698: And Do What?
30 Jun 2026Siri AI impressions, M6 and M7 rumors, Apple’s role in the supply chain, languages for LLMs, and price hikes for everyone!
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Who’s bored?
- 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Dev: Mac-assed Mac Apps
- Follow-up:
- Nugs and Sonos
- As the prophecy foretold… ☹️
- Mythos is back, but Fable isn’t
- Rumors about Siri AI indexing
- Corrections about 8TB SSDs (via Aaron Raimist)
- Price increases abound! ☹️
- On the Apple TV price hike (via Chris Carley)
- Steam Machine (More)
- Xbox
- Micron points fingers at Apple (News+ Link)
- Apple asks Trump to save their 🥓
- No M6 Pro/Max/Ultra‽
- Intel to fabricate the M7‽
- New Siri
- Iconography
- Joanna Stern’s review
- Gui Rambo’s experiment
- Dan Moren
- John tries to get it to understand Perl (because of course he did —Ed.)
- Ask ATP:
- Why isn’t Apple on a reliable cadence for processor releases? (via Ammar)
- If we really embrace agentic coding, what would be the right choice of language for that? (via Matthew Southworth)
- Do we collect vintage computers? (via Phil Kim)
- Casey:
- John:
- Post-show: Casey asks for technical support
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Ubiquiti Enterprise NAS
Sponsored by:
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Never bored
- Special: Mac-Assed Mac Apps
- Sonos music sources
- The obscure crash report
- Mythos is back, sort of
- Mail-indexing rumor
- 8 TB Mac corrections
- Price-increase corner
- Apple’s role in all of this
- Apple begs for Chinese RAM
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- Skipping M6 Pro/Max?
- Intel to the rescue?
- Siri AI impressions 🖼️
- Sponsor: Quince
- #askatp: M-chip release cadence
- #askatp: Languages for LLMs
- #askatp: Vintage computers
- Ending theme
- Casey’s tech-support question
Never bored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i I just basically ran into the room. so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good busy is better than not busy, I would argue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think so. I am never bored. Like, when when was the last time either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you were bored? Oof,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimately bored?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Sometimes on plane flights, I get bored because I can't do anything on plane flights.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, I can't
⏹️ ▶️ John watch a movie. I can only listen to podcasts. And sometimes if it's a long plane flight, like you're podcasted out
⏹️ ▶️ John and then what's left? That's fair. Yeah. And and the thing about planes too is like, why don't you talk to the person next to you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I cannot hear a damn thing on planes. Like it's so forget about the noise cancelling headphones. Just trying to have a conversation with the person
⏹️ ▶️ John next to me is like, I feel like I'm shouting. We're in a club. No, no, none of us want to be here. Let's go somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, like, the person next to you does not want that ever. Like, they want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about my wife.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, okay. Well, that may be true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe. That may be true, but still. Oh, Because she's got stuff to do. She's got knitting projects. She's watching a
⏹️ ▶️ John movie, like having a ball, but I have to stare out the window at the horizon. So it kind of sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. I just, I realize, like, you know, because of course, whenever you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around, you know, children and especially teenagers, you, you will frequently hear the complaint,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm bored. This seems to be something that only children really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have. Because like with every spare moment of time, I'm either choosing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do nothing. Like if I need to, like, if I need a break, I'm like, I'm going to stop and just watch TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the rest of the night or whatever. Or there's a million things I want to do with every ounce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time I have. Like I have so many projects going always all at once. I'm juggling a million
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different things. I have computer projects. I have 3D printing projects. Of course, I have like, you know, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual work, my programming projects, multiple programming projects. I have the restaurant now, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is open for the season. Like I have so many things going on all the time. There's a million things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around my house that need to be done, like different projects and tasks and cleanups and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there's a million things you haven't done? Is that a reference to something? Just you wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done, John. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, whatever that is, I have to watch or listen to or experience that. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. It's fine. Just keep, just keep going. You've seen Hamilton. You just didn't pluck it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not seen Hamilton.
⏹️ ▶️ John You haven't seen Hamilton? I don't know. I keep making Hamilton references, but very frequently Marco says things that are so close
⏹️ ▶️ John to Hamilton. I'm just like, come on, they can't be. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's it. Like, I've just, I've, I've never, the idea of being bored is so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foreign to me. Like, I, I just don't, I haven't been bored in a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I feel like my recollection of summers, particularly around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around either Declan or Adams' ages, was, and I had friends that I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play with or hang out with, depending on how old we're talking about. But I remember summers just being defined by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boredom. Now, that was still better than being in school and bored.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember just being so bored. And I feel like I could have done within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason whatever the crap I wanted. Like my family growing up was not super into limiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like video games or anything like that. Like I could have done whatever. And constantly I remember whining to my mother, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bored. Like, I don't know what my deal was, man. But yep, I hear you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you, I think you were a normal teenager. Like, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or normal, you know, kid, you know, whatever age we're targeting here. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey think it's,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it's maybe less so with teenagers because they, they are more easily able to find their own stuff or, you know, talk
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't think I ever complained that I was bored when I was a teenager. I'm sure I did when I was like a toddler, but I don't remember that. But I was a teenager.
⏹️ ▶️ John No way would I have complained that I was bored. Unless my parents were taking me somewhere and forcing me to be like, let's
⏹️ ▶️ John go look at the big, biggest, world's biggest ball of twine or something. Then I would have complained that I was bored as a teenager. That's fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they didn't do that, so I didn't have that problem. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even those things are even boring for adults. That makes sense.
Special: Mac-Assed Mac Apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a new member special that we recorded just a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days ago as we were recording this. We have ATP Dev Mac asked Mac Apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what the heck does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we explained it at the top of the show, but this is a response to a bunch of listener questions that we got
⏹️ ▶️ John about what makes a really good Mac app, essentially, especially for people who are like, I'm new to the Mac platform
⏹️ ▶️ John or I've never developed a Mac app. And you guys always talk about like, this is not like a real Mac app. It's weird
⏹️ ▶️ John or it's not the right, you know, what makes a great Mac app? How can you tell? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John advice, which we fall back on a few times in the episode, but isn't actually very helpful, which is like, well, you know when you see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe we know when we see it, but not everybody does. So we tried mightily in this episode to see if
⏹️ ▶️ John we could nail down a few concrete things about what makes a really good Mac app. And if you're wondering about the title,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, we explained it at the top of the member special where that phrase comes from, but it basically just means what makes a great
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac app? I feel like we could have three more specials just on this same topic because I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like we just scratched the surface of it. Like we didn't even get into like, can Apple still make good Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and stuff? Like there's so many other aspects of this, but we tried the best we could to tackle this
⏹️ ▶️ John topic from our different perspectives and to sort of feel around the edges. And I think there's lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John useful, actionable stuff in there, obviously, if you're a developer. And if you're not a developer and you're just sick of hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John us talking about, oh, that's not a good Mac app. What do you even mean? Well, we try to explain in this member special. So check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. I thought this was a fun one. And it is one of those very difficult things, like John said, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you define what is sort of undefinable? But I think we did a pretty decent job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. And, you know, the people who have already listened seem to have very nice things to say, which we always appreciate. So check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Marco, if one isn't a member, but if you were interested in hearing ATP Dev,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Asked Mac apps, what would you do? You would head to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp.fm slash join and join our wonderful membership for all of these wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits, including our exclusive member content, ad-free episodes, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more. We're going to get Marco an air horn so he can fulfill his morning zoo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dreams. I already have a vibra-slap and a bell. What else do you want?
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not a real air horn. It's just a soundboard air horn. And your voice,
⏹️ ▶️ John you're like, your voice, your morning, you know, radio DJ voice still
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like someone making fun of a radio DJ and not someone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann doing an
⏹️ ▶️ John impersonation of a radio DJ. So the sarcasm just comes through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the problem with doing any kind of, you know, kind of put-on like that is that the writing in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head needs to needs to keep up with the speed of speech. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm, I'm bottoming out there by the end of that. Like you've just got to read the URL. Well, fair.
