697: The Chart Is Terrifying
26 Jun 2026Apple altered their prices. Pray they don’t alter them any further.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Casey has some fantastic news about nugs.net for Marco
- Marco’s trip report
- Follow-up:
- John guested on a preview of Designed in California, published as part of Upgrade #624 (also on YouTube)
- Apple Intelligence 🤝 external boot disks (via Doug Weinfield)
- Spotlight indexing in 𝑥OS 27
- Apple’s AI Tech Talk
- What will Siri be capable of? (via Jochen Marschall)
- Bootleg video (via sayrer)
- Is Spatial Reframing in 𝑥OS 27 geographically-aware? (via Kevin Buterbaugh)
- Tesla 🤝 CarPlay?
- New CarPlay features (via Alec Hurdle)
- The US has approved a new sunscreen ingredient!
- Marco’s favorite: Rohto Skin Aqua Super Moisture UV Gel
- Tracking Apple’s environmental progress
- TOSTracker (via Andrew Leahey)
- Direct product comparisons
- Example: M1 MacBook Air vs. M5 MacBook Air
- Apple’s AI server infrastructure (expanding on ATP #680)
- General overview (via Gui Rambo)
- cloudOS job listing
- How to run PCC (via Zoe Knox)
- Tim Cook takes one for the Ternus (News+ link) (17 June)
- 25 June: Apple raises prices on Macs, iPads (News+ link)
- Ask ATP:
- Why doesn’t Apple just… make its own RAM? (via Brian Webster)
- Is new Siri an attack vector for, say, TSA searches? (via Anonymous)
- Post-show: Casey’s blog post about AI
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The Fable about… Anthropic Fable
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Chapters
- Jam bands, and also DMB
- 🇮🇹💸
- Designed in California
- Apple Intelligence on externals
- Siri AI indexing, long-term memory
- Booleg of CFed’s AI talk
- How smart is Spatial Reframing?
- Tesla and CarPlay
- New US sunscreen filter
- Tracking environmental-impact reports
- Apple’s AI servers
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Apple price increases
- Sponsor: Zocdoc
- #askatp: Should Apple make its own RAM?
- #askatp: TSA searching iPhones
- Ending theme
- An Old, Familiar Feeling
Jam bands, and also DMB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What you can do, John, is you can just sit this one out, because everyone knows that the show is really about Marco and me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’re just a Klingon. So you can just sit this one out. From Star Trek? No, I’m not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of Klingon. Anyway, all right, let’s get the show on the road. Hey, Marco, I have incredible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible news for you and for me. And I know we briefly talked about this privately, but I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bring it up one more time publicly. Marco, on Nugs.net, which we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit recently on account of me being freaking obsessed with with Goose these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco They’re really on a roll too. It’s really not helping you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not helping at all. Anyways, Nugs is finally, one day later, broadcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or archiving whatever verb you want to use. They’re offering up for listening, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming Dave Matthews Band’s concerts, which is incredible news for you boy, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to tell you, the only way I used to be able to get a Dave Matthews Band concert was to either trade for it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was a child, you know, with tapes or CDs, or there’s some places where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find torrents and the idea is that that sticks with the spirit of the band’s taping policy, which is that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share, because with a torrent, you’re sharing, but you’re not supposed to go like stream it from somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a pretty fine distinction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to move right past that. We’re going to move right past that. But, but these are all audience recordings. So this is people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who bring, it used to be dat tapes, and now it’s like mixed pre’s like I’m talking to you through right now and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hook them up to microphones on towers. And the quality has gotten way better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was in 96 when I started listening to Dave Matthews Band, but certainly pretty crappy still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the year, in the year 2020. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still a microphone in the audience. Like there’s only so good that can be compared to the soundboard. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly it. But these are soundboard recordings from Dave Matthews Band.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have finally joined the ranks of their peer jam bands,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is gonna cruise right on, their peer jam bands, and they are offering their concert recordings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following day. This is monumental news for me, and I’m sure for you. CWOALD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, obviously. What has been missing from my life is a way to get higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality Dave Matthews Band recordings of all the things I want to listen to from the Dave Matthews Band.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CWOALD Exactly right. So, our long national nightmare is over, our long international nightmare is over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just wanted to make sure that I called that to your attention, Marco, that you can now stream Dave Matthews Band
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concerts the following day on NUGS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And to be fair, even though Dave Matthews Band is not my cup of tea, I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much enjoying for many, many years now that Fish and then later Goose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would put for sale for about 10 bucks each every live show they did, direct masterings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the soundboard with very high quality and you know, like with the same mastering you would get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like if a band released a live album to, you know, iTunes and Spotify, like that same kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mastering level, like they were, they’re doing that every show and they release it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day, the morning after the show or later that night for 10 bucks. Like this, you know, Fish started doing this years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago and as Goose has gotten popular, they’ve been doing it and it is such a joy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like your favorite band to basically release a new set, a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album every night of a tour. So you get, what, 20 or 30 a year? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing to have that much music coming from a band that you love. And because these are jam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bands, plus Dave Matthews’ band, the shows are all different. So you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance, a noticeably quite different performance, quite different set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list every night. Obviously, there are some songs you hear a lot, but but like you’re getting a different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different performance and a different work every time, every night they play. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you end up just getting a, you know, but by being a fan of these bands, you end up getting a huge amount of new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music every year. And it’s just, it’s just a wonderful thing to be a fan of these bands. So for Dave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthews to have finally joined that mechanism, I’m happy for the fans like you who get to enjoy
🇮🇹💸
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also exciting, you had a vacation that you just went on, and I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear an after action or trip report. I guess I should say in the vernacular of our dear friend John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siracusa, what was your vacation results?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overall, pretty good. Spent about five days in Italy, spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four days in Florence, and it was wonderful. I can strongly recommend Florence as an American
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tourist. They make it very easy on us. It is full of other American tourists. And the Italians
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very kind and very accommodating of Americans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can especially call out the Gucci restaurant in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Florence is surprisingly good. It has one Michelin star. I think it deserves two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that was wonderful. Nice restorative trip. A lot of good history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see there and sights to see. And so that was wonderful. The art is great. The shopping is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food’s pretty good. Although honestly, I kind of prefer New York style Italian food, but- Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connelly Oh, please email Marco. Do not email us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please. Michael Morgan I mean, look, I also prefer American style coffee. Like, you know, I couldn’t get, you know, regular drip coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere in Italy, because everything’s espresso. So they had very good espresso. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then, you know, on the way out, we were flying out of Rome. So we spent one day in Rome,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right at the end of the trip. So, you know, finished up in Florence, took the train to Rome. The trains are amazing, delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get to Rome, I get on the metro to go to the hotel. It’s a crowded metro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone’s kind of cramming into the stuff. I kind of got pushed over on the way into the car, like into the subway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. Now, you know, I look, I’ve ridden the New York City subway all the time, so I’m used to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The doors close and I realize my wallet’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was in Rome for five minutes and I was pickpocketed. Gracious. You know what they
⏹️ ▶️ John say. What do they say, John? Apparently you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just hope the listeners can finish that thought for me. What, when in Rome,
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing? There you go! It just took a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was right there with
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco. I was deeply confused. Do as the Romans do. Get your pocket picked. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Romans did to me what the Romans do. Did you have it in your front or back pocket? I had it in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front pocket, but it was super hot. I was wearing shorts, and so it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looser, you know. And when I’m traveling, I always have in my front pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always have my wallet and my passport. My passport never leaves my person when I’m traveling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when I’m traveling internationally. And so the passport was between the wallet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my leg. And so I think the combination of shorts plus that made me not feel it instantly. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I noticed, like, obviously part of the, like, I did a bunch of research afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, part of the scam was when I was shoved into the subway car and I stumbled slightly. That was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously a physical distraction to get it. So I didn’t know any of this. this is like oftentimes a multi-person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operation. Pickpocketing in apparently specifically Rome and Paris
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a really professionalized thing. Like, it’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very well done. There are many YouTube videos on this if you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen them already. I haven’t, but you know, as I, at first I was, I mean, again, like I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly like, oh, that’s it. It’s gone. Like I knew, but you know, I didn’t want to like get into like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, an altercation with anybody in the train in case it was any of the people behind me. So I’m like, I don’t want to like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, now I know. Okay, now let’s go start canceling cards, you know, but fortunately I didn’t have that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there. And even more fortunately, I still had my phone and my passport, which are the two things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be harder to replace in that context. And I really didn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash or cards for anything on that trip. You know, the only real loss was, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, a couple hundred dollars worth of cash that I probably shouldn’t have even been carrying and the annoyance of having to replace a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cards on my driver’s license. But ultimately, it could have been a lot worse. It was more of an offense and more of a like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I literally just like I was in Rome for five minutes and Rome said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F you right back to me. And I’m like, OK, you know what, Rome? F you. Like, I can’t imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanting to go back to Rome now. Like, it kind of ruined it for me, whereas Florence was delightful. But Rome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, you know what? You know what Rome really made me appreciate? New York, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New York city is safer, nicer, like in terms of like the people, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are way nicer in New York City. People in Florence were nicer though. I got to give them credit for that. And I like the Italian food better in New York than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do in Rome. So you know what Rome, please my apologies to Federico Petitchi, he’s delightful. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my first impression of Rome was really bad. So I’m very happy to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New Yorker right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t blame you. And we when we were in Rome, this was pre Declan, we stayed near some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like plaza where apparently the pickpockets were legendarily really really bad and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember I had my hands deep in my pockets every time I walked through there because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had the fear of God placed in me including including but I’m limited to when I was walking to the Vatican
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and like I now know like what I should have done is had like you know a zipper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket or one of those front carrying bags that I’m like you know clutching but like I ride the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New York City subway usually at least once a week, and I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had any problem. This is a Rome problem. And it sounds like the Italians really don’t intend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put any kind of effort behind reducing this. So this is their problem to own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, New York is not a perfect place by any means. America is not a perfect place by any means. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it did make me appreciate how nice New York is in this one particular way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I totally hear you and I’m sorry to hear that but now you get to go down the path of potentially if you so choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buying 84 new wallets to figure out which one you like the most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, instead I reordered exactly the same one I had before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was the other option. Fair enough. you
Designed in California
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow out. John, you guested on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade number 624, which was really a Designed in California segment. Can you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me about that? And if you’d like, or I can handle it, tell me what is Designed in California?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so they’re releasing bits of Designed in California in the upgrade feed, both separately
⏹️ ▶️ John and integrated into upgrade episodes. But that’s going to end once Designed in California gets its own feed. Designed in California
⏹️ ▶️ John is a spinoff, I guess, podcast series by Jason Stel and Mark Hurley that
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the style of case. The rest is history. The rest is history. It’s a history
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast about 50 years of Apple’s history. And they’ve done a series so far about the Apple two and they did a Kickstarter,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we will link in the show until the by the time you listen to this, the Kickstarter maybe over because it ends in five days. If you just go to
⏹️ ▶️ John designed dot FM, that’s fast past tense designed dot FM that currently
⏹️ ▶️ John redirects to the Kickstarter. And I’m assuming eventually or redirect or be an actual website. They’re going to do something
⏹️ ▶️ John like 50 episodes, at least 50 episodes of the history of Apple. And they were kind enough to ask
⏹️ ▶️ John me to guest on some of those episodes. I’m not sure if they’ve released everything that we recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John so far, but anyway, whenever they need me, I’m available. The bit in upgraded 6.24,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we will also link, was about Apple’s need for
⏹️ ▶️ John a new operating system. So they’re having me come on to talk about Mac OS X, surprise, surprise. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if you want to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John that, check it out. And there will be more. there will be much, much more from Design in California
⏹️ ▶️ John in the coming year or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, yeah, I’ve already backed this. I backed it immediately. I enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the couple of rest of, the rest of history episodes that I’ve listened to, but I don’t know, it didn’t really rev my engine like it seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rev everyone else’s, but these done by good friends of mine about stuff I really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really care about, that’s Chef’s Kiss. So I definitely encourage you to check it out, designed.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and back the Kickstarter, you should. They also made a like pin or something. I forget exactly what it was now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they made this, um, California bear cow thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am still grumpy about after having seen it several days ago, because it’s so freaking perfect. Uh, so I think there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s pictured somewhere. I’m sure I can’t find it on their Kickstarter right this second, but, um, they made a, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pin that you can get a few back, the physical stuff, like the, one of the tiers is getting physical things from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that this, this California cow bear thing is just freaking perfect and I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grumpy about it, but that’s all right. Anyway, go to design.fm and check it out. you very much will like it.
Apple Intelligence on externals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple intelligence when booting Mac OS from an external drive Doug Winfield writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there may be a workaround for doing exactly that and there’s a link to I tech everything calm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Om shishad writes this process involves modifying a file on the system so that we can trick it into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking that your external drive is Actually an internal drive this cannot be done unless we disable system integrity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protection Fortunately the good news is that you can turn it back on after you’re done
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t try this but I’m glad to see that someone figured out how to make it work I would be scared to try
⏹️ ▶️ John this not because of the system integrity protection But just because essentially lying to the system and telling them that your external drive
⏹️ ▶️ John is an internal drive just smells like a formula for disaster You know that is just
⏹️ ▶️ John lurking out in the future. Are you afraid Eddie’s gonna show up at your house? Anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John I partitioned my not partition whatever I made another volume on my internal drives. That’s how I’m going forward But if you are determined
⏹️ ▶️ John to install Golden gate on an external drive you can follow these instructions.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re long and complicated. Good luck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say I still have Golden Gate on my portable laptop, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far pretty enjoyable, with the exception that it does keep filling up its hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a bummer. Mine hasn’t had that problem so far, although I have to say that the first beta of Xcode 27
⏹️ ▶️ John running on Golden Gate could not launch my app in debug mode at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s bad. Hmm. Oh yeah. It was trying to figure out,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it launching? What’s happening? It was launching the process, the debugger wasn’t attaching to it. So I had to uncheck the debug checkbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John so then I could run it from Xcode, but not debug it, which really puts a damper on debugging.
