631: The Colors Are the Pepperoni
20 Mar 2025Metallica on Vision Pro, the Apple Intelligence Siri delay, and the partial opening of the restaurant.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey received a present
- Follow-up:
- Vision Pro Corner: Metallica immersive concert
- Colorful Macs
- “Hidra”
- M3/M4 interposers (via Jonathan Dietz Jr.)
- M3 Max does not have a D2D (“die-to-die”) interface
- …nor does the M4 Max
- Reticle limits
- Apple Silicon info Google Sheet
- Apple’s multi-OS redesign (via Jon Tatum)
- Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
- Ask ATP:
- Do we set our phones on a surface face-up or face-down? (via Aaron Bushnell)
- What’s up with version numbers these days? (via Joe O’Connor)
- Post-show: Restaurant soft opening results
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple News+ Food
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
- Mack Weldon: Get 25% off your first order of $125 or more using code ATP.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- How to motivate Casey
- Metallica on Vision Pro
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- Right color, wrong Mac?
- Chip follow-up
- OS-redesign follow-up
- Mac setup via iPhone
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Apple Intelligence delay
- #askatp: Phone face up/down?
- #askatp: Version-numbering
- Ending theme
- Restaurant soft-opening
How to motivate Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A long time ago, I decided one of my pandemic projects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going to be to put fiber in the house. And we talked about this, I think it was like 2020
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been waiting for the fiber update. We all
⏹️ ▶️ John have. No, this is gonna be his like Project Titan announcement. He’s like, you know, project fiber
⏹️ ▶️ John has been canceled. Everyone is fired.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve reassigned all the staff of this project.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have spent $10 billion on it, but it turns out it’s not gonna happen. Go home, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re not far from the truth. No, what happened was, you know, I found other pandemic projects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I wanted to do. I replaced, we’ve talked about this many times, I replaced all these switches in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house with instead of the little nubbins that you grab, Americans know what I’m talking about, Europeans are like, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not how I would describe them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, I think I know what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean. So I think it’s, I think the technical term is a toggle switch instead of a paddle switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe is what it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re talking about Decora style switches?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, we’re saying the same thing. I switched from, um, from the like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old school, like 80s era, you know, like there’s little things sticking out of the wall to the thing that’s like a flat paddle.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that you got it wrong, sir. The 80s era things are the Decora switches. That’s what you switched
⏹️ ▶️ John to. You switched into the 80s. You moved, you moved from the 50s and 60s and 70s. You moved directly into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, fair enough. And I’m not here to argue about that one way or the other. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but whatever. I just think the flatter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones look better. Right. So I did all the switches in the house. Just like the 80s. Just like the 80s, yeah. So I also put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on shoulder pads. No, wait, that’s not right. So anyway, that was one of my projects. The garage door
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disaster was one of the projects. I mean, it worked, but it was a Rube Goldberg machine, to say the least.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was one of my pandemic projects. And I told you guys that I wanted one of my pandemic projects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be to wire the house for ethernet. And my thought was I would have the garage be the command center, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upon reflecting, and I think you two both said this at the time, the temperature scenario in the garage is not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conducive to it. But at the time I thought, okay, the garage will be the command center. I’ve got decommissioned HVAC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plumbing, tubing, whatever you want to call it. That isn’t being used anymore. That would get me from the garage to the attic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything will be easy peasy, you know, lemon squeezy. And then I got doing a bunch of other things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you know, kids were getting older and then the pandemic eventually mostly ended and it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got on the back burner. So a couple of days ago, well, my birthday was on Monday and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s actually not the point, but the point is, um, my friend, Spencer, who you guys have met, uh, several times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably know at this point, um, he and I will exchange, you know, small, like mostly gag birthday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gifts with each other when the time comes, uh, coincidentally, he shares your birthday, John. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got a message from Spencer on my actual birthday saying, Oh, your gift isn’t there. It’ll be there tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was like, okay, I mean, whatever, that’s fine. Um, and then there were three different boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my doorstep. You got Spencer Gifts. I got Spencer Gifts, exactly right. There were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three Spencer Gifts. Gosh, that store was such a disaster, but I loved it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got three Spencer Gifts, or three boxes anyway, and I put in the Slack. I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be sharing this picture publicly because it’s inside the house and it was not very well done, but suffice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, Spencer has sent me two 10 gigabit SFP media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey converters, which basically goes from fiber to Ethernet, two SFP actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doodads that you, that you plug into devices to get the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, to get onto fiber and literally 100 meters of fiber.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the message from Spencer was you have no more excuses. Make it happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now I’ve got a problem. And now I’ve got to tell, I’ve got to wire the house for
⏹️ ▶️ John Did the rest of the family feel about this gift?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Aaron’s, uh, rolled pretty much right out of her head. And the kids were like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why are all these boxes on the kitchen table? Which is where they found them. They have since moved from the kitchen table, but that’s where they were.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have no other updates beside that, but thanks to Spencer, at some point, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m actually going to have to put at least a little bit of fiber in the house. And I get asked about this, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once every month or two, someone will send me an email and be like, hey, what’s going on with the fiber thing? Or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah, P.S. Why didn’t Casey ever do fiber? So, so that’s the deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, as soon as I received this, the first thing I did was I said, you know, thank you so very much, Spencer, because this was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a gag gift. This was probably quite a bit of money. Um, and that was a very unnecessary, very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very kind. But the second thing I did was say to Steven Hackett, when are you coming? So we can install this.
⏹️ ▶️ John thought you would have done is write the date on all these boxes. Why? So in case there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John expiration date. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco six years from now, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John have you opened those boxes yet? Casey? Like I’ll get to it eventually. And I’d be like, well, check the dates, check the dates. They might might have expired.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not milk, John. It’ll be fine. Uh, so anyway, so yeah, so that’s a thing. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I dunno, I’m trying to convince Stephen to come up and make a project of it with me and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, wire the house for ethernet and in fiber to a degree.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s already doing his own.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know he’s an expert,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he’s got his own stuff going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well there will hopefully come a time that he doesn’t and maybe we can have a little adventure together. Plus I can show him what good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barbecue is. Shots fired. Uh, anyway, so that’s, that’s That’s my story and I’m sticking to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But yeah, thank you and also no thank you, Spencer. I told Aaron,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is both an extremely kind and also extremely trolly gift. And I think it’s both of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same time. He’s calling you a bluff. He is. He really, really is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, does this work for other projects? Like, can I just like mail you other things to do? Only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John if he’s declared that
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s looking into doing them in his house and you have to wait a few years.
Metallica on Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hi, alright, so speaking of forcing other people to do things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I’ve compelled you to watch the 30-minute Vision Pro Metallica Immersive Special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me quickly set the stage, we talked about this last week, Apple announced like a week and a half ago, something like that, that they’re going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this roughly, like I said, 30-minute Metallica special. It was pitched as basically a concert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey film, but only three songs. I believe it was Whiplash, One, and Enter Sandman, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one way or another, that was released this past Friday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have now watched it twice. I have plenty of thoughts, but Marco, would you prefer to start?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you like me to start? How would you like to do this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll start because I think I’ll be quick and I think I’ll probably be a little more critical than you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ll go into this by saying that I’m not a massive Metallica fan. I respect their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music. I’m just not really a metal person, but I respect that they are talented at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do you know I went through an SM phase like everyone else but that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good album but anyway so I did watch the whole thing in one go I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did it without air pods I used the built-in like speaker sticks on the ears that was a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was but I understand it I understand it but it was a mistake yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the it mainly because you know this is obviously a band that has a lot of bass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the there is just no bass in the ear pod things like that are on the sticks of the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s also like one thing that I immediately felt for a concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video, you really need easy volume control. And the Vision Pro doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. That’s fair. Well, don’t forget that you can do the look at your hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then flip your hand over. Do you remember what I’m talking about? Yeah, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I was, I was, I tried that and I was playing, eventually I got it. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro, if one of the main features of this device that makes it possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compelling is audio and video, like video experiences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs a hardware volume control. And they had the foresight to put a knob on it like Apple does. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all these digital crowns lying around, they’re like, we got to shove these everywhere. But they use the digital crown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something else. They use it for like the pass-through versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco virtualized world toggle. So there is no volume control, there’s no hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume control in the Vision Pro. It really needs one. Like, that’s, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really needs one. Anyway, so once I got past the physical setup there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual Metallica video, I’m glad they did it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of direction they need to start going in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think they made some poor choices and stylistic choices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in doing this. So what I’ve been saying for a while, and actually I was surprised to hear Ben
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thompson on Stratechery also really chimed in about this, saying very similar things this past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. What I’ve been wanting for a while is just give me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fixed camera so I can experience the concert as if I was there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experiencing a live event as if you are there, as something the Vision Pro can deliver that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other video screens can’t. And so I think that really would benefit from basically just a fixed camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a really good seat. That’s not what this was. It also like I was saying last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, like why they do a concert and only do three songs. Having seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I think they should have done two songs because I was bored. Because what they created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was sort of a documentary, sort of a concert film hybrid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the style of it, they had occasional interludes between songs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing these slow panning shots of one of the members of the band and saying something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pithy in the background as the narration. The spotlight goes across the dude’s face and it’s like, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks, you know, they’re trying to be dramatic and everything but I’m just kind of like, can we get to the songs please? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes through all that, whatever. And then when they were in the songs, they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just constant cuts. Tons of cuts. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cut like every couple of seconds. It was shot like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a music documentary or a music video. It was not shot like a concert.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What they chose to do was a lot of really intense close-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shots, both with the band members as they played and with the fans around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know we have to see a lot of Lars Ulrich sticking his tongue out. Okay one shot of that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like literally every shot with Lars in it he’s sticking his tongue out at the camera. I mean I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he thinks he’s cool I don’t know maybe that’s a metal thing that I don’t understand whatever. But so you know we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw a lot of Lars Ulrich’s tongue but we also like they kept cutting to shots of like the fans going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know into the camera and we were again like like all the other vision pro immersive content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were so close to everyone it was like a bunch of fans were sticking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their tongue in my eye as I’m trying to watch this and I’m like I is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pleasant to anybody like I you know when when 3d movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first became possible to show to the public what was largely shown on them was gimmicky stuff where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shark comes out of the screen and comes at you you’re like, whoa, like it almost seems like the vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro, like the, whatever the immersive video production team is, you know, whatever that studio is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, it almost seems like they’re trying to like wow us with the three D in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by having a bunch of stuff come really close to us. And I think that’s a mistake for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of reasons. Number one, it feels weird as a viewer. Number two, the vision pro and the content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being streamed to it is not that high resolution. So when things are shown very close to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see the limits of the resolution. You see the limits of those screens, you see the limits of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the codec and the video that’s being shown to you. So it actually doesn’t look very good. Whereas when stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, when you’re viewing things at a more moderate distance, you really don’t notice the pixelation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the blurriness or the lack of, you know, proper convergence and focus and things like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a mistake in lots of ways for them to be showing all these things that like get in your face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it seems like the creative decision-making of their video production keeps doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, I think that’s a mistake. But anyway, so back to the concert. It was this huge rock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco band in this venue. I think it was like a 60,000 seat venue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In this massive band, in this massive venue. But the way they shot it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it felt small. They were shooting it mostly with cameras that were like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the stage. looking right onto Lars Ulrich’s tongue. You were so close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You didn’t get the spectacle. We were too close to the performers, and that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made it feel small. You know, when you’re at a big concert in a big arena,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have things like the pyrotechnic firework blasts when they hit certain notes. They have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, a big lighting show. There were a couple times they had those firework blasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you only knew the fireworks blasted because the shot after they blasted you could see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trails There was one moment in enter Sandman where I guess they dropped a bunch of beach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco balls on the audience like big giant beach balls And you didn’t know because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you didn’t see them drop because they were zoomed in when it happened And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like a following shot, then you saw oh, there’s beach balls all over the audience when did that happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they shot it so close that it made this huge spectacle in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge arena of this huge band feel really really small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and instead of being a cool spectacle it looked like four old guys playing wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instruments and it really didn’t convey the scale or the spectacle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a concert arena, which is what it was. So I think the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of concerts in immersive video is a great idea, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s almost as if the people who were, who are filming or editing or remaking those creative decisions on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to present this and how to shoot this. It almost feels like they’ve never used a vision pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They overproduced, they went too far and they succeeded yet again in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making like a demo, a content snack. like I said last week, everything the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro has delivered so far is not content. It’s a demo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what content could be like on the Vision Pro. It’s like everything on the Vision Pro is a sample project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s an example app that you might be able to do one day. Here’s some example video styles that we might be able to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, it’s been out for over a year. When do we get to actually get the content?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this it? I hope not. This still feels like a demo and not a good one. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be in Apple’s best interest if they won’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pedestrian version of just fixed cameras in front of live events of various types, concerts, sports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theater. If Apple won’t make that, open up the doors and let someone else do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get these cameras in the hands of more people. I don’t know what they have to do, but the Apple-directed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studio, I think, is making the wrong creative stylistic decisions on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of content to make and how to make it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear everything you said and particularly the specific quibbles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I largely agree with. There was too much of Lars Ulrich’s tongue. There were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too many cuts. I do agree with that. Overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who loves a concert film, a concert video, whatever you want to call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I freaking loved it. I absolutely freaking loved it. I find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ben Thompson to be frustratingly bright. I feel like he is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much smarter than me in so many different ways. It’s almost off putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how smart he is. And I cannot disagree with him more. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by proxy, you, who is also very smart, I cannot disagree with you two more that plunking a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera down on stage is the better approach. is the better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approach. I totally— Not on stage, to be clear. Plunking a camera in a good audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seat. I hear you, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still disagree with you. It is an important distinction, however, but I still disagree with you. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing of it is, there’s a couple of problems here. Number one, this stage was— the way it worked was there was a cir—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stage was circular. In the center of that circle was a hole— it was like a donut, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so in the center, the donut hole, if you will, was—I believe it’s called the snake pit or something like that. Now I’m showing both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my age and my ignorance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they were talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I saw that term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco float by. I’m like, what are they talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about? Okay. I think that’s what that is. And honestly, you don’t need to correct us. It’s fine. But basically there were a bunch of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packed like sardines in the center there. And then there were a bunch of people outside the donut, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To begin with, that sort of a concert where it’s very dynamic and they’re walking around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this donut, that would have been awful if you had a stationary camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So maybe you have several stationary cameras around the entire venue. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess. But what if you’re, what, what if Lars is soloing or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in, in the nearest camera to him is 40 feet away or, or for whatever reason, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey director’s chosen a different camera. Like I still don’t think that makes this that much better. Now, again, I want to reiterate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are too many cuts. Absolutely unequivocally too many cuts. It got better as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the concert got, got further through the three. I can’t even call it a concert if it’s three songs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but as the concert went on, it did get better. And I feel like they kind of pulled back a little bit on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but could not agree more, still too many cuts for the love of all that is good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and holy Apple century LLC, whatever the thing is that produces these videos that they show at the end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let your directors hang onto a shot. I beg of you hang onto the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shot. And the way, you know, this is better is I believe it was during one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which which is the middle song, which is, I’m not a Metallica super fan by any means, but I enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Metallica. I also went through my SNM the album phase, and it’s an incredible album.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I generally enjoy their work, even though I don’t seek it out very often. One is one of my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey songs of theirs, which is not very hot take at all. That’s about the coldest take in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I also agree. I think that’s their best song, in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey During the performance of One, we were fairly close to James, and actually let me interrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, extreme closeups of human faces too much. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too f**king much, Apple. It’s too much. It’s in every video. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video. That’s what I’m saying. Like who wants this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny. It’s funny because it’s so it’s every video. Like you just said, it’s every friggin video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s too much, Apple. Anyways, we were not in extreme closeup mode at this point, but we were very, very close.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were two Jameses, the lead singers, left hand side and he’s solo, he’s kneeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the edge of the stage and he’s soloing to a degree and the fans are right in front of him, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches away from him. And there’s one fan in particular who’s got, you know, the horns up with his hands and he’s like rocking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out or whatever. And, and James is way off Mike. Cause you know, he’s, he turns out he’s very tall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we’ll get, come back to in a second, but he’s way off Mike. He’s kneeling down and he like yells