Sonos music sources
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some follow-up. I have some exceptionally quick follow-up with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nugs. I don't have it in front of me. I apologize to whoever pointed this out to me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody pointed out that you can add Nugs as a source within the Sonos app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with Sonos speakers, some people just airplay to them. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that every great once in a while. But generally speaking, one of the things I love so much about Sonos is is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will play things on their own. You know, you can go into the Sonos app and pick which speakers you want to play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things on and what you want to play, and then they will just handle it. And your phone or whatever device is not involved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all from that point going forward. So I have Apple Music on mine when I was still a Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscriber. I had that on there. But I didn't realize that there are like 100 or 200 other services
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can add, and Nugs is one of them. So if you are interested like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the Dave Matthews band, or if you're interested like both of us are in Goose, uh you can check that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out and go into your Sonos app and add that as another source. I had no idea that was a thing. Then
The obscure crash report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, John, apparently you had a prophecy and it has come true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Last episode I was talking about, I forget it was, I think it was in the after show. I was talking about a bug I had been chasing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it was an overtime. There was some overlap. bug I was chasing in one of my apps uh, and I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I had finally fixed it. And I said in that episode, and here I am saying this, but of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as I finish this episode, I'm sure there'll be another crash report and showing that I haven't fixed it. And guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what? There was indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ John grace period, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John report saying, hey, that crash on quit inside AppKit code is still there. I was thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John it last night when I saw this and I was like, you know, since it's like
⏹️ ▶️ John one every three days on average, this couldn't just be like one person's computer
⏹️ ▶️ John where they have some weird debug thing turned on for AppKit. Because it's like an assertion inside AppKit while
⏹️ ▶️ John it's deallocating stuff. And it's like, you know, the thing that's causing the crash is an assertion that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there should be nothing left in this dictionary while we're deallocating stuff inside AppKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is something left there, apparently, on this person's computer. And then it just, the assertion fails
⏹️ ▶️ John and it crashes on its way out the door. By that point, all the code in my app is finished executing and it's just deallocating
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. So I don't know what it is. I have so much debugging about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I said on the show, when I talked about this, I've never been able to reproduce this. I cannot make it happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just can't. I put in so much debugging. I tried everything I could think of.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just never, ever, ever, ever, ever happens for me. And I even put in debugging and say, hey, that assertion,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know what it's checking because I had an LLM decompile AppKit for me and says, yep, this is what it's checking. And this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can check it yourself. And so on my way out the door, I check and I always say, make sure this thing is empty. And of course, it's always empty
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I can tell. And then, you know, anyway, someone out there is having this bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it's still there. So I just want to update everybody on that. And yes, I did curse myself by saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that this would happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As the prophecy foretold.
Mythos is back, sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, John, I do have some good news for you, though. Mythos is back. Well, Hayden Field over at The Verge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: After a roller coaster negotiation process with the Trump administration that dragged on for two weeks, Anthropic's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mythos 5 is finally back in action, at least somewhat, for a select group of organizations, according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a letter from the government to Anthropic that was viewed by The Verge. Fable 5, however, sorry, John, the public-facing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mythos class model appears to still be in limbo with no apparent timeline for a rollout agreement.
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well, I guess the security researchers can get access to Mythos again. Lucky them.
Mail-indexing rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to indexing for the forthcoming Siri AI, word on the street
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that spotlight indexing only downloads a certain number of mail messages a day. So depending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the size of your mail archive, it could take a long time to complete. Well, that doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprise me because it's one of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John We want to be friendly. So just do X messages per day. But then they don't think about like, well, what if someone has X times
⏹️ ▶️ John a million messages in their mail? But I am excited to see that it seems like it's actually going
⏹️ ▶️ John to download all the messages rather than just, I'm just going to take the top 100 and that'll be it. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is related to people saying they were waiting like a week for their indexing to be finished with installing the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John 27 beta. So yeah, here we are out here hoping that the rumor about the 26.6
⏹️ ▶️ John OSs is true and that will do all the indexing for us while we wait for 27 to be released. But we'll see.
8 TB Mac corrections
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Aaron Ramist had some corrections for both you and for I. Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, On the last episode, John said that you can't get an 8 terabyte SSD on the Mac Mini. This isn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true anymore. Apple does offer 8 terabytes of the Mac Mini, even with the base M4 Pro. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you mean for you and me. Did I say you and I?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Second correction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, uh so John, did you do any further research about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't know why I didn't see that option. Maybe it's one of those ones where you get to change it for something else. But anyway, I priced it out just to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be like to get a Mac Mini with an 8 terabyte SSD. And it starts at $5,400.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is for a binned M4 Pro that is down two CPU cores and four GPU cores and 24 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM and just plain gigabit Ethernet. $5,400 Mac Mini. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would it take to have a stock Mac Mini, but in a gold case? You think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John would be more or less?
⏹️ ▶️ John Solid gold or just plated?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it's probably a lot of gold. Gold's pretty expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. So like the whole idea, I was musing about Mac Mini is like, if I could get like some kind of ARM computer to
⏹️ ▶️ John tide my over, or if I don't care about power, what can I get? But the problem is the SSD. The SSD is the problem. I was doing some
⏹️ ▶️ John more pricing out of things with like various discounts and stuff. And in most cases, with Apple's pricing,
⏹️ ▶️ John an 8-terabyte SSD costs more than the computer. Like the upgrade, even on a Mac Studio, very often in most
⏹️ ▶️ John configs that aren't ultras, the 8 terabyte SSD upgrade from whatever the stock is costs
⏹️ ▶️ John more than the whole rest of the computer combined.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, Aaron continues. Similarly, Casey said you have to get the top of the line max chip to get the 8 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the MacBook Pro, which is not technically true. On a MacBook Pro, 8 terabytes is an option with the base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5 Max. However, the base M5 Max only supports 36 gigs of RAM. So if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any additional RAM, then you'd have to upgrade to the top of the line Max chip. I think this is what got me because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you recall, I was on the air. I was pricing out basically my existing M3 MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if I were to buy it today and I have 64 gigs of RAM, so I conflated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the issue being SSD where it wasn't the issue. The issue actually was RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that caused me to go to the super top-of-the-line M5 Max. So I regret the error.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's always been the case with Apple's configs in recent years where upgrading to some other unrelated thing will be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John whoa, we got to change a bunch of other specs because they're really limiting the amount of configs
⏹️ ▶️ John they'll sell to you. And so they're it's like it's getting to be like optioning a car. It's like, well, if you want the entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know, interior, you know, whatever thing like leather seats or things
⏹️ ▶️ John are connected in weird ways. So I mean, I don't really blame them given the difficulties of
⏹️ ▶️ John component pricing, but it does make configuring these things even trickier than normal.
Price-increase corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's go to price increase corner. We're going to start with the Apple TV. Chris Carly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote in with a point that I think, John, maybe you intended to make this on the previous episode. Chris writes: a big Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV price hike makes sense since, unlike many other products, the Apple TV doesn't have other expensive components
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mask the changes in price of RAM and of storage. The Apple TV is, in terms of cost, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just an old iPhone chip with RAM and storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I did mean to make this point and somehow we moved on to another topic before I could. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we were complaining that I thought the Apple TV, 54% increase to the base price, 67%
⏹️ ▶️ John increase for the good one. It's just brutal, but like what is the Apple TV if not a bucket of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM and storage? Like there's not much
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey else in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It's just the SOC that has the RAM on it and then storage and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, you know, whatever Wi-Fi chip and stuff. It's like, there's nothing else in there. It's the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John similar to the point that I did end up making about like when you do, when you look at how much the RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade have increased, they haven't increased by 20%. They've increased by like 70 or a hundred percent because that's it. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John the source of the problem. It's the RAM. Well, I'm not saying the Apple TV is not overpriced, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the power that it has and hasn't always been pretty expensive for what you get. But if one product was going to have the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage increase, it would be the product that is just basically RAM and storage in the cheapest possible box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto. All right, let's talk Steam Machine. Jay Peters over at The Verge writes, after months of waiting, Valve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has finally announced that the Steam Machine, its new living room-friendly PC, will start at $1,050
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and go on sale beginning actually as we record this today, June 29th. That is not cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially when you're comparing it to like a PlayStation. But I guess, John, it might get worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you, I mean, so it is like a little PC and you can spec it up. And so if you get the maxed out two terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John model with a controller, because apparently the cheap one doesn't even come with a controller, then it's $1,428.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Steam Machine was looking really exciting back when we talked about it many moons ago as like a
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny living room PC that is as friendly as a console or tries to be as friendly as a console
⏹️ ▶️ John and as small and adorable, but it plays PC games. It's basically the desktop plugged in
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the Steam Deck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Valve's Linux platform where they heroically find ways to play Windows games in Linux and gets good performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's not a big fancy gaming PC, but what if you don't want to build a big fancy gaming PC? And what if you also don't
⏹️ ▶️ John want to run handheld? Get a Steam machine. It's like a little PC GameCube. It's so adorable. And it was like, well, no pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John is announced. So what do you think it will be? Like, oh, I don't know. Maybe this will be like as much as the PlayStation 5 Pro, like
⏹️ ▶️ John $700, $600 or $700, maybe even $800. Nope, it's over $1,000. And in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was delayed because they hadn't announced pricing. And then the date came when people expected them to announce pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're like, we're going to wait to see what's going on with the Hulk. And that was, you know, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John a little while ago. And now they've announced pricing and the pricing is bad. I mean, I did see a bunch of YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John videos being like, we're going to build a Steam Machine competitor by building our own PC. And I felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like most of those videos should have focused on how the PC is also more expensive to build now because it's not like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Steam Machine is the only thing that is getting hit by this price increase. But yeah, kind of bad timing
⏹️ ▶️ John on Valve's part. Uh, Although I guess they're probably glad they didn't launch the Steam Machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that like $750, uh, several months ago because anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jay Peters continues, while console makers sometimes subsidize their hardware to bring prices down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Valve is choosing not to do that with the Steam Machine. Here's what Valve said in remarks provided to The Verge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this might seem like an easy solution, it doesn't align with our beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built. If there's anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are religious about it, Valve, it's our belief that open systems are better in the long run for ourselves and our customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage or buy exclusive content for it, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you will want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use. We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either. You shouldn't feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you have to buy Valve hardware. You should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for playing games and select the one that makes sense for you. This means you get to decide which device fits your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal trade-offs around things like price performance, form factor, peripheral support, and everything else you care about. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the strength of the Open PC platform, and subsidizing hardware runs counter to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven't seen anyone push back on this because everyone's like, rah, rah, yeah, open is great. But it's like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John answer doesn't make any sense to me because like all that open stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's not really in Valve's control. Like they're not, I mean, I suppose they could make like a proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John console, but they're not. They're making a gaming PC. And as influential as Valve is, they don't
⏹️ ▶️ John actually control what constitutes a PC game. Microsoft with Windows still has more control
⏹️ ▶️ John over that, even though they're not even running Windows. Like I've talked to this before, they're out there basically trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, we're going to make Windows games run on a thing that's not Windows. And we know we're not in the driver's seat here. We are
⏹️ ▶️ John reactive. Whatever the Windows games do, we'll try to figure out a way to get them to work on our weird Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter layer. But people aren't writing games, at least thus far, directly for
⏹️ ▶️ John Valve. Maybe some developers are, but like they want to sell on Windows. If you make a PC game, you want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John run on Windows because you're really limiting your market if you can't. Now, why would Valve sell at a loss?
