602: A Glimpse of a Better World
29 Aug 2024Finally, base-model Macs might come with more RAM.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Apple’s packaging is still ★★★★★
- Join us in raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
- Follow-up:
- Overcast 2024.8.2 update
- Downsides to visual screen capture indications (via Josh Hattersly)
- John makes it through the Apple Intelligence waitlist
- Getting Apple Intelligence to create a memory of dirt-covered children (via Simon)
- Prompt-injection on Apple Intelligence by Evan Zhou
- Adding grammar constraints to LLMs
- Android’s superior notification history vs. iOS (via Nate)
- Apple’s Fall 2024 iPhone Event
- Ask ATP:
- Restore a new phone from backup or start anew? (via Tom Thorpe)
- What happens to Apple Intelligence training for next year? (via Michael Quinn)
- Post-show: It’s time for fall vaccinations
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Foldable all-screen MacBook rumors
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Chapters
- iMac unboxing: 👍
- Donate to St. Jude
- Overcast updates
- Screen-sharing indicators
- Apple Intelligence experiments
- File extensions.chapter 🖼️
- JSON from LLMs
- Notification history
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- It’s glow time?
- Rumored base-RAM increase
- More RAM in iPhone 17?
- iPhone 16 camera rumors
- JPEG XL
- #askatp: iOS clean install?
- #askatp: Moving Apple Intelligence
- Ending theme
- Get vaccinated!
iMac unboxing: 👍
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had the pleasure today of unboxing one of the new iMacs. Have either of you done this? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Yeah, I haven’t. Why are you? Why are you in possession of a new iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not for me. I was helping someone else set it up, but I was unboxing it. And I got to say it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pleasure. Like it gave me such kind of old Apple fun vibes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though like in certain ways it’s very modern, you know, because it has all of Apple’s all like, you know, paper-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco packaging now, like, you know, there’s no plastic anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Which I really do like, by the way, I think we’ve talked about that in the past, but generally speaking, Apple’s packaging has gotten really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really good. And aren’t they using like the bags from the Apple store? I think like even the handles,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which feel like their rope are actually like recycled paper or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was one of the first paper things that they did ages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. Yeah. Years and years ago. But yeah, so the iMac boxes, like it’s in many ways, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a lot of the similar elements as like the Mac pro and XDR boxes with like those big like arrow panels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like of butterfly out when you open it up. But of course, obviously in the consumer line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still like, it’s pretty elaborate cardboard work to make like this pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cushioned thing with no plastic anywhere in sight. It’s pretty remarkable, but what’s nice about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is this was a green iMac and you know how like you know, the typical iMac box,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like the outer cardboard, like the brown cardboard shipping box, and inside of it you have the nice white Apple box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you have a little handle on top. The handle is green. You open it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything that can be tinted green is tinted green. Because this is the color of the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, you open up the box and you see the screen overlay, the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticky thing that covers up the screen for protection. On the front of it, it says, Hello, written in the Macintosh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hello style. The first thing you see, you open it up, the cardboard butterflies out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you see it saying Hello under the translucent paper cover. It’s delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and every single accent, it’s the accent color of the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was so well done. It very much reminded me of old Apple, back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we were all buying desktops. I mean, John still is, but no one else is. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was honestly, it was delightful. And so I just wanted to kind of shout that out. In a world where most of us aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even buying desktops anymore, it was really nice to see see Apple putting a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of little detail work into making the desktop unboxing experience in 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the candy color IMAX predate both of your Mac use, but that was back when they were shipping with Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS nine and they did the same thing where Mac OS nine would ship and the accent
⏹️ ▶️ John color inside the interface like basically the scroll thumb color and like the text selection color. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John would match the color of the computer you got.
⏹️ ▶️ John and the background to a desktop background like default desktop background
⏹️ ▶️ John color. It’s an iMac tradition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, as we often discuss on the show, they really could use more use of color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their product line, please. But when they do it, they do a nice job.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know as we’re recording this, it’s the 28th of August, and that means it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not quite September. But you might be listening to this in September, and you know what? Darn it, we’re close enough to September. What is September,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentlemen? It is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time for the Marco Offset. What are we talking about? So hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you live in a backwards country like we do, healthcare is a real problem. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live in any country, then childhood cancer is a real problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is an establishment in St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, called St.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and they are a truly phenomenal organization that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants to end childhood cancer. They would like no child to die from childhood cancer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever. That’s their goal. Their final form is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have them just go away because childhood cancer is cured. That is the goal. So why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you care? Why am I telling you about this? Because September, like I said, is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and our friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Relay FM, which is also us, you know what we mean, they slash we are trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to raise as much money as possible for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Currently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record, the goal is $500,000. The campaign has been officially open for eight-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours, and we have already raised $30,000, which is truly incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is so very cool, but we can do more. And I know that both the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Relay and ATP listeners really, really do come out and support this wonderful organization.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you’re interested, you can go to stjude.org slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of fast track your way straight into the donation or if you’d like more information, you can go to stjude.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash relay and hey here’s the thing. Relay’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to get to three million dollars lifetime. We’ve already crossed it. Honestly, I think we should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just shoot for four. Let’s shoot for four this year. You never know. Could happen. Could happen. It’s an audacious goal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it could happen. So how do we get to four million dollars which is my goal not Relay’s? Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you got to donate. So stjude.org slash ATP. Let me just kind of talk about a couple of things real quick and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to explain the Marco, or have Marco explain the Marco offset. So here’s the thing, is that 400,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids worldwide get cancer each year, 400,000, that’s a lot of kids. In many countries, four out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the five kids who develop cancer will not survive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly due to lack of access to quality care. So St. Jude and Relay and ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we all think that’s no good, that is no good at all. So what are we trying to do? We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to raise money to help fix that problem. So St. Jude needs your help, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude, they pay for everything. They pay for patient families to come and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be with their sick child. They pay for everything. I actually went to Memphis in April for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big conference for fundraisers, and I cannot eloquently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey describe what it’s like to be there. It is unreal seeing a mass of people so wholly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedicated to just saving lives. It’s phenomenal. And the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can afford to do this is from people like you and me and donating at stjude.org.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In a couple of weeks, I will be going back to Memphis, I’ll be going back to the St. Jude campus in order to participate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my very first time in a 12-hour telethon event, which we call the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast-a-thon, with our friends Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett, Kathy Campbell, and Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snell. The five of us will be there for 12 straight hours, and you can watch me melt into a puddle during that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. It’ll be great. It’ll be fun for everyone. So again, please, if at all possible, go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stjude.org.atp. Here’s the thing, and they’ve kind of asked me to read this, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s accurate. So, when we rally for a common cause, we become more than a community. We become beacons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hope for all. I mean, think about that. Think about if your kid was sick or your, you know, your sibling was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick, and suddenly somebody swoops in and in so many words says, don’t worry, I got this, because that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude is basically doing. So that’s why we’re asking all of you to join Relay and St. Jude and ATP this September for Childhood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cancer Awareness Month. Together, we can help cure childhood cancer. Now, okay, what if you don’t care about childhood cancer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which you should? What if you just want to feel better about your rampant consumerism? Marco, how do we do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s what’s about to happen. We’re about to have Apple announce a whole bunch of tech devices, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones, probably Apple Watches, and maybe some new Macs later in the fall. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is Apple device consumerism season. This is when all of the best and most popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices come out, and many of us try to find justifications for why we absolutely need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy these things, even though we have a phone that works fine, and we have a watch that works fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we could theoretically not buy these things. But you and I both know that’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, we’re going to buy these things. So here’s how you assuage your guilt as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rampant consumer who is wastefully throwing away your money on phones and watches and Macs and things that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t necessarily need. I mean look you could use your old one for a little while longer right but you won’t. So we know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna buy new stuff. Here’s what you do. Donate a chunk of money to St.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jude when you do this. Think about whatever the, what Case is describing as the Marco offset,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a term we’ve come up with over the last couple years for describing, here’s my strategy for how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out what a good minimum donation to St. Jude is. When you buy your new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple product this fall or Apple products this fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about amounts of money that are kind of added on during the process that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of just accept or tack on without thinking too critically about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Things like sales tax or cost of accessories, cost of storage upgrades,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost of Apple care, these kind of additional costs that are above and beyond the base price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the, you know, the most basic model of thing that you could get. So if the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starts at a thousand bucks, the, of the line that you want, and you say, spend another a hundred bucks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco double the storage, and then you spend another 60 bucks on the case, you’re at 160 bucks. Maybe you spend another,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 60 bucks on tax. You’re at two 20, I think. Yeah. Massive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get in conflict. All right. So you’re at two 20 with those kinds of add ons over the base. That is your minimum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco donation donation to St. Jude. So here’s what you do whenever you buy these products in the next you know coming weeks and months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, hopefully coming weeks because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’ll be during the drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when you when you place your order for your new iPhone on Apple watch in a couple of weeks, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Figure out that that baseline minimum of the add-on price that is like what are you getting? That’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit extra That’s your minimum. So in my example, my minimum was 220. I think if I remember correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve already forgotten. I’m talking a lot. So So, 220 is your minimum,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that’s your minimum donation to St. Jude. So if you’ve done that configuration there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider a 220 donation to St. Jude. Now, if you are fortunate enough that you can give more, that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We encourage that. But that’s kind of a good baseline of like, here’s an amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that while making my frivolous technology purchase that I probably could have gone another year or two without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making, when I’m making this frivolous technology purchase, I’m throwing away another $200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just add-ons and fees and taxes, if I can spend it that easily, I can give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least that much to this amazing charity doing amazing work for the world. So that’s the Marco Offset I encourage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to give generously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So several years ago now when ATP started really embracing this, I kind of jokingly but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also seriously offered, hey, if you have the top donation and the donation list,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you reach out to me, forward me a copy of the receipt and give me a mailing address, As long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the United States Postal Service can mail something to your address, I will send you some not-for-sale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP stickers. In the course of the last eight hours, I have two batches of ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stickers to send out because one person, and I don’t recall if they want to be anonymous or not, so forgive me for not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey naming them, but one person donated $8,000 and then the other person said, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many words, hold my beer and donated $10,000. That’s $18,000 of the $30,000 raised between two ATP listeners, which is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, you don’t have to donate $8,000 or $10,000, but if you donate at least $10,000 and one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cent as I sit here right now, then you too can earn some hilariously overpriced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP stickers. So, reach out to me, forward me your receipt, and give me a mailing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey address and I will dispatch them as soon as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the competition for the world’s most expensive stickers. And I know we just talked about you’re buying a new tech device, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to pay a minimum amount of that you paid for the accessories, and these people competing to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John top donation so that keeps rising or whatever. That’s great for the people who are hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John that and say, I think I could swing that. That’s great. If you’re listening to that and you’re like, that’s ridiculous. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John barely have enough money to get by. A $5 donation is fine. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stop yourself by saying, oh, this pledge drive is just for people who can donate hundreds of dollars to buy new iPhones over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Give a single dollar. Like I swear, like they will. Anything you do helps, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they, they’re not going to turn you away because you can only give them $3. Give the $3. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what that’s what these donations are made. It’s the relay listeners adding up all this money or whatever. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not all giving $10,000. I swear to you people are giving five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks. That’s what makes this
⏹️ ▶️ John play drive. So please, stjude.org.