Siri AI indexing, long-term memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and let’s talk about indexing for Spotlight in the 27 OS’s. Steve Riggins writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m on day six and a half of indexing my iPhone with the iOS 27 beta one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex writes, same here. I’ve even had it plugged in for multiple hours each day. Yikes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that could be what’s filling Marco’s drive or something we could be doing Haywire. But if you’re wondering how long will it take
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the indexing, apparently a long time. And like we said last episode, the rumor slash
⏹️ ▶️ John word on the street is that Apple is going to make these indexes for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who upgrades to 26.6 whenever 26.6 comes out, that they
⏹️ ▶️ John will spend, I don’t know, five, 10 days or whatever indexing probably when our phones are plugged in at night or charging
⏹️ ▶️ John at night so that we don’t have to wait a week after 27
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey comes out to have the indexes built.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto. Then with regard to Apple’s AI tech talk, this was the thing that happened right after the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, what a couple of weeks ago now, uh, you can, Marshall writes, what I didn’t get from the tech talk discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is whether I will be able to casually tell Siri AI something like I put the screws for the bed in the closet in the guest room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have it still remember that two years later, or will I still have to keep sending emails to myself? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would guess that that’s not something Siri will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t sound like an AI thing. That sounds like a, like a data storing app things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s the kind of thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would put in Apple notes or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know, like, so that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, This is gonna happen when people like people who haven’t been playing with
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM chatbots get this on their phone because everyone or you know Mac users or Apple users
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever iPhone users have had Siri on their phone for ages so either they use it or they don’t but it’s not new to them
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as they’re concerned they change Siri again in some way like they don’t see it as a different thing
⏹️ ▶️ John but this question you know points towards like but it is kind of a different thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past if you were to do something like this with Siri Your assumption would be I have to tell Siri to put this in reminders
⏹️ ▶️ John or notes or like I have to instruct I have to like Or say something like remind
⏹️ ▶️ John me and then it will use reminders But if you are actually experienced with these type of chatbot things
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, well, can I just ask it to remember stuff? because a lot of the chatbot things have what
⏹️ ▶️ John they call a memory and you can say things like Remember that I like to use spaces and not tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John in my code stuff like that And it will quote unquote remember it and the memory
⏹️ ▶️ John feature as far as I’ve been able to tell, because it’s very difficult to tell how all these things are implemented, but it’s essentially like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just gonna write words in a text file and put that into, and add that to
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other crap that goes before the thing that you enter. So it’s gonna be the system prompt, all your memory stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John any skills you have, your whole previous conversation, and then the last thing that you wrote.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that all goes into the giant Pachinko machine and comes out the bottom. And so, in a sense, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John remembering it by writing it to a text file off to the side, but the memory is limited
⏹️ ▶️ John and the context window is limited and I wouldn’t trust that little text file that the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing writes off to the side behind the scenes to survive in long-term, not just with Siri, but with any of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the policy is for compacting or truncating or keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John long-term the things I tell these chatbots to remember. So my advice is do
⏹️ ▶️ John not assume that even if this works, which it might work for various chatbots, do not assume that,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s safe forever now. tell it to use the app of your choice to
⏹️ ▶️ John store this information. So then you can open the app and look at it and say, yeah, there is now an Apple note that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s where I put the, you know, things in the closet for the guest room or whatever. Have a note that
⏹️ ▶️ John already does that and have the agent write to that note and then look at the note and see that it’s actually there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even then I would be a little bit careful because someday it might wander by and say, oh, look at this note, I can fix this for you by
⏹️ ▶️ John summarizing it or some crap like that and you lose all your information. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be careful out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, in general, don’t count on the current world of AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for long-term stability of any sort. Because everything is moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so quickly and changing so quickly. People are, the big companies are changing their products left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and right, things change every two weeks. Everything is quicksand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. And so for something like long-term memory, long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco note or data or fact storage, use an app that has a proven track record of doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Apple Notes or, you know, Bear, you know, like one of those, any kind of like personal shoebox data app like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that is your email. If you want to email it to yourself, that’s another option too. But, you know, put the data in something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that and then use AI to index and search that data in whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form that can take. You know, if you’re using something like, you know, Gmail, maybe Gemini can search it in a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way or something like that. If you’re using Siri, you know, use Apple Notes and Siri will be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read that. I think that’s the much better way to structure your data like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you can ask the agents to add it to a note, to add it to reminders. You could ask at the email. I’m not sure which of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things that Siri will do successfully. But then you’re just using it as the same way you would do, say, remind me
⏹️ ▶️ John when I get home to blah, blah, blah. It’s Siri using the features of the Reminders app. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s perfectly fine, but the storage medium needs to be an app that you trust.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You introduced, John, some interesting thought technology to me. I think in rectifs and I think it was forever ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea of a squirrel list, which I have a pinned note and Apple notes called squirrel list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s where I write where things are that I know I will forget where I put them in the future. And that has saved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my bacon many times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And then it’s also.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time I go to my squirrel list these days, it’s like, why did you not? I use it as a verb now, like Googling something. Why did
⏹️ ▶️ John you not squirrel list this? Usually I come out ahead. Like I had to replace a part of my kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John faucet and I’m like, I’ve done, I’ve replaced this part before and when I replaced it, I know I bought extras
⏹️ ▶️ John because I could tell this is a new, newish faucet and like a year or two into it, this thing is already having a problem. I’m probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John need more than one in the week. So I bought spares. But where in my house are the spares? Go right to the squirrel list. Is it there?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, of course it’s not. Of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ John did find it, though. And you know what I did after I found it? I put it on the damn squirrel list. So set a time or three
⏹️ ▶️ John years from now when that stupid magnetic ring in the Delta faucet rusts out again, I know where to find the spares.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perfect. Bye guys.
Booleg of CFed’s AI talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, there is a bootleg video, if you will, of the, uh, aforementioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syria, I talk where Craig is talking at least in the beginning, this is via Saber, say, why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RER, uh, this guy, this, this guy that Sarah links to has three such videos, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says Sarah, I saw one from straight on that has the opening quote that we talked about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t find that one, unfortunately. And then we have linked to a YouTube short where one of these videos can be seen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So they should go on nugs, man. like, imagine if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there could be an
⏹️ ▶️ John official video instead of audience recordings. understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly right. It’s a whole new world for me, John. I tell you.
How smart is Spatial Reframing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then with regard to some of the new tools and photos, Kevin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Buterbaug writes, is the new spatial reframing feature in the 27 releases geographically aware?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For example, my wife and I recently had our picture taken together by someone else, as in not a selfie, while we were standing on the pier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in somewhere unpronounceable in California. The person taking the picture was facing south, so Morro Bay and Morro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rock were in the background. The person who took the picture managed to frame it such that my head hides Morro Rock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I were to use spatial reframing on it, would it know to fill in Morro Rock, or would it just generically fill in matching coastline?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to assume it would just fill in coastline.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know for a fact, but I would put very good money on no, it has no idea where you are
⏹️ ▶️ John and even what it knows your location, but it’s not going to use any kind of awareness or photos taken by other people in that location,
⏹️ ▶️ John which again, is it would be a privacy nightmare that Apple wouldn’t really delve into. It’s just going to use the training
⏹️ ▶️ John data of all the photos that its image generator is seen and say, here’s what plausibly could have been behind you. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be that the training data includes lots of images of Moro Rock. You’re like, wow, it is location aware.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I move my head it shows me exactly the right shape of Moro Rock. That just means Moro Rock was in the training data.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it is basing it on your GPS. Now again, I don’t know for a fact because I didn’t make this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John so if someone on Apple knows otherwise, but I would put good, good money that that’s not the way these things work
⏹️ ▶️ John currently. It’s just going to use the model and whatever the model puts is what the model puts. Yep, concur.
Tesla and CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Tesla and CarPlay. Or in other words, let’s have Casey pop off. Alec Hertel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points us to an article on notateslaapp.com, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entitled, Apple announces Maps feature that could finally bring CarPlay to Tesla. And Nahal Malik from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the aforementioned website writes, reports emerged last fall of Tesla actively pursuing native
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay integration. Follow-up reports from earlier this year indicated that CarPlay integration was still in the works, with Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reportedly working directly to bring the interface to its vehicles. At the time, the main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holdup was said to be how the navigation would be handled between Tesla’s whatever they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, their full self-driving, except it isn’t really full self-driving system, and CarPlay’s own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maps. Because supervised self-driving relies heavily on the car’s native
⏹️ ▶️ Casey navigation, Tesla and Apple were working together to ensure that turn-by-turn directions stay in sync across Tesla’s and Apple’s mapping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms. If this supervised automatic driving doesn’t know where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the CarPlay map is going, features like automatic lane changes, which I don’t understand why that’s a problem, but anyway, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supervised self-navigation simply can’t function. During a WWDC 26 session
⏹️ ▶️ Casey covering the latest updates to CarPlay, Apple announced a new feature called route sharing. And we will put a timestamp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link to the YouTube video in the show notes. Route sharing allows navigation to pass, a navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, excuse me, to pass a trip to the vehicle as an array of route segments, which are geographic coordinates that are sent to the vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whenever the trip changes. Apple notes that, quote, some vehicles with driver assistance systems work best when the intended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey route is known. For example, vehicles may support automatic lane changes or adjust their guidance systems to more closely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey match the route shown in your app, quote. So I really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want this to happen, not because I want Tesla’s to be more appealing to anyone, that’s even really possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but because if Tesla finally caves, because they were, you know, the kings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of no were too good for CarPlay, then maybe Rivian will cave and maybe GM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will cave. And yes, I am living in a fantasy world where things go my way. And no, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the reality world that I’m also living in, but man, I can dream, can’t I?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I like how they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t name Tesla and W.W.D.C.C. session, you know, because they’re, but it’s like the facts match up exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John that apparently this was what Tesla was waiting for. Now, does this mean Tesla will actually do it? We’ll see. But this rumor has been
⏹️ ▶️ John cooking for a while. Like, and the holdup being, we can’t do this because we don’t, you know, there’s not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing route information to support our other features. Makes technical sense, but I still wonder about
⏹️ ▶️ John how committed they are to doing this, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just, I do think it’s interesting because this does not strike me as, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re coming at this as a Tesla fan, which is a fantasy world that I find hard to inhabit, but if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming at this as a Tesla fan, this does not strike me as something you would do from a position of strength,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you’ve banged this drum for so long that, oh, we’re too good for CarPlay. Our stuff is better than CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have the best software in the whole car industry because we are amazing. And yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They do it in that voice too. And they do it in that voice. And yet, here they are potentially caving and saying, sure, we’ll support CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am struggling to find any reason to do that other than, man, it would be nice if we sold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more cars these days. Maybe that’s just me. Uh…
New US sunscreen filter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have incredibly, you know, Marco, this is your episode. It just occurred to me because not only do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to what will eventually be just hours and hours and hours of Dave Matthews Band on goose.net,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or excuse me, nugs.net, but the US has approved a new sunscreen ingredient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from Scientific American, the US is finally getting a new, better sunscreen ingredient. The Food and Drug Administration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added Bemotrizolone. There, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go with that. And I tried this earlier and I already forgot what I tried. Bimetrizanol, an effective chemical filter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s used in sunscreens made in Asia and Europe for decades, to the list of permitted active ingredients in over-the-counter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sunscreens. The list hasn’t seen a new entry in more than 20 years. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is, you know, as I was going through my sunscreen journey, I believe it was last year or the year before, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realized that Avobenzone, which is the chemical filter used in almost every US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunscreen, except for the mineral ones, but all the chemical sunscreens or the hybrids, they all had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Avobenzone. And it turns out Avobenzone is, you know, both not incredibly effective relative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to modern sunscreen filter chemicals, and also, the problem that I was having was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s incredibly irritating to most people’s eyes. My eyes would just burn and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco painful, you know, redness and everything all day if I had sunscreen on, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if like a little tiny bit traveled, oh, and alpha-benzone travels through the skin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through short distances too, it migrates. And so, if you had sunscreen anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your face, odds of it getting in your eye were pretty high. So at that point, I switched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, I tried European sunscreens and Japanese sunscreens. And I found all these other chemicals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are more modern that are much, not only more effective in most cases, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow much nicer formulations of the sunscreen. Like, you know, like how does it absorb? Does it have good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco textures? You know, stuff like that. And then it doesn’t migrate through your skin and it’s not as irritating to eyes, like by a huge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge margin. So the one that I use the most and love is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Roto Super Moisture UV Gel. It’s a Japanese brand, I’ll link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes you can find people on Amazon selling it, it’s more reliably found on eBay, or you can just order it from Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Japan if you’re willing to pay a lot of shipping. But one of the filters it uses is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. This is also called Tinosorb S. It’s available in a lot of European
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Japanese sunscreens. There’s also, there’s a whole community of Korean sunscreen enthusiasts. I didn’t get that far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I I basically got to Japan and was happy and stopped. So but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole world of sunscreens that now the US has approved one of the chemicals that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. And so therefore, we are likely to see better U.S. sunscreens that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not irritating to people’s eyes or not as irritating to people’s eyes and work better against, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, different different forms of UV. So this is great news for the sunscreen enthusiast world. I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to still keep buying my my roto super moisture UV gel just because I like it a lot. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the formula is good. The bottles are convenient. It has it has a scent, but it’s a very, very weak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scent. So it’s fairly neutral. And and it worked great for me. So I’m going to keep buying that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But hopefully I’ll have more options soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have a lot of faith in the U.S. sunscreen industry. I just assumed looking at this story that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll they’ll put this ingredient in and they’ll also include albobenzo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be to be fair, like I don’t think I mean, I don’t I haven’t looked at it exactly, but I don’t think it would make sense to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both because they probably cover similar UVA and UVB bands. So like I don’t it probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t make sense for the same product to include both.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying it makes sense. It just seems like a thing that the manufacturers would do. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John put a trace amount of this so they could put it on the label and raise the price, but just keep it the same as it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, probably. I mean, you wouldn’t believe like how many sunscreens, how many like US sunscreen I tried first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that claim to be like sensitive or, you know, all these different marketing words. And at the end of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day, they all had the exactly the same problem because they were all using the only US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chemical filter that was rated for UVA and UVB.