⏹️ ▶️ John The one way to do it is like, hey, we're going to sell our consoles at a loss so so many people will buy them. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John once we get them on our consoles, of course, our consoles only run, you know, the PlayStation only runs PlayStation games and then we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John get exclusive to the PlayStation and all that other stuff. So I get what they're getting at in terms of the closed ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But another reason people subsidize stuff is to get people in the
⏹️ ▶️ John door to people who don't have a gaming PC to buy a gaming PC. Because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are able to do that, then you can make it up in the games. And guess what? Valve does make
⏹️ ▶️ John money by selling games for this platform. They have the biggest PC game store
⏹️ ▶️ John on the internet. And so they could sell at a loss and make it up by selling
⏹️ ▶️ John all those damn games. Hell, they make money even when someone buys a game and plays it on their Windows PC
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as they buy it from the Steam store. That's exactly the model. Now, I know it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not a closed ecosystem or whatever, but like, you know, a random company like
⏹️ ▶️ John Alienware can't sell gaming PCs at a loss. They'll go out of business. But Valve is one of the few
⏹️ ▶️ John companies in the PC gaming ecosystem that could sell hardware at a loss because they make money in
⏹️ ▶️ John every game sold. Similarly, Microsoft with the Xbox could sell the Xbox at a loss, hoping to make it up with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox games that are sold. But again, Valve makes money when you buy a game from the Steam Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you don't play it on a Steam machine. So I'm not saying they should sell it a loss or whatever, like do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to do. But like the answer about how we need to keep an open ecosystem when we don't want to lock you in, it's like
⏹️ ▶️ John you selling your thing for low cost doesn't lock me into anything. You still play PC games, games that
⏹️ ▶️ John I can play on my Windows PC if I don't want to buy your Steam machine. So a little bit incoherent.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I'm not going to say disappointing that they're not selling it below cost, but I bet they're selling it close to cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you look at what's in the Steam machine, this looks like they're probably not making a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of money on the hardware. And how can they sell this without making a lot of money on hardware? Because they make
⏹️ ▶️ John so much money in that store. Because the margins on taking a cut of everyone else's PC games is
⏹️ ▶️ John much better than the margins on selling a hardware box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Xbox, Jay Peters yet again. Microsoft is increasing the prices of Xbox consoles again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Starting on August 1st, five 12 gig models will be $100 more expensive, while one terabyte models will be $150
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more expensive. This means that the Xbox Series S will start at $500, the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Series X without a disk drive will start at $750, and the Series X with a disk drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will start at $800. Microsoft also says it will be sunsetting its two terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xbox Series X. Microsoft last raised prices in October by $20 to $70
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and says it had hoped to avoid further hikes. Quote, unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by more than two and a half X, and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. Big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yikes. Expect another
⏹️ ▶️ John doubling. Like I said, they just dropped the high-end model because they're like, we know we can't sell it. We're having enough trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John selling Xboxes as it is. And the two terabyte model probably cost $900 or something. So we're not going to try that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the PlayStation 5 Pro currently costs $900 or something close to that. So I got a bargain when I bought mine
⏹️ ▶️ John at whatever it originally was sold at. But yeah, everyone's raising prices. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Xbox Series X, I don't know if these things are sold at a loss. Although Microsoft gives a good example of how they had raised
⏹️ ▶️ John prices by $20 and $70 and then had to raise them again, that's definitely a Microsoft thing to do. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple thing to do is hold out as long as you can and raise
⏹️ ▶️ John on almost everything by a huge amount that you hope will stick. But we'll say Maybe Apple underestimated
⏹️ ▶️ John how much it had to raise prices too.
Apple’s role in all of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of all these raised prices, a Micron executive suggests that Apple's aggressive purchasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tactics might have helped fuel the memory shortage. Ooh. Rolf Winkler in the Wall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Street Journal writes that Tim Cook said, there's less supply at a time when consumers want devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. That's Tim's quote. Then Rolf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, Micron chief business officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make investments during the memory market's last downturn when Micron's gross profits went negative, in part because certain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customers took advantage to pay rock bottom prices. Sumit said, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive. He said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. Quote, a lot of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is, you know, I mean, go to the press and, you know, passive aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ John subtweet, as we used to say, Apple or whatever. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's quite a fantasy world to believe that you know, this company is saying basically like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple drove a hard bargain. And if they had bought our RAM for more money back when things were okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John then we would have had more profit. And you know what we would have done with that profit? We would have built more factories. So we wouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ John be in this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would you, is that what you would have done with the extra profit? If only they would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agreed to pay higher prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John we wouldn't have given ourselves bonuses or done stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we would have built
⏹️ ▶️ John factories because we would have said, we want to prepare for the future. Now, there probably is some truth to that because
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the more money you make, the more investments in the future and so on and so forth you make. But this is really kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, well, look how the tables have turned
⏹️ ▶️ John back when Apple was in the driver's seat, they were driving these hard bargains and saying, you get nothing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John get one cent per chip and you'll you'll like it because we're buying a bajillion chips and those one cents
⏹️ ▶️ John add up. But like giving them the most razor thin margins, or I said, making making things go negative. And now that
⏹️ ▶️ John they're making huge profits and are richer and like, you know, Apple, you should have been nicer to us before, which, you know, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John business is business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably true, but also that would not have solved or avoided this problem at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Cause like, you know, it's the notion that these companies are so like forward
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking and magnanimous and don't take all their money and, you know, again, give it to bonuses to the top executives
⏹️ ▶️ John and do stock buybacks to make people like, I'm not saying it's 100% that, but history has shown
⏹️ ▶️ John that when the profits are good, most companies do not use it to do forward thinking things. Maybe Micron
⏹️ ▶️ John is different. Maybe they would have done something different. But anyway, it's uh it's kind of like kicking the rest of the industry while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Trotten-Smith, friend of the show, weighed in on this and wrote, Apple starved the silicon industry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, silicon supply chain for years. It was widely discussed back when GPU prices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started to skyrocket. Famously, Palm blamed Apple for not being able to source components for its webOS devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we have a Wayback Machine link to The Verge, where Chris
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ziegler wrote, citing an anonymous source, quote, we told HP we needed better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey displays for the Pre3. They'd come back and say, Apple bought them all. Our suppliers tell us we need to build
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them a factory if we want the displays. And they weren't willing to put the billion dollars up front to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, at various times, Apple has cornered the market on certain commodities. But the other thing Apple has done, as we know from the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John in China book, spend billions of dollars to make people make factories for so it's it's
⏹️ ▶️ John tough to be competing with Apple for components. And Apple, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John cornered the market on flash memory for the nano for a long time. uh Apple likes that situation where it's
⏹️ ▶️ John the one screwing over everybody else. And now Apple's getting screwed over along with everybody else. So uh what goes
⏹️ ▶️ John around comes around, I guess. But yeah, I would i would hope that this entire industry can eventually uh
⏹️ ▶️ John get its feet under it again and try to get things more in balance and have capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John that more closely matches demand without any one customer screwing everybody over, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John that be Apple or Nvidia or who else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think this also, like, you know, A, this is a good use of Apple's cash hoard now because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they want to front the money to build another factory for somebody in exchange for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, all of its output for a number of years, that's something they've done before. It's right out of their playbook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do it actually, I think, all the time. And this is a good time to be doing that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that being said, I think another angle of this is that Apple, when they were dictating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those terms, and this is, again, this is a great reason to read that Apple and China book. It goes into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this. We never really talked about it on the show. It's a very good book.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really is. Really, really, really is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I strongly recommend. I don't read a lot of books. That was one. And it was really good. You know, when you had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, back in the day, you had like Tony Blevins going around like dictating terms to people and Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being his ice cold, you know, dictator self. Like that's Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook leads by edict. Like just do it. Like ice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cold, do it. And Apple's able to negotiate that kind of way, which is not really negotiation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they are in positions of power. And we've seen this over and over again, Apple is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only able to work out good deals for itself when it has all of the power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don't really show a lot of strength in negotiation when they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not able to just dictate terms. So that is one area where I am curious to see how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this situation plays out today, because part of the reason Apple is in this situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that for the last couple of decades, they've done so well that they've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been able to dictate terms to all of their suppliers and have the suppliers basically say, okay, well, we have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically play ball because they're our biggest customer or they're going to give us the highest price or they're going to buy all of our output for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X years or whatever. Whereas now with AI chip demand, Apple is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer a lot of these suppliers' biggest customers. You know, NVIDIA, for instance, is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna i don't know I don't know what the numbers are off the top of my head, but like if you look at between NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple, like who has more sway over, say, TSMC?
