607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
04 Oct 2024Meta Orion, NotebookLM’s generated podcasts, leather iPhone 16 cases, and a request for two simple apps. How hard can they be?
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Windows woes
- Follow-up:
- Thank you, listeners. 💙
- Hard-wired camera indicator light
- AirPods 4 bass & new MagSafe puck (via Wayne Dixon)
- Quinn’s AirPods 4 review
- The A18 is not a binned A18 Pro
- The tiny ∆ between These AirPods
- iPhones 16 battery life
- Battery limiting
- AlDente app for managing charge settings
- Electrical battery release with reversed polarity (via David Schaub)
- Verizon activation problems
- Verizon self-service (via Steven)
- Bullstrap case review
- Apple Store experience (via Eli Liebman)
- Marco’s call for help
- Masimo founder resigns as CEO after board ouster
- Meta Orion
- NotebookLM
- Post-show: Torturing John Again
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Kids and phones at school
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- QA Wolf: Kiss bugs goodbye: Delivering 80% automated end-to-end test coverage for web & mobile apps in weeks, not years.
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Chapters
- Windows malware
- St. Jude wrap-up
- Hard-wired camera LED
- AirPods 4, A18 hardware differences
- iPhones 16 battery life
- Electric glue
- Verizon activation issues
- Sponsor: QA Wolf
- Bullstrap case review
- Apple Store issues
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Request for two apps
- Masimo CEO out
- Meta Orion
- NotebookLM
- “I Made This” 🖼️
- NotebookLM, cont’d.
- Ending theme
- “Fire up those stoves”
Windows malware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed my first Windows malware in a long time. Oh, well
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fun. Like a real malware or a sarcastic malware?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, I don’t know the extent of it yet. So there was some saga
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my son’s gaming PC in trying to figure out what was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on with his laptop’s cooling system or thermals or whatever. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to know, like, what do people use on Windows to show CPU and GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco temperatures to themselves. And this is one thing, honestly, I have found the web in general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be absolutely horrific at this, but chat GPT to be pretty good at recommending stuff like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, like what do people use for software type X? That would be something I would normally just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search, you know, the app store of the device on which I tried and there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, search the web and it’s, you know, useless garbage constantly. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually got pretty good results. And so there’s a program called CPU ID, a monitor or something that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses. And I was like, okay, that’s, I remember that from my old hard OCP days, that still exists. Okay, great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll download that. And it’s one of those things where like the download link opens up like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an overlay on the page that looks like a download link, but it’s actually an ad that is made to look like a download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco link, but it’s- It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like, it’s constant just like, okay, here’s the real download link, download now. But it’s like, that’s not really the download link.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to close the ad, the download link’s behind it or something. Anyway, I threw all the logistics of trying to find the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real download link to this app. I had one wrong try and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed apparently PC App Store, which oh gosh messed up all like all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his browser search parameters and stuff. It was a whole thing. So now I got to figure out like how do I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of this now like for of course Windows Defender is like everything’s fine. It’s not trust me. Everything’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so now I have to like do something else. I guess like malware bites is like what do people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like what do people do on windows now.
⏹️ ▶️ John What was I’ve already forgotten what was the name of the thing that caused the big downtime recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Crowd strike. Yeah so no we’re not going to do crowd strike. No that’s it seems like a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. And also that’s isn’t that like expensive enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s a free trial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All these secure all these like PC security things are all like you know guys with guns in the desert. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like, I don’t want to, you know, it’s very easy to make a wrong step here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I think I’ve removed some of it. I would love recommendations on what people, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do people who are not guys with guns in deserts, what do you use to just keep malware off of Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PCs that your kid is using for gaming? I think people just live with it and have 800 toolbars in their browser.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and he also like, he’ll install stuff like from random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discords that tell him, use this auto clicker tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann to cheat in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game so like God knows what else is on this PC. So I just, but like I just, I want something that just like is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit decent. Like, I don’t, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. I, uh, I moved to the Mac roundabouts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 2008 and I think, I think that’s right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was still a Windows developer by trade until, oh geez, 2016 or so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think I’ve spent more than five minutes using Windows since I left,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since I left that job, not, not the most recent job. When I, since when I got my most recent job, so I haven’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used Windows since 2016. It’s been almost 10 years and it’s glorious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so great because I don’t have to worry about this. I just don’t care. Do not care. And I know this is coming for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me because there’s probably going to be a gaming PC in my future. Little do I know, but right now it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignorance is less. Oh, it’s so great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the thing is like after not using Windows for so long, I too, I thought, I assumed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surely things have gotten a lot better and like Like they’re a little bit different. I wouldn’t say they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. They’re just different. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
St. Jude wrap-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up and we have to start with a genuine and heartfelt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you to our ATP listeners. It is no longer September,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it is no longer Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. However, during the month of September,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Relay and ATP, but mostly Relay, raised over $1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million. As I sit here tonight $1,061,652.04. And that is truly incredible. The last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year record, last year was the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record for relay, and that was somewhere to the order of $776,000. Here we are a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later over a million dollars. And I want to say from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottom of my heart, and I know I speak for you too, thank you so much to everyone who gave a dollar, $5, $10, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter, any amount of money, thank you to all of you. Look at what we have accomplished
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together. Truly, we have accomplished this together and that’s something to be extremely, extremely proud of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I hope that anyone who donated feels some amount of ownership over this because you do have some amount of ownership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over this. I will, as a final note for this year, I will remind you that corporate matching is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing and if you go to stg.org slash relay there’s a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information about employer matching and how you can get credit or how Relay can get credit for an employer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey match, perhaps based on your own donation. So please check it out. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t feel like you can’t donate for the rest of the year or the beginning of next year. You certainly can. That’s fine. Nobody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to complain. But genuinely, thank you so very much for the incredible amount of money that we all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey raised. I am incredibly proud of all of us and thankful to all of you. So thank you.
Hard-wired camera LED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some anonymous feedback with regard to the hardwired camera indicator light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from years past. Anonymous writes, When the first built-in camera was designed for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first Intel iMac, user notification was designed into the hardware. The camera board was separate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not integrated into the computing board. At the specific direction of a key individual, the light was hardwired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly into the board’s power circuit. If the board was receiving power, the light was turned on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If the board was not receiving power, the light was off. No software was involved. This design was passed on to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop team. And yeah, this is just anti-laptop propaganda. I don’t want to read the rest of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The design was passed on to the laptop team. Don’t extrapolate that laptops are bad, just from this one example. I can hear
⏹️ ▶️ John John- That’s not the conclusion I drew. I feel like you’re getting defensive for no reason. Because I know you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. This design was passed on to the laptop team. Much later, news of the camera light hack, mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the previous episode of ATP, went around Apple. Alarms went off, circuit designs were laid out on tables,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a lot of shouting happened. Turns out, the laptop team had later quote unquote improved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the design, accidentally making this hack possible. It’s amusing to think that this quote unquote secure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exclave is a return to the spirit of the original design requirement.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is big companies, you know. It’s hard to make sure that things are communicated across
⏹️ ▶️ John groups, you know, across years, across different hardware platforms. So, it is interesting to know that
⏹️ ▶️ John the design, initially, at least according to this person, It was sound, it just sort of got, the soundness
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of got lost in translation and eventually they shipped a thing that was supposed to be hack-proof but was in fact hackable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Yeah, it’s a bummer, but like you said, that’s big business for you.
AirPods 4, A18 hardware differences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wayne Dixon writes with regard to AirPods 4, the base on the AirPods 4 with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ANC is definitely heavier than the AirPods 3, according to Wayne. I have no personal experience, so I’ll take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wayne’s word on this. Wayne continues, also the new MagSafe puck does not align itself with the AirPods 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case either, despite being slightly smaller than the old puck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, and Marco was asking how to tell the difference between the two of them. Someone wrote in to say that the new ones have braided cables and the old ones
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. I’m not sure if that’s true, but that was a suggestion from a listener.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, With regard to the ear sensors in AirPods 4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is quoting from a YouTube video, which we will link in the show notes, these buds use Apple’s old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optical detection sensor. So anything opaque that modifies light to this spot will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pause and resume music. Apple does appear to be using the onboard accelerometers to prevent music from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being resumed when the buds are at opposing angles. So you would think that it might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be okay in your pocket, but it’s not bulletproof. Placing one or both earbuds in my pocket will often resume music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unexpectedly. This was a solved problem. The outgoing AirPods 3 had a sensor that only responded to capacitive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skin. This is a real bummer of a downgrade and a compromise that I hope was only made for that thinner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fitment comfort rather than to save a buck or to artificially segment the lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For whatever it’s worth, I have this problem on the AirPods Pros. Like the AirPods, I think the AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have skin sensing. I could be wrong, but I will often have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, I’ll put them like in like my pants pocket for a minute as I’m going in a building or something, and I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes find out that it has been playing in my pocket. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John don’t know if this is a- Just do an
⏹️ ▶️ John experiment and use your finger versus like covering it with a piece of cardboard or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s too much work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. John, do you want to tell us about discoveries with regard to the A18 and A18 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John So the real hardware folks are finally getting to give us the hardware answers that we crave in these next
⏹️ ▶️ John two items. The first one is something that we talked about when these phones were announced. Based on the specs that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John gave, I was like, boy, the A18 and the A18 Pro seem very similar. And some people were speculating
⏹️ ▶️ John that the A18 Pro, A18 might be just a binned version of the A18 Pro based on like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the A18 Pro has six GPU cores and the A18 has five, maybe they’re just binned. And I went through
⏹️ ▶️ John all the differences on the announcement show, and the differences were many besides just the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. And I was like, technically, it could technically be a binned one, but there’s so much that
⏹️ ▶️ John is different about the A18 Pro that it seems it would be totally unprecedented for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to be intentionally disabling so much of the chip. So now we have actual die
⏹️ ▶️ John shots of someone who cut the A18 and the A18 Pro open, and lo and behold, they are different chips. They look pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John similar, but they’re not the same chip. So no, the A18 is not a Bind A18 Pro, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just two similar chips. And you can look, this is from chipwise.tech, you can look at their die
⏹️ ▶️ John shots. And then Fabian Haussler also put in like a sort of a markup interpretation,
⏹️ ▶️ John labeling the parts of the chips to see what they are, and then put in an M4 for reference as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. So A18 and A18 Pro, two separate chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and this actually, I didn’t mention this when we first were talking about these, but I kind of regretted afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not mentioning it, that if you look at why they might be doing this, like the A18 being its own special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip, it’s now the smallest and most likely, therefore cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip in Apple’s lineup that can run Apple Intelligence. So this is not just going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the iPhone 16. It is most likely going to also be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all upcoming Apple products that don’t have a need for massive CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power otherwise, but want to run Apple Intelligence. So think about things like future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePods, like the rumored HomePod with the screen or the robot arm thing, whatever that’s gonna be, like that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Low-end iPads, maybe possibly the next Apple TV, who knows? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of products across Apple’s lineup that they’re gonna wanna put Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, you know, maybe because they are Siri based, like a HomePod or things like that. Like they’re gonna want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that across as much of their product line as possible, as quickly as possible. So I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base A18 is most likely going to be the next chip in lots of different things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably all releasing over the following year or two. And we’ll probably find out first when we get an update to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the low-end iPad, because I bet it’ll be powering that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope that’s true, and I know Apple probably says that the A18 is the minimum chip that can run Apple Intelligence, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think the neural engine, the A18, is actually any faster than the 17, or maybe even the 16. When
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re looking at the T-flops or whatever, I forget if there was a big difference. Obviously, the GPU’s
⏹️ ▶️ John slower, the CPU’s are slower, or whatever. It just seems to me that RAM is the real limiting factor, because it’s not like you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John run Apple Intelligence on older chips, it will just obviously be slower. The limiting factor that would make it so you literally can’t is
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. But, you know, practically speaking, they might just say A18 is the minimum spec going
⏹️ ▶️ John forward and yeah, these chips tend to live on for a long time. And the ones that live on are not the pro chips. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John A18 hopefully is in our future. I mean, I’m saying hopefully, because I don’t want them to like, like historically
⏹️ ▶️ John the HomePod line has not received the cream of the crop of chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though A18 is the, you know, maybe is Apple’s current minimum spec for Apple intelligence due
⏹️ ▶️ John to the RAM associated with it and whatever stuff they claim about the minimum speed required
⏹️ ▶️ John for the GPU and neural engine and the CPU, I can see them shipping like, for example, that robot arm thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with a chip older than the A18. I hope I’m wrong. I hope they don’t do that, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in the same spirit, it turns out there is a tiny hardware difference between the two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these AirPods. So John, what’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I fix it took apart the AirPods 4 painfully because they do not come apart easily. And here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John they had to say in a video we will link in the show notes. Both versions, talking about both versions of the AirPods 4 the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones with and without ANC. Both versions have the exact same system and package or SIP housing the brains. In
⏹️ ▶️ John fact, they said we won’t be tearing down the AirPods 4 with ANC because the only difference between the two earbuds appears
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a single outward facing microphone, the ANC version having a bigger beefier mic.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, link to the video you can look. These products as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John iFixit can tell are identical right down to the number of microphones. The only difference is
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods 4 with ANC, one of the microphones is bigger than it is in the AirPods 4.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which, if this is true, I mean, obviously they can’t tell every single minute component, but they can tell the SIP, they can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell, they can count the things that are in it, they have whatever this weird scanning microscope thing that shows
⏹️ ▶️ John them all the guts or whatever. Like, now I’m looking at it, I’m thinking, why didn’t Apple make the hardware the same?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they estimated, I don’t know if it’s a sarcastic thing, estimated it as a $2 part that’s the difference between them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess maybe that adds up. And they said it’s a $2 part, so maybe the other one in the AirPods 4 is a $1 part, so it’s a $1 difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose when you’re making millions and millions of things that $1 really does add up, so they should make them separate. But
⏹️ ▶️ John wow, like these really are, you know, for the $50 difference, you get a different case, which we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John to in a second. And you get a slightly bigger microphone in one of the places, pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, maybe they did it this way so that it wouldn’t be some big scandal that it’s just like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software lockout kind of thing. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s an interesting point. I mean, again, it could also just be that $1 difference that, you know, I don’t know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John fix this offhand comment, The one or two dollar difference times millions of AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John is millions of dollars. So there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then additionally from iFixit, if we take a look at the X-rays of the ANC version of the case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can again see the exact same PCB, but with a speaker inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the housing. This is another component that contributes to the extra $50 you’d pay for the ANC version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As far as I can tell, those are the only two differences.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they kept the guts of the case the same too, except for obviously, I mean, the case itself, I think is different because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got holes for the speaker. So there’s one hardware difference and the second one is hey There’s a speaker behind those holes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know for the $50 for the AirPods 4 with ANC you get My one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John microphones is bigger in the in each earbud and you get a single speaker component That is not
⏹️ ▶️ John and the three holes that it talks through in the case and that’s it Everything else about them is the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good profit margins on the high-end product. else is new from Apple.
