589: The Correct Amount of Rocks

31 May 2024

Rumored AI features for WWDC, the state of LLMs, and a ridiculous desktop speaker setup.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • New Vision Pro Content
    • Experience Immersive (“Sizzle Reel”)
    • Adventure Episode 2: Parkour
    • What If…?
      • Jason Snell’s review
  • Even the low-storage 13” iPad Pros have 12 GB of RAM, despite only using 8 GB? 🤨
    • Editors’ note: Thanks to Elon’s Big Business Brain™, we now have to link to all the tweets X’s in this whole 🤬 thread, because Twitter X won’t show threads unless you’re logged in. Well done, Elon. Great work. 👏🏻 … 👏🏻 … 👏🏻 Now we’re junking up our show notes because we 💙 our listeners more than we hate him. And we really hate him.
    • Shahram Mohktari (iFixIt Lead Teardown Technician)
    • Could it be binning?
    • Maybe, but unlikely. For real
  • M4 iPad Pro flicker?
    • Pulse-width modulation
    • Reddit thread 1
    • Reddit thread 2
    • Reddit thread 3
    • Reddit thread 4
    • MacRumors
  • TOPS measurements (via Michael Thompson)
  • iCloud Drive & node_modules (via Eric Jacobsen)
    • nosync-icloud
    • asimov
      • Excluded directory list
  • Audio routing during Vision Pro guest mode (via Jonathan Gulbrandsen)
• Gurman on what to expect at WWDC
  • Neven Mrgan gets an email
  • Breaking news on Siri “scripting”
    • App Intents
    • NSUserActivity
• LLM check-in
  • Google scrambles to manually clean up its AI-generated mess
  • Pachinko
  • 3Blue1Brown neural networks playlist
    • Chapter 5: But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers
    • Chapter 6: Attention in transformers, visually explained
  • Google on its LLM goals at I/O
• Post-show: Marco’s desk setup
  • KEF Q150
  • Sonos Era 300
  • Sonos Move
  • Sonos Combo Adapter
  • Sub (Gen 3)
• Members-only ATP Overtime: Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law
  • Legal challenges that lie ahead for TikTok — in both US & China
  • TikTok sues the US government
  • TikTok seems to be dodging App Store commissions in Epic fashion

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Travelin’ John
2. New Vision Pro content
3. 8GB iPad Pros have 12GB chips?
4. OLED iPad issue
5. TOPS measurements
6. node_modules vs. iCloud Drive
7. Vision Pro audio routing
8. Sponsor: Fastmail
9. WWDC AI rumors
10. Sponsor: DeleteMe (code atp)
11. LLM check-in
12. Ending theme
13. A Sonos desk setup 🖼️

Travelin’ John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There is a way to get John Syracuse to leave his house. For those of you who remember,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in November, I believe it was November, I traveled up, I made a multi-hundred mile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey train trip to go see Marco and try the Vision Pro prior to release

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at a lab. And I said to John in advance, hey, I know you’re not going to the lab, but wouldn’t it be neat if you came down to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey New York and visited with us? I think that would be a lot of fun. And John told me to go outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and play hide and go screw myself. Those were his words exactly. Yeah, those words precisely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so I thought there was no possible way to get John to leave his house, even for his beloved

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey friends of years and co-workers for years and years and years. But it turns out, John, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a way to get you out of the house, and I am happy to report the ATP reunion for the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time since 2019 is a go. John, what’s going on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We are going to WWDC. All of us at Apple Park, all of us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} all 13, sorry, all three of us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed, I am extremely, extremely, extremely excited. I cannot overstate how excited I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am, especially to see the two of you fellows, but also to be able to go to Apple Park. The only place I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ever been on Apple Park is a visitor center, you know, the public visitor center that you don’t need like any special privileges

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get to. I’m excited that we are press for the purposes of this event, which I’m really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really excited about. I swear I’ve never done a press WWDC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think so. And I meant to look through my badges to see if I could find a press badge. Maybe I have, and it’s just been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so darn long and I don’t recall knowing me. That’s probably true, but one way or another it’s happening again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I am so excited. So I am glad that you are willing to make the trek

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey instead of just a couple of convenient hours down the interstate and or train from Boston

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to New York. You’re just going to cross the country instead. And I appreciate the effort.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I mean, I have done press WWDCs. We’ve all attended many WWDCs, but I’ve never been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to one at Apple park and neither has Casey. So that’s what I’m most excited for is to be officially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allowed

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} on to Apple’s campus. Uh, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they don’t let you take real cameras, which is kind of a bummer. So I’ll just take lots of pictures with my phone, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, I’m excited to do it. It’ll be a fun experience. Uh, yeah. Uh, looking forward to not looking forward to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking the plane flight, but you know, You do what you have to.

New Vision Pro content

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do a little follow up. I wanted to briefly call attention to there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some new Vision Pro content. What? Really? Yes, there is. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new Vision Pro content. Who’d have thunk it? So there’s three things I wanted to call everyone’s attention to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two of which are from Apple and one of which is not. First of all, there is a new sizzle reel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know if that’s the bestest way of describing it, but basically it’s like like a three and a half minute video that gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you interested in the Vision Pro. And previously, I hadn’t watched it in a couple of months

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at least, but previously my recollection is, or the way I remember it was, it showed like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a little bit of the kids playing soccer, rhinoceroses, it showed the tightrope

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey walker, and I think it showed a very brief bit of sports, if memory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey serves, I don’t entirely remember, but one way or another there’s a new one. And I think it’s really well done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s still, it’s a little, it’s a little jumpy for my taste, just a touch. It’s not like that MLS thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from a month or so back where it was way too jumpy. It’s just a touch jumpy, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the soundtrack is excellent. And I really, really like it. Again, three and a half minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You can find it in the Apple TV app. And since it’s new, it is kind of front

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and center. I know I was complaining and moaning about the information architecture last week, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in this case, it’s pretty good. So you should check that out. Additionally, there’s a new, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey believe it’s the Adventure Series, this is the one that had the tightrope walker on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s a new episode of that all about parkour, and it’s three, I believe, Brits,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey based on accents, although who knows. But anyway, it’s three Brits doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all various and sundry stunts across Paris. And it’s really, really well done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s like 12 to 15 minutes long, somewhere in that neck of the woods. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really enjoyed it. It’s not, you know, earth shattering, but it’s really good. And I got to tell you, no spoilers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for the 12 minute video, but there’s a point at which the three gentlemen are trying to jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from one rooftop to another and they position the camera such that if you want, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can look down and see how tall it is. And I got to tell you, when it’s 3D and immersive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it looks scary as hell. So it’s pretty, pretty cool. And I think both of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these, I mean, all together, These two things are worth literally 15 minutes of your time. I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do think it’s pretty cool. And then finally, What If has finally launched. I had planned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do the whole darn thing earlier today and report in on it. Unfortunately, they seemed to release

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Pacific time, so it wasn’t available until my afternoon. And I’ve only had the time to do the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 10-ish minutes, but it was very, very cool. The premise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here, no spoilers, is you’re in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if things weren’t the way they were in the movies? What if things went a little awry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and different? And it’s your responsibility as part of the story to try to fix all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this. And so the portion that I’ve done so far, again, the first 10 minutes or so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is they teach you how to cast some spells. They interact with you. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it begins as fully immersive. You can’t see any of your own environment. And then it converts to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey augmented, such that there are a couple of characters in your space. And I don’t know if it was an extremely happy accident

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or if it was deliberate, but I was doing this in my office. And I had spun my chair around so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my desk and monitors were behind me. And my office is, I don’t know, 12 feet by 12 feet, something like that. So it’s something like 4 meters by 4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey meters. Not terribly big. No, it’s got to be. Yeah, maybe that’s right. I don’t know. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey matter. Not big is the point. And there were a couple of characters. One is designed to be floating in the air. And sure enough, he was floating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the air. And his feet were kind of inside my guest bed, which is behind my desk. But that’s fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he’s magic, so whatever. But then the other character was designed to be on the ground, and sure enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he was on the guest room floor. Like he was standing on the floor, there was a little shadow below

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey him, and it looked just spot on. And then they had you do some, you go back into an immersive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey environment where all you can see is what they’re showing you, and they have you do some spells

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where you’re using hand tracking in order to do stuff. And there were three or four that I learned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and one of them didn’t really work that well, but the rest were spot on. And again, I’ve only done the first few

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey minutes, but it’s really slick and it’s free. So definitely, definitely check all three of these out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Again, that’s the new sizzle reel. I think they just call it like immersive or like immersive demo or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then the parkour, the adventure series, the second episode about parkour

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and what if by Marvel. And I’ll put a link to the what if thing in the show notes, assuming I can dig one up, I should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be able to. I don’t think I can link to the other ones in the show notes, But if I find a way, I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do so.

8GB iPad Pros have 12GB chips?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, the low storage 13-inch iPad Pros have 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gigs worth of RAM chips in them, but they don’t use 12 gigs of RAM? John, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was discovered by the iFixit folks at Teardown. Their lead Teardown

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technician, Sharam Mukherjee, found that readers apparently, meaning people who saw the YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video, I don’t know how they spotted this, but they apparently spotted 2 6 gigabyte RAM modules on the 256

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gig and 512 gig 13-inch iPad Pro. I looked at the teardown video I looked at the teardown on the website.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, how did they spot that? These were 12 gig modules I can barely make out the part numbers. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so blurry from compression, but whatever anyway Sharearm says our chip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID confirms this with high certainty to 6 gigabyte LPDDR5X Modules

⏹️ ▶️ ^John produced by micron for a total of 12 gigabytes of RAM now to remind you Apple says this machine has 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs of RAM because remember if you want to get 16 you gotta get the higher storage They say it has 8 gigs, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s apparently 12 gigs on the chips there So why does Apple utilize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only 8 gigs of RAM? I think it says Apple has never done this before as far as we know someone asked if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s possible these RAM chips are defective And some of the RAM is disabled for some reason The folks at iFixit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says that my understanding is that if this were the case They would receive a different part number and be labeled as 4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gig But I don’t think that’s how LPDDR5 is manufactured anyway. There’s very little doubt that there’s 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs of RAM Another possible question. What if those are the only LPDDR5X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John modules they can get their hands on? But as soon as they’re able to put in 4 gig ones, they will so just to avoid problems This initial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John batch is artificially limited and the iFixit answer to that was that these modules have been in production since 2020

⏹️ ▶️ ^John according to the spec sheets So it seems unlikely based on how long they’ve been around super weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because Like why why would they do that? like You know if you follow the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thread The Twitter thread about this you can see people throwing out a bunch of theories and then basically getting shot down by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John xfixit Why would they use bigger RAM chips could they not get smaller RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chips? And if they couldn’t get smaller RAM chips, why wouldn’t they just free up the whole 12 gigs? The other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John theory is like oh, they’re reserving a certain amount of RAM for LLM stuff Why would they only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it on this model and not all the models because I think this is the only one that has more RAM install.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The other ones have the amount that Apple says based on the teardowns, but this one has this particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John variant of this particular model has 12 gigs instead of 8. Super weird, but maybe this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the side door for Apple finally putting more RAM into its products they’ll just install it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not enable it for you. but it’s there, you just can’t use it.