⏹️ ▶️ John NVIDIA is TSMC's biggest customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Yeah. Like and that's that's got to irritate Apple. And it definitely hurts their negotiating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position when it comes to getting access to the highest end nodes, getting getting like allocation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the supply. That's, you know, how much of the supply are they willing to give Apple and at what prices and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what terms. Apple hasn't been in the position to need to really negotiate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that rather than dictate for a very long time. And I don't think anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who's there right now has that skill. At least certainly the people who have been dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supplier relations you know, for the last couple of decades, I don't think any of them have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of chances to exercise that skill.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's very much like they're a relationship with developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly like their relationship with developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like, oh, we're developers. we've been working together with developers. We're one big happy family. But
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine, I mean, this has not actually happened, but imagine if the tables ever did turn and suddenly developers had power,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would be like, why are they so mad at us? We've been working together so great for all these years. And it's like, no, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John time we've been hating this. Like the suppliers who have been under Apple's thumb, Apple thinks like, this is great. You know, we've worked
⏹️ ▶️ John together for so long. Why don't they have any loyalty to us? And it's like, they've hated it because you've treated them so badly. And yet
⏹️ ▶️ John they've been nice to your face because you give them billions of dollars. But like the second they don't have to do what you say anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple is shocked. Like, I thought all this time we were friends. like, no, no, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on that topic of like, who's going to, you know, give money to make a new factory in exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John for all its output? The RAM makers now are going to be like, we're not going to take that deal
⏹️ ▶️ John either because we make so much more profit selling high bandwidth memory that the AI people make than we would making
⏹️ ▶️ John like the whatever LPDDR or whatever Apple needs. Like the RAM that Apple uses in its products has lower
⏹️ ▶️ John margins than the RAM that the AI people want. And so these companies are like, if we're going to build another factory, we're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be building high bandwidth memory in it because we make more money for every one of those. And Apple, I know
⏹️ ▶️ John you don't want any of this, but like we would rather not take your money to build a factory and then have
⏹️ ▶️ John to use that factory to make like memory for iPhones. We'd rather build it ourselves and sell the memory
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the people making AI servers because we make more from, like, that's the main problem with this is that the AI,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people making AI servers, both the the silicon, like the NVIDIA silicon and like all the RAM and everything goes into it,
⏹️ ▶️ John those customers will pay more for their stuff. Like that enterprise data center stuff has
⏹️ ▶️ John higher margins than selling RAM for Macs and iPhones. That's a lower margin business. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that's, that's part of the problem. Um, Maybe not so much with TSMC, but definitely with the RAM maker.
⏹️ ▶️ John So hopefully this will work itself out. Like in the end, money solves everything and Apple may have to throw more money than they're used to
⏹️ ▶️ John at various things. And, you know, and and Apple could play this well, like try to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if they can correctly predict how things are going to go, maybe they can get
⏹️ ▶️ John in a situation where there's a glut and an oversupply and the price goes down and they're, they're feeling like they're back in the driver's
⏹️ ▶️ John seat. But uh, for now, they have other strategies that they're trying.
Apple begs for Chinese RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and that brings us to Apple is asking the Trump administration to approve Chinese
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM. Zach Hall at 9to5Mac writes: The Financial Times reports that Apple is seeking a clearance from the Trump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey administration to purchase memory chips from a banned Chinese company. So, looking at the Financial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Times post, Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Chinese company that the Pentagon has put on a ban list because of alleged connections to the People's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Liberation Army, according to six people familiar with the matter. The PLA,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey People's Liberation Army, is the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party and the primary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey armed forces of the People's Republic of China. The iPhone maker has waged a lobbying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey campaign to get the blessing from the White House to help ease the financial pressure on the company from the rise in memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip prices. Apple is not barred from buying chips from CXMT or YMTC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another Chinese memory chip maker, but the Pentagon has put both companies on its Chinese military
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company ban list. The so-called 1260H list contains dozens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Chinese groups with alleged ties to the PLA that undermine U.S. national security. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Commerce Department last year added CXMT to a package of Chinese groups that it intended to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place on a trade ban list called the Entity List, but the White House told it to hold off on new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey export controls because the administration was in the middle of tough negotiations with China
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to reach a truce in the trade war. But most of the people familiar with the matter said it was unclear if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple would get any guarantee from the administration, especially a promise that the U.S. would not later put CXMT on the entity
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a little bit weird in that apparently they could buy from them, but it seems like the government's
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, we're probably not going to let you. And so Apple is sort of preemptively going to the government, to their, their wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ John friends in the government and saying, hey, we really want to buy this RAM from the Chinese companies because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we we need RAM and they have RAM and forbidding us to buy from them is really going to
⏹️ ▶️ John make things bad. And I know you're thinking about not letting us buy from them, but could you pretty please change
⏹️ ▶️ John your mind on that? And we'll see how that negotiation goes. This actually is, you know, as
⏹️ ▶️ John much as we constantly complain about corruption and everything in the Trump administration, this type of thing where companies
⏹️ ▶️ John lobby the government to allow them to do business with other international companies that they want to do business with
⏹️ ▶️ John happens all the time and is a actual somewhat normal function of government. What's not normal is how the decision
⏹️ ▶️ John will actually be made, unlike decisions that are made based on facts and evidence
⏹️ ▶️ John and what's best for the country. This will be made on, let's say, other criteria, but the actual situation is
⏹️ ▶️ John not that foreign, so to speak. Um, So we'll see how that works out for Apple. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they'll they'll try anything. They'll you know, try anything to get their RAM chips for less money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, And this type of thing of like, look, you're not going to build a factory overnight, but what we can do overnight is start buying
⏹️ ▶️ John from a new customer that previously we were staying away from because we, it was, you know, they were supposedly going to be banned.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we'll see how it goes.