iPhones 16 battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then Tom’s Hardware, or Tom’s Guide, whatever they’re calling themselves these days, did a large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test of the iPhone’s 16 battery life. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a summary table that John has been kind enough to put in the show notes for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t have a summary table. I made a summary table. They just had a bunch of numbers. And that’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, when these people do reviews, it always boggles my mind that they spend all the time to do these tests. They
⏹️ ▶️ John do all this hard work, and they have all these measurements, and they put them at a bunch of tables and it’s like, you gotta, you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John do the final step, which is like, like sum it up. Tell me what this means.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t make me do the math, which I had to do for all this to find out the actual important information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here it was. I was trying to credit you and apparently I did not give you sufficient credit. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t, you didn’t yell at Tom’s guide enough. That was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. I see. Follow up copyright 2011 John Syracuse. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery size for the iPhone 16. It’s up 6.3%. life up for almost 15%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Battery size for the 16 plus up almost 7% battery life up almost 16%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 16 Pro gets about 9% and 30% increased battery life. 16 Pro Max, 6% battery size increase and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again about 30% battery life increase. That is quite impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the reason why this, these are the things you should put in like this is sort of the bottom line sum it up for me
⏹️ ▶️ John is How much bigger did the battery get? And yeah, I did the math on like how many milliamp hours or whatever, but you really
⏹️ ▶️ John want to know percentage wise. Yeah, and this is all versus its predecessors. So it’s 16 versus 15, 16 plus versus 15 plus 16 proverse.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s directly versus their predecessors because there are
⏹️ ▶️ John direct predecessors for all these phones. It’s like, what percentage bigger did the battery get? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John for that increase in battery size, what percentage better is the battery life? And Tom’s hardware is in a position
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. They put the numbers in for these different phones because presumably they ran the same test on all the 15s. that they did
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 16s and they come up with a number that’s representative of whatever their
⏹️ ▶️ John test is. So in all these cases, the battery got some percent bigger, but the battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John increased much more than the battery size increase. So again, the 16
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro got a 10% bigger battery, but 30% bigger battery life. That is huge. And then I put the absolute values
⏹️ ▶️ John here, it’s like, what does that even mean? So the increased battery life in terms of wall clock time, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone 16 is an hour 38, For the 16 plus, it’s two hours and 15 minutes. 16 Pro is three
⏹️ ▶️ John hours and 14 minutes, and 16 Pro Max is four hours and four minutes. These are not small battery increases,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you get extra 10 minutes or 30 minutes. Again, how representative is this Tom’s Guide test?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, is it light web browsing? Is it representative of how you use your phones? But they made
⏹️ ▶️ John all the batteries bigger by a significant percentage, and the battery life got way bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ John the percentage increase, and you will feel those for most of these things as they’re measured in,
⏹️ ▶️ John Only one of them is a single hour and all the other ones are in multiple hours. And this brings me to the next topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a 16 Pro, which apparently gets 30% better battery life than the 15 Pro did, which equates to an extra three hours
⏹️ ▶️ John and 14 minutes of battery life in the Tom’s test.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I did after having my phone for a day or two was I put on the 80% battery limit.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I don’t think I need to charge this thing to 100%. So in the battery, this is the first time I’ve had a phone that
⏹️ ▶️ John it supports this setting because my 14 Pro didn’t support it. So I went into battery or whatever, and I said, never charge yourself more
⏹️ ▶️ John than 80%. And then for the next several days, I intentionally did not charge my phone during the day,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I could have, like I could plug it in while I’m doing dishes or whatever. I intentionally didn’t do that just to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John is 80% enough to get me through a regular day? And right now, on my brand new 16 Pro, 80% is more than enough. Intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John not charging, like I normally would during the day. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m currently on the 80% plan. And there’s been lots of debate about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John People saying, oh, that’s a waste. You’re never getting the full capacity of your phone. You should charge it to 100%. Don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. But if I don’t need to charge it to 100%, I am, you know, making my
⏹️ ▶️ John battery last longer, especially since I keep my phone for two years than if I did otherwise. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s my plan. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to some sort of anic data from Nick
⏹️ ▶️ John here who had like a survey of like 100 people and said, hey, are you charging to 80%? If so,
⏹️ ▶️ John how’s it going for you or whatever? I think this is something people should at
⏹️ ▶️ John least consider might be a possibility for them. And you know, everyone knows your own life. If you’re on a commute and you have no place
⏹️ ▶️ John to charge during the day and you barely make it through 100%, charge your 100% like by all means. But I thought I could
⏹️ ▶️ John make it with 80% and so far I can. And so I’m gonna keep it there. And if it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t make it with 80%, I’ll probably crank it to 90 and then go up to 100. And we’ll see at the end of my two years
⏹️ ▶️ John how my battery life is doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you crank it to 90 or 100? I thought it was either 80 or nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like a slider. Like, maybe you can even go by fives, I don’t remember, but yeah, it was like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John slider bar in the settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, for some reason I thought it was the same. I think the laptops are 80 or 100, and I thought it was the same on the phones. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not saying you’re wrong, I’m wrong. I just, I didn’t realize.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and on laptops, people always recommend this, and I forget to write it down, but there are programs for the Mac that give you
⏹️ ▶️ John even more control over this, that like, not just the OS things. What is that one called? Maybe it’s Coconut Battery, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s something else. There’s a bunch of Mac OS programs that lets you do the same thing for your laptop battery
⏹️ ▶️ John and choose what you want to limit to and do all these fancy stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one that I think most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people recommend. A-L-D-E-N-T-E, I will put it in the show notes.
Electric glue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Schaub has some input or correction, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking last episode or the episode before about the glue that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey becomes not so sticky when you apply a voltage to it. And remind me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what exactly we said would happen if you reverse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John polarity. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to remember what happened if you reverse the polarity, and I misinterpreted or misremembered
⏹️ ▶️ John the iFixit video that was explaining this, so David wrote in with the correction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So David writes, when making the positive and negative electrical connections to release an iPhone 16 battery, the polarity determines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which side the glue residue is left on when it unsticks. If you mistakenly reverse the positive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and negative connections, the residue is left on the chassis, which is hard to clean instead of the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is where you want it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it’s like the sticky gunk. Like apparently there is sticky gunk and you get to choose where it’s left and you don’t want it to be in the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why you have to be careful about the polarity, but it will not like re-stick.
Verizon activation issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then Eric Westland writes in to corroborate your story with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verizon activation problems. Eric writes, I bought my iPhone unlocked from Apple, as did I.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had the exact same experience as John. My last phone was three years ago and I had the same problem then too. Verizon just stinks at this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will interject as me now. Hi, this is Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Keep going. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll say that for me, I think we talked last week about how it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not, my phone did not activate initially. And then if memory serves, it was like once I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the standard springboard iOS screen, I think it was at that point, it was like, Hey, you’re not activated. You want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it again? I said, uh, yeah. And then it worked no problem. The second time for Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone, I did the exact same stuff that I did on my phone and it worked no sweat. Now hers was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tuesday or Wednesday after release. I think it was, whereas I was doing it the Sunday, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weekend of release. So I would imagine things were still a bit busy on both the carrier and Apple side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. So maybe it was just that it was, you know, things were overwhelmed when John was trying to do it and Eric apparently, but who
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m sure that’s what it was like, obviously, I’m doing it like the phones are arriving at people’s doorsteps that day, right? And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst possible time to do it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John is apparently very bad at this. And by the way, I think Eric said he did it in two different states. I think one like Massachusetts
⏹️ ▶️ John and Iowa had the same problem. So yeah, the moral of the story is, even if you get an unlock phone
⏹️ ▶️ John from Verizon, if you get it on day one and you try to do activation. Good luck.
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Bullstrap case review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I believe this is your case review that we would like to talk about next?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m working on the same case. We can both talk about it, but yeah, I got the leather bull strap case with the open bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. We’ll put a link in the show notes. This is the one that has a hole for the camera control as
⏹️ ▶️ John do nearly all, but not all third party cases. Previously, I was using the Beats case, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about on the earlier show. And so here’s my review of the bull strap case.
⏹️ ▶️ John is nicer material for as far as I’m concerned than the Beats case.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think this one, the corners had some wrinkles on them that’s a little bit unpleasing, but you know, it’s a artisanal
⏹️ ▶️ John product, everyone is a little bit different. Everything about it is the same as my iPhone 14 Pro case, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for the camera control cutout. Marco talked about the Peak Design camera control cutout, which had sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a sloping on all sides to get down to the camera control, and that was not pleasing to him. Bullstrap
⏹️ ▶️ John has decided to try to avoid that problem, which I think is smart of them, by not making
⏹️ ▶️ John it so there’s like sloping things on all sides so you have to kind of shove your fleshy finger into this little valley
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the thing. They decided one of the sides is not going to exist. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the phone from the front, it’s just a regular, you know, you see the case going all the way around. But if you look at the phone from the
⏹️ ▶️ John back, you see part of the sidewall of the case has been notched out, right? So it’s not symmetrical.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is not a symmetrical hole in the side of your case. there is a wall on the screen side, then there’s the hole
⏹️ ▶️ John for the camera button and there’s no wall on the other side. Like basically the bottom of the case just comes to an end and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not really, it doesn’t really center the camera control either. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann it’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is, it feels flimsier on that side. It feels like there’s a gigantic notch taken out of the side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone because there is a gigantic notch taken out of the side of the phone. The sort of little
⏹️ ▶️ John stick or pole or whatever that is the front of the sidewall over the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John control seems delicate and fidgety and creaky.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just generally hate this. I don’t like the hole in the side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John case at all. I can get to the camera control, I can press it, but it is annoying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John so. And now, well, so I’m going to leave this on the phone because I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I can handle this. Maybe I’m gonna go back to the Beads case. But after having it for like a week or so, I’ve decided the advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John of the leather, the grippiness of the leather, outweigh the terribleness
⏹️ ▶️ John of this hole in the side of the thing. So I’m going to keep this on until or unless it breaks. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as of right now, what I am looking for is basically this case, a leather case
⏹️ ▶️ John with an open bottom, but with the pass-through camera control. And
⏹️ ▶️ John of third parties, I think there’s like two or three or maybe four third-party case manufacturers that do have
⏹️ ▶️ John pass-through. One of them I saw doesn’t even use the quartz thing. It uses a piece of plastic with a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John little copper wires going through it to do the conductance thing. Look,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever you gotta do with third-party cases, but I’m out here saying, Bullstrap, Ryan London,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the five other manufacturers who apparently sell this exact same case for differing prices, I know
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to do the thing with the hole on day one. You couldn’t, maybe you couldn’t, like everyone else had to too, I get it. I bought your
⏹️ ▶️ John case at great expense. I’m using it on my phone, but please, Somebody, somebody out there
⏹️ ▶️ John make a leather open bottom case with a quartz pass through for the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John control. That’s what I want. And until then, I’m just gonna have a gigantic wound in the side of my phone that I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John every day. And it makes it slightly less satisfying. Marco, what do you think of the Bullstrap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case? After however many weeks it’s been, one, two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of using the Apple silicone case, I actually also switched to my Bullstrap case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of days ago. because the silicone case, it’s just too hard getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out of jeans pockets. It pulls the whole pocket liner out with it. So I wanted to try this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, the leather does feel a lot better. Bullstrap’s leather is very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. But yeah, I too hate the camera cutout.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t work well. It certainly doesn’t look good. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too worry about the longevity of that little thin piece of leather that comes down across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the front edge of it. This, look, this is all, no one’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have this design next year. By the time everyone makes their cases for next year’s phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one will be using this design on a good case. And there’s a reason for that. It’s not a good design. They did what they had to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with day one unknowns. But yeah, like John, I’m hoping for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better version of this case in the future that has a button cover for the camera control that works.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you agree that their decision to omit one of the side walls surrounding the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera control makes it more comfortable to you than the Peak Design version of the whole?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s only more comfortable because leather is softer than hard plastic. You know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, I’ll pull up the Peak Design one right here. Like the Peak Design one, it actually has about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same indentation shape. Like it is just as thin on a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skinny piece in front of the camera control button. But look at the other side of the camera control. There’s no wall
⏹️ ▶️ John there. mean like the back of the phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah, they’re like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s there’s not equal size walls on the front and the back of the phone in terms of surrounding the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John control. Do you see what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see what you mean. It’s pretty subtle. The Peak Design one is symmetric, but that’s a pretty subtle difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that matters. I think what I didn’t like about the Peak Design is merely that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that their plastic is harder than leather and neither one of these feels good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the I will I’m tolerating the Bullstrap case because it is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smallest number of bad trade-offs that I have found yet. I also have the Apple Clear Case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought that would solve my problems, and it does not. The Apple Clear Case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found to have very bad buttons. Especially the sleep-wake button, it’s much harder to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push than the other cases I have, and it doesn’t have good feedback. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s just like a lower quality, or maybe it’s a materials thing. So far the Apple silicone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case works the best and feels the best in use. It just sucks it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going in and out of pockets, which is the problem they’ve always had. Whereas the bare bottomed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bullstrap case is the nicest leather case that I have found so far, but with the exception of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that giant thing that Jon complained about, the giant camera cutout.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, if Apple made an open bottomed silicone case, I would probably be using it instead of the leather one because I don’t have so many
⏹️ ▶️ John problems with getting in and out of pockets. And I’m just I’m desperate to not have this giant hole
⏹️ ▶️ John in the side of my phone. It’s feels like like a chicken pox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scar. Yeah, I hope like I hope in a few months people have remade these cases with
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so afraid they’re gonna be like, ah, we’ll do that for the next phone. This phone tough luck, right? I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that they come out with version two. It’s like we couldn’t have been day one. But now everyone knows how to do the quartz pads through. So here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’ll buy a second case ball strap. Just put it out. You know, I don’t want to be like, well, we could never