Overcast updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so let’s do some follow-up. I hear that things may be different in Overcast Land. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I re-added streaming, as discussed last episode. That update is out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been in kind of a bad place mentally over the reaction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the update, in part because as I described in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few episodes ago, I said basically that I described my star ratings being lower as a small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fire on a big building that nevertheless I needed to put out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m happy to say that since the streaming update, there has been a sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rise in the average score of new ratings. So I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has made a substantial difference. So thank you everybody who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has updated your ratings since then or added new ones. Thank you for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also happy to announce now that what I’ve been working on for the last week or so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I’m bringing back a swiping UI to the now playing screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, hooray. That makes me very happy because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have mostly adjusted to the current one, but I still, my natural reaction after so many years is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to swipe laterally. So that makes me very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it was very hard to do because in SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was not a good way to detect pixel-perfect scroll positions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a scroll view until iOS 18 which added like a scroll geometry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that you can finally actually read it and I I’ve been experimenting with this for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get because because the reason I need scroll positions is when in the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI when you switch over to like from the artwork view to the info view I animate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the height of the of the main playback controls to make more room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for to give the info view as much room as it can get. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to do that I have to know, like, well if you’re dragging across and you like don’t drag it all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, well how do I know where you are in that animation to know like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far to bring that bar down? So I tried all these different hacks including like wrapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a UIKit UI scroll view in SwiftUI and then of course inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that scroll view the content that I’m putting in it is itself SwiftUI again. So it kind of like, you know, go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forth through UIKit. And let me tell you, that creates so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcomings and problems. And I tried making that work for like two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I couldn’t get it to work well enough and have no like massive show stopping problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I finally figured out a way to do it where the animation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works okay on iOS 17. It works a lot better on iOS 18.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m working on that now that should be out fairly soon, at least into beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, uh, I’m looking forward to, uh, sharing that with everybody. Cause honestly, like it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the app better. It does make it easier. You can swipe the whole screen again, like, you know, just like the old version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a much better design. Um, it was just very difficult to achieve in the constraints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had using Swift UI, um, until fairly recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is, I’m sorry, is the swipey stuff, is that requiring iOS 18 then? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no the way it’s going to work the way the way I have it right now Which is probably how it’s going to ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you the swiping works no matter what but on iOS 18 as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drag across and as the controls Shrink downward to make to make as much room as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the info on iOS 18 that will be pixel perfect on iOS 17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It will stay at the top height until you are halfway through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John at the halfway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point it will then animate itself down all the way and so it’s there’s kind of like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threshold really at the halfway point it will cross that threshold and do the whole animation at once as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you know doing it pixel perfect as it tracks your finger it looks okay at high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed if you do it at slow speed you’ll catch the transition but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that small price to pay for a much more usable interface and you know the way my users are like Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by December, I’m going to probably have like 70% iOS 18 usage anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this is one of your pet obsessions, making all the animations beautiful and everything, but honestly, I think from a user’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that counts so much more than the pixel precision of the transition where it was scrutinized
⏹️ ▶️ John is the responsiveness of when I put my thumb on it and I move, does the thing move immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John and in tracking with my thumb? And I think users will, I’m not going to say the forgiving of,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will not even notice almost anything else at normal swipe speeds as long as it is
⏹️ ▶️ John responsive. So I would sacrifice attractiveness of the transition even on iOS 18
⏹️ ▶️ John if it took away from the responsiveness at all, right? And you know, again, like users aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John running your animations at one 100th speed so they can scrutinize every pixel or whatever. They just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to put their thumb on the screen, move it to the side and see the info real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick. Believe me, some of my users are that picky, but yeah, overall, and yeah, it is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fluid responsive on both OS is because again, like it’s all SwiftUI, it’s all very efficient, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the way it’s drawing the UI and updating things and everything like I gotta say, I’ve gotten pretty good at SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like doing the whole app this way, I have finally built up like decent SwiftUI skills. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if something is possible to do in SwiftUI, I can probably figure out how to do it. It just takes a little bit of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, my usual pattern of doing it is like, I will start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to solve a problem, I will build up this ridiculous amount of complexity as I try different things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and figure out different what works what doesn’t try different approaches then I’ll like will it all back down to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the distilled essence of here’s the one thing that I that really worked well like it’s a whole it’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process but I am I’m very happy to to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to do this so quickly like this is part again part of the reason why the rewrite has been and just so massively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productive is that, now that it’s done, is that I can do pretty substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes like this in now days and a week or two, instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like months that it would take before. Like it’s so much faster to iterate. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much faster to change and design, like to restructure, redesign screens and controls and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. It’s so much easier. So I’m very thankful for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome. Well, I’m very, very glad to hear that things are looking up and looking better. They are literally looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up because that’s the way the graph is moving. That’s very good news.
Screen-sharing indicators
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had some feedback with regard to the Mac screen sharing like badge and we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Oh, could we do something visually or something like the Siri animation in iOS 18? What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we do to make it more obvious without having to nag the user? Is this okay? Is this okay? Is this okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Josh Hattersley writes even the existing colorful icon indicating screen capture approach has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its downsides some friends And I occasionally stream movies for group watch events and discord and while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I normally do so from a Windows machine I tried recently for my Mac. I was extremely annoyed to find that the colorful badge Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slaps on captured windows also appears in the streamed video, even in an app like, however you pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I-I-N-A. We went through this years ago. I don’t remember. Which hides the title bar. Frustrating,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it feels like there should be a method to dismiss it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I was saying last week that Apple really needs to do, although it may be tricky if an app like ENA is
⏹️ ▶️ John not using the right API. So basically, the purpose of that badge, that badge
⏹️ ▶️ John is for the person who is doing the stream so they know that a streaming app is recording their screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the output of that streaming app, like when it says, okay, I’m projecting my screen to all my friends so they
⏹️ ▶️ John can see it, the friends don’t need to see the screen recording badge. It’s not for them. I think Apple should,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is what I was saying if they ever did like a Siri-type border, that part should be omitted from
⏹️ ▶️ John screen recording itself and from any output of that or whatever, because its purpose is to inform the
⏹️ ▶️ John person who initiated the screen recording or who’s on the computer that is running the app that is recording the screen. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just for them. it doesn’t need to be in the output or the recording or the outgoing stream. And I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s something that either, if Apple already does that, I hope apps that use those APIs learn how to get
⏹️ ▶️ John just the part they want and not the badge. And if Apple isn’t already doing that suggestion, maybe I’ll file it as a feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m not really familiar with the APIs because I don’t have any screen recording apps, but I just assume that’s a logical thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. And it amazes me that like the badge is going out in the streams and stuff. Yeah, that’s something else. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John one more thing that I didn’t put in there about screen recording. Someone, I forgot who it was, I didn’t make any of the notes, but someone showed a
⏹️ ▶️ John picture probably, or maybe it was a screenshot of Apple TV projecting something. Apparently you can do screen recording in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV. Somehow, either is it like a diagnostic thing to do screen recordings for like feedbacks,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe their apps to do it, but either way, there was a giant solid red border around the entire television,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is the indicator apparently in Apple TV to let you know that the screen is being recorded. Not quite as elegant
⏹️ ▶️ John as the Apple Intelligence wavy thing or whatever, but gets the job done. That’s special.
Apple Intelligence experiments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you had some good news in your own world. You have finally gotten to the front of the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the Apple Intelligence wait list. Quinn Nelson suggested that I log out of my Apple ID and
⏹️ ▶️ John back in, but it turns out I didn’t have to do that. I just updated whatever the latest beta of 15.1 is because I’m on the 15.1 train.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I went into Apple Intelligence and I was like, yay, you’re in. It says, Apple Intelligence Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John a personal intelligence system integrated deeply into your Mac apps and Siri. Learn more, dot, dot, dot. Right underneath that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little box that says, Apple Intelligence is not available when starting your Mac from an external volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoops. So I am through the wait list and I have learned that, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I mentioned this on a past show, but there it is right in my face. I cannot use any Apple intelligence features in the
⏹️ ▶️ John beta because I am indeed booting from an external disk. I don’t know what that limitation is about,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is what it is. And I’m not putting 15.1 beta on the internal SSD of my wife’s computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t blame you. All right. With regard to making photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memories using Apple Intelligence, Simon writes in to say, I cannot get Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI to create a photos memory of the times my kids have gotten dirty. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Simon includes some screenshots. And the prompt that he typed or said was, my kids are covered in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dirt, to which Apple says, try another description. To create a memory, add details to your description
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or choose a new person, place, or event from your library. So Simon tried again. My kid’s getting dirty while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they play. to which Apple said, unable to use that description. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my kid’s getting dirty while they eat and play. Unable to use that description. Okay, fine, my kid’s playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in sand. Try another description, create a memory, add details, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are really trying not to do anything naughty or inappropriate, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the most part I applaud, but they might have swung a little too far in one direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the prompt that we read on last week’s episode, like nothing filthy. So my suggestion
⏹️ ▶️ John was, yeah, what about your kids like getting dirty or like getting food on their face or whatever? It’s so hard to tell with these
⏹️ ▶️ John different responses, kind of like when like HomePod tells you different things or whatever. Which one of these responses
⏹️ ▶️ John is because Apple intelligence is baited in and just can figure out how to do these? And which one of these is because of
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the, what do you call it? The prompt preamble or whatever you call it that said nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John filthy, right? You can’t tell, am I being denied because of that nothing filthy thing? Or am
⏹️ ▶️ John I being denied because it just wouldn’t work either way? I guess we’ll all find out when we get this and start using it and start
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make memories of ourself. If we get thwarted on things that we didn’t hear mentioned in the little preamble,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we know it’s just Apple intelligence being weird, but it’s not an easy problem. Like these, the nuances of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, my kid getting dirty while they eat, right? And the prompt saying nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John filthy. I can see where there might be some confusion there, but yeah, I’m glad someone’s out there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And speaking of trying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so Evan Zhao put up a YouTube video where they figured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out how to do prompt injection against Apple intelligence. It’s a pretty wild. Um, it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a 10 minute video, so it’s worth watching, but it is pretty cool what they ended up doing. And it involves a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of disassembly, not in the, like, you know, the, the computer code way necessarily,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like, how do I, you know, how do I get it? What they’re using? Where’s that data stored? How can I modify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in inject my own thing with it? Like I said, it’s very much worth your time if you have 10 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this is just another one of the weaknesses of a lot of LLM-based things, or lots of computer
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces. And we used to say this about Twitter as well. Difference between inline data
⏹️ ▶️ John and data that is provided in a different channel. So the thing you’re typing to
⏹️ ▶️ John an LLM, you want that to be processed, right? All the other stuff where you’re saying, this is not what the person
⏹️ ▶️ John is typing, but this is what we’re trying to tell you on the side LLM, like instructions to the LLM. you really want
⏹️ ▶️ John those things to be separate. But the way most of these systems work is it’s all just being one big
⏹️ ▶️ John wad that you throw in the top. And probably most of that wad gets to the actual LM
⏹️ ▶️ John under the covers, right? So if you watch this prompt injection thing, he’s just looking through like the config files and figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out what do I have to put inside the text that gets fed to the top of this big
⏹️ ▶️ John system such that it will interpret that as an instruction. And then do like, oh, well you set it off with
⏹️ ▶️ John double curly braces, or you put it in angle brackets or whatever. That’s an example of trying to put stuff in line. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same place as your message. It’s kind of like back in the day when
⏹️ ▶️ John you would on Twitter, where you would try to like quote tweet something, it would just be a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of text. And inside that text would be the URL of the tweet that you’re trying to quote tweet. But later
⏹️ ▶️ John when Twitter officially supported that, I don’t actually know the Twitter API, but I’m assuming what they did was said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John now when you quote tweet something, you get to say what you want to say in your tweet. and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you tell us the URL of the thing you’re quote tweeting, but that’s not part of your text. It’s totally separate. Like in the API
⏹️ ▶️ John request, you say, here’s my text, and then here’s a whole other field, which is, and by the way, this is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m quote tweeting. So you don’t have to worry about reading the text and trying to find a URL. And once you find
⏹️ ▶️ John a URL, figure out if it’s a Twitter URL, and if it’s a Twitter URL, figure out if it’s a tweet, you don’t have to do any weird parsing
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And if these systems use something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t be as vulnerable to just typing a double curly brace and then putting a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of special instructions and typing to closing curly braces. And then going back to what you were saying, because you get to
⏹️ ▶️ John type that in the text box and you can watch it. Like he’s just typing like text edit and he’s selecting it and firing up
⏹️ ▶️ John the writing tools and saying, go. And they do totally different things. Like they don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever feature he suggested. It’s because the text that he selected, Oh, we did a double curly
⏹️ ▶️ John brace inside the text. And now we’ve escaped out of the text world. And now we’re into this world. and parsing
⏹️ ▶️ John those things out and making it so people can’t inject that in there is a much harder problem than you think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s how these systems work. And they don’t have to, they don’t have to work this way. Like Apple could have made it so that when you select a bunch of text
⏹️ ▶️ John and you right click it and do the writing tools thing with Apple intelligence, it could take that text, put it into one separate
⏹️ ▶️ John bucket and then take another bucket and say, here are the instructions to our system and send them as two separate
⏹️ ▶️ John blobs. So like it would never parse an instruction out of the text that was selected, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how it currently works. At least in the beta he was using, the instructions that are in the text get interpreted by the system
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it do all sorts of things and those instructions are just plain text strings
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they’re double curly braces or angle brackets or whatever you can find what they are in a bunch of config files and even if they
⏹️ ▶️ John can encrypt those config files and try to hide it or whatever. Like people can figure it out. So.