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an excited, happy way, like right in this guy’s face, not in an angry, you know, mean way and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a happy, like, we’re in the moment together this fricking rules way. And he yells in this guy’s face and he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then immediately gets up and does the cool kid like walk away thing. Not again, not a mean way, not a bad way. He’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving on to the next moment of the concert. But the key is the camera stage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I loved this shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you could watch, you could watch this man lose his shit in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a perfect, beautiful way. And I know that seems kind of stupid for me to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beautiful, but really and truly, what I love so much about live music, even as someone who doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to very many live music concerts because I’m old and value my hearing and have children,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but as someone who loves live music, even recorded live music like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s that moment that is just truly a beautiful, beautiful moment because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he loses it. You can see him like throw his head back in like ecstasy and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then like kind of almost keel over because he’s like, what just happened to me? How did this just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen? It is truly a beautiful moment. And the key to this, the key to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that they let it air. They let the shot air. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’ve been saying. This is what I’ve been saying. This is what everyone has been saying. I violently disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you that you need to plunk one camera and then walk away. And part of the reason why I don’t agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you there is the absolutely incredible version of the talk show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where there was the immersive camera right up front. Or it wasn’t, well, maybe it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco immersive. Maybe it was just that. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple’s official immersive format. Because I don’t think they at that time had released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any cameras or anything to do that to the public yet. But it was basically what I’m talking about. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very close to what I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was great. I’m not trying to take away from that. It was great. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the immersive thing, it didn’t add that much. There’s depth, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neat, but there’s nothing happening. Like you’re just watching some dudes talk. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that watching some people play music is that different. So I disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that having a completely immobile camera is better, but as violently as I disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with both you and Ben in that regard, I violently agree with you, if that’s possible, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to let the shots air out. They need to let the shots air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. There’s so many times that it’s just rapid fire, rapid fire, rapid fire, and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helpful. Let it breathe. Even if you’re not watching the soloist, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is frustrating in and of itself, just let it breathe for a minute, man. I could deal with less letting it breathe on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lars’ tongue, but nevertheless, let it breathe. Now, to back up quite a bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the film starts, and it is like a documentary slash concert film, like you had said, it starts by watching James
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hetfield, the lead singer, walk out. Well, I’m sorry. It starts by the four of them kind of grouping and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting ready for the show. And then they follow James, and later they follow the rest of them and walk out. And they walk out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from backstage through the crowd. Like, there’s a pathway, but through the crowd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And presumably, they end up on the stage, but you don’t actually see that part. And it’s those moments that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think are what makes this so unique. Because unlike anything I’ve ever seen, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when there’s depth to it, when you can pitch your head and look around, it is real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way that nothing else I have experienced is real. I’m not saying that Vision Pro is the only way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to accomplish this. Presumably, you know, there’s equivalent things for the meta quest or whatever you call it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, for me, unlike anything I’ve experienced. And my mom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has said for my entire life, like, she doesn’t believe in reincarnation. I’m sure I’ve told this story. She doesn’t believe in reincarnation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If she could reincarnate as someone, she would want to be like an actor or a musician where they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walk on stage and they hear everyone cheering for them. And you’re walking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right behind James and you’re watching him high-five all these people. And it’s as close as I’ve been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than when we’ve done a live show. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was gonna say, you’ve had that experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is a mind screw in a bunch of different ways, in a bunch of happy ways. But other than, that’s not 60,000 people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? That’s several thousand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I think it’s a thousand at best. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I am overjoyed that I’ve ever had that experience once, let alone been lucky enough to have it many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times. But this is a whole different level, right? And to see these people just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey losing their minds to touch this man’s hand, it’s very, very, very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing I really liked about it was that they were no longer very precious about the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being visible. If you look at the concert for one for Raya or whatever her name is, she’s incredibly talented, forgive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I always butcher her name, Ray, Raya, I forget. They basically had one camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you’re describing, they occasionally cut to other ones, but it was mostly one camera. And you could never see that there were other immersive cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. And similarly, the concert for one with Alicia Keys, they put the cameras in like these monolith
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. So you couldn’t really tell, I mean, if you thought about it, you could tell, oh, that’s where the camera is, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t really see them. In this, you could see the cameras. You could see the one behind Lars. You could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the ones floating around on cabling. You could see the cameras, And it didn’t take away from it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was fine. And I’m glad they weren’t precious about it. The fireworks thing was another thing I took note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of. It’s funny what you said about not really seeing them because I didn’t either. But because I had my AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, I heard it. I heard it in the left channel. And what did I do? I turned my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head and look at that. Over there, there’s fireworks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t get this because you were open air, which is totally reasonable. It’s totally fine. But I think had you had your AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, it would have had, not a deeper meaning, That’s a bit dramatic. But you would have caught it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, right? And you would have understood it better because you’d hear it pounding in your left ear and you would have turned your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head to the left and you would have seen it. So much of this was so incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so cool. And I don’t, other than saying, you know, just stick a camera somewhere and walk away,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t particularly disagree with anything you said. I think it is too short. It is, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weirdly dancing on the line between documentary and film, and concert film, which is fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was a little weird. The extreme closeups, too much. We’ve already talked about it, too much. Let the shots breathe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously we talked about that. Just let them breathe. But ultimately this was to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely cool. And I’m so glad they did it. I’m so glad they’re starting to walk down this road.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so glad that they’re giving people the opportunity to watch at least some of this at the Apple store. John, I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have made you do this. I regret not having done so in retrospect. I know you never leave your house, but-
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about I never leave my house. I leave my house the same amount you are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, one way or another, I should have had you do this. And if you have the chance in the future, I strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encourage you to do so. It is incredible. The one final note I’d like to add, because I’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gone on too long, is for the love of all that is good and holy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we please take a screenshot of this? Can we make a GIF of this somehow? It’s Apple’s own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff! You own the rights! You’re trying to steal from Metallica again, aren’t you? Oh yeah, that’s what I’m doing. I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I can’t, I cannot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t. Oh, that was a Napster reference. It blew right over my head and then I brought it back. Well done, John. I did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you the credit you deserved. I’m sorry. Anyway, I just want to be able to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screenshot of James screaming in this fan’s face. And it’s just, again, it’s such a beautiful moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s what makes music so powerful and so amazing. And I want to take a screenshot of it just so I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some sort of visual aid to help people see what I see. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey admittedly, I didn’t try it. So maybe I’m going to be made a fool when people say, no, you can do that, you moron. but I didn’t even bother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying because I’m sure it’ll just be a black damn box. And please, Apple, for your own stuff, can I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please take a screenshot? Pretty, pretty please. Anyway, this was extremely cool. I appreciate you indulging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I’m glad you tried it, and I hope, I beg of you, Apple, Please,
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Right color, wrong Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk about colorful Macs. George Tharp writes, My sister is a very talented video editor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Many years ago, when she was graduating from high school, she asked me which Mac she should get for video editing. Naturally, I told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her to get a MacBook Pro. However, the MacBook Adorable, i.e. the 12-inch, one-port,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one-USB-port MacBook, i.e. Casey’s favorite, had just been released with a pink color option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Despite my best efforts to convince my sister otherwise, she decided to get the pink MacBook Adorable. full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well this would be underpowered for her needs. The next two years were filled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with phone calls to me asking why the computer was constantly beachballing as well as complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that she couldn’t charge her computer while uploading videos from the camera since the computer only had one port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Having said all that, she loved being one of the only students with a pink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macbook computer, so much so that years later she will still buy the pink iPhone if one is available,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regardless of how much better the non-pink iPhone Pro might be for all the videos that she shoots.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all that is to say, I’m sure my sister’s not alone and there are countless other people that will buy a product solely for the color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not the actual performance and functionality of the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John So two things about this. One, this is a case, another case where Apple is shooting themselves in the foot because people
⏹️ ▶️ John are color motivated and by confining the colors to the cheaper ones, A, Apple’s missing out on money because
⏹️ ▶️ John she would have bought the more expensive one with, you know, higher profit margins and she didn’t. B, it’s giving
⏹️ ▶️ John worse experiences with your products. Like she basically bought the wrong computer for her because she loved the pink
⏹️ ▶️ John that much. And that’s not on her so much. It’s really kind of on Apple for just confining the colors to
⏹️ ▶️ John the computers that are inappropriate to her. And then the second thing is, one way
⏹️ ▶️ John this has manifested in my, at least my daughter’s life anyway, is that she was the first one to introduce
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea, probably because she saw her peers doing it at school, of getting a case for your laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t mean a case that you put it into when it’s inside your backpack, because I got one of those as well. I mean a case like a phone case
⏹️ ▶️ John that is stuck to your laptop all the time. And guess what that opens the door for? Her laptop has basically been purple
⏹️ ▶️ John for all of high school, but Apple doesn’t sell a purple laptop, but hers was purple because it’s got these little, thin, hard plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John shells snapped onto it. And so you can get a silver one or whatever, and you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John it pink by putting a case on it. Naked robotic laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then conflictingly, Andrew Cohen writes, while I would love a colorful Mac as well, Well, the fact is most people don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They may think they do, but they really don’t. Let me explain. In a previous job of mine, we would often survey our customers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and find out what kind of pizza they would be interested in buying. Overwhelmingly, the customers said they wanted a healthier version,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something with more vegetables, better protein, healthier meats, etc. And every time we would introduce one of those, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be our worst-selling product ever. But when we introduced a pizza with three different kinds of pepperoni on it, it ended up being our best-selling product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by a landslide. I think the same is true here. will say they want colors, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go look at the cars that drive down the street. They’re all shades of gray, ranging from white to black. Rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do we see a car with real color, although I admit that trend is slowly changing. I think this is the same phenomenon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our desires do not match where we are actually willing to spend money. I have no facts to back this up, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I strongly disagree with this. I absolutely- We kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of talked about this exact thing last week. I think I maybe I’ve forgotten that this was an upcoming in the next week’s followup.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the main thing I’ll add here, aside from I like the pizza example, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference is that the thing that people do, like the sort of guilty pleasure, give me the one with three
⏹️ ▶️ John different kinds of pepperoni instead of the healthy one, that’s colors. Colors is the three pepperonis.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the guilty pleasure. You know you shouldn’t buy the pink one. You know you shouldn’t buy the pink laptop because it’s not appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John for your video editing needs, but you just love pink so much. You just love pepperoni so much. That’s the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why I think this example is not apt. Even if it was apt, see last week’s episode discussion of you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John make the colorful ones just to get people excited, even if most people are going to buy the gray and they will mostly buy the gray. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I think the colors of the pepperoni here, uh, people want to indulge
⏹️ ▶️ John in some fun with their laptops. Uh, and if you put that in front of them, they will take it. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s the wrong computer for them, just because they like it so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Because look, there’s nothing wrong with like buying or choosing something because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love it. When somebody makes the decision of like, I’m going to buy this pink one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love it and want it, even though it is, in certain technical aspects, worse for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my needs, that’s not necessarily them making a mistake. They could very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well know, yes, this other one would be faster, but I don’t love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that can be enough. Like, if when you look at an item that you have and you’re like, damn, I love that thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes that’s more important than, you know, to you or to that situation, then like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it would complete this task 20% faster. Like that’s, and it’s a factor that, you know, nerds like us often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t fully consider or, you know, we might forget about it or ignore it or minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But when people make that kind of choice, they’re not necessarily always just doing it out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ignorance of the technical specs. They’re making a decision that, you know what, I care more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the feeling I get when I look at this thing or like it makes me happier, like this one makes me happier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than this other one that we’ve better fit for many of them. And look, I can personally speak to this on a slightly different level,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like my travel laptop that I use constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the train, on the ferry, is a MacBook Air. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my needs, I’ve said on the show, the screen not being very bright and not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nanotexture actually really hurts its usability for me. What also hurts its usability for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me is the ports only being on one side. And often I run into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needing an SD card slot. The MacBook Air doesn’t have those. I really probably should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a 14-inch MacBook Pro for that role instead. It has nanotexture, it has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brighter, better screen, it has better speakers when I use those, I also use it for like FaceTime workouts, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the speakers all the time. Like it has the ports on both sides, it has the SD card reader, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even has better battery life. And by all accounts, I should be using 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro, but I still choose the Air. Why? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the way it feels when I pick it up. That’s it. That’s the reason. The MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels better in my hands. I’m physically strong enough to lift the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra, you know, whatever half-pound is the difference, like, between that and the 14-inch. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick up the 14-inch just fine. It’s fine. But I choose the Air, even though it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically substantially worse for my actual needs for that computer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I pick up a 14-inch MacBook Pro I don’t love it and when I pick up the Air I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love it. So these kind of factors matter that like that’s why like the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing applied to the 12-inch like people love that thing including Casey like you we loved it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it felt amazing to pick it up and it looked it was so small and it was so crappy in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many other ways but but people loved it. And part of it was because it was pink, and part of it was because it was super small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thin and it felt great in the hand. And those factors matter a lot. So for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to continue to do very well in one area, like the thin and light stuff mattering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do great in that area. For them to continue to under deliver or underserve the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color market, I think is a missed opportunity. Because people love colors, they love computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have colors. And all of that love that people have for their computer that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be there from it being a fun color, Apple’s just leaving that on the table and not serving it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and again, getting back to this analogy, the logical thing of like, you know, you should get the 14 inch because it has the specs that you
⏹️ ▶️ John need. You know what the logical choice is? I should get the food that’s healthier for me. I shouldn’t eat so much saturated fat. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should get more vegetables on my pizza. The vegetable healthy pizza is the laptop that has the right
⏹️ ▶️ John specs for you. But the one you love is the one with pepperoni. This is slightly complicated by the fact that, you know, it actually does
⏹️ ▶️ John affect your health badly to get the pizza that you love. Whereas getting the laptop that you love probably won’t affect your health, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the best I could do with this analogy. Anyway, I think it’s basically flipped. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Thank you. it.