⏹️ ▶️ John figure it out for the 16 line, but for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the 17, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have the quartz pass through. That doesn’t help me because I’m not getting a 17. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope they do. I hope they do. You say that and I agree with you in principle, but last year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was casting about for a case for my 15 Pro Max, I had gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a peel case, which I loved, but it had a cutout for the action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button, which at the time most cases were doing, and I hated that. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m currently going caseless, casey-less on the iPhone 16 that I have. And I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continue to do that, but I was looking and I was wondering, hey, I wonder if since last year, did Peak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up doing, or I think it’s, no, Peel, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peel. Did Peel end up doing an action button and how have they handled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camera control? And the answer is, they did not do an action button and they just have a hole for the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control, as they do for all of the buttons. And it’s too bad because like, the way I remember it, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year ago now, The way I remember it, the case felt great. It was thin because I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, I’m not an Otterbox kind of person. Like I want something thin, but more than zero, if I’m going to do a case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. And the key to the peel and they say it as a piece of marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they should. Say it with me, gentlemen, no branding, no branding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I loved that. And what I ended up doing was returning that case because I hated the lack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a, like a fake button, if you will, for the action button. And I got a Taurus TORRAS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which also doesn’t have any outward facing branding, but the case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was fine. Like I didn’t like it near as much as I liked the peel, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not abide by the gaps for the buttons. And I was hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much that by the 16, they would at least have an action button, even if they punted on the camera control.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And from everything that I can tell, nope, it’s just a bunch of holes. Just like your Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope they update these cases. If not, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. It was like if that little delicate thing does break,
⏹️ ▶️ John what am I gonna do? I can go back to the Beats case, buy a second one of these at great expense. Although honestly, because
⏹️ ▶️ John all I get on Instagram now are ads for phone cases, as
⏹️ ▶️ John can imagine, I’m really seeing how many different people
⏹️ ▶️ John resell this exact same Ryan London bull strap. Like I figured with the other brand I saw recently, it’s like at
⏹️ ▶️ John least three or four, maybe even five different brands that are clearly selling the same case that some manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John makes in China somewhere, right? And so we say, oh, Bullstrap’s leather is good. It’s not Bullstrap’s leather. What they do is stamp the
⏹️ ▶️ John little bull thing on it and put it in a pretty box and sell it to us for way more money than everyone else does, which is fine, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, I’ll take it. You know, they were the first one to ship, so that’s why they got my money. But please, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John out there, open bottom. As I always say, I’m asking for a lot. Nobody cares about open bottom but me, right? Open
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom, leather, quartz, camera control. Otherwise, I’m gonna be using this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John scarred case for two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s sad times. Part of me wonders if we should try to design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a case that makes all of us happy, and then I immediately decide that that’s a terrible, terrible, terrible decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you imagine trying to design a case that would please John?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. It wouldn’t actually be that hard, but the problem is most of us would never be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell, assuming we sold this as a product to our listeners. It’s just like a few hundred cases at best, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John no one’s going to manufacture you anything with those kinds of small numbers. That’s probably why these companies are not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a new case, because they have to pre-order like millions, not millions, but like thousands and thousands of them to get whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John good price they get on them. And they can’t afford to say, you know, let’s design
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole new case and buy a few thousand of those. They have to sell through all these ones that they made and paid for. And then by then
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s time for a new phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, hey, we did it for the chicken hat, can be done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the chicken hat is a little bit easier to manufacture than something that has to be precisely fit around an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, first of all, imagine if we had to make the chicken hat, but we didn’t know where people’s ears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be or how big their heads would be until after they were all made. And by the way, we did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know where people’s ears are, we did know how big people’s heads are, and we still had a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit complaints about the chicken hat, let’s be
⏹️ ▶️ John honest. Well, the chicken hat was, well, the good thing about the chicken hat was, first of all, the manufacturer that was making it for
⏹️ ▶️ John us was in the US and had a short turnaround time. And second of all, we had a prototype,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is my actual chicken hat and the chicken hats we sold, if you lay them down on top of my actual chicken hat,
⏹️ ▶️ John they pretty much nailed it. I’ve bought several of these hats that we sold and I have the original and
⏹️ ▶️ John I can just lay them on top of each other. They’re constructed the same way. They’re the same size, like pretty much down to the
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter. Now, again, they ended up being too small for a lot of people’s heads because my chicken hat is too
⏹️ ▶️ John small for a lot of people’s heads, but I didn’t, you know, what you got with the chicken hat was exactly what we were selling, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John as close a clone as possible as we can get to my chicken hat. And so, you know, I think we did a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John job with that, but yeah, trying to do something like that with a complicated product like this manufactured
⏹️ ▶️ John not in the US with, you know, six months turnaround time, not gonna happen, but somebody out
⏹️ ▶️ John there, somebody, somebody please find this manufacturer in China that’s making these cases for
⏹️ ▶️ John all these. If they sell one with the quartz pass through on it, somebody buy 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John of those and start selling them I will buy one and then step three profit. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine left
Apple Store issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the complaint about the Apple Store corner. Eli Liebman writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was planning to upgrade to the Series 10 watch, but wasn’t sure which size to get and wanted to see them in person before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchasing. After confirming online that both sizes were available for pickup at my local store, I made my way there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to choose and purchase my new watch. I found an employee and asked to purchase the watch. The conversation went like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, actually, would you mind playing the role of Apple in this little skit for me, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, hold on, let me. Wait, should I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey play it cool?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here we go. I’d like to buy this watch, please. Do you have an appointment? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know which one I wanted and I wanted to see them before I purchased it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of our new products require an online order and an appointment to pick it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Huh, I didn’t know that. Is the watch in stock? Yes. Jesus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I buy it? No. First, you need to make an appointment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, when’s the next appointment? two and a half hours. So, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though the item’s in stock, and I’m standing right here, I need to come back in two and a half hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to purchase it. Exactly. Thank you, Marco. Very well done. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eli writes, so I left in order to watch on Amazon where it was delivered to me later that same day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just terrible. Anyway, Eli continues, I can’t think of another store where this would be acceptable. If they were busy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure. I wouldn’t expect to be helped before folks who made an appointment, but the store was empty. Why is it acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell a customer to come back in a few hours to purchase an item that is in stock? It seems like they don’t value their customers’
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. I have things to do. I already took time away from work to come to the store. I’ve been buying Apple products for almost 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, and this is the first time I’ve had a negative in-store experience when trying to purchase something. What used to be magical—watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the employee pull out a receipt from under the table was delightful—is now simply inconvenient. I truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believed Apple solved the retail experience, but not anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the danger when saying like we’re reimagining the experience of retail you always picture in your head that
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re gonna be doing is Not accepting sort of the status quo for all the bad things
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying people just accept X Y & Z are just the way stores have to be well We don’t think that way everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on the table or reimagining the whole experience But if you’re not careful, and you just stick to that philosophy, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like you know We’re reimagining the experience what you can end up doing is removing some of the good things
⏹️ ▶️ John and reimagining them to be way way worse And one of the good things is, if you walk into a store
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have a product in stock, you can give someone money for it and then walk out of the store,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can buy it. Like, do you have this product? Is it in stock? I’m here and you’re here
⏹️ ▶️ John and the product is here, my money is here, let’s make this happen. In an empty store.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when they say to you, no, please make an appointment on the app and the first appointment is two hours
⏹️ ▶️ John from now, that is reimagining the retail experience. So you are following your philosophy of reimagining the retail experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for the worse, that you get into just ridiculous territory, like I would, you know, we’ve complained
⏹️ ▶️ John that even the whole like, oh, there are no lines is an example of re-imagining that maybe isn’t positive, but this is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John not positive. Like you should be able to go in there and buy something. It’s like, I have money, you have product.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey happen. But they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, make an appointment. Come back in two hours. That’s no good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so bad. And I know that some of this is just the East coaster in me coming out. I want a line,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want a queue, I want a order. I want everything to be ordered. I want to get in and get out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quickly as possible. But that being said, it’s just, it’s unnecessarily complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is the sort of thing that we would just eviscerate a Microsoft store for, and here it is Apple doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean, if,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there was ever too many people in Microsoft store that would require such a system like this. Well, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like it’s just, as I pointed out, it doesn’t value the customer’s time. They drove to the store, came
⏹️ ▶️ John to the place, brought their money and their wallet, and they want to like look at it and buy a thing. and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, make an appointment for two hours from now? That doesn’t value the time of the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who made the trip to do that. Especially if the Apple store is like far away from them. It’s just not acceptable.
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Request for two apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a small request for two apps that I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come on. It’s tempting, honestly, but you know I have a bit on my plate right now with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app I do have, so I don’t have time to make these right now. I assume someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has made them, but I cannot find them. So number one, I recently started sleep tracking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m wearing the Apple Watch to bed. I even discovered the sleep focus mode, which I’m finally using because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes the screen turn off at night. I try funny thing is before like I hadn’t been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sleep focus mode for whatever reason. I just use auto do not disturb at night and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out how to make the watch screen turn off while I’m sleeping because it was it was you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bothering my wife and so I’m like, alright theater mode. That’s what I tried theater mode. Guess what? Theater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode turns off alarms. Does it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, sure does. Remember when the alarm one off when the person was in the theater. Do you remember that whole controversy?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one night of that, I’m like, okay, well, that’s not the answer. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the equivalent of the shoe bomber. 25 years later, theater mode still doesn’t let the alarms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyways, yeah, theater mode’s not it. But this turns out the sleep focus does that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all I want to do is I want an app that every morning I can tag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sleep I had the night before with arbitrary tags that I input. Things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whether I like stayed up too late or maybe I had a late meal or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, you know, sleeping alone because I was, you know, at the beach by myself or something like, you know, like I want to have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tags that I can tag my sleep, you know, late coffee, alcohol consumption, things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And then I want to be able to see in the future, like I want to be able to pick a tag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see like okay with this tag your sleeps with this one are you know 12% better on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco average than sleeps that don’t have this tag or 12% worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Remember that
⏹️ ▶️ John app that Merlin always talks about and makes fun of?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like you know when you are in Washington you sleep worse. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John weigh more but sleep worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have been looking for apps to do this and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have so thanks to you know some on chat GPT research, I installed the top couple of sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. They have been like super disasters of just gross,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like massive privacy invasion, huge suites of functionality doing all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of stuff I don’t need. There was one app, this was one of the top rated sleep apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app store that first of all, puts you through a in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flow immediately and with no way to get around it. So I’m pretty sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually violates the App Store rule against minimum functionality, but the App Store rules are not being enforced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here in lots of ways. And this is like one of the, there’s like a handful of top sleep apps in the App Store, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of them. One of them offered me to pay $40 a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for premium features, including I can listen to recordings of my own farts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my sleep the next morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I learned when I saw that for $40 a year, Not only have we really hit App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom here, but that’s when I decided I think I should probably raise the Overcast subscription price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is currently a quarter of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John How many farts
⏹️ ▶️ John does Overcast let you hear?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None, well, depending on what other people generate.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you know, you gotta up your fart game if you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compete in those leagues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Obviously, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’m just tackling the wrong feature set, apparently. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, we started out with fart apps on the App Store, and we’ve come full circle. Now you have to supply the farts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Real time follow-up, by the way, apparently, Exist.io is the app that Merlin always talks about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, I remember that now. So thank you to people in chat who said that. But yeah, so anyway, I just want a simple app to do it. And like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, they wanna be, they wanna give you like a meditation routine and be custom alarms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tie into like, you know, lay your phone on the pillow and subscribe to our service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we can life coach your partner. And it’s like, oh my God, just let me just tag my sleep and see data, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s all I want. So far I have not found anything to do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t Underscore have a sleep app?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Sleep Love Spots. Yes, I don’t believe it has that feature though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think you have a direct line to getting that feature added.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s probably easier than making it myself. Anyway, so that’s one thing I want. The second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I want, I finally set up the rest of my Sonos system. I finally moved my Sonos speakers out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my office, downstairs to where they were originally purchased for the living room TV. So I have the ARC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soundbar, two Aira 300s as the surrounds, and a sub. Good God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a very nice system. However, the one challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with setting up a Sonos soundbar stuff is audio delay. There,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, any Sonos input introduces latency because of the way their system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, buffers and processes things and has network wifi stuff. There’s always latency on the input on the audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And TVs have ways to adjust the audio sync. The Apple TV also has a built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, something like calibrate wireless audio sync where if you’re using HomePods or anything else, it’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, all right, place your phone in front of the Apple TV and we’ll figure out your audio sync for you.” Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to change things, but not correctly. Anyway, so I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch TV and everyone’s lips aren’t matching up to their audio, which is infuriating. And so I’m trying to align it. My TV also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a built-in control, but it’s negative five through positive three or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These units make no sense. And so I’m like, all right, well, what is it? And I’ve been adjusting it, trying to figure out what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Eventually, I looked at it, there has to be an app to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically use my phone and the TV to tell me like all right you’re you’re 50 milliseconds behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your 30 milliseconds behind like you know show me an actual number like play something on the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the phone to show me an actual number and there’s even videos on YouTube that will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let that show you like it like plays beep beep every few seconds beep and it shows you like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar going across when it hits the middle right when the beep happens so you can tell if you use your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone to shoot video of the TV screen and then slow-mo through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the video to find where does the beep happen if you can see the waveform. Here’s how I did
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, by the way, this all sounds familiar to you listeners because we talked about this in episode 297 of ATP when I
⏹️ ▶️ John set up my AV setup, including probably the exact video that Marco was looking at and me
⏹️ ▶️ John recording on my phone in slow motion and seeing the waveform in iMovie. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to
