, I, I agree with you as a car enthusiast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who at least tries to watch and understand Apple. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine them saying about a business, as you’ve noted, is very low margin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which they can’t be too keen on to begin with. I can’t imagine they’re going to say, let’s spend a sum total of roughly $20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion, because that’s the sum total of the market cap of the two companies today. Let’s spend $20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion on two companies that are barely keeping themselves afloat. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John You wait a little bit longer. Lucid will get cheaper, I think. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so might Rivian. But then, I mean, so, so we’re buying these beleaguered, you know, failing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey companies. Yeah, we’re getting them on the cheap, but if they were good, they wouldn’t be beleaguered and cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not true at all. Like their, their problem is they don’t like their, their problem is they
⏹️ ▶️ John need to get through like the, the scary growth period. Like the Tesla barely made it through. Like Tesla almost went
⏹️ ▶️ John out of business several times too. Right. But there, it takes so much capital to sort of get, to get the ball
⏹️ ▶️ John rolling, to work out all the kinks. And both of them are kind of on the bubble. Like they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make it, but Tesla just like barely made it due to like some savvy fundraising and government
⏹️ ▶️ John mooching from Elon Musk at the right time, right? Like it’s a tough gig in the car business. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re beleaguered because they have bad products. They have great products.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just beleaguered because making a car costs a lot of money and they’re not entirely sure that they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get past the point where, like they’re just plowing and plowing in money and then they’re selling a
⏹️ ▶️ John smallish number of cars for a very low or negative margin. And then it’s like, just kind of like Amazon. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just give us another decade to not make any profit, but eventually we will. And Amazon did eventually, and they had
⏹️ ▶️ John that runway. Rivian and Lucid remains to be seen if they will be able to find the funding to give themselves that runway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know who can give them that funding? Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that’s true, but I just don’t think Apple would have that kind of patience, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after having been burned by being $10 billion in and having not a lot to show for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they did have the patience your boondoggle
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey project. They might not hear. Well, I mean, that’s true. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t ultimately matter, but it is an interesting thought exercise, if nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, honestly, I feel like Apple will not do this, because they should. I think they’re done with cars for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But if someone inside Apple just demands it, like just like, no, we need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in cars, which I don’t think is true, because again, if Tim Cook’s whole reason was that it was about self-driving disruption, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s now dissuaded of that, and he’s fine. But if someone demanded it, that would be the only feasible way to do it. because if they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John and they tried to make a car on their own, I think it’d be embarrassing for them because their car would, they wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about losing money because they got so much money, but they’d make a car and that car would have to compete with
⏹️ ▶️ John beleaguered Rivian, Lucid, and then not beleaguered Tesla. Right. And I don’t think it would
⏹️ ▶️ John fare that well because I don’t think Apple is good at almost any of the things you need to be good at to make a good car.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I just, you know, I just, I think I should leave it alone, but if they don’t want to leave it alone, they should
⏹️ ▶️ John buy Rivian and Tesla. And heck, even if they don’t want to be in the car business at all, Apple should just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John give an investment to lose it and reap it when the company comes roaring back, uh, two decades
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see where it goes. I think I am certainly in support of, of Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, letting go and stop trying to make fetch happen. I echo what I think it was Marco who had said, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel terrible for all these people that are going to now have to find either new jobs than Apple or new jobs entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. That stinks. But I think on the whole, it’s better for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple to go this way. I think it might be interesting seeing people who surely are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good at, you know, computer vision and artificial intelligence and things of that nature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working on other projects and problems inside of Apple. I think, I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot has been learned from this. And I feel like I made the same, um, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shared the same theory a while back and And I feel like somebody debunked it, but here I am again, thinking that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I wonder if the real time OS or some of the things that they learned building a real time OS for the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or used in the R1 for the vision pro. And I don’t know, maybe, maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was debunked. But like, I think you’d have a good point with the computer vision aspect because Apple does now
⏹️ ▶️ John have a platform that could benefit from computer vision expertise. And so those people on the car project who are probably
⏹️ ▶️ John super isolated from the headset project, cause why wouldn’t they be bring those people to vision pro
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Because that is expert, even if it’s not technology that they’re currently using, the crosses over that expertise for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and now also, like, you know, with with this talent and budget and executive focus freed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up from this project, if you think about like, what else could they do, even without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having like good uses of the of like shared technology with their other products, they could do something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pour more money into the idea of a glucose monitor for the Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think they’re already doing that. But yeah, freeing up the money is good for for everything across the board. Of course, if you told me what they should
⏹️ ▶️ John give the money to it’s just fixing bugs in macOS, but I don’t think that’s probably gonna be high on their list. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, just take a little bit of that 10 billion or you know, whatever it is, 1 billion a year that you just freed
⏹️ ▶️ John up, put a little slice of that into macOS bug fixing, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John it would even take that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of what the next big thing is, like, you know, we said this in the, our
⏹️ ▶️ John first episode in January, 2024, we did like, what do we expect this year to be for Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think one of the things that we got right, based on all the stories that are coming out, 2024, the year
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple sprinkles AI sauce on a bunch of stuff. I talked
⏹️ ▶️ John Rectif episode about this. It’s gonna come out soon. What are they gonna sprinkle it on? What will actually ship this year?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, but there’s gonna be AI sauce and it’s gonna be sprinkled.