Chip follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a couple of anonymous people that wrote in to us with regard to Hydra, H-I-D-R-A,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of combining their feedback. All Apple SoCs are named after systems on a chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are named after islands. There’s occasionally a subtle reference in the choice of the island, but that’s not guaranteed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The processor core names are more varied, although the power and efficiency cores of the same generation often have names that work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together. So some examples. The A14 was Sicily and the M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Tonga. The A15 was Ellis, the M2 was Staten, and M2 Pro Max Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were Rhodes. A16 was Crete, the M3 was Ibiza, and the M3 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Lobos, and the M3 Max Ultra was Palma. When the Pro variant has the same code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name as the Max and Ultra variants, the code name gets the CHOP suffix. The Max and Ultra variants get the CDI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 2CDI suffix, but we’ve already talked about that in past shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page of Apple code names. They have a section in the Wikipedia page for the SOCs
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can see it. And we’ll again put a link that we had in last week as well to that island off
⏹️ ▶️ John the coast of Norway called Hidra, which I still think sounds like Hedra, but Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. You may be right. Now that I know it was unequivocally based on that island, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the famous idea how to pronounce that word. We don’t know this unequivocally. It’s just almost certain. I mean, okay, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not unequivocally, but it’s based off that island. So I don’t know how that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Island’s name is pronounced. When I was giving you stick about it a couple of weeks ago, it was, it was because I didn’t, I thought it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a alternate spelling of the mythical beast. I didn’t realize that there was also the Island. So either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. Um, yeah, it sounds like this is, well, I can’t say unequivocally, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it is almost certainly, almost certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, based on the Island. And then front of the show, Jonathan Dietz jr writes with regard to the M three and M
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four max and interposers. Uh, John, do you want to handle this? You want to read this? How do you want to approach it?
⏹️ ▶️ John So he, as usually, provided a giant email, which we cannot include in the show because it’s too much information. He provided a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of links, most of which are either paywalled or in Japanese. So that kind of hampers our ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to link you to them. We’ll put a couple of Japanese ones in there. I tried Google translating on them, but anyway, I’m relying
⏹️ ▶️ John on John’s, indeed it’s a long time contributor to the show to parse these out. So here are the takeaways.
⏹️ ▶️ John First, and a couple of people wrote in about this, a little bit more precision in terms. John wants
⏹️ ▶️ John us to know that the interposer the piece of silicon that sits between the logic dies and the organic substrate, hence
⏹️ ▶️ John the name. It is not the name of the interface on the logic dies themselves, which is a die-to-die interface, or
⏹️ ▶️ John D-2D, D-2D for short. I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I always say interposer is just kind of shorthand because it’s the thing that the interposer
⏹️ ▶️ John connects to or whatever, but yes, it is more technically accurate to say what we’re looking for on these die shots
⏹️ ▶️ John is show me the D-2D interface, Show me the place where the interposer is supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John connect to this chip because if there isn’t one that means this chip isn’t wired To connect to an interposer
⏹️ ▶️ John and another chip through it. So that’s what we’ve been looking for So terminology, I’ll probably just keep calling the interposer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but and maybe I’ll be able to switch to D2D We’ll see how we go. I’ll try to during this feedback here Anyway, the next
⏹️ ▶️ John item the m3 max does not have a D2D interface. I’ll put some links for this
⏹️ ▶️ John This is Jonathan’s interpretation of these links that I either can’t see because they’re paywall by an expensive thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m not gonna pay or they’re in Japanese. In one of the links, John says, all these
⏹️ ▶️ John images show no D2D interface on the M3 Max die, yet clearly the M3 Ultra exists. The most likely explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple made two mask sets, one with D2D and one without. Considering how many fewer ultras they
⏹️ ▶️ John sell, ultras they sell their Maxes, this probably makes sense financially, especially considering they
⏹️ ▶️ John committed to volume production on the M3 Max very early in the M3, I’m assuming he means M3B
⏹️ ▶️ John ramp up. So that’s the idea. Those rumors were true. the M3 Max really
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have a place for an interposer to connect. The images weren’t just cropped, and yet that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that the M3 Ultra wasn’t coming, because in fact it did arrive, although the M3 Ultra is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John different in some substantial ways. Second item, the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Max does not have a D2D interface. Again, supported by these articles in Japanese that I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read, but I believe it. Now, does that mean there’ll never be an M4 Ultra?
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t mean that for the M3, but then again, Apple said probably every generation will not have an ultra so that’s why we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying no M4 ultra but anyway I guess the the practice of looking at the max chip
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if the D2D interface is on the die is not useful
⏹️ ▶️ John so oh well and then finally regarding the reticle limit which is how big a single chip can you make
⏹️ ▶️ John given the current process technology Jonathan said until TSMC starts using the high
⏹️ ▶️ John NAE UV there’s room for about a 75% area increase beyond the size of
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 Max. So on the current process, or on the three nanometer process at
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC, we do have a little more room to grow. So keep hope alive for those two chips
⏹️ ▶️ John that are bigger than a Max stuck together in the M3 or four extreme at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then also John has a spreadsheet that he keeps up to date on Google Sheets if you wanna see some
⏹️ ▶️ John facts and figures about Apple Silicon stuff.
OS-redesign follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then with regard to Apple’s multi-OS redesign, John Tatum writes, I was seven as a decade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old. Oof. Gosh, I, I, I can’t, I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, how long should a theme last on an OS? I’m looking forward to the new look. We can’t expect the operating system to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey static from a visual standpoint. Also, isn’t this a pitch for subscription software? I thought that’s why I regularly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I supported apps in this way so that they could be updated regularly with features, but also with
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so that is part of the reason you need recurring revenue, because there is a certain amount of minimum amount of work you need to do
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep up with the OS upgrade cycle. But it’s a question of where you want those resources allocated. You say, I want
⏹️ ▶️ John features, but also want you to keep up with system changes. Well, if a system change is big enough, that could
⏹️ ▶️ John swamp all the features you were going to get. And you may be okay with that. But what usually happens is users
⏹️ ▶️ John think I subscribe to this. So I expect it to be maintained to the level I expect. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John also when there’s a system update that should just come for free. As in, I still expect the exact same features. I always expect
⏹️ ▶️ John because from the outside, it doesn’t look like updating for the new OS look should be that much work, but it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is. So it just adds an additional burden and practically speaking, it can make it, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for independent developers with small staffs or a single person, make it so you have to halt all feature work
⏹️ ▶️ John and just spend all your time on the system updates before you can resume feature work again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think also, you know, first of all, I would disagree with the characterization that the theme that we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is that much like iOS 7, because I think it’s pretty different. know certainly the some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the broad strokes are still there so I see why people say this but yet many if not most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the details are very very different that being said okay sometimes yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should redesign things sometimes to keep them fresh but redesigning the OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned last episode is just incredibly expensive not only on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but on the entire ecosystem so you have to do you have to enter that very carefully and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to do it from a position of strength, both within Apple and into a strong ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as we’re going to maybe talk about, do we all think Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so little else to improve about their software that they can tackle this right now? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we trust Apple to do a good job of this right now? I don’t know how confident I would be in saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes to those. And then finally, how do we feel about Apple’s position with their developer ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the ecosystem of iOS apps, when there’s a big system redesign, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps will fall behind. Many apps will take a long time to implement it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it certainly puts a big burden on those apps, as John was saying, because it is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work usually to adopt a new system design that whatever features you were hoping that those apps would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add this year, they probably won’t be able to. Are we doing this at a time when the ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is healthy and robust enough to absorb that burden?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, I don’t know if I’d confidently say yes to that either. So what we have is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumored like giant redesign from a company that probably should be doing other things with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its software engineering resources right now into an ecosystem of developers that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not in the healthiest state, nor is the relationship with Apple in the healthiest state. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who would implement such a design at Apple, I’m not sure we have a lot of trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their taste or abilities to do so, especially on platforms like Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s where the hesitation is coming from here. It’s not that we want to hold on to a certain design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. It’s changing the design is incredibly expensive and burdensome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and risky. And do we trust today’s Apple with their priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and resources to do a good job of this and implement it this year?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s tough. And obviously what with the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole sphere being none too happy with Apple right now, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tough time and I don’t know how it’s going to work out. But I will use this opportunity to plug your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast with underscore David Smith, where you just had a really good episode about choosing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optimism over pessimism, which certainly hit home for me, something that I don’t think I do a good job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. And I think that I need to take Dave’s advice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to heart for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Me too. I was going to say, we know which one of the two hosts of that show that sentiment
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming from. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reality is, we’re all in this. We’re all in the Apple ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For most of what most of us do, that is still the overall best choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In many cases, it’s the only choice. So we’re in this no matter what. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that this all works out great. I don’t wanna have to be complaining on our show for the next three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years about how the new design broke Mac OS or like, I don’t wanna be doing that. I want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. And I’m rooting for it to be awesome. I’m just concerned that it might not be. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here we are, like we’re in this no matter what. So I hope it works out.
Mac setup via iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, as a final follow-up item, macOS Sequoia 15.4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now or will have a Mac setup via iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you caught this, I think you’re the first person I see to catch this, but an excerpt from Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey press release for the new MacBook Air and also on the Mac Studio, it reads as follows, next month macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sequoia 15.4 will make it easier than ever to set up the new MacBook Air with iPhone. I hate that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not the iPhone, but I don’t need to open that can of worms again. By simply bringing iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm close to the Mac. Oh, it’s close to Mac. God. I hate this so much Oh my god Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring it close to your friend Mac Users could quickly and conveniently sign into their Apple account to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their files photos messages passwords and more onto their new MacBook Air Asterisk requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 18.4 and Mac OS. Excuse me, iPad OS 18.4 or later.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s an interesting choice. I mean like so many aspects of the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone setup process are still better than the than the Mac setup process. And this is kind of like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can kind of help you there. Like, don’t you hate typing in your password? You used to just be able to, you know, use your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John to sign into things. We can do that. And we kind of need if you could bring your old Mac close to your new Mac and do it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, baby steps here. I think this will actually improve things a little bit. I wish it was kind of like you would just
⏹️ ▶️ John set up your Mac and it would show you a menu of all your Mac iCloud backups, but oh, that doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, we’ll get there someday.
