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.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, not that kind of Klingon. Anyway, all right, let's get the show on the road. Hey, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have incredible, incredible news for you and for me. And I know we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey briefly talked about this privately, but I wanted to bring it up one more time publicly. Marco on Nugs.net,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we've talked about a fair bit recently on account of me being freaking obsessed with Goose these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco They're really on a roll,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's not helping at all. Uh, anyways, uh, Nugs is finally, one day later, broadcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, or, or archiving, whatever verb you want to use. They're offering up for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening for streaming Dave Matthews band's concerts, which is incredible news for you, boy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have to tell you, the only way I used to be able to get a Dave Matthews band concert was to either trade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it when I was a child, you know, with tapes or CDs, or there's some places where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can find torrents. And the idea is that that sticks with the spirit of the band's taping policy, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have to share because with a torrent, you're sharing, but you're not supposed to go like stream it from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere 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 these are all audience recordings. So this is people who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring, it used to be DAT tapes, and now it's like mixed prees, like I'm talking to you through right now, and hook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them up to microphones on towers. And the quality has gotten way better than it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 96 when I started listening to Dave Matthews band, but certainly pretty crappy still in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year in the year 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's still a microphone in the audience. Like there's only so good that can be compared to the soundboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's exactly it. But these are soundboard recordings from Dave Matthews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Band. They have finally joined the ranks of their peer jam bands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann And we're just going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to cruise right on. They're peer jam bands and they are offering their their concert recordings the following
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day. This is monumental news for me and I'm sure for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, obviously. what What has been missing from my life is a way to get higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality Dave Matthews band recordings of all of all the things I want to listen to from the Dave Matthews band.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly right. So our long national nightmare is over. Our long international nightmare is over. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 to be fair, like even though Dave Matthews band is not my cup of tea, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been so much enjoying for many, many years now that Phish and then later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Goose would put for sale for about $10 each every live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show they did, direct masterings from the soundboard with very high quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with the same mastering you would get on like if a band released a live album
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to iTunes and Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same kind of mastering level. They're doing that every show and they release it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the morning after the show or later that night for $10. Phish started doing this years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as Goose has gotten popular, they've been doing it. And it is such a joy for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your favorite band to basically release a new set, a new album
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every night of a tour. So you get what, 20 or 30 a year? Yeah. It's amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have that much music coming from a band that you love. And because these are jam bands, plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dave Matthews' band, they're all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the shows are all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different. So you get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance, like a noticeably, you know, quite different performance, quite different set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list every night. You know, obviously there are some songs you hear a lot, but like you're getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different a different performance and a different work every time, every night they play.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you end up just getting a you know, by being a fan of these bands, you end up getting a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of new music every year. And it's just, it's just a wonderful thing to be a fan of these bands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for Dave Matthews to have finally joined that mechanism, I'm happy for the fans like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who get to enjoy that same thing.
🇮🇹💸
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also exciting, you had a vacation that you just went on, and I would love to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a after action or trip report. Or I guess I should say, in the vernacular of our dear friend John Syracusa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was your vacation results?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overall, pretty good. Spent about five days in Italy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spent four days in Florence, and it was wonderful. I can strongly recommend Florence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an American tourist. They make it very easy on us. It is full of other American tourists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Italians are very kind and very accommodating of Americans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I and I can especially call out um, the, the Gucci restaurant in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Florence is surprisingly good. Um, It has one Michelin star. I think it deserves two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that that was wonderful. Nice restorative trip. You know, a lot of good good, uh, you know, good history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see there and sights to see. And, you know, so that was wonderful. The art is great. The shopping is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. The food's pretty good. Although, honestly, I kind of prefer New York style Italian food. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, please, email Marco. Do not email us. Please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I also prefer American style coffee. Like, you know, I couldn't get you know, regular drip coffee anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 So right at the end of the trip. So, you know, finished up in Florence, took the took the train to Rome. The trains are amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delightful. Get to Rome. I get on the get on the metro to go to the hotel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a crowded metro. Everyone's kind of cramming into the to the stuff. I kind of got like pushed over on the way into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car, like into the subway car. Now, you know, I look, I've read the New York City subway all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I'm used to this. 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they say. What do they say, John? Apparently, you don't.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. I just hope the listeners can finish that thought for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What, when in Rome, like that whole thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. It just took a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was right there with Marco. I was deeply confused.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do as the Romans do. Get your pocket picked. The Romans did to me what the Romans do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you have it in your front or back pocket? I had it in my front pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was it was super hot. I was wearing shorts. And so there it's a little looser, you know. And when I'm traveling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always have in my front pocket, I always have my wallet and my passport.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My passport never leaves my person when I'm traveling, like when I'm traveling internationally. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the passport was between the wallet and my leg. And so I think the combination of shorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus that made me not feel it instantly. But I noticed, like, obviously part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, like, I did a bunch of research afterwards. Obviously, part of the scam was when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoved into the subway car and I stumbled slightly. That was obviously a physical distraction to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I didn't know any of this. This is like oftentimes a multi-person operation. Pickpocketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in apparently specifically Rome and Paris is like a really professionalized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Like it's very, very well done. There are many YouTube videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this, if you haven't seen them already. I haven't, but you know, as I at first, I was, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like I realized instantly, like, oh, that's it. It's gone. Like, I knew, but, you know, I didn't want to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get into like, 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, now I know. Okay. Now let's go start canceling cards, you know. But fortunately, I didn't have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much in there. And even more fortunately, I still had my phone and my passport, which are the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that would be harder to replace in that context. And I really didn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need cash or cards for anything on that trip. You know, the only real loss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, you know, a couple hundred dollars worth of cash that I probably shouldn't have even been carrying and the annoyance of having to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a handful of cards at my driver's license. But ultimately, it could have been a lot worse. It was more of an offense and more of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I literally just like I was in Rome for five minutes and Rome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said F you right back to me. And I'm like, okay, 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 was like, you know what? You know what Rome really made me appreciate? New York. Because New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco York City is safer, nicer, like in terms of like the people. The people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are way nicer in New York City. The 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 Vetici. He's delightful. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my first impression of Rome was really bad. So I'm very happy to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a New Yorker right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't blame you. And 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, uh, including, including, but not limited to when I was walking to the Vatican.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, and like, I, 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 New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco York City subway usually at least once a week. And I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had any problem. This is a Rome problem. And like, it sounds like the Italians really don't intend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put any kind of effort behind reducing this. So like, 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 Yep, I totally hear you. And I'm sorry to hear that. But now you get to go down the path of potentially, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so choose, 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.
Designed in California
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some follow-out. John, you guested on upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number 624, which was really a designed in California segment. Can you tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 Design in California in the upgrade feed, both separately
⏹️ ▶️ John and integrated into upgrade episodes. But that's going to end once Design California gets its own feed. Design in California
⏹️ ▶️ John is a spin-off, I guess, podcast series by Jason Stell and Mike Hurley that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Rest is History. It's a history podcast about 50 years of Apple's history. And they, they've done a series so far about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple two And they did a Kickstarter, uh, which we will link in the show notes so that by the time you listen to this, the Kickstarter
⏹️ ▶️ John may be over because it ends in five days. If you just go to designed.fm, that's fast past tense
⏹️ ▶️ John designed.fm that currently redirects to the Kickstarter, and I'm assuming eventually or redirect or
⏹️ ▶️ John be an actual website. They're going to do something like 50 episodes, at least 50 episodes of
⏹️ ▶️ John the history of Apple. And they were kind enough to ask me to guest on some of those episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not sure if they've released everything that we recorded so far, but anyway, whenever they need me, I'm available.
⏹️ ▶️ John The bit in upgraded 624, which we will also link, was about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple's need for a new operating system. So they're having me come on to talk about Mac OS X, surprise, surprise. So
⏹️ ▶️ 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 the Restus History episodes that I've listened to, but I don't know. It didn't really rev my engine like it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to rev everyone else's. But these done by good friends of mine about stuff I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really care about. That's Chef's Kiss. So I definitely encourage you to check it out. Designed.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, and, and back the Kickstarter. You should. They also made a like pin or something. I forget exactly what it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, but 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's pictured somewhere, I'm sure. I can't find it on their Kickstarter right this second. But they made a, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's a pin that you can get if you back the physical stuff, like the one of the tiers is getting physical things from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that 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 macOS from an external drive, Doug Weinfield writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there may be a workaround for doing exactly that. And there's a link to itecheverything.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Om Shashad writes, this process involves modifying a file on the system so that we can trick it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into thinking that your external drive is actually an internal drive. This cannot be done unless we disable system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integrity 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 going to show up at your house?
