615: A Mildly Brisk Walk
26 Nov 2024Casey’s adventures in sports piracy, John’s loss of apes, and Marco’s visions of pores.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: All John’s apes gone
- Follow-up:
- Casey has found yet new ways to make himself miserable
- Sunday Ticket updates
- TV Everywhere
- An alternative approach
- DAZN
- NFL Replay
- Tailscale and Exit Nodes
- Concert for One: Raye
- Using large external drives with macOS
- Photos library
- An anecdote from Marc Wickens
- Booting from an external
- Downloading large App Store apps
App Store→Settings
- Competition for the wall-mounted
HomePad
(via Alesh Houdek) - Apple Intelligence notification summaries
- Casey has found yet new ways to make himself miserable
- DOJ says Google must sell Chrome
- Gurman on a “more conversational Siri”
#askatp:- Can one push computation onto the performance cores? (via Andrew Hodgson)
- Why are apps getting so big? (via James Wilby)
- Post-show: Thanksgiving logistics
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Services on macOS
- Łukasz Rutkowski’s toot in Sean Heber’s thread
- Services on macOS
- Making a system-wide service
ThisService(now defunct)- In Automator
- Save your
.workflowfiles in~/Library/Services/ - To assign a keyboard shortcut:
System Settings→Keyboard→Keyboard Shortcuts(button) →Services(sidebar) →Text(list section)
- Save your
- FastScripts
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Chapters
- All John’s apes gone
- Adventures in remote TV
- Vision Pro: Concert for One
- Sponsor: Aura Frames (code ATP)
- External drives with macOS
- WallPod vs. iPad
- Bad notification summaries
- Sponsor: Uncommon Goods
- DOJ v. Google
- A(nother) new Siri?
- Sponsor: MasterClass
- #askatp: Get P-cores to spin up
- #askatp: Why are apps so big?
- Ending theme
- Thanksgiving logistics
All John’s apes gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here in the show document that we use, you know, just internally, we have a section for pre-show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it says in here, all John’s apes gone. I don’t know what that means, but I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve had a real bad, like, NFT-related loss or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what it means, then. You got it. Wait, what? Are you being serious? All my apes gone. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any NFTs, but it’s close. Did you at any time have any NFTs? I never had
⏹️ ▶️ John any. I still don’t. Um, it’s a funny meme.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sure I ever even knew like where even if I wanted to buy which I never did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know how to buy an NFT like where do you go? You didn’t miss out on anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Miss out on being scammed a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John probably well put the know your memes link in there. I think it’s like some person who Tweeted about
⏹️ ▶️ John losing all their ape NFTs all my apes gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh look at that Oh, I did better than I expected look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as usual Marco isn’t seen it
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, all my apes are gone. All
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my apes gone, not are gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what does this mean? You lost all of your zero NFTs
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had? Yeah, so I’ve never done NFTs and I’ve never been into cryptocurrency
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just not been my thing and there’s many bad things about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But about a decade ago, there was some cryptocurrency thing that was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, sign up for our website, we’ll give you 10 imaginary, you know, crypto
⏹️ ▶️ John coin things or whatever. And I signed up and I got 10 imaginary crypto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I’m sorry, isn’t imaginary crypto, isn’t that redundant?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, whatever. Like it’s just, I don’t even know if it’s, if it was a proof of stake or a proof
⏹️ ▶️ John of work one. It might’ve been a proof of stake one or something or it might not even have been crypto. I don’t even understand it. It was like someone
⏹️ ▶️ John just said, hey, sign up for this thing. It’s free. You get free whatevers. And I did. And I got free whatevers.
⏹️ ▶️ John worthless and and I ignored them. Uh and then around
⏹️ ▶️ John uh 2021 Coinbase was uh popular and there’s all these these
⏹️ ▶️ John like websites that are like come here and manage your cryptocurrency and I was like I should get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff can I just like sell it and get whatever meager amount of money it’s worth or something so I
⏹️ ▶️ John transferred all of my uh you know crypto whatever stuff to Coinbase
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was It was just so worthless and the transaction fees were high enough and I was like, I don’t know, who cares, I don’t wanna deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John this. So I ignored it again. And then in 2022, I think like the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who ran Coinbase were like under investigation for crimes or something. I’m shocked.
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, I don’t know if I want my, should I, I should just get my stuff out of
⏹️ ▶️ John Coinbase because who knows what’s going on with it. And so anyway, I just, I transferred it back out Coinbase and
⏹️ ▶️ John back onto wherever it came from originally. And then I ignored it some more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re probably committing some kind of tax fraud here. Like when you got your free whatever, did you report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their value of nothing to the IRS?
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I did. It was so small. I really, I told it to my accountant
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s been accounted for and it is, you know, worth so little that it doesn’t matter. But yes, in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome. See, that’s why I thought this was my fault is because last I heard, you were using the the same tax accountant that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am. And I thought maybe it was because of her that you had to like divest and it created
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of problems, but it sounds like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my fault yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, she just wanted to know what I had and I gave her all the accounting of the worthless stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it’s like, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John all I’ve been doing is moving it around, like no things are happening, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so with the upcoming change in presidential administration in our country, the crypto
⏹️ ▶️ John folks are all going wild. It’s like, woohoo, there’ll be no laws so we can do anything we want. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John all the cryptocurrency is going up in value. I’m like, all right, so this is a good time. I really just need to get rid of this. Like, I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying and taxes to do anything with it to me, but it’s just like, I just want to not have it
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. So let me just get it and cash out whatever amount it’s worth, just so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to keep like reporting it or whatever. And so I went to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s all gone. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, did I lose track of where I put it? Because I hadn’t looked at it in a while. Like, maybe I just don’t know. Was it
⏹️ ▶️ John in Coinbase? No, I’m pretty sure I removed it from Coinbase. It should be back in the thing. I looked at it. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, the good thing about blockchain is it records all the transactions. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey only is it all gone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was all gone two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, so where did it go?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John How did this happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Two years ago, someone stole it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve known it for two years. That’s special. How did they steal it? I mean, I presume you don’t know the
⏹️ ▶️ John no. How did they steal it? Most likely, what you’re supposed to actually do with this stuff is have it in some place
⏹️ ▶️ John like Coinbase or have it in a hardware wallet where you have multi-factor authentication and all that other stuff. And I never wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a crypto hardware wallet. And when it was in Coinbase, it was probably the safest
⏹️ ▶️ John place that it has ever been, because at least there, they have a multi-factor login and everything. But where it originally
⏹️ ▶️ John came from, the only thing there was, was your public address, which is this big long
⏹️ ▶️ John string of crap, and your super secret key that you’re supposed to tell nobody, which is this big long string of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John And their website was like, hey, do you want to see what your balance is? You should
⏹️ ▶️ John really have your money in one of these wallets or these things or whatever. But if you don’t have it in any of these wallets, you can just look at your
⏹️ ▶️ John balance by putting your super secret string in here. And then there’s all these scary warnings, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should never actually do this. Never paste your secret key into a web page. This is bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should use a wallet. And for the past 10 years, I’ve been like, ah, it’s fine. I’ve just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco super secret key into the text
⏹️ ▶️ John field on web pages. And at some point in the past 10 years, I must have pasted that secret
⏹️ ▶️ John key into the wrong web page at the wrong time, or one of these websites was compromised or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then someone just harvested that thing and took all my money two years ago, and I didn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Oh my God, until now. So yeah, thus ends my cryptocurrency
⏹️ ▶️ John adventure. 10 years of owning a bunch of worthless coins that I was hoping to cash out
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, maybe $100 or something. And it turns out I can’t even do that. The only good thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the person cashed out two years ago when it was worth even less than it is now. So they got nothing from me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they did, the account that got stuff stole money from like lots of people and they cashed out for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, $400,000 or something. Mine was just a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny drop in that bucket was my coins.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so how much would it have been worth? Did you do that computation?
⏹️ ▶️ John It would have been a couple hundred bucks, but you know, it was never real money. We got it for free.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was just a burden. I probably paid more in having my accountant keep track of it over
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco these years than I would have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John if I, I don’t know. I think you just report like that you have it and then it’s the end of it. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Thus ends my barely voluntary cryptocurrency adventure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It ends with it all getting stolen because I pasted my super secret key into webpages.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let that be a lesson for you. Don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, something tells me you are neither the first person to have all your cryptocurrency stolen, nor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first person to have lost money with cryptocurrency. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think you’re-
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they get stolen all the time. That’s the whole, all my apes gone thing. How do people lose their apes? Like it’s so easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like your security practices have to be better than ignoring all the warnings,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what I was doing. And it’s a very attractive target because if someone can steal
⏹️ ▶️ John it from you, there’s no recourse. It’s like, well, they’ve got it now. They’re totally anonymous. You don’t know who they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have all taken it and transferred it and cashed out. And so it’s like, you know, it’s not, there’s no,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s none of the things that are in our current financial systems like FDIC or like
⏹️ ▶️ John credit card chargebacks or all this, There’s all sorts of other things that give you some kind of out or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, a large transfer is triggering fraud notices and
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff. But none of that stuff exists in the crypto world. So if they can, if someone can find a way to steal it from you,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s free and clear to them. So kudos to the person who stole my cryptocurrency and cashed out
⏹️ ▶️ John when the price was much less than it is now. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it says all the security of a giant pile of cash and with no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you to protect it really from anybody on the entire internet. Like, that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I would have noticed if a giant pile of cash was stolen two years ago, but the fact that I didn’t even notice this for two years
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing is, it was stolen in November. So I’m like, Oh, it just happened two days ago. It’s because the prices are I look at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the data. Oh no, 2022. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, just to be clear, we appreciate those of you writing emails and tweets and whatnot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to correct any of the things we just said. Uh, we don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, just to be clear, we don’t all appreciate. Casey appreciates it. I don’t even appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John those emails.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re writing to tell us how awesome crypto is, you can save your time. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not for me. Maybe you can send them all to Casey because he appreciates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s not for me either. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, to be clear, that was a bless your heart kind of we appreciate. Bless your heart for writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that email, but don’t send it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the reason I was keeping it for all those years is because it just seemed like a ha- like turning it into real money seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just like had more consequences and it’s like the only way I care about this is if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John as people putting in the chat room like that person who bought a pizza for
⏹️ ▶️ John 10,000 Bitcoin and it would be worth like a billion dollars now or whatever I’m like I’ll just keep it this for the rest of my life and maybe when I’m 80 it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be worth a billion dollars or it’ll just disappear and turns out it It was the second one just disappeared.