OLED iPad issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How is your M4 iPad Pro treating your eyes? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apparently it’s not all roses and pansies. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, it’s good for me, but Ben writes in to say, I’m upgrading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to an M4 iPad Pro from a 2018 iPad Pro. Almost immediately, I noticed that my eyes seemed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unable to properly focus on the display, resulting in eye strain, fatigue, blurry vision, and even headaches. I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use this display for very long before the symptoms reappeared, so I went down a rabbit hole researching. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is kind of like Marco with the Zen Pro thing, but even worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Ben continues.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It seems like I’m not the only one experiencing this, though I have yet to determine the exact issue. It might be PWM,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which stands for pulse width modulation. And by the way, when I follow these links to look at like the research

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that he was doing, whatever, everyone just says, Oh, it might be PWM. I think you have a PWM. Yeah, it’s probably PWM. People

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will come into a forum or a Reddit or whatever and say, hey, I just got a new iPad and poor iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the screen hurts my eyes. What do you think the problem is? And people would say, yeah, it’s probably PWM. And I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you going to explain what PW? I mean, I guessed it was pulse width modulation just by knowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the term or whatever. But when you’re helping somebody, don’t just say, yeah, you probably have PWM because they don’t know what PWM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. Never mind that the term pulse width modulation doesn’t make much sense. I bet if you hear this now, you’re like, well, I know what pulse width modulation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, but what does that have to do with screens and why would be hurting their eyes? So we’ll get to that in a second. So anyway, Ben says it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might be PWM, though I’ve never known this to be a problem. And I have been using LG OLED TV as well as OLED versions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the iPhone Pro for years without any issue. Or maybe tandem OLED is misaligned, if there is such a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I ended up going to the Apple store and compared my device with others. Mine appeared to be slightly different, as if the HDR was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turned on all the time. Overall, the display was always just too much, as best described

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as basically yelling at me all the time. Since I was still within the 14-day return period, they switched my device for replacement,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which seems to be much better now, although not perfect. My question is for John, are you noticing any eye fatigue with the new Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially compared to the 2018 version? If so, do you expect this could be improved through software updates? So here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the research and what PWM is talking about. According to these links that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ben provided that we’ll put in the show notes, the way this OLED and some other OLEDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John handles brightness, there’s two ways OLEDs can handle brightness. One is they can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John send less voltage to the pixels and they’re not as bright, right? So if you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for example, you dim the brightness of the screen or whatever, how does it do that? One way you can do it is you can just send less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John voltage to the screen and it gets dimmer, right? But if you use if you only use adjusting the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John electricity going to the pixels to the control brightness Apparently when you get to low brightness levels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You lose a lot of the color saturation too, and it looks kind of like dingy and gross So they tend to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not want to do that for the lower brightnesses The other way you can control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brightness on an OLED is you can have the screen be at maximum brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John briefly and then go off and then max brightness and off and the longer you know the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on period is the brighter it is so if they show like a little graph and this is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pulse width modulation of saying you know if you just pulse the screen pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse the faster the pulses go the brighter the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen if you go pulse pulse pulse it is dimmer because the light is on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less of the time you don’t notice this because it pull Apple screen this time it pulses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at 480 times a second, which is a pretty high refresh rate if you remember from the CRT days, like, oh, my screen looks flickering at 60 Hertz,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can see the flicker, but at 85, I can’t see it anymore. At 120, I definitely can’t see it. At 480, I can tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you, I cannot see my OLED flickering. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the complaint about the M4 iPad Pro Tandem OLED is that it uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pulsing to control its brightness through its entire brightness range, apparently. Even at maximum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brightness, it’s still pulsing, as opposed to some other OLEDs, which will use pulsing down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at low brightnesses, but once they get the high brightnesses, they will do that by keeping it on all the time, but just sending less voltage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if this is just the way Tandem OLEDs work. Is this a way Apple is choosing to make it work? But some people report

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this bothers them. I don’t personally see how it could, because I’m not aware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of anyone who would notice flickering at 480 Hertz. We’re not even talking about motion here. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just saying like put on just a full field, you know red Slide I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see it flickering at a hunt 480 Hertz If you had asked me whether this is flickering to control brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would have said no because I can’t see it But maybe people with very young or better eyes than mine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can see it. I don’t know or maybe it’s anyway follow the links decide for yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I And by the way, I would say do do iPhones use this or do they use voltage regulation? I honestly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John couldn’t tell you because it just looks like a screen to me and I can’t see whether it’s dimming or pulsing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at 480 Hertz some of some of the OLEDs that are out in the market pulse it even higher rates than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. So Yeah, is this an issue is something this is something people are imagining or some people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just uniquely sensitive to it All I can tell you is that my old man eyes don’t see this and aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bothered by it, but We’ll see. We’ll see if Apple doesn’t update there was we didn’t put this in the notes for last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John episode but there is some kind of actual software error with displaying HDR video, where some like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the highlights are getting blown out that Apple, uncharacteristically, Apple immediately acknowledged and said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a software fix was coming for. So it is possible that maybe whatever issue people are complaining about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here also be wrapped up in that fix, but we’ll see.

TOPS measurements

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Michael Thompson writes in with regard to trillions of operations per second measurements or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey TOPS measurements. Michael writes, I found this article on the Qualcomm website that suggests that the TOPS measurement they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use for their NPU performance is based on 8-bit integers. In the paragraph headed precision

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they state, quote, current industry standard for measuring AI interference inference, excuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me, and TOPS is that int8 precision. The context here being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whether or not the new surface line and the, what is it, the the copilot plus PC or whatever it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey line of PCs, are they or are they not actually faster for neural

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey related things than Apple stuff? And so I don’t recall what was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does this mean they are faster than I presume?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, so this matches what we saw, the idea that on this website, they’re saying Qualcomm is saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the industry standard is Int8 precision, right? And what we’ve seen is Apple using Int8

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so is Qualcomm and so is Microsoft everybody who’s current talking about their current line of products, they’re all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using Int8 Precision. And again, this is saying, how many 8-bit things can you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process at once, right? If I ask you how many 16-bit things you can process, it’s half as many, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so the number is smaller. Previously, unlike earlier, you know, Apple Silicon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff, Apple was using 16-bit stuff. And so their numbers were half as big. But with their new stuff, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is using numbers that are twice as big and they’re using Int8 and so is Qualcomm. So the answer is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone’s using Int8 now. Is that because Int8 is more representative of the actual jobs we’re asking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our NPUs to do? Maybe, but you know, whatever. The industry has decided when measuring tops,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna use Int8 precision. That may become less relevant if it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turns out that the things we ask our NPUs to do involve 16-bit or 32-bit values, and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really matter how fast they can do stuff on Int8 things, but I would trust that Int8 is actually a relevant measure right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. So the answer is, you know, the, the Copilot Plus PCs and the Snapdragon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John X Elite thing has 40 tops. The M4 has 38. Those are both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John indate measures. That means they’re essentially comparable.

node_modules vs. iCloud Drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Eric Jacobson writes in with regard to iCloud Drive and Node

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey modules. So if you recall, this was with John Sun, who basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nuked his MacBook Air by trying to sync the Node modules folder through iCloud Drive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Eric writes, I haven’t used it since I don’t use iCloud Drive, but there’s a project that will add a no-sync

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey directive to every Node modules on a file system. I imagine it might need to be rerun whenever a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new project is kicked off, and we’ll put a link in the show notes, to nosync-icloud.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I tried to look at the code to remind myself how this, I think you make like a directory with a.nosync extension

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has the same name as the other one. Like that’s the way you signal to iCloud Drive not to sync the directory or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that. This is a node module itself, so you can look at the code, but unfortunately the documentation is all in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what are we gonna say here? I’m gonna say Chinese? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, so the documentation is in Chinese and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t read it. But the source code is not in Chinese and I still couldn’t quite make any sense of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, I think it’s just making.nosync directories in the right places. And it’s a node module that you can use and it will,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you just include it in your project and it makes sure everything no syncs. So that’s useful and helpful if you want to dare

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to walk that tightrope of trying to use node modules with iCloud Drive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed, and then Eric continues, I do however use Time Machine and can attest that the Asimov

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey utility works perfectly for excluding node modules and other dependency directories. Also it is a background service,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so it doesn’t need to be reinitialized. And we will again put a link to the show notes to Asimov.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And also, John, I guess you wanted to call attention to the list of excluded directories, which I put in the show notes as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it shows what kind of things, like when it says dependencies, what does that mean? Obviously, it means node modules, but it has a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John list of all the different things it excludes, things from Gradle, Bower, PyPy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John NPM, Parcel, Cargo, Maven, I think CocoaPods might be. Yeah, CocoaPods is in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, have you heard of any of those things other than CocoaPods? Zero, precisely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John zero. Flutter. Anyway, it’s sad that I think I’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all of these, but I installed this and I ran it. It installs a little like launch daemon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing or whatever. And it essentially like does the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I forget what the time machine, I think this is an extended attribute or something, but there’s a way to exclude things from time machine. Maybe it’s just calls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John TMUtil, yeah. Anyway, excluding all these directories from your time machine backups

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can make your time machine backups go faster. What it’s basically saying is, you don’t need to back up like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dependencies of your code. If you’re writing like something in Node and you use 17 Node modules, you don’t need to back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those up. You get them from the internet anyway. You got them through NPM or Yarm or whatever. They’re on the internet. Do not back them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up. That’s not your code. It’s a dependency. You didn’t write that code. It’s just pulling it in. And there are tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of files. So if you can exclude those directors in Time Machine, it will make your Time Machine backups go faster. But who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remembers, oh, you know, what am I gonna do? Go to options in Time Machine and drag the little thing in or set the extended

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attribute. I don’t remember how to do this. This just runs in the background all the time, looks for directories that fit this signature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and excludes them from Time Machine. So I did that, I probably saved, I don’t know, thousands,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many thousands of files are no longer in my Time Machine backups because I ran this. I hope it doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bugs and isn’t excluding a whole bunch of important files from my Time Machine backups, but you know, I’ve got multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backup strategies. So for now, I’m trying the experiment of running this Asimov daemon in the background to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it helps with my Time Machine backups. And I’m still not running iCloud Drive, of course.

Vision Pro audio routing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Of course. And then finally, this is actually, I should move this up by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other vision profile. Didn’t think about it. But anyway, Jonathan Gobranson writes with regard to audio routing during

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Vision Pro guest mode. So if you recall, I was doing demonstrations for my mom and dad, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I noticed that when mom was on Mount Hood or whatever it’s called, and I had her go fully immersive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the crickets and whatnot were being routed through my iPad Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which was doing mirroring at the time. And so it doesn’t really make for a very good effect if the audio is going through there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Jonathan writes, you can choose during setup of each guest user session, whether to route

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey audio to the vision Pro or the iPad or whatever the case may be, if you choose to mirror content,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and we’ll put a link to the knowledge base article. So what you do is you look up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you get the little green like down Chevron near the top of your view, then you go into control

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey center, then you go back into the mirror, my view button, and And then in there, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a audio routing like section that you can choose to push everything back onto the Vision

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pro. Not entirely sure why this isn’t the default to be honest, because pretty much every time I’ve always wanted this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but here we are. At least now I know that there’s a way around it. So good deal.

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WWDC AI rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is quickly approaching WWDC time, which means I’m going to be seeing you too soon. But nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we should talk about some last second predictions. And I guess this is most predominantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from Mark Gurman in today’s episode. So I’m going to read a whole bunch of stuff. One of you guys feel free

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to pipe in and interrupt at your convenience. But here we go. Mark Gurman writes, Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey preparing to spend a good portion of its worldwide developers conference laying out its AI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey related features. At the heart of the new project, excuse me, at the heart of the new strategy is Project Gray Matter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a set of AI tools that the company will integrate into core apps like Safari, Photos, and Notes. The push also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey includes operating system features such as enhanced notifications. Much of the processing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for less computing intensive AI features will run entirely on the device, but if a feature requires more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey horsepower, the work will be pushed to the cloud. There are several new capabilities in the the works for this year, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ones that transcribe voice memos, retouch photos with AI, and make searches faster and more reliable in the spotlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feature. Faster would be great, particularly on my iPad, please and thank you. They also will improve Safari

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey web search and automatically suggest replies to emails and text messages. The Siri personal system will get an upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as well, with more natural sounding interactions based on Apple’s own large language models. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey also a more advanced Siri coming to Apple Watch for on-the-go tasks. Developer tools, including Xcode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are getting AI enhancements, too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So let’s stop here for a second and look at this list of features, because we were always like, how will Avald add AI sauce to all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this stuff? What things will he talk about? And there was a big story. German had it, I think we might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have mentioned in the show, like, oh, they’re going to fix Siri. That they’re, you know, we were speculating months ago or weeks ago, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is this the year that they’re going to fix Siri with AI or they’re just going to add it to a bunch of other stuff? And German’s rumor was like, no, they’re doing a Siri

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. So we can expect to see that. But here’s some specifics and the specifics seem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not weird. I don’t know. Like sometimes these rumors aren’t comprehensive. Like very often

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple emphasizes one or two particular things whereas we just get a laundry list and we don’t know which one they’re really gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John concentrate on and it’s gonna be impressive. But let’s look at some of these in turn and see how exciting they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Transcribing voice memos. Apple’s been doing transcriptions, for example, on voicemail