⏹️ ▶️ John that episode of ATP and also to the two apps slash videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I did the same thing but the final cuts that I didn’t have I’m moving my computer but I had final cut still so my guy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like such a ridiculous like overuse of a tool like final cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not this is not what this is for. It fights you at every turn. It should not be doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yet you know that’s what that’s that’s when I was able to see where the waveform of the video
⏹️ ▶️ John at the other. And then you still have to make the choice, like I said, in episode 297. Then you still have to decide, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John so when the little bar is in the middle in the video, should that be just as the waveform
⏹️ ▶️ John goes from silent to not silent? Right. Should it be the peak of the waveform where the volume of the amplitude
⏹️ ▶️ John is the highest? You have to make all these judgment calls, but I can tell you from experience that no matter how you make the judgment calls,
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you do something reasonable, you can get it so close to being perfect that you won’t notice it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but what I want, like this process would be very easy. So here’s what this process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be. The phone plays a video over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay to the Apple TV or you just have a YouTube video that you can point your app to and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, play this video on the Apple TV. And then the phone uses its camera and microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to watch for a big white flash on the video and listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the microphone and listen to the beep. and you can see those impulses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the input video and on the input audio. And the app should be able to tell you. Every time it sees flash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beep, every time it should be able to tell you, you’re 35 milliseconds behind. Like, it can tell you that. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to write. I could write it, I just shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John write it. The tricky part of that is when you get down to these kind of timings, that the
⏹️ ▶️ John time between when a photon hits the camera and the time when an app registered
⏹️ ▶️ John that that took place is probably a handful of milliseconds and you have to account for that and it might vary from phone
⏹️ ▶️ John to phone, so that’s a little bit tricky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing that’s probably less than a frame of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, but again, maybe it varies by device. Like it’s not something that comes up normally, like when you’re recording
⏹️ ▶️ John video or something like that, like oh, how much lag is there? How much lag between, again, photons hitting the lens of
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera and a program that is watching for that knowing that that happened. But yeah, it would definitely be better
⏹️ ▶️ John than doing it the manual way, which is very annoying. And why Marco was
⏹️ ▶️ John using Final Cut when I was using my iMovie is because you need a visual representation of the audio.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to be able to see a waveform. And I don’t think there are at least there was no apps that I knew of on the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone that did that that were not like full fledged video editors. And honestly, I’d rather just do it on the Mac. So I was recording
⏹️ ▶️ John videos, coming back to the Mac, opening the video and iMovie, watching the slow motion
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, going frame by frame, seeing where the waveform is, and then adjusting the you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the delay until I dialed it in. And I did that in 2022 and haven’t touched it sink and it’s been great.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I believe in you, Mark. You can get over this hump.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t set up that it’s like it seems okay now, but it still doesn’t seem quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. But I think it’s so close and I have it, you know, between like, you know, negative three and negative four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my TV. And like, if I put it on the next one over, it looks too wrong. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is about as good as it’s going to get. But I still like this process took me like 40 minutes and it could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have taken me four minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm hmm. Yeah. Now, and the tricky part for you is like, I don’t know, maybe it’s not tricky. Maybe it’ll be the same. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John what you hope is like you get some scenario where you’re tweaking it right? And you get it. So you get it right
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Like, okay, it’s right. Is it right? For all video sources and all output types
⏹️ ▶️ John and all like, for example, if you did it through airplay, does that apply to things you play on Apple TV? Does that apply to things you watch on regular
⏹️ ▶️ John TV? If you have like any other video source connected if you have a video game system connected, like you’re hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ll be able to configure this in one place and it will apply to any picture that ever shows on your TV, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to be careful of where you’re doing it. Like for example, if you’re doing it on the Apple TV, it’s not going to apply when you’re playing a
⏹️ ▶️ John video game because the Apple TV is not involved if you’re playing like Nintendo Switch or something. It’s not gonna be involved in that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so now you have a second place where you have to dial it in. And this is one of the places where it comes in handy to have something like
⏹️ ▶️ John central meeting point for all the audio and the video. And that’s where I made my adjustment and everything that goes on my TV screen
⏹️ ▶️ John goes through my receiver and my receiver applies the delay and so far so good for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but everything else about having a receiver sucks and I will accept no other contrary arguments. Anyway, I should note that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Sonos app, if you go to the gear in the upper right and then go to your living room or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever setup and then scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll way down in the home theater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey section, there’s TV dialogue sync and I have mine cranked to five seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my 2019 LG OLED. Five seconds? Or five units, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sorry, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Five units, I think I said seconds. Five units. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero to five, I believe. Anyways, and that has worked for me across Switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across Wii, across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV. I’ll have to look at that. I assume that would, because it’s only like a positive offset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Correct. I assume that would change it in the wrong direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, give it a shot. You may not have the good experience I did, but it can’t hurt to try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because what has to happen is the TV has to hold the video back. The TV has to buffer the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video for a few milliseconds while the audio catches up, because the audio is where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos is introducing latency.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, but the TVs also have latency as well, so it depends on which adding more latency and you gotta kinda match them up. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the audio advice video, it’s a YouTube video that I use to do my adjustment, has helpful labels
⏹️ ▶️ John on the plus and minus sign where it says basically like, it says audio early, increase
⏹️ ▶️ John the delay, and then audio late, decrease the delay. But bottom line is, once you have something that you can measure on,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just push the delay to the maximum and minimum value and see which side of the zero it’s at, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you know which direction you need to adjust it to get it in. Mine, I think, was on, I can’t even see in
⏹️ ▶️ John this picture, it’s too blurry, mine was like 120, is that milliseconds? Maybe it’s milliseconds, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s microseconds. No, it’s milliseconds. Anyway, 120 milliseconds is what mine is set to
⏹️ ▶️ John in this image from the show notes from episode 297. You said 297, it’s actually 497,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t it? 297, oh yeah, 497, sorry, typo, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John 497, August 25th, 2022. There you go.
Masimo CEO out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We have some breaking-ish news from a few days ago. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you remember our friends at Massimo that do the blood oxygen detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing and have a patent for it, and oh boy, we’ve patented it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they have been in a bitter fight with Apple to the point that it went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the courts. The court said that Apple cannot enable the blood oxygen detection in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Apple watches, including the one on my wrist right now. And they’ve been battling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out for a while now. Personally, I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t just pay them all the money and make them go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away. Not to say that they’re wrong, but just make them go away. You have all the money in the world. You have infinite money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Less the 15 billion you just gave to Ireland. But you have infinite money. Just make them go away. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But here we are. Anyways, the breaking news a few days ago, actually a couple weeks ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a week ago, is that the founder and CEO has resigned after he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was removed from the board. So Reuters writes, Massimo said that on September 25,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey founder Joe Chiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker CEO days after shareholders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fund, Paulitan Capital Management.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the answer to your question of like, I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t pay this. One of the rumors is that it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John the CEO was being unreasonable and would just not accept any kind of reasonable offer. And this hedge
⏹️ ▶️ John fund thing here, again, I don’t know any truth to this. But some of the things I’ve heard swirling
⏹️ ▶️ John as people speculating was that, oh, this hedge fund is actually the hedge fund and the shareholders.
⏹️ ▶️ John And basically, everybody who’s not the CEO were like, Massimo, take the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got you one. You’ve got Apple over barrel. They have to pay you. Maybe they’re even offering to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John you. We as the people who are either current, you know, shareholders and board members of the company,
⏹️ ▶️ John or speculative shareholders who want to invest these hedge fundings or whatever, we, you know, whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we think if you let us be in charge of the company, we could make you more money because we wouldn’t be dummies
⏹️ ▶️ John like your CEO and we would just take the Apple money and make us all rich. And so I don’t know if any of
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, if that’s just speculation or rumors or whatever, but it sure looks like from the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John that there may have been one person and one person only who is stopping this from being resolved with large
⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of money. And that was the founder and CEO, and he is out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s more from Matt Levine at Bloomberg if you want to read about this. We’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John out in the coming weeks and months if, oh, suddenly there’s a Massimo deal between Apple and Massimo,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they get a lot of money. We’ll see if that happens. It seems like, again, from the outside looking in, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John finally, the way is clear for large amounts of money to change
⏹️ ▶️ John hands. but if he gets kicked out and still we go years and years and Apple still can’t enable this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US, then I’m out of ideas. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it sure seems like Apple just didn’t want to pay anything for it. So I don’t know that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the problem here, But we’ll find out.
Meta Orion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s also some news over the last week or so, Meta, Meta,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meta, whatever you want to call them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you saying Meta?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Does anyone pronounce it that way? Sorry, I have bad rhymes. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann I do sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, that company that Facebook put not, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released, or not released, I shouldn’t say, but have demoed some AR glasses that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re calling Orion. And apparently this stuff is really freaking slick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a wrap up at the Verge for MetaConnect, which is their kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equivalent of WWDC. There’s also a post where one of their authors whose name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have in front of me, I am so sorry, Alex Heath, actually got to demo the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Orion glasses in part with Mark Zuckerberg. And there’s also a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, a couple of posts, I think, over at Stratechery with our friend Ben Thompson. I will try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig up a link for the show notes for at least one of those. But anyways, everything I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read a lot on this, but everything I’ve read on this is, oh my, this is the future. The vision pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mistake. When can we have this? And the answer is, well, probably not soon. So let me read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some stuff. So from the verge, uh, meta not meta has revealed it’s Orion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey augmented reality glasses, and they look almost like a trendy pair of frames you could pick up without all the tech inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Orion uses micro led projectors inside the frame and beams images in front of your eyes via wave guides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the lenses. The glasses pair with a wireless compute puck and a neural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wristband you wear on your arm that responds to gestures like pinches. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this from the Orion Review now. Orion, Meta’s first pair of augmented reality glasses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was supposed to be a product you could buy. When the glasses graduated from a Skunk Works project in Meta’s research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey division back in 2018, the goal was to start shipping them in the low tens of thousands by now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2022, amidst a phase of broader belt tightening across the company, Zuckerberg made the call to shelve its release.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As Meta’s executives retell it, the decision to shelve Orion mostly came down to the device’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey astronomical cost to build, which allegedly is in the ballpark of $10,000 per unit. Most of that cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is due to how difficult and expensive it is to reliably manufacture the silicon carbide lenses. When it started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey designing Orion, Meta expected the material to become more commonly used across the industry and therefore cheaper, but that didn’t happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote, you can’t imagine how horrible the yields are, says Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth of lenses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instead, the company pivoted to making about 1000 pairs of the Orion glasses for internal development and external demos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote, it’s probably turned out significantly better than our 5050 estimates of what it would be, but we didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there on everything we wanted to. Zuckerberg says to the device, quote, we still want it to be a little smaller, a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brighter, a little bit higher resolution and a lot more affordable before we put it out there as a product. And look, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a line of sight to all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has really shaken up the tech press world over the last week because
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t understand why.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure people have had that take, but I said, I agree with you, that this is like the tech press is all over this, and people are like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my God, it’s this, it’s that. But like, honestly, people, like there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John new anything here that changes anything as far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t know. I mean, so what they’ve shown, first of all, this is very smart by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Meta, I think, because this goes along with, first of all, with their overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty, I would say, successful rebranding efforts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are the last people calling on Facebook. They’ve rebranded themselves as meta. They’ve dropped their terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco baggage from the Facebook name to almost everybody. Mark Zuckerberg is out there rebranding himself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as this cool, normal guy somehow. Good luck with that. It’s working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know, man. It’s working. No, I disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rebrands work. That’s why people do them, because you can hold on as much as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can to the old one, but the rest of the world moves on and listens to it. Like, they work.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the renaming, I think it’s going better than Alphabet, for sure, because everyone just keeps calling them
⏹️ ▶️ John Google. But like, the whole meta renaming was about the Metaverse, which bombed. And so now
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just a company who doesn’t want to be associated with one product called Facebook, and so they’re renaming themselves meta, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But like, the Metaverse still is not a thing. And they’re the leader in glasses, but they were before