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, I don’t think that’s a, to mark with question, what’s the next big
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? I don’t think that’s it, because kind of like self-driving cars at this point, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John that the large language model AI stuff has proved its utility,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like smart lane holding, better cruise control things have proved their utility in cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I also think that we’re pretty close to, well, I think the jury’s still out, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would put money on the fact that the current approach to LLMs, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just do more of that faster and get to HAL 9000. Maybe it’s a piece of the puzzle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s totally off in the wrong direction, but like, I don’t think the
⏹️ ▶️ John next big thing equivalent of the car project is Apple should make a computer that thinks, because nobody knows how to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, and I don’t think the current approaches are gonna get us there. But all that LLM stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John has proven utility. You can do useful things with it if you use it the right way
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple needs to use that to make its stuff better in all the ways
⏹️ ▶️ John that everyone else is making their stuff better. make Siri better, make image search better. Make like we
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like there’s no question it does that. Forget about how 9,000, you can use this technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, to make your current products better. And that is not the car project, the headset or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think getting a bunch of people put into that part of the organization is
⏹️ ▶️ John a good thing. So like rather than, you know, the car project and the headset are both kind of like pie in the
⏹️ ▶️ John sky. We have a great idea. We think this is the future. We’re gonna try to do it. One of them, they
⏹️ ▶️ John shipped. One of them they didn’t, but they’re big pie in the sky things. This is not pie in the sky. This is keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the Joneses. This is, Hey, have you noticed what everyone else is doing? Apple, you should do that too because you’ve got a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff that could benefit from things that other people are proving the utility of.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that I think is going to happen some of it this year, hopefully more of it next
⏹️ ▶️ John year. And if that’s all that came out of this, like that Apple never came up with the next new big
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, I think that it’ll be fine partially because I think, you know, Oh, we got the headset, but we’re still waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for the glasses, right? Like you can extrapolate from vision pro and say, where is this going to go?
⏹️ ▶️ John And unlike self-driving and how 9,000, you can see a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward path of like, just keep iterating on the vision pro with increases in technology that we expect
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen and, you know, screens get better, CPUs get better. Like just, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John see that progressing. We don’t quite know how to get all the way to glasses because some of the display stuff is questionable
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point. But even if it’s just Vision Pro, but better than the current Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a path to travel there. And I think that is a big enough project,
⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new platform that is very much more ambitious or different than competing platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John than the other things that it’s done. There’s 10 years of runway right there anyway. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple should be out there saying, we need to start something new. And that’s setting aside all the health stuff that we know they’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. I don’t think it should be like, hovercrafts, like, or we’re gonna start an airline, or just
⏹️ ▶️ John chill out. Can we just do the Vision Pro for 10 years and see if that works out? Because there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a runway there. You have so many other platforms that you’re working on. You’re still trying to do all the health stuff. You
⏹️ ▶️ John got all the services. You got all the antitrust things. You got the app store. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should be looking to have a rebound project after
Join us!
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s go back to the show.
#askatp: Email clients
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe writes, what email clients do you all use these days? Curious to know how each of you handle this on both iOS and macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what you feel are the best clients. I feel like this is one of those, as John often describes, annual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or sometimes semi-annual questions that people always want to know what email clients we use. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know that it’s changed, like properly changed for any of us since we started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording the show in 2013, 2014. or creatures of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but for me, it’s Mail app. I was briefly using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever that one is, is it Mailplane that everyone loves something that everyone loves for Gmail. And I was using that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a while. And then when I switched to FastMail, I put that aside and went crawling back to Mail.app. And that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use everywhere. And I thought that was the same for Marco, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have actually really never gone for many other mail clients.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, I just meant that that you’re all in on mail.app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, I’m all in on mail.app and I am mostly fine with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I wouldn’t say I love it, but I don’t love email. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I treat email as a very kind of functional thing that I have to deal with somewhat reluctantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I deal with it as little as possible. Apple’s mail apps let me do that on their platforms with lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of various nice little integrations. I appreciate all of that first partiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. My My problems with email have nothing to do with the client. None
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the email apps that are out there would do a meaningfully better job at making me hate email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less. I just kind of deal with it the way I do. The only thing that I… I literally just ran into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this earlier today. My one big feature request for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s mail apps, having used them now for how many years? When the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first shipped, and the iPhone had its version of mail.app on it, it mostly it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly satisfied my needs except for one giant area search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mail search on iOS has always been really rudimentary and really crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many times I end up having to go search on my Mac mail app instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will find things the iOS app will not find including this literally just happened today. I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why is because mail on the Mac downloads everything off the iMap server and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indexes everything locally. Whereas mail on the iPhone appears not to do that. I think mail on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone has always done server side IMAP search, not local search. I assume that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why we had a different search results. But that tradeoff made sense in 2007. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tradeoff does not make sense in 2024. I understand that people’s email boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be really big. So maybe make it an option. Give me a switch in the settings app that It says download all mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and let me search all mail in the iOS mail app with the exact same search characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and results that I would get if I did it on my Mac. It’s 2024, I’m pretty sure Apple can make that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you still using the Gmail web client?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the main sort of performance characteristics that I’m looking for in an email client date