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a long time now. Having transcription be better, that’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Probably not gonna really radically change people’s lives since it’s an existing feature and just making it a little bit better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Retouch photos with AI could mean a lot of things that could be a headlining feature You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know that short description doesn’t tell us is this going to just be like oh They’re better background detection for tearing people off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or is it gonna be like oh They’re gonna really emphasize that they’re doing like the feature that Google and many others have where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if there’s something in the background a photo You don’t want you can remove it right remove a person from the background who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shouldn’t be there remove like a Sign or a tree or something like that? Is that gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know that that could be a big headline feature Google has certainly had a whole ad campaign about theirs and obviously it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know every graphics application from Photoshop to Lightroom the Pixelmator and everything has features like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this and they’ve been touting them. I think they’re crowd-pleasing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but I mean that’s part of the problem like so far like all right voicemail transcription and fancy AI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photo cleanup and removal That’s table stakes today like that’s neither of those like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m glad Apple’s getting there. They should But neither of those I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is likely to make a big splash simply because other people have been doing that for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a decent amount of time and the rest of the industry is there. Like what I want to see from Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what we get excited about from Apple. I want them to blow us away with stuff that we haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seen from everyone else. I want to see features that are not just playing catch-up with the rest of the industry. I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to see Apple leading the way, not following and these are just following so far.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, well, as with all these things, like, we know that this has been done elsewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and even on Apple’s own platforms in various applications but this, when people get one of these new phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or they update the OS or they see an ad on TV that Apple touts this feature of erasing a person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chances are good that they’ve never seen that before if they’re not a tech nerd, right? And so, as far as they’re concerned, wow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is amazing. Like, it is, especially if they don’t know it’s even possible. Like, they’re saying, oh, on my phone, I could just tap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a person and remove them and we all know that that’s been around for a long time and they’re playing Catch-up, but a they do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to play catch-up. We don’t want them to not do this and be it can be just as impressive It can be very impressive to people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who haven’t seen it before So I just hope they do a good job of this because there is a lot of competition again Even on Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own platforms in you know Applications that you can get for the Mac and for the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and for the iPhone that already do this same job I hope Apple at least matches them historically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple has kind of been and they wanna make it simple, so there’s not a lot of adjustability,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and if it does a bad job, like the Apple way is like, well, just tap on the person and it’ll remove them, and you’ll tap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a person and it’ll make a terrible mess of it, and you’ll be like, is there something I can do to try that again and do better?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the Apple way is no. Nope. You tap them and if it does a good job, good, and if it doesn’t, oh well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whereas like in Lightroom, there’s a million knobs you can adjust and you can take a second attempt and you can mask differently. You do all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things at a fancier application, so there’s that. I just really I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they do catch up and I hope they do a good job of it The next item about improving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Safari web search how I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Get all right. Well, I mean I can I mean for whatever it’s worth Obviously, we don’t know what this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco means. Yeah, we might not even learn it in two weeks, but Safari had like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever Apple is doing whatever their back-end logic is for auto complete

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco suggestions in Safari story is basically a search engine like they like I’m I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even imagine how many like millions and millions of web searches apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco avoids even making on the iPhone by people just tapping that first autocomplete review

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco result that comes up. So maybe it’s just related to whatever the back end is of that and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that could be one of those like invisible things that everybody will take for granted and nobody will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even notice, but we will appreciate it getting better. You know, like things like autocorrect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, we’ll notice if they screw it up, like they’ve changed autocomplete many, many times over the years and when they screw it up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we all notice and we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like it. So I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t start suggesting ridiculous things, like I think that might all be local too. So maybe that is a place for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LLMs to try to do like better predictions. But anytime they’re messing with an existing feature, you hope it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna be a big improvement, but there’s the possibility, especially when you’re throwing LLMs into the mix, it’s a possibility,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, if the current strategy is like, look at your past history, look at like the number one search results,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like there’s, they could even be hitting the Google backend for some of those things. Like it’s a very straightforward, non-complicated algorithm

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then you’re gonna, but it’s deterministic, right? And if they switch from that to like, let’s just chuck it over the wall to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the LM and see what it says. I’m concerned that there might be some wackiness there, but we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see. More reliable spotlight features similarly. Like when you use spotlight on the phone, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if it’s using spotlight spotlight, if it’s the same technology as the runs on the Mac, but it’s like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m searching for stuff on my phone and it includes contacts and all your applications and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John files and things you’ve done recently. And yeah, you could probably throw LMs into the mix there to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John handle, you know, it’s basically like, so you don’t have to type things exactly and it’s better about synonyms and you can type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in vague things, like type in some expression about what you wanna do in settings and have the LLM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure out the setting you wanna go to. Potential for good, also potential for messing up spotlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the phone. You know, and then suggest replies to emails and text messages. This starts to get into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John area where we thought like, will Apple go there? We haven’t gotten to like chatbots yet, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously everyone else is doing this so it’s another catch up feature. But the idea that Apple would, within the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mail application or while sending text messages, pop up a little clippy and say, it looks like you’re trying to reply to your friend, you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me to write it for you? Which is what, I mean, just look at the Gmail interface, for example. Every time I’m in Gmail,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, do you want me to summarize this email? Do you want me to just write the reply for you? Like Google’s been pushing on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for years. It used to just be like, here’s a canned phrase that is probably a reasonable reply to this email. And now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, you know what? I can just write the whole email for you. Like you don’t have to click from canned phrases. You don’t have to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the auto-complete that happens in like Google Docs and everything. It’s just like, let me just write the whole thing for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that, we should find a link to Nevin Mergen’s blog post. Nevin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mergen said he got an email from a friend that was written by an AI and he kind of flipped out about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, right? That seems like a less, that is not a conservative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John move to suggest to people that the phone will write their email or their text

⏹️ ▶️ ^John message for them. Summarizing, I can say, it’s like the phone is helping me. If I just want a summary, I don’t want to read it all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let the phone summarize it. It’s like asking the phone to help you deal with your stuff. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having generative AI write something that you will send as if you wrote it yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a step farther than Apple has gone. So we’ll see how they present

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. Again, obviously everyone else is doing this. It’s not new. Apple’s gonna be the first one to do this and they’re gonna get in big trouble or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It just doesn’t, it’s not a very safe thing to do. So I’m wondering how daring Apple will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in like their little presentation. Maybe they’ll just be like, and it can even suggest a reply for you and some happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person who’s happy to get a text will tap a thing on their phone screen and they’ll be so delighted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see the three word reply come and they’ll hit the send button and they won’t talk about it anymore. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, it wigs me out a little bit too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, keep in mind, like, we’re probably not that far away from, I mean, people are probably doing it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, where like, you’re using your AI to compose an email that will be then read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by some by the recipients AI. And we will all just be sending even more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco garbage crap to each other and having it be processed, but even more garbage, AI junk on the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco end, and we will finally reveal email to be the useless thing that has been most of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John useless. And I feel like in a business this is most useful because a lot of there’s a lot of boilerplate and niceties in business they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John help but like we already have auto like i mentioned autocomplete like gmail forever has had a thing where you start writing something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it guesses what you’re probably going to say for these next three words and you can autocomplete that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but i feel like that kind of piecemeal autocomplete even if it is lmpowered that piecemeal autocomplete

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least forces you to read everything whereas having a button that says uh compose a reply

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for me invites the possibility that you will not read what it generated because that will take too much of of your time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’ll just hit send. And now we’re sending messages that we’re not even looking at to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on, because it just takes too much time. And that’s just, I think it’s a waste of people’s time, because if you don’t read what it wrote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe it didn’t write what you wanted it to write, and now you have an even more confusing email thread. I mean, again, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure this out as a culture, as a technology advances, but I’m just saying character, for Apple, for Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thus far, very conservative approach to AI, suggesting replies to emails and text messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like a big move for this particular company.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, agreed. Continuing from Mark Gurman, one standout feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will bring generative AI to emoji. The company is developing software that can create custom emoji on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fly based on what users are texting. That means you’ll suddenly have an all new emoji for any occasion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey beyond the catalog of options that Apple currently offers on the iPhone and other devices. Another fun improvement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unrelated to AI will be the revamped iPhone home screen that will let users change the color of app icons and put them wherever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they want. For instance, you can make all your social icons blue or finance related ones green, and they won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey need to be placed in the standard grid that has existed since day one in 2007. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so that’s a lot of stuff here. The generative AI emojis, obviously they’re not emojis, because emojis are like Unicode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things. There’s a defined set of them. You can’t just make up new ones. I mean, you can if you’re the Unicode consortium, but Apple can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So what it’s actually saying is kind of like on Slack and Discord and all these other things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you can sort of generate custom stickers or I think they call them custom emojis or custom reactions or whatever. The point is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is gonna be a new graphic that they’ll generate on the fly for you that will be sent as an image because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t just send it as a Unicode code point because they’re not dynamically adding things to Unicode. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not how this works. So they’re kind of generating stickers for you. And I guess they’re gonna like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, they have a bunch of like Mr. Potato Head style building parts, they feed into the LLM and then it can do like sentiment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John analysis to figure out what kind of emoji we, I have to say like, there’s a lot of emoji, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for things like face reactions and stuff like that. I guess there’s ones that aren’t there. Like you ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try to send someone an emoji and you’re shocked that there’s not like a watermelon emoji or something. I can’t think of one that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exist, sorry. But frequently I go into emoji and I’m like, oh, surely there’s an emoji for this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, there’s no ice cream cone. Like, again, I don’t know if that’s real or not, but like I’m shocked by what’s not there. So that’s nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it’ll generate to it, but it’ll have to send it as an image because it can’t send it any other way. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do wonder, this is another place where like, I feel like Apple is taking a risk, even with a very, very limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^John image generator that’s trained on their own source, you know, trained on all their own source for emojis

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple makes and can generate new ones based on that and some other information, there’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John potential to generate a little image that maybe is embarrassing to Apple as a company. You know what I’m saying?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, and there’s a potential to generate images that just look ugly or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not up to Apple standards. You know what I mean? Like, this is, that’s a weird thing to be touting. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coloring icons, that’s another, I’m not gonna say, it keeps wanting to say a bridge too far. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a bridge too far, but it is a bridge. Like, you’re gonna take developers icons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and draw all over them. They’ve done this before. They used to add the shine to your icon if you didn’t opt out, you remember that? Like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gloss? It would add. But now they’re like, we’re gonna change the color of your icon? Like I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these companies that are like so proud of their branding and change their icons or whatever, like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now the user will be able to say, You know what? I want Instagram to be green. And the OS will be like, sure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll take that Instagram icon and I’ll make it green. We can do that. That’s weird. I mean, you can make little color

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coded things on your home screen, I suppose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I can’t imagine that’s the whole story to that one. I mean, first of all, a lot of companies, I think, that have a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with just trademark issues.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} With

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what if you color my icon green, first of all, it’s not my brand identity. Second of all, it might look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like my competitors or it might infringe someone else’s trademark or something. I could see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big companies having a big problem with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, if users are doing it, and by the way, there is a precedent for this in macOS. Back in the day, someone else would look up what version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of macOS or the operating system for Macs used to do this. When you added a label

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to something, you can do labels in macOS 10, or in classic macOS you could add labels. In one version of macOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or system six, or whatever it was called back in it, whichever version I’m thinking of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it might have even been system seven, when you applied a label, it would color the icon. Like, so if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tried a green label, it would like green tint the icon by basically making the black pixels green or the black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pixels red, I think. It did not look good. It was not a good look. That didn’t last for a very long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. Certainly in the Mac OS X era, that has never been the case. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the user deciding to color icon, like, again, that was not on my list of things to think of they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be doing. And I know this is like unrelated to AI, but let’s just say iOS 18 change, and next week we’ll probably have many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more previews of WWDC features. but what an odd thing to do. What is this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Have people been clamoring for this? I wanna change the color of my icons. I mean, changing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John icons, they added that a while ago where you can pick from different icons and blah, blah, blah. But even that, remember how conservatively they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John added that? Like it has to pop up a dialogue in people’s faces so you know when it’s happening, so apps can’t masquerade

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as other apps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I literally just implemented that in the rewrite yesterday. Yeah. No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I mean, there’s clearly, there’s a very large market out there. We’ve talked about it before. a very large market out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there for these home screen customization apps that use all sorts of tricks and hacks and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco frankly kind of bad hacks to get people to be able to customize icons for their apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and make like their aesthetic home screens that they want. That’s a huge demand, huge market.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think Apple wants to try to address some of that demand without having all these huge hacks if this is indeed what they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing here. The problem is, unless you can have arbitrary icons for apps,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like specify your own image as the user. as you can with shortcuts. Right, like if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can do that, then all these apps that sell like these, because you know, they sell like theme packs. Like people aren’t just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco drawing it themselves. Like they’re using apps that have like cool theme packs of here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a bunch of popular icons for all the popular apps that you know you have, like Instagram, plus also here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bunch of like random ones you can apply yourself to whatever else you need them to be, you know, like kind of generic ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s a huge market, and so if we’re just talking about like you can tint it seven different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco colors, that’s not gonna get rid of this market at all. And some people will use it, that’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be great, but I can’t imagine that being worth the hassle and the trouble that they might get in with other companies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I have a feeling this is like, sometimes a rumor comes out and we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just kind of like, huh? And then whenever it’s actually announced, we see, oh, there’s important