Adventures in remote TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. And we have a decent amount of follow-up with regard to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adventures in remote television. Where we last left our heroes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m not mistaken, was that my friend in southwestern Connecticut had nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for TV service, over-the-air TV service at his house. And so we were trying to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some ways to get around this problem, mitigate it, et cetera. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first step that my friend was kind enough to take was to go visit his parents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey His parents live in New Milford, which coincidentally is right next to where I grew up. And he took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the antenna over there in the HD Home Run and had the HD Home Run scan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or have the antenna in the HD Home Run work in concert to scan and see what over the air channels they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got in New Milford rather than in the town in which my friend lives. And would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either of you like to guess how many channels we were able to receive in New Milford?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number? Oh no, literally zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Literally zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John Connecticut is not known for its amazing radio signal reception.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So that was a no-go. So the next thought we had was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right, what if we used TV Everywhere? And I could have my friend Sean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sign into his cable account on my channel server, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully that would give us his local channels. And when you would do this via the internet, TV Everywhere is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember Movies Everywhere, or Movies Anywhere, or whatever it was called, where you would, oh, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you buy physical media and then you can plug in a code and you will get a license, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the same movie on maybe Apple TV or whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the specifics don’t matter, you get the idea. TV Everywhere is kind of, in a spiritual similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense, you sign in with your cable provider’s credentials and you get access to all the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least a subset of, if not all of the channels, that you subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. And so I thought this is gonna work out great for both of us. He enters his credentials
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the online portal. Like I am not involved with this whatsoever. He doesn’t have to make me a child account, so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even literally perhaps. Everyone will be happy. It’ll work out great. And we did that and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked. And the channels goes and tries to find the lineup of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that it’s called channels. hate that it’s called channels. The channels app tries to fight Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV plus playing Apple TV on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it goes to figure out what television channels are accessible and available to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the good news is it found hundreds. The bad news is none of the local channels were included.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No good there either. So Marco, at this point, you should start to get a cold sweat because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point in our story, hardware was coming to your house, baby. You didn’t know it yet. But it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, I did offer because that does seem like it would make the most sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You did, and you were very kind about it. And even came back and asked me or gave a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggestion or something like that a couple of days later. So that was very kind of you. But a handful of listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reached out and Stephen was the first person, not Hackett, different Stephen, was the first person that I saw reach out and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, you know, if you were to enter the internet at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a place in the New York metro area, say, my friend Sean’s house in southwestern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connecticut, you might find that if you go to, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CBS’s website, and just try to watch their programming, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find that you get the local football game, which might so happen to be the New York Giants.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why I didn’t think of this. But yes, that’s exactly what I should have been doing this whole damn time. I didn’t need the HD home run. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t need the antenna. All I needed was this little Noc, you know, this little baby PC up at Sean’s house, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I can do. And thanks to the magic of Tailscale, who is not sponsoring the show, but I love it so damn much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I turned my iPad on to the… I used the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connecticut PC as an exit node, which is what Tailscale calls, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re routing all of your traffic through a different computer. So I got on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet by way of Connecticut, went to CBS.com, or actually I think I used the app on my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it doesn’t matter. And sure enough, it wanted to play me a a perfectly crisp feed of the New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey York Giants. And so hypothetically, this should work for CBS. I mean, it just did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understood that it works for Fox, and we’ll see about ABC and NBC. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this makes way more sense than anything I was trying so far, and I feel like a dunce for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not having thought of it. So thank you to Steven and a handful of others who reached out as well to point that out to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a couple other options, but any thoughts or commentary at this point?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is kind of amazing, like, that, you know, just like the answer of basically like just use a VPN.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, no one thought of that last week. Like we didn’t think of it, you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think of it. That is kind of funny. I know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know. It’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John People in the chat room talked about VPNs last week. I was still just thinking, why don’t you just pay for this, Casey, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so with that in mind, there are some options if you want to pay for it. One or two people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Europeans or people who are American expats in Europe, reached out to point out there is a service,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s called Dazen. I don’t really know, but it’s D-A-Z-N. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a service that is not available to Americans, but perhaps if you had a VPN where you were exiting the internet in Europe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might be able to sign up for it. And I don’t know how much it costs, but this is a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give that company, which in turn gives the NFL, your money so that you can stream the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NFL games from the internet. This is of questionable legality, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on account of the fact that you’re masquerading in Europe, but hey, I’m also masquerading in Connecticut, so who am I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to throw stones? I haven’t really looked into this much because I don’t think it’s necessary now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, if you’re gonna pirate it, don’t pay someone else to help you pirate it, just pirate it. Or if you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay for it, pay for the real thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right, right, right. So anyway, that’s an option. Then Chris H pointed out to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me that there are, there is a package that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exists through the NFL in America that will let you watch replays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the games. And I guess they’re not, they’re put online for you to watch not too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long after the game ends. So you can do that. And that is the far more affordable $100
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a season instead of the like several hundred dollars it is for full Sunday ticket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tend to want to watch them live, but this is a genuinely very good option if you’re willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give up on watching them live, which I really appreciate. Then there are a couple of things with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to YouTube TV, I was under the impression that you must have a full-on YouTube TV subscription in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get Sunday Ticket. That is incorrect. That is a misunderstanding on my part. You do not need a full-on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube TV sub to get Sunday Ticket. You can do that separately. Additionally, since we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late in the season, it’s worth noting that Sunday Ticket is just 90 bucks for the next,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, couple of weeks until the season’s basically over, which is something that’s interesting to me, but still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like that’s a temporary bandaid on a larger problem. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally, I was also very perturbed because this past Sunday, you were supposed to get NFL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday ticket for free, just for one day. So, you know, you can get a taste of it or whatever. And if you recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my parents are YouTube TV subscribers. That is legitimately how they get their television. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I have a child account off of their family and every, every,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every great once in a while, I will tune into YouTube TV for some reason or another. It’s extremely rare though. But I thought, okay, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my moment. I will turn on YouTube TV and I will go and I will go to watch the Giants. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said, no. Huh? And it didn’t work on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought, okay, I’ll do it on my iPad. Didn’t work. Couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t figure it out. Kept saying, I need to buy it, need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy it. And I’m looking at an email that says, oh, it’s free on this past Sunday. It turns out it was free on this past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday as long as you’re not on any Apple or mobile device. Which is like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hell is the point then? I guess if I had installed it on my TV, you know, like my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart TV, my LG OLED and whatever, I guess maybe it would have worked, but such an odd restriction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, yes, you can watch Sunday Ticket as long as you’re not using any of the things that you desire to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to watch it. Yep, sounds great. So yeah, that is my adventures in television. We’ll see what happens. I guess I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t even know the next time the Giants play, and they are so abysmally bad this year. It’s, I don’t even know why I’m going through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these efforts. It’s just a project at this point, but nevertheless, that is my update. And I know you both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are very relieved to have received it. sports sports ball baby All right.
Vision Pro: Concert for One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco I have assigned you this is two consecutive weeks. I’ve assigned you vision Pro homework and sorry not sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you did you or did you not do your homework?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did indeed do my homework
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very proud of you. So the homework this week was concert for one ray.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s our a ye She is a singer artist etc from London
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is a nine ish minute video in the spirit of the Alicia Keys thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where the Alicia Keys thing I think it was like half an hour 45 minutes or something like that And this was, like I said, nine minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s a nine-minute performance in a studio. I think it was recorded in London, if I’m not mistaken. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Ray and a backing band, including strings and backup singers and traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instruments that you would expect in a band. And I was curious to hear your thoughts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if you prefer me to start, I can start, doesn’t matter to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You go ahead, I’m curious to hear yours first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so this, like I said, eight, nine minutes. I had heard of Ray before, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had never heard any of their music. And so I didn’t know what to expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is yet another instance where I feel like this happens a lot, or maybe I’m making it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I feel like a lot of times when you see Apple immersive video, one of the first shots, if not the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shot, is like an extreme closeup of somebody’s face. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw this in, not shrinking, excuse me, in Submerged. And we see this here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe over time I will get used to it. Gotta say I don’t love it though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’m infringing on somebody’s personal space by being that close. It kind of, I’m being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little dramatic here, but it- No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not. I have the exact same complaint. You are not being overdramatic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s weird. Like- It gives me the heebie-jeebies. Yeah, like it feels like, okay, you are like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these shots start out so close that you can like see the person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pores on their face. You can see the stubble where they shave. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, it’s too close. Like, it is way closer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than anybody would ever stand. And because you have the VR 180 format, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immersive format, you are seeing it in 3D, huge, life-size, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front of you, it looks like you are there. And therefore, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks and feels like you are standing way too close to this stranger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it feels, and like, as, I mean, look, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle-aged men, who try to be conscientious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the realities of the world, I take extra precautions to try to make sure I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not creeping anybody out. Like, I don’t, I would never in a million years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand that close to a stranger. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never anything I would do. And so it feels really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off putting. And I think they are, they’re obviously doing it to show off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’re, they’re doing it to wow you so that you will say, Oh my God, look how sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. It feels like I’m here. And I think it’s one of these things that they will grow out of. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope if this, if this platform ever gets a chance to mature, I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the first things that will change as it matures is like they will stop getting so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damn close to everyone’s like faces and necks and bodies because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. Do you think it might be like the train coming out of the movie screen when people first saw
⏹️ ▶️ John movies and were worried the train was going to run them over? Do you feel like you’re that audience in the movie theater with the train coming at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. It’s not as much like scared. It’s just it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am infringing on somebody’s personal space.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m not saying the feeling. I’m saying the idea that when the people first experience that so the story goes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they thought all the train’s gonna come out of the movie screen and hit me, but obviously as sophisticated movie viewers who grew up with movies,
⏹️ ▶️ John we never had that experience. We didn’t think the train was gonna hit us. Is it because your old
⏹️ ▶️ John flutty duddies and future generations will not be bothered because
⏹️ ▶️ John they will understand it at a more instinctive level that there is not actually a person there, right? Like you’re not actually standing
⏹️ ▶️ John too close to somebody’s recorded video and you’re watching it in the same way that we’re not worried about that. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying this is the case. I’m saying, have you thought about that angle? Do you think that it’s the type of
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where maybe you yourself will never get used to it, but people who grow up with it won’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the same hangups? Or do you think it’s like, this is gonna be bothersome no matter what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it could be either way. I’m leaning toward it maybe, if you are a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey child of the Vision Pro, then I presume it wouldn’t be as bothersome. But for anyone that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any amount of life experience before strapping this thing to your head, I think it’ll be a little bit uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know, but on the plus side, and Marco, you touched on this briefly earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fidelity in this headset is just unbelievable. I mean, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see pores, you can see stubble. It is incredibly crisp, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey astonishingly crisp, or at least to me anyway. And so I really do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate the fidelity of it. I do think that this was kind of fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particular video, because basically imagine that the camera did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move a little bit forward and backward. It did not move laterally at all. And the way the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey musicians were arranged was that to the left and the right of the camera when it was positioned as far back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as possible, there’s a fair bit of space to the left and the right. And then the musicians start in like angled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward the center of the frame. I don’t know if I’m doing a great job describing this, but suffice to say, as you got closer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the back of the stage as you’re watching it, musicians were getting closer and closer to you just by virtue of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way they’re standing or sitting. And that left like this big kind of aisle, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where Ray could move forward and backward. And I feel like deliberate or otherwise, she did a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of playing with that. You know, she would walk forward or walk backward. And again, the camera occasionally moved forward and backward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought that that was kind of neat because I feel like depth means a little bit more in this context than it does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2D movie making. And granted, it still means something there, but I don’t know, it just hits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different. I feel when you’re when you’ve got this immersive and 3d environment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched it with the audio pods or whatever. They’re calling the the strap you know, I did not have air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pods in when I watched it and unlike the weekend music video that we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week, I Didn’t feel like the audio pods did a very good job with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what it was specifically if it just sounded awfully tinny in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way that the weekends didn’t, which is funny because I would argue The Weeknd’s music is inherently more bassy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than than Ray’s, but nevertheless I did this is the first time I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever that I’ve watched something on the Vision Pro that I’ve thought I really should put in AirPods because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is the audio pods and forgive me if I’m calling them the wrong name are astonishingly good at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broadcasting into the open air but kind of pointed at your ears and they sound really good like I’ve watched movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with them I’ve watched you know other short features like this and I’ve never felt it’s a problem until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one performance. I don’t know what it was, which was weird. But that being said, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am, I’m not a musician. Um, the only thing I can play with efficacy is a stereo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, um, I, I don’t know what it’s like to perform music,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do know what it’s like to be around live music. And I’ve been around enough live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music, not an overwhelming amount, but I’ve been around enough that. To me anyway, and I don’t think this is unique
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. There’s something special when a group of musicians,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they’re just cooking, you know, you can just tell that they’re in it, they’re in it. And they’re, they’re, they’re all, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if vibing isn’t the right word and I probably sound like an old man anyway, but it’s just like, they’re all in the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everything’s clicking and everything’s firing and it’s just good. And the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey song that she performed, I feel like toward like the tail end of that song, you could tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone was just cooking and being able to like look around and focus on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instruments that you want to focus on. I know we’ve talked about this before, but that is so fun and so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And God help me, I want to watch every piece of music content in this immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey environment because it’s just so cool. And I came away from it going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, I don’t know who Ray is to, wow, she’s really good and I should explore more of her stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in all, I really, really enjoyed it and I thought it was really good. So Marco, what did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She’s obviously very talented. It wasn’t quite what I would normally choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to listen to, but I enjoyed their performance. I like that, from the technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of view, you mentioned that the camera really was not moving much. It basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would switch between fixed shots. Like it didn’t, it wasn’t, you said you thought it moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during some of the shots? I didn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it did a little bit toward the back of the frame and then backward,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward where you would expect to be sitting. I don’t know how to describe it otherwise, but maybe I made that up, but I could swear that I saw it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move a couple of feet a couple of times. Like I don’t think it was very much and it was very slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not like that crash like dolly zoom that you saw in submerged that kind of made you go, whoa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or the weekend video where it’s like, there’s a lot of motion in the weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, this one, yeah, it was basically switching between a small number of like fixed shots. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s the way to do it. If you want to, cause like this one, I had zero problems with motion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sickness feeling like, like it was totally fine. I’m kind of learning as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a viewer that a better way, like I’m tempted because the 180