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way back to the early days. My very first email clients on the Mac, I was super heavy into
⏹️ ▶️ John Entourage and later when that morphed, or Clarisse emailer, which
⏹️ ▶️ John morphed into Entourage. And they, what I loved on those things is they had like
⏹️ ▶️ John rules that you could apply to mail that would ferry your mail into various folders or whatever, but it was so frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’d have all those rules set up on my home computer, and then I’d like try to check my home email
⏹️ ▶️ John while I was at work. And so I would like install the same email client on my work computer, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John the rules would be on my home computer, and this was before the days of ubiquitous cloud sync, and it was never quite
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. And a lot of times I was using pop. So if you popped it from one location, if you popped
⏹️ ▶️ John it from a second location, the second location wouldn’t have it because it didn’t pop it. So now you have the same message
⏹️ ▶️ John appearing in two different places. They had to be routed the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably explain that just a little bit more because everything you said was accurate, but it sounds bananas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to people of today. So most email clients or most email servers, excuse me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, I don’t know, 15, 20, 25 years ago, The way it worked was you used post office protocol
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or POP. And generally speaking, granted you could tweak this, but generally speaking, what would happen is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your email client would go to the server, it would say, okay, what are the new messages? It would grab the new messages and then it would delete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them off the server. So like John was saying, let’s say you have a machine at home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is checking your email. Generally speaking, the machine at home would check your email, delete the email, and then it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be living or alive. Or those emails would only be living on that one computer. If you went to any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other computer, because you know, you you wouldn’t go to a cell phone at this point. If you went to any other computer and went to get mail,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, tough noogies, it ain’t there because it was deleted off the server. And this was normal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was smart enough not to do that, but that introduces a second problem, which is if you say, okay, don’t do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John leave it on the server. Now my home computer would run a little, you know, using pop, it would check for mail,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would see there’s a new message, you would download it, right? Now my work computer would run two seconds later
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would see that same new message and it would download it, which is why both computers needed to have
⏹️ ▶️ John the same set of rules because as far as they’re concerned, it’s like the home computer downloads the message and files it away.
⏹️ ▶️ John The work computer downloads that same message. Now these two computers are downloading the same message
⏹️ ▶️ John and pulling it from the server. They better route it to the same place. Otherwise home and work
⏹️ ▶️ John will slowly get out of sync. Like they’re not even connected at all, but it’s like a one way process. But if they don’t have the same rules,
⏹️ ▶️ John as things flow in, they won’t go in the same boxes. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I respond to something at work or mark it red at work, home has no idea that that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John because their only function is using the POP protocol to see if there’s new messages and downloading
⏹️ ▶️ John them. There’s no reverse direction where when I mark something as red at work, it sends a message up to the POP
⏹️ ▶️ John server so that when I go home, no, no, that doesn’t happen. It’s one way, right? So trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with that, just home and work, being able to check my personal email at work, which is as
⏹️ ▶️ John all working people know is an essential part of your sanity, being able to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John was made very difficult. And I do like rules, and I do like routing, and I do like
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to be the same everywhere, right? And IMAP, you say, well IMAP solves this. Well, IMAP, especially in the early
⏹️ ▶️ John days, was a little bit of a nightmare. It was trying to solve this problem by having two-way communication and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the clients for it weren’t great, and there were lots of different IMAP servers, and depending on your ISP and where you email from, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was very confusing and annoying, but IMAP was an improvement, but still kind of janky. But anyway, I was using like Clarisse emailer
⏹️ ▶️ John and Eudora, not Eudora. I know Udori is great, but I wasn’t ever a big fan. Entourage and Clarisse
⏹️ ▶️ John email are back in the day where they did support both Pop and IMAP. But then Gmail came along and Gmail said,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about your stupid client. The server is the source of truth. I have all your email, that your email only
⏹️ ▶️ John exists in one place. Folders, rules, those are all here on the server. Oh, you can look at what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on the server however you want, say in a web browser, try Chrome, it’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John But don’t be fooled. Gmail, Google has all your email and all your
⏹️ ▶️ John rules and all your settings and all your preferences. And when you mark something as read or unread or reply to it,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you send mail into a sent mail folder, that is all happening on Google servers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what it did was gave me blessed freedom to say, wherever I check my email from,
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone, an iPad, an internet cyber cafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anywhere I go,
⏹️ ▶️ John where I don’t care whose computer it is, I don’t care if it’s at work, at home,
⏹️ ▶️ John on any computer that I have, When I load up gmail.com, my email looks exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John like it did the last time I left it. If I marked a thing as read, if I replied, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John search, Google’s really good at that. I can search my email really easily. And it also, in
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of the day, lets you import all your old email. So this is a long-winded way to say
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail. I use the Gmail for my email, and I use the Gmail web interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the Gmail web interface. I miss, you know, the days of Entourage and Clara’s emailer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve moved on since then. I don’t like Apple Mail. I don’t like the interface on any platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I use the Gmail web interface. On my phone, I use the Google’s Gmail app, which is not very
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but it doesn’t really matter because all my email is there. I can do what I want
⏹️ ▶️ John on there. If I don’t like it, I just put the phone down, pick up literally any other computer, log into Gmail, and there’s all my mail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Big proponent of Gmail. It has been one of my favorite products over the years, And it’ll be very sad when
⏹️ ▶️ John Google eventually cancels it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think they would cancel that, but I definitely take your point.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think I’ll be dead or retired by the time they do that. Too much valuable data goes through,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people keep Gmail around. Yep.