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Skipping M6 Pro/Max?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a very interesting report from Mark Gurman on June 25th, which reads:
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple plans to debut a base M6 processor as early as this year. But in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first, the company will skip higher-end versions of that chip. Apple instead aims to introduce the next Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Max chips with the more advanced computing and graphics power in 2027
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as part of a new M7 generation. Apple's taking this unusual step in order to fast-track
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technologies that it originally planned to release later. The change should help meet growing demand for on-device AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capabilities and more graphics-intensive software. Apple plans to introduce the base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M7, codenamed Delos, which is apparently an island off Greece, as early as the first half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of next year. Apple is also planning higher-end M7 Pro, M7 Max, and M7 Ultra chips, all dubbed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andros internally. The M7 Pro and M7 Max are scheduled for as early as the end of 2027,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while the M7 Ultra is on track for 2028. The M7 line is designed primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around major advancements to on-device AI processing. The base version is slated to support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 240 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, and John took the liberty of looking it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the M5 has 153 gigs a second, and the M6 will have 200
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs a second, according to Gurman. And I will repeat, the M7 will allegedly have 240
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabytes per second. The M5 Ultra chip, codenamed Sotra D, will have around 36
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU cores and 80 GPU cores. Apple has also tested support for up to 768
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabytes of memory in the M5 Ultra Max Studio, though the component constraints could complicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its debut you know
⏹️ ▶️ John cost $80,000. You think? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then the following day on the 26th of June, Gurman writes, Apple's first ever touchscreen laptop will rely on the company's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current high-end M5 chips rather than the next generation silicon, though the company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is working on a follow-up model with future M7 processors. The M7 laptop models are planned for as early as the end
⏹️ ▶️ John So here we go. Total destruction of the rumored plans that we've been talking about for a year, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, you believe they're going to, I know the M5 Pro and Max, MacBook Pros came out this year, but supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumor is they're going to come out with the M6 ones this year too. And those are going to be the ones that are redesigned and they have
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED screens and they have touch screens and they're going to have the M6 line and maybe they're going to be called MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra. And yeah, that plan is now like the stuff, I guess the stuff you care
⏹️ ▶️ John about, like OLED, still rumored, touchscreen, still rumored, Redesign, still rumored, M6,
⏹️ ▶️ John no more. Just the same M5 Pro and Macs that are in the current laptops will be in the new ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is somewhat disappointing. But on the other hand, it is a second MacBook Pro release
⏹️ ▶️ John within the same calendar year. And the thing most people are excited about of those laptops is the OLED screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John the redesign, and to a lesser extent, the touch screens. So it's not that disappointing. But I do
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if these end up being called Ultra or if they are priced like Ultras. It might feel kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of bad. It's like, it's an Ultra that's exactly the same speed as the existing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not going to be any faster, like unless they come up with better cooling or something. It's going to be exactly the same speed as a as
⏹️ ▶️ John a MacBook Pro you could have bought months and months ago. It just it's going to have a nicer screen and a touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff. Uh, And I'm not sure what they're going to put the base M6s in
⏹️ ▶️ John that we just talked about. The base M six seems great and everything, but like the fact that they're not even going to do an M six
⏹️ ▶️ John max Pro, Max, or Ultra, that it'll just be the no suffix M six.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, Like that's kind of disappointing that the M six generation will not get any of those other chips. It does make
⏹️ ▶️ John some sense based on the the rumors that German is talking about here of like, uh, you know, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever was planned for the M seven generation, these things, whatever things on the chip that make on-device
⏹️ ▶️ John AI better, Apple's like, look, we have limited resources, limited time. Why don't we
⏹️ ▶️ John fast track the M7 stuff? And just, because the M6s, maybe they're just like, well, they're, you know, a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John percent better than the M5s, but like we want to get to that next step as soon as possible. So rather than clogging
⏹️ ▶️ John up the supply lines of TSMC, the limited capacity that we get in TSMC, or maybe not TSMC,
⏹️ ▶️ John stay tuned. Why don't we just go right to the M7? And why don't we just start getting those out the door
⏹️ ▶️ John ASAP? Because apparently the design is done and they're ready to go. And they are a bigger leak over the
⏹️ ▶️ John M5. So yeah, it seems like the M5 is going to have a fairly long life as
⏹️ ▶️ John the top of the range in Apple's products with, you know, the M7 ones coming out sometime
⏹️ ▶️ John next year and the M7 Ultra in 2028. Jeez, Louise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does that mean you're not getting a new computer until 2028, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. People have asked about that. I can't wait though. Are you kidding? I needed a new computer yesterday. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John wait. I'm sure the M7 Ultra will be great. No way in hell I'm waiting until 2028.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll be perfectly happy with an M5 Max. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I've been fighting my hard drive capacity trying to offload more things. I'll have more on that on a future episode probably because
⏹️ ▶️ John there's some excitement going on there. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, jeez. Oh, great. No, I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting. I'm not waiting. I'll buy as soon as I can. Now, I'm not interested in the laptop, so it's not
⏹️ ▶️ John disappointing to me personally, but I do wonder if this throws a monkey wrench into their branding. Like if the whole plan
⏹️ ▶️ John was actually to call these a MacBook Ultra, are they less ultra if they have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John chip that you could have got months ago? I think I think they are less ultra. They're still cool. There'll still be
⏹️ ▶️ John nice laptops. But yeah, another casualty of Ramageddon.
Intel to the rescue?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, if you wanted to try to get to the front of the line in one of these fabs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what could you do? Well, a user on Twitter called Jukon writes: from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the GFHK monthly call, Apple and Intel already signed an agreement in December 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M7 chip will use Intel 18A-P and is expected to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enter production by the end of 2027, while the smartphone chip will use Intel 14A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and is expected to enter production by the end of 2028. John, what's GHA? GFHK?
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried mightily to find out by Googling. There's a lot of things with those initials that could be plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John uh The closest I get was GF Holdings Hong Kong, but the GF
⏹️ ▶️ John stand for some other words that I couldn't pronounce. And there's lots of GF companies with those same two words. Anyway, it
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it's some big financial institution uh somewhere near Hong Kong, maybe. uh Yeah, I don't,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sourcing on this, I don't know anything about this user or what they're saying, but like, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can keep reading. Like, there's a little bit more smoke around these rumors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gavin Bonshore, who formerly was a senior editor at Anantech,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is now at Bontech Labs, writes, Intel's 18A process is the company's 1.8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nanometer class node, the one that Panther Lake is currently manufactured on. It combines ribbon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FET gate all-around transistors with Power Via backside power delivery, and this delivers up to 25%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey higher performance or 36% lower power consumption compared to Intel's previous Intel 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process, with around 30% improved transistor density. The 18AP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey variant, which is what the M7 is reportedly targeting, is essentially a refined version of the base 18A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey node. For the M7, Apple may require some of Intel's advanced packaging techniques to hit its performance targets,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially involving combinations from the Foveros family, which is a 3D chip stacking technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alongside EMIB or embedded multi-die interconnect bridge. The first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mobile candidate for Intel's fab may not be the A21 for the iPhone 19 in 2027. Current reports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead point toward the unnamed SOC, pointing toward an unnamed SOC targeting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mass production on Intel's 14A node by late 2028, which suggests Apple will continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relying on TSMC for smartphone chips for the immediate future, at least until, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for the higher-end models. Apple's one of the most demanding chip customers in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and winning any Apple production gives Intel Foundry a proof point that other potential customers, including Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Qualcomm, and Broadcom, will pay close attention to. Every M7 that meets Apple's performance targets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is essentially a data point for every other company, evaluating Intel Foundry as an alternative to TSMC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TSMC has effectively held a monopoly on the world's most advanced consumer chip manufacturing for several years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If Apple begins splitting its most advanced chip production between TSMC and Intel, it It changes the competitive dynamics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the foundry business in a way that matters well beyond these two specific companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we did talk about the super vague rumors about Apple working with Intel on something something. And now they
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly got a lot more concrete with the rumor that that M7, that Apple is going to try to get out
⏹️ ▶️ John ASAP, that they're skipping the M6 Pro, Max, and Ultra to get to the M7
⏹️ ▶️ John faster. They're going to make Intel fab that. And the rumor being that they're going to still use TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John for their phone chips because, you know, it's more important and bigger capacity. But it is true that their biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John chips, obviously like physically biggest, most power-hungry, most complicated, most transistor chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John are the big giant ones they put in Macs, not the phone chips. And so going to Intel for those
⏹️ ▶️ John is would be quite a feather in Intel's cap if they can pull it off. As we talked about, Intel is taking
⏹️ ▶️ John some slightly different paths with its chip technology. They have some things that are, that they got to first
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least touted more strongly, like the backside power delivery, where you route the things that give power to the chips from the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of the top, because when you send it through the top, you got to weave it through all the logic and everything. Uh, They have some
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting technologies. The question always was, can they actually get them working and shipping and get the yields
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And Intel is actually shipping some chips of its own on a earlier variant of
⏹️ ▶️ John this supposed 1.8 nanometer class node. Um, So it's not like
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a complete unknown. I'm, If this ends up being true and like that M seven
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra in 2028 is fab by Intel, wow, what a world.
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC probably doesn't care because they'd still be doing all the phone chips, but this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of like Apple doing any kind of deal with Intel, investing. in It's like it's to Apple's advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John for TSMC not to be the only source for a billion reasons. And it's probably to the
⏹️ ▶️ John the world's benefit for there to be other competitors to TSMC, just so there's a more
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive marketplace. So I was, this, this is kind of actually an exciting rumor for for intel
⏹️ ▶️ John uh unless they totally blow it and then it's not going to be exciting for them. But uh this is future news. But boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John what what a world we're living in where there's going to be a Mac chip from Intel again, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is really wild. I mean, that being said, though, like Intel has shown a remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ability to screw things up in recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John years. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John the old Intel. It's not the new Intel. Is it? Like, I don't think they've proven that yet. Well, they did
⏹️ ▶️ John ship their own chip. Panther Lake is shipping it on the 18A process. So it's not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe Panther Lake has bad yields, but you know, like they're shipping something. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not like they can't make this. Right. They're shipping a chip on it, and the 18AP is the refined
⏹️ ▶️ John version of that. So I have some faith that they will ship something. But Panther Lake is a far
⏹️ ▶️ John cry from an M7 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's the thing. I think ultimately Intel is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too important to US national security for anyone to let them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fail. And that's wonderful for the US. It doesn't necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean that Intel is going to be able to become a foundry for other manufacturers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all of the expertise and trust and processes that somebody like TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to make cutting-edge chips for somebody else yet. We, That all stands to be seen. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that'll, that'll happen. I don't think they've shown any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really so far, at least not that, that kind of scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it'll, it'll be worse. It'll be harder to work. When Apple works with Intel on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it'll be harder for Apple. It'll be harder for Intel. There'll be more conflicts. Everything will be worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But, But the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is, both parties are highly motivated to just slog
⏹️ ▶️ John through the worstness because they're like Intel's obviously motivated because they're like, we want to stay in business.
⏹️ ▶️ John right Their foundry thing is like, this. we totally want to do chips for your apple, right? So they're highly motivated. And Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ John highly motivated because they're like, TSMC has a new boyfriend.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Nvidia. Oh, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about NVIDIA this, NVIDIA that. So they're both motivated to deal with all that crap that you just
⏹️ ▶️ John said, which is totally true. Like Intel is not going to be as good as the tsmc that Everything's going to be worse. The
⏹️ ▶️ John yields are going to be lower. There's going to be more problems. But like, it's good that they're both motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with it. They're like, look, we're in this together. You want to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because you want to survive.