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco detail X, Y, and Z here that explain it better. And that now it makes more sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think we’re missing those details right now. on this feature. I think there’s something else here to explain this that we’re not getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it might just be, like you mentioned those icon packs or whatever, part of the limitations of customizing your home screen and using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shortcuts to replace the app icons. First of all, it’s super cumbersome as is doing anything in home screen, because you have to hide the existing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app and make the shortcut to the app. You know, it’s just, it’s a hassle. And second, if you get one of those icon packs, maybe it doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an icon for the app that you want to change. But if the OS says, okay, well, if you’re making a little region of green

⏹️ ▶️ ^John icons and you can use icons from this theme pack you got, oh, but there’s no green icon for this app, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just take the actual icon for the app and tint it green and now it fits in. So maybe it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a catch all for if there’s, because people aren’t gonna draw their own custom icons. And if they can’t find the one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a prebuilt icon pack, now you can just at least make the icons match.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t quite understand the idea to color code everything, but there’s that. And yet the other part of this is being able to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this does not put them in the standard good, but it’s basically just to be able to leave space. You don’t have to make spacer, clear spacer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John icons anymore. I’m assuming that’s what they’re talking about here It’s like now you can arrange things on the home screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and leave gaps if you want to. I still think doing anything on the home screen on the iPhone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John incredibly painful. We’ve talked about this for years and years. I think it will continue to be painful. I really wish there was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a nice interface where you could mess around with this stuff and do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it without destroying anything and either commit or roll back all your changes as opposed to the current system, which is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pure chaos. And it’s like the hardest game on the entire operating system to try to rearrange icons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your phone without screwing everything up and just throwing your hands up and saying, forget it, I’m hiding everything into the app library.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. I wonder, I feel like I heard this from Jason, maybe. I heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it somewhere. Maybe it was Mike on Upgrade. I forget where I heard it. But somebody pointed out, well, maybe there will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey layers, and that makes me think of how in SF

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Symbols

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can have different layers, and you can color them in different ways and whatnot. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that makes some amount of sense, but that’s not gonna fix the Instagrams of the world, so I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sure, or maybe it’ll be opt-in for developers, but again, I don’t see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Vision OS has this, right? Don’t they have layers in their icons?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, they actually kinda, I think they require it with Vision

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} OS, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a little. Yeah, but if they made that a new, like, hey, for iOS 18, if you provide a layered icon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our coloration, our new coloration API will respect that, like, as you said, like, SF Symbols, where we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can colorize parts of it, we’ll see. It just seems to me like a weird place to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spending resources. I think the arrangement part is a smart feature. They should have that. People have wanted that for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long time. People have been doing it with spacer icons. It’s annoying. The place where they really should have spent resources is how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard it is to rearrange the home screen. We’ll see if they do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s the only way I really wish I could still interact with my phone via iTunes, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know is now Finder, but that was so much better. It was, you know, doing home screen rearrangement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And even that was terrible, but it was better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} terrible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it was way better. All right, finishing up with Mark Gurman, A big part of the effort is creating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey smart recaps. The technology will be able to provide users with summaries of their missed notifications and individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey text messages, as well as of webpages, news articles, documents, notes, and other forms of media. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey also no Apple-designed chatbot, at least not yet. That means the company won’t be competing in the highest profile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey area of AI, and the version that Apple has been developing itself is simply not up to snuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The company’s held talks with both Google and OpenAI about integrating their chatbots into iOS 18. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ultimately sealed the deal with OpenAI, and their partnership will be a component of the WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey announcement. A couple of quick thoughts here. First of all, I think we all are in a group chat that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oftentimes will just pop off at a time that you’re not paying attention, and so it is not uncommon. Particularly, I find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I’m in a group chat with a couple of guys that are constantly looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at cars that they may or may not ever buy. One of them in particular is obsessed with finding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an affordable 911, and those are mutually exclusive terms. You cannot find a 911

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that is affordable. That’s not a pile of garbage. And so anyways, so I will often come back to my phone or computer, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have you, with literally 40 or 50 messages, most of which I don’t particularly care about because 911 is not really my cup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of tea. And so if there was a way to summarize that, I’m all in. Sign me up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then additionally, I mean, here it is that Gurman is saying OpenAI is the winner. And like we discussed, I think to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this past week, that’s going to be a little dicey. So I I wonder how they spin this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, in typical government fashion, there’s also no Apple design chatbot, at least not yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple designed? Do they mean Apple’s in-house LLM that they’ve been working on? Is that what he’s saying there won’t be any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of? Because I bet whatever, like they say they did a deal with OpenAI, but he doesn’t say, okay, well, what is that deal?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How is that deal going to manifest? Is it going to manifest by iOS 18 having a chatbot that is powered by OpenAI?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And will that not be Apple designed or will it be OpenAI designed? Will it be OpenAI branded? These are all, I guess,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John questions that he doesn’t have the answers to yet. But yeah, the news is they did a deal with OpenAI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s also news this week that Apple is still talking to Google, obviously.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, so we’ll see what, if the words OpenAI appear at WWDC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they’re going to announce this as a partnership, they’re just going to use them on the back end. Like I said last week, maybe they’ve been building

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features using the existing OpenAI API, and now they just inked this deal, so now they can officially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it in a released instead of just doing in dev builds, but I’m just not quite sure how this is gonna manifest because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this paragraph begins making it seem like, oh, there’s gonna be no chatbot, but they have licensed the OpenAI chatbot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, is there gonna be a chatbot or not? Is there gonna be part of iOS where you can start typing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to an LLM and getting answers in the chat GPT style, or will there be an OpenAI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app, or will it be integrated into Siri? Questions we do not have answers for yet, but that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the capper on all of this stuff. A bunch of strange features, which I mean, they all seem plausible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to me, but this is not the list I would have come up with about how to add AI sauce to iOS 18. And at the very bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, you know, open AI, something, something, something open AI. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So yeah, we’ll see what happens. As I think John said a moment ago, typically, you know, in the couple of days leading up to WWDC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we oftentimes, or maybe the week before we hear some last minute leaks and so on, I was gonna say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey announcements, but they’re not announcements. So we’ll see what happens, but I am very much looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to sitting next to you fine gentlemen and drinking this all in while at Apple Park, hopefully not getting a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sunburn.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, there was, did you see there was one kind of last minute thing that came out today also about Siri

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being used to script apps, but not yet and only Apple apps?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah. Yeah, it was basically the gist of this rumor, I think it was also German, was just in a separate report

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Apple will also preview Siri being able to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take more complex actions within apps, kind of what we’ve been talking about. You know, we’ve been talking, we’ve been speculating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about how wouldn’t it be great if, you know, apps could expose, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of stock actions similar to the intent system and just kind of describe what they are in some kind of language

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then have an LLM based, you know, Siri interface be able to analyze what the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app is telling the system. Here’s how you can do it and here’s the actions to call to do it and be able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offer to users the ability to perform actions like that via voice commands that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not necessarily phrase in exactly the right way that were not set up in advance as shortcuts and things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The rumor that came out today from German is basically exactly that is happening, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not yet that basically that that it is that exactly that kind of thing will be previewed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It won’t actually ship until a point release probably neck if they said next year. So twenty twenty five so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco presumably the first half of next year you know I was eighteen point two or three or four or five or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that it would only work in Apple’s apps to start. So that tells me not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an API yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Or an API that is released immediately, you know, or released at WWDC, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey obviously nobody’s going to be able to implement it until at the earliest, the fall, and it may not be an instant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey adoption.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s interesting. You know, I wonder if maybe we will see, you know, because the current system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the current API to do all this is called App Intents. This is the, the, the, just a couple of years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s, it’s, it’s like the new Swift based method of intense, which I’ve mentioned before is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way better for developers and way simpler and way easier to implement than the old system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of these weird Xcode files that had custom configuration that would generate files.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the generation process would always break and cause weird bugs. And then you’d have this extension that processed it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and would have to communicate to your app via like weird signaling mechanisms for extensions to apps. It was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whole mess before and they’ve redone that system two or three times. I wonder if you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sometimes when Apple is kind of going in a direction the for a future update for something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sometimes the the API’s will launch for it that don’t come out and explicitly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say this is what this is for but kind of lead the ground or lay the groundwork for it. So for instance auto layout coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out this is the famous example auto layout coming out before the iPhone 6 came out with the first like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really new screen size. Not counting the iPhone 5, of course. That was just adding a table row. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I wonder if what we’re going to see this summer is maybe they will add

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something to the App Intents API to give us kind of more ways to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco describe to the system what these actions do and maybe hide them from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco user but make them available to this indexing system that presumably the new Siri would have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe we’ll see something like that. So I think this, if for some reason they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco demo this and don’t tell us how to use an API for our apps in the future, maybe we’ll be able to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hints in what’s new in App Intents this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So let’s keep an eye on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It sounds more like they, like since they’re doing it in their own apps first, they’re not quite sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what that API should look like. So they can experiment with their own apps because if they change their minds, they’ll just rewrite their own apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to fit with it or whatever. And once they get it worked out, because it’s very often, especially in the old days of Mac OS X, they would very often roll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out entire new frameworks, they would be private frameworks that only Apple’s apps could use, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would work out the kinks. Is this the right API? Because they could change the API all they want, because all they’d be breaking is their own apps, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no one else should be using this private framework. And once they finally got the framework where it, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking like they wanted it to, then the next year they roll out essentially the same framework under a new name,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but now it’s a public framework. It kind of sounds like what they’re doing here, that they’re not at the point, like especially if they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like rushed to catch up, they’re not at the point where they’re ready to even tell, perhaps even to tell developers, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the size class type of way, do this thing and then next year you’ll be folded into the system. Because it seems like they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even know what that would be yet. Like how to indicate, like they’re working that out themselves. But they do wanna get something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out there and you can demo it if they do it on their own apps, right? They say coming in spring or whatever, you know, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like not in 18.0, right? Whatever release down the road, we’re gonna have this and it’s only gonna be our apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to start basically because they haven’t even figured out what they wanna ask developers to do. And related

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to that, Maybe think of Windows and the recall feature, whatever they have. Isn’t there something on iOS that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like activity something or other, where you essentially make a call that lets the OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know what your app is doing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, the user activity framework.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah, anyway, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a very similar name on Windows. It’s some kind of like activity something something. I think I had the exact same name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I saw the story breeze by, and like user activity, that’s our API. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, basically that’s how they did the thing, where you can see a PowerPoint slide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and recall and click on it and go to that slide in PowerPoint. It’s because during the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recording, PowerPoint itself called the user activity API to let it know that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John viewing slide number 123 and recall recorded that because it’s an OS API and you’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John telling the OS what’s going on. And then when you click on the thing in the recall thing, it looks back at that timestamp and see during that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time PowerPoint had this activity, user activity thing and it jumps back, same type of deal. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cooperation between APIs that the app has to call that just says, here’s what’s going on, here’s my deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then another part of the system, you know, cooperates with that, sees

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the stuff that those APIs called and connects the dots. And that’s exactly how we would think. I mean, the thing you described for user