⏹️ ▶️ John they renamed themselves too, because they bought Oculus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, but the thing is, well, I mean, that’s true, but I would say in the same way that like, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they bought Instagram, they didn’t make it from scratch, but Instagram is way more Facebook now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it’s Instagram. Like, you know, in that same way, like, you know, their VR products are way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meta than they were Oculus at this point. But anyway, they show a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approach to AR and VR than what we see from Apple. What we see, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft and everyone else who’s tried it, You know, what we see from Meta has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty successful at the low-end gaming market for VR headsets with some basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pass-through features. And we see that, you know, using that foundation to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly build towards something like this. And what we see from Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, is like the total opposite approach with Vision Pro platform and products, which is like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Apple started at the extraordinarily high end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no gaming to speak of, no software to speak of, really not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly not putting much faith in this being a consumer product at all, but for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting it out there, which I continue to doubt at this point. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Meta is doing great at the low end and the mid range with their gaming stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re not even touching the high end anymore. They had a brief time trying to make the Quest Pro happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t happen, they backed off of it. They had a high-end one plan that they canceled because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they saw a Vision Pro and they’re like, eh, no thanks. They’re doing fine at the low end with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VR stuff, with gaming and with kids and everything, and now they’re demoing kind of where they think the high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end can go. And all of the tech demo, or all the demos from the people who had them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people come away being blown away by them. Like everyone’s like, oh my God, this is the future. Now granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a tech demo. It’s not a shipping product. That is a massive difference, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this kind of shows where there is huge value to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in the AR glasses format, in that kind of physical product format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AR glasses are a thing that people think is very cool and has a lot of promise. VR headsets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a different thing that people also think is cool and has promise, but for very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different reasons and in very different use cases. You can kind of see like, you know, the two companies trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve this from two different ways, but I think Meta’s approach is more likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco succeed, to be honest. There are so many physical challenges around these products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many technical challenges, so many fashion and just coolness challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so many practicality challenges to these products. Apple took a really big swing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think has almost completely missed. I think they went down almost every wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco path possible and shipped it out there. And I think part of the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re hearing all these rumors around the Vision Pro launch that like maybe some people in the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t really supportive of it or they weren’t sure if they should release it or it was divisive within the company. We’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for a long time. I think we see why. It’s a really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area to get right and the Vision Pro didn’t get it right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Meta is showing here doesn’t exist yet. But there is like they’re going towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And I think what everyone is kind of seeing is, oh, they have a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good chance of doing something good here. Whereas what we’re seeing from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has not really led us in that direction yet. I at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be surprised if we ever saw another vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware release from Apple. That’s how I think the platform has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off on such a wrong foot. I honestly would be surprised if we ever see a sequel to it. If they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything in this space, I think it will be radically different. Not the same thing, but a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit better and a little bit cheaper. I think it’ll be radically different if at all. And not soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what we see from Meta is like, they’re already succeeding in the VR market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than anybody else ever has. They’re doing great in that market. It’s still a small market, but they’re doing great in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they might be doing this thing at the high end. That’s why everyone’s excited, because everyone sees it and they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huh, it has some trade-offs, some pretty big trade-offs. And with the largest asterisk being it literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not shipping and is not buyable and will never ship in this form. So this is literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a tech demo. However, people like it and they’re excited by it. Now that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, I don’t think AR and VR, even in a great form like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s going to replace the smartphone. I don’t think it’s going to be nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as big or as important as a lot of people think or hope that it will. What we’re seeing with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual products that exist in this category is they’re fun, they’re useful to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain people, they’re not replacing phones, they’re not replacing game consoles, they’re not replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TVs, in any kind of meaningful numbers. I think the whole investment in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area is interesting and in certain ways it’s exciting, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s the future of computing. I think it’s the future of, you know, more wearables to add to our lives. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same way that the Apple Watch and wearables like it didn’t replace smartphones. They just added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them. I think AR glasses will add to our computing lives as well. I don’t think they will be replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly anything. However, if they are to succeed, the approach Meta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is taking, look, and they already have the Ray-Ban glasses that are pretty successful. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that approach, like what Meta’s doing, slowly adding things that people will add to their computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lives, not replace things with, that’s working. And this is the latest demo of where that’s going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s working. And I think what Apple’s doing is not working.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s why I think this is a non-story and I’m very disappointed in the press for how they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John handled this. Ever since we’ve been talking about this topic at all on the
⏹️ ▶️ John show or in the Apple world or in the entire tech world, everyone has
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann known
⏹️ ▶️ John that some kind of glasses thing would be amazing, but too bad we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t build that. And when years ago, when the rumors were about Apple’s headset thing, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not gonna do a headset, they’re gonna do glasses, because they know headsets are big and clunky and crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Tim Cook would just constantly, anytime he’s asked about this for years, he’d be like, we’re interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John AR, not VR, we’re all about augmenting reality. Have you seen all the AR features we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John added to our phones and iPads over the years. We don’t want to be closed off inside a VR headset. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all about augmented reality, right? The reason Apple was into that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just like, oh, Apple thought AR would be good. Everybody thinks AR is good. Everyone thinks glasses where they can let you magically
⏹️ ▶️ John see the world, but also stuff laid on top of it is a great idea. It’s in science fiction books and our culture. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John baked into everything. And that is an Apple strategy from day one. When we eventually heard, actually, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to ship a VR headset, you’re like, but what about all that stuff Tim Cooksman saying about the glasses and the basically consensus
⏹️ ▶️ John was well nobody can make the glasses so Apple’s gonna ship something
⏹️ ▶️ John and what they did ship was their attempt to say you know in typical Apple fashion super expensive VR
⏹️ ▶️ John headset but look we do it one of the reasons it’s so expensive is we’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you that AR glasses experience of like look the pass-through is magical it’s like you don’t even know you’re looking through
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras or whatever but of course it’s not an AR thing you’re not actually looking at the of room, we’re just applying
⏹️ ▶️ John technology and money to try to get something out there that has some desirable attributes that
⏹️ ▶️ John are better than the competitors that we try to spin as a computing device and get into the whole thing. But the bottom line
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple didn’t wait until they could ship glasses. They shipped
⏹️ ▶️ John a headset that they kind of sort of tried to push in the AR direction but wasn’t really that and setting the vision
⏹️ ▶️ John pro side and all those failures or whatever, that’s what they did. But at no point during this, did anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Apple doesn’t think AR is the future, or they shouldn’t have said that. It was just simply
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that no one has technology to ship something that looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John what the Vision Pro looks like, but is a pair of glasses that you can see the room through. That doesn’t exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So here’s Facebook, and they’re like, they come out with this thing. Now, first of all, AR glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John have existed for a while. There was Magic Leap, there was a HoloLens 1 and 2. It’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this. Obviously, the screen technology is not great. They come out with their thing, And I look
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s glasses that you can see through But it doesn’t really change anything about everything. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John laid out. Everyone knows glasses are gonna be awesome someday Everyone also knows we can’t actually currently do them
⏹️ ▶️ John and I would say a $10,000 device that doesn’t look as good as division Pro is an example of not being able
⏹️ ▶️ John to do them I mean like it’s not you can’t ship this to people It’s not a product and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not even as good It doesn’t even look as good as vision Pro in terms of the graphics setting aside the room
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re actually looking at or whatever right? So this is the type of thing I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple would have and say, well, we can’t ship this. It’s not a shippable product. The only difference is Facebook says,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, okay, we have something that’s not a shippable product. Let’s show it to the world to try to basically get our investors off our back
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re spending all this money and they think we’re just burning it because the metaverse didn’t happen and we’re just selling a bunch of quest headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John and why do we keep burning these billions of dollars? And Facebook’s got to come out there and say, this is why we’re burning billions of dollars because we think
⏹️ ▶️ John someday we’ll be able to make something like this only good and shippable. And as Zuckerberg
⏹️ ▶️ John says, we have a line of sight on that. If they had come up with a product that you could buy
⏹️ ▶️ John that did this stuff, maybe we could say they’re ahead of everybody else. Apple couldn’t find anything that they could ship, but Facebook could.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they can’t ship this. It’s not a shippable thing. And even if it was shippable, certain attributes aren’t even as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as Vision Pro, fidelity-wise. So, I don’t think this is anything other than
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook trying to get some good press out of a thing that is essentially on par
⏹️ ▶️ John with what everyone else has in the industry, but everyone knows that it’s not shippable and when Apple has something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not shippable, they don’t talk about it, right? Now, since we know nothing about what’s going on inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, it is possible that Apple at some point three years ago, diverted all of their
⏹️ ▶️ John resources into Vision Pro and left their glasses efforts dying on the vine and
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook really is ahead of them. But we don’t know that, just like we don’t know anything about what goes on inside Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we can’t say by Facebook showing us this prototype, they’re ahead of Apple. Apple is never going to catch up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t have glasses like this. We just don’t know the answer to that question. I would imagine that if Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you went into an Apple lab and wanted to get the same experience, although they might not look as nice as these
⏹️ ▶️ John with a little frame around them or whatever, you could probably get something similar if Apple had continued their AR thing. but we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if they continued it. If you look at this product though, one of the things that it does seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to take from Vision Pro is the idea of eye tracking and pinching as your interface, but interestingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t use cameras to track your hands, it uses the little wristband. This is something that Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe see how that works out, try the prototype, see how it goes if they haven’t already been trying this. Choosing
⏹️ ▶️ John how you are going to do eye tracking and pinching is kind of like an implementation detail versus
⏹️ ▶️ John deciding eye tracking and pinching is how you should interact with things. Like, in other words, they’re not saying, Orion,
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes with Quest hand controllers. Quest hand controller is great for games, maybe not so great for
⏹️ ▶️ John what you would imagine you would do something that’s more like a pair of glasses. These things seem to have, like, the wristband has like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John electrical conductor sensor thingies that catch your nerve signals or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a nice way to do it that doesn’t require you to have line of sight on your fingers and doesn’t require,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, these glasses frames to be bristling with even more cameras that are tracking where your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John are as opposed to the ones that are just tracking your eyeballs. But anyway, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like people saying this and say, were there people out there who were like previously? I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think augmented reality glasses would be a good idea. But now that I’ve been able to try a prototype, I do think they’re a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose there are people like this, but like read a sci fi book. We all want magic glasses that you put them
⏹️ ▶️ John on and they cover the world with information and you can see all the things and you’re walking directions go like that. And as we said,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a name tag over people’s heads. And there’s that whole story about like the the Ray-Ban glasses that do like image lookups
⏹️ ▶️ John for people and like docks them as you walk around. Yeah, that’s the sci fi future dystopian and utopian that we’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about here. Right. And there’s going to be a lot of problems with it. But like, first things first, we got to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the screens. And by the way, the way these things work is like they have like a little tiny screen that projects a
⏹️ ▶️ John little image into the lenses and tries the lenses, try to bounce
⏹️ ▶️ John the image from the screen off of the lenses and into your eyes. So they focus on the back of your eye.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, that is as annoyingly hard as you can imagine it is because it’s not like you can put a big mirror in there because that would block
⏹️ ▶️ John your view of the outside world. So these wave guides are essentially taking the image of a tiny little screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s projecting like from the side on an angle into the lens and internally bouncing
⏹️ ▶️ John it inside the last lens until it exits the lens at just the right angle. So it focuses on your eye. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is as complicated and apparently very expensive to manufacture as you would think. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, still doesn’t have the fidelity of, you know, a very expensive closed in VR headset
⏹️ ▶️ John where you don’t have to worry about all that business and you can just literally project the screen right into their eyeballs because you’re not worried about
⏹️ ▶️ John them seeing through it to the outside world. Final thing I’ll say about this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John the way the hardware is implemented, having the little, I don’t know, puck stick thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John the compute is, is, you know, if you want if you want something that’s like glasses,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put all the computer stuff inside the glasses, right? So they didn’t, they put the computer stuff inside a puck. And I’ve seen a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John look at that puck and say, well, the future is gonna be, that puck will just be your phone. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the distant future, but the near future, no. Because in the near
⏹️ ▶️ John future, A, you’re not going to want to literally destroy your phone’s battery by getting
⏹️ ▶️ John two hours of AR glass out of this thing. And B, the hardware that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to put in that puck is gonna have to be, it’s on the ragged edge of what’s possible. It’s gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be so purpose-built and so like high end for a portable thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John phones have to do so much different stuff. They have to have their cameras and the battery life for that
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s for web browsing, all the wifi radios, wherever, and this is a purpose-built device that the first one of these that actually
⏹️ ▶️ John ships somewhere needs to just be a thing that feeds these glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, yes, why have a separate thing, right? But that’s gonna be when we have so much excess computing capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s no problem for our phones to do it. And I would say today, it is not no problem for our phones to do
⏹️ ▶️ John what that little puck is doing. So I suspect whoever gets to be the first one to ship something like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, arguably Magic Leap and HoloLens already did ship something like this, albeit a much lower fidelity without the same
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Vision Pro inspired UI, it’s gonna be a separate puck. I don’t think it’ll be a separate puck for
⏹️ ▶️ John many years, which is fine and is the right move, and it is much better than hanging off a giant computer with a metal case
⏹️ ▶️ John off your face like the Apple Vision Pro does, but for now, I would expect there to be a puck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, we’ll find out in a few years when the, you know, or many years when the tell all things come out and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, oh, Apple abandoned AR because someone was convinced that there was no way they were gonna do it within the next 50 years, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we should stop. And they didn’t see these silicon carbide lenses coming or whatever. But I would hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that inside Apple, all the technology you just saw Facebook demonstrate was also
⏹️ ▶️ John known to them and had been experimented with them. And they realized that
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next X number of years, it’s not a viable product. So they’re gonna try this Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John thing It’s not going great for them, but I don’t think philosophically Anything
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I don’t actually think there’s a philosophical difference when it comes to the long-term view of
⏹️ ▶️ John AR between meta and Apple I think they both believe glasses of the future and they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to get there as fast as they possibly can the only Difference is how does that manifest for Facebook and manifests
⏹️ ▶️ John with tech demos of $10,000 headsets for Apple it manifests Before saying nothing and shipping an entirely different
⏹️ ▶️ John product that they can actually manufacture and hoping that works out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I, I both agree and disagree with basically everything that you guys just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said. I’m not so disappointed in the tech press as John is. I concur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s been obvious to anyone who’s paid even the tiniest bit of attention that this is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is angling for, that they want something that looks, maybe not aesthetically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in principle, like functionally looks, if you will, like Orion, that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have pass-through because you’re already looking at the real world and you’re just augmenting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Hence Tim’s saying over and over again, AR is very interesting to us. It’s, it’s clear that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Apple wants. And I think a reasonable way to get there, maybe not the best way to get there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reasonable way to get there is to say, well, let’s make some hyper, hyper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great looking internal pass-through inside these goggles that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lock you away from the world to get us used to what it’ll be like when we don’t have to have pass-through,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the pass-through is the real world. Hopefully I’m making sense here. And to get ahead of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to hopefully build a developer story around that, you just fake it until you make it. And that’s what Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. Now, the problem is they haven’t really made it, right? In the sense that developers are mostly ignoring it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that Apple is largely mostly ignoring the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Ben and others in the tech press
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, oh my God, this was amazing. Oh my God, this is the future today. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, it should be couched and there should be asterisks and daggers and double daggers saying, well, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the future today, but you can’t buy it because it is what? The future.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t fault them for being impressed by a cool tech demo. I fault the people, and it’s not Ben,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not Ben knows what’s up, but it’s other people saying basically like this shows that Apple is going in the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong direction and Meta knows what’s up. they’re both going in exactly the same direction long-term.