⏹️ ▶️ John We want to do it because we need these chips and TSMC is not returning our calls like they used to. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think they'll make it work. Like assuming this rumor is true, I think they will mostly make it work. And it's still still
⏹️ ▶️ John your point stands, which is like, OK, so they do make it work. What if the chips suck? What if it's like the Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, the Intel cell mode where everyone didn't want to get the Intel one. They wanted the Qualcomm one because the Intel one was worse. That could still
⏹️ ▶️ John happen too. So Absolutely. Fingers crossed here, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, for lots of reasons, like I do think, you know, anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying any attention to global politics or the chip business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be a little concerned how little of a contingency plan that we have if there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a conflict over Taiwan. That's a pretty significant risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the world these days, and especially to the chip business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we all want there to be a strong Intel. We want there to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be strong non-Taiwanese chip manufacturing around the world, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our own country. That would be great. But that's a really difficult thing to set up. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes decades of investment and prioritization and just huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amounts of change and infrastructure that we've, I think, started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do some of that. But I think it's going to be a very long time before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we could even be remotely competitive with TSMC in Taiwan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how do we get from here to there? I don't know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that steps on the gas a little bit in that area, I think is a very good thing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a very hard problem, but also a very important one. But it's kind of unfortunate that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our best hope is Intel because they have not really shown a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capability in that kind of area.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think Intel's process, like, it's got two things going for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, they're not trying to do literally exactly the same thing as TSMC. It is a little bit different. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it's good to have some kind of differentiator. And two, it's within shouting distance. Like it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you can quibble and say, well, TSMC is better for reasons X, Y, but they're not in a different ballpark.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they used to be like not even close. I'm not saying Intel has caught up to TSMC, but they are
⏹️ ▶️ John now plausibly in the conversation. The thing they have running against them is not so much like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you're terrible at fabbing things and so on and so forth. Cause again, they've done a lot of work to close
⏹️ ▶️ John that gap significantly. And Intel has been making chips for a long time. So they're not starting from zero. It's not like a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where like, why don't you just make a new RAM fab or, you know, make a new chip fab? Like Intel has been in this business, right? They
⏹️ ▶️ John lost their lead. They still won't have it back, but they're still in the conversation. Their problem is what
⏹️ ▶️ John is very new to Intel is being a foundry for other people's chips. And that's where they suck ass compared to TSMC.
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC has been a foundry. TSMC has been a foundry for other people's chips for ages. And they're used
⏹️ ▶️ John to working with customers and all their tools and everything. Like that is the problem that Intel has, because even though
⏹️ ▶️ John they've been fabbing chips forever, they have not been a customer
⏹️ ▶️ John oriented service company that says we will fab chips for anybody. And that was the whole transformation they made where
⏹️ ▶️ John they split off the part that makes like, you know, the actual Intel chips from the part that fabs
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And the part that fabs them says, we're just going to be a fab to the world. You've got a chip. You want it fab We can do it. And we had a
⏹️ ▶️ John story many shows ago where Intel was like, if we can't get a customer, we're we
⏹️ ▶️ John we can't build these factories. Like we're trying to build the factories for our future processes or whatever, but we literally
⏹️ ▶️ John can't, we we're not going to build them unless someone signs up to buy the chips they're going to come out of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John um And they were very blunt about it. Like, you know, our our attempt to be a fab depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on somebody signing on the dotted line and saying, we will buy chips from the factory you will make. If nobody does
⏹️ ▶️ John that, then our fab business is just going to fail and we're just going to fab all our chips at TSMC like everybody else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe Apple has stepped in and prevented that from happening. I don't know. It's not like they were naming names or announcing deals
⏹️ ▶️ John back then, but that's the situation of their fab. It's so new, such a new business to them
⏹️ ▶️ John that they're they don't even know if it's a viable business. And everyone who has worked with them said, yeah, TSMC is better at this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're so much easier to work with. They've been doing it forever. They know how to fab chips for other people. And Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John you've only been fabbing chips for yourself for so long that you suck at it. So that's that's one of the main
⏹️ ▶️ John risk parts here. But again, if both parties, if both Apple and Intel, they're both highly motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John to make this work. And I think they'll just suffer through it. They'll suffer through it. And best case scenario for Intel, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a learning opportunity for them. They'll get better at it. Best case for Apple, they get, you know, they can
⏹️ ▶️ John finally be like the most important customer again because I would presume they they will become Intel's most
⏹️ ▶️ John important customer for its fab, if only because like, you know, hey, you couldn't have even built this factory
⏹️ ▶️ John if it wasn't for our orders for our Mac chips. But on the other hand, the Mac chips are such low volume compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to the phone chips. Like they do say they have a phone chip off in like 2028 or whatever. Like the rumor is they're going
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a phone chip at some point, but I bet that's contingent on a lot of other stuff going well before that. So oh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting times for Apple, not so exciting times for people interested in high-end Mac chips. It's going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be M5 season for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, do you think maybe Apple can convince Intel to do it for free for exposure?
Siri AI impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh All right, let's talk. New Siri. uh John, you put this in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes as most things end up in the show notes. What do you want to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All things end up in the show notes. Thank you, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, sorry, sorry. My bad. I contributed some things to follow up, but that doesn't count,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it counts, but I also contribute things to the show notes, but that doesn't count.
⏹️ ▶️ John the new Siri, I change all your jokes after the fact to make them funnier. I punch it up for you. um
⏹️ ▶️ John The first thing I wanted to put in about the new Siri, I'm assuming you've all, well, I know Marco has installed Golden Gate. Casey, have you installed Golden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I do have the beta running on my iPad, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did install it on the Vision Pro, but I don't think I've actually used it since installing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried it. I'm not using it, of course. Yeah, well, so you've got it on the iPad at least. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is everywhere. This is the Mac icon we're looking at in the show notes. We'll put a link to this image, but I'm pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure this is the branding they use everywhere. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco probably also the
⏹️ ▶️ John icon for like the little conversation app on the iPad where you can go look at past conversations with
⏹️ ▶️ John AI and stuff, right? And this, like, Siri's look and brand has changed
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot over the years. Recently, it's been leaning pretty heavily into the like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know, you'd say like red and blue rainbow swirl thing going on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 27 releases, they've gone with, they have a new sort of mostly monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ John logo. This one has some rainbow tinges on it to remind you of the old silly but Siri, but it's like a circle with
⏹️ ▶️ John like a wavy line in the middle. It's not the yin yang symbol, whatever that's called, uh but it looks a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit like that, but it's like horizontal instead of vertical. um And
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone thinks it looks like a Pepsi logo. So Brad Ellis posted,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if you recognize this, but uh he posted a uh a bunch of images
⏹️ ▶️ John from a classic internet meme, which was a real thing. uh It was the Pepsi
⏹️ ▶️ John logo redesign brand manual from 2008. We'll put a link to
⏹️ ▶️ John that in the show notes, put a link to the PDF. The PDF is a real thing, kids, in 2008.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was not a joke. This was not a parody. This was, a as far as I know, an actual real thing
⏹️ ▶️ John from the Pepsi rebranding tried from whatever company that came up with the rebrand of the Pepsi logo
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, here's what it means. And it had some of the most ridiculous things you will ever see in your life. You're like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they cannot be serious. I think apparently they were. Anyway, Uh, they just put the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri logo into this document. And it fits in perfectly because it looks kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John rebranded Pepsi symbol that nobody liked. And so now there's a Pepsi logo on on all of our Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don't know, like, I didn't really like the rainbow colored one. And I I kind of like this will fit in better
⏹️ ▶️ John in the menu bar with the Mulmaronochrome stuff, but it does look a little Pepsi-ish. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn't take long for people to, you know, take this and run with it. Joanna Stern in one of her uh, videos,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, used it as the head as like a Mr. Siri. See the images. We'll put a link to our YouTube video. You can watch
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But like, it's like a it's like a person with a, with a giant pizza flopped
⏹️ ▶️ John over their head, like pizza dough or something. Like the the two eyes and the mouth are in the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the Pepsi logo and the top part of the Pepsi logo is just a big floppy thing on their head. And It's a sad
⏹️ ▶️ John looking Mr. Siri. And I don't know. I know it's a slight tangent to go off about like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri branding, but I do think this is the most significant Siri, like visual identity branding change
⏹️ ▶️ John that has happened in a long time. And I think it's a little weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it's not good. I mean, like, from what everyone has said, the new Siri is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally so far excellent for people. I haven't actually really had enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time with it to say. My one minor irritation is that doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like creating reminders via Siri now seems slower. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, everything's going to be slower because, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether it does it on device or not, it is doing a lot more processing than it used to. I'm sure that's the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which that part is not amazing, but if it is really as smart as everyone says it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when asking more complicated things, you know, maybe maybe overall the upgrade will, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure it'll overall prove to be worthwhile.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, we'll fix that for you, Marco? Buy a new iPhone. I'm sure it'll be very affordable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah, definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, it's um other than that, uh it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does seem like uh people seem to like it a lot. But that logo, like as I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing it on my laptop, i i don't I don't love it. I mean, I'll get used to it. I didn't love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weird rainbow blob that we had before this, that was in the menu bar all the time either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But both in the menu bar and in the dock, I do not prefer this new