#askatp: DIY ergo keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Warren Becay writes, you recently mentioned Marco’s love of the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, which I’ve always liked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why isn’t Marco constructed a do it yourself mechanical keyboard in the ergonomic layout he prefers with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the switches he wants, et cetera. This seems like exactly the kind of project he would love and he’d end up with a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customized to his personal specifications. You know, I get this and obviously my name is not Marco, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for me, I actually like Apple keyboards. And in your case, you like the, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard. And I don’t know, as I get older and more crotchety, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like there’s less space in my life for fiddly things. And I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s probably where you are too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m glad that that whole world of keyboards exists. If I ever want to dive into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will have no hesitation of diving into it. But right now, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, every few years when my sculpt flakes out, I can spend 60 bucks and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have that problem just disappear. And the reality is, I like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sculpt ergonomic keyboard. There’s not a lot about it that I would change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It solved my needs very, very well and for very low effort. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I were to customize something with the world of like custom keyboard enthusiast kind of stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what I would end up creating would actually be worse for my own preferences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, even though I know there’s different key switches with different volume levels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of them are way too loud for me. I’ve tried them all. Yes, even the Cherry MX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Brown or whatever, every few years there’s a new one and people say, oh this one’s quieter or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I try it and it’s loud. So that is problem number one, is that I don’t really like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant mechanical key switch sound. I also don’t have any problem with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feedback of the relatively standard scissor mechanism of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sculpt Ergonomics keys. Like, It’s not a problem I’m looking to solve. I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people like those things, it’s just not that important to me and I don’t like the noise trade-off. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sculpt is actually a very compact keyboard for an ergonomic keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I would actually create an ergonomic layout that has the two key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elements of what makes it help, which is the split gap and then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curved and reverse-tented shape of that. To actually create that with mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keycaps, with that kind of keyboard, would be a probably a larger overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finished product. And I again to create that, it’s solving problems I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to make a result that would be worse for my preferences. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I don’t do it. Things might change over time, my preferences might change, or the availability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboards, as we’ve discussed, it’s kind of in flux right now. So that could be getting better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like the the matias recreation or the was it in case who took over that business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah i think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yeah so um so you know their recreations could be fine or could be ruined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the matias recreation could be fine or could be ruined i don’t know yet i’ve pre-ordered both and we’ll see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens um and i still have a few sculpts left from my from my uh stock my personal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock so we’ll see but right now this is a problem that i don’t really need to be solved. Every time I use the sculpt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not thinking like, God I hate this thing I can’t wait for until there’s a replacement. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually like it. I prefer it. And whenever they die I just pop a new one out of the closet and and move
#askatp: AI interest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, as tech enthusiasts, how interested are you in LLMs and generative AI? Is it something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you follow from the sidelines or do you actually dive into these topics and do some of your own research? And follow up question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for which use cases have you been using chatbots like chatGPT, if at all, and what were your experiences?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, for me, I’m interested, uh, certainly this is the new hot thing and unlike,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, crypto, it doesn’t make me want to vomit all over myself. So that’s an improvement. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to keep up with it and get at least a nominal understanding of how it works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a very broad and basic understanding of how it works. In terms of how I use it, I don’t typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do anything with generative, you know, like making images or anything like that. I’ve tried a couple of times. Like, I think when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was first trying to come up with a placeholder icon for CallSheet, then called FlickUp,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was trying to come up with an icon that was at least passable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ship with, but just to ship like a beta with. And I couldn’t even get something that looked even remotely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like what I wanted at the time. And that very well could have been user error on my part. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, I do use a chat GPT every once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a while, typically to solve some sort of programming problem with something that I’m not familiar with, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a great example of this, a wonderful use of chat GPT, is how do I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this particular FFmpeg incantation because I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the things that I do regularly. And I like to think as people go, I know a fair bit about FFmpeg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s a ton of things that it does in almost infinite amount of things that it does that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know how to do. And I do have a folder in Apple Notes, speaking of Apple Notes, John, I have a folder in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Notes with, you know, individual notes of like different recipes, if you will, for FFmpeg. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly times that I’m like, well, how the heck do you do that? And chat GPT, oftentimes will either get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it right or get me close enough that I can get it right quickly. And that’s actually applicable to a lot of programming problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so that’s how, that’s how I’ve been using it. I feel like I picked on Marco first a lot recently. So John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you doing with this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do use, I’m interested in these things. I I’m interested in understanding how they work. It’s I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to learn as much about them as I could without actually. Having any reason to