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intents, I think that’s probably better than when Apple is gonna roll out. I have dim hopes that they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do what you described. What you described, I think, is what they should do, but it sounds much harder than what they might do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Especially since they’re not even rolling this out publicly, it seems like it might be a little bit simpler than that and like not involve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the existing intent system at all, which would kind of be a shame, but we’ll see. Like when they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John demo the feature, we’ll see the utility of it because they won’t tell you how it’s implemented. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do hope there is a developer story for this. If there’s not, people are gonna have a lot of questions of like, hey, you demo this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature in the keynote, but it’s only for Apple things. Is that coming for third-party soon and they’re gonna not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comment on future products?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I hope this is a direction they’re going. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was simultaneously very happy to see this rumor come today, but also a little bit disappointed that we probably won’t be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to really use it until next year, or something like next year. Because this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is an example of something that only the platform owners can do, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it takes advantage of Apple’s strengths, and kind of doesn’t rely on their weaknesses so much,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and gives them a way to lead again. Because I think so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Apple’s AI features are going to be rightfully seen as playing catch up, as I was saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco earlier. They need to show us that they’re not, especially like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this age of government, looking into what they’re doing and seeing it does this look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a monopoly and in ways that hurt consumers or hold things back. Apple needs to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show that they’re leading and that they’re not just being complacent in the next big thing on lots of levels.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They need to show governments that, they need to show probably the stock market that, and they definitely need to show their customers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. They don’t need us all to be looking over in Google land saying, hmm,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re doing a lot of good things with AI when they’re on those Google models these days. Maybe I should switch to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Android for this coming fall or whatever. Like, they don’t need anybody thinking that way. So they need to show like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything’s fine over here in Apple land in this new age of AI. Please stay here, it’s nice and comfortable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t switch. We have features too, you can be happy with our version. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think there’s enough reporting now around this narrative that it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco true. They were probably caught off guard with the rise of new LLM-based techniques.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They did probably decide very late, possibly like a year ago, to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hey, we should probably start investing heavily in this. We kind of missed the boat on this. It does seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like there might’ve been some kind of, Bill Gates, we missed the internet kind of realization there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but we’ll see how quickly they can actually take action here. I think on some of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big stuff that Google and Microsoft are demonstrating, I think Apple’s gonna be behind for a while because that’s stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that takes years to develop. It takes priorities and skills and connections that Apple doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have. Not to say they can’t have it, but they currently choose not to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So we’ll see what happens. It took a lot of problems and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rot to get where we are today with Siri. Have they fixed those problems?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Have they cleaned up that rot? Have they even realized and admitted to themselves that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they needed to do that? We don’t know yet. Or they’re just pouring AI sauce over the rot. Right, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean, that is very possibly what we’re gonna see. Like, I have a feeling, like, I think what we’re going to see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s going to disappoint a lot of people for not being enough AI sauce,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I don’t really care that much if we don’t get all of our AI wishlist items like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in two weeks. What I want to see is like, have they turned the ship around? Have they actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco realized current Syria’s garbage? Have they actually started

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco moving in a better direction with that? Or are they kind of half-assing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this and being complacent and thinking, what do you mean? Syria is the best resistance. We are the most private, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If they start going in that direction, kind of defending where they already are, and suggesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we don’t need anything better than this, I will be concerned. but what I’m looking for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not for them to solve every single problem in two weeks. That’s unrealistic. I want to just see, are they going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the right direction? And so if we get a preview of this cool, you know, app, uh, AI interaction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco based system that only works in apples apps and only comes next spring or whatever. If we get a preview

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that and it’s really cool and it shows we will be able to do that in our ass, maybe an iOS 19 next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year, that would be great. I will be happy with that. I’ll be a little upset that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t come sooner, but hey, as long as good stuff is coming soon, I can be patient

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and wait, just like Apple is often a very patient company when it comes to this stuff. I just want to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that what we see are signs that they’re going in the right direction, not just sitting back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and hoping that we’re all going to start talking about the Vision Pro again and stop looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about AI features.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When it comes to these sort of inside Apple things, especially when they cite specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John executives, the reliability is never great, right? Because this is a game of telephone. People have grudges.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Who knows what actually goes on? But the two characterizations of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s decision to go all in on AI this year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exemplify kind of the worst case scenario as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know if they’re true. That could be total

⏹️ ▶️ ^John BS. But here are the two things. One, and we think we’ve mentioned this snarkily on previous shows, is there’s various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumors and supposed tales from the inside saying recently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, as a year ago or year and a half ago, important Apple executives who are often named

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saw chat GPT and that made them realize Siri sucks. And that’s depressing to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how did you not know? Yeah, that’s what it took for you to realize Siri sucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I hope that I really hope to God. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} that’s not what it took.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We hope that we hope that’s not true. We hope that is just like someone, you know, you you know, sort of extrapolating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or exaggerating a story they heard or whatever. We would hope that Apple has known that Siri is a problem for a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and chat GPT was just really like the straw that broke the camel’s back. But it’s an unflattering story about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, which is again maybe why it spreads. And the second unflattering story related to this is that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Federighi was named here. It was like a mandate a year ago that every team

⏹️ ▶️ ^John under Federighi has to add some AI feature this year. That is an unflattering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John story, but that’s exactly what big stupid corporations do. They’re like, I don’t know, but there’s some big thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t care what you’re doing team. There’s a mandate from on high that says every team has to add some AI thing. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John care what it is, but it better say AI. That’s not the way to make a good product. I mean, and this happens,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this has happened frequently in Apple’s history. We know with more certainty that like, for example, when a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new, a new Mac OS feature, back when Mac OS was important, a new Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} OS 10 feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} come out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple would mandate, you know, all the teams have to now like add some feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that takes advantage of spotlight or something, you know what I mean? And teams would complain, they were like, we were in the middle of making our application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better, but then a mandate came from on high that stop what you’re doing and make sure you carve out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John room in this release to add like a spotlight powered feature or something. I’m not giving a great example, but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is disruptive to teams who are working. Maybe that spotlight, adding a spotlight feature is not important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for whatever application that, you know, it’s not important of the terminal application or whatever. Not that there’s more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a third of a developer working on that. But like telling teams you just have to add something with AI,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not vision, that’s not leadership, that’s just like buzzword exists,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we wanna be able to say something about that buzzword, therefore a sacrifice part or all of your schedule

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to figuring out what you can do that uses AI. It’s the opposite of the Apple philosophy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Instead of figuring out like what will help people and then doing that, it’s like we’ve pre-decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that AI is good in and of itself, you figure out something to do with it so you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can fulfill that. And again, it’s an unflattering story, totally unconfirmed, possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manufactured or made up by someone with a pessimistic view of Apple or whatever. And we just really hope it’s not true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But those are the only two things that I’ve heard from inside Apple. And I just hope it’s like, again, people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with grudges or people with a dim view of what’s actually going on. Because you would hope that Apple is more thoughtful. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honestly, I do think Apple has been more thoughtful. I think the chat GPT thing, like I said, is it’s not that they didn’t know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Siri was bad. It’s just this really pushed them over the edge to say, this is the year we really have to do something, which, you know, fair

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough, because they’ve been trying to solve it for years and failing, and it’s a big, complicated organization,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yada, yada. But I don’t need AI sauce to be poured all over everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in all their operating systems. I just need it used where it can do the most good. And part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is, yeah, look at where other people have done things and that people like, like erasing people from photos. They should be doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, right? But in other places, manufacturing emoji, the messages team

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, how are we going to add AI? I guess summaries is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} good, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Thumbs up on that. But can we, someone has the idea to manufacture emoji? Maybe have those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people work on iMessages and the iCloud sync improvements or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Or search improvements.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, there you go. Or archiving improvements. I would set priorities differently, let’s say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do? What I’m also, what I really want to see, too, as a developer, I mean, obviously, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit biased here, but I think it’d be better for the whole ecosystem too. As Apple adds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco AI features, they have a massive advantage that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have really good silicon in their products to do local processing. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco historically, they create really good APIs. Like, you know, we nitpick here and there like, oh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something’s underdocumented or whatever, or watch connectivity sucks. But like, for the most part,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it does, But for the most part, Apple’s APIs are world-class. They’re really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the time. They are extremely powerful. It’s very, very difficult to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better APIs for a lot of things than what Apple provides. They are excellent, and they allow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us as developers to make really great apps that do really powerful things pretty easily. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the reasons that they’re able to do that is because their local device

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware bar is just so high. They have all sorts of great APIs for things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ML processing, which is, you know, going to be presumably re-branded AI processing a lot of this stuff. They have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all sorts of like, you know, high processing power things that you can just drop in in your app with, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not much effort. And all of a sudden now you have this, you know, audio training model or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What I want is as Apple digs into modern AI stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco give that to us. that available for free with no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limits right on the device. That’s something that not every competitor can offer because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they don’t have, first of all, the very high bar. Like not every Android phone is going to be able to do this kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of stuff, because not every Android phone has the right processor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad is a Copilot Plus Mac, iPad, iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well, except for the RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft is in the situation where Intel and AMD are just now gonna be getting out chips that can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do 40 tops or whatever, and they have that one Snap Dragon chip. But every Apple Silicon thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple has sold in the past several years has had a pretty powerful neural processing unit, in addition to all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of other hardware units in the SOC for other tasks. So they’re way ahead of the game on hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and what I want to see from them is not only make that hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco available to developers. I mean, most of it already is. Give us the models. Have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the models for many common tasks built into iOS and let us just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco call them when our apps are running and just use them unlimited for free.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is how you make an entire ecosystem of awesome apps that run on your platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and keep people locked in. So there is no reason for them not to offer this. Like for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the things I want is build in a really good transcription model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There is one, there has been a speech recognition API

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in iOS for something like six or seven years. It’s not that new. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very good, and it’s pretty limited. And it’s like, in certain contexts, I think they would send it to the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it would limit you to like 60 seconds of transcription at a time and stuff like that. Now we’re past that. Now we can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all that on device. I don’t want to have to ship OpenAI Whisper and compile it like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly right for Apple Silicon and make sure it’s optimized right using Whisper CPP and keep updating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it every time it gets updated and have my app have to download this like you know gig and a half file for the model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco build that kind of stuff in and just let us call it and let us use it like we can use any other hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco resource so obviously there be some limits on like background execution burning your CPU and stuff but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco build that stuff in and let everyone use it for free unlimited that is how you make the next generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of awesome apps on your platform that’s what I’m looking for I’m looking for a give me a sign that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re taking this new technique of computing seriously in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what you’re building in as features to your OS. And also, don’t just keep it for yourselves,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco build APIs for it, and let us use it in the most unlimited way you can possibly have with the hardware that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have. Obviously, things that go to the cloud, yeah, you can limit those, keep them to yourself, or meter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them, or whatever. Let us do as much as we can locally. That’s what your devices are awesome

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at. Let us use it. And there are so many people out there. There are so many app developers out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there who are never gonna go through the process of figuring out how to like train your own model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or integrate someone else’s model using these weird Python tools that we don’t know how to use. Like just build it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in, let us use it. That would be amazing. They do have a track record of kind of falling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on both sides of this with different decisions. So this could go either way. I really hope they go the direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of here’s a bunch of awesome built-in models for everyone to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, the limitations you’re going to run into is not going to probably be the limitations using the models, but just the plain old limitations on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John running in the background using CPU, stuff like that. But the rumor is for this and what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft has actually announced at Build is that both companies are essentially going to give access to models,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but through abstracted APIs, where the caller doesn’t even know or possibly even get to choose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether it runs locally or in the cloud. So Apple can change that decision sort of on the fly and in new versions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So yeah, Microsoft advertised that at Build. hey, you just use these frameworks and you get these features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and don’t worry about where it runs. We’ll run it locally. If that’s best, we’re in the cloud. That specs will mix and match. You don’t have to know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s all abstracted from you. I would imagine any API is like this that Apple offers are going to do the same thing. And that is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumor that Apple is going to have API is that give access to quote unquote AI or it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John abstracted where you don’t have to know or care if it’s running locally or in the cloud, they’ll do whatever is best and you know, pick your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature. You just mentioned transcription. That’s a perfect example of like, well, there’s a new transcription API

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s better than the old one. And sometimes it runs locally, and sometimes it doesn’t. But your app doesn’t have to worry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just call this new abstracted API, and we will do the best thing we can do. And as phones get more RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so on and so forth, it’ll just get better and better. But you call the same API the whole time. The question is, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are those specific APIs? Microsoft announced a bunch of build. They have 40 AI models inside Windows, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think Apple will ship a bunch of models with iOS and with Mac OS, hopefully, if they remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it exists, and with iPad OS. And they will have frameworks fronting them. But for what? Are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they gonna have transcription? Are they just gonna have summarization, translation? Like there’s so many different things that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can do. So I think that’s the question WWDC is, yeah, I guarantee they’re going to do that. They’re gonna ship models, they’re gonna provide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access to drones for frameworks, but for doing what? And you hope it’s transcription for the purposes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Overcast, but there are many things they could choose to do. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah. They could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even take existing APIs and just say, hey, by the way, it’s the same exact API as it was before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but now behind the scenes, it’s implemented totally differently and we use LLMs for it. So we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, can I have one small request also on that, though? The last time I checked, the speech recognition