⏹️ ▶️ John It really does look like a Pepsi logo, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the problem with it is, I mean, yes, first of all, that the Pepsi logo thing, like that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible and all the memes around that were incredible. I think the problem with it is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's actually, there's not enough logo there. Like it it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically just looks like a circle with a squiggle in it. Like there's not anything else there. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs to be like a little bit more of a symbol, a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more recognizable. Because right now, when you see it, like in the dock, it just looks, it almost looks like a placeholder icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the menu bar, it's just this circle with a squiggle. Like it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs something else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, color would help, but then in the menu bar, I can't really have color. So they're kind of trapped by their own decision to make everything monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, not color, just like more, like the symbol needs to be a little bit more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more detail. Have like one other element, have some kind of a little more to it. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it's been like smoothed away through maybe committee or something. Like it's like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has had too much sanded off of it. It needs it needs a little bit more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, see, the Siri never had a corporeal body. Like it was always, it was always defined
⏹️ ▶️ John by those, by by clouds of color. And so once you take away the color, it's like, what's left then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you've just got a cloudy blur. Like it has never had a, I don't know if never. Maybe there was early on there was one
⏹️ ▶️ John back before Apple bought the Siri company. But like, yeah, they didn't, it never really had like a
⏹️ ▶️ John strong logo identity, nor has it had like a, I mean, if you look at your menu bar now, like there's
⏹️ ▶️ John not a brand identity for like the sound thing in the menu bar, right? Or the the time machine
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or the clock or the, even spotlight just being a magnifying glass. There's nothing like
⏹️ ▶️ John that for AI agents right now. Apple could, I mean, I guess this is it, but like come up with a logo that
⏹️ ▶️ John says, instead of saying, this is for controlling your displays, this is for controlling your sound, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is for controlling Bluetooth, this is for Wi-Fi, this is for AI agent. And I guess this is their symbol
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. I mean, obviously it's branded for Siri, but like if there, you know, if there was a generic
⏹️ ▶️ John symbol, we haven't come upon it at all. If we did, I think what we would say, I think the industry has decided
⏹️ ▶️ John that sparkle is the thing that means AI agent. Gemini leaned into this
⏹️ ▶️ John by actually having a branded single sparkle. But for a while, apps started sprouting sparkles
⏹️ ▶️ John all over the place. Sparkles in the toolbar, sparkles on the edges of buttons, sparkles in your face. And it's like, sparkle
⏹️ ▶️ John means AI agent. Apple has gone with Pepsi logo means our specific AI agent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but also like the like the other AI products out there all have logos. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, ChatGPT has that weird kind of like flower thing. Claude has the splat. Gemini has the diamond.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, what does Claude have? I have no idea what the Claude logo is. It's like a like an asterisk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, like the hand-drawn asterisk? Yeah, I think I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's a very splatty asterisk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, have you seen it? Speaking of things that wouldn't look good in the menu bar, Apple does have its, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it's like their Apple intelligence thing. It looks like two rings twisted around each other. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that one? I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like it's like two strands going in a circle, and the strands are twisted around each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think. They even
⏹️ ▶️ John animate it so they like they weave in and out of each other and straighten and twist. The problem with that one is those two
⏹️ ▶️ John strands that make up the circle are so fine that it doesn't read. It doesn't read as a, at menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar sizes, it's too small. You can't see the lines anymore. So that's just like their Apple intelligence thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at WWC sessions, I think they have an animated version of it where the lines weave in and out each other like two snakes and
⏹️ ▶️ John become straight or whatever. Like they do have some other branding about this, but yeah, I think they think they're in a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John a bind. Not that the branding matters too much because it's mostly faceless. I think their biggest problem aesthetically, I didn't have anything in
⏹️ ▶️ John the notes here about it, but like those stupid black gradient windows, at least on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John because now that's the look of quote unquote spotlight as well. So you do command space and it's just like this giant
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of web 2.0 looking gradient black hole that fades to gray and all the
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri AI things are in that little black hole. I don't like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think this logo is fine. Like it doesn't offend me as it appears to offend many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don't think it's particularly great either. Like it's fine. It's very middle of the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the other thing I'll complain about visually with the new series so far is that when I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pulling down to use, I guess what used to be called Spotlight to to launch an app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I want, you know, you pull down, you start typing the app name on the iPhone, that is slower. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's, I think it's trying to be a little too smart, a little too quickly on that now. Because it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are you trying to launch? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to start a launch request? No, I'm literally typing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the name of an app on my phone and I want to just tap the icon and launch it. But that is now a little bit slower
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it's the same thing on the Mac. If you used to just command space to launch an app, that command space window
⏹️ ▶️ John can now do so much more and is uglier. And so, yeah, there's the fight between, oh, you're
⏹️ ▶️ John just typing the first three letters of an app versus, are you asking me some question that I'm going to send off to a
⏹️ ▶️ John server and do like it's the same box. I mean, we went through this with the address bar on browsers years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it used to be a place where you typed a URL, then it became a place where you Google and now it's a place where like, we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John do all sorts of crap. Well, you type stuff, we'll auto-complete to bookmarks and sites that you've gone
⏹️ ▶️ John before. And like, just, so here we are again. There's there's a word for this from back in the day. What is it like? um
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't remember. There's a term for like a universal box where you type text and you do everything from one box instead of separating
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I don't remember what it was, but those are everywhere. And now we have one more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Omnibar or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. You got it. Something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Oh, see, look at me. All right. Well, continuing on with the new Siri, a friend of the show, Gi Rambo writes, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing an experiment where every time I use ChatGPT to help me search for something, I'm also asking the same question in the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. So far, my experience has been that the Siri app typically responds with the same information, but more quickly and with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better formatting and source citations. Impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I've tried it a little bit, and we'll get to that in a second. But most of the people who have tried it say, are you wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, did Siri AI quote-unquote fix Siri? And the answer is it behaves like the
⏹️ ▶️ John other AI agents, which is high praise for when you're talking about an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thing because that's like kind of like Intel. We just wanted Apple to be in the conversation. No one is saying like, is
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri AI better than ChatGPT or worse or whatever? It's like, we just want it to be in the ballpark. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we want it to not suck terribly. And so people who've been trying it say, you can quibble. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John one's better, sometimes the other, but at least now it's in the conversation. At least now it seems to do the same
⏹️ ▶️ John things that the other agents do. Maybe not as well, maybe not as thoroughly. Maybe I like the formatting better or worse. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Maybe it's faster or slower, but at least it's in the conversation. So thumbs up on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meanwhile, another friend of the show, Dan Morin, asked Siri, make a keyboard shortcut to open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clipboard history in a single keystroke. To which Siri replied, the keyboard shortcut to open clipboard history
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Windows is Windows TV. The shortcut opens a panel that displays a list of recently copied items,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allowing you to select and paste an older item instead of the most recent one. Oops.
⏹️ ▶️ John he's asking us on a Mac. For those of you not familiar, Apple added keyboard clipboard history to Spotlight
⏹️ ▶️ John in the previous release, or maybe one release before, I forget. I know it was in Tahoe, right? Um, But people are annoyed that
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a two keystroke sequence. You got to do like command space and then like four, command four or something to get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard history. So Dan's trying out the new Siri and saying, make me a keyboard shortcut that
⏹️ ▶️ John gets me to clipboard history in one keystroke. And you notice that prompt, that message, doesn't say anything about a
⏹️ ▶️ John platform, but he is asking it on a Mac, I think. I can't tell. Maybe this is on a,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's got to be on a Mac, right? Anyway, why in the world would it come up with an answer that tells
⏹️ ▶️ John you how to do clipboard history on Windows? Because that's how these things work sometimes. And I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying this shows that Siri AI is worse or better. I'm saying it works like all the other agents where sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it just does the wrong thing. And honestly, I don't even know
⏹️ ▶️ John if Windows Key plus V is the correct answer for this. Who knows? Didn't check it, but yeah, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not the answer that you wanted. So it's not as if, you know, the old Siri used to make fun of it. I ask some question, it gives
⏹️ ▶️ John a comically wrong answer. At least now it's failing more interestingly and, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John can succeed at some other things. And so my experience with it, like this, the next part here is just me, my
⏹️ ▶️ John very first experience with Zero, Cause I had just seen some videos. I just installed Golden Gate and I'd just seen some videos
⏹️ ▶️ John of like people doing stuff with it by like selecting files in the finder and then asking it
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things with the selected files. I'm like, oh, that seems handy Cause I, I figured what that tool is that I haven't sold.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm sorry to the developer of this every time I can never remember the name of this app, but there's there's various tools that will let you do that now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even on an ancient old Mac OS 15 that I'm running, select multiple files, bring up an LLM prompt and
⏹️ ▶️ John have it do something like, you know, pull the text out of these images or scale them or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you're basically just talking to an agent somewhere, you know, whatever it is, an open AI
⏹️ ▶️ John agent or whatever, and having it do stuff, but with things that you select. And so Siri can do this now as well. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to try that out. So I selected a file that was on my desktop. And my prompt was,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is this file? Question mark. And the first answer was amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ John good. I had selected a Perl script.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here's the answer. Siri said, this is a Perl script named thrash.pl designed to stress test
⏹️ ▶️ John an application by repeatedly launching and terminating it. The script forks multiple child processes to
⏹️ ▶️ John open the accessorize.app, monitors them, and automatically kills them after a random duration up
⏹️ ▶️ John to five seconds before launching a new instance to maintain continuous load. How it works, process management. The
⏹️ ▶️ John script uses a SIGCHILD handler to asynchronously clean up the exited child process without blocking the main loop. Continuous
⏹️ ▶️ John load, it starts by launching 10 instances of the target application. Whenever the number of active children drops below five or
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer, it automatically spawns five more to keep the system under pressure. Target application, currently configured to execute a local development
⏹️ ▶️ John build of accessorize.app located on your desktop. This is all correct. It doesn't actually know the context
⏹️ ▶️ John because it's not, I guess, scanning my whole system. This was a thing I was using to stress test Switchglass.