⏹️ ▶️ John make anything like this. It’s difficult to follow sometimes. This is not my area of expertise, but I think I have somewhat of a
⏹️ ▶️ John handle on what their approach is. But the most important thing, like the distinction
⏹️ ▶️ John between crypto is that these things, these large language models and generative AI, have
⏹️ ▶️ John practical utility. You can use them to do useful things. It’s very obvious to everybody. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John people are excited about this. Again, unlike crypto, where it’s like the useful thing is make a bunch of people a lot of money,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, okay, but like, does this help me with my work? No, not really.
⏹️ ▶️ John I use these things kind of in as a Augmentation
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google search right so anything that I’m doing where I would be using Google I will
⏹️ ▶️ John throw in these various large language model things into the competition just like I may
⏹️ ▶️ John I You know put all my little voice cylinders in the house against each other and I asked them all the same question
⏹️ ▶️ John to see how They do I’m trying to see who’s gonna be the most useful So sometimes, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, when I’m programming is a great example. When I’m programming, very often you Google for things, right, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember what that is, how do you do this, you know, what is the order of
⏹️ ▶️ John arguments to this function, I can’t remember, right? You can use Google for that, and you find a stack
⏹️ ▶️ John overflow question, or you find the reference documentation, or you know, if you’re in Xcode, you can go directly to it with
⏹️ ▶️ John just a right click or whatever. But yeah, I’ll throw in chat GPT, Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ John barred thing, the Bing thing to see how they do. Because sometimes, even though I know
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is in the reference documentation, sometimes reading the reference documentation, like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re trying to look like the select system call in Perl and you want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what are the constants that you use in the bit masks and is it the write bits then the read bits or the read bits
⏹️ ▶️ John then the write bits. And you could look this up in the reference docs. It’s going to tell you the order of
⏹️ ▶️ John the things. You’re going to be able to find the constants, then you can look them up and just like, I know exactly where the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer is, and you could Google for it, and it will probably point you to the reference docs that you can read to get that answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the utilities that things like chat GPT provides is you could just ask them for the call
⏹️ ▶️ John that you wanna make, and it will essentially not do that work
⏹️ ▶️ John for you, but summarize that. It’ll say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John use this bit mask for the first argument, use this bit mask for the second argument based on what you asked me. So it already
⏹️ ▶️ John has found what order the arguments are in, and it found the
⏹️ ▶️ John correct bit mask things to order together in the right things, and it gives me the result faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than if I had done that work myself. One of the things I don’t use any of these
⏹️ ▶️ John large language model things for is anything based on facts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because unlike the line of code, where I can just run it and find
⏹️ ▶️ John out if it does the thing that I want it to do, I can step through it in the debugger, I can see yes, it’s working. No, it’s not working right I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it compiles or is it made up a function or whatever Using it for facts. I don’t find
⏹️ ▶️ John useful You know What year did this movie come out? It’ll give me an answer
⏹️ ▶️ John and the answer will be plausible But the problem is if I knew what the answer was already I wouldn’t have asked
⏹️ ▶️ John and so now I’m faced with the answer Says all this movie came out in this year. Is that right? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like it could be right right. But now I have to go check somewhere to see if it actually is right. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to go check somewhere anyway, I might as well just start in Google and end up at the Wikipedia page or the
⏹️ ▶️ John IMDb page or whatever. Now, is Wikipedia right? Is IMDb right? I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ John at least I have a foundation for setting a level of trust. How much do
⏹️ ▶️ John I trust Wikipedia? How much do I trust IMDb when it comes to the release date of movies, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John How much do I trust, you know, this result from the New York Times or the verge or whatever. With
⏹️ ▶️ John large language models, when it just gives me the answer for fact based things, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John useless to me. Because I mean, I can just stare at that and
⏹️ ▶️ John go, that might be the answer. But I don’t know where that answer came from.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it’s right, or if it’s wrong, like there’s no, the LLMs don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, don’t care. Like that’s not that’s not their job. They’re just smushing together a bunch of stuff and spitting
⏹️ ▶️ John out something that is plausibly an answer to the question asked. And so that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes them entirely useless for me in that area. And I would say also dangerous because
⏹️ ▶️ John you might think you’re getting the answer. And even like when Google does the general results at the top of a search results,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tend to ignore those two for the same reason. Kind of for the same reason I’ve been ignoring the thing that Google’s been doing for many
⏹️ ▶️ John years before generative AI, which is like, don’t worry about the search results. We’ve extracted the answer for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yeah, but like, I kind of need to see where you got that answer from. So I just ignore it. And I go to
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain old search results. And then I have to make the judgment myself. Like, do I trust this SEO spam
⏹️ ▶️ John page? It’s in the first 10 results are all like that? Or do I want to actually go to something more authoritative?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if I go to the Wikipedia page, is this page constantly being in edit wars? And the talk page shows there’s a much
⏹️ ▶️ John controversy about this? Does everyone agree that this movie came out on this date? Right? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John do use it. I think there is there is a bright future of utility for things like
⏹️ ▶️ John this and the the image generators the same type of thing because it’s setting aside the legal and
⏹️ ▶️ John ethical implications there people do agree that being able to type in a Description
⏹️ ▶️ John of an image and get an image back is a useful thing to do if we can get the rest of the stuff worked out
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I’m I’m definitely incorporating it into my into my normal workflows and I have
⏹️ ▶️ John found things Kind of like Steve Jobs said about the iPad like there should be something where the iPad is the best device