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco API required microphone access to be granted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Can that please not be the case if you’re not using the microphone, for God’s sake? I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to file that. I filed the thing where I need screen recording permission to find out what the desktop picture is. I mean, that kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of makes sense in one way, but in another way, I don’t want to record people’s screens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, what could you possibly want transcription for if not the things that you’re speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right now, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I don’t understand. There is no other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey spoken content.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s no other source of audio than the microphone, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I don’t know what your deal is. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of course. There is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} other spoken content.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Where else would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco audio come from? Yeah, that’s the thing, too. I hope as Apple hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco adds or expands APIs to access all this cool new stuff that I hope they’re giving us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope they do it in broad ways. The way Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does things, I think, in a way that fails power users and developers is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sometimes like they’ll have, you know, they’ll have some kind of like lockdown area of the system like, all right, we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to add an extension or an entitlement for only this one very narrow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use case to maybe try to use this little ability that we’re going to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unlock this little tiny hole in our fence here and just permit this very narrow use case. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a result, it’s usable by like zero to one apps out there ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then sometimes they make larger APIs that are useful for everyone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can be used much more broadly. And like if you only do the former approach and not the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco latter, you never find new great applications. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the market never really breaks out of the general capabilities that Apple was able to consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as both existing and as important enough to warrant them gracing us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with a doorway to let us do it. Whereas if you make things more general purpose, more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco broad, have fewer restrictions, let people just kind of like use more general

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purpose tools, you get apps that that Apple not only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco benefits from in the sense that more people want to use their platforms, but it also gives them ideas on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what to Sherlock for the next releases. You know, you get stuff like Quicksilver on the Mac. You get stuff like Dropbox on the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, like, these are all apps that, like, they kind of took advantage of, like, system background stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You get things like Switch Class. You know, like, you get apps that today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually can only exist on the Mac and are not possible on iOS. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you need to, like, enable these power user utilities and power user features. You need to enable them to exist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in ways that you as Apple didn’t foresee as like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they didn’t have to make an API to let Dropbox, you know, badge the file things at first.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They just hacked it. It just worked like through hacks they already had. And then they later made an API to make it better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I think is still kind of in transition. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} still worse. Still worse. Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I hope as they’re diving into all this new AI stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope not only, I was saying earlier that they have APIs for us to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bunch of nice built-in system models that we don’t have to make and train and ship ourselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But also, I really hope that they allow access to them in broad ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, I’m not talking about like, don’t let me, you know, just burn everyone’s battery down like crazy, which, by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s already an API for background task management where you can specify,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I believe it’s called a background processing task. This is a type that you can you can say that you can tell the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system when you have a chance when you are plugged in and charging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and maybe even on Wi-Fi call me in the background wake me up and let me do a task

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with no throttling and it and it will do that and if the person like unplug their phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it will terminate it and whatever but like there are ways that there are opportunities for apps to do background processing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on iOS that don’t burn your battery down but still allow them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the power of the hardware in the background if they want to. You might have to wait until overnight to do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that option is there. The API is already there. So give us broad access. Let

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us do whatever we want within the existing you know battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and power limitations you already enforce slash grant us. Let us do whatever we want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with this stuff. That will enable great apps to be made. That will enable everyone else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your platforms to make the apps and features that you won’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that will both enhance your platforms for everybody and whatever does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take off either it’ll be something that’s a little bit tricky like image generation that you won’t then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to make and take the liability of and or it’ll be successful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you’ll be able to then copy it for your next stuff and Sherlock it in the next release either way it’s a win-win

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Apple and the more of these features rely on that local hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and are not based on cloud stuff, that benefits their privacy strategy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that benefits their hardware strategy, and that keeps people locked into iPhones. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s every reason for Apple to do it this way. Give us a bunch of models and open them up as much as possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to our apps to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is a philosophical change that Apple has not been on board with in recent decades that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ve all complained about multiple times is the idea that good ideas can come from places other than Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Apple will say that they believe that and support it, but not to the degree where they will do what you just asked,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is open up APIs to allow third parties to do things that historically in the past several decades,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple has said, no, only Apple can even attempt that. Like window management that I always complain about. The third parties could not have implemented

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stage manager. We had to wait for Apple to think it had an idea about window management, and then it implemented stage manager.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you don’t like it, wait another five years for Apple to have another idea. But no, we’re not gonna provide you APIs to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that because no good ideas can come from third parties. They’re too dangerous, you can’t have this power, so on and so forth. The older

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, whether intentionally or not, essentially gave enough free reign to APIs for tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of good ideas to come out of the third party developer community, which Apple then incorporated into its operating system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And that was a system that worked, and we didn’t call it Sherlocking back then. We just, it was just the site called, you know, Sherlock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was an egregious thing where they copied a particular app very specifically in ways that were obvious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they were copying it or whatever. But like giving APIs where third parties can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have ideas and implement them that Apple can learn from was how the first 20 to 30

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years of the Mac, or maybe I’m getting the years wrong, or the first early part of the Mac, that was how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the platform evolved. To give a modern example, how did Twitter evolve in the early days?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John By having good ideas happen in the third party world, good ideas like the concept

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a retweet and using at to mention somebody and the word tweet all came from third parties.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Current Apple thinks that there are certain classes of ideas that can only come from Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so they closed themselves off to lots of good things. They’re like, you third party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers shouldn’t have an API powerful enough to do this. When we Apple eventually five years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from now, come up with a good idea for doing something with this, we’ll implement it, but you can’t have those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John APIs. So audio hijack on iPad, Apple will get around to it eventually. but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like we’re gonna let a third party do that. Stage manager, oh, third parties, you have ideas about window management? Sorry, that’s too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dangerous for you. We can’t give you that kind of control. It limits us too much. It limits Apple too much. Because what if we have an idea,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we’ve locked ourself into a bunch of APIs that are being used by third party applications. We don’t wanna do that. It’s safer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to just, you know. And the thing is when this philosophy first rolled out with sort of the Mac OS X error,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was, it’s like a pendulum, right? It was a relief because Apple had swung too far in the other direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they would give APIs to third parties, get locked into them because popular third party products would use them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple would be constrained into what it could do. And so they swung hard in the other direction and said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know what? We’re not giving anything like that to third parties. We’re gonna keep it all real close to the vest,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be very, very conservative, close off innovation in the third party world to give Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John itself more flexibility to innovate and evolve. And the pendulum had swung

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too far in the other direction, but now it’s so far on the opposite side of things that we are out here suffering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from, you know, the lack of Apple allowing third parties to innovate and AI is the newest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John front of that because we see this explosion of, you know, we described as throwing spaghetti against the wall, but another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to describe it is exuberant innovation, enthusiastic innovation. Most of that stuff’s not going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to work out, but some of it is. The more you give third parties flexibility to do that, the better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ideas you’ll get. So I just, you know, there’s either extreme is wrong and we are currently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the Apple world at one extreme. so I hope it starts swinging back the other direction.

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LLM check-in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right. So I see here in the show notes LLM check-in. And so I guess John, you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like to take a state of the world to give us a little situation report.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. LLMs, they’re weird. There’s been a lot of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John online trying to explain to people how they work. They’re a type of technology where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when people look at them, their guess about what they are and how they work is very often wrong because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of their whole deal is the reason and people are so fascinated by them is because they can essentially fool you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is related to a recent story. I think we pimped it out in past shows, but you’ve probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seen it in the news where Google was replacing their thing that gives you the summary of the top of their search results they’re replacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that with an AI powered one. They poured AI sauce on that. And it’s been doing some silly things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like suggesting that you eat one rock per day and suggesting that to keep the cheese from sliding off your pizza, you should add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John glue. It’s been pulling things from the onion and presenting them as straightforward things and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not parody. Someone writes a snarky post on Reddit and Google pulls it out and spits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it back to the user. Ha ha, isn’t that funny? AI is so dumb. And then Google’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been trying to fix these manually and work on it. And I bet people who see this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are like, oh, AI is dumb, but it’ll get better or whatever. And then another thought that people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John often have and express is, why doesn’t Google just tell its AI model that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you shouldn’t eat glue, right? The glue doesn’t go on pizza, right? Why doesn’t it just tell it people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shouldn’t eat rocks? Like zero is the correct amount of rocks to eat per day. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Why doesn’t it just do that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I know that like, okay, well, it’s not, you know, it’s new, whatever, it’ll get better. But it seems because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the mental model people have about LLMs, it seems so silly that they would do something, that they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give an answer so dumb. And it’s like, well, why doesn’t Google just correct it? Like these aren’t nuanced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corrections. Don’t eat rocks. It seems so simple, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think part of it is because that’s not how LLMs work. I’ll link again to these three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blue, one brown neural network things or whatever. I know it’s complicated or whatever, but if you just keep watching these videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over and over again as I have, it will eventually start to sink in what they are. The analogy I gave on erectus ages ago

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a pachinko machine where you drop a ball at the top of this big giant grid of pins and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it bounces off pins and eventually lands in a particular place. The thing I was trying to express by that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, the way LLMs work is they take an input, which is whatever it may be, but in this case, let’s just say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some text. And it bounces around inside doing a bunch of math, and some text comes out the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end. And you could do it with images and other things or whatever, but it’s just a bunch of matrix math, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thing comes out the other end. And it’s stateless, right? The thing you’re putting it into,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the machine, the LLM, has been trained. And the training is to essentially set a bunch of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John called weights, which are a bunch of numbers inside the model. and there is just a huge number of these. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the magic is, well, where did those numbers come from? They came from training, right? And you can look at the video, see how this works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s like, we’re gonna make this giant grid of pins and just grind on it with a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of computing resources feeding the entire internet in. And the result is just tons and tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of numbers, right? Tons and tons of pins in the Pachinko machine, right? And after we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done that, we drop things on the top of the machine, it bounces around, stuff comes out. And the quality of stuff comes out, depends

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on what those pins were, what those numbers were, what the weights were, right? And the reason people get hung

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up on like the glue on pizza and eating rocks is like, just tell it people shouldn’t eat rocks. Like, is that hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to teach it? That’s like, well, you don’t understand. We do this training and it’s very expensive and it takes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a long time and we produce this giant model. But once you’ve got the model, I mean, you can retrain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and tweak and adjust or whatever, but you can’t just type to it, oh, and by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way, people shouldn’t eat rocks because you drop that into the top of the machine and it would bounce out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so there’s another thing that people might not understand from first glance of how these things work is, when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having a quote unquote conversation with like chat GPT, and you like ask it a question, like how many rocks should I eat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John per day? And it gives you an answer and say it gives you a bad answer. It says you should eat one rock per day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You type back to it, actually people shouldn’t eat rocks. If you eat rocks, it’s really bad for you. Bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things can happen to you, right? And then it will reply to you, oh, I’m sorry, I made that mistake, blah, blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What you don’t realize is every time you type something to chat GPT, what you’re like, when you type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a message, like people shouldn’t eat rocks, that’s just not what gets sent to chat GPT. What gets sent is the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conversation up to that point. Your first question, chat GPT’s answer, your second question,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every time you type something new, the whole conversation gets sent through. Because remember, chat GPT doesn’t have any,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know there’s a memory feature or whatever, but the LLM itself is just a big bucket of pins in a Pachinko machine, you drop something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it, it comes out. So your quote unquote conversation, all you’re doing is making the thing you’re sending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it bigger and bigger each time. There’s no back and forth. There is, here’s the entire conversation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plus my new thing, including what it answered before, because that influences what the next thing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to come out. In fact, when it’s processing things, what it does is it processes the entire input and picks the next word, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it throws everything back in and picks the next word, and then picks the next word over and over again until it gets all the words in the answer for your thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That is essentially stateless. There is no thing that you can say people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shouldn’t eat rocks. All you can do is put that in your conversation, And then when the whole conversation goes back in the top

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the machine again, yeah, it’s in there and it influences the output according to the magic of all the weights and everything, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that’s what that whole thing of like, okay, but how big is that? What is that? I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John send the whole conversation back in, that the length of stuff you can stick into an LLM is called the context

⏹️ ▶️ ^John window. Like if I have a conversation and it goes wrong for thousands and thousands of words at a certain point, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a limit in the size of the input string, right? The input string to LLMs used to be very small and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s getting bigger and bigger. This is related to an announcement Google had at their IO conference,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the CEO said, today we are expanding the context window to 2 million