Tracking environmental-impact reports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we are going to dig up some freaking ancient follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re finally going to exhume and get through. These are not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remarkable, but it’s hilarious to me how long these have lived in our internal show notes. So like 18 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, we were talking about tracking Apple’s environmental progress. And Andrew Leahy writes, your mention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of diffing the environmental impact report on the latest Apple products gave me an idea. I fed historical environmental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impact reports into TOS Tracker, which is a terms of service tracker if I’m not mistaken, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep track moving forward. Mind the bugs. Some report PDFs are still being ingested, although this was like three months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, and you can go to the TOS tracker website and we will put a link in the show notes where you can see this. And Andrew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continues. If you go to an individual product, you can compare directly across whatever metrics Apple provides. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there will be another link for, for example, the M1 MacBook air versus the M5 MacBook air.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. The magic of technology. Yeah. These, these long lasting, uh, follow up, like lots of things have died out
⏹️ ▶️ John here, but these are the ones that survived. It’s just because I thought like we talk about this and diffing like this is a pain and who has time
⏹️ ▶️ John for that? Well, if there’s a website for it, you just bookmark the website. And if you’re wondering what kind of progress is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John making on the environment stuff, are they just doing the same stuff year after year and just retouting it over and over again? are they actually improving?
Apple’s AI servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, in episode 680, we were talking about, or we had questions about how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s AI servers work. This was keyed off of a Wall Street Journal video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we were talking about in, again, episode 680 back in February. And friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, writes, no need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to rely on rumors or leaks for what Apple’s AI servers are running. The software images they distribute to security researchers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey include details about the hardware. With regard to how each ultra chip is addressed, we know that as well. Each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those chips is a single PCC node, or private cloud compute node, running as a standalone computer with Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS, which is a variant of iOS. And there’s an orchestration layer that handles distributing work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within that ensemble, which is what Apple calls it. You can also see there’s a Cloud or was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time anyway, a Cloud OS job listing, which includes the Cloud OS team is responsible for all facets of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivering OS and system services on Apple Silicon servers, including driving hardware and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software initiatives to enable new Apple Silicon based systems in data centers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Zoe Knox contributes, Here’s Apple’s documentation on how to run the PCC virtual environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we will put a link to that in the show notes. In there, it says the Private Cloud Compute Virtual Research Environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or PCC VRE, is a set of tools and images that can boot a version of PCC software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and simulate a PCC node on a Mac with Apple Silicon.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta get this item in right before I would imagine potentially this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John tech stack becomes irrelevant. It’s not, we don’t know that this is gonna happen, but now that they’ve moved to
⏹️ ▶️ John using Nvidia servers and other people’s data centers, I do wonder how long they’re going to continue the effort of
⏹️ ▶️ John building their own servers. That Wall Street Journal video like showed us inside the factory where they have those big giant rack mount servers
⏹️ ▶️ John that had a bunch of, you know, M2 Ultras or whatever inside them, building their hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John racking the hardware, supporting it, writing an OS called Cloud OS that goes on there, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the security. Like this is a hell of an effort for what I have to imagine at this point is just
⏹️ ▶️ John not competitive at all in any measure like an M2 Ultra. It was a great chip back in the day. But boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve moved on compared to today’s Nvidia chips that, you know, Google’s got in its data
⏹️ ▶️ John centers. Is Apple really going to keep up with the state of the art or are they just
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say, you know, what Google is doing? We’re also calling that PCC. We’ll make sure it has
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the same properties as the PCC that we did. We’re you know, they already in WC that we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John distinguishing between one of the other. It’s all PCC to us. Right. And I promised that by the time the 27 was
⏹️ ▶️ John a ship, Google’s PCC will be just as good as Apple’s PCC. And I just feel like that’s clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John the path forward. But for now or in the past, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have their own servers that they built in their own factories that they ran cloud OS on and they were had job listings for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I don’t know how it’s going to go. Tune in next year to see if this is still a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine it would be like there’s there is not a lot of worlds where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this makes sense for Apple to do long term while, you know, Google and AWS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everybody and, you know, Microsoft, like all these other companies are running giant data centers that are specialized for exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this purpose with the newest cutting edge, everything from everybody. Like, it just doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense for Apple to themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I kind of see how they got there. Like in the old regime, the old regime that was
⏹️ ▶️ John wiped away and replaced with this new regime that gave us, you know, WWC 2026 in the
⏹️ ▶️ John pre WWC 2024 regime, the idea of PCC is like, what if we could do this this thing where we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do stuff in the cloud, but in a secure way. And we have great silicon and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very efficient and we could make our own servers and we could put our own OS on it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, then we would have, it’s basically like, well, you could run on your device and you can also run in this thing, which is basically as secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we make something that’s not on your device as secure as being on your device? That’s the whole idea between PCC. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John just like stuff that stays on your devices, you know, we can’t see it, nobody can see it as encrypted, whatever. Can we do that? But on the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it makes so much sense as a thing to do. and it made sense to like the WWDC 2024
⏹️ ▶️ John timeframe to announce it, if only all of that actually ever shipped. And it didn’t, and the world moved
⏹️ ▶️ John on, and it’s like, okay, well now, the servers are still M2 Ultras, and the world has
⏹️ ▶️ John moved on. This is, you know, I’m not gonna bang this drum too much, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple wants to compete in the high end of hardware anywhere, including on the server, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make new high end chips on a fairly regular basis, because the state of the art in things
⏹️ ▶️ John that run in data centers and do AI stuff is moving rapidly. The M2 Ultra is positively
⏹️ ▶️ John ancient. Even if they’ve replaced them with M3 Ultras, also pretty ancient. And where’s the M5 Ultra?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometime in 2026. Meanwhile, the world is racing forward. So I just don’t think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has it in them to compete hardware-wise. And if you can’t compete hardware-wise, the whole effort is pointless, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John your software stack is really cool. So yeah, just have Google do it with NVIDIA GPS.
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Apple price increases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On June 17th, which is we record this on the evening of the 25th, it was a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a day ago, Tim Cook took one on the chin for John Ternes and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did an interview with Rolf Winkler of the Wall Street Journal. Rolf writes, Apple plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to raise prices on its products to offset the surging cost of memory and storage chips, chief executives Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said in an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cook said. We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cook declined to offer details on timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey products would be affected. Just you wait. But they included a chart in the Wall Street Journal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price changes from the first quarter of 2023, And the baseline, or it starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at, like I said, 2023. And there’s, you know, little blips and blurbs of defer D-RAM memory and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NAND storage, how expensive they are. And got a little bit more in 25 and then toward the end of 25,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just hockey sticks. And the tall, the, the, the, the top of this chart,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what D-RAM is estimated to be at the end of 2027, 900% above what it was in 2023.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, again, that’s an estimate, but holy jamolis, not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of those charts where you’re like, please do look at the y-axis. It is rooted at zero, and you’re like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but these graphs always exaggerate stuff. Yeah, it looks like they go up a lot, but I bet it’s like point zero, and then the top
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing is 0.01. No, the top is 900. It’s a percent. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a terrible, terrible, scary graph. And by the way, Casey, it pains me when you skip my terrible puns.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to put them in. Which one? Maybe it’s my pun,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my me, because my pun is so bad Casey didn’t even recognize it as a pun, which I’m going to take. That’s on me. That’s not on
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey. The way I described this was Tim Cook takes one for the turn. It’s takes one for the
⏹️ ▶️ John T’s taking one from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the team. I know team and Ternus.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a stretch. It’s on me. It’s not on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s no, I’ll take some of that blame. That was a group effort because I did not. My reading comprehension as always has failed me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t see for the Ternus. I just read that as take takes one for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John turn. I should have done your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and may have had team and strike through And then I turn is then you would have figured it out anyway. That’s true. This again,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was June 17th. Obviously, we know where this goes because today is June 25th. And stay tuned. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But when this came out on June 17th, everyone was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s nice of Tim. Like because, you know, we all know this bad news is coming. We talked about the you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the the Ram crisis and everything and what Apple’s doing. And we talked about how
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple has long term contracts for its parts. They don’t buy them the day they make the things.
⏹️ ▶️ John they lock in a price for a certain amount and they do that potentially a year or two in advance.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that timer runs out eventually, like eventually all those deals that you made one or two years ago, those
⏹️ ▶️ John end and then you have to buy things at market prices. And then Apple is not magical and immune from market forces.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even though we saw that Apple was holding the line on prices, it’s like, well, if if the commodity
⏹️ ▶️ John prices don’t turn around and Apple runs out of all the deals, eventually they’re going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make some hard choices. Tim Cook could have said, yeah, well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll just leave this and John Ternus can announce the increases. Now, we don’t know whether
⏹️ ▶️ John like they had to be announced now and so it was always going to be Tim Cook because Ternus doesn’t take over until September
⏹️ ▶️ John or whether he was doing what people thought he was doing on the 17th. Because remember the 17th, we didn’t know when the price increases were coming or what
⏹️ ▶️ John they would be. So in the 17th, people could have been saying, well, it’ll probably be the iPhones in September
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, it’d be bad if Ternus’s first keynote, he’s got to announce all the iPhones like hundreds of dollars more expensive. So let
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook on its way out the door, soften everybody up. And then when Ternus announces it, it’s like, well, we’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John known this is going to happen right now. You know, that turned out not to be the case, as we see in a second. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, you know, this is one of like the instead of a strategy tax, it’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy credit or whatever. Not not quite the same thing. But like when you have something like this happen, you have a transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of downsides to a transition. Change is scary and there’s lots of instability.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not sure how things are going to go. But one of the advantages of a transition is you can do stuff like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have the guy on his way out the door do stuff that is unpalatable.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m not talking about the Trump stuff. He did that while he was not out the door, like like
⏹️ ▶️ John announced, be the bad guy, announced the price increases. Don’t make your new CEO do it. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ John totally a Tim Cook move. And as we’ll see, it wasn’t really taking one for turn us. It
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it might have been just like something that needed to be announced now and Tim is currently the CEO. So it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, and so that chart, the chart is terrifying. Please, we’ll put a link to the image, but you can just go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John article. I think you can see it even if it’s paywall, but if not, look at the image in our LinkedIn or show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then there was some tangents here to the story to say just this chart here, again, that goes up to 900%, how
⏹️ ▶️ John this has ripple effects throughout the entire world. And so this Wall Street Journal story continued with some more fun details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right-o, so from the Wall Street Journal, three companies dominate the market for DRAM memory, Samsung and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SK hynix in South Korea and micron in the U S makers of Nanda storage include
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those three companies as well as Keoxia and Sandisk their stock prices along with their profits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have exploded over the past 12 months You don’t say micron and SK hynix shares have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey risen more than 800% Y Keoxia and Sandisk have risen 4,600 Anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John buy any SanDisk stock in 2024? Good. Not me. Gravy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this has led to some interesting corollaries, like John was saying. So reading from CNBC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few workers can say that their bonuses have been so large that the company’s central bank takes notice. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in South Korea, the phenomenon is playing out as workers from tech industries receive bonuses worth millions of won,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prompting the Bank of Korea to warn of the upward pressure of inflation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to an unidentified union source cited by Reuters, a memory chip worker with a base salary of 80 million won
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or about 52 grand U.S. is expected to receive a total bonus of around 626 million won or 410,000 U.S. dollars this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Holy crap. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you’re working in the memory chip factory for 50 K a year, and your bonus is going to be 400 K. That’s a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Good for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to find more details. And so I think like some of those, they’re union labor and then unions had negotiated a like
⏹️ ▶️ John a profit sharing deal before all this happened, which was like, you know, we get some piddling percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of the company’s profits as a bonus. Little did they know that the profits
⏹️ ▶️ John are about to go off like a rocket ship. And so what seemed like a reasonable deal of profit sharing with the union
⏹️ ▶️ John now becomes guess what? You get a 400k bonus this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Diamond hands all the way. And then there was a Reddit post that I presume John stumbled upon, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is quite funny. Someone took a screenshot of a chat GPT conversation. And I guess what they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is they’re building a custom PC or something like that. And again, this is a screenshot from chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPT. Chat GPT says to this individual, that is a very solid build, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spotted one thing immediately. And then big warning, rotating light. RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price is wrong. Your screenshot shows, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 32 gigs of RAM, $420.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That has to be a pricing error or the company picked some weird seller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The 32 gigs of RAM should be around 80 or $120, not 420. If I’m still quoting now, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually paid $420 for 32 gigs RAM, I’d call the police laughing with tears in my eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, chat. GPT. Incredible. It’s it’s the, it’s the hot dog. Uh, the, the meme with the guy in the hot dog suit
⏹️ ▶️ John saying we’re trying to find the guy who did this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I’ve I’ve seen that, but I don’t know it offhand, but no matter what,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you not see these memes? You have children. We’re going to help you old people see memes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I know about is six, seven, John. That’s the only thing I know these days. That bro is used as a comma anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, yeah, this is incredible. I mean, it’s sad and terrible if you’re not an employee of those memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey companies, but it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to have to use all that money to buy their next PC though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, it all comes back around. Right. So then that was all June 17. Again, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Wednesday, June 17. It is now, as I’m sitting here today, Thursday, June 25.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And guess what? Apple’s raised prices. So there’s another post at the Wall Street Journal. We’ll put in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both for the prior one we were discussing and this one, we’ll put in an Apple News Plus link if you happen to be a subscriber. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, Apple has said, the consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for iPad and for Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will put some links in the show notes. Our dear friend, Stephen Hackett, had a good rundown of this. There’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post on Mac rumors. And additionally, Gruber had a post that we’ll end up discussing here in a moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the 50,000 foot view is that basically everything that isn’t an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, if I’m not mistaken, has gone up at least 10 to 15%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in some cases, as much as 60%. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just gonna jump to what I was going to say later, but I can’t resist, I’m gonna say it right now. The Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is ancient has gone from $129 for the base model to $200,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a $70 increase or 54%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The nice Apple TV, the nice Apple TV that has thread and ethernet is $250, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put things in perspective. And I know this doesn’t mean as much to everyone else as it does to me, but I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think we’ve all joined in my familial journey over the years to put things in perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My daughter, Michaela, was not in elementary school when the last Apple TV was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released. It was, I forget how many days ago now, don’t have the buyer’s guide in front of me out but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was thousands of days if they’re like thirteen hundred days ago or something like that and uh… she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not even a kindergartner yet when that was in the when that was released let’s see what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it as a storefront one thousand three hundred forty six days ago when the apple tv was most recently released october