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree field of view is so novel, I’m always tempted to look around to see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s on the edges of this frame?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the shot technically, I’m like looking around like what’s on the edges? But the problem is the edges are never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in focus for lots of reasons. I’ve kind of learned that like in order to prevent weird like eye strain and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus issues with my eyes, I’m better off just looking in the middle of the frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole time. Like just let, you know, let the camera framing show me where to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look instead of trying to like look around and get every single edge of every single frame, like to figure out what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on around me. Um, so that I’m kind of learning how to watch it better. And so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have many problems with focus here. The only weird thing about that is like, there are moments where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when it would, you know, the way it was staged was, you know, the artist was in the middle and then she had like her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup instruments on one side and her backup singers on the other side like left and right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like in a line and the problem is that when when they would show either the instruments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the backup singers only one of them would really be in focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’d want to be like oh well that’s that singer sounds pretty good cool but like I kind of want to look at the one behind her too and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there there were kind of weird issues with you know with again selective focus is weird in this format because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think with our eyes, we think we can just focus on anything in the frame, like because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like we are there. And if we were actually there, that’s how our eyes would work. But it’s shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more in that cinematic style where like, you know, the background is all blurry and only the subject is in focus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t expect that from 3D. Like my eyes don’t expect that. My eyes expect that I can focus on anything I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it feels like I am actually in that room. So the immersion is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working in the sense that it is tricking me into thinking that I that my eyes will work the way they would work in real life. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and that’s another one of those kind of technical decisions that I think immersive video might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to reconsider as it matures. Like I think having very shallow depth of field
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably not the right call a lot of the time. If you’re trying to show a whole scene,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really think filmmakers should probably have Very narrow apertures to get very big depth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of field because that’s what we actually expect our eyes to be able to do when we’re watching it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, all that being said, the idea of this series Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting out there where there’s basically like five minute mini concerts being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put on that are specially filmed just for this in a special room, that’s fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think it’s ideal, but it’s fine. I think in an ideal form,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we would get a lot more of these. It would be an actual concert with an actual audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they would be a little more complete shows. Like, you know, give me a whole set. Give me, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least an album worth, give me 45 minutes or something. Like just, instead of like basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s a little snack of content. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all we’re getting on the Vision Pro is little snacks. What that does, first of all, it’s obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep harping on this, like we need more content on the Vision Pro. You can still go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through all of it the first night you have it. But more than that, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you try to capture full concerts, it’s easier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s cheaper. You can just film a concert that’s already happening. Just stick a VR camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a good seat in the middle, like from where the soundboard is. like, you know, usually that’s kind of central,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of midway into the audience. Like, stick a VR camera on the front of that thing. Like, so people can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just see like just a fixed view. Cause like one thing I did think about with this, like because they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly just switching between a small number of fixed camera positions, I realized like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, I would be fine if there was literally just one. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever they would switch to one of the other ones, I wasn’t really gaining anything. I was just getting too close to her pores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, I would be totally fine to just like have a fixed position where I just, where it’s just like you have a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good seat to a concert. And again, I do think having an audience, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would really add to it. Because that’s part of the live music experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there being an audience there and the audience energy and musicians
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perform differently when there’s an audience present than when there isn’t. Obviously those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two very different art contexts and some people can be better than one than they are at the other. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if what you want is the experience of being in a concert, which I think this can probably very well deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s captured that way. If what you want is that experience of being to a concert, this isn’t that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This feels like you are in a room while they’re performing a demo for you. And that’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the music can be interesting, but it’s not a concert experience, really. A concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is other people in the audience and the musicians playing to those people in the audience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not playing to a camera person with nothing else there. So this is a fun experiment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there is so much more they could do. And I hope someday, sometime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually just give us concerts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like the snacks, but I do agree that a concert would be incredible. And all I can think about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, you know, imagine, and maybe this is just me, but imagine MTV Unplugged being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought back, because as far as I know, they haven’t done one in years. But can you imagine Unplugged in this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of environment? Like it would be amazing. And I can imagine that, you know, if Phish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whomever that you’re into, Marco, even if they did exactly what we just saw for eight or 10 minutes, I mean, that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one tenth of one Phish song. But nevertheless, that literally would be a snack. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine how amazing that would be. Like I would kill to see like, you know, Dave Matthews band or, or someone else that I really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this kind of a format. So I don’t, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. I mean, I think more would be better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure, but I’m really digging the idea. Just please Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just pump the brakes a little bit on the extreme closeups.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like, can you, like, it doesn’t even have to, I mean, look, I would love for them to actually record full concerts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are in full size venues that are actually happening with real audience members, but it can even be something a little smaller scale if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do like a halfway point between this and what I’m actually asking for. Look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at things like the NPR Tiny Desk Concerts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of the great gifts to music. I love those. Oh, 100%. They get such great artists there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s such a cool recording environment where, for those who don’t know, just look up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube for Tiny Desk Concert and look for any artists that you’ve even heard of, even ones you haven’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s totally worth seeing because they literally just like host artists in like a part of the NPR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office. And it’s full of like carpets and book shelves that are full of books and everything. So the acoustics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are great. It’s very absorbent acoustic, like there’s no echo, everything sounds very warm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s usually just surrounded by a ring of like all the people who work there just like kind of standing around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the boundaries of like a big square of desks, I guess, listening and clapping. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a small audience, small club feel with amazing acoustics and they get top tier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acts like the really good acts to play these and yeah they play you know five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six songs maybe they’re playing for like a half hour that’s a great format and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing would also I think be a good inspiration of like what can music look like in VR that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give us that make it seem like we are there listening to that that would be wonderful as well if you want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s you know a little bit bit closer than a full concert arena. But there’s so much potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here for just take events that are literally already happening and just put us there, bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us there through a fixed camera. Please more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. I would love tiny desk concerts in this format.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, I think that’s… I don’t know why I didn’t bring it up because I adore tiny desk concerts and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, I think, the modern version of MTV Unplugged. I mean, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco literally unplugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the times, but I think this is the spiritual successor to MTV Unplugged. And coincidentally, Ray
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a tiny desk, which I actually preferred the songs that she performed in concert for one, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still very good. So you can check that out if you wanted to get a taste for her music.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I really, really dig this idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think they’ve perfected it, but it’s off to a great start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost like, I think what I’m hoping for, what we are seeing so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far with what Apple’s producing content wise, is it kind of has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say, the same problem that Apple’s keynote videos now have, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just kind of dripping with too much money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You know what I mean? Like production wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like everything is too amped up, it’s too perfect, it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high budget, it’s too corporate. I don’t know if they have the capability to pull back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that a little bit or to give it a little bit, I’m not saying like spend less money, I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it look like it wasn’t so corporate. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems almost synthetic at a point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As opposed to just, you know, natural for lack of a better way of describing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would call it overproduced especially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah. Like it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it starts losing its humanity and kind of organicness. And when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about what the specs of the new iPhone are, fine, you can do that. But when you’re trying to show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a performance of music, there should be some humanity still left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there. And I feel like Apple’s current style, it squeezes a lot of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. It makes it very high polish, very high production, very high budget, very corporate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling. And part of why I love live music is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how studio albums sound. studio albums sound now very high budget, very production, you know, all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But live music usually is much more human. That’s part of why I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, like this is such a great format to make you feel like you are really there. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this is great at. You feel like you’re really there. And I think what I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like is I am really in a little bit more human environment and a little bit less produced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You don’t want to, you don’t want to be in Johnny Ives white world. No. That’s right. That’s the bad place.
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External drives with macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, welcome back to the show. Can you tell me about using large external drives with macOS, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve been talking about this topic since discussing storage prices and the new Mac minis and the fact that unlike the laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not incredibly inconvenient to use external storage, but oh, how do you deal with that? How do you
⏹️ ▶️ John divide up your stuff between your internal drive and your external drive and what are the limitations?
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things that came up on past episodes was what about my photo library? That’s big. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we discussed it in vague terms because none of us had personal experience with moving the photo library to an external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Turns out Apple has a support document on it, which we will link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John As Apple says, to save storage space on your Mac, you can move your photos library to a different storage device.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there are some caveats, so there’s much more in the document, but just a little taste. You can’t store your library
⏹️ ▶️ John on a storage device used for time machine backups. And to avoid possible data loss, don’t store your library on a removable
⏹️ ▶️ John storage device like an SD card or USB flash drive or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including
⏹️ ▶️ John over a cloud-based storage service. So as always, there are caveats, but Apple says it is officially
⏹️ ▶️ John supported and they can explain to you how. But Mark Wickens wrote in with some personal experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John that show even though it’s officially supported, there are other things that
⏹️ ▶️ John might thwart you. Mark says, I have my photos library and a cheap external SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great, except occasionally the SSD will randomly unmount itself and I’ll have to kill the Photos cloud sync process
⏹️ ▶️ John to get syncing working again after remounting. Or I could just reboot. But it happens about once a month, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bearable and worth it to keep my faster internal SSD reserved for day-to-day work. I can say that
⏹️ ▶️ John OneDrive did not like syncing to its folder in an external SSD. It coincided with various sleep issues
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuck processes. That was over a year ago now, so it might be fixed, but I haven’t risked trying it. This is part of the experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of having stuff in external drives. Everything should be fine, especially if they say it’s officially supported, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you kind have to make sure that external drive stays mounted all the time just like your internal drive would
⏹️ ▶️ John and some programs inexplicably get angry about having their stuff over there
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you kind of have to go on a case-by-case basis to see which ones like it. I still continue to think that booting from
⏹️ ▶️ John the external drive quote-unquote booting from the external drive see past episodes about what’s really happening but anyway booting from an external
⏹️ ▶️ John drive simplifies things greatly because at least your stuff is on the boot drive But
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of that, when I was experimenting with Apple Intelligence in
⏹️ ▶️ John the beta versions of macOS, I was using an external drive on my wife’s Mac Studio to boot that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, to boot from that beta OS. But it wouldn’t let me use Apple Intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got through all the waiting lists or whatever and it said, sorry, Apple Intelligence doesn’t work on an external drive. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John booting from that external drive. And I hope that was just a beta thing. Remember, we discussed it in the showcase.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if you were there. No, I guess not. Yeah, but anyway, I hope that was just like
⏹️ ▶️ John a beta thing or whatever, I didn’t really pay much attention to it. But since we’ve been having this discussion, many, many people have said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would consider booting from an external drive, except if I do that, I don’t get Apple intelligence. So apparently that’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing in the released versions of macOS. Why? I don’t know. It seems like a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John limitation to me, but that’s the thing. So if you care about Apple intelligence, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re booting from that internal drive until Apple changes that. So keep that in mind. And finally
⏹️ ▶️ John on this topic, there’s another thing that came up frequently that I think we alluded to vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John in past episodes if we have more concrete details, to try to save space on
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever SSD you’re booted from. Like if you’re booted from the internal one, but you wanna put stuff somewhere else,
⏹️ ▶️ John in 15.1, in Mac OS 15.1, there is an option in the Mac App Store. If you just go to settings, there’s a checkbox that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John download and install large apps to a separate disk. And the subtext is apps larger
⏹️ ▶️ John than one gigabyte will download and install to the disk that you choose and then you can pick a disk. It’s kind of weird they don’t let you
⏹️ ▶️ John put all the apps over there, just the big ones, and you don’t get to pick that threshold size, but if you’ve got some really big
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, like I can imagine maybe games have a lot of content or I don’t know, other big creative apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, try that setting in the app store to see if you can get your files over there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s for downloading, like for future downloads, I don’t think it moves any of your existing applications
⏹️ ▶️ John over, but I guess you could just try copying them there or just deleting them and redownloading them if you wanted, although if they’re large, that might be kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John onerous. But yeah, part of dealing with an external drive, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you were booted from it, is working out all of these issues. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this sounds like a lot of scary limitations. You’re like, oh, I don’t wanna do that. I guess I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John pay the Apple price for having the big internal thing. That does simplify stuff, but as someone who has had a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of tower Mac computers, where they have had multiple drives installed
⏹️ ▶️ John in them, I know they’re not external drives, technically they’re internal,
⏹️ ▶️ John but from the OS’s perspective, I wonder, I haven’t actually tried this because I can’t use Apple Intelligence on my Intel Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, but someday when I get an ARM-based Mac, if I get one that supports internal storage, I’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John what it thinks about booting from an internal drive that’s connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to some ancillary bus like SATA or something, you know, some slow internal bus.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does Apple Intelligence run? You know, would it say, sorry, you can’t run Apple Intelligence when you boot it from an external disk? And it’d be like, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John external. It’s in the box. Does that count? Lots of weird caveats. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John in all my experience of having many drives inside of my big tower Macs, I’ve been able to freely boot
⏹️ ▶️ John from any of them and it has not made any difference in my life. But of course I’m still in the Intel world. So
⏹️ ▶️ John things are definitely different when it comes to booting on Apple Silicon. And by the time I finally go over to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon, hopefully they’ll have some of these limitations worked out, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you honestly think that your first Apple Silicon Mac is gonna have internal drive bays? Who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows? Who knows? with an M4 Extreme and it comes in the big tower case and
⏹️ ▶️ John I somehow decided to buy it. Odds are against it, but you know, could happen. This is the time where
⏹️ ▶️ John anything could happen. I would it be like $8,000?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Do you remember what he spent on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey His current one is as much as a damn Civic, or was anyway. Now it’s worth as much as a Yugo,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking at someone sent us some feedback about someone was benchmarking one of the dual GPU cards that
⏹️ ▶️ John you could get for my Mac Pro and how amazingly fast it was even compared to like like modern video cards or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were like, oh, and I, you know, I bought this on eBay or whatever. So I did an eBay search to see how much these go for. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, what is it? 6800X Duo, it’s got two Radeon 6800 GPUs on a single card.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could put two of those cards inside my computer. They still go for like $3,000 on eBay. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my God. For each card.