⏹️ ▶️ John They both have VR headsets, albeit very different ones, right? And I think they both have AR
⏹️ ▶️ John headsets. It’s just that Facebook is showing you theirs that they can’t ship, and Apple is not showing you theirs that they can’t ship.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? And again, we don’t know that’s true. I’m speculating because Apple doesn’t say anything, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are citing this as like, a condemnation of Apple has dropped the ball, they’ve taken
⏹️ ▶️ John the eye off the ball, they shouldn’t be bothering with VR headsets. Meta is also bothering with
⏹️ ▶️ John VR headsets. There’s a difference in strategy there, which we’ve talked about at length between how they’re doing with VR headsets, but
⏹️ ▶️ John VR headsets is what we can make now. And, you know, they have differing opinions about how to do that, but that’s the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John in their strategy is like, Apple has taken one direction in VR and Facebook’s taken the other. A difference
⏹️ ▶️ John in their strategy is not that Meta thinks AR is the future and Apple does not.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s insanity and that’s what I can’t handle. From a free agent, you’re like, Apple doesn’t think AR is the future, but Meta
⏹️ ▶️ John does, and Meta is showing Apple how it’s done. No, that is absolutely not the case. based on public statements
⏹️ ▶️ John from the CEO of the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would agree with that. I don’t know. And I also, I know it’s fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everyone, including sometimes me, to slag on the Vision Pro. And I’ll be honest with you, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t use my Vision Pro very often. And if it wasn’t purchased for my job,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like if I had done this just because I thought it was neat and I wanted one, I would really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really regret spending all the money I did on it. That being said, I maintain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that for specific things, the Vision Pro was really incredible. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an all things to all people device, if you ask me, even though I think that’s what Apple wanted it to be, if you were to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keynotes when it was announced and whatnot. But I cannot say enough good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things about the immersive video that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has put out. Now, admittedly, they’ve put out very little of it, and it’s coming in at a snail’s pace,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It is so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than any other cinema-like experience I’ve ever had. It is truly, truly phenomenal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they are releasing more stuff. It is way too slow, but they are doing it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe there’s going to be an immersive film. I don’t know if it’s a short film or a film film, sometime either late this year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or early next year. And I’m really excited to watch it because I think it’ll be super cool. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I went to Memphis a couple of weeks ago, I did travel with the Vision Pro, but because both of my flights were so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn short, I didn’t bother using it on the plane. But on occasions that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used it on a plane, leaving aside that you are 1 trillion percent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that guy, if you don’t mind being that guy, it’s unreal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you’re in an incredible movie theater. You’re not in a plane. You’re in an incredible movie theater by yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody’s around you and it’s amazing. Additionally, when I was in Memphis, I did get the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro out because I did have a little bit of downtime to do work. And you know what the Vision Pro is? It’s a giant ass screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that doesn’t take up a giant ass amount of space in your bag. Well, it doesn’t take up a small amount of space in your bag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but you know what I mean. I was going to say, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big space in the bag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually. You know what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t take up a lot of length and width. I wonder volume-wise if it would actually be the same as a very thin screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe. But you know, I mean, we’re snarking, but you know exactly what I’m saying. And And it was really great for that. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly was. I was in this actually very small hotel room and yes, it had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mediocre TV that I think I probably could have hooked up to my laptop, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was so much nicer to use Vision Pro because I was suddenly in a different space and I’ve got this huge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen in front of me. And especially with the developer strap, it is basically lag free. I think the fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, admittedly my eyes are not perfect, but the fidelity of it is great. Like there are times the Vision Pro is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not argue that it is, to my eyes, it appears that it is a flop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, we don’t know what Apple’s expectations were. Maybe they expected to sell three of them, in which case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mission accomplished. But I suspect they wanted to sell a whole heck of a lot more. Certainly, the rumblings we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard in the press is that they wanted to sell a whole heck of a lot more. And they haven’t. So it is a flop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by most measures. But if you have an obscene amount of money to burn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and light on fire and have these specific use cases, I don’t want to continue to slag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Vision Pro because in certain circumstances, it’s unlike and better than everything else I’ve ever tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Admittedly, those circumstances are few and far between, but they do exist. And I do think that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really solid precursor to something like AR glasses. It’s gonna look way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different, both inside, outside, in every way, it’s gonna look different than the Vision Pro does. But I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a reasonable precursor. And those who have embraced the Vision OS and Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their AR experience when designing stuff for Apple Glasses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re going to be ahead of the game because they’ve already done it. The same way that Underscore was way ahead of the game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for widgets on iOS, because all the APIs were basically just ripped from watchOS for complications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stuff. I think I have that right, but you get the idea either way. Underscore is way ahead of the game because he’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already done that. So that’s part of the reason I think that Widget Smith was there on day one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and was so good is because he had so much experience in a slightly different context, but using basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same APIs. And I think that people who really and truly embrace the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Vision OS, I would say I have reluctantly shown it a small amount of attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would not say I’ve embraced it. But anyways, those who have really embraced it, I think they’ll be way ahead of the game. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that everyone would agree that something that’s like Orion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the future if we can get there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think your point about the Vision Pro being like, oh, well, we can’t do AR glasses, but just if you get used
⏹️ ▶️ John to this, like as a platform extension, like we build this platform over many years
⏹️ ▶️ John inside these stupid goggles, this platform doesn’t look that much different than the platform we
⏹️ ▶️ John would build for AR glasses. And I’m sure Meta is doing exactly the same thing. They’ve got the Quest headsets, which
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, addressing a different market in a different way. But whatever interface and APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John and compatibility they’re building up there, even though they they don’t emphasize pass-through as much, I would imagine that as
⏹️ ▶️ John they extend into AR glasses, it will be an expansion of their existing VR
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms, if they’re smart, rather than just saying, oh, here’s all new platform, nothing you did on the Quest headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John is applicable at all to this. I hope they don’t do that. Now, Apple, I think, has a little bit of a
⏹️ ▶️ John headstart in this because their VR headset is so focused on pretending it’s an AR headset,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Quests are not. Even, like I said, down to the choice of how to do the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro does eye tracking and you use your fingers to like pinch and do stuff, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John does Orion, but Quest does not. Quest does not lean that heavily on that type of interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the other hand, Quest uses the wristband instead of cameras to track, but it was still like the whole idea of like, how
⏹️ ▶️ John would you want to use sci-fi type of AR glasses?
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably wouldn’t wanna have hand controllers because that kind of defeats the purpose of like, oh, they’re just like regular glasses, you put them
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Where do the hand controllers fit in that? So it’s gonna probably have to be, How do I how do I do stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, how about if you looked at it and did gestures with your hands? And then it’s just a question of how do we implement that? Looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at stuff, eye tracking, that seems to be obvious. Just with your hands, you could look at your hands with cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have a wristband. You could do both at the same time. You could use your Apple watch like there’s all sorts of like platform
⏹️ ▶️ John synergies. That’s where I think I heard Ben and Gruber talking about like, what if your Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ John was was like the neural check, the nerve checking thing? And what if
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone was like the puck for the glasses? and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe eventually let’s hold your horses. And I guess, like I said, I feel like our glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be so close to the edge of what’s even possible for so many years that there’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be dedicated hardware for it. And like I said, you wouldn’t want to destroy your phone’s battery on this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not OK, but it is the status quo that the Vision Pro gets like two hours of battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life, right? Orion gets two hours of battery life. Your phone, you do not want to have two hours of battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s wait on this. let’s it’s you know, $10,000 doesn’t look as good as vision pro the battery last two hours,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We’ll get there eventually. But But yes, there are platform synergies that Apple is well positioned to take
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of. But Apple is not going to show you their AR glasses demo things
⏹️ ▶️ John until they actually have a product they can ship. And we’ve been talking about vision, bro. And we haven’t been like, Oh, boy, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t wait until next year when Apple ships the glasses. No, we don’t think that’s coming next year. And guess what, it’s not coming next year
⏹️ ▶️ John from meta either. Despite Zuckerberg’s, we have a line of sight on that. I’ll believe it when I see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, you should look at it, I’m surprised I haven’t seen many people talking about this, HoloLens and Magically, whatever the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John their thing’s called. There have been AR glasses that have shipped as actual shipping products over many years from both
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and Magically startup. And they didn’t look great, and they weren’t popular,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they made slightly different choices, but they have existed. So it’s not like we don’t know, like real
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping products that you could buy with less than $10,000 worth of money that would let you see the room
⏹️ ▶️ John and also see images projected on it. Many of them have existed. It’s just like people looked at them
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, they’re not very good yet. And even Orion, I mean, it’s the best, it’s the most impressive that anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John has seen outside of, you know, development labs inside Apple or wherever. But still, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, but this is not, I can’t buy this. And if I could, it would cost too much money. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John if I could, even if it didn’t cost a lot of money and I could buy it, it still has limitations compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to, let’s say, the best images you can see inside Vision Pro or whatever. So we’ll get there eventually. but
⏹️ ▶️ John I really think this is a perhaps very shrewd PR move from Facebook to satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who are upset that Facebook is spending billions of dollars on the metaverse. And they have to say, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, like we’re not spending millions of dollars on that thing where people with no legs talk to each other in meetings.
⏹️ ▶️ John What we’re actually trying to do is this. And we haven’t actually done it yet, but let’s show you
⏹️ ▶️ John like what we’ve got so far so you know we’re not just like making the Quest 3S
⏹️ ▶️ John and we think that’s all we’re doing with these billions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was listening to Upgrade and they had a really good turn of phrase for it, which I’ve already forgotten,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they were saying another thing that, um, that this might accomplish is kind of like reverse Osborne,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, anything that Apple’s doing. Right. Because now it’s like, look, you know, the vision pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is lame. Cause you got to put this thing on that keeps you away from the world. You
⏹️ ▶️ John do they need to do that to the vision pro is it selling so much it needs to be tamped down.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re not wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, look, look, if they’re Osborne anything, they could be Osborne their own actually, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John well-selling, the Quest heads, I don’t think anyone sees a product that they can’t even buy and like, no one
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s playing Beat Saber is like, I want those $10,000 glasses where I can’t play Beat Saber. No, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a tech demo that shows how close are we to AR glasses? And the answer is,
⏹️ ▶️ John closer than we were, but still not really that close. Anyway, back to your VR stuff. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Vision Pro had been selling like crazy, I can see how this working is like, like you said, Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, stop going gaga over Vision Pro. That’s not the goal. The goal is
⏹️ ▶️ John this and we’re closer to it than Apple. But like, I don’t think they need to stop Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John from selling. I don’t think there’s any juggernaut needs to be tamped down.
NotebookLM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the other bit of breaking news over the last few days is that Google will—I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little fuzzy on the details here, but apparently you can point Notebook LM, which is, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pre-existing product of theirs that I was not previously familiar with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can—I guess it’s like a data management thing or like a knowledge management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco thing? It’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco research tool. I haven’t looked too much into Notebook LM itself, but it’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you add your documents and stuff that you’re researching on this topic to Notebook LM and it can tell you stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using LLMs about your documents.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can use them for like study guides too? Is this the same product?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so, yeah. You can put in like PDFs or websites and things like that and it’ll tell you stuff about them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be canceled in five years, don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Oh, less than that. But what’s interesting about this is they introduced this feature called Audio Overview,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which auto generates podcasts about whatever you put in. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course people have been having a lot of fun with this. However, before I begin, Have either of you heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these podcasts yet? I sure have. Same. In this case, this won’t be as much of a surprise to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’d like to welcome to our show some guests. Oh, no. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get pitched all the time for guests for our show. It’s just from PR spam.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be worried about what you’re about to do causing that to increase, but it’s so clear that those people never listen to our show, so it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, definitely not. I listened to one of the podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was generated by Notebook LM, and it kind of blew my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was not anything that made me scared about us and our future as a show. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is worth hearing. So now I’d like to play what I fed Notebook LM for this guest appearance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here was John’s post on Hypercritical entitled, I Made This. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gosh. Which. Oh gosh. So this is a podcast that Notebook LM generated. It’s seven minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long. I’ll chapterize it. If you want to skip it, you can, listeners. But I suggest you listen to it. Now, I have not heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one yet. I saved this for the three of us to listen to live on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here is this AI podcast discussing John’s post about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI creation entitled I Made This.