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of twenty twenty two my daughter who was not yet in kindergarten just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grab worked out as soon as he graduated just finished second grade has gone through three years of school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the time since we have had a new Apple TV. What the fuck is going on? And why the fuck do they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this thing is worth $250? Are you out of your mind? What is happening? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the more expensive one went up by 67%. Oh God, it’s even worse. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I have to say that this, I
⏹️ ▶️ John find this one of the least objectionable Oh my God. Price increases actually. Obviously absolute
⏹️ ▶️ John value, it’s not a lot because it’s 70 bucks percentage wise is big, but it is a cheap product. But the thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple TV is like, I’m honestly, I don’t quite know why Apple hasn’t been gouging us even
⏹️ ▶️ John more on it, is because as time passes, it’s competition in the realm of thing you
⏹️ ▶️ John use to watch streaming video on your TV has just gotten like worse and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey worse. That is fair. That is very fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s just like, what would you pay for an Apple TV? And the answer is I’d pay more than 250 to not have to
⏹️ ▶️ John use like smart TV software or like a streaming stick or some other weird thing. I’m not encouraging Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to increase prices. This is all terrible, but that particular one doesn’t bother me that much. Although it is, I believe the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage increase. And what we’re gonna mostly be talking about here are base prices, because obviously we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to upgrade prices in a second, but the base prices have gone up. And this is for like, they say Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPads, but Vision Pro is in there too, which is great. The average price increase is $258
⏹️ ▶️ John and the average percentage increase is 21.5%, which is bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is bad going up. But like, depending on what you’re looking at, as the base price goes up,
⏹️ ▶️ John the percentage increase, the absolute value goes up as well. So Apple TV, I think is the worst with the base
⏹️ ▶️ John price going up 54%. Some of them only went up like 18, 17, 15. The
⏹️ ▶️ John big expensive Macs with the big CPUs in them, like the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, 32.5%
⏹️ ▶️ John increase, which isn’t that bad, but that’s an additional $1,300 to the base price,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Vision Pro got out
⏹️ ▶️ John easy with only a 5.7% increase. So they just added $200 to the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can look at this chart and kind of see like, products
⏹️ ▶️ John with RAM and SSD, the more RAM and the more SSD, the more the increases go up. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s brutal. And the percentages are weird and uneven, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the price increase, it’s like 200, 200, 100, 200, 300, 500, 200. Like they tried to make all their increases
⏹️ ▶️ John round numbers. There’s a 150 thrown in there as well. Apple TV is 70 and HomePod mini is 30, right? But they tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the round numbers. And this makes me start thinking about the timing of this. Like the whole, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna have to increase prices announcement on the 17th. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John thing Something came to a head at this point We’re like we can’t wait until September like we can’t just wait until September
⏹️ ▶️ John and just have like the new phones be more expensive We have to raise the price on other products too, and there’s no good time to do that So
⏹️ ▶️ John why don’t we rive off the band-aid and raise the prices on all of them? No, does that mean every single one of these products
⏹️ ▶️ John just ran out of its one or two year contracts for SSDs and RAM? No, but there it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John than doing it piecemeal So it could be that some of these products have been coasting on on not having Apple style
⏹️ ▶️ John margins for like a month or two. And other ones could have another year of runway with based on the RAM and SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John chips they already have or they already built for the thing. But they’re not gonna do it based on like exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John when the things like, they’re not gonna wait till the last minute. They’re like, if any one of these products needs to be increased so we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t lose our precious margins, we’re gonna do all of them now. And we’re gonna do all of them by round numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are these round numbers exactly how much more Apple has to pay to build them? Absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John not. Like there’s no way it would magically come out. So it just so happens the low end products get like a hundred out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the other ones get, no, it doesn’t make any sense. That’s, but they just pick the round numbers. So their
⏹️ ▶️ John announcement uses careful words as always. It says, Apple’s statement says, we have shielded
⏹️ ▶️ John our customer from these increases so far. I think shielded is the correct word because Apple’s deals
⏹️ ▶️ John have shielded the customers from these increases in the same way that they’ve shielded Apple from the increases.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause hey, if we have a contract that says you’re going to give us this many RAM chips at this price,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we haven’t used all those RAM chips yet or the contract doesn’t run out, we’re shielded from the increase
⏹️ ▶️ John and so are you as the consumer. But the second that contract is up and we have to buy at market prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not gonna eat that cost. And so they were shielding and then they’re no longer shielding,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re no longer shielding themselves either. What they didn’t say is we have been eating that cost for you. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John what the statement says. Now, they may have been eating some of that cost. Like I can think maybe like on the Neo or some other products
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, you know, got caught by surprise by this or a super low price that maybe they actually have had reduced margins
⏹️ ▶️ John on some of these products. But then I look at the price increase list, and I say, well, whatever products you had been
⏹️ ▶️ John suffering decreased margins on, I think you’re in for another few months of what I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John will be potentially better than normal margins, especially on the products that still have locked
⏹️ ▶️ John in contracts for components, but their prices still went up by 20%. That’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be some good margins on those and those will offset the other one. So anyway, we’ll see in their financial calls. I know we don’t cover the minutia
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, but a an across the board price increase like this on basically every Mac and every iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John plus the Vision Pro in round number amounts is totally an Apple thing to do, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s do this. Let’s do it once. Let’s get it over with and let’s make the numbers big enough that we don’t have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it again. And I would assume and we’ll see, but I would assume that when they come out with new
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs and new iPads in the future, they will simply adopt these prices as the new normal
⏹️ ▶️ John prices. Like, even if and when commodity prices go back down, I don’t expect Apple to have an announcement and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Hey, remember in 2026, when we had to increase all our prices because commodity prices went up? Well, guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what the bubble popped and now commodity prices are back down because there’s a glut of ram manufacturing capacity because it’s 2030. And
⏹️ ▶️ John all these factories have been built. They’re not going to lower the prices. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to keep them where they were. So this is the new normal for us probably
⏹️ ▶️ John for multiple reasons. One, more capacity for SSDs and RAM is
⏹️ ▶️ John coming online in a few years. So don’t expect like this will be over tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing they can save us is the factories get built in several years or
⏹️ ▶️ John the AI bubble bursts before that and AI companies have to start actually selling services at the cost of
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me like the whole giant influx of free money with which to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy all the RAM chips in the world stops flowing for whatever reason. So what do you think will happen first?
⏹️ ▶️ John That the new factories will get built in three or four years or that the bubble will pop? I don’t know. I’m not predicting.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not financial advice, but I would expect these prices to be with us for a while, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible news for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. Not a good time to need to buy a very high spec Mac. I mean, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly everyone’s focusing a lot on the base prices, but where you see even more of a hit is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on those upgraded RAM in SSD sizes. Like I looked today, like a maxed out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro right now is now a little over $10,000. Which,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, before I think they maxed out around the 7,000 range. So it’s especially like I was looking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the eight terabyte SSD on a MacBook Pro is now a $3,000 BTO option. Good God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So these are pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers. Most of those are up, you know, 50 to 60%. Now, that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Casey, you brought up the Apple TV example, and the Apple TV was last updated, as far as I could tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly in 2022. And in that time, there’s been about 15% inflation. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just inflation alone covers a lot of these for like the older stuff. And like Ben
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thompson’s been making this point a lot, that basically in inflation-adjusted terms, Apple products have actually been getting a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper over the last, you know, five, six years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the phones in particular. Some of the Macs questionable, but definitely the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because you know the reality is like this is what we’re talking about one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why why a particular type of thing is now more expensive but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve been going through a pretty significant period of inflation certainly in the US and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think a lot of the world has to that you know look around our lives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing cost the same now as it did even three years ago because everything is more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we have not to get political much about this, but like we have in addition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to general fiscal dynamics and interest rates, things like that. We also have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous tariff chaos from our current president that throws the entire supply chain into chaos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any given moment. Then he started a war and ruined oil prices for a while. And it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these things are going on in the world around us. Of course everything’s going to get more expensive. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is nothing in my life that cost today what it did three years ago, except I guess iPhone based prices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s probably not long for this world now either. Right? So like, I do think it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I think Apple has been basically eating inflation rises for us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also for all this time. I don’t think this is going to be that temporary. Uh, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just what these things are going to cost for the foreseeable future. Um, you know, when more capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes online in two years, maybe supply and demand we’re getting bound? Maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe the capacity that is being built today isn’t enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t actually know that. You know, it’s also it’s equally possible to wait too much, and there’ll be a big glut in these companies, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of business like this. There’s certainly a lot of a lot of, you know, unknowns about this dynamic. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are in the middle of a very inflationary period of all costs of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going up. and then also we’re adding specifically problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with common computer components. This is just going to be our world for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple has done a great job so far of not letting it show and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having it affect them or us particularly much but that time is over and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just what things cost now. So I think this is a good opportunity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extend the lives of devices you have, you know, look for deals on used things maybe if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, you know, if you need to get that, get a discount to make, to put something back into your price range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, do what you can to be more efficient and pressure app developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other people who were making very memory hungry apps and stuff like, you know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pressure them to start being a little more concerned with that. But this is a really good time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to already have a computer that you like. This is not a good time to need one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is also going to affect Apple kind of broadly by whenever they release new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products in the coming years, demand is gonna be a little bit softened by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact that they’re going to cost substantially more than they used to. Like, you know, this fall we’re heading into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty significant iPhone season. Like they’re gonna launch this foldable. Foldables are expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even before this. You think like now, imagine like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone Pro, you know, you get one now for about 1200 bucks. What is that? $1,200? What’s the base price on the iPhone Pro? Something like that. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I figure that’s probably going to be at least $1,400 now. And then what’s the foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be? Like, people were expecting before these price hikes that it might be $2,000. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking that might be conservative. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s $2,500. Well, it depends on what they do with margins because, like, speaking of the upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John price table the Gruber had in his thing. The upgrade prices for this stuff are a concentration
⏹️ ▶️ John of this problem to like, because like the whole you know your whole Mac your whole iPhone has lots of different components
⏹️ ▶️ John in it not all those components are getting more expensive right but specific ones are. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrading one of those specific components like oh I want to get a Mac but I want more RAM in
⏹️ ▶️ John it those are not 20% 15% increases. You can look at the Gruber chart some
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are 100% increases because that’s where the problem is in the in the supply
⏹️ ▶️ John chain right now. If you want a bigger SSD, that’s a 50, 60 percent, 70 percent increase
⏹️ ▶️ John in price. And it’s not just because Apple’s gouging you, because that is the source. That’s the source of the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of the the foldable phone and stuff, the foldable phone is more expensive because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got more screen, it’s got more battery, but screens and batteries aren’t the things that are going up in price. Things that are going up in
⏹️ ▶️ John price are RAM and SSD. So does the foldable phone have more RAM and SSD than the pro phone? No, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John have more screen and battery. So maybe that will actually take less of a hit because the things that it has more
⏹️ ▶️ John of are not appreciably hit by the particulars of the RAM and SSD. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously just there’s inflation or whatever, but like, and it’s a new product and it’s complicated to build and it’s folding.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it will definitely be expensive. But yeah, when I look at these tables
⏹️ ▶️ John of the upgrade stuff, all I can think about is like Apple’s strategy of on-device AI
⏹️ ▶️ John seems so smart a couple of years ago. It’s like, well, they have great Silicon and everyone else has to have these big expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John data centers. And Apple’s going to, you know, if Apple tried to run data centers for its billions of iPhone users, it’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be really expensive. But if people can do it on device so that, you know, we got the Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM windfall year or two ago, where Apple put more RAM in all
⏹️ ▶️ John its devices so they could run Apple intelligence. Well, now we’re in a world where Apple needs even
⏹️ ▶️ John even more RAM, like they’re increasing their RAM even more above and beyond what they did for like the old Apple intelligence for the new
⏹️ ▶️ John one because they want to run stuff on device. Well, guess what’s expensive now, specifically because of
⏹️ ▶️ John a identity centers, it’s RAM because they’re stealing it all. And Apple needs more of it than ever
⏹️ ▶️ John on its devices to run its local models. So Apple’s strategy of we’re going to run a local
⏹️ ▶️ John models because we have the best silicon is great until RAM is prices are destroyed. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they’re going to reconsider that policy. Like the rumors of all the upcoming devices are they will, in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John have more RAM than the old ones specifically so they can run the whatever. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Foundation model, core, advanced, blah, blah, blah. Like that Apple is putting
⏹️ ▶️ John more RAM and all of its devices above and beyond what that used to be the baseline for Apple intelligence so they can run
⏹️ ▶️ John this new stuff. That’s going to hurt prices way more than you would think, because,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it seems like those had to buy. They had to buy that RAM at prices that were inflated. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens with the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But these Mac things, I feel like they’re running, you’re probably running an inventory and some of these are going to be replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John and their deals are expiring or they didn’t have long term contracts for these things. But with the phone, I still
⏹️ ▶️ John have some faith that maybe some of the phones introduced this September will benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John from locked in rates for certain components. But we’ll see. As with the big price
⏹️ ▶️ John increases we just saw here, it probably behooves Apple that even if they do have good locked in rates
⏹️ ▶️ John for their components for the for the iPhones in September, just increase all the prices by $200 anyway, because guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what? In a year, this will probably still be going on. potentially, like the rumors are, the rumors, the predictions
⏹️ ▶️ John are, this is going to get worse next year, not better, but like it’s going to get twice as bad as it is
⏹️ ▶️ John now in 2027. So buckle up for that. And that means Apple should probably
⏹️ ▶️ John increase the prices on all of its phones by a big amount so they can keep that price the same in 2027
⏹️ ▶️ John and maintain their incredibly high margins.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back several steps, I priced what is a modern facsimile for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my current laptop. So I have I have an M3 Max, 64 gigs, 8 terabytes, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Marco, I’m a fool. I wanna say I paid roundabouts of $5,000 for this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it was new, when the M3 Max was brand new. This was late, like two or three years ago, what, late in the year, two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago. So it was $5,000 then. Today, although I did option the nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display because I want it, but leaving that aside, that’s the only real difference, $8,250. Yep, mine went from 7,200 to an even 10,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good freaking God. So I’m really, right now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really happy with my M3 Max right now. It’s like, oh, do I want to spend $10,000 to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern version? Not particularly.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the past like month, I’ve been pricing out like used and refurbished,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple Silicon stuff, including like a used M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Max Studio with a third party eight terabyte SSD in it and everything. And I wonder if those prices
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to go up to like, because I didn’t pull the trigger on anything was like, oh, it’s still a huge amount of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And do I want to pay a huge amount of money for an ancient computer? Maybe I’ll just keep holding out because it’s what I’m good at. But
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of that, Apple has, by the way, also raised the prices on their refurbished Macs and
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads, and you would think, wait a second, the refurbished ones, those are already built and assembled and
⏹️ ▶️ John probably preowned. Why are they going up? Well, market prices, demand, supply and demand.