⏹️ ▶️ John you would think like, you would think this stuff, the price would be dropping rapidly because, you know, who wants this? It’s old, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously like, why would you, you know, Someone might need it, I guess, but like still,
⏹️ ▶️ John their original retail price was 5,000 and you can find them on eBay for 4,000, 3,000 in that range. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s not, that’s well above the threshold of me wanting to buy one
⏹️ ▶️ John to experiment with it. It’s only, I think it’s only like almost as fast as an NVIDIA 4090,
⏹️ ▶️ John although if you got two of them, you’d be faster than a 4090. But anyway, yeah, don’t recommend,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s a lot of cool technology And for whatever reason, it’s still not
⏹️ ▶️ John dirt cheap. One other eBay search I have, by the way, is for the bent piece of metal I have holding my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It was like $400,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they made you buy a hard drive with it or whatever. I have an eBay search on that just
⏹️ ▶️ John to see, surely the bent piece of metal that has no electronics in it, surely the price of that will come
⏹️ ▶️ John down from a few hundred bucks. And the answer is no, still. If you find it on eBay, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John being sold for, not just being listed for, or being sold for multiple hundreds of dollars for a
⏹️ ▶️ John bent piece of metal. It’s a wild world out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, for the record, my estimate of $8,000 is definitely wrong because right now the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra is $7,000 if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want some of the GPU cores disabled, or if you actually want the entire GPU power of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 Ultra, it’s $8,000 for the machine. So there is no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if they did an extreme with two ultras next to each other, no way that’s less than 12 grand. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least and possibly more than that, maybe 15 grand to start like it would be ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Odds are against it, but we’ll see. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t, I can’t. I am genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very curious and excited to see what is the final straw that breaks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camel’s back that gets you to buy a new Mac because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not even convinced that being locked out out of new versions of Mac OS is going to be enough to get you to upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the real the real question is what will be the straw that breaks us back to get him to buy a gaming PC? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want a PS5 Pro. I’m not gonna get a gaming PC. My PS5 Pro is great.
WallPod vs. iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lash Hudak writes, regarding the speculated quote unquote low price of $299 for Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home device with a screen, well, a brand new iPad is only $50 more right now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought one a few years ago and stuck it to my fridge. It’s always on with an all widget homepage that shows photos, slideshows,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calendar and weather and has some home controls. It also controls the multi-room Sonos system.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s Apple’s competition. You know, if they’re gonna make a home thing that’s kind of like an iPad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John is much more limited, doesn’t have an app store, hopefully it won’t cost as much as the low-end iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be a weird, I mean, not that Apple hasn’t sometimes had really weird pricing arrangements,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re like, why would anyone buy this when they can get this other better thing from a product line for less money? They’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John that sometimes, but I feel like it really does put a ceiling on the
⏹️ ▶️ John potential sane price for a home thing with a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless it has features that Apple’s iPad doesn’t like. for example, if it comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John very fancy high-fidelity speakers that are better than the ones that come with a $350 iPad. But we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John They keep lowering the price of the bottom-end iPad, and I can’t imagine that the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John in their home device is going to be much more powerful than the low-end iPad. So hopefully that puts a ceiling on their price.
Bad notification summaries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a few weeks ago, I think it was, there were some very, very funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple intelligence notification summaries that I think John had collected. And we will put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey links to these in the show notes, but we wanted to take a quick nickel tour of all of them. A friend of the show, Steve Trout and Smith,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote, sometimes the summary is less helpful than the subject line. So the summary reads, Netflix is sending an email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to remind you about a new movie coming out on Wednesday. And what was summarized? The subject is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wednesday, November 13th, hot frosty. So the subject
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually specified the movie, but the summary did not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well done. That’s the problem with summaries. Like people don’t always, we talked about this before, about subject lines versus summaries and how subject
⏹️ ▶️ John lines can lie to you and be incomplete and people don’t write good subjects. But in the case where
⏹️ ▶️ John there is information in the summary, in the subject line, the summary is trying to summarize not
⏹️ ▶️ John just the subject line, but the the entire email and it is missed out on the thing you might wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John know about. If you’re gonna give me a one line description about a movie that’s coming out soon and they name the movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John name the movie, right? But it’s not a person doing this, it’s just a big bucket of
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers and it didn’t come up with a useful thing. And so in this case, it would have been better just to show the subject line, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t. And this, by the way, this is like, speaking of Apple intelligence doesn’t work on external drives, doesn’t work on my Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, all this other stuff. I would be more bummed about that if I
⏹️ ▶️ John was more jazzed about
⏹️ ▶️ John Intelligence features. Like I’ve tried them on my wife’s Mac, I tried them on my phone and my iPad. Right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John for me personally, the Apple Intelligence features are mostly a technical curiosity and a thing I’m interested in looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at for the purposes of this show. But in my day-to-day life, they’re not exactly wowing me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think, so far, the lack of Apple Intelligence is gonna be a thing that drags me
⏹️ ▶️ John to a new Mac sooner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think that the notification summary is this whole follow-up topic notwithstanding. I think they’re generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty good. They definitely miss from time to time. But by and large, I’ve actually been pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pleased with them. But with that said, Chris Hancock had tweeted, tweeted, whatever, poor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summary of the fight, Siri. So the summary is there are apparently 44 notifications from the New York Times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which were summarized to be Mike Tyson defeated Jake Paul, Israeli aides under investigation for leaks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and record doctoring. The three most recent notifications that it appears that Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summarized read as follows. October 7 leak investigation. Aids to Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are being investigated over accusations of leaks and record doctoring related to the Hamas war. From the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Atlantic, Jake Paul defeated Mike Tyson, not the other way around, via unanimous decision in Netflix’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high-profile boxing showcase. And then finally, from the Atlantic, Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight champion, will soon fight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jake Paul, the YouTuber turned boxer. Follow along live.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exactly what I was talking about with sports results. They can’t get much simpler than a fight. Two people, one of them is the winner.
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. And if you read that summary, you could be forgiven for swiping it away
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not that into it. And just the next day when talking with friends like I can’t believe Mike Tyson beat Jake Paul, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, What are you talking about? Because you didn’t watch it, you didn’t care, you just read the notification. That’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John important thing to get right. Don’t trust notification summaries. If you see that little icon, which looks like two little lines, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little arrow swooping down, and you actually care about what it says, tap through.
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DOJ v. Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Department of Justice says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monopoly. So reading from The Verge, there’s kind of a lot here, but forgive me because I think it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly important. The Department of Justice says that Google must divest the Chrome web browser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to restore competition to the online search market, and it left the door open to requiring the company to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spin out Android 2. The initial proposed final judgment refines the DOJ’s earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high-level outline of the remedies after Judge Amit Mehta found Google maintained an illegal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monopoly in search and in search text advertising. The filing includes a broad range of requirements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google, from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more broadly breaking the company up. The DOJ’s latest proposal doubles down on its request
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to spin out Google’s Chrome browser, the government views as a key access point to searching the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web. While the government isn’t going so far as to demand Google spin out the Android business,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s leaving the option open. The government says a spin-out could also be mandated should those other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solutions prove ineffective, at restoring competition to the market. The DOJ says Google might even choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to divestiture itself if the company doesn’t want to comply with some of the other rules the government
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is proposing against self-preferencing Google search in Android. Other remedies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and other phone makers, to make Google’s search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey competitors. It also wants to ban Google from preferencing its search engine on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any owned and operated platform like YouTube or Gemini, mandate it let rivals access its search index at quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marginal cost and on an ongoing basis quote, and require Google to syndicate its search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey results, ranking signals, and US-originated query data for 10 years. The DOJ is also asking that Google let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey websites opt out of its AI overviews without being penalized in search results.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In response, Google published a blog post saying the DOJ’s proposed remedies go, quote, way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overboard, quote. The post, attributed to Alphabet’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, says the DOJ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, quote, pushing a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leadership. blog post response, it’s spicy. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not happy. And it is, it’s on the one side, it’s like the old man in me is kind of like, wow, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little inappropriate to talk like that. On the other side, I’m like, yeah, let’s just, let’s just call it like we see it now. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not entirely sure I agree with how they see it, but nevertheless, I appreciate the fact that, you know, they’re just letting it all hang
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. So, uh, that’s pretty good stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, this is, this is just the DOJ saying, this is what we think should happen. There’s no, had no official decision yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they all like the DOJ won the case and they’re saying, here’s how we think, here are the remedies that we are proposing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s going to be months and months until something actually happens. But this is the time for Google to say, the DOJ’s
⏹️ ▶️ John proposed remedies are terrible and they’re going to cause the end of the world. And you know, that’s time for the DOJ to ask for everything that it
⏹️ ▶️ John wants, you know, split it all, Chrome, split it this, split it all, whatever. I don’t know if you want to read Ben’s take before we talk about ours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, had what I thought was a really good take on this. Ben writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m picking and choosing a couple of things here, but Ben writes, Chrome, meanwhile, is an excellent input for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data factory. Owning the browser is a bit like owning an operating system when it comes to the web. The browser has to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle every single piece of data that comes and goes, including decrypting encrypted data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s one of the pieces of software you as a user have to give absolute trust to. It’s unclear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what data Google harvests from this or how it builds proxies of your browsing habits so it has plausible deniability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of harvesting information. But there’s no question that Chrome is a major asset for Google’s business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At a minimum, it ensures that Google Search is front and center without having to pay any traffic acquisition costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That, more than anything, is what rubs me the wrong way about these remedies. At a very high level, the core issue in this case is that Google has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been effectively paying off Apple, the one company with the resources and motivation to build a competitive search engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ensure that they don’t compete with them. To that end, the remedy seems obvious. Make Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop. Stop paying Apple, that is. I think that Google would dominate those search services regardless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the crime was in paying off a competitor and demanding that Google give away the result of nearly three decades
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of development and innovation instead of simply addressing the problem at hand is too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when I look at this, I kind of think that the, uh, the EU approach is as problematic as their
⏹️ ▶️ John like solutions have been. Their approach to deciding what the problem is, is
⏹️ ▶️ John refreshing compared to the U S version. So the U S version, you have to prove that a company
⏹️ ▶️ John violated some existing U S law. Uh, And so the DOJ
⏹️ ▶️ John makes its cases based on what it thinks it can prove that you did wrong. But
⏹️ ▶️ John very often, and I think in this case, the thing that a company did that’s illegal,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the remedies that would come from that, don’t actually solve what we think
⏹️ ▶️ John the underlying problem is. The EU just says, there’s insufficient competition in MarketX because
⏹️ ▶️ John we think there is. And therefore, here’s a bunch of remedies that we think will restore our competition. And we can debate
⏹️ ▶️ John the remedies, but they basically decide there’s not enough competition here. There’s too few companies that have too much power.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can’t just go into court in the US and say, I think there’s too few companies that have too much power and they should be knocked down
⏹️ ▶️ John a peg. It’s like, oh, what law did they violate? Like there’s not such like broad regulatory control
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can just sort of talk about it for a while and decide we’ve all voted and we think that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough competition in this market. Right? And so they have to say like, oh, they did this
⏹️ ▶️ John illegal thing and that according to this rule and these antitrust laws that are really old. And the remedies they come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with just like, I mean, what Ben’s getting at is like, look, the thing that Ben thinks
⏹️ ▶️ John they did the most wrong is this, and he wishes they would just not do that. And everyone looking at the case will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the thing Google did most wrong was this, and therefore they should do that. But the thing the government actually proved is the Google
⏹️ ▶️ John did X. And then the government gets to pick what they think the remedies are. And this is where these cases always seem to fall down in my
⏹️ ▶️ John lifetime anyway, where the DOJ will win some kind of kind of antitrust case against a tech company and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the solution is this. And you look at the solution, you’re like, wait, how is that gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John fix things? So in this case, you got to break off Chrome because you having Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John is not fair because you get to favor yourself and you get to observe everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John activity and yada yada, right? So that’s gotta be a separate company.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many problems with that. First of all, who would want Chrome? I guess the obvious answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is Microsoft, because they’ve been trying to, they’ve been trying to, you know, have
⏹️ ▶️ John their own web browser, Edge. The IE was so damaged by being terrible for so many years that they had to come up with a new
⏹️ ▶️ John Edge uses the Chromium engine, and Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, just like IE
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be, so Microsoft should buy it or whatever, but the thing is, Chrome, as a standalone business, doesn’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ John sense, and is difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to run. Just ask, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the entire business model for web browsers for the last decade or more has been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get Google to pay you to be the default. That’s how everyone makes their money in browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it costs, here’s the thing, it costs such a huge amount of money to maintain a
⏹️ ▶️ John modern web browser because the web is complicated and evolving. So you need some
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty big source of funding to fund that development. Web browsers are not simple and they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John static. I guess people take them for granted. They’re like, oh, I just browse the web. But from a technical perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John The things that underlie web browsers are incredibly complicated and change
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. There’s security problems, there’s new standards. It is a huge Herculean
⏹️ ▶️ John effort. And by the way, that effort is made a million times worse if you are not the leader.