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I partitioned my, not partitioned, whatever. I made another volume on my internal drive, so That's how I'm going forward. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are determined to install Golden Gate on an external drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh you can follow these instructions. They're long and complicated. Good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have Golden Gate on my on my portable laptop, and uh it is so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty enjoyable with the exception that it does keep filling up its hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. no that's That's a bummer. Mine hasn't had that problem so far, although I have to say that the first beta
⏹️ ▶️ John of Xcode 27 running on Golden Gate could not launch my app in debug mode
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. So that's bad. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John was trying to figure out, like, is it launching? What's happening? It was launching the process, but like the debugger wasn't attaching to it. So I had to uncheck the
⏹️ ▶️ John debug checkbox. So then I could run it from Xcode, but not debug it, which really puts a damper on
Siri AI indexing, long-term memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And let's talk about indexing for Spotlight in the 27 OSs. Steve Riggins writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm on day six and a half of indexing my iPhone with the iOS 27 beta one. Alex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, same here. I've even had it plugged in for multiple hours each day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yikes. That could be what's filling Marco's drive or something we could be doing haywire. But if you're wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John how long will it take to do the indexing, apparently a long time. And like we said last episode, the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor slash word on the street is that Apple is going to make these indexes
⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody who upgrades to 26.6. Whenever 26.6 comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ John they 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 comes out to have the indexes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto. then with regard to Apple's AI Tech Talk, this was the thing that happened right after the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, a couple of weeks ago now. Jochen Marshall writes, What I didn't get from the tech talk discussion is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound like an AI thing. That sounds like a data storing app thing. So like, that's the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John kind of thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would put in Apple Notes or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John this is going to happen when people, like people who haven't been playing with the LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John chatbots, get this on their phone because everyone or you know, Mac users or Apple users or
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 in
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 how all these things are implemented, but it's essentially like
⏹️ ▶️ John it's just going to write words in a text file and put that into and add that
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the other crap that goes before the thing that you enter. So it's going to 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
⏹️ ▶️ John is remembering it by writing it to a text file off to the side, but the memory is
⏹️ ▶️ John limited and the context window is limited. And I wouldn't trust that little text
⏹️ ▶️ John file that the thing writes off to the side behind the scenes to survive for long term, not just with Siri, but with any
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things. I don't know what the policy is for compacting or truncating
⏹️ ▶️ John or keeping long term the things I tell these chatbots to remember. So my advice
⏹️ ▶️ John is do not assume that even if this works, which it might work for various chatbots, do not assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that, oh, that's safe forever now. Tell it to use the app of your choice
⏹️ ▶️ John to 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
⏹️ ▶️ John that 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 be careful out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. In general, like don't count on the current world of AI to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like long-term stability of any sort because it's just, it's everything is moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so quickly and changing so quickly. People are, you know, like the big companies are changing their products left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and right. Things change every two weeks. You know, it's everything is like 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And maybe that is your email. If you want to email it to yourself, that's another option too. But, you know, put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data in something like that and then use AI to index and search that data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in whatever form that can take. You know, if you're using something like you know, Gmail, maybe Gemini can search it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really good way or something like that. If you're using Siri, you know, use Apple Notes and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Siri will be able to read that. I think that's the much better way to structure your data like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can ask the agents to add it to a note, to add it to reminders. You could ask it to email I'm not sure which of those things
⏹️ ▶️ John with Siri will do successfully. But then you're just using it as the same way you would do, say, remind me when
⏹️ ▶️ John 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the idea of a squirrel list, which I have a pinned note in Apple Notes called Squirrel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey List. And that's where I write where things are that I know I will forget where I put them in the future. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has saved my bacon many times. And then it's
⏹️ ▶️ 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?
⏹️ ▶️ John I come out ahead, like I had to replace a part of my kitchen faucet. And I'm like, I've done, I've replaced this part
⏹️ ▶️ John before. And when I replaced it, I know I bought extras because I could tell this is a new, newish faucet. And like a
⏹️ ▶️ John year or two into it, this thing is already having a problem. I'm probably going to need more than one of these. So I bought spares, but where in my
⏹️ ▶️ John house are the spares? Go right to the squirrel list. Is it there? No, of course it's not. Of course not. I did find it
⏹️ ▶️ John though. And you know what I did after I found it? I put it on a damn squirrel list. So set a timer three years from now
⏹️ ▶️ John when that stupid magnetic ring in the Delta faucet rusts out again. I know where to find the spares.
Booleg of CFed’s AI talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, there is a bootleg video, if you will, of the aforementioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri AI talk where Craig is talking, at least in the beginning. This is via Sayre, S-A-Y-R-E-R.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, this guy, this, this guy that Sayre links to has three such videos, but says Sayre,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw one from straight on that has the opening quote that we talked about. I can't find that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, unfortunately. And then we have a link 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
⏹️ ▶️ John an official video instead of audience recordings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That's exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 Buderbaugh writes: Is the new spatial reframing feature in the 27 releases geographically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aware? For example, my wife and I recently had our picture taken together by someone else, as in not a selfie, while we were standing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the pier in somewhere unpronounceable in California. The person taking the picture was facing south, so Morro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bay and Morro Rock were in the background. The person who took the picture managed to frame it such that my head hides Morro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rock. If I were to use spatial reframing on it, would it know to fill in Moro Rock, or would it just generically fill in matching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coastline? 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, and
⏹️ ▶️ John even well, it knows your location, but it's not going to use any kind of awareness of photos taken by other people in that location,
⏹️ ▶️ John which again 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 has 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. So, you're like, wow, it is location-aware.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I move my head, it shows me exactly the right shape of Mora Rock. That just means Mora 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 at Apple knows otherwise, but I would put good, good money that that's not the way these things
⏹️ ▶️ John work currently. It's just going to use the model, and whatever the model puts is what the model puts.
Tesla and CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk about Tesla and CarPlay, or in other words, let's have Casey pop off. Alec Hurdle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points us to an article on NotATeslaApp.com, which is entitled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Announces Maps Feature That Could Finally Bring CarPlay to Tesla. And Nahal Malik from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aforementioned website writes: Reports emerged last fall of Tesla actively pursuing native CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration. Follow-up reports from earlier this year indicated that CarPlay integration was still in the works, with Tesla reportedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working directly with Apple to bring the interface to its vehicles. At the time, the main holdup was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said to be how the navigation would be handled between Tesla's whatever they think their full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey self-driving, except it isn't really full self-driving system, and CarPlay's own maps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because supervised self-driving relies heavily on the car's native navigation, Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apple were working together to ensure that turn-by-turn directions stay in sync across Tesla's and Apple's mapping platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If this supervised automatic driving doesn't know where the CarPlay map is going,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features like automatic lane changes, which I don't understand why that's a problem, but anyway, and supervised self-navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simply can't function. During a WWDC 26 session covering the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey latest updates to CarPlay, Apple announced a new feature called route sharing. And we will put a timestamp link to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the YouTube video in the show notes. Route sharing allows navigation to pass a navigation app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the trip changes. Apple notes that, quote, some vehicles with driver assistance systems work best when the intended route
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is known. For example, vehicles may support automatic lane changes or adjust their guidance systems to more closely match
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the route shown in your app. Quote. So I really, really want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this to happen, not because I want Teslas to be more appealing to anyone, if that's even really possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but because if Tesla finally caves, because they were, you know, the kings of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, we're 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 not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reality world that I'm also living in. But man, I can dream, can't I?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like how they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn't name Tesla in a WWDC session, you know, because they're, but it's like the facts match up exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was what Tesla was waiting for.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Now, does this mean
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla will actually do it? We'll see. But this rumor has been cooking for a while. Like, and the holdup
⏹️ ▶️ John being, we can't do this because we don't, you know, there's not enough sharing of route information to support our other
⏹️ ▶️ John features makes technical sense, but I still wonder about um, how committed
⏹️ ▶️ John they are to, uh, 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you're coming at this as a Tesla fan, this does not strike me as something you would do from a position, a position of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strength 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey They do it in that voice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that's just me.