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it There are things that I do do when, you know, programming, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John where a chat GPT is better than Google for getting me
⏹️ ▶️ John what I need faster. There are also things where Google is still better. There are things where right-clicking and looking it up in the reference
⏹️ ▶️ John docs is faster, but very quickly, things like chat GPT have become a sibling
⏹️ ▶️ John to direct lookups and reference documentation, blind Google searches, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John right alongside there, ask a large language model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, personally, I have used generative AI relatively little. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did make that icon for my Fire Island driving app. I made that with generative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI because that’s an app that had zero budget and any time spent on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was time I shouldn’t have been spending on it, really. And so I needed something quick and dirty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be seen by about 70 people, and it was perfect for that. I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of need to generate a bunch of BS on a regular basis, so I tend not to use it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, but it’s a tool that I’m glad it’s there when I need it. I’m more looking forward to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some of this is already out there, tools that use generative AI functionality and techniques
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that I actually do use on a more regular basis. So for instance, like if I’m editing a photo of myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I want to remove the pimple on my forehead. You know, we’ve had various techniques to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in image editors for a long time now, but if you involve generative AI in that kind of feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can usually do a better job of it. Or other things, other kind of image manipulation, things like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a low-res image and you want to make a high-res version of it and you want to, you know, do whatever you can to extrapolate whatever the details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have been in a higher-res version of that image. Great! That’s a great use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a lot of these generative AI type techniques to do things like that. These features by themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like the current, you know, standalone products that we see them in They have utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a lot of people no question, but I don’t see a lot of that myself but I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and already still currently benefiting from some of the implementations of those techniques
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into tools that I use so again other instances like You know if if Apple ever realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there’s five of us out there who use logic to edit podcasts They can probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add a whole bunch of really interesting, useful features to Logic to make editing podcasts better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which would be AI based. And then another example of that is like, the world of audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcription algorithms has been radically improved by the OpenAI Whisper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model. It doesn’t get as much attention as the other OpenAI stuff, but Whisper has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive transformation, no pun intended, in audio transcription.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking forward to advances like that. you know, that being integrated into more things. Like one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big hopes I have for whatever Apple’s AI sauce sprinkling process looks like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer is, Apple has a built-in API to transcribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio. It’s not that good. I’m hoping that this year it gets substantially better because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’re using some AI type models to, you know, improve their transcription. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already been going in that direction in, you know, small steps here and there. So that’s the kind of thing I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward to is, you know, yeah, there’s going to be fun, new problems that arise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we didn’t even think about that they can all of a sudden solve and it revolutionizes everything, etc. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of what we do in our computing lives is boring tasks that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done for a long time. Things like, as mentioned before, answering emails, you know, doing various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media manipulation, tact, you know, tasks and stuff like that. There’s lots of opportunities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in tons of computing for those features and those tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get better within the capabilities of what we already know AI can do. Like, we don’t need it to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much better that it can answer all of John’s questions with factual accuracy. That’ll be nice if it goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that direction, it should, but even with what we know it can do today, there’s tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of possible applications for the existing AI techniques, even the existing models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have already been built, in ways that we haven’t seen yet, either because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they kind of can’t get built without somebody okaying it, like in the case of Apple being a gatekeeper over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their platforms. Like for instance, I would love the option to have chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco respond to my Siri questions whenever they’re about knowledge because even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a BS generator, it tends to generate more accurate answers than Siri does the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time for informational questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I wouldn’t say it’s more accurate. You’re more likely to get an answer and Siri will just be like, sorry, can’t help you or
⏹️ ▶️ John go look on the web. But honestly, I that’s more that’s that’s the writer answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want something just giving me plausible BS when I ask a question. If you can’t answer it, don’t answer it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, just just ask
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not want plausible BS when I when I ask him when that movie was released, Alexa should tell me the real answer, not the plausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I’m looking forward to just the the integration of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these awesome some new AI techniques and models into the rest of our boring computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lives, making them a lot better. That’s where I see the most promise. And yeah, we’ll have some cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products along the way that are more exciting than that. But in the grand scheme of like how is it going to impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people? I think it’s going to be more like the former more just making our everyday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tasks better and making the tools that do them better.