File extensions.chapter
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a weakness of trying to put metadata in line. See also file name extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John stop banging this drum. I will never let it go. Put it on my gravestone to the day I die.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe because I grew up with extensions, it just does not bother me the way it does you. Because I like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the file name, it’s clear what this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John file is. You can have that without
⏹️ ▶️ John literally putting it in the file name.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Do you see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying? So how did you have that in Mac OS, in classic Mac OS? How did you know what kind of file it was?
⏹️ ▶️ John There was type information. It was metadata separate from the file name.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, no. But the system would never
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the system would never part, try to parse anything out of the file name. Never.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. You’re we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, this is you and me having two different conversations, which I think the two of us do a little too. All
⏹️ ▶️ John said, if there was separate information, just like there’s separate information, like where’s the creation data in the file? Is that in the file name? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere else. No, no, no. You’re missing my point probably because I’m not presenting it. Well, what I’m saying is I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at a finder window or whatever the hell of the equivalent was in classic Mac. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was called Explorer back then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s called Windows Explorer. I have 10 different files in this folder, or directory, or whatever. And three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them are pieces of text, two of them are images, and the rest are a smattering of other styles of file.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do I know as a user what’s text and what’s an image?
⏹️ ▶️ John You ask this question as if that’s not a thing that can happen today on your Mac. Do you have show all file names extension at all times turned
⏹️ ▶️ John So how, if you have a bunch of files in the finder and the file name extensions are not visible, how can you tell what kind of files they are?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess that’s fair. All right, touche. Touche. I mean, I think I do typically see the file names. Where is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know the setting you’re thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people turn that on, which I guess I could understand you forgetting that that’s not the default. No, I don’t have it on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the default to turn it on. And if you don’t turn it on, most of the time, the system tries to hide them by
⏹️ ▶️ John simply literally hiding that part of the file. It’s still in the file name, but it’s hiding it. And then your question is exactly the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fair. You look at the icon. If you’re in ListView, you look at the Kind column. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, fair enough. I mean, either way, I just really don’t see why this is so offensive to you. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fair. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m not saying you’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s just— It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey principle. I guess. I don’t know. I bet if I grew up the way you did, I would probably also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John be negatively offended by it. I had a glimpse of a better
⏹️ ▶️ John world, and it was taken away from me. But I’m still glad to still—I’d much rather still
⏹️ ▶️ John have Max even with the sport. At least we didn’t get drive letters. Am I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? That is—actually, drive letters are a true abomination. I am right there with you on that
JSON from LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. All right, moving right along. How do you add grammar constraints to an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LLM, John? So like, if I want to get a valid JSON out the other side, how do I do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was a question. Well, again, when we were looking at the prompts that people pulled out of Mac OS or wherever
⏹️ ▶️ John they were, the prompt said, please produce only valid JSON. And I discussed how just mind bending it is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to put that again, in line with the with the text that’s being fed in, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to put these instructions in plain English in line and then cross your fingers and hope to get it done because there’s There’s nothing particularly special about
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, please provide valid JSON or only output valid JSON, or please produce JSON that’s valid, or please
⏹️ ▶️ John send your output in the format of JSON. Like, you can say it a million different ways. It’s just text. This is not offset by
⏹️ ▶️ John double curly braces. This is not a special instruction to the engine. It’s literally just the plain text
⏹️ ▶️ John sent exactly the same as your text, right? And that doesn’t seem particularly reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John or great. But Stephen Tierney was the first to write in to give some examples of how
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs are augmented to try to make this slightly less ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John So he writes, you can constrain the output format of an LLM by specifying a formal grammar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he linked to an example from the Lama open source LLM. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the
⏹️ ▶️ John readme in GitHub. It’s basically just like a BNF type grammar where you say, this is what JSON looks like. And it’s a grammar that defines
⏹️ ▶️ John the valid structure of JSON. I’ll put another link to a recent paper on the topic called
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM Generation with Grammar Augmentation from one of the authors of the paper. They write,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the compared approaches use constrained decoding to filter syntactically invalid tokens
⏹️ ▶️ John during generation. They remove the set of bad tokens when the LLM is choosing the next token. So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John the LLM goes through this process and for every token, which is basically like a letter or a part of a word or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has a list of possible candidates and like probability and then there’s this other system where you pick
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them. You don’t always pick the highest probability, but you pick one of the ones that’s near the top, right? And what it does, it says, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM, during this normal process, produce all the possible tokens, the candidates that we might pick.
⏹️ ▶️ John But before we do the picking process, we decide which one we want. Again, it’s probably gonna be one of the top ones, although
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not always the topiest top one. That’s part of what the temperature setting does. Right? Before we pick
⏹️ ▶️ John that one, delete any token that would make the output invalid
⏹️ ▶️ John JSON. Because it knows, based on the grammar, like, okay, we just did the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John a double-quoted string. Right? The next token has to be a colon or a curly brace. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John in the grammar what is even valid for the next token. Is any letter valid? Does it have to be?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is any letter a double quote or colon? It knows. And so it just goes through the candidate list and just deletes
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that wouldn’t be valid. And you hope there’s something left. You hope that when you delete everything that would be valid, hopefully something’s
⏹️ ▶️ John left. And it usually is, because the candidate list is very, very long. And that’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John way where you can constrain the grammar. Now, there’s possibility you might have to backtrack where you end up at a terminal condition where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t produce any more tokens because you deleted all of them or whatever. And there were some earlier versions of this that did slow
⏹️ ▶️ John down inference a lot, but a lot of them use the similar approach. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a Reddit discussion where someone
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to explain like the pipeline of like the text goes into a tokenizer that goes into the model.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would get the list of candidates, then a sampler takes it, then you get the winner, and then you keep doing that. And then the grammar
⏹️ ▶️ John filter just goes in between the candidates and the sampler. And OpenAI has a similar type of feature where you
⏹️ ▶️ John tell it what kind of output you want. Again, this is different than asking for plain
⏹️ ▶️ John JSON, But even given all of that, like I said, if you wanna make sure that your candidate
⏹️ ▶️ John list contains something that will be valid JSON, you should also still ask for it
⏹️ ▶️ John because that makes it much more likely that near the top of the candidate list or at least somewhere in the candidate list
⏹️ ▶️ John will be tokens that would make it valid JSON. So you still have to say please and thank
⏹️ ▶️ John you, like please produce
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco valid JSON. But
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, even if you, when we pick your tokens, I’m gonna delete all the choices
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t valid JSON and only pick from the ones that are left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. I mean, it makes sense. It’s something though.
Notification history
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we also had Nate write in and point out that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the notification history that I think John was asking for is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that exists in Android right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better in Android. Could be better still, but they have a notification history and it shows you your notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s all your notifications in the last 24 hours grouped by application and it gives you little summaries of it. You could have
⏹️ ▶️ John even more information because again, what I was looking for was like, show Show me all the notifications that have gone by.
⏹️ ▶️ John When did they appear? And what action did I take on them, if any? And at what
⏹️ ▶️ John time did I take the action? Stuff that the system surely knows at the time you do it, but just record it
⏹️ ▶️ John and keep a rolling 24-hour window. It’s probably not that much data. Because it happens to me all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John a notification comes and go. Maybe I actually did something with it. Maybe I swiped it away,
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually I want to see it again. And I would just like to say, you know, I would like it to be just like a big linear list
⏹️ ▶️ John where I’m at certain point in the list, but at any point I can say, show me the things that have gone by in the list already.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can scroll backwards or forwards. That’s just not how notifications work on iOS or the Mac for that matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wish they did.
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It’s glow time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re not going to talk too much about it right now. We’ll do more of that next week, but we wanted to note that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has announced their September event. It will be the 9th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of September, which is a Monday. It’ll be Monday, September 9th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at one o’clock, one true time zone. We will be watching along with everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m excited for it. I think it’s going to be really fun and we’re going to talk about what we expect later. but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any thoughts about that, gentlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re gonna talk about the little invitation, which I gotta admit, a little odd this year. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if people haven’t seen the artwork, we’ll describe it. It’s like an Apple logo with what I guess is supposed to be kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the new Siri kind of glowy effect around it, but it doesn’t really look, it doesn’t look like the old Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t quite look like the effect that goes around your screen when you activate Apple Intelligence and the new
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS and iOS 18, but I think that’s what they’re going for. And then the slogan in white text
⏹️ ▶️ John with a similar kind of multicolored glow behind it is it’s glow time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple intelligence isn’t even launching with these phones. And now I know there’s gonna be features that are
⏹️ ▶️ John like whenever you activate Siri, it’s going to glow. So I guess, yes, it is glow time because now you’re gonna be activating Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s going to glow around your screen. So technically it’s glow time, but do you really wanna highlight
⏹️ ▶️ John the feature that everyone is going to associate with Apple intelligence even though you know Apple intelligence isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping with these phones? It’s kind of weird. I guess this is the invitation, so who cares? But we have
⏹️ ▶️ John a very strong tradition in this community of overanalyzing these, so I feel like I need to do my part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I ask this question every year, and I never recall what the answer is, because hey, it’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Has there ever really been a strong correlation between this and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a actual new announcement? This clearly is reminiscent of Siri, but Siri’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been around for a while. Have we ever seen the dynamic island as an example? that wasn’t teased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any way, shape or form in an event poster, was it? Like, have we really ever gotten one of those in the last 10
⏹️ ▶️ John You have asked this multiple times, although I think the question is shifting slowly over the years. But you used
⏹️ ▶️ John has any one of these invitations ever hinted at anything that it was actually in the presentation? And the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, it totally has. Now you’re asking, has it hinted at something that we didn’t know about at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think maybe the closest we can come there is one of the ones that was like the invitations
⏹️ ▶️ John basically let us know that there was going to be Mac stuff. And at that point, we were so disillusioned that nobody thought any Mac stuff would
⏹️ ▶️ John be announced because the Mac was really down in the dumps. But when we saw the invitation, like, that’s got to be Mac stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was it was Mac stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what the particular invitation was or which one it was. But yeah, these things often do have hints
⏹️ ▶️ John about what they’re going to show. Sometimes it’s boring. Like this year, they’re like, yeah, the glowy effect. We’ve all seen it in the betas and that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going for. But it’s glow time. It’s so weird. And I I don’t I do think
⏹️ ▶️ John that a lot of times the invitation Has a thing and a theme or whatever that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t You won’t see the presentation and say that was the glow time presentation because they’re not gonna say it’s glow time in the presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re probably not even gonna show this graphic or whatever, but they will of course show Their new OS and their new phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other stuff. So anyway, it’s you know, I I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is revealing anything Like I can’t even think of anything that hasn’t been rumored that
⏹️ ▶️ John could possibly be hinted at by this invitation, but you know, it can happen.