New US sunscreen filter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have incredibly, if 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 U.S. has approved a new sunscreen ingredient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from Scientific American, the U.S. is finally getting a new better sunscreen ingredient. The Food and Drug Administration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added. bemotrizinol. There, we'll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go with that. And I tried this earlier and I already forgot what I tried. Bemetrizinol, an effective chemical filter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's used in sunscreens made in Asia and Europe for decades to the list of permitted active ingredients and over-the-counter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sunscreens. The list hasn't seen a new entry in more than 20 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So this is, you know, as I was going through my sunscreen journey, I believe it was last year or the year before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had realized that avobenzone, which is the chemical filter used in almost every U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunscreen, except for the mineral ones, but all the chemical sunscreens or the hybrids, they all had avobenzone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out avobenzone is both not incredibly effective relative to modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunscreen filter chemicals. And also the problem that I was having was it's incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco irritating to most people's eyes. My eyes would just burn and get painful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redness and everything all day if I had sunscreen on, because even if like a little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit traveled, oh, and avobenzone travels through the skin through short distances too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It migrates. And so if you had sunscreen anywhere on your face, odds of it getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your eye were pretty high. So at that point, I switched over. I tried European
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunscreens and Japanese sunscreens. And I found all these other chemicals that are more modern that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are much not only more effective in most cases, but also allow much nicer formulations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the sunscreen. Like, you know, like how does it absorb? Does it have good textures? You know, stuff like that. And then doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco migrate through your skin. And it's not as irritating to eyes, like by a huge, huge margin. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that I use the most and love is the Roto Super Moisture UV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gel. It's a Japanese brand. I'll link in the show notes. um Sometimes you can find people on Amazon selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It's more reliably found on eBay, or you can just order it from Amazon Japan if you want to pay a lot of shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But one of the filters it uses is this one. This is also called Tinosorb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S. It's available in a lot of European and Japanese sunscreens. There's also, there's a whole community
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Korean sunscreen enthusiasts. I didn't get that far because I basically got to Japan and was happy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped. But there's this whole world of sunscreens that now the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco U.S. has approved one of the chemicals that they use. And so therefore, we are likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see better U.S. sunscreens that are not irritating to people's eyes. They're not as irritating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people's eyes and work better against different forms of UV. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great news for the sunscreen enthusiast world. I'm going to still keep buying my Roto Super Moisture UV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gel just because I like it a lot. The formula is good. The bottles are convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has a scent, but it's a very, very weak scent. So it's fairly neutral and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works great for me. So I'm going to keep buying that, 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 put this ingredient in and they'll also include avobenzone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be fair, I don't think, I mean, I haven't looked at it exactly, but I don't think it would make sense to have both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because they probably cover similar UVA and UVB bands. So it probably wouldn't make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, like they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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. Yeah, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you wouldn't believe like how many sunscreens, how many like US sunscreens I tried first that claimed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be like sensitive or you know all these different marketing words. And at the end of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all had the exactly the same problem because they were all using the only US chemical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 remarkable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it's hilarious to me how long these have lived in our internal show notes. So, like 18 years ago, we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about tracking Apple's environmental progress. And Andrew Leahy writes, Your mention of diffing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 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 continues:
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you go to an individual product, you can compare directly across whatever metrics Apple provides. And so there will be another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 here,
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 for that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if there's a website for it, you just bookmark the website. And if you're wondering what kind of progress is Apple making
⏹️ ▶️ John on the environment stuff, are they just doing the same stuff year after year and just retouting it over and over again? Or 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 Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI servers work. This was keyed off of a Wall Street journal video that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were talking about in, again, episode 680 back in February. And friend of the show, Guy Rambo, writes: No need to rely on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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, a private cloud compute node, running as a standalone computer with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cloud OS, which is a variant of iOS. And there's an orchestration layer that handles distributing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work 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 CloudOS job listing, which includes the cloudOS team is responsible for all facets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 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 We got to get this item in right before I would imagine potentially this whole tech
⏹️ ▶️ John stack becomes irrelevant. We don't know that this is going to happen, but now that they've moved to using NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ John servers and other people's data centers, I do wonder how long they're going to continue the effort of building their
⏹️ ▶️ John own servers. That Wall Street Journal video like showed us inside the factory where they had those big giant rack mount servers that had
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of you know, M2 Ultras or whatever inside them, building their hardware, racking
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware, supporting it, writing an OS called Cloud OS that goes on there, doing the security.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this is a hell of an effort for what I have to imagine at this point is just not
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive at all in any measure. Like an M2 Ultra, it was a great chip back in the day, but boy, we've
⏹️ ▶️ John 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. Where, you know, they already in WWC is that we're
⏹️ ▶️ John not distinguishing between one or the other. It's all PCC to us, right? And they promised that by the time the 27
⏹️ ▶️ John OS is ship, Google's PCC will be just as good as Apple's PCC. And I just feel like that's the clearly the path
⏹️ ▶️ John forward. But uh, for now, or in the past, they have their own
⏹️ ▶️ John servers that they built in their own factories that they ran Cloud OS on and they were had job listings for it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly this purpose with the newest cutting edge everything from everybody. Like It just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn't make sense for Apple to do this themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I kind of see how they got there, like in the old regime, the old regime that
⏹️ ▶️ John was wiped away and replaced with this new regime that gave us, you know, WWC 2026. In
⏹️ ▶️ John the pre-WWC 2024 regime, the idea of PCC is like, what if we could do this thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John we can do stuff in the cloud, but in a secure way? And where we have great silicon and like
⏹️ ▶️ John it's very efficient. And um 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, oh, you can 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 the stuff that stays on your devices, you know, we can't see it. Nobody can see it. It's 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
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC 2024 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,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the world has moved on. This is, you know, I'm not going to 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 Oh, sometime in 2026. Meanwhile, the world is racing forward. So I just don't think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has it in them to compete hardware-wise. And if you can't compete hardware-wise, the whole effort is
⏹️ ▶️ John pointless, even if your software stack is really cool. So yeah, just have Google do it with NVIDIA GPUs.
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Apple price increases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On June 17th, which as 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 Turnis and did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 executive Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal. Quote, 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we've 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 at,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said, 2023. And there's little blips and blurbs of deferred DRAM memory and NAND
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage, how expensive they are, and got a little bit more in 25. And then toward the end of 25, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just hockey sticks. And the top of this chart, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what DRAM is estimated to be at the end of 2027, 900%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey above what it was in 2023. Now, again, that's an estimate, but holy jamolies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not great. This is one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John charts where you're like, please do look at the y-axis. It is rooted at zero. And you're like, yeah, but these graphs
⏹️ ▶️ John always exaggerate stuff. Yeah, it looks like they go up a lot, but I bet it's like point zero. And then the top of the thing is 0.01.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the top is 900.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's a percent. it's It's a terrible, terrible, scary graph. And by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, Casey, it pains me when you skip my terrible puns. You need to put them in. Which one?
⏹️ ▶️ John you Maybe it's my pun. This is my me because my pun is so bad that Casey didn't even recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John it as a pun, which I'm going to take. That's on me. That's not on Casey. The way I described this was Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook takes one for the Turnus. Takes one for the T. He's taking one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for the team.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know team and Turnus, they both begin with T.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's a stretch. It's on me. It's not on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'll take some of that blame. That was a group effort because my reading comprehension, as always, has failed me. I didn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see for the Turnus. I just read that as takes one for Turnus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I should have done your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and had team and strikethrough and then had Turnus. Then you would have figured it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway, that's true.
⏹️ ▶️ John This, again, this was June 17th. Obviously, we know where this goes because today is June 25th and stay tuned.
⏹️ ▶️ 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 we all know this bad news is coming. We talked about the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ John forces. 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 its deals, eventually they're going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make some hard choices. Tim Cook could have said, yeah, we'll just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we'll just leave this and John Ternus can announce the increases. Now, we don't know
⏹️ ▶️ John whether like they had to be announced now. And so it was always going to be Tim Cook because Turnus doesn't take over until
⏹️ ▶️ John September, or whether he was doing what people thought he was doing on the 17th. Because remember, the 17th, we didn't know when the
⏹️ ▶️ John price increases were coming or what they would be. So on the 17th, people could have been saying, well, it'll probably be the iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John in September. And, you know, it'd be bad if Ternus' first keynote, he's going to announce all the iPhones are like hundreds of dollars more
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. So let Tim Cook on its way out the door soften everybody up. And then when tanner announces
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it's like, well, we've already known this is going to happen. Right. Now, you know, that turned out not to be the case, as we'll see in a
⏹️ ▶️ John second. But this is, you know, this is one of like the instead of a strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John tax, it's like a strategy credit or whatever. Not not quite the same thing, but like when you have something like this happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a transition. There's lots of downsides to a transition. Change is scary and
⏹️ ▶️ John there's lots of instability. You're not sure how things are going to go. But one of the advantages of a transition
⏹️ ▶️ John is you can do stuff like this. Have the guy on his way out the door do stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that is unpalatable. No, I'm not talking about the Trump stuff. He did that while he was not out the door.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like announce, be the bad guy. announced the price increases. Don't make your
⏹️ ▶️ John new CEO do it. And that is totally a Tim Cook move. And as we'll see, it wasn't really
⏹️ ▶️ John taking one for Ternus. It seems like it might have been just like something that needed to be announced now. And Tim Cook is currently the CEO. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is what it is. But yeah. And so that chart, the chart is terrifying. Please, we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John put a link to the image, but you can just go to the article. I think you can see it, even if it's paywalled. But if not, look at the image in our
⏹️ ▶️ John LinkedIn or show notes. And then there was some tangents here to the story to say just this chart
⏹️ ▶️ John here, again, that goes up to 900%. This has ripple effects throughout the entire world.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this Wall Street Journal story continued with some more fun details on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Oh, 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 NAND storage include
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those three companies as well as Kioxia 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 risen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than 800%, while Kioxia and Sandisk have risen 4,600%.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anybody buy any Sandisk stock in 2024?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gravy. Good gravy. So this has led to some interesting corollaries, like John was saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So reading from CNBC, few workers can say that their bonuses have been so large that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the company central bank takes notice. But in South Korea, the phenomenon is playing out as workers from tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey industries receive bonuses worth millions of won, prompting the Bank of Korea to warn of the upward pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of inflation. According to an unidentified union source cited by Reuters, a memory chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worker with a base salary of 80 million won, or about 52 grand U.S., is expected to receive a total bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of around 626 million won or 410,000 U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars this year. Holy crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine you're you're working in the memory chip factory for 50K a year and your bonus is going to be 400K. That's a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Good for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to find more details on this. I think like some of those, their union labor and the unions had negotiated 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. uh 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year. Diamond hands all the way. And then there was a Reddit post that I presume John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stumbled upon, which is quite funny. Someone took a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess what they're doing is they're building a custom PC or something like that. And again, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screenshot from ChatGPT. ChatGPT says to this individual, that is a very solid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey build, but I spotted one thing immediately. And then big warning, rotating light.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM price is wrong. Your screenshot shows, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 32 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of RAM, $420. That has to be a pricing error, or the company picked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some weird seller. The 32 gigs of RAM should be around $80 or $120, not $420. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm still quoting now. If you actually paid $420 for 32 gigs RAM, I'd call the police
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laughing with tears in my eyes, emoji.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's it's it's the hot dog,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh the the meme with the guy in the hot dog suit saying we're trying to find the guy who did this. I'm sure I've seen that, but I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know it offhand. But no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ John do you not see these memes? You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have children.