⏹️ ▶️ John So one of the benefits Google gets to owning Chrome is that Chrome has massive market share, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John dominant. And that means Google, which has tons of web apps, like the Google
⏹️ ▶️ John web apps, not just Google search, but all of Google web apps, are a very important part of Google’s whole value proposition.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much easier now for Google to ensure that all of its web apps work with the
⏹️ ▶️ John world’s most popular web browser because they own that too. Back in the bad old days, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John would try to make web apps and half the world was on IE and they would have to make their web
⏹️ ▶️ John apps work with a browser owned by a company that’s their competitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was difficult because sometimes that browser didn’t do the things they wanted and Google said, Oh, we can make this cool thing in our web app, if only
⏹️ ▶️ John the browsers did X, Y, and Z, and they’d have to beg them, please can you add this feature to IE, please can you retire
⏹️ ▶️ John IE6, like just all these, like it made Google’s life more difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome is the most valuable, Chrome is most valuable to Google
⏹️ ▶️ John by a huge margin, not just because it’s the world’s biggest web browser ever, but because of the nature of Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ John business and its advertising business or whatever, like it is so valuable to Google, and Google made it from
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. It wasn’t popular when it started, They made their own web browser, they stuck with it, which is strange for Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John kept developing it. They just kept developing it and it got to where it is. And now in
⏹️ ▶️ John the US they’re saying, there’s not enough competition for search advertising, which I basically
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with, that’s true. And the fix
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to get rid of Chrome. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s almost unprecedented, like the most popular, very important application, web
⏹️ ▶️ John browsers are very important application and the most popular one in the world, they’re saying the one company that
⏹️ ▶️ John developed it and can support it and can develop it, the one company that this is most valuable to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to spin it off. There’s no way it can survive as an independent company because they’d have no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to make money and they’d have to start getting into weird crypto stuff or they’d have to be even worse than what Google was doing. I mean, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at Mozilla trying to be an independent web browser and figuring out
⏹️ ▶️ John that business model, right? And the other option is, okay, well, it’s an independent company then Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John tries to snap it up. Is the DOJ not gonna let Microsoft buy it because they’re saying, oh, now we’ve just transferred
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome from one giant company to another and then we have to have another trial against them? Like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see how Google getting rid of Chrome solves anything
⏹️ ▶️ John and it creates a whole bunch of problems for the entire World Wide Web, which is an important platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that I care about. Not that Chrome is perfect and that Google should be able, you know, like things that Google does with Chrome are bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as Ben says, my perspective, Tell them not to do those things. Don’t say, oh, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got to split Chrome into another company. That’ll solve the problem. I don’t think it will solve the problem. I think it will make a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of new problems. And I think it will make the Chrome browser worse. And I think it will make everyone’s experience
⏹️ ▶️ John on the web worse. And yeah, it will hurt Google a little bit. But like the goal is not just to do something mean that Google doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like. Like it’s not, you know, you’re bad, so you get punished. Like we’re supposed to be trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to like solve the underlying problem, which is, you know, not enough competition in search. And there are a bunch of things in
⏹️ ▶️ John the remedy to go to that, like you can’t pay people to have privilege thing. You can’t, you know, you have to let people opt out
⏹️ ▶️ John of AI without, you know, downranking them, like things that recognize the power that Google
⏹️ ▶️ John search has and saying you can’t wield that power in a way that stifles competition. Yada,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, right? Those are all good. But splitting out and splitting out Android is similar. Splitting out Android,
⏹️ ▶️ John splitting out Google, like splitting out Android, but then saying Android can’t preference Google services.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is Android, if not an operating system for phones that is tightly integrated with Google services.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just have to be, you know, an operating system that just doesn’t have any services or lets you pick from Google
⏹️ ▶️ John services. And what’s the alternative? I don’t think Apple is going to be vending a lot of its iCloud services to
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phones. So it’s just a mishmash of like one drive and Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever third party photos apps are out there like just
⏹️ ▶️ John if any of these remedies go through in the form that they are proposed, these big ones about
⏹️ ▶️ John taking pieces of Google and chopping them off and throwing them out into the wilderness, I don’t think it’s going to solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem and I think it’s going to make things a real mess for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I’m not an expert in this kind of stuff, but when I look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google has done over the years, they’re obviously anti-competitive in a few pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big ways. At the same time, and I look at Chrome and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google’s ownership over Chrome is a huge problem. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is, they have used it in abusive ways. There is tons more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abuse potential to be had. It is very uncomfortable. You know, how much they control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the entire web via Chrome. It’s a little off. Like, it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risky and it’s not a great place for the web to be. All that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see how splitting up the company this way would really meaningfully help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that. I think it would fail spectacularly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is, when you split up monopolies like that, what can very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily happen over time is, as the regulatory environment changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can eventually kind of reform, like what AT&T largely did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think a more pragmatic solution here that’s more likely to actually work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to regulate the kind of behavior Google can do, but keep the company intact.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep Android, keep Chrome, because again, like John, I don’t see any plausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco path for them to be split off in a way that would actually achieve the goals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the DOJ probably wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John AT&T, like splitting off AT&T, when you split off, you take one big phone company
⏹️ ▶️ John and split into a bunch of little ones, those individual little phone companies are still
⏹️ ▶️ John profitable sound businesses. They’re just smaller. It’s only the, you know, they sell phone
⏹️ ▶️ John service to people in a smaller geographic area, but phone service itself is still profitable to sell people
⏹️ ▶️ John want it. It is a good product. Android and Google are both effectively subsidized because
⏹️ ▶️ John what they do is serve the needs of Google’s other business, which is search advertising and selling, you know, like selling advertising,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Android, if it was an independent business, would not be as free or cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John as it is to all the different vendors. Because right now it’s like, oh, Android is open source is free, and you can port it or whatever. But hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to put it on your phone, you have to use the Google Play services, and so on and so forth. If not, you got to do a bunch of development yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada. Android is a standalone business. Now it’s got to start charging people is like, well, how
⏹️ ▶️ John do we pay for all these engineers who work on Android? It like subsidized businesses that that serve
⏹️ ▶️ John the larger needs of a bigger company, a bigger abusive monopoly, you can’t just break them off like you could with the
⏹️ ▶️ John baby bells and say, Android, you’re free, go on your own, now we’ll have competition. Android’s gonna be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do we make money again? Like, you have to raise their prices and then we go back to the bad old
⏹️ ▶️ John world where cell phone makers are all developing their own OSs because they don’t wanna pay what turns out to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a sustainable price for Android or they just, everyone forks it and it’s like they leave Android
⏹️ ▶️ John behind because there’s no reason to use the Google version if it’s not doesn’t privilege Google services and Google is not forcing them to anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe that’s the goal to say Android is like Linux. It’s free to the world. It’s open source.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let a million different Android clones bloom. No longer will Google be forcing you to use their
⏹️ ▶️ John services because they can’t anymore. But like, it basically just makes it dissolve. And the same thing with Chrome. How are you gonna pay for the
⏹️ ▶️ John development of Chrome? Who’s gonna pay all his engineers to keep working on Chrome if it’s not subsidized because of how
⏹️ ▶️ John important it is to Google’s other business. It just, it’s not the same as breaking up the baby bells.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those were, it’s like, well, now you’ve just got a smaller phone company. It would be like breaking Google up into a bunch of smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John Googles, where there was like a search engine for the left half of the United States and the right half, but they still had all the pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John together. I just, I don’t honestly, like, and I’m not against, like, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John there would be more competition briefly, but I’m like, we’re at a stable equilibrium right
⏹️ ▶️ John now where the monopolies are abusing their power. We would like them to stop abusing their power, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure the solution to that is put a stick of dynamite into the monopolies and just blow their pieces all
⏹️ ▶️ John over the world and then say, problem solved, and just walk away because I don’t think that’s the solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, the simpler version, make them not do the worst of the anti-competitive things that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. That’s not perfect, they’ll always find a way around it or whatever, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s less collateral damage to just saying you can’t pay
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple off, you can’t privilege your products and other products and so on and so forth, but leaving intact the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of you can continue to put tons of money into developing Chrome because it is valuable to your business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in Google’s case, you know, all like the EU type things is like, oh, you gotta have
⏹️ ▶️ John a choice screen, you can’t default to anything, yada, yada. Google is still good enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that most people will pick them as the default because they have brand recognition and a legacy of being
⏹️ ▶️ John a brand that people like. So I don’t think Google should fear that type of competition. They should say, bring it on. None of
⏹️ ▶️ John our services are privileged. None of our search engine is privileged. user choice for every single thing. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John it is entirely open to competition. Competition is free to form. Maybe Apple will feel the competitor, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Bing will get more leverage or whatever, but Google shouldn’t shy away from that. It would motivate them to make their
⏹️ ▶️ John search engine better and friendlier, I think. You can do all that without breaking these pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John up and saying Android and Chrome, you have to sink or swim on your own as an independent business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just, I’m very curious to see how this is, how this lands, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t seem like it’s tenable right now. And even though I think the Google response
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a bit, you know, petulant whiny child, which I kind of get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re kind of making a point. Like, of course, they’re being exceedingly dramatic about it, but they’re still making a decent point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like you and like Ben have said, I don’t feel like this is the right solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Safari, by the way, you know, is a competitive browser. There is no, I mean, there’s Bing, I guess, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple hasn’t made a competitive search engine, which is Ben is always saying that Google essentially paying Apple off to prevent them
⏹️ ▶️ John from ever trying to make a search engine, which honestly, I don’t think Google should be afraid of because Apple would not do a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You never know. Apple sometimes surprises you. Apple Silicon was a surprise to everybody. Turns out Apple does a really
⏹️ ▶️ John good job on that. Not so much on cars or video games or a bunch of other stuff. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari exists. And Apple subsidizes its development because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John important for them to have a web browser that they control that’s not owned by one of their competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John and it costs a lot of money to develop Safari. And that money is not, as
⏹️ ▶️ John if Safari was an independent company, they couldn’t afford that. How would Safari make money? I guess from the Google search deal, but that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John soon be illegal anyway. So like it’s, it turns out giving away a web browser for free,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most complicated pieces of software to develop and maintain that has to be compatible with
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire worldwide web, that costs a lot of money. It needs to be funded somehow. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we all agree that having more web browsers is better than having fewer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John all of those web browsers, if they’re going to be competitive and useful, need to have a source of funding.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think Apple funding Safari and Google funding Chrome is a reasonable funding model
⏹️ ▶️ John to make two competitive web browsers for the World Wide Web. I don’t think there can be 75
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive web browsers because there’s not enough different funding models to fund 75 of them. Maybe two
⏹️ ▶️ John is too few, but throwing Chrome out into the woods and letting it wither, ending up with just Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep leaving out Edge, I’m sorry, Microsoft, but like, or just leaving it open source Chromium or whatever, like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying there couldn’t be a future with more competition, there certainly can be, but how do you get there from
⏹️ ▶️ John here without tremendous disruption is the difficult problem. And of all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that Google dominates and makes too little competition, at the very least, Chrome actually does
⏹️ ▶️ John have some competition in Safari, and I guess Edge and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Opera. You know all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARC people have already written us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So ARC is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. But I mean, those are a lot of the Chromium-based browser show at Google would say, hey, look, we give away the main engine open source. There can
⏹️ ▶️ John be lots of browser competition. But in the end, all that matters is how many people use this browser. And if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John market share ratios, it’s like it doesn’t matter what those browsers do. They basically have to do what Chrome does, just like back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the old days. You just had to deal with IE because as much as you may hate it, so many people
⏹️ ▶️ John use it that it’s a fact of life. And the fact that it used to be the same engine
⏹️ ▶️ John under both Safari and Chrome, but they sort of divorced into Blink and WebKit ages ago as
⏹️ ▶️ John another potential increase in competition. So of all the areas that where Google’s causing problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is one where there actually is competition and we would like there to be more, and I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John injuring Chrome is going to increase the competition. That other stuff they propose
⏹️ ▶️ John will increase competition. You can’t favor the search engine, you can’t pay Apple off, You can’t, you know, punish people
⏹️ ▶️ John in Google search results. You can’t spy on people through Chrome, like stop them from doing all that data collection stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John One way to stop them is say it’s a whole different company and they won’t share the data with you, but that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty heavyweight.