Rumored base-RAM increase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so hell might be freezing over. There are rumors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was posted on Bloomberg, that Apple is going to increase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the RAM in their base Macs or MacBook Pros? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? Huh? What? We’re not gonna be stuck with, oh, I just got an error network changed. We’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be stuck with eight gigs forever and forever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this the first time during the history of our show existing that this is going to maybe happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? I was gonna say, how long has 8 gigs been around? Like, and what we’re talking about is the base model Mac. So
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the cheapest Mac is, for years and years, the cheapest Mac laptop would come with
⏹️ ▶️ John four gigs of RAM. And then one glorious day, Apple said, you know what, the cheapest Mac, even
⏹️ ▶️ John the lowest end Mac we have, now it’s gonna come with eight. And I think that day may
⏹️ ▶️ John have been before the beginning of the show 11 years ago. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We looked it up. Remember, somebody looked it up and pointed it out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. and there was, I believe, if you went to like, if you said only like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new models, there was, I think the MacBook Air was the last one to have a low-configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that at some point. But if you look to just whatever was for sale, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MD101, that old, like the last one that had the CDU drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one stuck around for a very long time in the sales channel. I think that one started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up at four also, and that might have been the last one actually for sale.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and despite this, let’s say, conservative approach Apple has taken to RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM prices do fluctuate over time. You can look at the graph, it’s not smooth, but in general
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM becomes cheaper for the same amount of memory over time. And despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that Apple has always done it this way, there’s nothing particular about RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John that absolutely dictates that you must go from four to eight. You could go from four to six
⏹️ ▶️ John or four to five. Now probably it’s gonna be powers of two and you can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John everything you want. It can’t go from four to 4.75 because they probably don’t sell things in those units or whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But you don’t always have to double it. And as the amount of RAM gets larger and larger,
⏹️ ▶️ John doubling becomes much more significant. You’re adding one gig of RAM, then you’re adding four
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM, then you’re adding eight gigs of RAM, like because you will, you know, from one to two and two to four and four, Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John just you don’t necessarily have to double it Again, RAM is usually sold
⏹️ ▶️ John in powers of two and it usually makes sense to do the doubling or whatever but what it means if Apple is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John really hold the line on RAM for a long time is It’s not a smooth ramp.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like just 8 8 8 8 8 for just years and years and years and you’re like, oh, it’s okay Well, you know when it
⏹️ ▶️ John went from 4 to 8, it’s like wow, everyone gets 8 that’s gonna be great And then you’re like 8 is okay. And then you’re like, well, you know, you probably shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy one with 8 And you’re like, oh, really don’t get the base model. It has it, you really need to get 16, like
⏹️ ▶️ John eight outstays it’s welcome. And it’s like, you know, you could have gone to 12 at some point in there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John instead it’s just gonna be eight forever. And this rumor is we’re gonna go from eight to 16, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John all for, I’d rather go from eight to 16, right? But I’d rather not always have to wait for the
⏹️ ▶️ John doubling because it’s going to become untenable. Like what about when you’re going from 64 to 128?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a missing 64 gigs of RAM that you have to live with until finally it becomes completely
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous that they’re only shipping with 64 gigs of RAM and then finally you get 128, right? How about a 96? How about
⏹️ ▶️ John throw a 96 in there somewhere? You know, like it should be smooth. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is all the more frustrating because of that weird, it’s not even a rumor, it was a teardown that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John basically confirmed this. Like they opened up an M4 iPad and look at the M4 SoC and it had 12
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM on it because the RAM is on the SoC. It’s like right next to the actual little chip. It’s like on the
⏹️ ▶️ John package with the SoC, right? It had 12 gigs of RAM in it. Only eight was exposed to the iPad, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John chips were a six and a six. Now people are like, well, maybe those are RAM chips that only, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John four of the six gigs work on those RAM chips. And other people said, that’s not how RAM usually works. Are they just disabling
⏹️ ▶️ John that RAM or whatever? I was like, hey, that made me hopeful that the next low-end Mac would
⏹️ ▶️ John start at 12 instead of eight because we had seen M4 SoCs that Apple shipped that have 12 on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I’m way happier with 16, but it shows that 12 was possible, is possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple did ship 12 on machines, granted it didn’t expose all or whatever. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John could have done that on the M3 or on the M2 or whatever, but they didn’t. So this may be the year
⏹️ ▶️ John when the M4 Max, the plain old M4 Max, not the M4 Pro, not the M4 Max, those will have tons of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever. Just a plain old M4 Max. That’s probably gonna ship in the MacBook Air, obviously, the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John what am I missing? The Mac mini, right? Plain old M4
⏹️ ▶️ John starting at 16 gigs of RAM. Long overdue and it will make the M4 line
⏹️ ▶️ John a great time to buy in. You won’t have to scare people away from the basest of base
⏹️ ▶️ John miles except for the fact that it’ll probably have 256 SSD which is insane and they should double that too. But anyway, setting that
⏹️ ▶️ John aside, you won’t have to tell everybody, oh, you’re gonna get a MacBook Air? Oh, you’re getting an iMac? You
⏹️ ▶️ John just make sure you double the RAM to 16 and you’ll be fine. And of course they charge like $200 for that extra RAM which
⏹️ ▶️ John is disconnected from all reality. And then suddenly the base price doesn’t look that good. So it seems like when
⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 Max come out, you can buy the base model and it won’t be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we are getting real-time follow-up from the chat from David Schaub and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the desktop Max, if I’m reading this graph right, which I think I am, desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max went to eight gigs of RAM in 2012. When
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did we start the show? It was 2013, right? So that was before the show started. Laptops, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went in 2017. What? So in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early 2017, you could buy a laptop with four gigs of RAM? Like the base model MacBook Air, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s what it’s like towards the end, right before a RAM transition,
⏹️ ▶️ John you look back and you’re like, really, they were selling Macs with that little base RAM? Because we just all get into
⏹️ ▶️ John this mindset, we tech nerds, of like, oh, of course you’d never get the base amount of RAM, that would be ridiculous, right? But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just because Apple holds the base amount of RAM for so long that we just get trained. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a great machine, you don’t have to do anything to it except pay 200 extra bucks for more RAM. But everything else about
⏹️ ▶️ John it is great. You’re like, wait, why doesn’t it, like why can’t I just get the cheapest one? I’m like, well, that doesn’t come with enough
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. It’s like, well, why would they sell it? This is what happens if you talk with a non-tech person. They would say, well, why would they sell it if it doesn’t have enough
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM? I was like, well, it has enough, but if you want the machine to last longer and it will be a little bit better. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to go through, it used to be worse with spinning disks, obviously. SSD makes this better, but it’s still not an excuse. Like it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it lets you get away with less RAM for longer, but there is a time limit. You can’t hold
⏹️ ▶️ John it at eight gigs for 50 years. You have to increase the amount of RAM. And it looks like 2024 slash 2025, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John go from eight to 16 and we will enjoy a blessed two, three, four,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe even five years where we’re all happy with the base RAM on Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited. I mean, we’ll see what happens, but that would be excellent.
More RAM in iPhone 17?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so with that in mind, there’s also a rumor that the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 17 not the one that we’re gonna hear about in just a few weeks Next year’s iPhone iPhone 17 will feature 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of RAM This is reading from Mac rumors next year’s iPhone 17 models will come with 12 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up from the 8 gigs of RAM expected across Apple’s upcoming iPhone 16 models according to the Weibo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user phone chip expert The iPhone 15 and 15 plus feature 6 gigs of RAM while the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max come with 8 gigs of RAM The difference is said to be the reason why Apple intelligence is only currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supported on the iPhone 15 Pro models Now since it’s a requirement for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intelligence all four of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 16 models are expected to feature 8 gigs of RAM as is the rumored
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the the Apple intelligence RAM dividend on the phones Obviously, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John forcing all the phones up to 8 gigs as we know based on what Apple has shipped already That the 6 gig ones can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John it now obviously Macs were already shipping with 8 gigs But there’s more stuff going on and contending for RAM on the average Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John than there is on the average phone given the different Environments or there can be anyway because there are fewer constraints on what
⏹️ ▶️ John people can run simultaneously yada yada Why why is this the year that we
⏹️ ▶️ John go from 8 to 16? I think the answer is Apple intelligence I think that’s that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John that all of a sudden the The phones are going all of a sudden the pro and non pro phones are gonna have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of RAM and it’s gonna be more than they had last year. Like, it’s still kind of weird to me that the 15, I mean, it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of how blindsided Apple was by the whole LLM stuff, that the 15 line had this bifurcation
⏹️ ▶️ John where the pros can run the LLM stuff, but the non-pros can’t because they only had six,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re not making that mistake with the 16 line, and apparently not with the 17. They’re all gonna have it. Maybe the 17 line,
⏹️ ▶️ John this rumor just says the iPhone 17 models will come with 12 gig, does that mean
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them will? I mean, again, I welcome it. I think it’s useful even if it wasn’t for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Intelligence, but if that’s what it takes, if it takes a new incredibly RAM hungry
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that Apple wants to promote to get them to finally start putting RAM in their devices, I’m all for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument here. And then.