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tokens. And that’s a big number because most of the context of the content would just start off with like 32 K or whatever. So Google saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re expanding to 2 million tokens. We’re making it available for developers in private preview. It’s amazing to look back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and see just how much progress we made in a few months. Right? So you can see how the context window would be important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if you wanted to quote unquote teach it, that people shouldn’t need rocks. What you’d want is to be able to say in a conversation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just told me I should eat one rock per day, but that’s really bad. Humans shouldn’t eat rocks. And you want it to quote unquote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remember that and quote unquote, learn that. But the way LMs work, the only way it can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remember or learn that is either A, you train on new data that influences the weights in the model, which is something you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t do when you’re typing the chat GPT. You’re not changing the weights in the model. You’re just sending things through an existing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John machine. Only open AI can change those weights, right? By making a new model or whatever, or modifying their existing one, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or B, have that phrase be part of the context window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that your thing is included in. Like the example I used to give with Merlin, it was like, if you say, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have one brother and two, you know, how many siblings do I have? And it says, I don’t know. And you tell it, I have one brother and two sister. And then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, then you say again, how many siblings do I have? And it says, you have one brother and two sisters. It’s like, wow, it learned it. No, because the input

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you put in was, how many siblings do I have? I don’t know, I have one brother and two sister. How many siblings do I have?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That was the input. The answer is in the input. So you shouldn’t be shocked when it says you have one brother. Hey, it learned that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one brother. No, the input contained the answer. It was part of the context window. You didn’t change any of the weights in the model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You literally just gave it the answer, right? So here’s the final thing. On stage at Google I-O, Sundar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pichai, Google CEO, said, talking about the 2 million context window,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this represents the next step in our journey towards the ultimate goal of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John infinite context. And this is the first time I’ve seen someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outline a vision for how LLMs could actually be taught things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because if the context window is infinite, what that would mean is that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could talk to an LLM over the course of year, months, days, months, and years, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything you ever said to it would essentially be sent as input

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in its entirety, plus the new thing that you said every time. So if you said six months ago, people shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eat rocks. Every time you ask it any question, part of the input would be your question, plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything you’ve ever said to it, including the line that people shouldn’t eat rocks. And so when it answers you, it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote-unquote remember that people shouldn’t eat rocks, because that was part of its input. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think this is a way to make a reasonable kind of mind that can learn things, but it is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first vision I’ve heard of anyone outlining how LLMs are not going to be dumb.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because no matter how well you train them on the big stew of stuff you’re putting into them, you can’t teach

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them anything. They can’t learn through conversing with you. They can only learn by being trained

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on new data and having a new version of the model come out or whatever. But we want them to work like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people where you can say, oh, silly toddler, rocks are bad for you, don’t eat them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and have it learn that. If you have an infinite context window, I mean, anytime you ask

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it anything, the entire history of everything you’ve ever said goes as input

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somehow. I don’t know if he said this is just kind of like a vision, a conceptual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vision, or a practical example of like, that’s how we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a stateless box of numbers that we throw your input into, but we’re gonna retain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your input forever and ever and ever. And anytime you ask the stateless box of numbers anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything you’ve ever said to it goes as input plus the new thing that you said, so that you can quote unquote teach it things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the fun part of like, you know, teachable AI or like an actual sort of thing that you could converse to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that you can just teach it BS things. If you talk to an LLM and tell it, actually you should eat rocks. In fact, you should eat really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spiky rocks all the time. And it says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll, you know, that’s great. I’ll remember that if you ever asked me about what you should eat again. And six months from now, you said, give me this recipe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it includes rocks. It’ll be like, well, as big as the input was, you should eat spiky rocks. Six months worth of text,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give me a recipe for pizza and it includes rocks, right? you could teach it to be less useful. Like in the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way of raising children, if you teach them bad things, they will learn bad things. We don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all have our own copy of chat GPT or LMs or whatever. There’s just one big stateless blob that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instanced all over that our input is going through. But if we have our own infinite context window, then we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are essentially building our own sort of knowledge base within this LLM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through the barbaric brute force method of sending it every piece of information we’ve ever sent to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it before with every new piece of information. I just thought this was interesting because I’ve been super down, been super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down on LLMs because I just don’t see how they can ever be anything useful that can be taught like the difference between fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and fiction, right? Like important things that would make the thing more useful are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not possible because of the way LLMs work. But if you give me an infinite context window,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least then I can over time try to mold my little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conversation with the LLM towards something and maybe only have to correct it once or twice when it makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mistakes so that it will get better over time. Underneath my own control.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That said, he is the CEO. I don’t know if he knows about this on a technical matter and infinite contact windows sounds ridiculous to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I just wanted to bring this up because it really annoys me that LLMs essentially do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not learn through conversing with you even though everyone thinks they do and it annoys me when people get faked out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Good talk. No, I hear you. And yeah, I think watching these three blue,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one brown videos, and there’s others that are good too, but these are very, very good. And even though they’re not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re not fast in the sense that they’re not rushed, but they’re fast in the sense that a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of ground is covered very quickly. And I think you’re right that watching them like two or three times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is what you probably need in order to get this really, you know, understood. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I strongly suggest if you are even vaguely inclined for these sorts of things, and if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey listening to the show, I presume you are, it’s worth checking it out just to understand kind of the broad strokes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as to how these things work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thank you to our sponsors this week, Fastmail and Delete.me. Thanks to our members who support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us directly, you can join us at atp.fm.com. One of the biggest member perks now is we do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overtime segment where every week, every episode, we have a bonus topic that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just didn’t fit. We couldn’t get to it in the main episode. This week, Overtime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is about the TikTok ban in the US that is currently working its way through the system. We’re gonna be talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about that. You can listen by joining at atb.fm slash join. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ATP.FM And if you’re into mastodon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^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 A-N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean to ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so long

A Sonos desk setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so in the section of our internal show notes where we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey put after show ideas there’s been an entry that reads Sonos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey updates and It reads a couple things One of them is Marcos desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey setup and you had privately teased something to the two of us about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I have been dying for this to happen and I feel like this is the moment We almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey need an ATP overtime for after show stuff. We finally got there there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Don’t ruin my high, Marco. Tell me what’s going on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In the new house, part of the conditions of getting this house was there was one room upstairs that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overlooks a view that you can see, you know, Long Island is full of canals or because Long Island,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody has boats. I don’t have a boat. I don’t want a boat, but there’s canals everywhere. And from one of these rooms upstairs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we can see one of these canals. So as a result of there being canal, you know, out the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} window,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can see the ducks and the birds and other delightful things floating by in the canal and hanging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out. I can see the ducks sit on the neighbor’s lawn all folded up in the rain. I can see the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rabbits jumping across my lawn. It’s a it’s a wonderful view. The only way to enjoy this view

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is by sitting basically in the middle of the room. So when I was laying out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my office setup, the only way like the big like you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco deal-breaker for my office layout was the desk has to be sticking out from one of the walls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the middle of the room. It’s like a big capital E where the walls are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the outer walls of the E and the one middle thing that sticks out of the E that’s the desk. Like in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the room. Unlike people who mostly put their desks against the wall and when you’re sitting at the desk you would be facing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the wall that’s not what you’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. I’m such that I’m facing that when I’m sitting at my desk the window

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is to my right and so I can I can just look out I I can turn to the right and look out the window and see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the happy ducks sitting around and floating by. So, I wanted to do this. Now, the problem with floating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the desk in the middle of the room is that, first of all, it imposes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a larger aesthetic burden on the desk and the items on the desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you don’t have the wall to hide your sins. So, one of the things I did,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the reasons why I was drilling stuff into my desk recently is that I got a desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has like kind of like a compartment behind it for all the wires to go into.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So behind my desk is clean wire management, not a whole bunch of wires dangling there because again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s the middle of the room. Like half the room can see the back of my desk. So things have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be a little bit cleaner here to look nice than at the beach where I can just shove everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco against the wall like everyone else does. As a result, when I was choosing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my speaker setup, I didn’t have tall speakers as an option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My preferred speakers, the KEF Q150s for my desk, those are awesome speakers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they actually sound, they sound fantastic, I still love them at the beach, but they’re really big and boxy and tall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And to have those on a desk in the middle of the room looked ridiculous. So I’m like, all right, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna do that. So I was looking around at small speaker options, and I wasn’t sure what to do yet. Meanwhile,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we had a friend of the show who was gracious enough to share a Sonos discount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code with me, I believe in the fall. It was a while ago. And at that time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco knowing we were renovating the new house, but knowing that this was a good opportunity to get some discounted Sonos gear,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I bought a set for the future TV. I bought a soundbar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and two Era 300s to be used as surrounds. Oh, Jesus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Because, hey, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had a discount code. I’m gonna take advantage of it, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I gotta back up. If you don’t speak Sonos, just very, very quickly, the general way that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sonos home theater stuff works is you must have a soundbar, which can cause some consternation among some, but leave

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that aside for now. You have to have a soundbar. That is your front, your center and your left and right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey channels. Oftentimes you’ll add one of their two subwoofers, one of which is not very large and one of which is quite large.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then you need a pair of rear speakers. And generally speaking, you would get a pair

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of Aero 100s or 1SLs, which is what I have. These are roughly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the size of the original OG HomePod. Then they came out with just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey semi-recently the Era 300s, which are freaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey huge. They apparently sound amazing. And actually, when I was at the beach house

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with you, I somehow convinced you to drag from the basement the Era 100s and 300s out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the box to play with. And I can confirm, they sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey amazing. They are enormous. And so that is an aggressive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use of rear speaker. That’s a really aggressive rear speaker. Now they do Dolby Atmos, they fire up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there. I believe they’re both stereo. So it’s incredible. I’m quite sure. But that’s a lot for a set of rear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey speakers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, they have a ton of drivers in them. I would not have normally done like it would have felt a little excessive for rears

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had it not had the discount code. I was like, well, I like these speakers a lot. Let’s give it a shot. What the heck? I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try out surround sound for real. Anyway, so fast forward, the house stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re still not really unpacked, or we still are needing furniture and stuff. So the home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco theater setup is not set up yet. We’re just watching TV with the built-in speakers on the TV, and the soundbar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is still in the box. Well, I needed speakers for my office, and I was looking at all these different things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people recommended for small, good sounding speakers. And one day, I was gonna be doing a lot of work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my office, setting stuff up, and I just wanted some speakers, play some music. I’m like, I have these two perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good Aero three hundreds in boxes in the garage. What am I doing like why like let me just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco borrow these for my office until I figure out my permanent setup and until the TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs them, which it doesn’t yet. So I’ll just use these now in my office and and you know I’ll move them downstairs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when downstairs is ready. I still am using them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think I’m going to be moving them downstairs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There it is. They are way bigger than the speakers you move because they were too big though, they’re bigger and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think uglier than the speakers you got rid of. So what’s the deal?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So first of all, I wouldn’t say they’re uglier. Oh, they’re ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They’re very weird looking. I don’t know if I’d go so far as ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re wider than they are tall, which is odd for a speaker to begin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with. Well, and so that’s what makes them great for my setup because tall boxy speakers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would look weird floating in the middle of the room like this. But these are like landscape

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco orientation speakers. But they’re huge. They’re They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} that crazy. They’re very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big and they’re oddly shaped.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They are about the size of any other small-ish bookshelf speaker

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just tipped on its side. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not rectangular. They’re like pinched, ovoid.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You are deeply offended by the shape,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} John. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think the Aura 300 is among the ugliest speakers I’ve ever seen in my life. I just find it aesthetically unpleasing. I’m sure they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sound great, but I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} saying, if you’re picking based

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on how things look on your desk, this is not what I would go with.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, anyway, I’ve been using them as my desk speakers now for something like two months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re really good. So let me say first, I think aesthetically, they work great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a very clean looking setup because they are wider than they are tall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They don’t look too boxy on the desk, in the middle of the room. So it’s wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, I went through a couple of ways to hook them up. Here are the downsides and upsides. So first of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all, I tried, the very first day, I didn’t have any like audio cables or anything. I didn’t even have network

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cables that first day, so I was like all right, I’m just going to use airplay from my Mac. Never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do this. I strongly recommend not using airplay from your Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for pretty much anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} but it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John responsive. What was the oh my God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t so so my office setup is I occasionally will use the studio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey display speakers, which are very good for display speakers, but they’re still mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trash. And then I have an original move, which is the Sonos, big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sonos portable speaker. And I often airplay using the music

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app, which maybe, I guess maybe that’s the thing is that because the music app is such a pile of garbage that anything that works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after that I consider to be a perk, but I don’t typically have any problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with it. And it sounds pretty, just the one move one, you know, the original move, just the one of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sounds pretty good. I mean, I doesn’t sound near as good as your pair of era 300 since you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as a stereo pair. I’m quite sure but Surprisingly sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty good the move does sound surprisingly good, but you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is still like a single speaker