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want to buy the new ones because they’re too expensive. So the demand for the refurbished ones goes up, which raises their prices
⏹️ ▶️ John too. Although I did see someone complain about this, and I did not confirm it. But a question
⏹️ ▶️ John is, have they also increased the trade-in prices? And the person was complaining that Apple hasn’t increased the trade-in prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I did not confirm whether that’s true or not. But that’s something to watch when you go to buy a new whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Has your trade-in gained more value just because the price of all these things has gone up? We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Narrator, no. Right. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just saying I didn’t check it. I’m just saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in check. I mean, I’m sure it goes, I’m sure the value is up like on eBay or something, but not an Apple straight in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world. No, I seriously doubt that will go up. It certainly hasn’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we should note that this all happened, like I said, today as we record this, Apple stock is down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to six point one five percent today on account of all this. So not a great day for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, it’s also worth noting. We mentioned it before, but like these are Mac and iPad increases. There were
⏹️ ▶️ John no price increases for iPhones, watches or AirPods. iPhones, you just assume they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for September to increase, you know, the new ones will be more expensive, okay? Watches, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the same deal. And AirPods don’t have SSDs, have
⏹️ ▶️ John the tiniest piddling amount of RAM. And so maybe aren’t actually affected
⏹️ ▶️ John by this, but watch for that. Watch for the AirPods price increase and try to explain that. I mean, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John like inflation adjustment. It’s not as if Apple has never tracked inflation. They do tend to increase the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John of their products over time. They’ve held the line on the phones mostly because the margins are so massive and they find ways
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, decontent them to keep their margins the same while keeping the price the same. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is such an important product that just like anything having to do with the phone is like multiplied by a billion and it’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John scary to mess with that. But the other products they’ve, you know, adjusted over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will be watching the AirPods to see, I mean, obviously they’re gonna come out with the AirPods with the whatever, camera, IR
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, whatever. And those will be more expensive simply because, you know, they have more stuff in them and they’re the fanciest and the newest.
⏹️ ▶️ John but the plain old AirPods, the ones that are like the ones we have now, which I assume they will continue to sell in some form,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if those will actually stay more or less the same, simply because they don’t use any of the components that are affected by this
⏹️ ▶️ John crisis, but the phones and watches certainly do, so watch out for that. And yeah, Wall Street says, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like this Apple. We think this is not good for your business because if you raise
⏹️ ▶️ John the prices on all of your products, probably gonna make the demand for them go down and that doesn’t bode
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but we’ll see. We’ll see how Apple does. It may be a buying opportunity for people who wanna get in and on the stock, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because in Apple’s next earn call, they’re gonna be like, we sold more phones than we’ve ever sold in, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it goes back up again. But anyway, this is again, not financial advice. Don’t play the stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. I would also point out though, like, you know, when you’re thinking like the AirPods are not gonna be as affected, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, you know, they do have some RAM. I mean, almost every electronic device has RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco NAND, storage, or both. And I do think though, you know, you have to consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, okay, well, right now, these component prices are going up. So that means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now Apple’s products are going up. Well, the companies that, you know, like all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the different companies that make all the components that go into AirPods, all of their costs are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going up around them. Like all of their components are going up, their own, you know, R&D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs are gonna go up. As everyone in the world is facing inflation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all of their expenses, they have to demand higher salaries so they can afford regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. And so everyone’s costs go up broadly and diffusely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across everything. So even things that are not directly affected, they get the ripple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effect. So there, I don’t think there’s any major product category, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same way that like fuel costs affect everything. I don’t think there’s any major product category that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to escape some effect of this. Everyone is going to have to raise their prices on almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, almost everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s really not great. And I mean, again, I’m very grumbly at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for just cranking up the cost of this freaking ancient Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But other than that, I mean, I don’t really blame them for most of this. But there is some good news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the end of the story. We had three people either reach out or we had seen three people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about how they had great timing. So T. McGeary writes, I owe Marco a beer. I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a MacBook Pro a few weeks ago based on his warning about Apple prices increases on ATP. Thanks.”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron writes, four or five episodes ago, Marco recommended that if you were planning on buying a MacBook, now was the time. I’m writing to thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bought a new MacBook Air for my wife in late May and that same machine is $400 more today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a friend of the show, Greg Pierce wrote, guess I pulled the trigger on a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5 Pro MacBook Pro at the right time. The specs I bought two weeks ago for $3,400 is now $800 more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s what happens. I don’t think the end is in sight. I also don’t think this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last price increase to happen in this wave Again, we’re gonna see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more across everything and we’re gonna see Significant ripple effects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of of those price raises So, you know, not only everyone’s cost going up and everything like that But also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got a thing like how will this change the market for certain types of devices at all, you know as we know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when computing resources get very cheap, that enables stuff like Raspberry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pis and like all sorts of like fun and new types of gadgets, new types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, new uses for hardware that used to be expensive and then got cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we see the opposite of that. What categories of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are now just not going to be worth it? are going to be such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low volume customers of these component vendors that they won’t even be able to get allocation of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock. So they won’t even be able to exist. So, you know, this could affect things like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, like in the medium-sized market, this could affect things like game consoles significantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox just announced price increases and we’ll talk about the Steam Machine next episode probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like, you know, what we’re seeing in that world is like consoles are being you know price hiked or delayed you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know people are kind of just going to try to get more of what more more out of the current generations because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just not a good environment to try to launch a new electronic that’s not super critical you this could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affect other stuff like you know my my beloved eink tablet world or e-readers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s all sorts of electronic categories that like now that hardware is becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive and harder to even come by supply-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of these categories aren’t going to make it or they’re going to kind of just be put on ice for a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until things stabilize. I think this is going to be in some ways a pretty dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time for the electronics business while in other ways like also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI is very exciting and opening up new possibilities for lots of people in lots of contexts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a really turbulent time and some of it’s positive and some of it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. If your business or hobby life relies on certain electronics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being available to you, you know, maybe move some of those purchases up quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might be too late. Yeah, no, on that topic and a call back to the episode we did about why everyone hates AI. Uh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, oh, that’s all well and good. You talk about that episode of what other people think, but now they come for your Apple hardware and all you Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fans like, well, now suddenly I care about AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was fine when they were increasing prices, stuff that I I don’t care about, but now they’re increasing Apple product prices. This is this can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stand, but this is it’s all the same thing, which is like, obviously, there’s a massive investment
⏹️ ▶️ John across the entire industry in A.I. That massive investment is allowing those companies
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy up all the RAM in the world, like literally all the right. They’re not doing that because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so rich from the profitable from the profit they’re making from selling their products. They’re doing that with the
⏹️ ▶️ John money they have invested because people think these companies are the future. And so they’re piling all this investment
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, and they take that investment money, and they shove it to Nvidia and all the RAM companies and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the bubble. It’s distorting the market with all this money flowing into it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if and when this market distortion comes for the thing that you care about, in our case, being Apple hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it could be anything, as Marco said. It could be garage door openers. They have chips and RAM and everything. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s anything, right? And as Marco said, just the general price increase everywhere. As we saw with the
⏹️ ▶️ John COVID-19 lockdown, People will take any opportunity to price gouge, even if their costs haven’t actually increased. If everyone else is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it, they’re just gonna do it anyway because it’s the thing to do. And if you’ve got cover, it’s like, oh yeah, AI RAM crisis.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why, you know. When that happens to you, people are naturally going to think,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I am right now, is this trade-off worth it? Oh, AI is cool and exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, but there are things I hate about it. And also, would I be happier
⏹️ ▶️ John with a slower growth in the AI industry in exchange for sane prices in Apple hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John or garage door openers or Raspberry Pis or E Ink tablets or whatever you have.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think a lot of people would say, hell yeah, like AI is exciting and everything, but do we need to
⏹️ ▶️ John destroy the entire world economy to allow that industry to grow as fast as possible? Because people
⏹️ ▶️ John would look, it’s like, what am I getting in exchange for that? Okay, say you love chachi poutine, it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but then you look at the things,
⏹️ ▶️ John the costs on the other side of it, and you’re like, even me as the biggest fan of this, I’m not sure this balances out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say you hate AI and everything about it, Then you’re looking at this and saying, oh, so the thing I hate is making
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things I love worse. This makes me hate it even more. So yeah, this like
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is, you know, it’s it’s not imminent that something is going to happen, but things are going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John come to a head. Like I said, it’s either the case where we wait out three terrible years, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, will probably be worse than this year, like next year is predicted to be worse than this year, not better.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were at all these years and they build capacity or whatever. And then eventually the bubble bursts or there’s consolidation
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and then it comes back to sanity. Or maybe the bubble bursts sooner. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John chickens come home to roost. Maybe these companies go public and it turns out when you’re public, you actually have to turn a profit
⏹️ ▶️ John in a more reasonable time. Although look at Amazon, they spent a long time not turning a profit and they did fine. So again, not
⏹️ ▶️ John financial advice, but like it seemed the current situation seems both terrible and unsustainable
⏹️ ▶️ John in obvious ways that everyone is looking at. And just like the financial people are like, well, this is just the horse race.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we know this is all going to end in some kind of consolidation, and it’s not going to go on like this forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’ll be winners and losers and blah, blah, blah. But this is what we’re doing now. And screw the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John get sideswiped by the damage we’re making. And then the rest of us are just out here, like, hitched to this wagon. Like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing highlights this more than what was it? The stupid SpaceX IPO, which you may think, what does rockets have to do with AI?