“I Made This”
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Hey everyone, welcome back. We’re gonna be diving into some pretty fascinating territory today AI
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann art you guys sent in some really interesting questions about John Syracuse’s blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann I made this And to be honest, it’s got us thinking pretty hard over here too,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer yeah, it really gets some thorny territory fast
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It does it does so I mean everybody’s sort of played around with those early AI art generators
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann by now, right? But Syracuse is kind of digging deeper here. He’s asking like who actually
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann creates AI art
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer It’s a great question because on the one hand you’ve got these AI systems
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco that
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann are basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer giant sponges just soaking up all this data, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann Great
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann images, styles.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Exactly. And they can pump out these crazy realistic images in seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann Which
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann is mind-blowing in itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Totally. But Syracuse is really wrestling with something more fundamental, I think. He’s trying to figure out if we can even call it
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer creation when it comes to AI.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Right? Like are we just talking about fancy algorithms here or is there something more going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer And that’s where it gets interesting because he uses this analogy
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer of emailing an artist and asking them to paint, you know, a polar bear wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer a cowboy hat riding a unicycle.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Right. I’m already
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer interested. Is that accurate? I thought my jumble was
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer different. The artist goes and paints it. Beautiful masterpiece. They own the copyright.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann No problem. Makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer But what if you swap out the artist with an AI?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Right. You just type that same request into a text box and boom, you’ve got your polar bear unicyclist.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Exactly. So then who’s the creator in that scenario?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann Oh, you missed the middle part where you
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John asked an
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann artist to do it. Or is it the company that
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John made the AI? That was the
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann important part. Because it’s their technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Finally, we get the experience of yelling at a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Before we can even begin to untangle the whole question of ownership, like who owns the copyright
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer to AI art, we need to grapple with this more fundamental question of who or
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer what is the creator in the first place?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Because if we don’t know who the creator is, how can we say who owns it?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer precisely. And that’s where things start to get really interesting and complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann And I think that’s what makes this such a big deal, right? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann just some theoretical debate happening in a vacuum. This stuff has real world implications.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Absolutely. I mean, you think about all the different fields that could be impacted, photography, graphic design,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer music, even things like writing and filmmaking. I mean, the potential here is huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer And it’s already happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Right. Like it’s not even a question of if AI will disrupt these industries. It’s already starting to end.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Exactly. And that raises a whole host of questions about jobs and livelihoods.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer And you know, copyright law is scrambling to catch up with all of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Which is a whole other can of worms.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Oh, totally. But beyond even the economic and legal questions, Syracuse makes this really
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer interesting point about the impact of all this on human creativity. Like what happens to us,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer what happens to art when suddenly anyone with an internet connection can crank
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer out something that looks like a masterpiece?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann I don’t think I made that point at all. I don’t think I made that point
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John at all. If you don’t have to struggle, if you don’t have to hold
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann your craft over years and years of practice, it could be made. Does that diminish the
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer drive to create in the first place? Right, like you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann your own creative pursuits, whatever they might be. No, I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer didn’t talk about this. There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from the process itself, from pushing through those frustrating moments,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer those creative blocks, and coming out the other side with something you’re proud of, something that’s uniquely yours.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Absolutely, I mean, I was working on this song a while back, And I hit this wall just
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann totally stuck. Couldn’t figure out where to go with it, almost gave up. But then, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann something clicked. And I finally broke through it. And that feeling of having
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John wrestled
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann with it and finally found the solution, it’s just incredible. And I can’t imagine getting that same
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann feeling from just typing a few words into a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Yeah, it really makes you question what it is we value about art in the first place. Is it purely
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer about the end result? Or is there something inherently valuable about the human element, the intention,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer the struggle, the imperfections even that go into the creative process.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Like, is it even possible for AI to replicate that experience? And if it is, do we want it to? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it’s a lot to unpack. So like, where do we even go from here? We’ve got this potential decline in human creativity, this legal
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann minefield around ownership. What’s the next step?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Well, Syracuse doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but he does offer this really intriguing what
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer if. He suggests that maybe trying to force AI art into our existing copyright law is
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer kind of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John What’s a square peg? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer No,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John absolutely not. It’s this idea
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer that creation has to be this single definable act by a single entity, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Which has always been the basis of copyright law. You can pinpoint the creator and therefore you can determine
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer ownership.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John It makes sense to me. They miss the whole thing about hiring someone to do it. Exactly. Which is like the key to this whole article.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer But AI throws a wrench in that whole system because it’s not always so clear cut. Is the creator the programmer
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer who wrote the AI’s code? Or is it the user who typed in the prompt? Or is it somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer the data that the AI was trained on all those millions of images and text snippets?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It’s like this weird blend of human and machine creativity where it’s almost impossible to separate the
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Right. And so Syracuse’s point is that maybe instead of trying to cram AI art into this outdated
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer framework, maybe we need to rethink the whole concept of creation and ownership for the digital age.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann So instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann black and white, it’s more like shades of gray.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Precisely. He’s suggesting that maybe we need to embrace the ambiguity and complexity that
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer AI brings to the table instead of trying to erase it.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It’s like AI is making us rethink centuries of assumptions about
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann what art is and who gets to be called an artist.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Yeah. And that can be a little unsettling for some people. It’s challenging these deftly held beliefs
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer about human exceptionalism.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Deftly held beliefs?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Totally. It’s like this really exciting time, this explosion of possibilities, like
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann we’re on the verge of something totally new and uncharted.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Exactly. And I think Syracuse captures that tension really well. He doesn’t shy away from the hard questions. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann he definitely doesn’t. And speaking of hard questions, he leaves us with a pretty big one. Go
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann on. He says, instead of just asking, you know, who made this when it comes to AI art,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann maybe we should be asking, how do we want to define made in a world where
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann AI is becoming this powerful creative force?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer I love that question because it shifts
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John the focus away from trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer find the one true creator and it puts the emphasis on what kind of future we’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer create.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Exactly, like it’s not about assigning blame or credit anymore, it’s about taking responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann for the tools we’re building and the impact they’re having.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer And it’s about recognizing that AI isn’t just this neutral technology, it’s shaped by our values,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer our biases, the choices we make as a society.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It makes you think about the ethical implications, all the unintended consequences that we might not even be able to foresee right
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Absolutely. It’s like opening Pandora’s box in a way. But instead of just fearing what might
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer come out, maybe we can try to steer it in a direction that benefits humanity.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann So it’s not just a technological challenge anymore, right? It’s a philosophical one, a social one,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann an ethical one.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Totally.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer about figuring out what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines and what role
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer creativity will play in all of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Yeah, and I don’t think there are any easy answers here, but I do think Syracuse gives us a
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann good place to start.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer But
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Marco this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer end.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco We didn’t get anywhere. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer about having those difficult conversations, being willing to challenge your own assumptions and being open to new
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer perspectives.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And I think that’s something we’ve tried to do here today, to really grapple with the complexities of
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John AI art. Are
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann they gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann a Squarespace ad now? Absolutely,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer and
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann I think
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer it’s a conversation that’s only gonna become more important, more urgent as AI continues to
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer evolve.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann So on that note, I want to thank you all for joining us for this deep dive into the world of AI art. It’s been quite
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann a journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer It really has. Has it? I think it’s just the beginning. Definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer Yeah. So until
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann next time, keep those creative sparks flying, whether they’re human or artificial.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann True to that. And we’ll see you all in the next one.
NotebookLM, cont’d.
⏹️ ▶️ John To quote a famous line from a nerdy show, the line being, maybe I use too many monkeys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they use too many cliches when they train this LLM because wow, there was, like the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John was just how many different cliches can we work in at the same time? It missed the main point of my article,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not a great, I mean, you would think people think, oh, LLMs are great at summarizing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not if you miss like the main, most important point. Even when they were parroting back the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John and the part of whatever they trained it on was like, this is the part where we’re gonna go over the article. They did not
⏹️ ▶️ John get the crux of it. And when they sort of did verbatim the example I had in the middle, they missed the important
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the example, which was the similarity between typing a prompt and then
⏹️ ▶️ John typing an email to an artist who makes it for you. They omitted that entirely. And the only two examples they had were
⏹️ ▶️ John typing a prompt and you making it yourself. And that’s not, there’s nothing interesting. Oh my God. Anyway, this
⏹️ ▶️ John was a bad podcast that if I heard a person doing a podcast like this, I would be to quote another
⏹️ ▶️ John famous line, Woody Allen, whatever. What was this? Was it Annie Hall?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know nothing of my work. Boy, if only life were really like this. Oh, people know what I’m talking about. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they know nothing of my work. They the LMS did not get it. It’s a shame. And they talked in circles
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. And they use so many cliches. And it’s obvious that they’ve trained on a lot of information surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John AI and stuff, which is not surprising. So they can riff freeform riff on it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as an example of trying to look at an article
⏹️ ▶️ John and talk about what the article is talking about, they fail. As an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of natural sounding voices, speaking text generated by an LLM, these things
⏹️ ▶️ John are actually pretty okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann You can still tell in AI
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve heard a few of them because there’s kind of a sameness to what they do, but honestly, there’s kind of a sameness
⏹️ ▶️ John to what a lot of humans do in certain things anyway. I bet if you trained an LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John on R hundreds and hundreds of hours, they could do a pretty good job of simulating us. But I think they’d
⏹️ ▶️ John make us say even dumber things than we already say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s interesting about this, so to me, when I hear the podcast generated by NotebookLM,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t sound that ridiculous to me. They don’t sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that bad. No, absolutely not.
⏹️ ▶️ John The words that they’re saying or the voice that they’re saying them in? Because it’s two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different things. The actual content is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but I think that the actual content is very similar to the actual content of text that comes out of an LLM.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you type in the chat GPT and it gives you a big answer and you read the text, it’s coherent, right? That’s the whole point.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why people are always so impressed by it. That’s why it fools so many people into thinking that it’s actually intelligent because the text is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it makes sense. Like the sentences join to one another or whatever. Now, maybe the sentences are filled with, you know, made
⏹️ ▶️ John up stuff or whatever, but the sentences themselves join. So I think the most impressive thing about these is taking
⏹️ ▶️ John that text that you would see in ChatGPT and then reading it in the style of a podcaster
⏹️ ▶️ John with the same ums and oohs and pauses and emphasis or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is the more impressive thing from my perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is what they’re doing. Like, you know, this is still based on modern LLM generation techniques and summarization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. And, you know, obviously they’re then forming it into a podcast with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, these kind of podcast formats of people saying, hey, what about this? Hey, welcome back, guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good point. But to me, this shows, I think, the immense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power of generative AI to actually replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of mediocre media. What this sounds like to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot of real podcasts that are out there. Nothing that I really listen to, but it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lot of podcasts out there. And in many ways, the style of speaking where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very prepared and professional, and yet there’s no personality being shown whatsoever. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a good point, Jane. It sounds a lot like news anchors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to each other and trying to appear human.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like what a news anchor or a host or, I don’t know, a presenter you would call them in the UK,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re asked to do, what part of their job is, is to fake interest in things that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John no interest in. If you’re like a news anchor, you You can’t have interest in every news story, but it’s your job
⏹️ ▶️ John to pretend that you are interested in this bake sale or the
⏹️ ▶️ John school budget committee or whatever. Your job is to make it sound interesting and engaging,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you as an actual newscaster can’t possibly be interested in all those things, which is why we read
⏹️ ▶️ John newscasters, for example, as having their interest or like a program on a morning show. And they’re talking about, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you won the pie competition. Tell me about that. We know they’re not actually interested in the pie competition or the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John these people want, but it’s their job to pretend they’re interested, which is why they read is fake to many of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John But morning shows are popular. People like seeing that. And so that that artificiality
⏹️ ▶️ John is essentially what we’re paying those people for. And it is a service that people like to consume. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this provides the same thing and that we listen to it and we’re like, Okay, well, there’s no actual person who’s actually interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John anything here. But is it that much different than the host of Good Morning America feigning interest
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world’s biggest ball of yarn? I don’t think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And and the thing is like what I am into podcasts for is people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the personalities and the chemistry between hosts and like you know how people just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interact with each other and have interesting conversations and this is not that and doesn’t sound like it will ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be that however there’s also a lot of people out there who just want like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information digest here is like what happened today in X whatever my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry or interest is I want to hear the latest in that that. Summarize the news headlines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me and give me a little bit of context for each of those that I can listen to every day on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jog or whatever. There is a large market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utilitarian mediocrity and that’s what this delivers. It’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace like Dubai Friday, but it is going to replace a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mediocrity that’s out there because a lot of people like and especially because you can make something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specialized to like your like one thing. Like if you’re the only person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wants to hear a summary podcast of topic X, you can do that here. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s very powerful. You really like individualize your media. It’s like this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly what you want, even if no one else wants to hear this or is interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this or it’s about something that’s like private documentation that only you have for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason, you know, or like your own content, like you can listen to that kind of stuff. You can use it as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learning tool. It can be a summarization tool. It can be, you know, get me up to date. Like give me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a quick refresher on the notes for my presentation before I give my presentation in an hour, like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my drive to work. Well, now you’re getting into
⏹️ ▶️ John things where accuracy might be required and I would be wary about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John but like. Because on the test, they’re gonna want you to get the answer right, not just, well, I told you what my LLM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, but this, like this blew my mind because yeah, this does not sound as good as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good podcast, but it sounds better than a lot of bad podcasts that I’ve heard from actual people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would rather listen to these than a lot of actual podcasts I have heard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you hear that Facebook’s going to one of the things they’re proposing or slash implementing is in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook like, I don’t know, the news feed, the feed that is personalized for you where they
⏹️ ▶️ John take stuff from your social network on Facebook, where they also throw stuff in your face that they
⏹️ ▶️ John think you might be interested in based on what they know about you. And then the third leg of that stool
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be. And also, we will generate stuff that we think you might be. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because like the old way was like stuff from people you follow who are in your network. And then it was like, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that are out of room that you might think would be interesting. But all that stuff is stuff that presumably humans were creating. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, you know what? There’s a third leg, which is stuff that we create out of thin air
⏹️ ▶️ John based on LM stuff. And we’ll put that in your feed, too. And to Marco’s point, do you think people
⏹️ ▶️ John will notice that that is not different than the stuff they’re being algorithmically
⏹️ ▶️ John fed and the stuff that is from people in their network? Like depending on what the stuff is, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of things created by humans have that same look and feel. And if Facebook AI
⏹️ ▶️ John generates something that’s, unbeknownst to you is specifically for like you or a tiny slice
⏹️ ▶️ John of the population, but it looks just like the thing they fed you from People Magazine, As far as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned, you’d never be able to distinguish the AI-generated, like the average person, never
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to distinguish the AI-generated content from the real people magazine content because they are really kind of at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John level. And they both fulfill the same need. The problem, of course, is if the AI-generated thing is just completely
⏹️ ▶️ John made up BS that is filled with lies, or for example, a podcast discussing
⏹️ ▶️ John an article that misses all of the major points of the article. That’s not great, but maybe people won’t notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But still, I think a large effect that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are already having with generative AI and LLMs that will continue to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get even more severe in the future is there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media out there that is formulaic and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low personality and is mostly being used to just generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff for that for people to consume in mediocrity. I think there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be a lot of AI stuff that will replace that like a lot of AI generation will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace a lot of that mediocrity and this is going to be a large theme of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AI age in general that there’s a huge amount of mediocrity out there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be easily automated and the results will be good enough or better and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this this This blew my mind when I heard it because it’s way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I would have guessed. It’s not great, but it’s way better than I thought it could be at this stage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I very much agree. When I heard the one that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody had done, I forget, I will put a link in the show notes, but somebody had done one of these about a subject that I knew nothing about and I only listened the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first couple minutes and I was gobsmacked by how real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sounded. And yes, if you really pay attention and if you really listen, if you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey active listening or whatever, you can tell that it’s probably not real. But note that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said probably because genuinely, if I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was listening to AI, I would have thought that these were typical but not terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skilled podcasters. And the ums and the inflections—or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe they weren’t ums, but the inflections and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. And there’s not, it’s not just monotone, right? And they play off each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other well. And it sounds real. Certainly at a glance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would argue, unless you’re really, really, really paying attention, it sounds real. I was stunned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at how real it sounds. I could not, and I still can’t believe it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yes, you know. That part
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t new, by the way. Like, they’ve been able to do people speaking like this. And obviously the text from LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John all been around for a while now. The new thing that I think is impressive about this is understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John of the podcast format. How do I make it? And I know it sounds silly. It’s like, how do I make a podcast out of this? It’s clear that this has been
⏹️ ▶️ John trained on how podcasts are structured right down to like, hey, we’re going to talk about this article.