A(nother) new Siri?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman had a report a few days ago now about allegedly a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Siri So reading from Mark and Bloomberg the new Siri details of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which haven’t been reported uses more Advanced large language models or LLMs to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allow for back-and-forth conversations The system also can handle more sophisticated requests in a quicker fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new voice assistant which will eventually be added to Apple intelligence is dubbed LLM Siri by those working on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The company is planning to announce the overhaul soon as 2025 as part of the upcoming iOS 19 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS 16 software updates, which are internally named Luck and Cheer. Like Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this fall, the new features won’t immediately be included in next year’s crop of hardware devices. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is currently planning to release a new series to consumers as early as spring 2026, about a year and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from now. Holy freaking crap! That’s a long time away. The revamped Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will rely on new Apple AI models to interact more like a human and handle tasks in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way that’s closer to chat GPT in Google’s Gemini. It also will make expanded use of App Intents,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which allow for more precise control of third-party apps. Siri will get additional tweaks in the coming months as part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iOS 18, the iPhone’s current operating system. The software will be able to draw on customer data to provide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey context for commands and take action using the information on a user’s screen. the iOS 18 version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relies on a first generation Apple LLM to determine if requests should use the existing Siri infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or be routed to a second LLM that can handle more complex queries and tap into third-party apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John So buried at the very end of that summary is, oh, and by the way, you’re not totally
⏹️ ▶️ John forgetting this, but like, yeah, iOS 18 also has promised and will have
⏹️ ▶️ John a version of Siri that’s LLM powered that is better. You know, the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John we were promised back at WWDC. hey, Siri will be better, thanks to Apple Intelligence. It’s not coming immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, eventually in the iOS 18 timeline, you’ll get a Siri with LLM, which makes
⏹️ ▶️ John me wonder how this iOS 19 one, as is dubbed LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri by the people working on it, well, that’s LLM Siri. What the hell is the iOS 18 thing that uses LLMs with Siri?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that sort of LLM Siri, or half LLM Siri, or LLM Siri Lite?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been a long time where it’s like, Apple intelligence is gonna make Siri better, but not when they updated
⏹️ ▶️ John the graphics, which Marco complained about a few episodes ago, and he’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John right. You updated the graphics, but you left the same old dumb Siri back there answering the questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so there goes your opportunity to dazzle people with your new
⏹️ ▶️ John voice assistant and accompanying new appearance. Instead, you just get the accompanying new appearance,
⏹️ ▶️ John but same old thing. And so at some point in the iOS 18 timeline, there’ll be a slightly better
⏹️ ▶️ John one that uses LLMs, but now we have to hear about, oh no, the real one where Siri’s actually gonna be good.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s iOS 19, but not launching with iOS 19. You know, halfway through iOS 19’s lifetime.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe mid-2026, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so stupid. It’s like, Siri, it’s like, we got him this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, Siri is always gonna get better in a couple of years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, we have yet to see the quote unquote good Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iOS 18, it has not shipped yet. So maybe once that ships, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will remove a lot of the pent up demand for Siri to get better. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t trust them. Siri has zero credibility to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Apple has promised so many times that Siri is getting better, it’s smarter than ever, it’s better than ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is still so disappointing to so many people so often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still so unreliable and inconsistent so often. Siri has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no credibility. And Apple’s claims about Siri, Apple’s demos about Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s stated features of what Siri can do all have no credibility to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have been burned. I have gotten my hopes up so many times. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has said, now it’s better. And then I go try it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is the same old inconsistent, dumb mess. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS 18 one that still hasn’t, you know, actually shown itself, maybe that really will be better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe this alleged iOS 19 and a half one will be even better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that. I’ll believe it when I see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’re all excited by it because of the promise of LLMs. That was the whole Apple intelligence announcement at
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC. It’s like, I know we’ve been saying for years and years that Siri’s gonna get better. And it totally hasn’t, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been disappointing. But now there’s an actual concrete technology that you see in other competing products.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone else is using it. You can see their demos. You can use their products right now as we’re on stage announcing
⏹️ ▶️ John our thing. You can go and talk to chat GPT and do it like, this is, you know, LLMs. There’s real
⏹️ ▶️ John promise. It’s not just like vague, oh, we’re working on Siri and it’s gonna be better, whatever. There’s a concrete
⏹️ ▶️ John technology that you can look at and say, yeah, put that in Siri, because that is like what Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John does, but better. And Apple says, yes, we are totally gonna put that into Siri and it’s coming in iOS 18, just
⏹️ ▶️ John not immediately in iOS 18, but eventually in iOS 18 it’s coming. And so I think that’s why we’re all,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have our hopes up more than usual because it’s not just vague promises. It’s like, we feel, put it this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like out here that Apple could make Siri better with this. I’m like, I see the ingredients,
⏹️ ▶️ John put them together, mix it up. Like, it seems to me like this should work.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know how the old Siri worked, but I’ve used lots of LLM Power products. I’m like, yes, use
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And we’re just waiting for them to use it. We haven’t seen what they have in iOS 18. We’ve just seen a bunch of canned
⏹️ ▶️ John demos and who knows what that’s representative of. But a story now that iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John 18’s thing is called LLM Siri, like does that just mean that even inside Apple they’re like the iOS 19 thing is called
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM Siri? Does that mean inside Apple the iOS 18 thing is already like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know this is not gonna be that great. We’re just doing it because we said we were gonna do it, but practically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, we really need to be working on the real LLM series for iOS 19, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re so far behind on that that it’s not gonna even come out when iOS 19 comes out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s disappointing, right? We will have had the new fancy graphics for like an entire year
⏹️ ▶️ John before the iOS 19 one comes out that backs those fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics with an engine that’s better. Now, we’ll see, well maybe the iOS 18 better, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John will only be better. Apple has a little bit of a branding problem here because like one of the things I collect is,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Merlin collects them too, but I don’t know where I see when I send it to Merlin, these just ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John spoken or typed query and then replies from Apple’s various things
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’ll see the text that it understood, so it’s not like it misunderstood your voice or whatever, and you’ll see the most nonsensical,
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous reply from Apple’s voice assistant. and they often come on Apple TV, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the question for all of this is like, what is Siri? When I talk to my HomePod, is that Siri? When
⏹️ ▶️ John I talk to my Apple TV remote, is that Siri? When I talk to my phone, is that Siri? When I talk to my Mac, is that Siri?
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of those things are, some of those things aren’t. Which of those things will be getting better in iOS 18 or iOS 19?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a feeling the HomePod’s not gonna get better. Will the Apple TV get better? I don’t know. Presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone will because that’s their flagship platform and probably the Mac because you can do better things there because there’s lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, but like, Apple’s got this problem that they have a lot of things that you can talk to that currently
⏹️ ▶️ John do nonsensical stuff when you talk to them, and only some of them eventually might get better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the others probably won’t. But Apple just has one brand,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they say, it’s Siri. Siri is everything when you talk to Apple stuff. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the way things are, so. Yeah, I mean, at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, they just really need, The Apple Intelligence announcement was like, they have a good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. They, you know, the way they’re approaching it makes sense. If you go listen to what we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Intelligence, I think their approach to using LLM technology to enhance their
⏹️ ▶️ John products makes sense. They just need to do it. And now we’re just waiting around for them to do it. And the things
⏹️ ▶️ John they released so far, like I said, are not super compelling to me. I mean, it’s not that they’re bad, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they do what they’re more or less supposed to do the way we expect for them to do them, but they’re not particularly compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I talk to my devices all the time. And when they don’t listen to me or do something that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is not correct, I think to myself, this could be better and that would be a material improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m waiting patiently to see what this is like. But meanwhile, just like we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 17, while we were waiting for the iPhone 16 to come out, apparently now we’re just talking about iOS 19’s LM Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John while we’re waiting for the 18 one to come out. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. You know, I really, I don’t love when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of us, and it could be any of us, calls for, you know, like a firing or something like that. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John should be fired. Who would do that? Who would do that? No. But nobody would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco One of us. No, definitely not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, and I’m not saying that somebody should be fired, but I am saying something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is fundamentally broken. Either Apple is just incapable of this, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think is the case. I really don’t, or there’s some political infighting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has prevented forward progress, but like Apple keeps trying to make Siri happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it hasn’t happened yet. I mean, it was 2011 when Siri debuted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s two years before ATP. That’s three years before Declan. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has been a long time and they still can’t get it right. They still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t get it right. And I just, I don’t understand. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t understand. Like it is getting better in little, little bit here, little, little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, but it sure seems like everything around it is now to your collective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points is now getting better in leaps and bounds. And where all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other like assistants are running, Siri is at best at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mildly brisk walk. And it’s just, it’s not an, it wasn’t, it hasn’t been enough for at least five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, probably 10, but it’s certainly not enough now. And to say, oh, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got you in 18 months. Come on, figure out a better way. Figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a better way. I don’t care if it’s acquisition. I don’t care if you have to fire the whole damn team. That’s not actually what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but I’m fired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up about it. It’s just do something Apple and do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do it so that we can see. Don’t promise something. Don’t open the Komodo and tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, oh, it’s going to get better. Just friggin do something do Something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me for the first time ever be the voice of reason on this topic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please yes, please This is a fun change of a change of roles for you and me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know right All right, so I think Tim Cook should keep his job. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t Not for this though So we we heard like rumblings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there there’s been like, you know reports from the information and from our government over the last couple of years that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically there was this project to remake Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a whole different approach to how they were doing the language processing possibly with LLMs, but I think that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco predates the LLM craze and apparently the story was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the group that had the new rebuilt Siri they lost the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battle internally and they instead decided to keep the old one going and just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on it instead
⏹️ ▶️ John And wasn’t the reasoning, by the way, wasn’t the reasoning kind of like a iMovie eight or Final Cut Pro 10 kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of reasoning, which is basically like the new stuff looks great, but you would be drop
⏹️ ▶️ John it because the new stuff is new. It doesn’t have all the same features as the old one. So we have to explain to our customers that, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, for the past X years, you’ve been able to ask Siri to do these things, but now you can’t anymore because we replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John it with a new and improved one that doesn’t have all the features of the old one. I seem to recall
⏹️ ▶️ John that being part of the decision making, which is always the way it is like inside a company when someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got a new idea for a technology or whatever it’s very often difficult to sell it
⏹️ ▶️ John if it doesn’t do literally everything that the old one did and Apple has gone against that a few times in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past like with Final Cut Pro 10 or whatever the Version of iMovie that they replaced the old one with I remember they
⏹️ ▶️ John shipped the both the old and the new version of iMovie for a while To avoid this problem to say we have a new
⏹️ ▶️ John structure for how we think iMovie should work It doesn’t do all the things the old one did but we still think it’s such
⏹️ ▶️ John a good idea that we’re gonna ship the new one and the old one, so you can keep using the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one, and in the meantime, we will try to build the new one up to match the feature set. Or they can just do what they did with photos
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, which is make a new version that doesn’t have the features of the old one, and say, tough luck, the old features are gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the case of Siri, the rumor was, I think, that the new folks said, we have a new approach
⏹️ ▶️ John to Siri, and it’s better, but it doesn’t do literally every single thing the old one did, and that’s enough for
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who are against it to kill it and say, well, do we want to explain to our customers why our voice assessment
⏹️ ▶️ John just got less capable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, to be fair, I don’t know if we actually had that level of information on it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe that was part of the gist of the rumors that we were hearing. Anyway, so there was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty firm rumor a couple years back that basically Siri was going to be rewritten, the project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost the battle internally, and they kept the existing one. Now, separately from that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Intelligence happens, seemingly, And that seemed to be unrelated to the reporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that whole Siri drama that would seem to precede it. So it’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe they, for this kind of first iteration of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intelligence that is this year, maybe they figured out some quick ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bolt the LLMs onto the old Siri, but that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the much better approach that they’re working on for a year and a half from now whatever is that is a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri. So I think it that that narrative if true I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very plausible and would would kind of explain the timeline. Now the second aspect of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that though is that the whole reason they have all this time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can take their sweet ass time and they can ship Siri that sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so long is because they don’t allow competition on a technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level on iOS for the voice assistant. Like this is what happened. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the downside, you know, what we’ve seen for a very long time is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Apple has a lot of strong competition, they get their act together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually and compete well. They can do amazing things. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can somehow preclude competition from happening, they get complacent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t do that well. What they put out might not be the best of the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in class. And I think what we see now is on iOS it’s so locked down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so you know it’s so impossible for anybody to compete with them in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas and the voice assistant is one of those. As chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all these other ones have been coming up over the last couple of years, if there was an API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to replace Siri, they would have destroyed Siri by now. We wouldn’t even be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Siri anymore because none of us would be using it for anything because there would be some kind of plug-in architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead, they did the no money changes hands deal where a chat GPT is integrated into the existing voice