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Apple Intelligence delay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk. Oh, there’s been a lot of news this last week and it all started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a post on Daring Fireball and John Gruber, I guess exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a statement from Apple with regard to upcoming personalized in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri, Apple intelligence features. And so that post reads or their comment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reads as follows. Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and added an integration with chat GPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more awareness of your personal context as well as the ability to take action for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on these features, and we anticipate them rolling them out in the coming year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what this means is all of the stuff that they promised, well, I shouldn’t say all, a lot of the stuff they promised at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t going to land perhaps this calendar year?
⏹️ ▶️ John What does in the coming year mean? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what is year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to take bets right now? Ever?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing, the thing about their announcement of Apple intelligence and all of the features that are involved in how they’re rolling out in the coming
⏹️ ▶️ John year and stuff like that, that they’ve done that for the past many years with the features. It’s just, it’s real easy to just
⏹️ ▶️ John lose track of which feature that they announced is coming out and which release was that supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in the 0.1 or that one’s coming in the 0.4 or like, it’s just so hard to keep track of
⏹️ ▶️ John that and you just start to kind of just start to forget about it. Like, I think they could actually get away with for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John just like disappearing features. Like we announced this, but we’re never gonna speak of it again and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll just forget about it. And that would probably work for a lot of this stuff. But unfortunately the main
⏹️ ▶️ John one that they’re talking about here in this announcement is like, we’re gonna be later than we thought,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a time that we’re not going to define for you, but just assume that you, whatever you were thinking it was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be, whatever vague thing that we said before, whatever you had in your mind about when you were gonna get this
⏹️ ▶️ John one flagship feature, it’s gonna be later than that. And what is that one flagship feature? Make Siri better.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s the one they talk about. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are other things here. There are other things that they promised that are gonna be coming later as well, I’m sure, but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the new, more personalized Siri with context awareness that doesn’t like the cool Siri, the better Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John the improved Siri, the Siri that should have been bundled with the new appearance, but wasn’t, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That thing, that thing that you’ve been waiting for, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. Lots of room there for,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we didn’t say they were coming out in the coming year. We said we anticipate rolling them out and rolling them
⏹️ ▶️ John out doesn’t mean releasing them. It maybe means like doling them, rolling them out a piece at a time. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John coming year could mean 365 days from the time you got this announcement or it could mean the end of calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John year or it could be the fiscal year, could be the lunar year, we don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the upshot is things are taking longer than they thought on Apple AI. And that announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John and that release to that release of statement to Gruber triggered
⏹️ ▶️ John a crisis of faith in our friend, John Gruber. And
⏹️ ▶️ John he had a lot to say about that on his website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He did. The whole post, it is a little bit on the longer side for Gruber, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is worth it. Every word was really, really good. I mean, Gruber, man, when he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on, he is so freaking on. But anyways, John pulled a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quotes from this, one of which I went to pull and then realized that John beat me to it. This is Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that is. But anyways, reading from John Gruber, In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the more personalized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until the coming year. I should have my head examined. This announcement dropped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a surprise and certainly took me by surprise to some extent. But it was all there from the start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year. And I am embarrassed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start. How I missed this is twofold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First, I’d been lulled into complacency by Apple’s track record of consistently shipping pre-announced products and features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Second, I was foolishly distracted by the Apple Intelligence brand umbrella. Apple Intelligence doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a single thing or project. It’s a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then later on in the same post, it’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing we need to show something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that only Apple can do. At WWDC last year. But it turns out they announced something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple couldn’t do. Sick burn. And now they look so far, so out of their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state of the art in AI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped, but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this big post, which has gotten a lot of attention, it is framed like that. The first
⏹️ ▶️ John passage you read, I believe is the very start of the post. It is framed as, and I think substantially is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John a post about John Gruber’s personal disillusionment and,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, and kicking himself for missing the signs that were there that,
⏹️ ▶️ John he should have expected that they weren’t going to deliver what they were said going to deliver based on everything that he had seen
⏹️ ▶️ John about them. And as he said, like, how did he miss it? He was just like, well, they always say they’re going to do stuff in the coming
⏹️ ▶️ John year and they always do. So why wouldn’t they do it this time? And then, like I said before, Apple intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they just amount so much stuff and like some stuff shipped with the 0.0 and then some stuff was coming later. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you just kind of lose track of like which things were supposed to be coming when and are they later, are they early and which things do they demonstrate
⏹️ ▶️ John for real? he does a lot of things in the post about talking about things that they demo, things that are in the video,
⏹️ ▶️ John things that they demo where an Apple person holds a device and shows someone from the press and then things where the press gets to touch
⏹️ ▶️ John it and things where the public gets to touch, like the different levels of like doneness and when the software is released. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that the post is worth reading to get an idea of kind of the nuts and bolts of how things are judged
⏹️ ▶️ John in this way. Now, I did read it thinking a lot that this post really was a lot more about
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber than it was, say, about the three of us or a lot of other people who are, I think, constitutionally
⏹️ ▶️ John more skeptical and grumpy about Apple than
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say. I mean, if you are an ATP listener, you probably heard lots of skepticism about
⏹️ ▶️ John all things AI, including Apple Intelligence, and maybe less so if you have been reading Daring Fireball,
⏹️ ▶️ John because he seemed to believe that these were coming, that more likely to be coming. But there’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John angle on this that I haven’t heard mentioned that I’m kind of glad no one brought up. I saw now since this
⏹️ ▶️ John was what put out like last week sometime. Now it’s time to talk about an ATP and that’s this. It’s another one
⏹️ ▶️ John of my hobby horses. So you might not be surprised to hear me talk about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of times Apple will announce a feature and then
⏹️ ▶️ John like sometimes it’s not in the first beta back before they got into the habit of saying this will be, this will be released in the coming year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember when just the features weren’t in the first WWDC build, like there was many years of that where it’s like, huh, weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the feature they demonstrated, it’s not actually in this bill, but they tell me in a future build, it’ll be in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re at WWDC, you’re doing stuff, you’re like, I’d really love to use that feature, but I guess it’s not in this bill, but
⏹️ ▶️ John when we all go home, the next build, it’ll have the feature. And then we entered, it was a couple of years where that happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then we entered a couple of years where it was like, this will be coming out in the coming years, it’s not even gonna be in the 0.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then of course this thing where it’s like, it’s not gonna be, it’s just not gonna make the year period.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think there’s a specific difference between Apple intelligence and all of
⏹️ ▶️ John the past things. And it doesn’t have to do with something being rotten
⏹️ ▶️ John in Cupertino and like the whole thing of like, who inside Apple said that we should
⏹️ ▶️ John announce this and other people said we shouldn’t, it’s not ready and someone insisted on it and stuff like that. Because I think, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know for sure, but I think from the outside that, I don’t know, multiple decades
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple, they have had someone in a position of power saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to announce this, even though it’s not ready. And things have been just
⏹️ ▶️ John super not ready. Just, you know, some of them didn’t exist at all. Some of them barely
⏹️ ▶️ John existed. Just like that is not a new phenomenon. It is not as if suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple of today has done something that has never done before. They used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John so good about making sure that they wouldn’t announce a product unless they sure it was gonna ship
⏹️ ▶️ John in the software realm. And I don’t think that’s the case. I think this is the case, that they would always do that. they would always
⏹️ ▶️ John aggressively announce things that absolutely were not ready, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they were saved by the fact that most of the time, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John burn out your employees and work them real hard and get it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the point where you could ship something. And very often that something, it would ship super broken, but they would fix it afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ John That happened a lot where a feature would be announced and unbeknownst to us, it was just so massively
⏹️ ▶️ John far behind inside Apple. And we would kind of get a feel of that, but you’re like, wow, this is super broken in the beta. Did you notice this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work at all in the beta? Like, I mean, whatever, maybe, you know, obviously the beta, we get it behind
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple does, so it’s probably better inside there. But it turns out, no, it was a disaster inside Apple too. And even though our beta was
⏹️ ▶️ John older, their current ones inside the company were still broken and they’d be broken right up to 0.0 release
⏹️ ▶️ John day. And sometimes they’d be broken in 0.0 and then we could fix them. We would just forget about it and all goes fine. But that only
⏹️ ▶️ John works. This is the difference. That only works. If you’re working on a piece of software
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can fix by having programmers find and fix bugs in it. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John just think of like, what is the one that Marco regrets putting on his thing when they add notification center for like iOS 5 or something? Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John me too. How super broken that was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 5, beta 1. I’ll never live it down. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John mess. There have been Mac OS X releases where like the release of WWDC was just super broken in lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ John ways. Back in the Mac OS X days, even in Mac OS days, right? The difference all those
⏹️ ▶️ John is you can imagine a team just going heads down and being like, all right, it’s broken, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John SMOP, simple matter of programming. By putting in too long hours and working ourselves too hard
⏹️ ▶️ John and regretting all of our poor planning and regretting the aggressive deadline set, impossible deadline
⏹️ ▶️ John set for us by our bosses, especially back in the Steve Jobs day, when he’d be like, just do it, it’s gotta be ready for WWDC, right? They would
⏹️ ▶️ John make it happen. Apple Intelligence, here’s the difference. They can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that with LLM type stuff. This is what I was saying snarkily
⏹️ ▶️ John when, and I’m surprised more people didn’t call me on it because technically you can think that it’s not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John accurate if interpreted in a certain way. Remember when I said when they got the bad notification summaries? I was like, well, why don’t they just fix it? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John their announcement was like, oh, we’ll disable it or whatever and we’ll work on this. Why don’t they just fix it? It’s a bug, why don’t you fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Because they can’t fix it. And I didn’t mean they can’t as in it will never be better or it’s impossible to fix. I meant
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t fix that as in you can’t have the team come in and work over the weekend and
⏹️ ▶️ John get, you know, notification summaries to stop making mistakes. In the same way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t tell everybody, well, just work harder on it and make the LLM not make mistakes anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because nobody knows how to do that. And it’s like the LLM is a bucket of numbers and it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John time and energy to train it and your iteration cycle is long and it takes huge amounts of money and they’re using other people’s foundation
⏹️ ▶️ John models or they’re using their foundation models that were made a long time ago. It’s not a simple matter of programming.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t just go find the bugs, fix the bugs, you know, trim off the features that you’re not gonna, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John treat it like regular software. Developing LLM powered systems
⏹️ ▶️ John is like trying to introduce, you know, a dragon, so use more dragon analogies, into
⏹️ ▶️ John your tech stack. It’s like, well, you can’t really tell it what to do and it’s hard to understand and there’s lots of weird stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John going on inside there, but it’s super important and powerful. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they missed on Apple Intelligence. It’s not because they made a judgment call that was worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than previous ones they had made. It was a bad judgment call, but they’ve made bad ones before. It’s because they did not
⏹️ ▶️ John have the ability to recover from or rise to the challenge of a
⏹️ ▶️ John typical aggressive timeline because that’s not how development
⏹️ ▶️ John with LLMs work. Like think if you were on that team and they told you, well, the LLM keeps making mistakes, fix it. And you’re like, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I’m on the team that makes the UI for Siri and or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I don’t, I can’t, the LM does what, do we have, should we train a new model?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, has anyone else have an error rate that we would find acceptable? Like there’s an article about this, it says like, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you call it, the pep talk that they were giving to the Siri team and everything and the rumors that the
⏹️ ▶️ John error rate was like, it was getting 80% things correct and 20% wrong. It’s like, well, just, you know, just come in
⏹️ ▶️ John on weekends and fix that 20%. No one knows how to do that. You cannot program your
⏹️ ▶️ John way out of this hole. And that I think is at the foundation of the whole LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John powered product scenario and how it has just slammed head on into
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s need to ship something that they think is satisfactory combined with their typical decades
⏹️ ▶️ John long habit of setting incredibly aggressive goals and then trying to rise to meet them. In this case, they simply could not
⏹️ ▶️ John and cannot for a technical reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what do they do about it? Do they just bail entirely? Do they just delay, delay, delay? What do you suggest they do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if there was kind of a strategic error here is not recognizing that this difference exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thinking like just in the same way that we just set aggressive goals in the notification center and people come in on weekends and they fix it, we’ll just do that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not realizing that nobody has figured out how to make the thing you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John make to the level that you wanna make it. You want Siri to be smarter and do all this stuff, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John also want it to not tell people to put glue on their pizza, not make mistakes and do this and do that. And it’s like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John has anyone else done that? And the answer is no. The people, other people ship products where that is acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ John or like an expectation. When you talk to chat GPT, you know it’s gonna have BS information, you know it’s gonna be wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But Apple’s like, we’re gonna use it to enhance our voice assistant
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll be able to do all these amazing things and control your apps. And nowhere in there, they say, oh, and don’t worry, 20% of
⏹️ ▶️ John the time, they’ll do the wrong thing with your app, but I’m sure it’ll be fine. Like, they’re just like, when
⏹️ ▶️ John we do it, it will be better somehow. but they didn’t have a way to do it. So they should have recognized that.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do they, you know, what could they have done differently? They should have said like this technology, LLM based
⏹️ ▶️ John technology, we have to deploy it in ways where its current capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John are fit for the need. And there are ones like we said, it’s always said this, you can enhance Siri a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot with existing LLM capabilities. The example I always give back in the day
⏹️ ▶️ John when we’re talking about this is, have the LLM figure out what the heck the user is trying to say and have it
⏹️ ▶️ John translated into the stilted, fixed, limited syntax that Siri requires behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes. So that at the very least, you can do simple things like the one I just saw fly by before we started recording
⏹️ ▶️ John is a, hey dingus, what month is it? And Siri blows this so bad. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can phrase it seven different ways and it just doesn’t know. There’s probably a right way to ask it. Have the LM sit
⏹️ ▶️ John in front, figure out when people are asking what month it is, translate it into Siri speak and how, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are ways you can use the technology to enhance your products. I think they used the LM type stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they then called transformer models, to improve autocomplete. And granted, people still have
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints about how it works, but it was way worse before they added the transformer model. They needed to,
⏹️ ▶️ John like everyone else in the industry, needed to deploy this new technology according
⏹️ ▶️ John to what it can do, not what people say they think it might someday be able to do, like have a clear-eyed
⏹️ ▶️ John view of what can this actually do. In particular, have a clear-eyed view of, given its capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it makes mistakes you want to improve it. What does it take to do that? Do you have to spend $100 million to retrain a