iPhone 16 camera rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Coming back to this upcoming, I was going to say year, but this upcoming month, I guess, this upcoming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey event, iPhone 16 camera improvements. These are rumors about the cameras for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next month. Again, reading from Mac rumors, the summary is that the ultra wide camera will go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from F2.4 to F2.2 aperture. The 16 and 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus may support macro photography for the first time. The iPhone The iPhone 16 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the human-sized iPhone 16 Pro, not the gigantor one that I have, will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gain the 5X tetraprism telephoto camera, which will make my decision-making very complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this upcoming month. The iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max will feature an upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultra-wide camera with a 48 megapixel sensor with the same pixel binning feature as the main camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It will have an f2.2 aperture up from f2.4 and support 48 megapixel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ProRAW photography.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It all sounds good. I’m happy that I will finally get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5X lens in my size phone. I won’t have to pull a Casey and jump up. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, there were some other items in this article as well. I’ve just pulled out the most relevant and interesting ones. But
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things I didn’t put in because that’s not an improvement is the rumor is that the main camera, no change.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly the same for the Pro models anyway. The 16 Pro and the 15 Pro will have exactly the same 1X main camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, I mean, obviously there’ll be processing changes and there’s always something to tout. And Apple has done it a couple of times
⏹️ ▶️ John where they really haven’t actually improved the camera hardware at all, where they have find a way to make you think that it’s better or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the rumor is this is gonna be one of those years. But, you know, they make up for the other changes. Suddenly the ultra wide
⏹️ ▶️ John getting, you know, a 48 megapixel sensor with pixel binning and having a better aperture, that’ll really hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John make the ultra wide a lot better camera. I forget if there was a, I might’ve snipped out, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John if there was a rumor about the selfie camera improving, but that’s always welcome. So it’s not always, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ John these days, it’s not always about like, how much better is the One X camera getting? Because it seems like they’re really pressing up
⏹️ ▶️ John against the size and cost constraints that they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to, at least that Apple wants to dedicate to camera. Other phone makers are dedicating even more
⏹️ ▶️ John size and even more cost to their cameras. But with Apple’s current design,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure, you know, we can’t expect the kind of changes we got during like the big
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, you know, blow up era, which I’m gonna show you a graph of this, of how rapidly
⏹️ ▶️ John and dramatically the cameras improved when Apple started making them way bigger. Because they used to be flush with
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of the phone and then all of a sudden they weren’t and they became less and less flush over time and they took up more and more room.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the camera improvements during those years, when they went from a tiny little flush pinhole to these gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John mountains, huge improvements. But even though the camera bump has been getting, still getting
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger, it’s getting bigger more slowly and the area dedicated to the cameras is also slowing. So yeah, the One X
⏹️ ▶️ John camera’s probably not gonna be that big of a leap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re running out of space to expand into on the back of the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you gotta do, like I said, I’ve always said that you can’t, you know, you gotta do the full width, right? And maybe have fewer,
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger cameras. Like look what the Pixel 9 does. They’ve been the full width of the phone for a while now and their lower end phone
⏹️ ▶️ John just has two cameras side by side and the high end one has three cameras side by side. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see what they do on the slim and if they actually change the design of the non-slim ones. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think like you could make better cameras with bigger sensors, but they will take up more
⏹️ ▶️ John room and stick out more and cost more money. And every bit of space inside a phone that you
⏹️ ▶️ John take up with camera space that you can’t put battery in or any other parts in. So it is a balancing act, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve definitely seen the rate of improvement of the One X camera really slow down and lean heavily on processing features.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the other camera is getting better. Again, I think that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, what I look forward to more than camera optic changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because again, as John’s saying, the actual raw quality of the cameras changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty slowly these days. Just again, because we are really hitting a lot of limits of physics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and current sensor tech and optics. But the processing does change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year. And even when in the past, even when they have occasionally had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a generation where the basics of the camera didn’t change between one and the following phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually the processing is tweaked or is able to be more advanced, maybe be less heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handed in certain ways. And like, as I’ve spent more of the last couple of years getting back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into real cameras, like big cameras, one of the, I mean, obviously again, like there’s certain things that smartphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will just always be worse at because they’re so optically, you know, very, very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensors, very, very small lenses that have to be very inexpensive, relative. But also there’s certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that phones are way better at, and generally always will be, like stacking multiple exposures together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to generate HDR and different effects and different processing steps. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is still very, very clear to me when I look at a phone picture versus a big camera picture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can spot the differences very quickly if you know what to look for because phone pictures are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so heavily processed by default. And there’s recent things, like I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t Halide just release a cool raw mode that’s less or like that’s basically unprocessed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like, is it
⏹️ ▶️ John called zero processing or something? I actually tried it out where it’s not no processing, but it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ John no processing. Obviously there’s some amount of processing just to get a reasonable picture off of the sensor, but they do
⏹️ ▶️ John almost no processing. And if you ever wondered what it would look like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you didn’t apply most of the iPhone’s processing, the answer is noisy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John very tiny sensors and you’re gonna see rainbow noise all over everything unless
⏹️ ▶️ John it is extremely bright sunlight and you’re like, wow, why would anyone ever use this zero processing mode?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, in good lighting, what you’re saying is, phone, don’t try to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where you take 17 exposures and make everything look beautiful and have it all be exposed in like this weird, you know, artificial
⏹️ ▶️ John exposure bracketing HDR type thing. Let the sky blow out or let this thing be in shadow or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and if there is enough light, you won’t get that much noise. And it is, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a feature that most people want. default should still be all the processing on, but it is fun
⏹️ ▶️ John to just see like, what are these cameras capable of? Honestly, I’m pretty impressed with the zero processing mode and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, these cameras aren’t that terrible. Like, it’s not too long ago that I owned, like when my
⏹️ ▶️ John son was born in 2004, we had a digital camera that took pictures that were just about as noisy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only there was no option to add processing to make them better. So technology marches on. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna try that, download the, I think it’s in the latest version. I think it might be on the beta, I think it’s in the latest release
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Halide that zero processing feature. They have a big blog post about it. It’s fun to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was also very impressed honestly by like how decent the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor, the raw sensor stuff is. But yeah, you do get a lot of the rainbow, the chroma noise and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just the realities of such a tiny sensor that’s having to crank up its sensitivity a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of different lighting conditions. And so anyway, one of the biggest differences when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at iPhone pictures versus like bigger camera pictures is you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been a lot less processing done to the bigger camera pictures. Now again, in certain conditions, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not what you want, especially in terms of like, you know, if you need to combine multiple exposures to get larger dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range, for instance. That’s something that the phones are just so much better at and probably always will be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the big cameras, you can really, like a big camera version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you take it, if you like in the spot and you take the same picture with a big camera and then a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barring, you know, exposure differences for things like HDR, other than that, like usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big camera one will look a lot more natural because there’ll be like way less like over contrasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge sharpening, like all these, like these kind of artifacts of the heavy handed processing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I hope for every year that I don’t usually get too much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes it gets worse, but usually what I hope for with the new phones every year is that they’ve developed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better processing so that it is a little bit less obvious, like so it can be a little bit less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy-handed by default or at all. This is something that again, like, just due
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the sensor size and the realities of those optics and phones, it’s very hard to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not require a lot of processing to look good, but over time we do approach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, we do get better over time. Some phone generations are a step back. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super happy with the 15 in this regard. I think it does apply very strong processing by default,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think it actually is better than the 14 was in that same area. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoping, hoping for more improvements there. And that usually requires not only, you know, just slight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements to the camera here and there, but that also usually requires higher end processing, different techniques,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, more power in the signal processing pipeline. And you know, where AI comes in and helps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes to, or ML or whatever we’re calling it this few year period. All those things help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. But anything that can make the camera, make the photos appear less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily processed, I very much welcome those changes when we can get them.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s an interesting parallel with the AI thing. Like one of the knocks against the early and even
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the current image generators, like a DALI or whatever, where you just ask it to make you an image based on
⏹️ ▶️ John a text prompt, is that they had real difficulty with text because they didn’t know or care what letters were. So if they had a sign
⏹️ ▶️ John with text on it, it would look like, like Greek text where it’s like, oh, this isn’t a real language. They aren’t real letters.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like, you can tell it’s supposed to be text, but they’re not, there’s no actual alphabet. They’re just these blurry smear of letters,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Cause it, you know, it didn’t consider that an important part of the image. And whenever it sees signs in his training data, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, just a bunch of high contrast lines on a background. You know, anyway, um, the
⏹️ ▶️ John parallel to that in over-processed phone pictures is they take a picture of real text on a real sign,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then they apply their processing to it. And that processing, if you zoom in, often looks like kind of an impressionist painting, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like blobs of paint instead of sharp individual pixels. And they’re doing that to sort of denoise and lump everything
⏹️ ▶️ John together. And it will make text unreadable. So if you ever tried to use your phone to take a picture of some tiny text,
⏹️ ▶️ John so then you could pinch and zoom on the text, you may be surprised to find that when you pinch and zoom, the text looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like a total mess. It looks like that AI generated text and you can’t even read it. You’re like, wait, is the text actually
⏹️ ▶️ John blurry? On this little temple, not stem, not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of my eyeglasses, because you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, and they’re just like, no, the text is perfectly clear on your eyeglasses, but the processing of your phone totally
⏹️ ▶️ John mangled it and made it unreadable. That is an example of where Process Zero, which is the actual brand name that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using for this, hey, it’s Process Zero, would come in handy. Because yes, it would be noisy, but it won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take the letter forms and melt them into nothing. And sometimes when we talk about, oh, I can tell a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John picture from a real picture, like, oh, well, you’re just pixel peeping, which is what they mean by that is you’re zooming in to the picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can see at an individual pixel lever that, oh, this is totally blobby and gross. Whereas if you zoom in on a real camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks nice as you zoom in and right up to the point where you actually see the individual pixels kind of right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like pixel peeping is said derisively. Well, first of all, that is getting a closer look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the quality. But second, there’s a thing called cropping, which with real cameras you can do if you didn’t frame the shot
⏹️ ▶️ John well, or perfectly with a real camera. It’s usually better to although AI helps
⏹️ ▶️ John with this, it’s usually better to get more of the background that you want so that if you do need to reframe, you can just crop
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little bit. Or if you take a big picture and the most interesting part is in the upper right corner or whatever, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can crop in on that, but you can only do that if when you crop in, which is another way of zooming, throw
⏹️ ▶️ John away everything except for this tiny square, pinch and zoom until only this tiny square is visible on the screen, they’re both the same
⏹️ ▶️ John operation. If you do that with a phone picture, you’re like, oh, this is unusable. This person is a wax
⏹️ ▶️ John blob, right? They are an impressionist painting. I can’t make out a single thing. At regular
⏹️ ▶️ John size, it looks okay because they’re small, but when I crop in, all of a sudden, pixel peeping
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes, I just wanna crop this. I just wanna crop and only have this person in the picture. And with a real camera, you can do that because
⏹️ ▶️ John the quality of the pixels doesn’t immediately go into wax-melted blob the second
⏹️ ▶️ John you view it at more than 1x zoom or even less than 1x because sometimes the phone screen
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t even show the entire picture. So yeah, I’m a little bit of a big camera bigot, despite the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John I take tons of pictures on my phone and mostly enjoy how they look, but I know the weaknesses
⏹️ ▶️ John and I know better than to try to crop a tiny one third portion of a phone picture and expect it to
⏹️ ▶️ John look good, especially if it’s a person because they will look like a melted wax horror. Cool.
JPEG XL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so our subtopic that I alluded to earlier. So allegedly Apple will support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JPEG XL, which will sit alongside HEAF, JPEG, HEAF Max, ProRAW and ProRAW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max. And the initial reports I read about this seem to hint that Apple invented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JPEG XL, but having looked at the Wikipedia entry, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t understand these stories that put like a new format from Apple called JPEG XL. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John just Google the term before you write that story. But before we get to that, though, Have any of you heard of heath max?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I was just thinking, I don’t recall what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t Google it either. Like I’m assuming it’s just some variant of heath and heath has been around for a while. What
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the heck is heath max?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea. Like we had only two image formats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so long. And then when they added heath, which was now, I mean, a good number of years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was like such a big change. And kind of like what makes me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit nervous about this JPEG XL news is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we still don’t really have amazing support for heath in the ecosystem around our computers
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s that I think is a a thing in favor of JPEG XL, which we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John to in a second when we get to the form. But I did just look up heath max. That’s just what they call what they call the 48 megapixel thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you get all the actual 48 megapixels and you don’t bend it. They’re calling that heath max. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the way it was was that But originally when the 48 megapixel came out, the only way you got all 48 megapixels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was if you did a raw shot, if I recall correctly. Then they eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added with 14 Pro, HEIF MAX, which is, yes, I would like a 48 megapixel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image, but feel free to compress it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. It’s not raw. Right. So the HEIF, HEIF, H-E-I-F,
⏹️ ▶️ John H-E-I-C, whatever, that whole, when Apple introduced that format, right, their pitch was, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a new image format. Again, it’s not an Apple invention. It’s some standardized thing that Apple likes
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably had some part in. And what their pitch was, you get better quality images
⏹️ ▶️ John for the same size or you get smaller images, you know, like it was, it’s a better format, right? Compressed images.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a raw format. It’s a compressed thing. The format is very flexible. We can do all the things we need to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John We can implement all the features we want to implement. I forget if this is the one that they implemented the little live picture thing in
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of having the sidecar thing, they combined it. But anyway, the pitch was it’s a better image format, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re judging that by the quality of the image at a given size. And even though it was weird, we’re like, well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like it’s Apple’s proprietary format. This is a format that anybody can use. It’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John open thing, and it’s better than JPEG. And that frustration that we have about like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John only Max and stuff can read those things mostly mitigated by the fact that when you share, we convert
⏹️ ▶️ John it to a JPEG. And if you didn’t like it at all, you can go into settings and say, I don’t want to ever use this he feeks stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John just shoot everything in JPEG, and it would still but I left everything on the default, which was shoot everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in HEAF or whatever, because they take up less room on my phone, or they’re better quality
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same size, or whatever. Like, it’s a better image format, and I was figuring, before I read the
⏹️ ▶️ John story, that this HEAF HEAK thing, we’ll just tough it out
⏹️ ▶️ John for another five to 10 years, and eventually you’ll see more widespread support for
⏹️ ▶️ John this format, and it won’t be that big of a deal. Honestly, it hasn’t been that big of a deal for me, again, because of the sharing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But then this JPEG XL story comes out and it’s like, well, if you were waiting around
⏹️ ▶️ John for heaf or heek to become so standard that it’s as common as JPEG, that seems like that
⏹️ ▶️ John is never going to happen for reasons that we will explain now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, oh, so JPEG XL supports lossy and lossless compression
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ultra high resolution images up to one terapixel, up to 32 bits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per component, up to 4,099 components, including alpha transparency, animated images
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and embedded previews. that has features aimed at web delivery, such as advanced progressive decoding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and minimal header overhead, as well as features aimed at image editing and digital printing, such as support for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey layers, CMYK and spot colors. It is specifically designed to seamlessly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle wide color gamut color spaces with high dynamic range, such as Rec 2100,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the PQ or HLG transfer function. I understood about a third of what I just read. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are some sweet features involved. There’s independent tiles. So decoding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sections of a large image by allowing images to be stored in tiles. Progressive decoding, more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically, excuse me, it’s a mode specifically designed for responsive loading of large images, depending on the viewing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device’s resolution. There’s support for both photographic and synthetic imagery. The format features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two complementary modes that can be used depending on the image contents. Efficient encoding and decoding without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey requiring specialized hardware. JPEG XL is about as fast to encode and decode as old JPEGs using libJPEG Turbo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an order of magnitude faster to encode and decode compared to HEAK with X265. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also parallelizable. JPEG XL can losslessly transcode a widely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supported subset of JPEG files, making about 20% smaller file sizes possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey due to JPEG XL’s superior entropy coding. This process is reversible and it allows for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original JPEG file to be reconstructed bit for bit. JPEG XL, and I think this is the kicker, is a royalty-free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey format with an open source reference implementation available on GitHub under a three clause BSD license.