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant as a stopgap. And I know you’re talking about competition on iOS, which is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John very relevant, but of course, there is actually competition on Android with its voice assistants, which tend to be doing better
⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple’s, but Google is doing exactly the same thing and trying to keep as much competition away from
⏹️ ▶️ John their built-in voice assistant as well. But yeah, Apple at least felt enough pressure to say, and we’re partnering with ChatGPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if our thing craps out, you can say, give up and
⏹️ ▶️ John chuck it to ChatGPT, which is not a great solution. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because nobody can compete, like because ChatGPT couldn’t make an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to officially replace Siri, Look at how many of our nerds and our power user friends have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used the action button on our iPhone 15s and 16s to just open chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many times have you asked chat GPT a question that it would have been nicer if you could have just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used a voice hail command freely on your phone or held down a button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever to do it? There’s a reason we do that, because chat GPT for a lot of things is simply better. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had the ability to integrate with things the way Apple Intelligence and Siri do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be even better. And I have no doubt that Apple would have its butt handed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it and Siri would be even more marginalized among power users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Safari is, because we know it from Chrome users. But instead, Apple does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to compete in this area. They have technically foreclosed competition.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple dictates the terms that you’re gonna access chat GPT on their system. It’s a third party app, or when you integrate
⏹️ ▶️ John it with Apple’s own thing, Apple’s thing comes first, and then chat GPT only with a warning dialogue after and yada yada, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a result, Apple does not have to compete very well in the area of voice assistance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know if it’s directly because of that, but the reality of that and effect of that is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they don’t have to compete, they don’t compete very well. They are taking their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sweet time. They totally missed the LLM revolution. They’re coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it late and they’re coming to it on, you know, kind of a slow timeline, kind of dipping their feet in slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it does seem like that is giving them some advantages in the sense that they’re able to do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like a more thought out way. They’re able to be a little bit more careful with how they do it. They’re doing certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in a more privacy focused way than everyone else is doing. But the reality is, they don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a fire lit under their butts because they don’t have to compete. And whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if iOS was not as locked down as it was, they would actually have real competition here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would work harder and faster and probably produce better output. So this is one of those areas where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is actually better for both Apple and Apple’s customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to be less locked down because that creates fewer areas that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will foreclose competition and get complacent and lazy and deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-assed products. And Siri for its entire lifetime, calling it half-assed would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a generous compliment. It is quarter-assed at best and way less than that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality. It has been a really rough, unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco untrustworthy product for its entire lifespan. And maybe if there was easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competition in that area, maybe they would actually make it better, faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds like there’s a great job opening for you in the European Commission, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think they agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John Every part of the operating system that Apple has integrated would benefit from competition. You should be able to replace the Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John app, the voice assistant, the web browser, all that stuff should not default to Apple should be pluggable. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John European Commission is trying very hard to make that happen across not just Apple’s platforms, but Facebook’s platform, Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ John platform and all those platforms. So yeah, they’ve got the same idea. We’ll see if their remedies
⏹️ ▶️ John end up going in that direction or not. But in the meantime, like the half
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri solution that you described, Apple doesn’t give technical details about you know, when they promised LLM, they promised
⏹️ ▶️ John a better Siri and iOS 18.4 or whatever their target was back when we talked about WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we all just assume Apple Intelligence, better Siri. We just, we read between the lines
⏹️ ▶️ John and we say, LLM. I don’t know if Apple said it explicitly. LLM, it’s perfect. And as we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John before even Apple Intelligence was released, the idea of having an LLM,
⏹️ ▶️ John you speak to something, the LLM interprets what you say, and the LLM has been trained
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 75 things that Siri can do and the precise way you have to word it to make
⏹️ ▶️ John them work. And that’s what your LLM does. It takes whatever BS you say, translates
⏹️ ▶️ John it to a command that Siri will understand, and makes it do it. And that would make Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John way better because Siri can actually do a lot of things, but is incredibly frustrating when you talk to it and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s not as bad as a text adventure where it’s like it doesn’t understand your sentence entirely. But it thinks
⏹️ ▶️ John it understands it and it does something totally off the wall. Like here’s the example I just sent to Merlin most
⏹️ ▶️ John recently. It’s an Apple TV one. The Apple TV ones are usually the best and it shows the text that it understood
⏹️ ▶️ John from the user and the text was let’s watch family guy perfectly valid sentence
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see what it understood there’s no like it didn’t miss hear a word or pick a word that
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds the same but it’s spelled differently let’s watch family guy they’re talking to their television set
⏹️ ▶️ John the response from the thing on Apple TV which uses the Siri logo which may or may not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John be quote-unquote real Siri this is what Apple TV said if you think it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be serious ask me to call emergency services or someone you trust.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a response to Let’s Watch Family Guy. And I looked at Let’s Watch Family Guy and I’m like, what? How?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it doesn’t even make any sense. Like is there? It’s not just I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s Watch Family Guy. Do you want me to call emergency services? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, maybe. I don’t know. Am I having a stroke? I don’t know. That’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John is where an LLM could help. I know the Apple TV knows how to find a show based on, and even capitalized family,
⏹️ ▶️ John capitalized capital G, it knows it’s a proper noun. I bet it can find that as a TV
⏹️ ▶️ John show somewhere and start playing it because it’s a TV and that’s what it does. And instead
⏹️ ▶️ John it offers to call families, so emergency services. So yeah, a half
⏹️ ▶️ John L, an LM in front of Siri, treating Siri as like a lot of the LMs treat like calculators
⏹️ ▶️ John or other sort of things. That would be great. A full-fledged LM Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John might be a disaster because it could start doing even more ridiculous things and Apple has less of a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to control it. But we’re just all out here using the plain old dumb Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don’t even know if it’s the same Siri everywhere. And we’re just looking for relief. And this is kind of unfair
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like, oh, rumors about a future thing are making me feel worse that I don’t have the current thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit of Osborne effect and it’s a little bit, I mean, there’s always gonna be a better version
⏹️ ▶️ John of everything. But for me, I may have been getting hung up on this, but like the fact that the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is called LLM Siri internally, maybe that’s what the iOS 18 one is called too, Garmin is never precise in these rumors, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it really does make me sad to think that the thing I’ve been waiting so patiently for somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John around the mid point of the life of iOS 18, it seems like Apple itself already
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have that much confidence that it is the thing that we all hope it’s gonna be, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m willing to keep an open mind and try it when it comes out, but in the meantime, just to enjoy those snazzy graphics.
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#askatp: Get P-cores to spin up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And Andrew Hodgson writes, is there a way to get the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance cores to spin up when doing normal activities like file management, spreadsheets, internet browsing, et cetera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a M4 Pro Mac Mini. I can never seem to get them going. And I didn’t know if there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to tell the system to make use of them rather than just stick with the efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Otherwise, it seems a bit of a waste of those extra cores. I did wonder if the high power, low power options and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings energy might have an impact or if there was some other setting that could be tweaked. Maybe the answer is that the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro chip is simply overkill for these types of tasks. I think that is the answer, but I don’t know. Tell me I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so some of the tasks, especially things like file management, you’re gonna be spending most of your time waiting for IO.
⏹️ ▶️ John So having a faster CPU is not going to impact things because that’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottleneck. The high power mode is interesting. It’s a feature that I was introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of years ago, I think, and it’s spreading to more Macs. I think the Mac mini’s got it as well. But I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John all that basically is is a different fan curve, which is a way of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John for a given set of inputs from temperature sensors, what should the output fan speeds be on all the fans?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could graph it on a curve in an old school simple scenario where there was one thing that had a temperature and one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and one fan. Obviously, modern Macs are more complicated than that. Well, some of them still only have one fan. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, high power mode, my understanding is, just makes the fans go higher
⏹️ ▶️ John rpm sooner. So it makes your Mac noisier, it blows more air through it, and the theory is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it will allow your the things that get hot to sustain their
⏹️ ▶️ John maximum throughput for a longer period of time because you’re not waiting of them to get hot you’re sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John preemptively cooling them by blowing more and more air on them. That’s the idea with high power mode. Doesn’t change
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I know anything having to do with what’s scheduled on what kind of cores inside your Mac. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another thing you don’t control we’ve talked about it before when trying to speed up jobs like file
⏹️ ▶️ John compression and stuff when software runs
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever job is going to run there are tools that it has to
⏹️ ▶️ John indicate what it thinks the priority should be is this is this a high priority thing that the computer should do
⏹️ ▶️ John ASAP or is it a low priority thing that it should do just whenever it gets around to it a lot of that prioritization
⏹️ ▶️ John affects what course things will be scheduled on background processes set at a low priority will
⏹️ ▶️ John run on the efficiency cores. Foreground processes that need lots of fancy computing that are said to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the highest possible priority may run on the performance cores. But my question for Andrew is,
⏹️ ▶️ John are you waiting around for your computer to do things? Like what thing are you waiting for? When you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John file management and spreadsheets and internet browsing, are you twiddling your thumbs and saying, come on, come on,
⏹️ ▶️ John page load. If that’s happening, it almost certainly isn’t because you are CPU bound.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably your network connection or it’s IO with the file system or something else. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it would take some pretty sophisticated performance analysis to figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ John is the bottleneck that is making you wait for something. If you’re staring at your iStat menus
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and you’re annoyed because the power cores aren’t being used, but you’re not waiting for anything, don’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John annoyed. It’s using the appropriate resources for you. It’s saving your battery life. It’s reducing your power
⏹️ ▶️ John usage. It’s reducing the heat. it’s, you know, just because it’s not using the power cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a reason to complain about it. Now, if you have something that you’re waiting for and you’re sure it’s CPU pounds and it’s not using the power
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, I would talk to the developer of that program. But that’s not something that you as the user have control over.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s any tool out there where you can say like, shuttle everything to the power cores and ignore the efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. And honestly, I don’t think you’d wanna do that because it would produce more heat, it would probably go slower because you have lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of things running in parallel and you wanna use those efficiency cores. And Apple’s efficiency cores are,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re more efficient than the power course, but they’re good course too. So don’t don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John it too much. They’re good course branch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Keep in mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also. So one thing that you might see if you if you’re watching a tool like I step menus or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re watching an activity monitor, if you’re watching your CPU usage between the course, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice that some one or two of the efficiency cores might be maxed out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all the time doing something like photo indexing or spotlight indexing or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. Um, that is not a sign that you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to somehow convince those tasks to run on the performance cores. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS has been seemingly tweaked since the Apple Silicon era to, to let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain background tasks basically do whatever they want as long as they do them on the efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores, because the efficiency cores are so much less power consuming than the performance cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can basically run a couple of them like for free almost all the time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even notice a hit to battery life or an increase in heat. Like they’re so power efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that macOS therefore lets things like photo indexing or whatever just max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out one of them forever as long as it wants to. And if you ever actually you know need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that power for something else usually these things are prioritized such that other Other processes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can take priority if they all of a sudden need a burst of everything you’ve got. But for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you see efficiency cores maxing themselves out for a long time, that’s normal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t, you don’t have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And speaking of photo stuff, it’s, you know, like I said, it’s a software problem. If you think there’s something you’re waiting for and you wish
⏹️ ▶️ John it would use the power cores, talk to the developer, which is why I’ve tried to talk to Apple through my podcast and say, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John give me a giant button in photos that says, do photo analysis now using all my resources. Apple has not provided
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Instead, they’re using background jobs that, you know, run whenever they feel like it, when the system
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks that the resources are available, and they run on the efficiency cores, and they don’t use all the resources, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate it. That is a software problem. It is Apple’s Photos application could,
⏹️ ▶️ John or their Photos daemon could have a giant button that says, do face recognition now. Do it just
⏹️ ▶️ John on this individual single photo. Use all the resources in the system. That button doesn’t exist, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the fault of macOS. Mac OS is just doing what it’s told by the applications. And the applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are saying, do full analysis on the background on an efficiency core, it’s fine. And most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time, that’s what you want. But sometimes you just wanna do it now and I really hope they provide that button someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s my money and I need it now. All right.