⏹️ ▶️ John model? Are you going? Are you trying to you telling your people, your your understaffed team to do something that
⏹️ ▶️ John literally no one else in the entire world has ever been able to do, which is make an L on that doesn’t make mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think they were kind of set up for failure here. And in the end, it is on leadership,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the team can’t help with this or whatever. But that’s that’s why I think they missed this. It makes Gruber feeling better. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would say it’s the same mistake leadership always makes with respect of setting too aggressive deadlines. The mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John they made was. Industry wide. I think everyone in the industry just think looks at LMS
⏹️ ▶️ John and, and just like closes their eye to the limitations and just says, la la la, I’m not listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John LM it’ll do like the, they, they take the, uh, what is it like, uh, Instagram is other people’s highlight
⏹️ ▶️ John reel, right? And you’re comparing it to your whole life. Lots of people are comparing their
⏹️ ▶️ John product ambitions to LMS highlight reel. The highlight reel for elements is real great, but that’s not the whole story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s, it’s tough. I mean, I feel, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel especially for the rank and file, cause obviously I think it’s pretty clear they’re doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can, they’re trying their hardest and you know, everyone, including the three of us is kind of pooping all over it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s bad. It’s not good. I mean, Siri has been not good for a long time and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we’ve given the benefit of the doubt to Siri to a degree for what, 10, 12 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When was it? Was it the iPhone four or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it’s longer than longer than Declan’s been alive. I mean, it’s, it’s been a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and Siri should have gotten better by now and it just hasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I know what I talked about as an upgrade too, but it’s worth a rementioning here is I just think I just saw someone mentioned in the
⏹️ ▶️ John chat, they were complaining about a Gruber’s conclusion. Let me just scroll and to make sure they’re complaining about the thing they think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about. Um, yeah, so this, I, I, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason and I I talked about this, the leak of the meeting with the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John team, it was like one of the managers of the Siri team, not the bigwigs or whatever, one of the people talking to the team and trying to reassure
⏹️ ▶️ John them and say, we’ve done some great things, we work real hard, it’s a shame it has to be delayed, yada yada. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber brought up the same thing that I think I brought up a couple of weeks ago, just because we have the same set of experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John and cliches in our head about Apple. I think it was in the context of Siri, maybe you too, well, why am I asking Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John When I brought up the MobileMe thing, wasn’t it like two or three shows ago I was like, remember the mobile meeting where Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John asks, like, what is mobile be supposed to do? And then the person answers and says, why the F doesn’t it do this? Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John is all for like, he was upset that there was this meeting, this all hands meeting where they were trying to console
⏹️ ▶️ John the team and tell them we’ve done amazing things. We just need to work harder, blah, blah, blah. He feels like that what should have happened in
⏹️ ▶️ John that meeting is you should have had a Steve Jobs like figure up there saying, why the F doesn’t Siri do what
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s supposed to do like that. They, you know, it wasn’t appropriate to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to puff up or encourage the Siri team they need to be yelled at. And Jason and I both
⏹️ ▶️ John agreed, having worked in large companies much more than Gruber has, that that’s not how you that’s not how you lead a team.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t want to go in there and yell at people. Steve Jobs is a jerk. That is not the best way to lead people. It’s not to say that you
⏹️ ▶️ John should like tell them that everything’s great and say you did a great job and everyone is wrong to say things
⏹️ ▶️ John are bad. You have to be clear eyed and say, we all know we are not not working up the potential. We know
⏹️ ▶️ John we have not met our own standards for excellence here. But you don’t yell at them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t say why the F doesn’t it do that. You’re a bunch of losers. You should be ashamed of yourself. And you should, they already feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Believe me, everyone on the Siri teams already feels bad. Like they know what’s out there and they know
⏹️ ▶️ John what Siri is like. There is a balance to be struck between being honest and clear eyed with
⏹️ ▶️ John your employees and just yelling at them. I think in an upgrade, I compared it to
⏹️ ▶️ John when a puppy makes a poop in the house and you shove the dog’s nose in it. That is a bad way to treat a dog.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a bad way to train a dog. and that’s a bad way to treat a human. And that’s not leadership. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I also disagree with that final paragraph. It may be, from the outside, it may be cathartic for us to imagine the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are screwing up the technology that we care about get yelled at or something, but that’s not the way to treat people. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not even the best way to lead. It’s not like we should do it because it would be mean to them. It produces subpar results.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better to be a leader and to rally them to do better next time.
⏹️ ▶️ John While being honest about how far they are behind, right? Don’t sugarcoat it, but don’t be mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think that’s, there is kind of a cultural challenge there sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can give honest feedback to people. You can say like, hey, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t working. This isn’t good enough. Like you can say that without being a jerk and without yelling at them, without berating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John drastic changes too. Like don’t just say, oh, it’s business as usual. By all means, fire
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are in charge. Change the structure of the organization. Do something radically different. We’re not saying just keep doing what you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And I think it is very important, you know, we have seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last, I don’t know, at least five years, we’ve seen very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much a kind of like support the troops attitude coming out of Apple. What that results in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple excusing itself for things being really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the team having worked really hard on something. Using that as as an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excuse that we should not talk about it’s not good enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s a BS excuse that is like and I think you can you can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as being BS while also Not wanting to yell at people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and berate them and be a jerk to them. I think those are different things
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah Like that was one of the good things that Steve Jobs was good at and that this is a thing you won’t see modern Apple Do and I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a good manifestation of his jerkiness and I think it was brought up in the same article here, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John he shouldn’t be in there yelling at people and being mean to them, right? But he also, when he, like, for example, when he rolled
⏹️ ▶️ John out iCloud, what he said on stage is like, iCloud, you’re saying this is from the team
⏹️ ▶️ John that brought us MobileMe, why should I trust them? Like, why should I trust, these are the losers who brought us MobileMe. And modern
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would never denigrate one of its past things, even if everybody in the world knows
⏹️ ▶️ John it was sucky. That, despite that it’s still coming from a position of
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs being mean. Being honest about your own past failings to the public
⏹️ ▶️ John is also an important part of building trust and leadership because Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John so allergic to ever implying that anything they have ever done in the past is less than wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll always say the new thing, we love the new thing, but they’ll never, they’ll never even just admit like, it’s like, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John knows Siri sucks. You not saying that to us in public, not acknowledging it to us in public,
⏹️ ▶️ John acknowledging that you know that we know that you’re behind on this, you don’t have to do it in a mean way, but by
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing it all, it really gives the impression like you said, that it was just like, nope, everything’s fine, right? And we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what goes on inside the company. I’m sure that people are yelling at each other in big boardrooms and stuff, right? Because that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is in any company. But the inability to be honest with your public
⏹️ ▶️ John about your past mistakes does not build trust. Like it’s that, it’s taking press,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, public relations too far to say, we just need to be disciplined, we never need to integrate our best
⏹️ ▶️ John products or whatever. Sometimes you have to admit, yeah, old Siri sucked and we think the new one
⏹️ ▶️ John is great and here it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think it’s hard for us to trust recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, that Apple stuff will work the way they say it will because of things like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, look, how many things have they demoed in a keynote in the last five years that looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cool and look, it was gonna really solve a problem people. And then you get the real thing and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, never really panned out all the way or it’s not as useful as they said, or it doesn’t work as well as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they said it would. You know, this is not the first example. This is just probably the biggest and most egregious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. But we can look at recent, and I don’t mean just this past year, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last 10 years. Look at Apple over, you know, a recent period. They do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be able to fix things very, very, very slowly. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like the feedback loop, for whatever reason, between Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting something out there that is broken or doesn’t land well or is poorly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco received and them fixing it is very long.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like retraining an LLM. Maybe Apple’s one giant LLM. They can never get it exactly right, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they will eventually improve things. It just takes so long to retrain and hundreds of millions of dollars of us buying iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. And like, they do have substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cultural problems. We can see just the surface level of like, There is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a culture in this company of such arrogance and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such hubris that they not only misread the room a lot and with increasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequency, and I put that right on Tim Cook, they misread the room constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then when they do ship something that is not very good or poorly received
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or doesn’t work, it seems to take a very long time to fix that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a problem. And so I think this is kind of this, you know, the Siri delay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of a culmination of like, you know, an example of that in terms of like what it will look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the public, you know, how much will it damage Apple? I think it’s not gonna, you know, it’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like end the company or anything. However, I do think they have a false advertising class action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lawsuit probably coming their way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was another thing that we didn’t mention is like that the Apple pulled the ads. They had ads advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John features that they now know are gonna ship even later than they thought. So first of all, they ran the ads before the features were released. That
⏹️ ▶️ John has also happened in the past, but usually when Apple thinks those things are imminent. So that was another bad
⏹️ ▶️ John call on their part. But just like Gruber, I think inside Apple, they were like, yeah, but this always happens. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always a shambles and we always just work real hard and it comes out, so run the ads. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the mistake here was, this time you can’t just go in there and fix the bugs and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will work. You don’t have a path to your destination. you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how to get there, you can’t just have people work harder on it. And that came back to bite. So they literally pulled the ads.
⏹️ ▶️ John They ran the ads for what, how long? How many months? Months. We’ve been seeing these ads about Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John features that don’t exist and haven’t been released. And instead of saying, well, we’ll just keep running the ads till they release.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now they’ve just stopped running the ads. And yeah, if someone complains, hey, I bought an iPhone because of XYZ, they’ll probably just say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a fine print at the ad that says, features not yet released, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Professional driver, closed course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like literally even that, that is false advertising. If you advertise, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what the iPhone 16 can do. Go buy one and then you go buy one and it doesn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s false advertising.
⏹️ ▶️ John Coming soon to the iPhone 16. Maybe. Yeah, it depends on the. Well, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John someone will file it. So Apple is never at a loss for class action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lawsuits. We I mean, this I mean, look, they get a lot of class actions that are BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this would be BS. I think this would be warranted. That we are going to get like thirty one dollar checks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboards That ad should never have aired. There’s multiple, it wasn’t just one ad. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than one. Yes, the entire ad campaign for the iPhone 16 line has been all about Apple intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly about features that aren’t really there. This is a big problem for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is it that they chose to run these ads that are pretty false advertising?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they thought they would be done. It would be a little late, but they’d work hard and they’d come out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then how did that, it is inexcusable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying like this is the one time that like they’re didn’t realize they were dealing with a different beast that it is not just
⏹️ ▶️ John a Bunch of objective C and Swift code that controls UI and so on and so forth. That’s not what it is It’s a fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John technological problem that literally no one in the world has solved which is how can we make this LLM stop being stupid?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but and that no no amount of extra weekends would fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, and that’s the problem like certainly like Somewhere there was a series of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive failures inside the company for that to not be communicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or heard by the top people?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or realize, that’s what I think a lot of people really, I mean, maybe not at the rank and file, but as you go up the
⏹️ ▶️ John levels, I think a lot of people, a lot of people in this whole industry really believe in their guts that,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, LM’s make some mistakes, but hand wave, hand wave, it’s probably mostly fine, right? Like I see it all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time, where people will talk about them as if these are not problems, or as if the problems are so trivial that surely
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll be solved by tomorrow, and tomorrow keeps coming and coming and coming, and they’re not solved, and people keep talking about them
⏹️ ▶️ John these problems don’t exist. And I bet a lot of levels inside the company have gotten that, picked
⏹️ ▶️ John up that sort of overall consensus within the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John that LLMs are always on the verge of not having these silly problems. Of course, we’ll solve this problem real
⏹️ ▶️ John soon. Glue on pizza, ha ha, that was last year, but we don’t have that problem anymore. We still do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but there seems to be a bigger problem than that. I think you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a a problem with LLMs that like we, we, I think the entire industry is still battling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. However, what was the problem inside of Apple that led them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to advertise to, to demo a feature that seems like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a totally faked demo to advertise a whole new iPhone line based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this feature to run TV commercials based on a feature that seems like it probably doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist or at least is nowhere near shippable and might never be shippable. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like this is the result of so many cultural problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the company in this era. And look I don’t know if it’s a Tim Cook thing specifically but it’s the Tim Cook era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple. This is an era of huge growth of the company, lots of levels of management and bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know expansion and big departments and everything. There is a problem there. There is a significant cultural
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem there that the people at the top seem to not have a good feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanism for when things are ready, for what will be ready,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how things are advertised, how things are shown, and setting expectations to the public and even maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to themselves. It seems like the deepest problem here is that the people at the top of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today don’t seem, and this goes right back to to Siri, they don’t seem to have a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of what sucks about what they ship or about what they are
⏹️ ▶️ John – Which is very common in all big companies and used to be less common in Apple. They were an anomaly in
⏹️ ▶️ John that regard. The quote I was trying to remember on Upgrade, which I just looked up now, is the Upton Sinclair quote,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding – slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John gendered there, but anyway. The idea that if you’re in it, if you’re in charge
⏹️ ▶️ John of the software, you know, group or whatever, it behooves you to sort of manage upward and make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that the people above you think that everything’s going okay in the group that you manage. Because if things
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t going okay, well then you’re not doing a good job. And just repeat that for every single level in an org chart.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it takes a lot of effort to combat that, to be honest, to
⏹️ ▶️ John be willing to say ASAP, you know, this is not working. And we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had, since 2011, the entire pre-LLM series and evidence of this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John working, but that information was not getting up to the highest level to reprioritize it. And we talked about that last week.