⏹️ ▶️ John clear, Apple has been doing that for years and years back before the AI buzzword, they used ML,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The magic thing where you can, I don’t even know if this would even qualify for quote unquote AI today, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John subject detection where you can drag the picture of your dog out of the photo. Apple’s photo search where you can search for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, tin can or whatever. And it has a set of like, that was ML and not AI,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s exactly the type of stuff we’re talking about. And what we’re saying is, hey, state of the art has moved
⏹️ ▶️ John on and you could make all those things better. I really, because in photo search, if you ever try this in Apple photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John You can search for things like dog or cat or bed or spoon or car
⏹️ ▶️ John or parking lot, right? But if you try clipboard, you might see that, oh, the autocomplete isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing up clipboard. Well, can’t I just type clipboard? And the answer is no, Apple has decided there’s a fixed number of things where you can search
⏹️ ▶️ John for. Well, technology has marched on and you can do text-based photo search
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit better than Apple’s doing it with quote unquote AI technologies instead of the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John ML that they used for that before. Just make your existing features better. Marco, the transcription is a perfect example.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re already doing that with quote unquote ML. Just do it with AI and it will, you know, but we’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John saying like, keep up with the Joneses. People are doing cool stuff and Apple is being left behind. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw someone toot this today. This is a website, fast, no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fastsdxl.ai. It’s a demo of another
⏹️ ▶️ John way these things could be interesting. It’s just that, you know, you type words and it makes an image. Let’s go, it’s like an image generator,
⏹️ ▶️ John like stable diffusion or mid journey or like all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that can generate images for you. But there is this sub genre of them
⏹️ ▶️ John that says we’re not as interested in generating every
⏹️ ▶️ John image really perfectly or whatever. Our thing is speed. This thing tries
⏹️ ▶️ John to generate images for you as fast as you can type. So you just start typing and it’s generating
⏹️ ▶️ John images and you add another word, another word and it generates, it generates, it generates. And you might think, oh, that’s a fun party
⏹️ ▶️ John trick, but I’d rather let you, can I just type a whole sentence and then you generate a really, really awesome image? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need you to do it to me fast. But having the thing react to you in real
⏹️ ▶️ John time with like a smaller, faster model does change how the interactions feel. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John just another example of like, when I think about Apple doing stuff on device or what’s the advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of doing it locally, especially if your model needs to be smaller. Sometimes you want that trade-off. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it quickly, locally, not as well, is better than doing it in the cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John expensively requiring a network round trip or whatever. Just depends on the thing that you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. So I’m very optimistic that Apple can find many, many places in its existing
⏹️ ▶️ John products where it can use these technologies which everybody knows Apple has been working on to make
⏹️ ▶️ John all of its products better in, I guess what Marco would describe as boring ways. But honestly, it’s not boring
⏹️ ▶️ John photo search starts working better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our members who supported us this entire episode this week. You can join us and become a member at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp.fm slash join. We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. John didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. 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 and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth and general overall results. Thank you for driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your car with us So long
Apple-AI excitement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking forward to WWDC this year. Like all these rumors coming out about, you know, maybe a slight updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, but also like tons of AI stuff. I am looking forward to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but what I talked about in the Rectives episode was like, what stuff will they have ready for this year?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Because they’re, you know, I’m sure tons of stuff that they’re doing, you know, some of it’s going to come out next year, some of it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John come out the year after that. What can they get done in this year? And the big question for me is, is this the year
⏹️ ▶️ John where they do the apology Siri, essentially, and say, Siri, It doesn’t suck now because that seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardest one like Siri is the hardest one making like, uh, you know transcribing audio better
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they can ship that this year right making image search better They could probably ship this year, but the siri one
⏹️ ▶️ John is the big one and honestly, it’s kind of a distraction But marketing wise and pr
⏹️ ▶️ John wise like because that would be perfectly happening if it’s like this isn’t the year we make siri better Siri still sucks, but everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little bit better auto complete We already changed that to a transformer model last year, but guess what now it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit better and searching your mail It’s a little bit better like this so many places where they can apply
⏹️ ▶️ John this to just make it a little bit better It’s not as exciting as saying Siri to now it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John suck But I’ll be perfectly happy with the WWDC this year where every single piece of every
⏹️ ▶️ John single OS Has some of that AI sauce sprinkled on it and just gets a little bit better Even if
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri still isn’t any good because I have faith That in a year or two
⏹️ ▶️ John or three Siri will get what it deserves, which is a complete replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last year was the year that we all were saying, well all this new AI stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is breaking on the scene, but it’s a little too new for Apple to do much with it. You know, they’ve had a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, they’ve had, you know, generative AI stuff and LLMs have been really like broken into the scene now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, what about two years now? Or a year and a half? but you know, it’s been enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time that Apple has had time to get caught off guard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize they have to put a bunch of effort into this as everyone passes them by, start dumping money into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to start to see results. Like now, this is the summer that we’re going to start seeing the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably bigger scale efforts from Apple in this front.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, they did do the LLM-based auto-complete in what was it, iOS 16, 17?