⏹️ ▶️ John Poor Heek and Heef. They were better image formats. And they had their very brief
⏹️ ▶️ John time in the sun, but not enough to become industry standard. And here comes JPEG XL, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John better than them in every possible way, including the most important one, which is royalty
⏹️ ▶️ John free. BSD implementation, royalty free, open
⏹️ ▶️ John source, parallelizable, supports all the new modern things, huge image files, transparency.
⏹️ ▶️ John just think of all the image formats that we’ve lived with and all the weird stupid that we’ve had. We had GIFs, which are fun,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they only go up to 256 colors. We have JPEGs, but there was a kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John blurry, so you’d use GIFs for those if you could, but if they had more than 256 colors, then you needed to do PNG, but PNG was the
⏹️ ▶️ John only one that supported transparency, but then I didn’t support transparency in PNGs. And even today,
⏹️ ▶️ John even when I’m putting stuff on my website, it’s like, I’m gonna put up this image. Oh, I want it to have transparency. I guess I’ll have to use a ping, but of course, pings
⏹️ ▶️ John are basically uncompressed, even though you can squish them down a little bit farther. So JPEGs are much smaller than pings, but then JPEGs are blurry,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you have text because they don’t do a good job with that. And like, and there was progressive JPEGs
⏹️ ▶️ John when we had modems, so the JPEG would slowly fade in or whatever, but then there’s those old JPEG 2000, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s WebP and all the weird Google formats, and what is it, AVIF, and then there’s all these wars about,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate it when I download a WebP image because macOS doesn’t like those, and I always have to end up converting them, so I have a RetroBatch thing that converts
⏹️ ▶️ John all the WebP images into PNGs, and of course there’s Photoshop formats. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this solves all of them. Supports everything that they all support is totally open has the
⏹️ ▶️ John name JPEG in it, which is really important I mean it probably is from the joint photographic experts group, but
⏹️ ▶️ John being called JPEG something is important I granted it didn’t help JPEG 2000 but putting 2000 the name
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t a great move, right? And Excel makes it sound like it’s extra large but I think that’s not what the Excel stands for
⏹️ ▶️ John but this this has all the features and it’s royalty-free and it’s open source
⏹️ ▶️ John and And like it’s made for modern hardware, parallelizable, the thing with the tile encoding or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s parallelizable is you can break up your image into chunks and decode them all in parallel. And if you’re just showing one
⏹️ ▶️ John quarter of an image, it can just decode that corner of the image. Like it’s so well
⏹️ ▶️ John thought out and well designed to not have any of the weaknesses of the existing formats. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it also makes smaller files at the same quality or better looking files at the same size, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I am ready to throw Heek and Heef In the dustbin of history, I’m ready to go
⏹️ ▶️ John all in a JPEG XL provided everybody starts supporting it. That means
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, Chrome, all
⏹️ ▶️ John like every platform needs to support this, which almost sort of mostly happened with WebP. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think WebP on the web works okay, as its name suggests, but when you download a WebP onto your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS is like, you know, and whatever the other format that
⏹️ ▶️ John Google likes, is it AVIF or whatever, there’s a bunch of other image formats that are better than
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the existing ones that are kind of competing with Heek and Heef and all that. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing JPEG XL doesn’t have going forward, you know, it does support animation. You know, why do we have quote unquote animated
⏹️ ▶️ John GIFs for so long? Because it was the only image format that supported animation. And then there was like animated pings, but that didn’t get very widely supported.
⏹️ ▶️ John These days when we say I’m uploading a GIF, they just convert it to MP4 behind the scenes, right? And like
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter and Macedon or whatever, they don’t actually show you an actual GIF because actual GIFs
⏹️ ▶️ John are humongous because it’s individual frames that are, you know, individual GIFs or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is not a video format, so it doesn’t solve all the problems, like H.265 will live on and all that other good stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I am excited about JPEG XL. And I hope, unlike Heek and Heef, this does
⏹️ ▶️ John sweep across the entire industry and become boring and supported everywhere. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John the only barriers to that not happening are companies that are really
⏹️ ▶️ John tied to their formats, either because they own the patents on them, or because they’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John invested in this giant infrastructure that understands WebP and process them or whatever. And I hope we get over that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this being royalty free should help. Being royalty free also means people don’t make money from it. So some people
⏹️ ▶️ John are motivated not for that format, not to spread, but my fingers are crossed
⏹️ ▶️ John on this. And this is just a rumor. We don’t even know if it’s true, right? I haven’t even seen the betas. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John in the, is JPEG XL gonna be the default? Are they gonna talk about it in the event? And because they did talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about HEAP and HEAP, they said, hey, we’ve got a new image format and it makes better images, right? And don’t worry, it’ll be compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John because when you share it, it’ll convert to JPEG. I assume they would take the same approach to JPEG XL.
⏹️ ▶️ John And where does that leave Heaph and Heek? Are they still even gonna be an option? Or are they just gonna be removed from the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s gonna be plain old JPEG, same as it ever was, or JPEG XL, which is the extra large version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. Yeah, I’m hoping this takes off because Heaph and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Heaph slash Heek, I know one’s the container and one’s the format. Heaph has just still, it’s been around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, that has never gotten good enough support across the industry to the point where like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are taking a photo from an iPhone and sending it anywhere or using it anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else that besides another iPhone, you’ve probably been just having to convert it to JPEG. And to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the point where like Apple’s own frameworks will do that for you a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that is usually what people need to do. I would love for JPEG XL to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get wide enough support everywhere that we don’t have to do this dance anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few years because JPEG has been a wonderful format for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire tech industry for the 150 years that we’ve had it. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have better techniques now, we do have better compression now, we do have like different needs now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is time to hopefully retire JPEG and replace it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the only reason we’re still using using JPEG is because it is like the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco universally compatible version. Now, everything I just said is also true about MP3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I say that with love, because I love the MP3 file format. I think it’s a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace JPEG than to replace MP3 for a lot of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, here’s the difference, though, because you mentioned JPEG and how much you love it, and it’s been around for a long time. But JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ John has obvious problems, which is the reason people used anything that wasn’t JPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, if you have something that’s like line art or something like that, a like a black and white
⏹️ ▶️ John line art, a gif is better for sharpness 256 grays in a gif,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, is going to give you sharp, crisp edges, none of that weird compression artifacts stuff or whatever, it’ll be a real
⏹️ ▶️ John small file, or a PNG or something like that. JPEG makes things blurry and gross
⏹️ ▶️ John and so unless you crank up the quality and then it makes your file size bigger. It is it is made for photos, it
⏹️ ▶️ John relies on your perception of human perception. that’s great for photographs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John black text on a white background, line art, tiny text that becomes a fizzy mess,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is JPEG’s weakness. Transparency, not a thing in JPEG, except
⏹️ ▶️ John for probably JPEG 2000. Animation, I believe there is an animated JPEG, you know, there’s motion JPEG formats or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like lots of things that we eventually found to be useful in image formats, plain old JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ John in most implementations simply doesn’t support. Not true of MP3. MP3 has a lot of things going for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Number one, pretty much every thing you could think to do with an audio file, MP3 supports,
⏹️ ▶️ John MP3 is so close to the perceptual limits of human hearing and file
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes in the grand scheme of things are so low that we don’t care that you can make a better sounding, slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller file with AAC or whatever, because the difference isn’t that big. You know what I mean? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John for hours and hours of video or something like that, and maybe for multi-channel formats, it’s a whole other thing, but like MP3
⏹️ ▶️ John for its role, doesn’t really have any of those glaring weaknesses. Like no transparency in an image format
⏹️ ▶️ John for the web is so killer and there’s no equivalent to that for like, oh, here’s the problem with MP3, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, it was bad when we were doing like MP3s at really low bit rates, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a 320 kilobit MP3, that’s fine for 99% of the planet for basic
⏹️ ▶️ John two-channel audio or mono audio. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I think MP3 has still got more legs, But JPEG, again, the reason anybody uses
⏹️ ▶️ John formats other than JPEG is because they know JPEG’s weaknesses and they know this has to be a ping, this has to be a GIF,
⏹️ ▶️ John or this has to be something else entirely because JPEGs can’t do it all. But JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ John XL, like those old, this is what I said, I don’t know if this is the case, but when I read support for both photographic and synthetic
⏹️ ▶️ John imagery with two complementary modes, I think it’s gonna be one mode where it recognizes line art. I don’t know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true. I’m putting my hopes and dreams in that one line there. And then the other thing, where it can transcode
⏹️ ▶️ John existing, most existing JPEGs and make them 20% smaller, essentially losslessly, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John reverse that. That means that like, if you have a library full of JPEGs, like if you shot JPEGs for years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone, and then when he came out, let’s say you didn’t pick that format, but either way, if you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John JPEGs on your phone, this format can make all your JPEGs 20% smaller, like
⏹️ ▶️ John losslessly, not re-encoding them and making them look worse. Just take that JPEG and replace it with a file that is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, but it’s 20% smaller. That’s one of the great things about having JPEG in the
⏹️ ▶️ John name and saying it will subsume your existing JPEGs and make them smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John And 20% is not a small number. So, boy, again, we’re just reading a feature list and it’s from the Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ John page and it makes everything sound like wonderful and roses and we’ll see if this is really true or
⏹️ ▶️ John if all my hopes and dreams are accurately represented by these bullet points. But this is looking great to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, just recently I’ve been putting images up on my website and it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are images such a mess still on the web? And here’s JPEG XL, come to save us all. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John people said the same thing about JPEG 2000 and again, that didn’t quite work out, but maybe this time we’ll do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope so, because like, if you think about like, what it takes for a new image format to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like gain a foothold and really, you know, get as widely supported as JPEG and PNG are today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have such a massive world of technological tools and infrastructure and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various devices, server-side, open-source libraries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server-side language support, different CDN support, obviously browser support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different phones, whether cameras are gonna shoot this format. There’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there that either processes or converts or resizes or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco displays images. And this is part of the reason why we haven’t had more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formats that really take a foothold because the world of of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech and software and hardware that deals with images is so vast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for this to really take off, obviously having, you know, royalty free and open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source components is massively important here because any, if, if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of royalty requirement on a format, That means that in the entire ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of open source tools and of server side, you know, language supports and everything, it’s probably not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support it, or at least it’s going to support it in a very loose or half-assed way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s going to be format wars because you’re like, well, you have your royalty one, and I have my royalty one, and I want mine because I get money from it, and you want
⏹️ ▶️ John yours because you get money from it. And even in this case, there’s an open source implementation, but it’s not like a
⏹️ ▶️ John copy left type of GNU public license or whatever. It’s BSD, which is the one that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John take it, make money off it, whatever. Like, it’s not even a restrictive open source license.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so that that really is setting the stage for this to be widely adopted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see. I mean, the only other thing that generally tends to hold back new formats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from being adopted besides you know, the tech besides the you know, the technical requirements, royalty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requirements, open source, lack thereof. The only other thing that tends to hold things back is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s not a big enough improvement over the ubiquitous established format. That was always the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with JPEG 2000. And I think to some degree that was a problem with HEAF.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this might be enough overall improvements to finally make it worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people actually like putting in the work to to implement this. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this goes that way. Because again, like JPEG really has had its time. It’s been wonderful. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this this is a lot of advancement over that. And I hope we get the chance to actually use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if it isn’t, even if it turns out this is not a big enough jump for it to be adopted industry wide, I’ll say the same thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ John said when Apple went to Heek slash Heef. Even if this is only a format that only Apple ever
⏹️ ▶️ John uses, if it makes all the pictures on my phone a little bit smaller and they all just get converted to JPEG anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re exported, which again has basically been my experience, I never have to think about the fact that this phone is always taking pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John in Heek Heef unless I like look at see that format in the photos menu on my Mac when I export. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, that’s right. That is a format, right? I don’t have to think about it, but they take
⏹️ ▶️ John up less room in my iCloud photo library. They take up less room on my phone. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worth doing. That’s why I didn’t change that option. I want my pictures to be smaller. I keep taking pictures. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John them to be, like I said, I want them to be smaller or better quality at the same size and just keep making those formats better.