⏹️ ▶️ John But with LLMs in particular, the other factor that I bet people have already sent us feedback about if they’re listening to this now,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should always wait till you hear the end of the episode, is that LLMs and the AI revolution
⏹️ ▶️ John put an extra amount of pressure on Apple. Like we said last week with the, is this the
⏹️ ▶️ John time to do an OS redesign when there’s this AI disaster? but like Apple felt the heat,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, AI stuff is happening and it’s kind of happening without us. And whatever, three years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John that Craig Fideregi, to his credit, noted that it was happening and got Apple to scramble,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the best time to figure that out, Craig, was, you know, three years earlier than you did. But the second best time
⏹️ ▶️ John was then. I’ve kind of mangled that one. But anyway, he figured it out late, but he did say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we got to get on top of this. And he pivoted, everybody pivoted, the whole company pivoted to AI everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did it late, but that added extra pressure. And that is another contributing factor. It’s like, why run these
⏹️ ▶️ John ads? Why do this thing? Why did you feel like you had to do this? Like I said, I don’t think it’s that far out of bounds. They
⏹️ ▶️ John do that all the time, but also why did you feel the extra pressure to do it? So maybe the feedback did come up that was like, you know, this actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is different. It’s not the same as just whipping together some widgets and some buttons and making it work.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is actually different by nature. And the countervailing force was, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John AI, like we’re gonna look like we’re behind the times if we don’t make a big splash
⏹️ ▶️ John in WWDC 2024 with Apple Intelligence. And so all those factors combined
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it so that they were highly motivated to announce things that weren’t ready, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve done many times in the past, but also against the advice of people who I’m sure said
⏹️ ▶️ John from below, this is different this time. Not only is it not ready, it’s not gonna be ready next week or next month,
⏹️ ▶️ John or actually we have no idea how to do this. And they said, ship it anyway. And yeah, that’s part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem of leadership. And it is one of the weaknesses of Tim Cook as somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily, and I think wisely given his skillset, delegates a lot of this stuff to his subordinates.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, in the Steve Jobs thing, he always considered himself the arbiter of like, look, I’ll tell you what, when it’s good or it’s bad. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll, you know, he’ll look at it. Let me, let me see the stuff that we were supposed to be announcing a few months before. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s no good. Go back to the drawing board. Like he had no problem being decisive when,
⏹️ ▶️ John when he fixed his gaze upon something to decide, Is this up to Apple quality or not? Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John should not do that because he can’t do that because that’s not where his skills lie. So he has wisely delegated that
⏹️ ▶️ John to his subordinates, but unfortunately his subordinates are motivated to make it look like they’re not screwing up. So-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Which is a big
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. It’s true of every company. Like they understand this. I’m saying it’s like, oh, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how to, like everybody in every company knows this. It’s just so hard to fight against it. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does probably one of the best jobs of any large company in fighting against this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it’s just not enough. Like you’re battling the tide here. Like you know you don’t wanna make
⏹️ ▶️ John it seem like you’re not doing a good job at your job, but part of your job is also being honest. But like, and because
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook is never going to and shouldn’t like override his subordinates and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you think, you’ve told me this is good enough, but I disagree. Like maybe he does that occasionally when it’s really clear, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John he’d be mad at that subordinate. Like it’s not where his skills lie. So at least he knows enough to not be
⏹️ ▶️ John like the pretend Steve Jobs and be making product decisions at every level of the arc
⏹️ ▶️ John chart, it was reach Steve Jobs, just reach down to the lowest level of the arc chart and tell someone to change a button or whatever, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what he could do all the way up to the highest level of this is no good. Like I think when Grover was talking about this
⏹️ ▶️ John on one of his shows, like that MobileMe was terrible and Steve Jobs maybe just didn’t even pay attention to it because he thought like this will be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But as soon as it was released and it was bad, suddenly he paid attention to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It got better real fast because he would say this is not good enough and we’re gonna do better and the next thing we release is
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna be released until I say it’s good enough. Unfortunately he was dying at that point, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John even then, uh, anyway, I, it’s, it’s a difficult situation. Like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things, everything that has happened in the past, let’s say three or four years has really
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly swayed me to the opinion that, uh, certain
⏹️ ▶️ John features, certain features of the leadership of Apple have probably like been there too long and we need some fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John blood in here because a lot of the decisions that just seem unchangeable that seem to not be moving over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just gotta get some new opinions in there at the highest level, because I feel like the same old team, they have the same old strengths
⏹️ ▶️ John they always did, but they also have the same old weaknesses, and I would like to see some turnover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think we have gotten all the value we’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of a lot of the upper leadership, and it’s time for a generational turnover. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re all so wealthy. Go on vacation, retire. I know it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re an important person at an important company doing work that you love. Like I’m not saying, you should just retire and just do
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing on a beach all the time because they love their jobs. They can get that. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you just need some fresh ideas. Like there’s a reason why
⏹️ ▶️ John when a company is in trouble, they bring in new people. They don’t just ask the existing people to do
⏹️ ▶️ John different things. And if you really want to see something really different, like a different attitude towards developers, a different attitude
⏹️ ▶️ John toward third party integration, a different attitude towards regulations in the EU, I’m sorry if you were expecting us to talk about this stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll probably get to it next week or something. Um, or a different, you know, being on top of industry
⏹️ ▶️ John trends, trends instead of following them or knowing what to do with AI. Sometimes you need a fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John set of eyes. Doesn’t mean everybody needs to leave or people need to be fired or wherever, but it does mean you need people.
⏹️ ▶️ John New people need to have a seat at the table. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to slightly disagree with something you had said earlier. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Siri team knows full well that series pilot garbage. I really do. There’s a lot of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought you said that they were not so convinced,
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I said the Siri team knows, knows it sucks. But anyway, continue. I agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think the leadership knows it sucks? Honest question. Cause like, it’s like, I mean, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure a huge part of this is just marketing. You know, Apple’s never going to say their products aren’t very good. So when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple talks about, and when Apple executives talk about how amazing Siri is, like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like they might believe but do you think, like, do they know how bad it is? I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they’ve, I think it’s like, obviously they know it’s worse than they say in public, because that’s their job.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Do they? I’m not sure they know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure that’s the case. Like, because who has private conversations with them about only people inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple? So they know it’s worse than they say in public, but I also think that the pressure of putting a brave
⏹️ ▶️ John face on things has slowly convinced them that it’s actually not as bad as it really is. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like in between, like it’s, that’s what I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think like if you ask Craig Federighi about the quality of Siri, he said, he would say it’s not as good as it should be,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he doesn’t have full grasp of exactly how bad it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree. See, I disagree with you there. And part of the reason I disagree with you is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri freaking sucks. It sucks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can imagine a scenario like Apple Maps, which to me is the quintessential, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only place in the world that matters is Silicon Valley, and Apple Maps works great in Silicon Valley, so it must work great everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they knew it sucked. I’m not so sure they knew
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs made Forrestal sign an apology for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think they knew it sucked for a little bit. But I feel like even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in casual conversation with people that I know inside Apple, and this is not like me digging for information or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, but early on in Maps, maybe not the first year when I think everyone knew it sucked, but after the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first year or two, it started to be real good in Silicon Valley, but it was still trash everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. And Apple, I feel Silicon Valley broadly, and Apple particularly, are real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad about like, oh, well, it works in my backyard, so it must be the same way everywhere, right? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. And so Maps got good in Silicon Valley, and then they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just assumed it was great everywhere. And it’s not, or it wasn’t. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was part of the story then. Like the story was, hey, Maps used to not be good, but we’ve improved
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and now it’s getting better. And what Apple PR wanted the story to be was, Apple Maps is now
⏹️ ▶️ John good enough, or Apple Maps is now as good as Google Maps. Like they were pushing that story for years and years afterwards,
⏹️ ▶️ John well before it was true, because that’s what they wanted the story to be, to write finally, Apple Maps. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John you remember the spate of stories? It was like, hey, you may have dismissed Apple Maps because it always sucked, but have you looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at it lately? Actually, I looked at Apple Maps and it’s actually almost as good as Google Maps. And in fact, it’s better in these
⏹️ ▶️ John ways. Do you remember those stories? Oh, absolutely. That is a product of good PR, right? But they were
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to push those stories and they were pushing them well before it was true. And that’s what you’re getting at, Casey. You’d be like, why do I
⏹️ ▶️ John hear from all these Apple people that actually Apple Maps is as good as Google Maps now? It’s not, don’t they
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s not? And some of them didn’t because the story gets pushed so hard both internally and externally that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to reach this goal. We’re going, we know we’re bad now, we’re gonna make it better. And that is one of the sort of those
⏹️ ▶️ John useful fictions that motivates people. I think that’s part of what helped Apple improve Maps by
⏹️ ▶️ John having the people working on it think they were always sort of asymptotically approaching being as good as Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Maps. And it took them, what, a decade or whatever. And I would say they’re getting close
⏹️ ▶️ John now. But yeah, exactly how clear-eyed is everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John in the stack about how good things are? In some ways, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad the
⏹️ ▶️ John rank and file think it is. If they think it’s better than it is or worse than it is or whatever, it’s the decision makers that matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the decision makers, I think, like I stand by what I said before, like I think decision makers are always going to put a braver
⏹️ ▶️ John face on it in public. What they think internally is closer to the truth,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there still is the repetition and optimism that
⏹️ ▶️ John is required by their position can’t help but influence in their heart of hearts to skew
⏹️ ▶️ John their perception of it to be slightly less accurate. They don’t realize the full extent
⏹️ ▶️ John of how bad it is, but they’re closer to it than they would ever seem in their public statements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I broadly agree with you, but I never quite finished my thesis here, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is with Apple maps, you could be in a bubble where it works great. And Silicon Valley loves to think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re the only bubble that matters and that everything, you know, if it works here, it works everywhere. And that’s just not true. But when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Silicon Valley and you’re using Apple maps and everything’s working great, you can convince yourself easily that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maps is great. The difference between that and Siri is that Siri freaking sucks and it sucks
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it works great in Silicon Valley.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know you’re being silly, but no, I can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John acknowledge it. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and actually, to use a term of art recently, Siri sucks multimodally. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually sucks in many different ways. Like, it sucks in-
⏹️ ▶️ John it suck in agentic ways? Is agentic sucking?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really, it figures out new ways to suck all the time. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John what month is it is a new one for me. I hadn’t heard that one before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it sucks in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just outright performance. Like, it sucks in speed. It sucks in reliability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sucks in consistency. It sucks in intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, let me jump in real quick. Apologies for interrupting, but something I’ve been meaning to whine about on the show for at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of months now. I use Siri a lot in the car because I use CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I’m not even in the car that much, but I feel like almost always when I’m in the car, I’m interacting with Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know exactly when this started. I want to say it was definitely during iOS 18, but it might’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a point release, but when I’m using CarPlay, I will be looking at a list of messages or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who have sent me messages. And I’ll tap on one of those names, let’s say Aaron. And so I’ll tap on Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name. And then the animation comes up. Aaron said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s what is taking so long? It takes an eternity. And this is what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. If you ever interact with Siri, if you ever interact with Siri, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s a pile of shit. It’s I’m sorry. I it’s just, it’s awful. You can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read a text message on the device without a 5 to 10 second delay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s awful. And that’s the difference between Apple Maps and Sirius. Apple Maps on occasion is, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m making it sound like I don’t like Apple Maps. I actually think it’s really excellent. And I almost never use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Maps or Waze or anything like that. But in the early days, there was a place where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Maps was great in certain pockets and it was trash everywhere else. Sirius trash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everywhere. How could you possibly convince yourself that that’s not true? I’d also like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that Siri is now listening to me and it said, serious trash everywhere. How could you possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah blah blah blah blah. So, my phone is in front of me and decided to start listening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s garbage and when I start dictating text messages to people, you know, thankfully it says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, sent with Siri or whatever on the receiving end, but then I’ll go back after I’m not driving and look at these messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re freaking unintelligible. And some of that is on me because I don’t have the best diction and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pronounce everything exactly perfectly. But a lot of that is Siri just coming out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of left field with things that just aren’t even close to what I said. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot fathom anyone who ever interacts with Siri thinking it’s anything other than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t a pile of trash in simple ways. It’s a pile of trash in ever growing, new and developing ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it really, I don’t know how much Apple realizes, maybe they do now, but how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they realize, first of all, how much it holds back their products, and then second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reputation they have squandered by using the term Apple Intelligence when and how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did. So, first of all, Siri holding back their products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The entire HomePod, okay, that was a hobby, whatever, maybe they didn’t sell that many of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh well. How about the Vision Pro? They didn’t sell many of those either, but the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be a lot easier to navigate if Siri was better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you try changing the volume using Siri, by the way, when you were watching the Metallica thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I never even considered
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, Dingus, turn the volume up 10%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does that work? It would have been faster than what I was trying to do with my hand. I don’t know, I was just wondering, like it didn’t even occur to you to try it. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, because I have learned over and over and over again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t trust Siri. And here’s the thing, I use Siri every single day for something, like I use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. It’s not like I tried it once and never again. I use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s part of why it fails for me all the time because it fails a large percentage of the time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use it all the time. I mostly use it for like reminders, but it fails so much and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it fails in ever-changing ways. And this holds back the products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple has a very locked down ecosystem everywhere so that no one else can make voice assistants that plug into their platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if somebody could, I think it would be better for everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if there was an API for a voice assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else to just plug in and take over as your assistant, it would do a better job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would be more consistent and it would be faster, it would develop faster. This is not Apple strength.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have shown over and over again that they don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either the will or the talent talent to make it their strength. So that’s a pretty big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, the Apple Intelligence marketing and name, this was their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance to start over, to say, you know what, we’re in a new era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, an LLM powered era, we have all these great assistants coming out now and great LLM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capabilities coming out all across the industry, as we can see from the other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple used the term Apple Intelligence. Now, I said last summer when they unveiled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, it’s a bit of a marketing risk, because they have this great term,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re putting their name right on it, and the last thing they want, like as I was saying, it better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be good, because the last thing they should want is for the term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Intelligence to come to mean something bad, to have a negative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connotation, because that just looks so bad for them to have used the name Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intelligence and then for it to suck. Well, guess where we are right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think right