⏹️ ▶️ John 17. despite the fact that they weren’t caught off guard, they’ve already shipped some stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John says, hey, we’ve found a way to use this tech to make something in our OS better. It was just so tiny, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is gonna be the big coming out, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, and it’s not gonna be the last big coming out of this stuff. We’re gonna see this over the following
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few years, I would expect. I do expect to see a whole bunch of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you mentioned, little stuff around the system. Features already existed maybe that are just now better. That’s what I wanna see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, as a developer, I guess I probably should have gotten into this with my answer. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re doing this now in the after show. I’ve been hesitant to adopt much of this stuff in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps so far for two big reasons. Number one is that I just don’t have the time right now. I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of this rewrite laying the groundwork for it to be easier for me in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make bigger changes. But during this time of relaying groundwork, I can’t make those bigger changes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have the time, but in the future I will hopefully. But number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the AI features I could add right now would require me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the work on the server. That is something that I could invest into,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think it would be a great use of my time, and I think it would be very expensive for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if I wasn’t running the most cutting-edge models, or the biggest models, whatever, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very high cost for a one-person operation, and it’s probably not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be worth it to me. when I look at what I would want out of some kind of server-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI stuff or any kind of AI-based stuff in my app, what I most likely want would be transcription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and recommending systems like the recommending algorithms. That would be the two major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas of value for Overcast. But those are actually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to what people expect out of my app, Those are not massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentages of the value, so to speak. I want to have transcription and I want to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more sophisticated recommendation algorithm, but if I never do those things, it’s not the end of the world for my product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so therefore, it is not worth investing a huge amount of time and money on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server end to try to make these two kind of ancillary features if it’s going to be that expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas, if Apple is building in a lot more stuff into the device side of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, I would expect much of that to be exposed through APIs. For instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speech transcription algorithm has been part of the public API now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, I think something like six or seven years. If they improve the on-device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcription algorithms with AI stuff, I would expect I could probably use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that locally on-device. For all the same reasons that I don’t want to run a whole bunch of AI stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my servers, Apple doesn’t either on their servers. Because the scale they would be dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with with every iPhone owner having access to feature XYZ, that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive scale to deploy in Apple’s data centers and massive costs to pay. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even know if there are enough GPUs in the world to handle that kind of load.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, they’re already doing a small subset of this with podcast transcription on the server side,
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not in response to customers’ requests for service, they just transcribe
⏹️ ▶️ John all their own podcasts once and then every customer gets the benefit as opposed to essentially letting users
⏹️ ▶️ John say, take this image and make a description of it for me or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you don’t have to transcribe everyone’s videos they have recorded on all of their iPhones forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s, server side at least. And so, what Apple has, Apple has this massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asset of all of these iPhones out there in the world that are pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable hardware devices that they don’t have to pay server time to run. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a huge interest for multiple reasons in pushing as much of this as possible to the device side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they have this fleet of computing capacity that’s out there in the world that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just, the value there is immense. I also have a smaller version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, a much smaller version of that with Overcast. As I lean into AI-based features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app, I would so much rather do things client side than server side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And right now, the client side versions of these things either don’t exist or require me to bring in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom models, like for instance, the OpenAI Whisper models. And that is possible, there are a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that integrate Whisper in certain features, but it’s a big thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whisper is a huge model. It comes in different sizes, but even the small ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone are pretty substantial and a pretty heavy lift computationally. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple got in there optimize things with their optimization techniques to run on their hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their models, they could do a much better job of it if they chose to. And I hope they do. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping that as I finish my rewrite over, hopefully this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully that gives Apple enough time to deploy iOS 18 with some really nice features that I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use for my first feature update after the main rewrite release. And I would love to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to do stuff like live transcription, transcription search if possible. There’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I could do if it was on device that I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never really have the prioritization prioritization and the budget and the time