⏹️ ▶️ John Elon Musk has combined all his companies into one giant cluster of evil. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John when companies are that big, these funds that buy like, you know, index
⏹️ ▶️ John funds for like your retirement accounts end up owning them just because they’re so big and they buy like the top 500
⏹️ ▶️ John companies or whatever as part of their index thing. And now SpaceX is part of that instantly because it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John big by market cap because it’s a combination of Twitter and XAI and blah, blah, blah. And so all of a sudden people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John retirement accounts, people who do not buy individual stocks, this is maybe more US centric thing. But anyway, we have retirement accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John here because we don’t have any kind of social safety net speak of. If you have an individual retirement account or 401k
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and you have a bunch of index funds, this is a wide ranging paragraph. Yeah, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John an index fund. And now that index includes SpaceX, which is an AI company, because they went public. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when this bubble bursts, oh, your 401k gets screwed too. So we have that to look forward to as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not only enduring all the pain of this, but when it does, quote unquote, end and things
⏹️ ▶️ John consolidate and the bubble bursts and winners losers are picked and companies have to actually start turning a profit. All
⏹️ ▶️ John our retirement accounts get screwed. He’s like, I never consented to buying any of this crappy AI stock. Well, tough luck if you’re buying
⏹️ ▶️ John the S&P 500 or some other index fund. SpaceX is going to be in there. So, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John things are not looking great financially for us. And like I said, for me in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I do have this Intel Mac here. And at this point, any kind of ARM based Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ John looking like it’s going to cost a lot of money. So I may be cruising on this for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John I made fun of my old Mac Pro that I had for over 10 years. And it’s like, well, that won’t happen again. They did
⏹️ ▶️ John a process of transition right after you bought your new Mac. Surely you’ll get rid of that one pretty soon. Well, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John on year seven, so tune in in three years to see if I’m still running this Intel thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you can’t on account of the OS, right? I can just keep running
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS. I’m not running 26
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey now. I mean, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll do increasing amount of dev work on my M1 MacBook Air, which is what’s booted into
⏹️ ▶️ John GoldenGate right now. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my God. I’m sorry, John. I really am. And I mean, the good news is you have precedent for spending as much as a civic on a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I don’t, I, but I don’t like it. But your voice is haunting me. Casey’s remember in the previous episode, or a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes ago, you were like, do you think you’re going to spend as much money as your Mac pro and your new Mac? I’m like, no, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey subtract $6,000 because
⏹️ ▶️ John buying a new monitor. Knock on wood. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ John now maybe you’re right. Maybe, Maybe the 8 terabyte m5 max
⏹️ ▶️ John max studio with 64 gigs of RAM is going to actually cost as much as my entire
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel Mac Pro setup from 2019
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John it feels good to be right, but I did not want to be right about this
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m really hoping though because if that’s a situation like maybe like maybe I’ll just get like the
⏹️ ▶️ John You know is the max the smallest one that probably is gonna be the smallest one The problem is they don’t let you get 8 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac Mini. I’d be like I’m gonna get a Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you want 8 terabytes, you got to get a max chip these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the smallest CPU that comes with this, the max, right? Yeah, I believe so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And you have to get the fancier max because there’s, at least on the laptops, there’s two maxes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I was pricing it a few minutes ago, I went to 8 terabytes and it was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You need to get the super baller CPU before you can get 8 terabytes. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John have to become an external disk person again and just have a bunch of disks and divide up my world into little pieces. I’m not looking forward
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. as a problem for another day because I mean, this just makes it so much worse that like the
⏹️ ▶️ John this exact same crisis essentially caused if the rumors are to be believed, the Mac Studio that would have been announced to
⏹️ ▶️ John WRC to be pushed back because, you know, because of this whole thing. And now it is pushed back, pushed back
⏹️ ▶️ John past the price increase horizon. So if a one Apple does roll out an M5 Max based
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio, it will benefit from the price increases in both the base price and the
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade prices that we just read because they are going to be this bad or potentially worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not great, Bob.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. And by the way, just for the record, in case this is unclear, space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data centers make no sense because of heat and radiation and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, yeah, that doesn’t work. Just for the record, just putting it out there, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing. In case that wasn’t clearly a stupid idea. Right. In case anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t know science, just look into what it takes to radiate the amount of heat that a typical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data center rack needs to radiate into space. But Margo, isn’t space cold?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the problem is how do you transfer the heat from the chip to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space? And it turns out there is a way to do it. It’s just really large.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, that’s not going to be a thing. You can just build on land. It’s a lot easier and cheaper.
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#askatp: Should Apple make its own RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do at least a touch of Ask ATP. And Brian Webster wrote, I don’t know, maybe a month ago or so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Given the soaring cost and unpredictability of RAM prices, and given that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already manufactures its own SOCs and many of its own cell modems, would it ever make sense for Apple to start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manufacturing its own RAM? They ship high enough volumes of RAM that they would likely get an OK return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on investment in facilities for RAM production. It would insulate them from the supply constraints triggered by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI boom, and most importantly, since they would only be paying manufacturing costs without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extra profit margins, they could finally lower those ludicrous RAM upgrade prices, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you know the
⏹️ ▶️ John meme he’s referencing here? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know a meme. Marco, do you know this one? No. The Anakin Padme meme. You’re lowering RAM prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Right? Okay, well, we’re batting Casey knows the name and Marco doesn’t. Again, I don’t know how both of you
⏹️ ▶️ John exist on the same internet as me. No, Marco does know it, he just doesn’t realize he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knows it. Marco doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know who Anakin and Padme are. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John very familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with those characters from the terrible Star Wars prequels that inexplicably she falls in love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with him and then dies of sadness. I mean, has there ever been a worse written woman in all
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, doctors never believe women, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey She probably just
⏹️ ▶️ John had a blood clot like Serena.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, so how do we want to approach this? I mean, obviously the, the, the clear answer is you can’t just spin up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, you know, a new, uh, Ram factory. And we were talking about that earlier. Like it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two to three years to spin one of those up. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a company that already does that, right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John should just read Joe Lyons answer because he knows the industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Joe Lyon writes memory is a commodity. That’s why Apple doesn’t design it. And also why they will never manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Eventually sane pricing will return. But if Apple made their own memory, they would be locked into their own cost structure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they wouldn’t be able to bargain with vendors in multi-source nor meet surge demand. Also, the Chinese government
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building and propping up domestic memory suppliers over the past 12 years, and they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several generations behind the leading edge. If Apple broke ground on a fab today, it would be five years before the first wafers came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, 10 years before high volume yield on a decent process, and 15 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or more, or perhaps even never, before it would be cost competitive with current DRAM vendors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember that episode we did where we talked about like the silicon fabbing machines from ASML and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. Like you can say, well, they’re not making processors, they’re making RAM. It’s the easiest thing to make. It’s very regular and it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little bit of a different process than you use for logic and everything, but the base facts remain the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a turnkey business. You don’t just buy the kit and like have a franchise and start a thing. These
⏹️ ▶️ John companies that have been doing this have been doing it for decades and decades and you can’t catch them by just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’ll just make a factory and do the same thing. they’re doing. It’s incredibly difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John and complicated and anyone who has ever tried to do it like the Chinese government example is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John What if you had basically unlimited money like that the Chinese government is funding you
⏹️ ▶️ John they want this industry to come up and it’s taking them a long time and they’re not a private company that has to have investment
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Chinese government is backing it saying we want to be contenders here and they spent 12
⏹️ ▶️ John years doing it and they’re still several generations behind those three big companies and Apple kinda sorta needs
⏹️ ▶️ John like the good RAM, like the best the industry has for a purpose in an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t, you know, you can put crappy RAM on the Apple TV, fine, but the iPhone’s kinda gotta have the RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John best suited to the iPhone. They’re not bargain shopping for that in terms of like, we’ll just get a two-year-old version
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. No, they want the best. And so yeah, Apple, even if Apple decided to do this today,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t help them unless this crisis goes on for a decade and a half, which God, I hope it doesn’t. But that’s the kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of the timeline. But the earlier point I think is more important than Joe made, that like, it’s a commodity business.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple is just making RAM for itself, the only way you can survive in
⏹️ ▶️ John a capital intensive business like Silicon Fabrication is you spend billions and billions
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars building the factories, machines and expertise to make chips. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John need those things to be running and churning out money to make back your investment. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can’t have them be like a single customer. This is why Intel was in such trouble. You can’t have it just be a single customer thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, we just make what Apple needs. Well, what about when Apple doesn’t need any more chips for the year? Do you just let the factory
⏹️ ▶️ John sit there and be idle? That’s terrible, you’ll lose tons of money doing that. You
⏹️ ▶️ John need to keep running that factory and selling people chips. And so you end up essentially in the RAM business,
⏹️ ▶️ John selling commodities to the entire industry. And Apple tends not to wanna be in the commodity
⏹️ ▶️ John business, like we sell components to the world. But if you build a RAM fab, the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a viable business is you have to sell RAM to everybody and suddenly you’re not Apple making these
⏹️ ▶️ John special products just for your customers with big margins. Now you’re competing with the existing RAM vendors
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell the world. And it looks like a great business now because everyone wants RAM. But again, you gotta build the factories and
⏹️ ▶️ John learn how to do that over the course of 15 years. And who knows what the RAM situation will look like in 15 years. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple essentially never wants to be in the business of manufacturing things for the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire world to use as parts in their products. They just don’t do that. They have other people do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as Joe points out, they play them against each other to get better rates and everything. But it’s those people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John problem, what to do with the excess capacity in their factories. Now it seems great. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no excess capacity. TSMC is running flat out. All the RAM manufacturers are selling every chip they
⏹️ ▶️ John can sell. It’s like a great business, but that doesn’t stay true forever. So if you spend a decade and billions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John building yourself up as a commodity business for RAM, and then eventually the world changes
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re not in the current crisis, you either lose money hand over fist or you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to become a different kind of company and Apple doesn’t wanna do either of those things. So, I mean, this makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense when you, as I think Brian lays out the question, like it makes perfect sense, look at all these other things they do. He mentions the
⏹️ ▶️ John SOCs, but they don’t make their own SOCs, they pay TSMC to do it. TSMC has that factory
⏹️ ▶️ John that they invest billions and billions of dollars into that they need to constantly turn out chips. And Apple is not
⏹️ ▶️ John their only customer. Apple used to be the biggest customer, but not their only customer. So, Apple doesn’t wanna do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. They want someone else to do it for them. And they want to be able to, you know, have things fabbed
⏹️ ▶️ John in Arizona for last year’s or two years old chips or whatever. So it seems like it might be
⏹️ ▶️ John a good idea, but if you look at it more closely, it is a thing that Apple is never going to do and would probably be a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. And even if they didn’t, wouldn’t save us from the current crisis.