⏹️ ▶️ John now that the Apple intelligence is associated with a image playground and Genmoji features that
⏹️ ▶️ John people use once and thought it was dumb. And the text summarization features with most people don’t use but work okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I disagree very
⏹️ ▶️ John strongly. I don’t think, but here’s the thing, by not releasing the better Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have staved off the whole Apple intelligence is dumb. Right now people are just saying Siri is dumb, but they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that for ages. I don’t think Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John has made that much of an impact, despite Apple trying to claim that it drives sales in the places where it’s available
⏹️ ▶️ John and blah, blah, blah, just because the features that have actually shipped to customers’ hands
⏹️ ▶️ John are so slight and don’t really make a difference in people’s lives. Like my kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have Apple intelligence, my kids have Apple intelligence, my wife does. I’ve never seen any of them
⏹️ ▶️ John use any of the features. So as far as they’re aware, it doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I really think that what most people associate with Apple Intelligence now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just the iPhone 16 with the new Siri animation and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the summarized notifications that suck. That is what most people see. Some people
⏹️ ▶️ John like the summarized. Gruber likes the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco summarized. I do, I like them. Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John likes the summarized notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them sometimes, but not, like a lot, they do screw up a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree that it has not buffed the brand. It has not been like, oh, Apple Intelligence is a thing that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John loves. I think it is slightly negative, slightly on the negative side of neutral,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is not as disastrous as it would have been if they had rolled out an LM series that was
⏹️ ▶️ John touted as the new smart series, but was even dumber. And the thing is, Siri’s in such a hole, it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to roll out something that is actually worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But really, I think because, look, if people, they see the ads that have been spreading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the term Apple intelligence for months, they go, they have a new iPhone, they get an iPhone 16, They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the new Siri animation, which is not new Siri, but they see a new Siri animation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this phone has Apple intelligence, allegedly, and they see some of our notifications. So to them, that looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, okay, this is it. This is Apple intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just not impressive to them. They’re like, eh, it seems about the same. When they’re right, it is about the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, and Apple blew it. They blew that marketing term. They’re blowing their credibility even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. Like, this is such a flub. Like, how did this happen? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, they had the pressure to announce something, say they weren’t falling behind in AI, yada yada. Like it’s just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a confluence of events, but yeah. If something good has come of this, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps made Grubber more skeptical going forward about Apple’s claims and not just assume they will
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to execute because they always have. Past performance is not an indicator of future results,
#askatp: Phone face up/down?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do at least a little bit of Ask ATP. And Aaron Bushnell writes, when you place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone on a surface, is it face up or face down? I typically place mine face down because the edges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the case lifts the screen away from the surface. And I’m worried going face up doesn’t lift the camera lens as far enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off to prevent scratches. What do you all do? Typically I go face down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This year for this phone, I’m sure we talked about this when it was new. I still haven’t found a case that I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it and I mostly stopped looking. And so I have gone caseless, casey-less for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone and haven’t yet shattered it, knock on wood. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did this year, and I’m pretty sure we did talk about this, get a, I think it was a Belkin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen protector. I got one that Apple applied and it slightly shattered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn near instantly. I’m sure it was my fault, but I don’t know what I did to it. I got a replacement for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had Apple apply the replacement, that slightly shattered damn near instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco What do you do? Do you have your broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen that way though? No, right? You have really tight jeans.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Super tight. Now, I have no idea how I’m doing it. Again, I’m sure it’s my fault. I’m not trying to say it’s not my fault, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was no like clear instance where I was like, oh, yep, that was why. But then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the third time, I’m now on my third screen protector, Belkin was sold out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the ones that Apple applies. And I guess there’s a slight difference either in the screen protector itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whether or not they include the application frame thing you stick your phone in to apply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but they didn’t have one for the third screen protector and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, look, you can either wait a couple of months or we can give you the one you apply yourself. So I was like, all right, fine, I’ll take the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I apply myself. And the application process was fairly easy. It took a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while to get bubbles out from under it. Like that was kind of a pain in the butt. But that being said, this one has lasted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, knocking on wood, this one has lasted for a couple of months now, which the other ones were like a month a piece,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like, or maybe two tops. So I’ve been actually fairly happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Also the edge of this one is a little bit rounded as compared to the ones that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey applied because I think I did talk about how it was like a cliff on the edge of my phone, which I hated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time I swiped up. But all that’s to say that even though I don’t have a case, I do have a screen protector.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I personally think that the respectful thing to do is to put your phone face down. Doubly so if you use the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always on display, but just in general, put your phone face down if you can get away with it. So that’s my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, you guys are monsters. All right, here’s, listen, the camera lenses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are made of sapphire. The front glass of your phone is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made of marshmallows. Like it scratches so easily. That is true, that is very true. Sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not scratch very easily at all. So if you are worried about scratching,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen will scratch way more easily than the camera lenses. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, maybe you have a case that has like a lip around it that offsets the screen if you put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face down. But are you sure that every time you put it face down, there’s gonna be nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that surface that sticks up slightly? That is a big risk that you’re taking. Whereas if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put the phone screen facing up whenever you put it down on a surface,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are merely resting a very small amount of surface area, possibly even just an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge if you’re in an angle, of a sapphire camera lens or two or three on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface. you are so much less likely to cause a scratch on that camera lens in that context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you are to scratch the screen during the lifetime of your phone. So the correct answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when you put your phone on a surface, it is face up. Now, I will also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add that if possible, if your clothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or bag or jacket or whatever allows for it, when you sit down to a table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where there’s people with you, you should not put your phone face down or up on the table,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should keep your phone stowed away safely because you should be there present for the people who are in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. So if you’re at your desk or whatever, fine, do whatever you want. But if you’re like going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to lunch or dinner with somebody or hanging out with people around a table or something, leave your phone in your pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be there with the people that you’re with. But if you are gonna put your phone on the table, it should probably be face up.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is actually one of the questions that we get asked frequently and I can’t remember the last time we answered it, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John more than three years ago, So I don’t actually remember if any of our answers have changed. Do you two recall if you’re doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing now that you did last time we answered this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Definitely. Pretty sure, yeah. I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was pretty much always faced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John down. Just checking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, yeah, I put mine with the screen facing up. Part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the modification to that is I don’t use the always on screen. I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried it for a while, I didn’t like it back when they introduced it. I just don’t use the always on screen. So when my phone is face up on the table,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as if it’s blaring stuff in my face. but most of the time this comes up at my desk. Right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone is sitting on my desk face up next to me. That’s the main place my phone sits. I don’t have like a dock or
⏹️ ▶️ John a charger or whatever. I just put, when I sit down in front of my computer, I put my phone on my desk with
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen facing up. I tend not to put it on the table otherwise, but if I ever do put it on the table, it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John screen facing up. That’s mostly so, if I put it on the table, it’s because I’m like watching for something,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m expecting a text message from a kid to pick up or something like that. And I don’t, I’ve known from experience not
⏹️ ▶️ John to trust that I’m going to feel the vibration, especially if it’s in like, in my winter
⏹️ ▶️ John coat pocket or something, I just won’t feel that. So I need to have it on the table with the screen face up. And because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use the always on screen, it’s totally black until a notification comes in. And then if
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone suddenly lights up, my eyes will be drawn to it and I’ll see that I have to go pick somebody up. So yeah, face up for
#askatp: Version-numbering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe O’Connor writes regarding software version numbering schemes, for example, call sheet 2025.2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see lots of patterns from the typical 15.3.1 to 2025.2 to V1000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever versions Firefox and Chrome are currently on. Why choose one scheme over another?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, for me and with 2025.2, that means it was the second release in 2025. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I pulled this, I think from Marco. And if I remember Marco, you got this from Curtis of slopes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? Or I get, did I get some of that backwards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I for it might have been slopes. I forget where I pulled it from. I’ve been seeing a lot of people do it over the last few years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So one way or another, it’s basically year dot release number. Uh, I, and the theory there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me was that I feel like, uh, and I think again, I’m stealing this from both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and Curtis that, you know, 1.0 versus 1.1 versus 1.1.1.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I don’t have a lot of interest in making those distinctions and a release is just a release.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t really have a lot of, I don’t hold a lot of value in keeping around or running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old versions of most of my software, if not all of it. So, you know, the, I don’t, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to imply by there being a 1.0 and a 2.0 that, that there’s a lot of worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the 1.0, you know, once, once 2.0 ships, 1.0 is dead to me. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think just having a date based or date and release number based thing, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fits my model of how my software should be treated better. And that’s why I stick with it. I have nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against semantic versioning, which is, you know, the X dot Y dot Z thing. Um, it’s probably the writer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer to be honest. And what John is probably going to say to me in a minute, but for me, I kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real, uh, year dot release number and it’s been working pretty well for me. Marco thoughts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version numbers used to be more important to communicate marketing messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, you know, it used to be like you, you know, you had like your beta period 0.7, 0.8, whatever. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you released your 1.0. that was your big first non-beta release. And then if you had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some, you know, kind of minor feature additions, you’d be 1.1. Little bug fix, 1.0.1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like there’s, you know, this kind of standard of semantic version numbers. You know, if you had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really big update, you would save up for your 2.0. And then you would, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would charge an upgrade price for your 2.0, because it’s a new major version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in a lot of software today, it’s being updated through app stores and stuff, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one’s ever even gonna see the version number because it just auto updates in the background. It is oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a continuous release cycle. So you’re not like saving stuff up forever and then pushing it all out later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to get an upgrade price. You are largely releasing things as you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they are done because you are subscription based or ad based. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of situations today where like your business and your pricing and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing don’t really need a big 2.0, 3.0 kind of versioning. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a choice you can make to switch to one of these other schemes that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that kind of baggage. Now, you might want that baggage because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to make big splashes with your marketing or have an upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price, then you probably do want 1.0, 2.0, that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you are going for a more continuous update cycle, which most software these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is, then you can just do one of these regular sequential numbers. Now as to which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one you do, I switched to the year dot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, 2025 dot two, whatever, I switched to that. It is a question of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether that’s a good idea. I have found, I kind of wish I didn’t switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that, I kind of wish I just did like 1,000. 1001 1002 like that kind of thing, because when you date it, people start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they see the date is like two or three months ago or more like that’s when they start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting really antsy and yes, they can just go see like you know your version history to see the age of the app or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but people like it looks good when it’s a high number it looks bad when it’s a low number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then secondly whatever the point after the year is 2025.2 does that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean February or does that mean the second update in 2025? Well if it happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be February maybe people will assume it’s just the February update if it happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be April maybe they’ll assume it’s a three-month-old version when you actually just released it last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it actually people’s expectations about that second number are not consistent so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it So what I usually do, I will skip numbers. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t done a release yet in the last couple of months, but when I do release an update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon, suppose my update comes out in the month of April, I’m gonna call it 2025.4, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though there wasn’t a 2025.3 or.2. Because if I release something in April called 2025.2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are gonna think it’s old. So it’s not a great, like even that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a great scheme. That scheme has problems. Also, what if you release something in April,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then a week later, while it’s still April, you wanna release another version?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that 2025.4.1? No, I just go 2025.5. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably gonna skip a month here or there so I know, okay, that’ll be fine. Even that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great scheme. It has those kind of flaws. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in App Store Connect, if you’re using Apple’s distribution, it once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have uploaded a version 2025.1, you can never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again for that app, upload something that is like 15.3. Because Apple enforces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whatever you upload has to be like version compare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco greater than the last thing you uploaded. So whatever is before the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decimal point has to be a larger number than what was before the first decimal point for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last one or whatever, like you know, however you compare it, you know, point, point, point, like you compare each part separately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like once you have 2025.2, you can never have 16.1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s less than 2025. So for me, like now I just said, I would love to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like, you know, 1000, 1001. I can’t. I would have to go to like 10,000. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have like version 10001, 10125, like I could do that. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers start to look a little stupid. So I don’t love that either. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what you pick, it’s not an amazing system. I would suggest if I was starting new today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I would do is I would just call the first version, like a hundred. Like just have the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean nothing, but be small enough not to look stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what’s the right answer?