⏹️ ▶️ John to help you, old people, see memes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 all comes back around, right? So then that was all June 17. Again, that was Wednesday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey June 17. It is now, as I'm sitting here today, Thursday, June 25. And guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? Apple has raised prices. So there's another post at the Wall Street Journal. We'll put in, both for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much this quickly. We have shielded our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey products, including today's increases for iPad and for Mac. We know this is not welcome news,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we are working tirelessly to find solutions. We will put some links in the show notes. Our dear friend Stephen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hackett had a good rundown of this. There's a good post on Mac Rumors. And additionally, Gruber had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a post that we'll end up discussing here in a moment. But the 50,000-foot view
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that basically everything that isn't an iPhone, if I'm not mistaken, has gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up at least 10 to 15%. And in some cases, as much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as 60%. And I'm just going to jump to what I was going to say later, I can't resist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm going to say it right now. The Apple TV that is ancient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has gone from $129 for the base model to $200,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a $70 increase or 54%. The nice Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, the nice Apple TV that has thread and Ethernet is $250.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To put things in perspective, and I know this doesn't mean as much to everyone else as it does to me, but I like to think we've all joined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my familial journey over the years. To put things in perspective, my daughter Michaela
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not in elementary school when the last Apple TV was released. It was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget how many days ago now, I don't have the buyer's guide in front of me, but it was thousands of days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 1,300 days ago or something like that. And she was not even a kindergartner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet when that was released. Let's see, what is it? As I stall for time. 1,346
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days ago when the Apple TV was most recently released, October of 2022, my daughter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who was not yet in kindergarten, just graduated, I shouldn't say graduated, just finished second grade,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has gone through three years of school in the time since we have had a new Apple TV. What the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fuck is going on? And why the fuck do they think this thing is worth $250? Are you out of your minds?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the more expensive one went up by 67%.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, God, it's even worse. But I have to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I find this one of the least objectionable
⏹️ ▶️ John increases, actually. Obviously, absolute value, it's not a lot because it's 70 bucks percentage-wise is big,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a cheap product. But the thing about the Apple TV is like, I'm honestly, I don't quite
⏹️ ▶️ John know why Apple hasn't been gouging us even more on it. It's because as time passes,
⏹️ ▶️ John its competition in the realm of thing you use to watch streaming video on your TV has just gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John like worse and worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is fair. That is very fair. And so it's just
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 going to mostly be talking about here are base prices, because obviously we're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get into upgrade prices in a second, but the base prices have gone up. And this is for like, they say
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs and iPads, but Vision Pro is in there too, which is great. The average price increase is
⏹️ ▶️ John $258 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,
⏹️ ▶️ John 32.5% increase, which isn't that bad, but that's an additional $1,300
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the base price,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is rough. Vision Pro got out easy with only a 5.7% increase. So they just added
⏹️ ▶️ John $200 to the Vision Pro. 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 it's brutal. And the percentages are are weird and uneven. But if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John 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. And 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 going to have to increase prices announcement on the 17th. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John thing something came to a head at this point where 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 prices on other products too. And there's no good time to do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John why don't we rip off the band-aid and raise the prices on all of them? Now, 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 it's better
⏹️ ▶️ John than doing it piecemeal. So it could be that some of these products have been coasting on not having Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John style margins for like a month or two. And other ones could have another year of runway with based on the RAM and
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD chips they already have or they already built for the thing. But they're not going to do it based on like
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly when the things, like they're not going to wait till the last minute. They're like, if any, if any one of these products needs to be increased
⏹️ ▶️ John so we don't lose our precious margins, we're going to do all of them now. And we're going to 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 100 added
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other ones get, no, that doesn't make any sense. That's, But they just pick the round number. So their announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John uses careful words, as always. It says, Apple's statement says, we have shielded our customer
⏹️ ▶️ John from these increases so far. I think shielded is the correct word because Apple's deals have
⏹️ ▶️ John shielded the customers from these increases in the same way that they've shielded Apple from the increases.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, hey, if we have a contract that says you're going to give us this many RAM chips at this price uh
⏹️ ▶️ 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 going to eat that cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they were shielding and then they're no longer shielding, but they're no longer shielding themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John either. What they didn't say is we have been eating that cost for you. That's not what the statement says. Now, they
⏹️ ▶️ John may have been eating some of that cost. Like I can think maybe like on the Neo or some other products that like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John got caught by surprise by this or a super low price that maybe they actually have had reduced margins on some of these products.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I look at the price increase list and I say, well, whatever products you had been suffering decreased margins
⏹️ ▶️ John on, I think you're in for another few months of what I imagine will be potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John better than normal margins, especially on the products that still have locked-in contracts for components,
⏹️ ▶️ John but their prices still went up by 20%. That's going to be some good margins on those and those will
⏹️ ▶️ John offset the other ones. So anyway, we'll see in their financial calls. I know we don't cover the minutiae like that but a
⏹️ ▶️ John and across the board price increase like this on basically every Mac and every iPad plus the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John in round number amounts is totally an Apple thing to do, which is like, let's do this. Let's
⏹️ ▶️ John do it once. Let's get it over with. And let's make the numbers big enough that we don't have to do it again. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I would assume, and we'll see, but I would assume that when they come out with new Macs and new iPads in the future,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will simply adopt these prices as the new normal prices. Like even if and when commodity
⏹️ ▶️ John prices go back down, I don't expect Apple to have an announcement and say, hey, remember in 2026 when we had
⏹️ ▶️ John to increase all our prices because commodity prices went up? Well, guess what? The AI bubble popped and now commodity prices are back
⏹️ ▶️ John down because there's a glut of RAM manufacturing capacity because it's 2030 and all these factories have been built.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to lower the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John back down. They're just going to keep them where they were. So this is the new normal for us
⏹️ ▶️ John probably for multiple reasons. One, more capacity for SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and RAM is coming online in a few years. So don't expect like this will
⏹️ ▶️ John be over tomorrow. So The only thing they can say of us is the factories get built in several
⏹️ ▶️ John years or the AI bubble bursts before that and AI companies have to start actually selling
⏹️ ▶️ John services at the cost that makes, you know, like the whole giant influx of free money
⏹️ ▶️ John with which to buy all the RAM chips in the world stops flowing for whatever reason. So what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think will happen first? That the new factories will get built in three or four years or that the AI bubble will pop? I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not predicting. This is not financial advice, but I would expect these prices to be with us
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while, which is terrible news for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, not a good time to need to buy a very high-spec Mac. I mean, like, certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone's focusing a lot on the base prices, but where you see even more of a hit is on those upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM and SSD sizes. Like, I looked today, like a maxed-out MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking, the 8 terabyte SSD on a MacBook Pro is now a $3,000 BTO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann Good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So these are pretty big numbers. Most of those are up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 50 to 60%. Now, that being said, Casey, you brought up the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco example. And the Apple TV was last updated as far as I could tell quickly in 2022.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in that time, there's been about 15% inflation. Like just inflation alone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covers a lot of these for like the older stuff. And like Ben Thompson's been making this point a lot that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically in inflation adjusted terms, Apple products have actually been getting a lot cheaper over the last you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phones in particular. Some of them are Macs questionable, but definitely the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because you know, the reality is like this is we're talking about one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think a lot of the world has too. That, you know, look around our lives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing costs the same now as it did even three years ago because everything is more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive. You know, we have, not to get, you know, political much about this, but like we have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to, you know, general fiscal dynamics and, you know, interest rates, things like that, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also have ridiculous tariff chaos from our current president that throws the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply chain into chaos in any given moment. Then he started a war and ruined oil prices for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while. And so all these things are going on in the world around us. Of course, everything's going to get more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is nothing in my life that costs today what it did three years ago, except, I guess, iPhone-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prices, 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. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just what these things are going to cost for the foreseeable future. You know, when more capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes online in two years, maybe supply and demand will get in balance. Maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe the capacity that is being built today isn't enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don't actually know that. It's equally possible it's way too much and there'll be a big glut and these companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will go out of business. There's certainly a lot of unknowns about this dynamic, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are in the middle of a very inflationary period of all costs of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything 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 this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just what things cost now. So I think this is a good opportunity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extend the lives of devices you have. Look for deals on used things maybe if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need, you know, if you need to get that, get a discount to put something back into your price range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do what you can to be more efficient and pressure app developers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people who were making very memory-hungry apps and stuff. Maybe pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new products in the coming years, demand is going to be a little bit softened by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that they're going to cost substantially more than they used to. Like, you know, this this fall, we're heading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a pretty significant iPhone season. Like they're they're going to launch this foldable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Foldables are expensive even before this. You think like now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine like, you know, so what, you know, the iPhone Pro, you know, you get, you get one now for about 1200 bucks what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that 1000 1200 What's the base price on the iPhone Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. You know, that's, I figure that's probably going to be at least 1400 now. And then what's the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foldable going to be? Like, people were expecting before these price hikes that it might be $2,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I'm thinking that might be conservative. Like, maybe it's $2,500.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it depends on what they do with margins because like, speaking of the upgrade price table the grouper had
⏹️ ▶️ John in his thing, the upgrade prices for this stuff are a concentration of
⏹️ ▶️ John this problem to like, because like the whole, you know, your whole Mac, your whole iPhone has lots of different components in it. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John all those components are getting more expensive, right? But specific ones are. If you're upgrading
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those specific components, like, oh, I want to get a Mac, but I want more RAM in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are not 20%, 15% increases. You can look at the group of charts. Some of them are 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John increases because that's where the problem is in the supply chain right now. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you want a bigger SSD, that's a 50%, 60%, 70% increase in price.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's not just because Apple is gouging you because that is the source. That's the source of the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of 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 are going up in price
⏹️ ▶️ John are RAM and SSD. So does the foldable one 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 crisis.
⏹️ ▶️ 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 uh, yeah, the, the, the, when I look at these these tables of
⏹️ ▶️ John the upgrade stuff, all I can think about is like Apple's strategy of on-device AI seems
⏹️ ▶️ John so smart a couple of years ago. It's like, well, they have great silicon and everyone else has to have these big, expensive data centers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple's going to, you know, if Apple tried to run data centers for its billions of iPhone users, it would be really expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if people can do it on device, so that, you know, we got the Apple intelligence RAM windfall
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, a year or two ago, where Apple put more RAM in all its devices so they could run
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple intelligence. Well, now we're in a world where Apple needs even more RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they're increasing the RAM even more above and beyond what they did for like the old Apple intelligence for the new one because they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to run stuff on device. Well, guess what's expensive now, specifically because of AI data centers?