#askatp: TSA searching iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, I remember a while back there were stories about TSA doing searches of mobile devices as people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entered the US. Does the new Siri open up any security or privacy concerns? Does Apple provide any settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could mitigate these issues while traveling similar to 1Password’s travel mode? I mean, I guess if you allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri when unlocked, and I haven’t used the new Siri yet. I’ve only got a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of devices on the beta OSs and I haven’t made it through the wait list yet. But if you allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri when unlocked and if it allows you to go searching your personal context without,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, like a face ID challenge or whatever, then yes, I suppose that is possible. But if it were me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even as an American, I would do the thing where you hold the side, the buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on either side for a few seconds to force a non-biometric unlock. I would absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that as I was approaching like immigration or customs or anything like that just to be safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s how I would handle this. And at that point, you can’t use Siri no matter what, until you type
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your password and unlock your phone again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s very optimistic of a solution. But I think the reality is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you know, so that that solution of like locking up the phone so biometric authentication doesn’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great if you are afraid of being arrested in your country and having,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, having law enforcement try to get you to unlock your phone. But that’s a different situation than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like border control entry. For a border entry situation, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to get through these people to get where you’re going and they can just say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. Like if you won’t let if you won’t give them access to what they want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can just deny you access to the country. So it’s a different situation. And I think in that case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I think the for especially like for non US citizens trying to enter the US.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we are such incredible jerks in that area. And again, that’s only getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse under the current administration. Um, they might not have that option. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they lock out their phone, then the border control can say, okay, well, I’m just not letting you in the country then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you need to come to the U S for it’s not happening. So it’s, it’s a very different power situation. I think if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this context, if one of our terrible border agents wants to ask you to show them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Instagram account or whatever, I think your only real option is to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, again, or like cancel your vacation or cancel the conference you were going to and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave. And that’s not really an option for most people entering the border. So the reality is they’re gonna just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. And whatever technical measures you’re gonna try to implement, I think, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, best case scenario is you can hide apps. Like that I think is, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, if you don’t want them to see that you have a certain app installed, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it in the hidden folder and make it require a face ID. That’s the best way to make sure an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t appear to exist on your phone so that if they make you search for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, it won’t show up. So that you can do. But if they’re asking for your social media handles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re gonna look at that, to say I don’t have Instagram, it’s a pretty easy thing for them to go verify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think that kind of approach will work a lot better on certain types of apps than others. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want them to not see that you have like, you know, signal installed, that’s probably a lot easier of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lie to keep up. Whereas if you say, I don’t use any social media, they could very easily just check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and find your profile if it’s public, and then you’re in trouble for a couple of problems. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very careful with this kind of thing, but I think hiding apps is a much better way to do it than assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they won’t convince you to unlock your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if the new Siri makes this worse. Like in theory, the new Siri is more capable. So a technically savvy
⏹️ ▶️ John person, if it was working from the unlock screen, blah, blah, blah, could use it to be more successful, but just because the old
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri was so useless that you couldn’t use it or anything. But this assumes a fairly sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John attacker in the form of whoever is doing the screening here. If you want to social
⏹️ ▶️ John engineer your way to mitigate this, my advice would be to drain the battery on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and just tell them it’s broken, because are they geniuses or are they going to sit there? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know how long iOS devices take and they’re like, the battery’s totally drained. When you plug it in, it just shows the little battery with the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That takes forever and they’re not gonna wanna wait. And if you just tell them it’s broken and they can’t turn it on, like that’s social
⏹️ ▶️ John engineering, it’s rolling the dice, but like that may be your best bet in terms of mitigation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And second best is, you know, the password unlock thing or whatever, but it depends on what situation. This was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John TSA, which I assume is just inside the US or whatever. So yeah, I would say the new Siri probably does make it slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John worse if you have a sophisticated attacker who knows that they can do things from the lock screen with
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri. because you’ve configured it that way, but you can not configure it that way. And you could also hold the power button on your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and require a passcode. And you can also drain the battery completely before going to the airport if that doesn’t freak you out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know your boarding pass might be on the phone too, so you’re gonna have to print it out. Like, it’s a terrible world we live in. Don’t come to the
⏹️ ▶️ John US. It’s not a good place to visit. Our government is bad. Yeah, pretty much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Better than Rome. I don’t know. Rome has universal healthcare. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John And will not arrest you for saying something on social media. I won’t shoot you dead in the street.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do have a couple of things on us. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have a lot, a lot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have one more wallet now than they used to. All right, thanks to our sponsors this episode, ZocDoc and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. One of our many perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weekly bonus topic. Every week, we do about 20 more minutes of content on some topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just wouldn’t fit in the main show because as you know, a lot of stuff happens in computers. So this time on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime we’re talking about Anthropx Fable and John’s quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LLM bug releases. We’re going to hear what that means in Overtime if you want to hear that. Join atv.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check podcast so long
An Old, Familiar Feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, you wanted to talk to me about a blog post I wrote recently. What’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to jam into the overtime because it was like kind of AI-related things. And I had this overtime topic
⏹️ ▶️ John in before you wrote your blog post, which was just a happy coincidence. But we figured we would separate it out because it’s more like after-show material
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s you talking about your feelings
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and your feelings
⏹️ ▶️ John about AI. Even though, like, again, the overtime is going to be about Anthropx Fable and all the drama there
⏹️ ▶️ John and me using Fable. But you’ve also been using AI. Before I read your blog post, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, this is great. Casey has the exact same idea as me. He’s going to talk about exactly the thing that I’m going to talk about. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I read your post and like, nope, it’s totally different. So summarize what you wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John and why you wrote it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So when I was at the beach a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, whatever it was, during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC week, I had somebody write in and they were very kind and very polite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they said that something was broken. And the particular something, if I recall correctly, was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in call sheet for the last several months now, you can turn on or turn off different sections of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discover screen, which is to say the screen that you land on when you open the app cold. And so maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t care about recent TV shows and you can turn that section off. And maybe you wanna see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now playing information from like Plex or Jellyfin or something, but you don’t want that to be front and center at the top, you want it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be toward the bottom of the screen so you can rearrange them and so on and so forth. And I’d had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reports, sporadic reports since I released that feature, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some people, their settings would get plowed over every time they restarted the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had no strong theories about what that was other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than, well, maybe they’re like force quitting the app before user defaults has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a section of like flush it before it has a chance to flush it’s like queue, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, man, user defaults is the mechanism by which most apps save like user preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto your device and it’s got to be up there on the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battle tested, like almost flawless bits of the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SDK. So it was a very weak theory that I held very loosely. But this person wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and said, oh, it’s not working for me. They were very kind about it. They weren’t jerks about it. And I asked a follow-up question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here and there and then got a log file from them, which which is very kind of them to spend the time with me and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, and give them, you know, or give me that log file. And there was something in log file that made me go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey huh, that doesn’t seem right. And I’m at the beach. I don’t want to sit down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like properly do work. Like I don’t want to bust out Xcode. I don’t want to like really, really do work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought to myself, well, let me talk to my buddy Claude and let me see what Claude code can come up with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I asked Claude to take a look at this one particular section of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code. and the literal verbatim query that I asked of Claude was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in user settings.save, I save the user’s preferred arrangement of sections of their main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or discover screen on call sheet. Sometimes users will report that the settings reverted to the default.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m completely at a loss as to how or why that could be happening. Can you take a look and see if you have any guesses, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was the entire prompt. It obviously has access to all my code, but that was the entire prompt. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a brand new session. I’d given it no other information. And this had been happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for months now. And again, I glanced at it, I looked at the code here, looked at the code there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t freaking figure it out. So I asked Claude and it churned for some amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to say it was between two, maybe five minutes tops. And it said, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I know what this is, not Veradum anymore, but I think I know what this is. And it spelled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out what it thought the problem was. It wasn’t changing code at this point. it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, here’s what I think the problem is. Actually, so I’m looking back, this is the compressed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the conversation, but I had my prompt and it says, I’m going to do this, I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that, found it. Let me confirm by looking at discover section state, which is a piece of my code, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the constant keys, what read for a little bit. I found it, let me confirm, nothing else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes the old toggle key, but now I’m getting into specifics, but then confirmed. I have a strong guess and it clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explains why only some users see it. And it turns out that there was a very brief window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time when I allowed users to turn on or off sections of the Discover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen. But I did not yet have the code written to rearrange sections of the Discover screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was a released version of Call Sheet, not just TestFlight, like a honest to goodness released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of Call Sheet. And I sent that out into the wild. And then very briefly thereafter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I released into the wild the version that lets you rearrange things. It turns out the specifics aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly important, but it turns out that the way in which I was trying to key off of, well, did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have the version that only did the on and off, or do they have the version that does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on off and rearranging? When I was keying, when I was looking at that and trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like basically a migration, I screwed it up. It was my fault. I screwed it up such that if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had run the version of the app that did the on off, which again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only existed for maybe a week at most, and then went and did the migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and went to do the newest version at the time, which was the one that allows the on-off and rearranging,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I screwed up the way I did that migration so it would keep migrating every time. And every time it migrated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would clear out what was there and it would reset it anew. So the reason it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sporadic was because it was only people, potentially who messed with this setting or at the very least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that ran that one specific version of the app. I don’t remember what version it is offhand. And Claude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found it and it found it in five or ten minutes. And that was that. And I thought, okay, well, there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one other thing that’s weird. Occasionally, when you override the language settings or the region settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in call sheet, similar stuff happens. Now, that isn’t user defaults. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, cloud ubiquitous key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John value store or something like that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco basically like a…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, thank you. It’s basically similar to user defaults, but it’s stored in iCloud, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember the specifics, and it doesn’t really matter, but suffice to say it looked at it for a few minutes and said, Oh, this is your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, it was me being an idiot. At the end of the day, that’s what it boiled down to. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was fascinating that here I am at the beach, and I’m obviously like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying attention to what’s going on. And when it presents a theory, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I had it implement the fix, but the very least when it presented the theory, I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it and then I did end up opening up Xcode because now I’m nerds, nerds like myself, but, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it presents the theory and then I look at Xcode and say, oh no, no, this sounds right. Yup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yup. That’s, that’s gotta be it. And so then I either implemented it myself, or I think what I might’ve had to do is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a first pass and then I re rejiggered a fair bit of it. And then I asked it, okay, I’ve rejiggered what you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. And does this still look right to you, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what was fascinating about this was this is two different bugs that, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wholly my fault. I’m not trying to deny that they’re my fault. But two different bugs that were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very pernicious and very tricky and that I had been trying to figure out what the heck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going on, again, on and off for months. I would look at it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few minutes here, and then I’d decide, no, I still don’t get it. I’d look at it for a few minutes, another time. And I still don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Both of these bugs and Claude was able to look through my code and figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what was so striking about this and I was sitting on the couch in the beach house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was leaning forward on in because the, the, my laptop, my $5,000 soon to be $8,500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop was sitting on like the coffee table and I’ve, I’ve caught myself leaning back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against the, you know, the back of the couch and thinking to myself, holy God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a coworker again. I haven’t had a coworker in the better part of eight years. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think eight years, just a week or so shy of eight years that I’ve been independent, which is also bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, I have a coworker again, because what this felt like was so, it felt like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much like me saying to a coworker, Hey, I’m banging my head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against the wall. Can you take a look at this code and see what you can figure out? And working through the problem together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let me tell you one of the things, if not the thing that I miss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most about being w w about working with coworkers and particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be doing so in person. Although, you know, maybe this would be just as fun, just this would work just as well remotely, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, my memory of it was in person because it was eight years ago. I miss so desperately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being in like a conference room, standing in front of a whiteboard and working a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or maybe standing, you know, maybe sitting in front of a projector and, you know, looking at a, looking at code together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and working a problem. And more than I have at any point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last eight years, I felt like at least when it comes to code, obviously I have coworkers with you guys, with Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in other cases as well, but when it comes to writing code, suddenly I had a coworker again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and as I said in the top of this blog post, as a pundit and as a person,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still don’t know what I think about AI and I echo what you were saying, John, like, yes, there’s so many amazing things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI provides for us, like this very moment, but is it worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my computers being twice as much? Is it worth, you know, possibly systemic inflation as we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were talking about earlier? I don’t know. As a pundit, I’m really not sure how I feel about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But as a developer, this was an incredible feeling that really felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely good. And as I hear myself talking, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little uncomfortable with how much I feel like I sound like, oh, I just, I found myself a girlfriend. You know what I mean? Like, obviously that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not at all the same, but it almost was like a, not a relationship feeling, but like, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an interpersonal thing or on the verge of an interpersonal thing that I haven’t had in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so long. And I know that I could get either one of you or both of you on a zoom call.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I was really desperate, you would work with me, work through these problems with me. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey takes so long to bring any human being up to speed on my code base, the way I like to write code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that even if it would have taken either of you 10 minutes to spot the bug, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have taken the three of us working together or the two of us working together 10 hours to get up to speed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the way my code works. And as a developer, thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myopically as a developer, this is such an incredible boon to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ability to write code and do work and fix problems. I’m so enthusiastic about it and so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it as a pundit, as a human, as a person, I don’t know, as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer, holy crap, it’s so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have found, I’m, I’m leaning more into that, that opinion as time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes on. Um, you know, when, when you look at even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even just what you’re saying now, like even just the, the bug fixing and testing abilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of modern AI tools, it dramatically changes the landscape of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software development. Like, even if you’re writing most of your code yourself, like the other day, I…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, if you’re an Overcast user, there’s a couple of things that you probably have with problems with the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And some of them are probably obscure bugs. And one of the most common obscure bugs that I get reported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically unexpectedly large storage usage. Like somewhere, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is leaking temp files or something. And what is going on? Why are some users getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really high storage usage for Overcast? And I have thought for a while this is related to the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download demon, because it creates these weird like NSURL session D folders in various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places and fills them with crap. And you know, maybe at some point, the temp files aren’t being cleaned up properly. And so I’ve had logic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Overcast to try to clean those up over time. And, and one of the like, I actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I rewrote the downloader a few months back in the fall. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually made it a whole separate component. I gave it a name, I might open source it at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a whole separate thing because I was so tired of having to deal with downloader bugs and I feel like, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me actually write a good one and then open source it so that nobody has to deal with downloader bugs and maybe other people can help me fix my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloader bugs. And it turns out, you know, most of the things I’ve open sourced, they don’t get a lot of users because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t make the kinds of things people want and I don’t support them in the kind of way that open source software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs to be supported to get a lot of community around it. Oh well, but I said, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other day, just last week, I asked Claude, hey, here’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco component in Overcast that’s the downloader. People are reporting this storage usage. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out why. Look through this component. It’s probably here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try to figure out why and fix it. And sure enough, it churned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away for a while. It read a bunch of stuff. It dumped a bunch of garbage on the console. And then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found a bug. There was one case where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had like, you know, I was testing a Boolean condition with a knot on it and I had the logic backwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is like a weekly occurrence for me and I’m not proud of that. But oh my gosh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need one of those signs. You know, it has been zero days since I’ve screwed up basic Boolean logic. Oh my gosh, I’m right there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Of course, we’re programmers and we’re humans. Like that’s like programming involves a lot of Boolean logic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it turns out humans aren’t perfect. So it found this inverted Boolean condition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never would have spotted this. The only way this would have ever gotten fixed is next time I rewrote the entire component,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I wouldn’t have made the same mistake. Yep. Or if you had tests. Well, maybe. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was this would have been a hard one to come up in a test, honestly. But yeah, point taken. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had cloud write tests for me, too. It’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the topic of Boolean logic, though, I never even proposed this. And everyone who has proposed
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have surely been shouted down with this exact argument. I come from a language that had the
⏹️ ▶️ John keyword unless, so you didn’t have to do if exclamation point condition, you could do unless condition.