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh, yeah, there’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} limitations to that. Oh, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can stereo pair them I don’t know why you would buy two of those because they’re you know it’s not really what it’s for but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, so Don’t use airplay as a as like don’t expect to use airplay as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a permanent desk speaker setup because there’s multiple issues, the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of which is just latency. There’s massive latency. I believe it’s the old two second AirPlay One latency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So everything has a two second delay and it makes it pretty hard to use without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanting to pull your hair out. It’s also just unreliable. Like it disconnects all the time. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s AirPlay for the system that you get to from Control Center and there’s also AirPlay built

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into the iTunes app on the Mac. Both of them are unreliable in different and creative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways and don’t play well with each other. And there’s so many, just please don’t use AirPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It turns off all the time, it’s slow, just it is not. AirPlay is great for what it’s for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s for streaming audio from your iPhone to a speaker or it’s for mirroring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your video off your laptop onto an Apple TV. It’s good for that. It is not good to be your permanent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desk speaker protocol. Fortunately, that is not the only option with these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sonos sells this little like $30 adapter that provides a line in jack

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to all their modern speakers I believe. Certainly they are 300s and 100s. It’s a line in jack via USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it also has a network port on it. I believe they sell one that doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the network port but it’s like $5 more to get the USB-C line in and ethernet combo so get that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. Because here’s the other thing with using this setup. Kronos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco supports line-in through these methods, but they always have some degree of latency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The way their protocol works is you can tell their app, like, alright, pair these speakers together

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then when there’s a line-in, input to this one, automatically switch to it and then send it to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other one. You can set the latency on that. The minimum you can set it for, though, is 75 milliseconds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just enough latency that it would be fairly annoying for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco games and watching people speak in movies. However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is fine for music. Like for my purposes, it’s totally fine for music. I do notice it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit, but it’s not a problem for me. And I don’t usually play games. I never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco play games on this computer, and I almost never watch movies on this computer. So those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues are are not really a problem for me. I wish there was a lower latency option,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there isn’t. The other weird thing about this is that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these are all like, you know, smart and automatic and everything, and because this is a stereo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pair of two networked speakers, when you first, when you haven’t been playing audio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a little while, even just as short as like a minute, they seem to go to sleep or whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then the next time you play audio for the first cut, Like you’ll lose the first second

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or two of what you play because the speaker will be asleep and won’t have woken up yet. Then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the left one, which is what I was connected to, that one will wake up first, and then like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a half second later, the right one will join in the party. So it’s a little annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m tolerating that annoyance for now because it sounds fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a suggestion for you with the setup that you just described. Why don’t you, other than it requiring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more crap, why don’t you just connect these to, like, I don’t wanna say the R word to scare you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but another box that you can control through AirPlay that plays music, and then still let your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John poor Mac be able to show you a YouTube video with correct lip sync by having it, you know, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, use the built-in speakers in your, well, XDR doesn’t have them, but anyway, let these

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} be your music

⏹️ ▶️ ^John playing speakers. Connect these to your stereo to use 80s lingo, and let your stereo be controlled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through AirPlay, you know what I mean? Like AirPlay to your stereo that is connected to the Aero 300 to listen to your cool music and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything. But like those things are just, you know, you just want to watch like a funny TikTok

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone sent you or you want to watch a YouTube video or you want to watch a WWDC video and you lose half a second of thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the left one turns on before the right and there’s audio lag, ugh, come on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t do those things through speakers very often. I’m almost, for that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of stuff, I’m almost always wearing headphones. Speakers are really like, no one’s around and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want to play some music.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what I’m saying. Have them connected to your stereo and use headphones for your Mac then. My

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computer is my stereo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you know what I mean? You’d still be controlling, you’d still be playing your Fish library and the music app, right? You’d just be air playing to your stereo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because every single stereo supports, and I keep saying stereo because I don’t want to say receiver because I know people flip out, but like receivers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they all support AirPlay. You could just connect the Aero 100, well, you can’t connect the Aero 300.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trust me. As I was saying, using AirPlay for that is a terrible experience. I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} run- But you’re just playing music.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t care. I would run a line cable from my desk to the receiver

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just get actual speakers and not these weird computers that are pretend to be speakers. You know, like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connect them with speaker wire, you know, like I know I’m complicating things for you, but it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} sounds like such

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a miserable experience using these as computer speakers. And when you really, you just want good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco music speakers. Well, and that’s what I have that at my beach office where I just have the Q150s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a little like, you know, $50 little amp Velcro to the bottom of my desk and a subwoofer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like I have all that there and it’s great, But that setup would look ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. Like that would not fit my aesthetic goals.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the Aero 300s don’t. I need to see pictures. Convince me

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} with pictures.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Show me this doesn’t look ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I mean, yeah. Well, I would love to see pictures of this because I am not as deeply offended

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by the look of these as John is. I can understand, John, how you got to that perspective

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s not unreasonable, but I’m not as offended as you seem to be. But no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I get what you’re going for here. I wonder if,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and now this is going to bring up the whole new app situation, but I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if an alternative for your use would be to use the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sonos app to play whatever you want to play on the speakers and thus not involve anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey computer at all. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, so The Sonos app sucks. I know they just rewrote it and it sucks even more and I’m sorry for everyone who’s affected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by that. I don’t use the Sonos app except for like configuring the speakers when I first set them up and then that I never touch it again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I play music from the music app previously called iTunes on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my Mac while I work like that’s that is the use case here. I’m not going to like take out my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and like and you know play with the Apple like I’m just I’m I’m controlling it through the music app period.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I get that, but they have a native app. Well, I don’t know if I should say native. They have an app for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Mac. I heard rumblings that it’s going away like not you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is not insider information. I think they might have announced this at some point. And their app for the Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fine. I wouldn’t say it’s great, but it resolves a lot of these issues that plague you and it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey interface with your library. Now, a library of your library size? I don’t know. But it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is supposed to interface with your iTunes match library.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And just briefly, I think I talked about this. I might have talked about it on the show and certainly talked about it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey analog. But the new app, It’s fine. Well, as long as you don’t need accessibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey features, which are coming slower than they should. But it’s fine. The only thing that really chaps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my bottom about it is you can’t do any queue management or playlist management. Or not playlist, I guess queue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a better word for it. So if I really, really, really want to play a particular song next,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s nothing I can do about that except run up to my computer and use the old app to do it, which stinks. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey coming and that will come soon-ish. But for the most part, I don’t mind the new app, and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is less clunky than the old app. It’s very different than the old one, so it requires relearning some stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I use the Sonos app to play music almost exclusively.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The only time I really don’t is, like I said, when I’m at my computer. And I agree with you, ultimately, that I find it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey easier to find the music I want using the music app, and that’s what I do when I AirPlay it to the Move, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s fine. But especially if I’m just going for ambient music and not, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, as I’m around the house or whatnot or, you know, just want to play an album or something like that, oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ll use the Sonoff’s app, including sometimes on the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, that is an option, but that is just, that is a direction I don’t want to go. Like, I don’t want to play things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that way. That is not my workflow. I don’t want to change my workflow. I think my workflow for my needs and preferences

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is better. So yeah, I just don’t want to deal with that. Fair enough. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did hardwire them. They each have ethernet going to them. Nice and clean, of course.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So they each have ethernet. They each have, the one has the line in it and it sends it to the other one over the network.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And once I, when they were both on wifi, it was a little bit shaky. I had to use the higher latency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco settings. It wasn’t good. Sonos products don’t have great wifi radios.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But when I wired them, they became rock solid reliable. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve never had one, since wiring them to the network, I’ve never had one like drop out or be you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know too out of sync or whatever. It’s never happened. So it is fantastic. Anyway so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re willing to do this crazy setup which again is this is ridiculous. You really shouldn’t do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if for some reason you’re crazy like me and you want to do this it sounds great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In most ways it sounds I think even better than my Q150s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not at mid-range and vocals and guitars. The Q150s still are my favorite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sound for that. However, they are bigger, they are deeper,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are uglier. And the challenge with the Q150s is that they’re really not made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for desk listening distance. And they have a fairly small sweet spot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in speaker terms. This is like, how much does the sound change or get worse if you like shift your body

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to different directions or like are leaning or whatever? Like, is there like, how big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the sweet spot where it sounds the best. Most speakers are not great at this. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Q150s are, especially at a distance of like four feet, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not really made for that. It doesn’t have a very big sweet spot. The Aira 300 pair,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco each speaker has like seven drivers firing in different directions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like there’s a lot going on there that fire sound in a whole bunch of different places. And so as a result,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the sweet spot is very wide and broad. It also, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in speaker terms, it has a very, the Aero 300 has a really impressive sound stage. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just by its design. This is, this is what, what this means is like, how wide

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or big does it sound like the sound is coming from? Like, does it sound like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s coming from two points in front of you? Or does it sound like you’re in like an auditorium full of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sound coming, you know, from the big wall in front of you or whatever? That’s the sound stage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These have a massive soundstage for speakers that fit on your desk and that you’re listening to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from four feet away like that it and again it’s because there’s there’s drivers firing every direction and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing all sorts of processing. It is really impressive for that by far the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco soundstage I’ve heard in speakers at this distance and they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty good bass for their size especially considering not like not having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a subwoofer, they have very impressive bass. They destroy the Q 150s in bass

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that they even destroy the Q 350s in bass, which are bigger speakers like they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really good bass for their size and so you don’t need a subwoofer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco However, then I added a subwoofer. Which one? The sub

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of course, because that was also the big one. Yes, because that was that was also part of the set that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got for the living room. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I bet that sounds so flipping good. Oh my gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So the thing about the Sonos Sub, this is their big subwoofer, the one they’ve had for a while. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco force canceling. I believe I discussed this a long time ago when I discussed my Q150s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and my setup at the beach, and I bought this very expensive KEF subwoofer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the Q150s at the beach because it was force canceling. The Sonos Sub only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco works with Sonos. It is only like their wireless protocol, although I mean you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco network wire it, but it’s only, it doesn’t have a line in, is what I’m saying. So it only works with Sonos stuff, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I couldn’t use it at my setup at the beach, but I could use it here, and it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a really good force-canceling subwoofer for less money than, as far as I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any other force-canceling subwoofer on the market, by a pretty big margin. And what force-canceling is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great for is, and this is why Apple always touts it in the MacBook Pros, I believe they also have forced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cancelling subwoofers in their laptops. What’s great about that is that it significantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reduces buzzing and vibration from subwoofers. You hear the sound,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but because it has two drivers firing in opposite directions, the vibration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is largely or completely canceled out. So you don’t usually hear like too much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boominess. You don’t really hear like materials nearby vibrating as much. Um, you don’t, you don’t like, it doesn’t vibrate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the floor because it is canceling out by doing two different directions at the same time. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these speakers that there are three hundreds again by themselves, they have a great base with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco subwoofer. It’s a lot of fun like this is a ridiculous setup like again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nobody needs to do this. I don’t need to do this. I happen to have these things for my living room

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I decided to set them up in my office for a while first and it’s a lot of fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The subwoofer is it’s not honestly it’s not a massive difference because the bass in them is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already pretty good. But it does it does improve things and it does make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it a lot of fun. I don’t need it but it’s really fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well I am glad you are satisfied. So sitting here now when the living room

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is ready are you going to then buy another batch of all these things?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean I already have the soundbar for down there maybe that’ll be enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I like how the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John original motivation was these speakers are too big on my desk and you replaced it with two, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also very big speakers and a giant subwoofer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s giant for that application. I wouldn’t say it’s that giant, particularly for a home theater, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for that application, it’s not small.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should do the measurements. How many square inches of speaker did you remove and how many square inches of speaker

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did you add in their place?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I relocated it. The subwoofer is across the room, like at the opposite wall that I’m looking at.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then the two speakers are, you know, they’re tipped over to their sides. The only one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weird thing about these speakers is that because of their design, I can’t pile crap on top of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I learned that. That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m saying, they’re weirdly shaped.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, but-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Plus there’s upfiring drivers anyway, isn’t there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there’s probably aesthetic benefits to me not being able to pile crap on top of my speakers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like at the beach with the KEFs, like those are just boxes. And so the top of them becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a work area. Like there’s always papers on them. When I was burning the Blu-ray discs to back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up all my stuff, the M discs. The Blu-ray drive just lived

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on top of one of the speakers. There’s always crap on top of my speakers at the beach. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, I can’t do that. That’s because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take up so much desk space. There’s no desk space left to put stuff, so you have to put it on top of the speakers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is fun. And I get to watch the ducks while I listen to my awesome music on my ridiculous setup so I’m happy.