⏹️ ▶️ John It's RAM because they're stealing it all and Apple needs more of it than ever on its devices to
⏹️ ▶️ John run its local models. So Apple's strategy of we're going to run local models because we have the best silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John is great until RAM is prices are destroyed. So I don't know if they're going to reconsider
⏹️ ▶️ John that policy. Like the rumors of all the upcoming devices, are they will in fact have more RAM than the old ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically so they can run the whatever, you know, the Apple Foundation model,
⏹️ ▶️ John core advanced, blah, blah, blah. Like that Apple is putting more RAM in all this devices above
⏹️ ▶️ John and beyond what that used to be the baseline for Apple Intelligence so they can run this new stuff. That's going
⏹️ ▶️ John to hurt prices way more than you would think because, yeah, it seems like those had to buy, they
⏹️ ▶️ John had to buy that RAM at prices that were inflated. We'll see We'll see what happens with the phone stuff. But these Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John things, I feel like they're running it, probably running an inventory and some of these are going to be replaced and their deals are expiring
⏹️ ▶️ John or they didn't have long term contracts for these things. But with the phone, I still have some faith that
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe some of the phones introduced this September will benefit from locked-in rates for certain components.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we'll see. As with the big price increases we just saw here, it probably behooves Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John that even if they do have good lock-in rates for their components for the iPhones in September, just
⏹️ ▶️ John increase all the prices by $200 anyway, because guess what? In a year, this will probably still be going on. Or potentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the rumors are, the rumors, the predictions are this is going to get worse next year. Not better, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's going to get twice as bad as it is now in 2027. So buckle up for that. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John means Apple should probably increase the prices on all of its phones by a big amount so they can keep that price
⏹️ ▶️ John the same in 2027 and maintain their incredibly high margins.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several steps, I priced what is a modern facsimile for my current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop. So I have an M3 Max, 64 gigs, 8 terabytes, because like Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm a fool. I want to say I paid around about $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, late in the year, two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or three 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Mine went from $7,200 to an even $10,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good freaking God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I'm really, right now I'm really happy with my M3 Max right now. It's like, oh, do I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the modern version? Not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly. For the past like, month, I've been pricing out like, used and refurbished like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon stuff, including like, a used M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio with a third-party 8-terabyte SSD in it and everything. And I wonder if those
⏹️ ▶️ John prices are going to go up too. Like, Because I didn't pull the trigger on anything. because, like, it's still a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money. 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
⏹️ ▶️ John what I'm good at. But speaking of that, Apple has, by the way, also
⏹️ ▶️ John raised the prices on their refurbished Macs and iPads. And you would think, wait a second, the refurbished
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, those are already built and assembled and probably pre-owned. Why are they going up? Well, market
⏹️ ▶️ John prices, supply and demand. People want them because they don't want to buy the new ones
⏹️ ▶️ John because they're too expensive. So the demand for the refurbished ones goes up, which raises their prices too. Although I did
⏹️ ▶️ John see someone complain about this and I did not confirm it. But a question is, have they also increased
⏹️ ▶️ John the trade-in prices? And the person was complaining that Apple hasn't increased the trade-in prices, but I did not confirm whether that's true or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that's something to watch when you go to buy a new whatever. Has your trade-in gained more value
⏹️ ▶️ John just because the price of all these things has gone up? We'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Narrator, no. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm just saying I didn't check it. I'm just saying I didn't check.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I'm sure it goes up. I'm sure the value is up like on eBay or something. Not an Apple's trade-in world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to 6.15% today on account of all this. So not a great day for
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah. Oh, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John the 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,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's 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 going to come out with the AirPods with the whatever, camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John IR camera or whatever. And those will be more expensive simply because, you know, they have more stuff in them and they're the fanciest and the
⏹️ ▶️ John newest. But the plain old AirPods, the ones that are like the ones we have now, which I assume they will continue to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John in some form, I wonder if those will actually stay more or less the same simply because they don't use any of the components
⏹️ ▶️ John that are affected by this crisis. But the phones and watches certainly do. So watch out for that. And yeah, Wall Street says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don't like this Apple. We think this is not good for your business because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you raise the prices on all of your products, probably going to make the demand for them go down. And that doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John bode well. But we'll see. We'll see how Apple does. It may be a buying opportunity for people who want to get in and on the stock.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, because Apple's next earning call, they're going to be like, we sold more phones than we've ever sold, in ever you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it goes back up again. But anyway, this is, again, not financial advice. Don't play the stock market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also point out, though, like, you know, for when you're thinking like the AirPods are not going to be as affected, first of all, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do, they do have some RAM. I mean, almost every electronic device has RAM, NAND,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage, or both. And I i do think, though, you know, you you have to consider that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well, right now these component prices are going up. So that means that now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple's products are going up. Well, the companies that, you know, like all the different companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make all the components that go into AirPods, all of their costs are going up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around them. Like all of their components are going up. Their own, you know, R&D costs are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go up. As everyone in the world is facing inflation on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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, uh, it's really not great. And I mean, again, I'm very grumbly at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple 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 at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 timings. So Team McGeary writes, I owe Marco a beer. I bought a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you. I bought a new MacBook Air for my wife in late May, and that same machine is $400 more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. And then a friend of the show, Greg Pierce, wrote, guess I pulled the trigger on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new M5 Pro MacBook Pro at the right time. The specs I bought two weeks ago for $3,400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now $800 more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, that's what happens. I don't think the end is in sight. I also don't think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the last price increase to happen in this wave. Again, we're going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see more across everything. And we're going to see significant ripple effects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those price raises. So you know, not only everyone's costs going up and everything like that, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we've got to think like, how will this change the market for certain types of devices at all? You know, As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know, 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, or that used to be expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then got cheaper. Now we see the opposite of that. What categories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hardware are now just not going to be worth it? Or are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be you know, such low volume customers of these component vendors that they won't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even be able to get allocation of stock? So they won't even be able to exist. So you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could affect things like obviously on the medium-sized market, this could affect things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like game consoles significantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Already has. Xbox just announced price increases. And we'll talk about the Steam Machine next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like, you know, what we're seeing in that world is like consoles are being price hiked or delayed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, people are kind of just going to try to get more of what 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. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could affect other stuff like my my beloved e-ink 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 AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very exciting and, 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 to call back to the episode we did about why everyone hates AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Yeah, it's like, oh, that's all well and good. You talk about that episode what other people think, but now they come for your Apple hardware and all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are like, well, now suddenly I care
⏹️ ▶️ John about AI. It was fine when they were increasing prices of stuff that I don't care about, but now they're increasing Apple product
⏹️ ▶️ John prices. This just can't stand. But this is basically, it's all the same thing, which is like, obviously there's a
⏹️ ▶️ John massive investment across the entire industry in AI. That massive investment
⏹️ ▶️ John is allowing those companies to buy up all the RAM in the world, like literally all the RAM in the world, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They're not doing that because they're so rich from the profitable, from the profit they're making from selling their products.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're doing that with the money that they have invested because people think these companies are the future. And so they're
⏹️ ▶️ John piling all this investment in And they take that investment money and they shove it to NVIDIA and all the RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John companies and everything. That is, that's the bubble. It's distorting the market with all this money flowing into
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And if and when this market distortion comes for the thing that you care about,
⏹️ ▶️ John our case being Apple hardware, but it could be anything. As Marco said, it could be, you know, garage door openers. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John chips and RAM and everything. Like it's anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, as Marco said, that just the general price increase everywhere, as we saw with the COVID-19
⏹️ ▶️ John lockdown, people will take any opportunity to price gouge, even if their costs haven't actually increased. If everyone else is doing it, they're just going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it anyway because it's the thing to do. And they've got cover. It's like, oh yeah, AI RAM crisis. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John why, you know, when that happens to you, people are naturally going to think, as
⏹️ ▶️ John 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, uh 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? uh
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think a lot of people would say, hell yeah, like AI is exciting and everything, but do we need
⏹️ ▶️ John to destroy the entire world economy to allow that industry to grow as fast as possible? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John people would look, it's like, what am I getting in exchange for that? Okay, but say you love ChatGPT. It's the best thing since sliced bread spread, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John to 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 it 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 chickens
⏹️ ▶️ John come home to roost. Maybe these companies go public and it turns out when you're public, you actually have to turn a profit in a more
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable time. Although look at Amazon, they spent a long time not turning a profit and they did fine. So again, not financial
⏹️ ▶️ John advice, but like it seemed the current situation seems both terrible and unsustainable in
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious ways that everyone is looking at. And that just like the financial people are like, well, this is just the horse race. This is just,
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, nothing highlights this more than, what was it, the stupid SpaceX IPO, which you may think, what does rockets
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do with AI? Elon Musk has combined all his companies into one giant cluster of evil.