⏹️ ▶️ John You whippersnappers. So, I mean, I, I, I think I tried to warn you both off the year thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or there, maybe I didn’t and just thought it
⏹️ ▶️ John Margaret had already done it. It was too late, but yeah, for all these reasons. So first of all, a clarification you, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re youngsters and think that the number.number.number is semantic versioning. Semantic versioning is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John recent thing that is specifically designed for libraries where it’s important for the consumer to know what they
⏹️ ▶️ John expect from the API, where a major version breaks API, a minor version adds functionality, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John patch version fixes bugs. That’s semantic versioning. It has no bearing on applications because
⏹️ ▶️ John applications in general don’t defend APIs the same way libraries do. Just because semantic versioning has three numbers separated
⏹️ ▶️ John by dots doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. Anyway, that aside, I do
⏹️ ▶️ John have extremely strongly held cultural beliefs
⏹️ ▶️ John surrounding version numbers based entirely on my experience in adolescence and young adulthood
⏹️ ▶️ John and the software that I used. To me, the cultural
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning of 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, those numbers all mean so much to me and
⏹️ ▶️ John selecting which version number to use, which like version number like that to use for
⏹️ ▶️ John my applications is one of the parts of writing software that I treasure and enjoy the most.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is totally a factor of when I grew up and the software that I used. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why all of my apps have been developed like that. And speaking of having multiple releases in February,
⏹️ ▶️ John I released a Hyperspace in February, it is now March. I’ve done seven releases,
⏹️ ▶️ John three in February and four in March. We mentioned a Switch Class or whatever, the
⏹️ ▶️ John last thing we were talking about it, or maybe it was my other two apps. In five years, I did 75 releases. Just the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of being constrained by having one release a month is madness to me. And it means like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at my version history, like I just went to 1.1, that’s just freighted with meaning from
⏹️ ▶️ John my perspective. Like that’s why I choose the number version numbers I do. And by the way, it’s 1.0, not 1.0.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? Because then I go, the next one is 1.0.1. What
⏹️ ▶️ John happened to the first zero? I’m glad Apple’s versioning comparison allows me to do this. probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not a coincidence, because my entire cultural understanding of version numbers comes from Apple software,
⏹️ ▶️ John and old Mac software, although I’ve had to abandon the whole use of letter D’s and B’s and stuff, although I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you might still be able to do that, but I don’t do it. But anyway, that’s how I use versions, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they are meaningful, they are culturally meaningful to me. And they and I am communicating probably
⏹️ ▶️ John to other people my age with similar experiences, something with those version numbers, but in the grand scheme of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t matter too much. The one other anti-pattern I will note is that even if you’re using them for marketing purposes and you’re going to like do upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing because you’re not selling on the Mac App Store or whatever and you want like 2.0 to be a significant thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to charge a big upgrade or whatever. The one thing I cannot stand is when it’s like new
⏹️ ▶️ John Frobinator 4 and the version number is 7.0. Don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bad enough that Apple does it with iOS and SOCs and the numbers like when the when you
⏹️ ▶️ John prominently feature in your marketing like a two or a four or an ex major version, but the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John version number itself is off by a couple in either direction. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just making everybody sad. But anyway, what which one should you use? I would suggest you use
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that fits how you expect to release it and that makes you happy because
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I don’t think it matters that much from other people’s perspectives. Everything you said about the year ones and people looking at it and thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bad, that that is all true. But if you really love year version numbers because you grew up with
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows 2000 and your values are warped,
⏹️ ▶️ John go for it if it makes you happy. But I would humbly suggest that
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain old 1.0, 2.0, three numbers separated by dots, two numbers separated by dots,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a tried and true system that has a lot of tradition behind it and that could be molded into something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace and Mack Weldon. And And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly, you can join us at atv.fm.com. One of the many perks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, members will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear us discuss Apple News Plus, food and recipe management in general. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a new thing happening in the Apple News Land. We’re going to talk about that. So if you want to hear us talk about that and many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things, atv.fm.com. everybody and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at atp.fm And if you’re into mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental Check podcasts
Restaurant soft-opening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, how did my birthday go at the restaurant?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this was kind of our soft opening where we did Saturday and Sunday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mostly just the bar being open and then some free food that we were giving away as tradition,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corned beef and cabbage, which is what the restaurant has always done around St. Patrick’s Day. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was basically two days of being open and then we’ll open again fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next month. It went great. This was the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big test of everything we’ve done. All the, you know, the cleanup, the updates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wiring, I replaced the camera system, I replaced, you know, as you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deployed Dante for the audio transmission between different parts. We had a DJ,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I got to test that. Everything worked. It was great. Like, there were a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor tweaks I had to make when the DJ got there. Like I had one of the volumes was set too low, so I increased it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it was fine. It was incredibly fulfilling to see all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this come together. First of all, the staff was incredible. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were so good. I am not qualified to do almost anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the restaurant. So as a result, I wasn’t that necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was amazing. The staff came in, they knew what they had to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they did it. They did a great job. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see myself as being in a supporting role to the staff. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run this place myself. I need other people to do it. So I will do the best job that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can to create an environment that supports them, that gets out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their way, and that continues to attract and retain the best staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s how this continues. And for me being normally a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sole proprietor and a control freak, that’s very new. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very new feeling to me. So that’s going to be an evolving thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time as I figure out like how to manage the staff and what they need and what they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how to balance everything. But so far that part went great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My kid helped busing during the service. Oh, nice. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was awesome. He like never stopped moving. He was on his feet. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were giving him tips. I was a buser for two years and I think I got a total of three tips from customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He got, I think, five or six tips in one shift. Nice. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he… And I wasn’t a bad buser, he’s just a better one. I think drunk Long Islanders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are more generous than randos in Ohio. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just a great time. Everything went off that a hitch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing that I think really meant a lot to me is everything we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did, someone noticed. People didn’t all notice the same things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the improvements we made, the upgrades we made, the cleanups that we did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that we did, someone pointed out and someone noticed. Like and the DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even noticed that I had EQ’d the speakers. Which like I I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look I know he’s a DJ but like I didn’t I thought that was a pretty subtle thing and I thought like who else was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care but me? Who else is gonna ever know that I EQ’d them to sound better? He knew. He could tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately. Like every like I installed lighting under the pass in the kitchen. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff noticed that. They love it. Like you know there’s there’s all sorts of like things that we did we cleaned up a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff did like some a lot of like you know staining of wood in the dining room to make it look better like there’s there is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that we did that people noticed and appreciated and so that was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfying and then the greatest thing like like Tiff and I we were just kind of watching from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the back we were watching just like you know this this dining room full of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a really good time and being so happy to be back in their bar again after all winter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we kind of we looked around like we enabled this like us buying this place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maintaining it and you know not changing the spirit of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are we are now enabling these people to have this kind of fun and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a good time and to be in their bar and that was really satisfying like we really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoyed it so and if Saturday was super busy Sunday of course being a Sunday was less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco busy and was interesting so Sunday it was less busy and there was no DJ on Sunday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically had nothing to do. Like I Sunday I was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just getting in the way and so I mostly just kind of sat back. I had some time a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend came and I had I had time to just like sit with him at a booth and just hang out with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my friend for like 15 minutes because I wasn’t necessary for anything. Like that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was great and that was because we have a great we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are letting them do their jobs and getting out of their way and it all went great. I even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on Sunday because of the ferry schedule and because of school being the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, Tiff stayed behind and I went home with with our kid on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the afternoon ferry like that on the last ferry of the day the restaurant was still open so I left while it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was still open and Tiff and the staff closed it down cleaned it up shut everything down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I wasn’t even there for the last like two hours of the work and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was fine. Everyone did a great job and it was done. So what this has shown me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, it felt so good to do all this and to enable all this as I was saying. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has definitely shown me, so far at least, I know this is not like totally in the weeds yet, but so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was the right decision and we feel very good about it. But also it has shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me like, And this is not going to take over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash end my life. Like I’m going to be able to keep doing other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will be fine because the staff is good. And as long as I keep the staff good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know which and they mostly just manage themselves like and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a hard thing for me to it’s a hard position for me to be in being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the control freak being you know fiercely independent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a a component of fierce independence is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fear that like if everyone quit tomorrow I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t know what to do I’d be screwed that and so a huge part of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to let go of control I think a huge part of that is because I’m afraid if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do everything I’m afraid it will all come crumbling down you know well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the restaurant I’m stuck I can’t do everything so this is just how this has to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just have to hope the entire staff doesn’t all leave at once but you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every company works that way if everyone walked out of Apple Tim Cook’s not gonna be sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there like hmm how do I you know who’s what button do I push to keep the servers running like no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s right That doesn’t really happen. That’s not how business works and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. So I think it will, this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much a, like a growth thing for me for sure. Um, but it’s all going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well. And so far it seems like we’ve made the right decisions. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made the right environment. We have the right people. Uh, so it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty well. Everyone likes my coffee. And you know, I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s ridiculous, but you know, we were joking back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks, months ago about how little my skills were relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to running a restaurant. And I think that’s actually wrong. What I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found over the last couple of months of setting things up and going through stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I actually have a lot of extremely valuable skills to running a restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, you know, I’m at a different, I’m in a different role than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chefs, the bartenders, the servers. Like I’m not in one of those roles, but like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it has taken to run, to set, to get this restaurant set up and running a ton of administrative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, a ton of wiring, a ton of paperwork, a ton of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor repairs and cleanup and maintenance of stuff around the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m good at all those things. Like I’ve done business before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know like how to get a sales tax certificate in New York because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff sold things with sales tax before. So we’ve done that already. I know what accounts receivable on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invoice means. I know that, oh, the reason why this dollar amount is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from what we were quoted was that they were estimating the sales tax based on where they’re located, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from where we’re located, and that’s why it’s like 0.1% off. I’ve seen this stuff before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know about what the accountant needs to do our tax stuff. I know about federal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EINs and all. I know what vendors want when they ask for credit check materials and things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things we had to deal with was we have all these credit card slips. you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you sign a credit card receipt and you put in the tip and you do the math and you add it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it’s possible for people to later dispute that to say like I didn’t write I didn’t total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that up I didn’t tip that much or I did the math wrong or whatever they dispute that with us or the credit card company so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the restaurant has to keep those on file. Well the previous filing system was like a big stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of receipts and some rubber bands. My filing system is a scan snap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and files that get backed up and organized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know how to do that. How do I organize the stuff on this computer? How do I automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco classify documents that are scanned into their vendors? We know how to do that already. That’s skills
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have. When the coffee sucked, I knew how to fix the coffee, and now everyone likes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my coffee. There actually is a lot of that. There’s a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work that I actually know how to do. So that’s actually been very encouraging as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. That being said, I didn’t get enough singles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I still banked wrong. But now I went to the bank today. I got a bunch more. We’re good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m glad to hear that it’s gone very well. And it sounds like the biggest challenge for you might be just staying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hell away from it. And I mean that in a good way. But you know, your natural inclination, as you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to get involved and to be in control, which is fair. That’s all you’ve known for 20-ish years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now it sounds like you need to just sit back and let the restaurant, you know, let the machine do its thing. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a great problem to have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, largely, yes. And you know, one thing I will be doing a lot of is just like observing and listening. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see somebody is doing some really inefficient task, like—so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the first day, Saturday, Tiff had me come count one of the register drawers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I counted one register drawer and ordered a bill counter. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, hey, those flippy things at the bank, how much do those cost? And it turns out not that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, like, let me get one. I got like a more basic one. Like, let me get one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the very first drawer I counted, I was off by like $62. dollars. Oh gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, okay. And then of course Tiff counted it and it was exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Like well, okay, it’s a me problem. This is like, I can view this task and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, counting a big stack of singles out of a cash register drawer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes a long time, is not a good use of somebody’s time, and is error prone. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an opportunity where like, yeah, you know what? If I can spend 200 bucks and make this way faster and better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will choose to do that. And there’s all sorts of little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opportunities for that. Like if I see like, oh, somebody is spending,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re spending a half hour a day doing this tedious task. Can technology help that? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it usually can. It might not be worth it. Like if it comes down to like custom software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development, maybe that’s not worth it. There’s all sorts of stuff about business that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like dealing with files, dealing with documents, dealing with data. Like one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things we have to do, I am now food safety certified. When a restaurant gets shellfish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least in my county, I don’t know how it is everywhere else, shellfish comes with tags that identify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vendor and the sourcing and everything. And you have to keep those tags on file for 90 days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, again, here’s another filing system. Well, what if we just scan them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll keep them for the whole year. Once they’re scanned, who cares? Like keep them for the year. Like it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’m not like filling up a filing cabinet here. So there’s all sorts of opportunities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, just somebody who is a tech expert to be able to look at any business and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hmm, this little thing over here, that I can save you 20 minutes a week with something pretty simple on that. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a lot of those. And when you add those up, it’s actually pretty useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very glad it worked out nicely. And here’s hoping that when, you know, you open properly that