⏹️ ▶️ John And anyone who hasn’t used that thinks it’s gonna be the end of the world because they’re gonna, oh, it’s gonna make me screw up the logic because I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John handle it, right? Guess what Swift has? Guard condition
⏹️ ▶️ John else block. And guard condition else is, I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than an unless keyword in terms of making you accidentally put the wrong Boolean logic in a condition,
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially if you convert an if to a guard once you realize it’s kind of a precondition. Don’t forget to reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all you people out there
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, I’m never gonna allow unless and swift, you would love unless. And guard as much as I like
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and I understand the function that serves in the language. Guard
⏹️ ▶️ John else, I don’t particularly like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve come to enjoy the guards, but linguistically it is kind of weird, but I like the function. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Claude found this bug and it could very well be related to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird edge case download behavior and the downloader never cleaning up those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco temp files that are abandoned by the system. So like if the background download daemon abandons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a file, like if the process crashes maybe, then that file might never be cleaned up. This found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bug and while it was there, it found a couple other little bugs that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affect background download terminations. Oh, and by the way, And it was giving statements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me in the feedback chat stuff about like, oh, when users delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes, I never told it it was a podcast app. I never, the component it was looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at was not dealing with episodes. It figured all that out just from the rest of the code. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is amazing. And I come from a little bit different angle in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been a much longer time since I’ve worked with other programmers. And I never worked with that many of them. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my biggest team I ever worked on programmer wise was like six people. I’m not coming from the corporate world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’m used to having a lot more infrastructure around me, a lot more like testing and process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. Like I don’t come from that world, so I don’t know it. The way I see this so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far is like, not only is this allowing me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write better software, the kind of bugs it’s finding, you know what I had to do next, Overcast fans?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m having it look at my priority podcast logic, because the priority podcast insertion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into playlists with priorities set on them, ever since the rewrite, people have been very upset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has weird behavior that they don’t think is right. And that’s a really hard thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write tests for. And of course, I’m not gonna do it anyway, but Claude can, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Claude also found some logical bugs in that. And so I’m gonna, in the next few days probably, ship an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast beta update that includes that download fix, and these priority playlist fixes and people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can start telling me how they work for them. And these are like really obscure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little logical things. Like the priority playlist thing was like a greater than, less than was flipped backwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Little things like that that are just really hard for humans to find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it found them like the first time I asked it to. So it’s allowed me to write better software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s allowing me to continue being one person team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for longer. Now I don’t know how long I want to be a one person team with Overcast to be honest. I’ve been honestly thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about maybe trying to hire another programmer to help help me you know do more things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I feel a little bit stretched right now. But Claude gets me some of the way there in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms of like if I have like certain bugs on my hit list I can have it take a look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it fixes it. By the way, disclosure Claude has been a sponsor of our show and probably still will be. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, all this also applies to codex and everything. When you have it, look at it. It’s just like AI broadly. Right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I happen to be using Claude. But anyway, I also think like from what I’ve heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple also uses Claude internally a lot over the last year or so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, look at what happened at WBDC this year. When they scrolled by those giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walls of text of oftentimes fairly small but nice little fixes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you think Apple did all that in one year? It’s not because they had a change of heart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and realized software quality now matters. No, it’s because they are using Claude to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix their own bugs and to help them develop things more quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s going on across the industry. So I think even though this is this is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a it’s going to be a bumpy ride for lots of reasons, as we’ve talked about, both both from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like a straight up like, you know, coding and security perspective, which we’ll talk about more in the in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overtime. Also to just everything we’ve been talking about, you know, AI itself is very disruptive and turbulent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and causing a bunch of turbulence in the world and is not a universal gain for everybody. But specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the area of software and software quality, I think it’s a huge boon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because everyone can start finding and fixing really weird, obscure bugs that a human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never would have found. And when you see Apple’s giant wall of text WBDC slide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can tell that’s what’s going on here. They are fixing their own stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are all benefiting from it. So I, again, it’s as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey said, like this is not a universal good, but there are some real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits to this and specifically this area. And I am here for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And just very briefly, and I, I also covered this very briefly in the blog post, but I’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reiterate here in my perfect world, I would have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money coming in from call sheet where I could hire somebody either, you know, halftime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or full time to be that person that we can work together to figure these things out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that it, we, the call sheet does not make that kind of money. does make enough money to handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, you know, monthly fee from, from Claude, which I’m now paying. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they did sponsor in the past and I was rolling on the freebies that they gave us when they sponsored, but, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but now I’m paying them and I’m choosing to, uh, because it has been that transformative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me now, again, in a perfect world, I’d much rather have a human being to work with on this, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest, I’d still probably ask Claude some of these questions, but I think there’s something to be said for having a human and having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a human do these things and make these decisions and use what makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey humans uniquely wonderful and amazing to figure out some of these problems. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since I don’t have that and I cannot afford that with, with call sheet alone, the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey greatest thing I could do is ask Claude. And I think that the thing is what I’m saying in a roundabout way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this isn’t the question of hiring a human or hiring Claude.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A human was never going to be here. I just don’t, it doesn’t, call sheet does not make that kind of money. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question is, do I fix these bugs by using the tools that I have at my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disposal or do I not? Right. And, and that’s the thing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of that, I don’t feel too guilty about it. I feel guilty about AI in the broad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strokes, like we were talking about, but in this one specific way, I don’t feel too guilty about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. And it is so rewarding having what isn’t a person, but occasionally kind of feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a person to fire questions at and work with and figure out problems. And, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even a lot of times I don’t take the code that Claude writes, or I vastly change it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work, to fit my preferences and style and so on and so forth. But having it identify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where a problem is, like Mark, like I said, like Marco said, is incredibly valuable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly valuable, and it makes my product better, which makes my customers happier. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, two things on the tops you touched on first, Marco, on the big wall of text and Apple fixing bugs. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s using all the same tools everybody is to find their bugs, but you still need the essentially corporate
⏹️ ▶️ John mandate that that’s where they’re allowed to spend their time because every bug fix requires understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John the bug, finding it, verifying the fix and the risk inherent in changing any code and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all of that requires a corporate mandate, an actual decision that, hey, this release, we’re going to fix bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John that decision is made, yes, the tools make bug fixing way more efficient as before, but I still give credit
⏹️ ▶️ John to management deciding we are going to fix bugs this release. Maybe the decision was influenced by
⏹️ ▶️ John the increased power of the tools available to do that, but it’s the decision in management
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the most important part. In other words, if Apple hadn’t made this decision and these tools were available,
⏹️ ▶️ John they still would have been forced to do whatever features they have to do for the release and they wouldn’t have been able to spend time with these tools to
⏹️ ▶️ John fix bugs. Maybe they would have snuck a few in because they’re more powerful, but nothing like what we saw. Apple for deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend time fixing bugs. And Casey, on your blog post, I do feel like, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve spent a lot of time talking about the nitty gritty of the bug or whatever, I felt like the thrust of your post was what you were getting at the
⏹️ ▶️ John end there, which is like, the feeling of working with someone else. And I feel like your
⏹️ ▶️ John post essentially identified or crystallized for you
⏹️ ▶️ John a need that you have. And I’m sure this is not a surprise to you. You know, you miss working with people and whatever, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John having that experience with the coding agent like, you know, I really do miss working with
⏹️ ▶️ John people. I miss this. Yeah. This, this kind of reminds me of that. And here’s a need that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John in my life. On the flip side of that, I would say that even though this evokes that
⏹️ ▶️ John feeling and reminds you that you
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, the AI thing is not a person. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it fools you into thinking it is, but it’s like, that’s, that’s a dangerous trap. I mean, it’s a trap. A lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John fall into, obviously it’s more dangerous. the more these things are able to fool people
⏹️ ▶️ John into thinking that they’re a little person that they’re talking with. And so, I mean, in all cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone finds himself in that situation, uh, it is highlighting a need, not
⏹️ ▶️ John fixing a problem. And the need is, I have a need for human context, right? I miss
⏹️ ▶️ John my coworkers or whatever. Uh, that need is not filled by, uh, talking to an LLM agent, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John So take if you find yourself using one of these things and finding it’s like, I just, I find myself just, I just love
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to it. and it makes me feel better. That’s highlighting a need that is not fulfilling that need. So please
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, yeah, LMs are not people. But the need is real
⏹️ ▶️ John and I feel like that experience and like what you took away from it is not entirely, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I have a tool to make my apps better. That’s part of it, you just talked about it. But also I’ve identified
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I’m not getting in my life, especially if it’s something that you used to have. I’m like Marco who is far removed
⏹️ ▶️ John from that and never really had it to the same degree as you. You could find other ways to get that. I mean, I mean, working
⏹️ ▶️ John on open source projects or other things where you’re collaborating with someone on code, it doesn’t make sense to do it for call sheet for
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons you stated, because you’d have to hire someone to do that. Cause it’s not like someone’s going to help you with your app for fun, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, and you know, that’s maybe argues for like, say, say you get super into jellyfin or home assistant or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like dabbling in that environment. It doesn’t become a second job or a third job or a fourth job or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like. That could give you that experience of working with other people. And then you also mentioned like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have had someone else like ask some other programmer, you know, to look at this thing and see if we could figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John the bug or whatever. Well, guess what? If you asked another programmer to do that, if you asked me to do that, I would’ve said, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John why don’t you just ask the agent of your choice to find
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s because that, and that highlights the role of these tools from my perspective is they are tools.
⏹️ ▶️ John There have been tools that will help you find bugs in your program before LMS. There’s, you know, fuzz testers
⏹️ ▶️ John and Val grind and all like, this is not the first tool that humans have ever made that helps find bugs in programs.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an amazing, powerful one that surpasses all others. Yes, but it’s not the first one. And so if you were
⏹️ ▶️ John asked another human today to come in and help you find bugs in your program, this would be the tool that they would pull out. They
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t spend 10 hours learning your code. It’s like, well, let’s do this for five minutes at least.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it can’t find them, oh, well, then we’ll dig in. But ignoring the tools available to you as a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John is counterproductive unless you’re taking some kind of moral stand against it, which is fine. But I’m saying most people who
⏹️ ▶️ John you asked would, would, would grab for the same tool that you were already going to use anyway. And that’s how I
⏹️ ▶️ John view these things. They are in fact tools for programming tools with questionable
⏹️ ▶️ John origins and bad externalities and whatever. But in the particular case of programming, as I’ve argued in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John I personally believe that it is possible, not currently happening, but possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a ethical environment, environmentally responsible, uh, created
⏹️ ▶️ John under ideal circumstances, blah, blah, version of this simply because code, like to give an
⏹️ ▶️ John example, if Apple trained its own coding agent, if it was not terrible at doing that, let’s say they were
⏹️ ▶️ John actually good at doing it. They train their own coding agent on all the source code Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John ever created. That would be an incredibly powerful agent for writing for Apple platforms, just based
⏹️ ▶️ John on the code that Apple owns, because it wrote it. That’s what it would be trained on. and they would
⏹️ ▶️ John do a good job of it, and they would hire people to like, you know, like just, they could make an Apple-centric
⏹️ ▶️ John coding agent and then run it on, you know, in data centers run 100% from renewable
⏹️ ▶️ John resources, you know, like do all the things, like it is possible because we see the technology is there and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, isn’t the rest of it just details? I mean, it’s kind of important details. If you’re living in Memphis
⏹️ ▶️ John and you got XAI data centers spewing out smoke next to you, it is not a theoretical thing, it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John real terrible thing, so I get that. but like my techno optimism says,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can see how it would be possible to both have this useful tool and not
⏹️ ▶️ John destroy the world and bankrupt us all and blah, blah, blah. Currently, that’s not the path we’re going on, which sucks, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. So I do feel like this kind of tool will inevitably become
⏹️ ▶️ John an essential part of every programmer’s toolbox eventually, hopefully not in the
⏹️ ▶️ John current form that we’re currently, that currently have it available to us And perhaps after a long dark
⏹️ ▶️ John period of it being so expensive that nobody can use it. Because if we were paying the true cost of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re doing right now, none of us would be using it either. Because in the same way that CallSheet doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John enough money to hire another programmer, it also doesn’t make enough money to pay for the tokens you’ve been using.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you look at the actual cost
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever you’re paying for your agent for a monthly thing, that is not the true cost of what you’re getting. The true cost
⏹️ ▶️ John is thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. And that’s a bubble folks. And so someday,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe by the time that ends, inference will have gotten so much more efficient with dedicated ASICs and everything, and we’ll all be
⏹️ ▶️ John running on renewable resource data centers and all that stuff, but we’re not there right now. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a weird time to be in, but I did enjoy your blog post,
⏹️ ▶️ John less for the technical aspects of it, which by the way, we will get into more in overtime, because it’s more in that vein, but more
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of what I felt like your thrust was in the post, which was like, I miss programming
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a very strange conclusion going in to say, oh, I use these cool AI tools to do coding or whatever. And the lesson is
⏹️ ▶️ John I miss coding with people. Not because the tools are bad. You just go, you explain how the tools are good and
⏹️ ▶️ John helped you, but because it reminded you of what it was like back when you work with people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I felt that too, because I used to work with people as well. And that’s, I mean, if you’re ever listening to this program, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I want to be a cool indie developer and support myself and do all these things. There are lots of upsides to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are downsides too. And one of them is if you came from a world where you were working with other people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you’re not particularly social like me, just working with people in their capacity as fellow programmers on a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John or working with people in any kind of problem, programming or otherwise, is fun and
⏹️ ▶️ John rewarding. And when you’re working on your own, unless you can hire a staff, and
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you can, by the way, because your staff aren’t necessarily gonna be your friends, especially if you’re like either a boss or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a downside of being an indie developer is like indie developer loneliness, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, that’s what I took away from your post. And I thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. I think the thing I miss the most from working in an office is lunch, like with other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, just being able to hang out. You can have lunch at
⏹️ ▶️ John home, Marco, it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I hear you. I really do. I mean, I was lucky enough to work in very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey progressive as in the word I’m looking for, but places where they did not micromanage every second of my day for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I remember like at my most recent jobby job, when the switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was brand new or very new. There were a handful of times that we would go down to the cafeteria and all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us would do like, would, would do eight player Mario cart races with our switches for a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while over lunch. And like that, you can do that to a degree over the internet, but it’s just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun and different doing it in person. And yeah, you’re, you’re exactly right. I mean, that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that struck me so much about this experience was. It reminded me of having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coworkers and I do miss that quite a bit. I’m not, I’m not trying to complain. I have, I live an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blessed and lucky life. I am so thankful to everyone listening to my words right now, because you, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening to me makes my life, Marco’s life, John’s life possible. Um, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not trying to complain, but as John said, there’s something to be said for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having coworkers, for having people, even if they’re just work friends. And once you leave that job,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you never speak to them again. It’s still nice to have work friends. friends and I miss that in the development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capacity. I’m so lucky to have that with the two of you, with Mike and with others from a podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capacity, but I do miss it quite a bit from a development capacity.