⏹️ ▶️ John um Anyway, when companies are that big, uh these funds that
⏹️ ▶️ John buy like, uh, you know, index funds for your like your retirement accounts end up owning them just because they're so
⏹️ ▶️ John big and they buy like the top 500 companies or whatever as part of their index thing. And now SpaceX is
⏹️ ▶️ John part of that instantly because it's so big by market cap because it's a combination of Twitter and XAI and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. And so all of a sudden, people's retirement accounts, people who do not buy individual stocks, this may be more
⏹️ ▶️ John us centric thing. But anyway, we have retirement accounts here because we don't have any kind of social safety net to speak of. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have an individual retirement account or a 401k or whatever, and you have a bunch of index funds, this is a wide-ranging
⏹️ ▶️ John paragraph. Yeah. You have an index fund, and now that index includes SpaceX, which is an AI company
⏹️ ▶️ John because they went public. And when this bubble bursts, oh, your 401k gets screwed too. So we have that to look forward
⏹️ ▶️ John to as well. Not only enduring all the pain of this, but when it does quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John end and things consolidate and the bubble bursts and winners and losers are picked and companies have to actually start turning a profit,
⏹️ ▶️ John all our retirement accounts get screwed. And he's like, I never consented to buying any of this crappy AI stock. Well, tough luck. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you're buying 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
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular, because I do have this Intel Mac here. And at this point, any kind of ARM-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is looking like it's going to cost a lot of money. So I may be cruising on this for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while. I mean, we made fun of my old Mac Pro that I had for over 10 years. And it's like, well, that won't
⏹️ ▶️ John happen again. They did a processor transition right after you bought your new Mac. Surely you'll get rid of that one pretty soon. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm on year seven. So tune in in three years to see if I'm still running this Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you can't on account of the OS, right? I can just keep running the OS. I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John 26 now. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll do increasing amount of dev work on my M1 MacBook Air, which is what I'm doing, which is what's booted into
⏹️ ▶️ John Golden Gate right now. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my God. I'm sorry, John. I really am. I mean, the good news is you have precedent for spending as much as a Civic on a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't. But your voice is haunting me, Casey. Because 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 on your new Mac? I'm like, no, that can't,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I subtract $6,000 because I'm not buying a new monitor. Knock on wood.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now, maybe you're right, Maybe the 8 terabyte M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Mac Studio with 64 gigs of RAM is going to actually cost
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as my entire 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 the, you know, is the max, the smallest one? That probably is going to be the smallest one. The problem is they don't let you
⏹️ ▶️ John get eight terabytes in the Mac Mini. I'll be like, I'm going to get a Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you want eight terabytes, you got to get a max chip these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then and the smallest CPU that comes with it is the Macs, right? Yeah, I believe so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. and you have to get and you have to get the fancier max because there's, at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops, there's two Maxes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was pricing it a few minutes ago, I went to eight terabytes and it was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to get the Super Baller CPU before you can get eight 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 to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That is 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 WWDC to be pushed back because, you know, because of this whole thing. And now it is pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John back past the price increase horizon. So if and when 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pop. No. And oh, and by the way, just for the record, in case this is unclear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space data centers make no sense because of heat and radiation and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. And so, yeah, that doesn't work. Just for the record, just putting that out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's not a thing. In case that wasn't clearly a stupid idea. Right. Like, in case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone doesn't know science, just look into what it takes to radiate the amount of heat that a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typical data center rack needs to radiate um, into space. But
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 Um, so yeah, that's, that's not, 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 All right, let's do at least a touch of Ask ATP. And Brian Webster wrote, I don't know, maybe a month ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or so: given the soaring cost and unpredictability of RAM prices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and given that Apple already manufactures its own SOCs and many of its own cell modems, would it ever make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense for Apple to start manufacturing its own RAM? They ship high enough volumes of RAM that they would likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get an okay return on investment in facilities for RAM production. It would insulate them from the supply constraints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey triggered by the AI boom. And most importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco since they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only be paying manufacturing costs without extra profit margins, they could finally lower those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ludicrous RAM upgrade prices, right? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Do you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he's referencing here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes, I do. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ 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, that's… We're batting 500. Casey knows the meme
⏹️ ▶️ John and Marco doesn't. Again, I don't know how both of you exist on the same internet as me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, Marco does know it. He just doesn't realize he knows it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John He doesn't know who Anakin and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, no, I'm very familiar with those characters from the terrible Star Wars prequels that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inexplicably she falls in love with him and then dies of sadness. I mean, has there ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a worse-written woman in all of cinema?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, doctors never believe women, so she
⏹️ ▶️ John just had a blood clot like Serena.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, gracious. Anyway, so how do we want to approach this? I mean, obviously, the clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer is you can't just spin up a new RAM factory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we were talking about that earlier. Like, it takes two to three years to spin one of those up. So that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you're a company that already does that.
⏹️ ▶️ John you should just read Joe Lyon's 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 it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 and 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still several generations behind the leading edge. If Apple broke ground on a fab today, it would be five years before the first wafers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out, 10 years before high volume yield on a decent process, and 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years or more, or perhaps even never, before it would be cost competitive with the current DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John That's the problem. Remember that episode we did where we talked about like the silicon fabbing machines from ASML
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything? Like you 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 used for logic and everything. But the base facts remain the
⏹️ ▶️ John same. This is not a turnkey business. You don't just buy the kit and like have a franchise and
⏹️ ▶️ John start a thing. These companies that have been doing this have been doing it for decades and decades. And you can't catch
⏹️ ▶️ John them by just saying, well, we'll just make a factory and do the same thing they're doing. It's incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult and complicated. And anyone who has ever tried to do it, like the Chinese government
⏹️ ▶️ John example is great. What if you had basically unlimited money? Like the Chinese government
⏹️ ▶️ John is funding you. They want this industry to come up and it's taking them a long time. And they're not a private company
⏹️ ▶️ John that has to have investment. The Chinese government is backing it saying, we want to be contenders here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they spent 12 years doing it. And they're still several generations behind those three big companies. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sort of needs like the good RAM, like the best the industry has for its purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John in an iPhone. They can't, you know, you can put crappy RAM on the Apple TV, fine. But the iPhone's kind of got
⏹️ ▶️ John to have the RAM best suited to the iPhone. They're not bargain shopping for that in terms of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we'll just get a two-year-old version of it. No, they want the best. And so, yeah, Apple, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple decided to do this today, it wouldn't help them unless this crisis goes on for a decade and a half, which God, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn't. But that's the kind of the timeline. But the but the earlier point I think is more important that Joe made that
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's a commodity business. If Apple is just making RAM for itself, the only
⏹️ ▶️ John way you can survive in a capital intensive business like silicon fabrication
⏹️ ▶️ John is you spend billions and billions of dollars building the factories, machines, and expertise
⏹️ ▶️ John to make chips. And you need those things to be running and churning out money to
⏹️ ▶️ John make back your investment. And so you can't have them be like a single customer. This is why Intel was in such
⏹️ ▶️ John trouble. You can't have it just be a single customer thing. It's like, we just make what Apple needs. Well, what about when Apple doesn't need any more chips
⏹️ ▶️ John for the year? Do you just let the factory sit there and be idle? That's terrible that you'll lose
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of money doing that. You need to keep running that factory and selling people chips. And so you end up essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John in the RAM business, selling commodities to the entire industry. And Apple tends
⏹️ ▶️ John not to want to be in the commodity business. Like we sell components to the world, but if you build
⏹️ ▶️ John a RAM fab, the only way it's a viable business is you have to sell RAM to everybody. And suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John you're not Apple making these, these special products just for your customers with big margins. Now you're competing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the existing RAM vendors to sell the world. And it looks like a great business now because everyone wants RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, you got to build the factories and learn how to do that over the process 15 years. And who knows what the RAM situation will look like in
⏹️ ▶️ John 15 years? But Apple essentially never wants to be in the business of manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John things for the entire world to use as parts in their products. They just don't do that. They have other
⏹️ ▶️ John people do that. And as Joe points out, they play them against each other to get better rates and everything. But it's
⏹️ ▶️ John those people's problem what to do with the excess capacity in their factories. Now, now now it seems great.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like there is no excess capacity. TSMC is running flat out. All the RAM manufacturers are
⏹️ ▶️ John selling every chip they can sell. It's like a great business. But that doesn't stay true forever. So if you spend a decade
⏹️ ▶️ John and billions of dollars building building yourself up as a commodity business for RAM, and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John the world changes and we're not in the current crisis, you either lose money hand
⏹️ ▶️ John over fist or you have to become a different kind of company. And Apple doesn't want to do either of those things. So it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this makes sense when you, as I think Brian lays out the question, like it makes perfect sense. Look at all these other things
⏹️ ▶️ John they do. He mentions the SOCs, but they don't make their own SOCs. They pay TSMC to do it. TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John has that factory that they invest billions and billions of dollars into that they need to constantly turn out chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple is not their only customer. Apple used to be their biggest customer, but not their only customer. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn't want to do that. They want someone else to do it for them. And they want to be able to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John have things fabbed in Arizona for last year's or two years' old chips or whatever. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it might be a good idea. But if you look at it more closely, it is a thing that Apple is never going to do and would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably be a terrible 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 U.S. 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 new, on the beta OSs, and I haven't made it through the waitlist yet. But if you allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri when unlocked, and if it allows you to go searching your personal context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without, you know, like a face ID challenge or whatever, then yes, I suppose that is possible. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it were me, even as an American, I would do the thing where you hold the side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the buttons on either side for a few seconds to force a non-biometric unlock. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely 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 solution of like locking out the phone so biometric authentication doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, that's great if you are afraid of being arrested in your country
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having, you know, having law enforcement try to get you to unlock your phone. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's a different situation than like border control entry. For a border entry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation, like you have to get through these people to get where you're going. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just say no. If you won't give them access to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want, they can just deny you access to the country. So it's a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation. And I think in that case, like I think the, especially like for non-U.S. citizens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to enter the U.S., I think we are such incredible jerks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that area. And again, that's only getting worse under the current administration. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not have that option. Like if they lock out their phone, then the border control can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well, I'm just not letting you in the country then. Whatever you need to come to the US for, it's not happening. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very different power situation. I think if in this context, if one of our terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco border agents wants to ask you to show them your, you know, your Instagram account or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think your only real option is to do it. Or, again, or like cancel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your vacation or cancel the conference you were going to and leave. And that's not really an option for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people entering the border. So the reality is they're going to just do it. And whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical measures you're going to try to implement, I think, you know, best case scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you can hide apps. Like that's, that I think is, you know, if you, if you don't want them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that you have a certain app installed, you can just, you can, you can put it in the hidden folder and make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require face ID. That's the best way to make sure an app doesn't appear to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist on your phone so that if they make you search for it or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won't show up. So that you can do. But if they're asking for your social media handles and they're going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look at that, like to say, I don't have Instagram, it's a pretty easy thing to go 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want them to not see that you have Signal installed, that's probably a lot easier of a lie to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. Whereas if you say, I don't use any social media, they could very easily just check and find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your profile if it's public. And then you're in trouble for a couple of problems. So be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ John savvy person, if it was working from the unlock screen, blah, blah, blah, could use it to be more successful But just
⏹️ ▶️ John because the old 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
⏹️ ▶️ John to social engineer your way to mitigate this, my advice would be to drain the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone and just tell them it's broken. Because are they geniuses? or Are they going
⏹️ ▶️ John to sit there? Because you know how long iOS devices take when they're like the batteries totally drained. When you plug it in, it just shows the little
⏹️ ▶️ John battery with the thing. That takes forever and they're not going to want to wait. And if you just tell them it's broken and they can't turn it on,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that's social 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 is talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about 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 Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John require a passcode. And you can also drain the battery completely before going to the airport if that doesn't freak you out. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John your boarding pass might be on the phone too. So you're going to have to print it out. Like, it's a terrible world we live in. Don't come to the U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not a good place to visit. Our government is bad. Yeah, pretty much. Better than Rome.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know. Rome has universal healthcare. That's true. And will not arrest you
⏹️ ▶️ John for saying something on social media and won't shoot you dead in the street. Yeah, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do have a couple of things on us. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot, a lot. And they have one more wallet now than they used to. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ZocDoc and Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. One of our many perks of ATP membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every week, we do about 20 more minutes of content on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some topic that just wouldn't fit in the main show because, as you know, a lot of stuff happens in computers. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Anthropic's Fable and John's,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, LLM bug releases. We're going to hear what that means in Overtime. If you want to hear that, join atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at CAS.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Auntie Marco Arman. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It's accidental. They didn't mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann accidental, accidental. Check the podcast so
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 it 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, so it's 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 and your feelings about AI. Even though, like, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the overtime is going to be about Anthropics Fable and all the drama there and me using Fable, but you've also been
⏹️ ▶️ John using AI. And before I read your blog post, I was like, oh, this is great. Casey has the exact same idea as me. He's
⏹️ ▶️ John going to talk about exactly the thing that I'm going to talk about. And then I read your post and like, nope, it's totally different.