⏹️ ▶️ John So probably like half my collection is JPEGs before they introduce HEAP and then half of them is the
⏹️ ▶️ John new format and then I’ll start with JPEG XL. I would prefer it if it went industry
⏹️ ▶️ John wide and solve those problem. But to give another example, because of Apple, I
⏹️ ▶️ John use the photo screen shaver on all of our Macs and I have my favorites from my photo album being the
⏹️ ▶️ John floating images going up and down your screen, it’s like pictures of my family and everything, they’re all the favorites from my photos library. The
⏹️ ▶️ John screen saver has a feature that says, hey, pick an album from your photos
⏹️ ▶️ John library in this little picker and we’ll use that to feed this slideshow. But I can tell you that once you push up
⏹️ ▶️ John for around 200,000 pictures, that UI gets very upset. So what I do instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, you can fix this, but anyway, what I do instead is I go to the favorite collections and photos and I
⏹️ ▶️ John export them all to a folder on my Mac somewhere. And I don’t export them at 100% size because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna be in a screensaver and they’re usually pretty small in that floating screensaver. So I export them in like the quote unquote large size
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of original size. And I do that in Heek. And when I used to do that in JPEG,
⏹️ ▶️ John the folder was way bigger. And now the folder is smaller. And I like that, right? And then you just point the
⏹️ ▶️ John screensaver at the folder and it can somehow handle that when it couldn’t handle the thing in the photo picker library. Try not
⏹️ ▶️ John to push my photo library too much. I don’t want to upset it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just for that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, taking up less space on my phone and taking up less space in the favorites folder that is
⏹️ ▶️ John on all the Macs in my house, for that alone, please, I welcome JPEG XL. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope it does sweep across the whole industry because it seems like it just finally resolves
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the issues. It’s the image format that does everything we want image formats to do and hopefully does it well.
#askatp: iOS clean install?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, you want to do some ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Tom Thorpe writes It’s that new iPhone time of year again and time to ask the age-old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question whether to restore from backup or start fresh I’ve been on the same backup for 10 years But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m starting to think it would be nice to start fresh partially because I want to clear out unused apps But I also still can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help but imagine it would clear out the croft provide better battery life, etc What are the pros and cons of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so today? What would I lose by starting fresh? and what would I get any or in what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get any of my imagined benefits. I don’t know that I don’t think I’ve ever started fresh. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still carrying the same, you know, iOS installation, if you will, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my three GS way back when. So I don’t think I can can say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from experience, whether it would be a good idea or not. Generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s a bad idea. The The thing that scares me the most personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is losing my iMessage history, which granted is basically a black hole anyway because search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is terrible in messages. But I don’t know, it gives me the heebie-jeebies to think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey losing it. But I guess, man, go for it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report in and let us know if it was a mistake. Especially if you take a backup first, I mean, it’s not going to hurt anything. You’d always go back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco your backup. All right, so Marco, correct me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the whole thing of like, well, you could always back up. I feel like yeah you can but after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of days of using the new one it’s like how when you undo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an undo stack as soon as you make any change you can’t redo anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no way for you to like merge that change back into your stack you know it blows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the redo stack. What you can you can take a backup but like as soon as you start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing anything on the new installation that is like creating new data, writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new things, you’re not going to want to ever go back to that backup because it’ll be too disruptive or you will lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that you’ve done. So basically that’s that’s usually a pretty one-way transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say if you actually want to like have a clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco startup, that’s like a really appealing thing to you for some reason, sure go ahead do it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think though that it’s necessary it with with modern OS installations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost every case, especially on the phone. On the Mac, sometimes you can build up a whole bunch of weird stuff in various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library directories, even then you can clean that out. But it’s so it’s rarely necessary on the Mac. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say on the phone it’s basically never necessary. I think, like you Casey, I think I’ve either never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it or I’ve done it maybe once in total ever. But I don’t think it’s really necessary because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS is already so controlled and limited. You’re not throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in texts, You’re not throwing in weird preferences that live around forever in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directory. You don’t need to run iPhone cleanup utilities to find lost and abandoned files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s so much in the iPhone that, because of the technical limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imposed on apps and because of all the containerization of all the apps data and everything, you don’t really need most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that stuff. Now, whether you wanna go through your apps and clean out apps, that’s a different story,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can just delete the apps. You don’t need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, bringing over your restore. I think mostly what you’d be doing by doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fresh installation without a restore and manually starting things from scratch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most of what you’re doing there is causing a lot of time loss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly some data loss in apps that don’t transition over at all or well or perfectly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all for a benefit that I’m not sure is real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least I’m not sure it would be anything you would ever notice. So I would recommend if this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not something that you really think you need to specifically do because of a specific reason you’re trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of, I would say don’t do this. Just bring your stuff over. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to make a meaningful impact on stuff like battery life or things like that. That’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a myth on iOS and there’s other ways to control that like deleting apps. So just go through like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you really want the same effect, go through and delete a bunch of apps that you don’t use anymore. Like you can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s fine. And before I address Tom’s question here, I’ll just say that all three of us are in agreement for just general people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t have this specific question. Our advice is just transfer data from your old phone. It’s what everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John does. It’s the default. That’s what we recommend. Flat out, not even close, right? Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tom’s question is like, I think I might have a problem. I think I might want to do this. What are the trade-offs here? What would
⏹️ ▶️ John I lose by starting fresh? Marco kind of already addressed this. It is possible to lose something because if you have an app,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially older apps, but who knows, it could be modern ones too, that don’t have any kind of cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John sync type thing, and you start fresh and you reinstall that app, the data that was associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with that app that was on your old phone is still sitting on your old phone, and that’s the only place it is, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have any kind of like, it saves it up to iCloud, or it puts it on a server, or it does any kind of syncing thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just locally on that, inside that app. If you did a backbone restore or
⏹️ ▶️ John did a data transfer, you would keep that data most of the time, right? But if you have an app like that
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, okay, let me download that app from the app store and you launch it and you see nothing in the app, you’re like, hey, where’s all my stuff? It’s back on your old phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it totally is possible to lose data. Again, good apps don’t do that. They have some kind of cloud sync thing, they use CloudKit
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. That’s how people expect iOS apps to work, but there’s no way as an end user for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John really know, what is this app doing? Is it just storing things inside its container locally
⏹️ ▶️ John on my old phone? And if I install the app fresh on a new phone and sign into it with my account,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t bring my data with it? You won’t know that until you do that. So that is a pretty significant risk. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another reason to keep around your old phone when you’re setting up a new phone, just to make sure that’s not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John As for would I get any of my imagined benefits? There are scenarios where a fresh install
⏹️ ▶️ John will save you, but they’re pretty obscure, right? So because everything is so containerized or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John the usual way that you’re gonna get any kind of benefit is there’s some kind of problem situation
⏹️ ▶️ John usually having to do with corrupt data. Like there’s some kind of file format or data or whatever associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with an app that is, that for whatever reason, a bug in the program or who knows, something, it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it got mangled. And so it’s sitting on your SSD on your phone and it is improperly formatted.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe you don’t notice because it’s some obscure corner of some database that some file uses to keep track
⏹️ ▶️ John of its stuff, right? But the way this could potentially manifest is, let’s say that app runs
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background once an hour for 60 seconds. If during that 60 seconds, it goes into a tight loop
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s decoding code, gets tripped up over the bad formatting and just goes around and around, does an infinite loop
⏹️ ▶️ John for 60 seconds before it gets killed. You don’t know that’s happening behind the scenes, but once
⏹️ ▶️ John per hour, there’s a little tight infinite loop for 60 seconds, draining a little tiny bit of your battery because of
⏹️ ▶️ John some tiny corrupt database and something, you have no visibility into this. The app developer thinks there’s nothing wrong with
⏹️ ▶️ John my app, I don’t know what the problem is. He would have to diagnose and get your actual data file to determine that your data file was corrupted
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe by a bug three versions ago in his program. And you’ve been slinging that corrupt database file around
⏹️ ▶️ John from phone to phone to phone, burning tiny little bits of power on it and multiply that by three or four apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that have this problem. If you do a fresh install of those apps and it syncs a new thing down from the
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud or whatever, you wouldn’t have that problem, right? If it’s corrupt in the cloud and you do a fresh install
⏹️ ▶️ John and you install that app and it syncs to the cloud, you got the same problem. You didn’t, you know what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you don’t know unless you’re the developer of that app, is this corrupt just locally or is it corrupt in the cloud?
⏹️ ▶️ John Am I just, you know, the only one thing is you could have problems on your phone, do a fresh install,
⏹️ ▶️ John reinstall all the apps that you lose, and restore all those problems. Because all the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John were like corrupt data in the cloud or something like that, or any bug related to that, right? Because you never know, like, is the problem that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have, like people have this concept of like, I think there’s cobwebs inside their phone or whatever, but it’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there are specific things that applications could be doing that could be causing you a problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even sure what the ratio is, but a huge number of those are not solved by setting up a new phone at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just going to faithfully reproduce every single one of those problems. If you just delete that entire
⏹️ ▶️ John app, then hey, problem solved. But if it’s an app that you use every day and you had a problem over there, you’re also gonna have a problem over here in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of circumstances. And that’s not satisfying, right? On the Mac again, it is much more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s some leftover files or something you never use that you can just clear out. And doing that manually is very difficult and I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not recommend people do it. And it takes a lot of experience not to hose yourself. So, you know, that’s why the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John is what the Mac is. But on the phone, your tools are fresh install or backup, delete
⏹️ ▶️ John app or not delete app. And that’s pretty much where it ends. And that’s good. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want more tools than that. But sometimes you have problems that you can’t escape by doing a fresh install.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s just a break. So I would recommend not doing it. You didn’t say you had any specific
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. You just want your thing to be better. Getting a new phone and setting it up as a fresh phone by itself
⏹️ ▶️ John will empty out a lot of stuff. Like when you transfer data from your phone, it’s not transferring
⏹️ ▶️ John like every single thing that was on your phone to your new phone. It’s transferring the things that it thinks it needs to transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everything else on your new phone is fresh. Probably all like the caches directories, the spotlight indexes
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be recreated, whatever the heck Apple Intelligence is doing. It’ll sync your photos down from
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud fresh. So if a bunch of photos were corrupt over there because of some heated up part of your SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John flipped a bunch of bits or something, you won’t have that problem over here as long as they weren’t corrupt in iCloud. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John just restore from backup. It will still be a fresh phone even if you don’t start from zero. And if you do start from zero and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a lot of stuff, you will spend hours and hours and hours trying to get it back like your old phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as soon as you think you have a good and you sell your old phone or wipe it or whatever, then you’re gonna find the thing that you missed and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John only on your old phone and you deleted it. So don’t do it.