#askatp: Why are apps so big?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey James Willbey writes, why are apps seemingly ballooning in size? I’ve looked at a few app update sizes recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s not uncommon to find apps that are between 300 and 500 megabytes or even beyond. Tesla and the Unifi network app are my examples.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why is this? Is it just a load of assets, or is it just a load of baggage along for the ride?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It could be either, but generally speaking, isn’t it like analytics frameworks and stuff like that? Like Crashlytics,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is huge, and I’m trying to think of some of the other ones, or Firebase maybe. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t those typically quite large?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the actual code is not that large. Now, code, keep in mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the modern code culture is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need one thing, like one little function or one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piece of functionality from a piece of code, you import an entire library, an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire framework, possibly an entire services built in frameworks, and you don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what it does to your project. That is the modern coding culture in every way, in web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programming, in application programming, mobile, everything. Everyone has this kind of framework-itis and library-itis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just like, I need, you know, like that joke of like the, you know, is even function in JavaScript,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah, I’ll import an entire library for that, like rather than see if I can just have that function by itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That applies at every scale. So you have, you do have huge amounts of code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have duplication within code, especially for larger companies. You might have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a large company’s app. Suppose they need a library to like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parse URLs out of strings or whatever. Their app might have 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different functions that do that because just out of sheer scale, like they have hundreds of people working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the app and at different times, different people have added different versions of that same thing in different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. So code size is bigger these days by a lot. And a lot of that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just due to this kind of culture of anything you need, just import some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework or library and don’t even look at how big it is, don’t even care. And definitely don’t try to write it yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or copy out just that function, no. So anyway, there’s that. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the assets tend to be way bigger than you might think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because again, like if you are, suppose you’re writing a library that offers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of UI. Well, if you have any images in that UI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that library is gonna include every single image that might ever be displayed on that screen. It’s gonna include it in possibly different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designs, different resolutions, different color schemes, light and dark mode. Like there’s so many different versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all those things. And yes, you can, if you try to keep things small and simple, you can like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, use some basic vectors and, or, you know, have like a SVG or PDF version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your icon that you just render in different colors or different contexts. Like you can do that. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why nobody does that, except people like me who waste their time doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why no one else does it is because there is no incentive whatsoever to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make apps small these days, none. I can tell you this as somebody who has a very small app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one cares and nobody is going to pick your small app over your competitors 300
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megabyte app. Because that isn’t how people choose apps these days. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is possible to make smaller apps, but there is no incentive to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so everyone just kind of gets sloppy and lazy and doesn’t really care.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously for things like games, the assets are a problem. You know, they just,
⏹️ ▶️ John the amount of textures you have and all the various 3D data and everything else, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, it adds up real fast. And the general approach is, like you said, to
⏹️ ▶️ John package up everything that your app is going to need. Apple TV prevents that, and it’s one of the reasons game developers
⏹️ ▶️ John dislike it, because people just want to package up everything. All the images, all the different things,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that, you know, and, you know, demo videos sound like stuff that could
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially be downloaded as like just package it all in the app. So the code size is bigger, the asset size is bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the motivation is to just package it all in there. And sometimes there’s even repetition of
⏹️ ▶️ John assets, depending on how you’re, you know, folding things in. You might have the same asset in there multiple times, and having
⏹️ ▶️ John something that deduplicates assets across different frameworks is a big pain. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John just the sizes just keep going up. I was messing with
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows when I was trying to do that iCloud stuff, and one of the things I mess with when I’m in there is I download the latest version of
⏹️ ▶️ John Unreal Engine, and I like to look at their little demos to see how the engine is advancing. 5.5 just
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, it has a bunch of new features. I was like, I wanna, you know, let me find some of the cool demos. My
⏹️ ▶️ John old 5.0 demo no longer worked, fine, I’ll download the 5.5 version of that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like a demo showing you their various, you know, features for texturing large landscapes
⏹️ ▶️ John and dynamic lighting and stuff like that. And the demo was 100 gigabytes. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s pretty big. Unreal Engine itself, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems small in comparison, right? A few hundred megs, gig even or whatever. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John file, and this is not a game. This is just a demo thing showing a bunch of features of the engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then I updated to, I didn’t update to the latest version of Flight Simulator, which actually improves this, but I have a old Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John Flight Simulator 2020, I think it is. That itself is over a hundred gigabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I needed to update it, it needed to re-download a substantial portion of that. Things are big. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the advances of the new version of Flight Simulator 2024, is that it dynamically streams
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff. So the download can be smaller. It’s still very large, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making progress there. So I think there is a breaking point, but iOS apps are not 100 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John each unless they’re a really, really big game.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, individual apps being 500 megabytes, it’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple rolled out that feature years ago that says like, do you want us to basically
⏹️ ▶️ John remove apps that you haven’t used in a long time? We’ll leave the icons on your screen, but they get like a cloud icon
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever next to them, right? We’ll leave the icon there. If you ever wanna launch it, we’ll redownload it. But just like, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you know this, but like, you know, a couple dozen 500 megabyte apps like here and there, it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John to add up real fast and all of a sudden a lot of your phone storage is taken up with apps that you never launch. That wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter if every single app was 20 megs, but if they’re in the hundreds of megabytes each and you’ve got 11 pages
⏹️ ▶️ John of those apps plus folders, yeah, that can be taking up a lot of room. So yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of an uphill battle, things get bigger over time. That’s generally one of the reason we make better computers. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s any sense in trying to hold the line on application size because we do want better
⏹️ ▶️ John fancier assets, better fancier libraries. Now with LLMs, with people having
⏹️ ▶️ John models inside their applications, or even if they’re dynamically downloaded, even Apple itself does it, for the first time used the cleanup
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, it will say downloading cleanup, it’s downloading a model and that model is big. And they didn’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John make it part of the iOS 18 distribution for whatever reason, they wanted it to be a separate download, maybe so they can update
⏹️ ▶️ John it independently, but anyway, it’s big. Every one of these model things is big. They take up lots of memory
⏹️ ▶️ John and they take up lots of disk space. And if every app has two or three different models, plus the OS has its models,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just making the apps bigger. So yeah, Margo’s point stands. If developers care,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can do a lot to make things smaller, but in general, over the entire history of computing, the
⏹️ ▶️ John apps just get bigger and will continue to do so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsors this week, Aura Frames, Uncommon Goods, and Masterclass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many perks of being an ATP member is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week Overtime will be about services on macOS. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna get to hear John Syracusa talk about services on macOS. And me and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, oh yeah, that exists. You can join atp.fm slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear whatever that’s gonna be and many other things. Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
Thanksgiving logistics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, Thanksgiving driving is going to happen. I’m not looking forward to this. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are a lot of advantages to living on Long Island. Um, many things are easy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, way easier than the beach and even easier than many of the places I’ve lived. Um, you know, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an easy drive away there. All the roads here are wide and the parking lots are huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, you know, American suburbia done to the max, but you know, certain things are still walkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and small. It it’s pretty, it’s pretty great overall. Now, the one problem about living
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Long Island, it’s similar to a problem living in Brooklyn, is that it’s great as long as you never have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave. But leaving Long Island is unpleasant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not because, like, you know, you just miss it so badly. No. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to go through the New York City surrounding metro area to get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island. Wow, is that unpleasant. So in a couple of days I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have something like a six hour drive. The first two and a half of which will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be going like 40 miles. Ugh,
⏹️ ▶️ John can get yourself a helicopter or you gotta get your relatives to move north and east so you can take a
⏹️ ▶️ John boat off the island which is less traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are many things that I joke about I will never want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy or own. And then I end up buying them. and you make fun of me and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fair. I still have had zero temptation to own a boat.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not supposed to get your own boat. You’re supposed to take a ferry where you can drive your car onto it, but it doesn’t help you because your relatives are not in
⏹️ ▶️ John Connecticut or Rhode Island
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or Massachusetts.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re going the wrong way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not gonna be fun. I’ve probably shared this numerous times, but my very limited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory of driving on Long Island was leaving,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is LaGuardia Long Island or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JFK. They were both on Long Island. OK. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s plenty of room. I don’t know why they wouldn’t put them both there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. Well, so leaving LaGuardia, I remember, I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed to follow signage. This was 20 years ago now. But you had to follow signage that seemed like it was heading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeper into Long Island in order to actually exit Long Island the way I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to Western Connecticut. And so I needed to, like, I’m making this up, but I needed to go eastbound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the first road or two in order to actually end up going northbound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, it was ridiculous. And then I remember, and I’ve told the story many times on the show, I remember going to Jones Beach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see a concert and that was the most utterly bananas set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of roads that I needed to take to get from Western Connecticut to Jones Beach, including popping off the interstate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and or highway, popping off the highway and then going through like a freaking neighborhood to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the next highway, it was insanity. And that apparently, my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that’s just Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Look, it is easy public transportation to both airports, so there’s no problems. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John that and you won’t have to drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks, RM. You really did us dirty on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I don’t envy you. So how many charging stops are you expecting to make? 13? Ideally, zero. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can make it the whole way?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but I can’t make it there and back. But I can usually charge at my in-laws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place, just overnight, like out of a circular saw outlet they have in their barn. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have like, I run a giant, like 30 amp extension cable, like out there barn and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. It’s, it’s like thicker than a garden hose. It’s a whole thing. Uh, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, I, I, I’ve done that for years. Like, you know, back when I had the Tesla, I did it then too. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, it, it does work. It’s, you know, it can charge a whole EV like roughly overnight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, which is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a lot of driving. I don’t miss that part of my parents being in Connecticut. like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they’ve been down here in Virginia since just before Declan was born. And generally speaking, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very convenient. And I, and I prefer it. I don’t, I don’t love that. I no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an excuse to go to the New York metro area. I don’t like that. You know, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a cheap as, which is to say free place to stay, you know, one Metro North ride away from Manhattan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, not having to drive eight, eight to 10 hours to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to and from Connecticut for holidays. I, I’m, I am not complaining about not having to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will wake up on, or what, well, I think we’re going to go Wednesday afternoon and we will drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sum total of maybe 50 minutes if there’s traffic to get to my parents, it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glorious. John, what are you doing for the holiday?
⏹️ ▶️ John When do you two think you’re going to start hosting your own Thanksgiving service? That just never going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does from time to time with us, but it’s not common. Coincidentally, I think Erin’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cooking most of Thanksgiving at my parents because my mom, for all of her wonderful qualities, is not a stellar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cook, and Erin is. So she’s been conscripted, enlisted, whatever word I’m looking for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to do a lot of the cooking at mom and dad’s. But we’ve done Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at our house from time to time, but it is not common.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I’ll just be at home. Uh, yeah, I don’t like traveling. I don’t like traveling at all in the winter. Definitely don’t like traveling
⏹️ ▶️ John for Thanksgiving. Uh, it’s such a bad holiday, especially with like the school schedules because schools don’t give kids
⏹️ ▶️ John that much time off. So if you’re trying to like, oh, well, we’ll just, you know, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John travel for Thanksgiving, but we’ll try to travel on odd days. You basically end up having to pull your kids out of
⏹️ ▶️ John school or have the missed days on either side. Otherwise, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just traveling when the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole rest of the world is traveling and it’s miserable. So and whether you’re driving or flying or doing anything, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John miserable. So yeah, Thanksgiving at home in New England. That’s what we’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I envy that so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John You envy that until you have to cook and clean up everything because that is the part that comes along with that is you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t just get to show up somewhere and then someone feeds you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, for honestly, so I actually did host Thanksgiving years ago. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before ATV. This is like 2006 or so. I had messed up my back. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I had been advised by a doctor not to take long car rides for a little while little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I like as I slowly fixed my back and and so my family all came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me and I hosted Thanksgiving in a little like 500 square foot apartment like a one-bedroom apartment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hosted my entire family on my little like you know that like that rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wooden IKEA table that everyone had because it came as a set with a table and four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chairs for a hundred bucks I that I hosted Thanksgiving on that little table like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just made it work you know we like had some people sit like at the counter and stuff like it. It was fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and honestly that was one of the best Thanksgiving’s we ever had. It was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny because I think my best holiday travel experience of all time, I don’t remember what year was, it was also before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP, but for whatever reason Aaron and I traveled on Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning which was very unusual for us and typically we would tell our families like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if my side has Thanksgiving then her side has Christmas and that’s that. And this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when mom dad was still in Connecticut. And we left Richmond on Christmas morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively early but not absurdly so. And it is not like what Marco’s dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. I’m not saying my troubles were as bad as Marco’s are, you know, getting off of Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for us to get to Western Connecticut, we basically took 95 the whole way up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every major city on the Eastern Seaboard from here to there. So you would go through DC, which is always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nightmare. You would go through Baltimore, which was usually okay, Philadelphia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole of New Jersey, Manhattan, et cetera, et cetera. And on Christmas morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that year, I think we might’ve made what is typically between an eight and 10 hour drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like six, six and a half hours or something like that because nobody was on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey road and it was amazing. It worked so well. And I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would genuinely think about doing that all the time if we still had to make those runs to Connecticut. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so great. Oh man, That was the best. Beep, beep, beep.