⏹️ ▶️ John So summarize what you wrote 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 WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, I had somebody write in and they were very kind and very polite. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that something was broken. And the particular something, if I recall correctly, was that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 want to 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be toward the bottom of the screen so you can rearrange them and so on and so forth. And I had 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 a section
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like flush its, before it has a chance to flush its 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 you know, battle tested, like almost flawless bits of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iOS SDK. So it was a very weak theory that I held very loosely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this person wrote in and you know, said, oh, it's not working for me. They were very kind about it. They weren't jerks about it. And I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a follow-up question here and there and then got a got a log file from them, which is very kind of them to spend the time with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and give them, you know, or give me that log file. And there was something in the log
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file that made me go, huh, that doesn't seem right. And I'm at the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't want to sit down and like properly do work. Like I don't want to bust out Xcode. I don't want to like really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really do work. So I thought to myself, well, let me talk to my buddy Claude and let me see what Claude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Code can come up with. And so I asked Claude to take a look at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one particular section of my code. And the literal verbatim query that I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Claude was, in user settings dot save I save the user's preferred arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sections of their main or discover screen on call sheet. Sometimes users will report that this setting is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reverted to the default. I'm completely at a loss as to how or why that could be happening. Can you take a look and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see if you have any guesses, please? That was the entire prompt. It obviously has access to all my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code, but that was the entire prompt. It was a brand new session. I'd given it no other information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this had been happening for months now. And again, I'd glanced at it. I looked at the code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, looked at the code there, couldn't freaking figure it out. So I asked Claude, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey churned for some amount of time. I want to say it was between two, maybe five minutes tops. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, oh, I think I know what this is, Not verratum anymore, but I think I know what this is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it spelled out what it thought the problem was. And it wasn't changing code at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was just saying, here's what I think the problem is. Actually, so I'm looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back. This is the compressed version of the conversation, but I had my prompt and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Found it. Let me confirm by looking at discover section state, which is a piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my code, and the constant keys. you know what Read for a little bit. I found it. Let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me confirm. Nothing else writes the old toggle key, but now I'm getting into specifics. But then confirmed. I have a strong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess, and it clearly explains why only some users see it. And it turns out that there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a very brief window of time when I allowed users to turn on or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off sections of the Discover screen, but I did not yet have the code written to rearrange sections
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Discover screen. And that was a released version of Call Sheet, not just TestFlight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a honest to goodness, released version of Call Sheet. And I sent that out into the wild.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then very briefly thereafter, I released into the wild the version that lets you rearrange things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it turns out the specifics aren't particularly important, but it turns out that the way in which I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to key off of, well, did they have the version that only did the on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and off? Or do they have the version that does on-off and rearranging?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I was looking at that and trying to do like basically a migration, I screwed it up. It was my fault. I screwed it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that if you had run the version of the app that did the on-off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which again, only existed for maybe a week at most, and then went and did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the migration and went to do the newest version at the time, which was the one that allows the on-off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and rearranging, I screwed up the way I did that migration. So it would keep migrating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time. And every time it migrated, it would clear out what was there and it would reset it anew.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the reason it was sporadic was because it was only people potentially who messed with this setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at the very least that ran that one specific version of the app. I don't remember what version it is offhand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Claude found it and it found it in five or 10 minutes. And that was that. And I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, well, there's this one other thing that's weird. Occasionally, when you override the language settings or the region
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings and Call Sheet, similar stuff happens. Now that, that isn't user defaults. That's,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, what is it, cloud ubiquitous key value
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John store or something like that? It's basically like…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, thank you. It's it's basically similar to user defaults, but it's stored in iCloud, right? And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. And again, it was me being an idiot at the end of the day. That's what it boiled down to. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, it was fascinating that here I am at the beach, and I'm obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like paying attention to what's going on. And when it presents a theory, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't remember if I had it implement the fix, but at the very least, when it presented the theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked at it and then I did end up opening up Xcode because now I'm nerd snipe. I've nerd sniped myself, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it presents the theory and then I look at Xcode and say, oh, no, nope, this sounds right. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep, that's got to be it. And so then I either implemented it myself, or I think what I might have had to do is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a first pass, and then I rejiggered a fair bit of it. And then I asked it, okay, I've rejiggered what you've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. You know, does this still look right? 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heck was going on. Again, on and off for months. I would look at it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few minutes here, and then I'd decide I still don't get it. And then I'd look at it for a few minutes another time and I still don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get 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, because my laptop, my $5,000, soon to be $8,500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop, was sitting on like the coffee table. And I 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, I have a coworker again because what this felt like was so, it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like so much, like me saying to a coworker, hey, I'm banging my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head 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, about working with coworkers and particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing so in person, although, you know, maybe this would be just as fine, just this would work just as well remotely. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my memory of it was in person because it was eight years ago. I miss so desperately being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like a conference room, standing in front of a whiteboard and working a problem, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe standing, you know, maybe sitting in front of a projector and you know, looking at a, looking at code together and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working a problem. And more than I have at any point in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that AI provides for us like this very moment. But is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it worth my computers being twice as much? Is it worth possibly systemic inflation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we 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 a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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, with work, work through these problems with me. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey takes so long to bring any human being up to speed on my code base and the way I like to write code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that even if they would have taken either of you 10 minutes to spot the bug, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have taken the three of us working together or the two of us working together 10 hours to get up to speed on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way my code works. And as a developer, thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myopically as a developer, this is such an incredible boon to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my ability to write code and do work and fix problems. And I'm so enthusiastic about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so excited about it. As a pundit, as a human, as a person, I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a developer, holy crap, it's so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have found I'm leaning more into that opinion as time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes on. You know, when you look at even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just what you're saying now, like even just the bug fixing and testing abilities of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern AI tools, it dramatically changes the landscape of software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background download demon uh because it creates these weird like NSURL session D folders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in various places and fills them with crap. And you know maybe at some point the temp files aren't being cleaned up properly. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've had logic in Overcast to try to clean those up over time. and and uh and one of 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don't make the kinds of things people want and I don't support them in the kind of way that open source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software needs to be supported to get a lot of community around it. Oh well. But I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? The other day, just last week, I asked Claude, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here's this component in Overcast that's the downloader. People are reporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this storage usage. I can't figure out why. Look through this component. It's probably here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 to the console and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it found a bug. There is one case where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had like, you know, I was testing a Boolean condition with a not on it and I had the logic backwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is like a weekly occurrence for me and I'm not proud of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But oh my gosh, I need one of those signs. You know, it has been zero days since I've screwed up basic Boolean logic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh, I'm right there with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco component, maybe I wouldn't have made the same mistake. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if you had tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, maybe. This would have been a hard one to come up in a test, honestly. But yeah, point taken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I've had CloudWrite tests for me too. It's wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the topic of Boolean logic, though, I've never even proposed this, and everyone who has proposed
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have surely been shouted down with this exact argument. But I come from a language that had the keyword
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 going to be the end of the world because they're going to, oh, it's going to make me screw up the logic because I
⏹️ ▶️ John can't handle it. Right. Guess what Swift has?