⏹️ ▶️ John First, we’re going to talk about, like, we’ll give you an overview of the article. Then we’re going to get into some of the details. And then after that, we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John spin off into a more freeform discussion on ideas from there. Like, that is the structure of a podcast discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what this model knows. And if you haven’t heard voices like this before, you’re impressed by the intonation
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But previously, this same type of voice would be saying things, but it wouldn’t sound like a podcast because it would just
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, look, we can make this voice recite this passage from the book and it sounds very expressive and it does ums
⏹️ ▶️ John and ahs and aren’t you fooled by it? Like this is the whole like origin of all the deepfake stuff is out there. But this one is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess they just fed it the transcripts or the audio of podcasts, however they did it. It definitely gets the
⏹️ ▶️ John structure and the vibe of a podcast, despite the content being terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the thing, like, you know, obviously you’re going to be, I think, a more critical evaluator than many.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the thing about all these, like when Casey was saying he listened to one that was about a topic he didn’t know about, that’s the danger of these. The whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of LLMs is, like, you know, like pets and many other things, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to fool humans into thinking that, like, there’s a spirit living in the tree or the chair
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Like, we will personify anything. And so it’s so easy to fool
⏹️ ▶️ John us into thinking that that’s a real person expressing real things and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the worst when the content is in it has no rhyme or reason
⏹️ ▶️ John other than just a bunch of statistical probabilities. And so you end up listening to a podcast about a topic you knew nothing about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at the end of it, your head is filled with completely false information because the accuracy of the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John is not really important at all. And you’re like, well, it was a person saying it to me, so I really totally
⏹️ ▶️ John believe it. I guess that’s the truth and it’s like no not even close and that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I feel like it’s the utility is potentially somewhat limited it’s like we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about the summarization of notifications once you rely on this
⏹️ ▶️ John or like studying for a test once there’s like a Once there is a measurement to to like
⏹️ ▶️ John that you compare against like okay But the summary of my notifications has to be accurate. Otherwise, it’s useless
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, but this study guide needs to tell me the correct capital of Minnesota, because when I enter it on the test, if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s wrong, I can’t say, well, that’s what the LLM said, because there actually is a right answer, and the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John of this study guide is to let me know the right answer. The purpose of the study guide is not to fool me into thinking that this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good study guide, because I’ve thought that right up to the point until I took the test. And so I would say, podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John are somewhere in the middle. Like, do you care if this podcast about avocados is full of lies? I bet there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John plenty of real podcasts about avocados that are full of lies. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But right until you
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the point of like, even something as simple as, oh, iPhone summarize my notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s not accurate, the stakes are still low, but suddenly now you’re mad and now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not impressed by the intonation and the ums of the voice that was reading you the thing. You’re like, well, what the hell? If you’re not gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John accurate about the summaries of my thing, I’m just gonna turn this feature off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ve been living with the notification summaries on 18.1 for the last week or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find them very useful. Even when they are not always right, I think I find them very useful. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I listen to notebook LM generated podcasts about things I do know about, I find their error rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be about the same as people podcasts covering the same topics. I really do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like, this is closer than you think to human accuracy. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, podcasts are somewhere in the middle. You’re not being tested on them. And in the end, you knowing false
⏹️ ▶️ John information on a lot of contexts isn’t that big a deal, but like notifications, that’s an annoyance question
⏹️ ▶️ John of like whether you’re annoyed when it gets things wrong, but like study guides, now we’re starting to get into like, it actually kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of matters if it gets it right, because I don’t want to study incorrect information. That’s just gonna make me mad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then obviously you crank that up into like, you know, let this LLM control the surgery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine, yeah. No, my, at this point, my only problem with Apple’s, Apple’s summarization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Apple Intelligence beta so far, and this is a big problem, is that there is
⏹️ ▶️ John For you to, as an app developer, to try to make the summaries better?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me to use them at all in my app, like for example. Yeah, it’s applied to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, in mail, it can show in the table list there a summary of each message. Right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do that in my app. Yeah. And the most infuriating thing, Apple sent a developer email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like two weeks ago saying bring Apple intelligence to your apps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single thing the email suggests that you do is not Apple intelligence. They’re just using that to brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Here’s our ML features that we’ve had for years. Use this. Here’s Spotlight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try to use that, we guess. All of the Apple intelligence features that they’re advertising everywhere else as Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not available in any APIs to any developers right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John But by doing like the Spotlight thing, that feeds into their semantic model on the phone and everything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not yet. It doesn’t, it might someday. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’ve got to do it. It’s chicken egg. They want you to do it. So when they roll that out, the data’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. This is like the biggest Apple development on iOS, in iOS’s history,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that only Apple can use. They have opened up zero of it. There’s no API for any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. And that makes me very angry. Anyway, but besides that, I like them. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big thing that I will keep harping on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, we talked about this on past shows, you can disable those summaries, both
⏹️ ▶️ John on an individual app basis, and I think also globally if you don’t like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I live with them for a couple days before you do. I have found them to be very useful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and accurate enough to be useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you know I’m gonna. I’m the one who asked my three different voice assistants the same questions
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all day. You know I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann gonna. I’m gonna be able to. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I’d question the utility for people who aren’t doing what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and QA Wolf. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. One of the member perks is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, a weekly bonus segment that is available exclusively to members. This week’s Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll be talking about school cell phone bans and kids and cell phones and kind of the parenting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and school decisions and legal decisions around whether your kid should have a phone in school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll talk about that in overtime. You can join a list in atb.fm slash join. Thanks for listening everybody and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S That’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Accidental, check
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer podcast so long
“Fire up those stoves”
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Right, get ready to fire up those stoves because today we’re diving into something seemingly simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann but surprisingly nuanced. John Syracuse’s legendary basic
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann pasta sauce. You wouldn’t think a simple tomato sauce would require such a deep dive.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Right. But trust me, Syracuse approaches this recipe with almost philosophical
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann reverence.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer What’s
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann fascinating is how he breaks it down into this soft,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco No, you sure don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Emphasizing that the ingredients the process and the time all hold equal weight, okay
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer He argues you can’t just nail one of these elements you have to treat them all with equal importance,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann okay? So it’s like three-legged stool no neglect one leg and the whole thing collapses
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer Oh, no, he goes deep especially on the San Marzano tomatoes
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer He could have just said, use canned tomatoes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer no, he practically wrote a dissertation
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann on finding the perfect San Marzano.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann For those of us who haven’t quite reached that level of tomato enthusiasm,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann what is it about these San Marzanos? What makes them so special?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer They have this unique combination of
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann low
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John acidity, a natural
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer sweetness, and a meaty texture, which makes them ideal for a well-balanced, flavorful
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer sauce. However, Syracuse is also realistic. He knows
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer finding truly authentic San Marzano’s can be a challenge. He even links to this hilarious
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer video where he’s case testing different brands.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer And some
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann of them are
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer atrocious.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Oh man, I’ve got to see this video. It’s like finding out your favorite band has been lip syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer this whole
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer they generate that for us? He
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer does say a good San Marzano style
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John tomato
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer you enjoy is better than an authentic one you don’t. Right. Exactly. And that actually ties into his
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer whole
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco philosophy
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer about understanding the ingredients.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco I
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer ultimately trusting your own judgment.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann There’s that trust element again, just like with the sauce trinity. You have to trust your gut,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John which leads us perfectly to the next part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann trinity. They’re really adding a lot to this, because this is not that much text. And Syracuse gets real about the anxiety of burning
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann the sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer He does, he even points to a clean pot as a mark of success. People stop being polite, start getting real about
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer burning
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann the sauce. Reference acknowledged.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Low and slow cooking.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann He says a burned sauce ruins the entire batch, which
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer does give
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John us a fear
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann we’ve all experienced in the kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John I hope you all
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer experienced it. What’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann science behind this low and slow approach?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Low heat allows the flavors to develop
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John and evenly without that
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer harshness you get from high heat. And it prevents burning, which can ruin the flavor of the whole sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer He’s also a stickler for stirring, not just letting it simmer on its own.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann So it’s about being engaged in the process, not just letting
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer it
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Marco simmer unintentionally. He doesn’t want us
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann to just go off and
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Marco watch TV while the sauce simmers, does he?
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to try so angry
⏹️ ▶️ John, Google NotebookLM Announcer if someone wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John like this or it’s like top of mind because my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Google NotebookLM Announcer daughter’s doing college essays. Forget
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer it kind of sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John Get out the red pen. Speaking of being
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer present and engaged.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John Let’s talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Syracuse’s very specific instructions on fresh herbs.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Oh yes. The fresh factor as I like to call it. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer very
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John clear about wanting everybody calls
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it only fresh parsley and basil chopped right before they go into the pot.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer He is. And I love how he emphasizes not refrigerating the basil saying it dulls the flavor.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann It’s like he wants to capture the essence of these herbs at their peak.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And that little tip about storing parsley in a glass of water like a bouquet of flowers. So simple yet
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann brilliant.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John So brilliant.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer But why all the fuss about fresh herbs? I’m the first
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer person to ever think of that. Can’t we just use the dried stuff? He would argue, and I’d have to agree that it makes a world of difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer See, fresh
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John herbs have these volatile oils that give them a vibrant,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer almost nuanced flavor, which you just don’t get with dried
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco herbs. I love this method of torture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for John. Have somebody poorly summarize your own content back to you. Speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John celery, let’s talk about the most curious kind of recipe, the whole onion. This is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann that had me completely buzzed. He
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John instructs us to add a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann peeled onion
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann the sauce, but then we just discard it at the end. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer like a culinary magic trick.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco Even though you’ve never actually
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer seen it, it infuses the sauce with this really subtle depth of flavor.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann So it’s like a secret ingredient that disappears, leaving behind its essence.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer It’s a classic technique to
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John add a subtle layer of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer without overpowering the other flavors. Think of it like using a bay leaf. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer eat it, but it subtly enhances the overall taste.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Mind blown. It’s like Jesus is teaching us to think beyond. Jesus. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann when it comes to something as basic as an onion. Now his actual cooking process seems
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann pretty straightforward, wouldn’t you say?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer It is, but straightforward doesn’t mean foolproof.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann This is longer
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John than the recipe, way longer. Yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Google NotebookLM Announcer is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann Time.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Ah, yes, the simmer. He does have some specific guidelines about that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer He
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer does. He recommends simmering for one to two hours, which seems pretty standard for a good tomato sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer But then he
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John throws in this
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer interesting curveball. He says he often finds less is more.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann Wait, hold on. So it’s not like baking
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann where you absolutely need to follow the recipe to the letter? You’re telling me he’s cool with me eyeballing it?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann That’s classic Syracuse of you. Not you, AI
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer The man could explain the nuances of drying herbs and make it sound like a suspense thriller.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John No. He emphasizes the use of the sauce
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann as
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer it simmers because overcooking can make it bland. Wow. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann I’m blown.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer The longer
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann you cook it, the more flavorful it gets.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer That’s what’s so great about Syracuse’s approach. He encourages you to trust your instincts, not just the
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John clock. Your instincts. No, I definitely do not encourage
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann that.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Start adding those optional meat additions.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Right, we briefly touched on the meatballs and sausage before.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann How does simmering time come into play when you’re adding those to the mix?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Well now you’re not just simmering for flavor, you’re also making sure those meats are cooked through. And of course Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer has some very specific thoughts on this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann I bet he does. Does he have a size guideline for the meatballs?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer He does. He actually compares them to sports equipment. He says
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John they should be bigger than a golf ball,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Marco but smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann than a tennis ball, This predates the weight.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer With a billiard ball being the absolute
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann maximum size. Only Syracuse could use sports equipment as a meatball size guide. Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann What’s the reasoning behind this?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer It all comes back to that final element of the sauce trinity time.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John The
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer larger the meatball, the longer it will take to cook through.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann 3.5 ounce balls. And you don’t want to end up with undercooked meat
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann in your sauce. Safety first. So it’s all about finding that balance between simmering
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann long enough to develop those deep, rich flavors, but not so long that you end up with a bland
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann or even worse undercooked sauce. It’s a delicate dance, but clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John a rough mastery. Undercooked? Why are we cooking it so
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann long we get undercooked? It really highlights how even a seemingly simple sauce requires a certain level of attention
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer It does. And that’s what makes Syracuse’s approach so fascinating. He doesn’t just throw a recipe at you.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer He guides you through the process and encourages
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John you to
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why. Someone needs to feed this model more podcasts where they trash
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann something. Because they’re already so positive.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It’s about trusting your senses and your instincts.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Marco You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell they’re not trained on our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Marco exactly. Mind blown.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann What final thoughts would you leave our listeners with as they embark on their own pasta making adventures?
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer I’d say use this recipe as a starting point, a foundation upon which to build your own culinary
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer masterpiece. Don’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann afraid to experiment with different tomatoes,
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer maybe try and mix up herbs, or even adjust the simmering time to suit your taste.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann So just like he trusts us to find the perfect San Marzano, he’s also giving us permission to make this
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann recipe our own.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer Precisely.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann That’s about discovering what brings you joy
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer in the kitchen. Cooking shouldn’t feel like a chore. It should
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, John be a
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann celebration of flavors and
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer creativity.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John This
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer is just, again, from Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann or other recipe pages. And on that note, I think we’ve given our listeners plenty to chew on today.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Google NotebookLM Announcer Indeed. Chew on her. Even though the nuances of San Marzano
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer tomatoes, the importance of low and slow cooking, the magic
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann of a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer onion, and the empowering
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer, Jonathan Mann realization
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer that even a basic pasta sauce can be a platform for culinary exploration.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Who knew there was so much to unpack in a simple tomato sauce? A huge thank you to our
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann expert for guiding us through this delicious deep dive.
⏹️ ▶️ Google NotebookLM Announcer The pleasure was all mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And to our listeners, we hope this episode inspires you to approach all your culinary endeavors with a newfound appreciation
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann for the process, the details, and the joy of creating something truly delicious.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Until next time, happy cooking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Happy cooking, John. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re so miserable. It just like, it makes things worse. It’s the magic power of
⏹️ ▶️ John like making anything worse by having those people try to explain it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But see, there is a market for like, talk to me about this thing for a few minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody wants that. They just want the recipe. You know, even when they go to the recipe, They don’t want to hear the big story. It’s like, just give me the ingredients