#askatp: Moving Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Michael Quinn writes, so we all buy new iPhones in a few weeks, spend the next 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months training them as our personal AI assistant with stuff securely stored on board. What happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after that? Does that transfer to iPhone next? Do we have to retrain every iPhone forever, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey la waiting for photos and Spotlight to rescan and index each year? Kind of a sucky experience if so, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another barrier for upgrading if you know you’re going to lose your personal AI. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good point and holy crap, I would assume since Apple is a company that knows what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re doing and cares that it would transfer, but then photos. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think Michael’s answer here, Michael’s question here contains the likely answer. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Michael says in the question is, do we have to retrain every phone forever, a la waiting for photos slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spotlight to rescan and index each year? I think it’s probably going to end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up working much like spotlight indexing, because that is kind of what it’s built upon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least that is like the structure that they have built it with. So chances are, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I don’t think we know this yet, but chances are the way Apple Intelligence, you know, indexing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or assistant learning will work on the phone is very similar to photos in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you get a new phone or you do a restore, it’ll spend the first couple of nights that it’s plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all night, indexing your data and training itself on that data. it’s going to be, or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’ll, as it’s sitting on your desk during the transfer, it’ll heat itself up like crazy melt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself while it’s doing all this. So I would expect it will be similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that. Apple does have a history of features like, like, for instance, like some of the, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people training, uh, metadata stuff in, in the photos app. Apple has a history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having features that have local intelligence or categorization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or other ML kind of data that is generated on device, but then they have ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other devices or restores on that same device later down the road to re index and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically get that same data somehow on them. So I think it will be very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that process where whatever you have like taught it that will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, we don’t even know initially what that means yet. Um, but I don’t know if any of the features that we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even have things that you can teach them besides indexing content from your apps. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever effort you put in to training Apple intelligence will probably carry over just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And I think again, most of the features that we’re gonna see in this first year, I think are gonna be based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon either just kind of global knowledgeless models that you’re not putting your special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spin on, or index content from apps that can just get re-indexed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as when you have a new phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So photos is a good example of this, because I think one of the photos things he’s probably referring to is face
⏹️ ▶️ John recognition. When that feature resource introduced, photos would scan all your photos and find people and find
⏹️ ▶️ John their faces and do all that stuff. And you get a new phone, it would have to re-scan them and re-find all the faces. And it was frustrating,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the scanning for faces is not perfect. And sometimes you have to correct it. No, this isn’t my mom. This is my grandmother.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, this isn’t my first kid. It’s my second kid. And you would do those corrections because it would get it wrong. And then you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a new phone, and you’re like, jeez, it’s getting it wrong again. I corrected the same photo that it thinks is my mom, but it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John my grandma. It’s literally the same photo. I corrected it on the old thing. This is like Michael’s question. If I do all this stuff on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, do I get a new phone? Do I have to like, essentially, like I lose all of that information? And so Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John added a feature, I think a year or two after this, the face recognition came out that said, we will
⏹️ ▶️ John transfer your face recognition data from your old thing to your new thing. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean get your faces set up all the way you want them on
⏹️ ▶️ John your old phone. And when you get your new phone, it’ll be just like that. That’s not what they meant. The way they implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John it was anything you manually did on the old phone, when you corrected that and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not my mom, it’s my grandma or whatever, right? That action by the
⏹️ ▶️ John user, those actions were recorded and transferred to your new phone and synced to your
⏹️ ▶️ John new phone or whatever. Everything else was not. So what would happen is it would transfer over basically like the
⏹️ ▶️ John manually entered info, which is probably pretty small because you just manually do one or two things so you got thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos. Then it would rescan all of your photos and do phrase recognition, augmented
⏹️ ▶️ John by your corrections. But the rescanning is probably like a new version of iOS and a new code base
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And who knows, it’s not going, first of all, you have to do the rescanning, because that’s, so that takes time and energy or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least usually not that long. And second, it’s probably not going to end up in the same state as
⏹️ ▶️ John your old phone, because that was scanned, you know, some of those photos were scanned two versions of iOS ago, depending on, you know, how old
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone is or whatever. And there’s totally different code scanning. And by the way, it’s scanning with the benefit of all
⏹️ ▶️ John your manual data, whereas those are scanning with only the benefit of some of your manual data that existed at the time the scan took place.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you end up with your new phone not being like your old phone. It’s one of my frustrations with photos on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I meticulously arrange my, select my faces and everything. And
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, your iPhoto’s library is essentially a folder on your Mac. I can never lose that folder,
⏹️ ▶️ John because when I go to another Mac and pull up the same photo library, faces are all over the freaking place.
⏹️ ▶️ John because it doesn’t benefit from all of my stuff. Like this is a carefully curated collection of things
⏹️ ▶️ John that have been scanned over the course of years, plus my manual corrections or whatever. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John is what they did with photos. What might they do with AI? There’s no technical
⏹️ ▶️ John reason for both photos or AI that they couldn’t take your
⏹️ ▶️ John complete semantic index or whatever they’re calling it and transfer it wholesale to your new phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could do it through the cloud because they have end-to-end encrypted things in the cloud where Apple would have no access to that information,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it would go up to the cloud in a way that Apple has no access to it because it’s encrypted. Not like your iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John messages backup where they can read it all or whatever, but like totally encrypted and pull it down to your phone. It could be device-to-device
⏹️ ▶️ John transfer where it never touches any Apple server, but it goes directly from your phone to your other phone. They could
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, but I kind of understand why they don’t want to. Well, for multiple reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is that I think the amount of manual information
⏹️ ▶️ John in the vein of like, oh, I’m correcting the face in this picture, for AI is going to be small. People
⏹️ ▶️ John like this question envision is like, oh, I’ve got this AI on my phone and I’ve trained it up to really know me or whatever. You
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t trained it up. You’re not retraining any models here, right? Basically all you did was
⏹️ ▶️ John through your data and let it chew it up. If you allow it to chew up that same data on your new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should more or less come to the same result or maybe better because it’s a new version of the model
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But it’s not as if you are retraining the model, so to speak, and it’s somehow the model is
⏹️ ▶️ John getting smarter and learning you or whatever, you are just feeding it more data into that semantic index
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and that it’s reading that or whatever. That same process should be pretty much 100% repeatable
⏹️ ▶️ John on your new phone, because again, like the LLMs and all their weights and all their numbers or whatever, you are not changing those
⏹️ ▶️ John by talking to the LLM. Those never change unless Apple releases a new model. It’s only the semantic
⏹️ ▶️ John index stuff that’s there. And how did that index get formed? It got formed without your intervention. It got formed when you were sleeping and your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John was plugged in and it was scanning all your data. So as long as that data is over there, the semantic index will be over there. So I kind of understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why Apple wouldn’t copy it. And also, like I said, if they make improvements to that, you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the scanning with the new improved system rather than taking the scan that was made with the one year old system
⏹️ ▶️ John and transferring it to your new phone. So that’s how I guess this is going to work. Again, we don’t know for sure. Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t even shipped, let alone had anyone transfer from one phone to another. But like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s put it this way. I think it’ll be better than photos because I think photos, there is actual
⏹️ ▶️ John work that you’re doing and like a, a, a presentation of all the faces that you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduced. I think what Apple intelligence, whatever happens on your old phone, when you set up a new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should all be reproduced because I think there’s less manual stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, trade coffee. Thanks also to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at p.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overtime, a bonus topic every week. This week’s overtime, we’ll be talking about rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a folding all-screen MacBook, which is, I think, very interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’ll be talking about that. So, that’s this week’s ATP overtime. If you want to hear us talk about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folding all-screen MacBook this week and new topics every week in overtime, plus other membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonuses, go to atp.fm.com to join up and support us that way. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much to everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Mastodon, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental
Get vaccinated!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a brief life update I am happy to share with everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re doubling your RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m doubling my RAM. Actually, I’m doubling my 5G because as of a few hours ago, I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even more vaccinated than I was before.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? He’s got his new COVID vaccine. He’s got his new COVID vaccine, is what he’s saying. I need to get that too.
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a flu shot at the same time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, in my personal opinion, October is the right time for a flu shot based on no science, no medicine,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is science, But like there is science about the timing. It’s of the, any of these shots, because your immunity
⏹️ ▶️ John is strongest. The, I think like the first, you know, right after you get the shot, your immunity is the strongest and it does fade over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a strategy that says wait until you’re farther into like cold and flu season to get your flu shot. Same thing with COVID.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, especially with COVID, you get COVID tomorrow. So yeah, it’s gonna be worse in
⏹️ ▶️ John the winter, but if you get it tomorrow, waiting was the wrong move. But if you don’t get it tomorrow, waiting was the right, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is more, has more of a seasonal bump to it. so you can probably game that a little bit better. But like, I just know so
⏹️ ▶️ John many people have gotten COVID lately. Like the summer has been a pretty big surge and it’s out there and it’s waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to get it. And so I’m gonna get the COVID shot immediately. I’m also gonna get the flu shot immediately because I don’t even bother timing
⏹️ ▶️ John that and I just don’t wanna have to go back and forth, you know what I mean? To get multiple shots, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, recommended. When you’re in there getting your COVID shot, get your flu shot. And if you wanna wait and take the risk, feel free. But if you get COVID before
⏹️ ▶️ John the shot, that sucks because you get COVID and it also sucks because you can’t get the shot until you’ve been over COVID
⏹️ ▶️ John for some amount of time too. So not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, I am stunned that we didn’t bring it home from Europe. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like our time is ticking, because it appears from what the kids are telling us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that half of their elementary school is out for multiple days at a time. And then occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of them will come back with masks on. And so you put two and two together, and you know exactly what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s only a matter of time. So here’s hoping that I dodge it at least long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to get through the podcast-a-thon. And then if I come down with it after that, so be it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And COVID was out there in Europe with you. A bunch of people who were there got it. A bunch of people were there with it and
⏹️ ▶️ John got it while they were there, or brought it back and you dodged it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s every, like all summer, it’s been everywhere. Like we got it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my family, we got it in May. And it’s been, like everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has it around here. All summer long, I just talked to one of my friends here today, just coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of it, from the last nine days, it’s everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We like to think that we’re past the era of COVID. Not only are we so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not past it, and not only are we probably never going to be past it, but the only things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really different now is that for most people, it is less severe to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now than it used to be because we have some experience with it in our bodies now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s still very widespread and still causing problems for a lot of people. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just everywhere. So yeah, definitely get your vaccines. Like, yeah, they’re not perfect. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also a lot better than nothing. So get your vaccines. It’s not a big deal. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please, for the love of God, do what you can to help.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you read a story, it’s like, oh, the vaccine is for a strain that’s not even circulating. That’s true. But the vaccines,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they don’t stop you from getting it, they make the symptoms more mild. And that’s what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you want every bit of help you can get, even if it helps just a little, even if it makes you like a little bit less, because there is
⏹️ ▶️ John still the possibility that you’re gonna have a bad experience or get long COVID. Like that is still happening to
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Like we benefit from quote unquote, benefit from the fact that a lot of the people that COVID
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna kill, it has killed like millions. Right, so those people are dead. And the people who are still
⏹️ ▶️ John here are the people who didn’t die or didn’t catch it. And we all have lots of vaccines that makes the symptoms
⏹️ ▶️ John less severe. But yeah, it’s just not a thing that you want. Same thing with the flu shot. Do they guess
⏹️ ▶️ John right on the strain or whatever? It’s just like every little bit helps, right? And you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John studies say it does help. It does help if you’ve gotten vaccinated. It does help if you’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John vaccinated recently. And it does help if you’ve gotten vaccinated recently with a strain that is somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ John close to the one that’s currently circulating. So just do it. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John highly recommended. And same thing with flu shot. and any other vaccines that you might be overdue for when you visit your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, honestly, like one of the, I wouldn’t necessarily, it’s hard to say like upsides,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a silver lining of all of this is that it seems like in recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, as part of the COVID vaccines ramping up, it seems like getting almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any vaccine has gotten a lot easier, because like the major drugstore chains now have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only, they had flu before, but not in, I think, the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have now. And most people weren’t thinking to go and get it as much as they are now, especially younger people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now you can go to any drugstore in the US at almost any time you want and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a COVID shot, you can get a flu shot, you can get other commonly needed shots like HPV, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people should be getting. There’s so many, it’s so easy now to get access to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many vaccines that are just in drugstores, widely available for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little to no money. It’s actually, to have built up all that infrastructure now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is quite an upside. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a primary care doctor and you do annual visits, that’s also a great time to do it. Time your annual visit for
⏹️ ▶️ John right before flu season. You will get a flu shot when you go into the office. They’ll have it there. It’ll, you know, just make sure it’s out by the time
⏹️ ▶️ John you go and get all your vaccinations. It’s very convenient.