⏹️ ▶️ John else block. Oh, yeah, yeah. And guard condition else is, I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than an unless keyword in terms of making you accidentally put the wrong 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, Marco So all you people out there saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm never going to allow unless in Swift, you would love unless. And guard as much as I like it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand the function that serves in the language. Guard else,
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up those temp files that are abandoned by the system. So like if the background download demon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abandons a file, like if the process crashes maybe, then that file might never be cleaned up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This found that bug and while it was there, it found a couple other little bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might affect background download terminations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and by the way, and it was giving statements to me in like the feedback chat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff about like, oh, when users delete episodes, I never told it it was a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. I never, the component it was looking at was not dealing with episodes. It figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that out just from the rest of the code. Like, this is amazing. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I come from a little bit different angle in that it's been a much longer time since I've worked with other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmers. And I never worked with that many of them. Like, my, my biggest team I ever worked on programmer-wise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like six people. I'm not coming from the corporate world where I'm used to having a lot more infrastructure around me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more like testing and process and things like that. Like I don't come from that world, so I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it. The way I see this so far is like, not only is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowing me to write better software, the kind of bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's finding, you know what I had to do next? Overcast fans, I'm having it look at my priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast logic because the priority podcast insertion into playlist with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priorities set on them, ever since the rewrite, people have been very upset that it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird behavior that they don't think is right. And that's a really hard thing to write tests for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, I'm not going to do it anyway, but Claude can. And Claude also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found some logical bugs in that. And so I'm going to, in the next few days, probably ship an overcast beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update that includes that download fix and these priority playlist fixes. And people can start telling me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they work for them. And these are like really obscure little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 allowing me to write better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software and it's allowing me to continue being a one-person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team for longer. Now, I don't know how long I want to be a one-person team with Overcast, to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've been honestly thinking about maybe trying to hire another programmer to help me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do more things because I feel a little bit stretched right now. But Claude gets me some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the way there in terms of like, if I have like certain bugs on my hit list, I can have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a look and it fixes it. By the way, just a disclosure, Claude has been a sponsor of our show and probably still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be. But honestly, all this also applies to Codex and everything. When you have it, look at it. It's just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like AI broadly. Right now, I happen to be using Claude. But anyway, I also think like from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I've heard, Apple also uses Claude internally a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last year or so. Well, look at what happened at WBDC this year when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolled by those giant walls of text of oftentimes fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small but nice little fixes. How do you think Apple did all that in one year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's not because they had a change of heart and realized software quality now matters. No, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they are using Claude to fix their own bugs and to help them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco develop things more quickly. And that's going on across the industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think even though this is this is kind of a, it's going to be a bumpy ride for lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, as we've talked about, both from a straight up like, you know, AI coding and security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perspective, which we'll talk about more over time. Also to just as everything we've been talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI itself is very disruptive and turbulent and causing a bunch of turbulence in the world and is not a universal gain for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody. But specifically in the area of software and software quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it's a huge boon because everyone can start finding and fixing really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, obscure bugs that a human never would have found. And when you see Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant wall of text WDC slide, you can tell that's what's going on here. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fixing their own stuff and we are all benefiting from it. So I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it's as Casey said, like, this is not a universal good, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are some real benefits to this and specifically this area. And I am here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And just very briefly, and I also covered this very briefly in the blog post, but I'd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to reiterate here, in my perfect world, I would have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money coming in from Call Sheet where I could hire somebody either half-time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or full-time to be that person that we can work together to figure these things out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Call Sheet does not make that kind of money. It does make enough money to handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a monthly fee from Claude, which I'm now paying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, they did sponsor in the past and I was rolling on the freebies that they gave us when they sponsored.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now I'm paying them and I'm choosing to 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 honest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 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 strokes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we were talking about. But in this one specific way, I don't feel too guilty about it at all. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is so rewarding having what isn't a person, but occasionally kind of feels like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person to fire questions at and work with and figure out problems. And again, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of times I don't take the code that Claude writes or I vastly change it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fit my preferences and style and so on and so forth. But having it identify where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a problem is, 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 topics you touched on first, Marco, on the big wall of text and Apple fixing bugs. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John sure 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 that requires a corporate mandate, an actual decision that, hey, this release, we're going to fix bugs. Once
⏹️ ▶️ 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 and management that's
⏹️ ▶️ John 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. So kudos to Apple for deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend time fixing bugs. And Casey, on your blog post, I do feel like even
⏹️ ▶️ John though you've spent a lot of time talking about the the nitty-gritty of the bug or whatever, I felt like the thrust of your post was what you were getting
⏹️ ▶️ John out at the end there, which is like the feeling of working with someone else. And I i feel like your 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 or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like having that experience with the coding agent was like, you know, I really do miss working
⏹️ ▶️ John with people. I miss this. This kind of reminds me of that. And here's a need that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have in my life. On the flip side of that, I would say that even though this evokes
⏹️ ▶️ John that feeling and reminds you that you want it, you know, the AI thing is not a
⏹️ ▶️ John it fools you into thinking it is, but it's like, that's a dangerous trap. I mean, it's a trap a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people fall into. Obviously, it's more dangerous the more these things are able to fool
⏹️ ▶️ John people into thinking that they're a little person that they're talking with. And so, I mean, in all cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone finds themselves in that situation, it is highlighting a need, not
⏹️ ▶️ John fixing a problem. And the need is, I have a need for human contacts, right? I miss
⏹️ ▶️ John my coworkers or whatever. That need is not filled by talking to an LLM agent,
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately. So take, if, if you find yourself using one of these things and finding it's like, I just, I find myself just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just love talking to it. and It makes me feel better. That's highlighting a need that is not fulfilling that need.
⏹️ ▶️ John So please, everybody, yeah, LMs are not people. But but the need
⏹️ ▶️ John is real. And I feel like that experience and like that, the, what you took away from it is not entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, now I have a tool to make my apps better. That's part of it. You just talked about it. But also, I've
⏹️ ▶️ John identified something that I'm not getting in my life, especially if it's something that you used to have. I'm like Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John who is far removed from that and never really had it to the same degree as you. You could find other ways to get
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I mean, I mean, working on open source projects or other things where you're collaborating with someone on code doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense to do it for call sheet for the reasons you stated because you'd have to hire someone to do that because it's not like someone's going to help you with your app
⏹️ ▶️ John for fun. But that's, you know, that's maybe argues for like, say, say you get super into
⏹️ ▶️ John Jellyfin or Home Assistant or whatever, like dabbling in that environment. It doesn't become a second job
⏹️ ▶️ John or a third job or a fourth job or whatever, but like that could give you that experience of working with other people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you also mentioned like you could have had someone else like ask some other programmer you know
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at this thing and see if we could figure out the bug or whatever. Well, guess what? If you asked another programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that, if you asked me to do that, I would have said, oh, why don't you just ask the agent of your choice
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 LLMs. There's, you know, fuzz
⏹️ ▶️ John testers and Valgrind and all like, this is not the first tool that humans have ever made that helps find bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John in programs. It's an amazing, powerful one that surpasses all others, yes, but it's not the first one. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were asked another human today to come in and help you find bugs in your program, this would be the tool that they would pull
⏹️ ▶️ John out. They 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
⏹️ ▶️ John programmer is counterproductive unless you're taking some kind of moral stand against it, which is fine. But I'm saying most
⏹️ ▶️ John people who you asked would grab for the same tool that you were already going to use anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I 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
⏹️ ▶️ John the past, I personally believe that it is possible, not currently happening,
⏹️ ▶️ John but possible to make a ethical, environmentally responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John created under ideal circumstances, blah, blah, version of this simply because code, like
⏹️ ▶️ John to give an example, if Apple trained its own coding agent, if it was not terrible at doing that, let's
⏹️ ▶️ John say they were actually good at doing it. They trained their own coding agent on all the source code Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has ever created, that would be an incredibly powerful agent for writing for Apple platforms, just
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the code that Apple owns because it wrote it. That's what it would be trained on. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they would 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 it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, isn't the rest of it just details? I mean, it's kind of important details. If you, if you're living in Memphis and
⏹️ ▶️ John you got XAI data centers spewing out smoke next to you, it is not a, it is not a theoretical thing. It is a real
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ John the current form that we're currently 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 call sheet 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, Marco If you look at what your
⏹️ ▶️ John actual cost of you're
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ John be running on renewable resource data centers and all that stuff. But like, we're not there right now. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ John a weird time to be in. But I do I did enjoy your blog post less
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 like what I felt like your thrust was in the post, which was like, I miss programming
⏹️ ▶️ John a very strange conclusion going in to say, oh, I use these cool AI tools to do coding or whatever. And the lesson is I
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ John like, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John problem or working with people on 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 going to be your friends, especially if you're like their boss or whatever, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the thing I missed the most from working in an office is lunch, like with other people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just being able to hang out. You can have lunch at home, Marco. It's okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I hear you. I really do. I mean, I was lucky enough to work in very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very progressive, as in the word I'm looking for, but places where they did not micromanage every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second of my day for the most part. And I remember like at my most recent jobby job,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was when the Switch was brand new or very new. There were a handful of times that we would go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to the cafeteria and all of us would do like, would do eight player Mario Kart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey races with our Switches for a little while over lunch. And like that, you can do that to a degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the internet, but it's just, it's fun and different doing it in person. And yeah, you're exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that was the thing that struck me so much about this experience was it reminded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me of having coworkers. And I do miss that quite a bit. I am not, I'm not trying to complain. I have, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live an incredibly blessed and lucky life. I am so thankful to everyone listening to my words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now because you, you listening to me makes my life, Marco's life, John's life possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't, 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for having coworkers, for having people, even if they're just work friends and once you leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that job, you never speak to them again. It's still nice to have work friends. And I and I miss that in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey development capacity. I'm so lucky to have that with the two of you, with Mike and with others from a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcasting capacity, but I do miss it quite a bit from a development capacity.