⏹️ ▶️ John The accessorize.app is not the interesting app here. That is just a, an app I made in Xcode that does some
⏹️ ▶️ John particular stuff while it's running. Like it fiddles with its state in a way that Switchglass can detect. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted, I was basically torture testing Switchglass to say, is there some kind of crash when there's like massive
⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of activity of like tons of apps uh, launching and quitting all at random and
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the accessorize app fiddling the things that Switchglass can note about them or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I'm like, just, you know, and it's configurable to do more than 10 or whatever. Um, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn't just say, this is a Perl script. It read all the code in it. And, you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we're surprised to know on this podcast, these agents are good at understanding code. And it explained to me, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like, this is like, I don't know, less than half a page of Perl code. It's not a complicated script,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is a more or less accurate description of what's in there. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wow, that's, you know, and it's not like, oh, Siri AI is amazing. I would expect that from any of the
⏹️ ▶️ John modern AI agents. I would never have expected that from Siri in the past. Yeah. And now it can do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm like, that's awesome. And then me being me, come back to my computer later that day. I select the
⏹️ ▶️ John same file. I say, what is this file? Question mark. Exactly the same prompt. Here's what Siri AI
⏹️ ▶️ John said then. Based on the .pl extension, thrash.pl is likely a Perl script. These are plain
⏹️ ▶️ John text files containing code written in the Perl programming language, often used for text processing, system administration, and
⏹️ ▶️ John web development. The end.
⏹️ ▶️ John what happened, What happened, Siri AI? That's, I mean, true. You got that right. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is, in fact, a Perl script, and you're right about Perl. What happened? What happened to all the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John about telling me about what's in there and what it does or whatever? And this variability is one of those things that
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I feel like a hallmark of Siri AI and some other products as well, which is, um especially
⏹️ ▶️ John like a various chat gpt things and like their default mode. Like, we'll figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John which model to use based on stuff, criteria. I don't know, time of day,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much load our servers are under, what plan you're on, this, that, the other thing. It seems pretty clear to
⏹️ ▶️ John me that in the second answer, Siri AI chose to use a less powerful model.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it used a local model for that one and you use the server model for the first one. um But either
⏹️ ▶️ John way, very different answer to the exact same prompt on the exact same day about
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact same file, which has not changed. And that also makes me think, huh, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John AI, you're just like the other ones. You never know what you're going to get. And unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John like the fancier models where you can be like, always use the big super mega ultra model, super thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, I don't think you have that option in Siri AI. You're more
⏹️ ▶️ John likely to get a better model if you have like an M4 or better, whatever the specs are that makes you use the more advanced local
⏹️ ▶️ John one. But this variability in answer really makes it difficult to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not going to say rely on, but just to like, to get consistent results. Because imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ John I hadn't asked about the, I hadn't had the exact same letter for letter prompt about the exact same file. Imagine instead
⏹️ ▶️ John that I made two separate requests. You may come away thinking, well, it's really good at that first request, but when I
⏹️ ▶️ John ask it about this other kind of thing, it's bad at it. And that's not true at all. Maybe maybe it's just that the first time I went to a server and the second time
⏹️ ▶️ John I did local. And so as with all things related to LLMs, it's very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to form concrete judgments based
⏹️ ▶️ John on what they do, because what they do is often not
⏹️ ▶️ John what you think they're doing. Like this is the problem. They seem like they're doing something that they're not. So in this case, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it's good at question X and bad at question Y. question X was about sports and question Y
⏹️ ▶️ John was about uh knitting, you'd be like, oh, they're great at sports, but bad at knitting. But that's the wrong conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ John because you don't know what's going on behind the scenes. It's not like they're telling you, I did this one to the server and this one to a local thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so you end up drawing the wrong conclusions and you never ask it any knitting questions and really that's not the problem at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know what to think of this. I'm not, you know, I mean, kind of like the Vision Pro that you upgrade and then
⏹️ ▶️ John never use. I did play with this for a little while and then I, you know, went back to
⏹️ ▶️ John basically ignoring it. Although I was also playing with the new version of Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John and its built-in functions for doing agentic coding stuff or whatever to see
⏹️ ▶️ John how those work compared to how they were in Xcode 26. And when I set that up, I'm like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you have to configure like, you know, one of the third party agents
⏹️ ▶️ John in Xcode because I'm pretty sure there's, it doesn't use, like, you can't configure Siri AI
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I can tell as an Xcode 27 agent. Maybe that's not true. And if so, we'll follow up next episode. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell me. But Apple, seems like Apple's not competing in that realm. Like that's not what
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri AI does. And so I couldn't, you know, i i i I would have liked to seen
⏹️ ▶️ John what it could do. Now, I did see, I've been watching WWC sessions still about this. And one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them talked about how the um, what, what's in Xcode 27,
⏹️ ▶️ John they like, they provide stuff for the agents that integrate with it. For example, they have a
⏹️ ▶️ John um, agent friendly, uh, incarnation of all their documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know the details. It's like vectorized or somewhere or some way, uh, made with like embeddings so that the agents
⏹️ ▶️ John can be more easily digested rather than just feeding it the text or whatever. I don't know the details, but the point is Apple has supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John done work in Xcode 27 so that agents that are running in Xcode 27
⏹️ ▶️ John have, in theory, a leg up on agents that are just like browsing the web.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here's where Casey says, well, it doesn't matter if it's a special vectorized version of it or
⏹️ ▶️ John the web version. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documentation's not there, it doesn't really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But like it shows that it's not, you know, if you say, why would I ever use an agent
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Xcode? Why wouldn't I just go use the agent of my choice outside Xcode to buy code stuff? Apple's answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is, well, if the ones that are actually used from inside Xcode, they have more direct access to
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode functionality. They have more direct access to resources. I mentioned on an earlier episode
⏹️ ▶️ John that they made a bunch of essentially skills for agents that teach it about their
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies and you can export them and use them with third-party agents. But any agent that you use within Xcode gets access
⏹️ ▶️ John to them automatically with no extra work from you. So I guess Siri AI is not
⏹️ ▶️ John in that, but like, I hope someday Apple does, you know, at least maybe take a third-party agent and train
⏹️ ▶️ John it up on all their internal stuff. Like, cause that's what we want. We want an agent, you know, agents can train on
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in Stack Overflow and all sorts of open store stuff that they've taken without permission and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. But as I said in the past episode, Apple can train models on its own proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John source code that no one has access to. Maybe they don't want to do that because like a lot of these agents, you can make them spit back like the
⏹️ ▶️ John New York Times suing to say, hey, we can make we can make this agent spit back verbatim passages from New York Times article.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they trained an agent on their own source code and let the public have access to it, could we get it to spit out like the source code to AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John by cajoling it in the right way? Maybe that's why they're afraid of it. But that's what I want Apple to do. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you have the source code to all your frameworks and and we don't have the source code
⏹️ ▶️ John to all your frameworks. So please train a model on that source code and make that be the
⏹️ ▶️ John model that I get to use for Mexico. But anyway, all this to say is that I think Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John AI is uh, not terrible. It is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann is in the
⏹️ ▶️ John conversation with the other agents. It does things that those agents do. It is night
⏹️ ▶️ John and day difference from the old Siri. Uh, and, uh, that's something at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, it It does seem like they've really finally done it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They've like they've really launched a Siri that is smart and and has the intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side handled. And so now I think what we need to see is, you know, what remains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be seen, first of all, is like scale, speed, and reliability, because, you know, all the parts that are not locally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running have to depend on a lot of infrastructure that has significant scaling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges ahead of them. That's always kind of been one of Siri's weakest points has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how does it actually perform for everyone, everywhere, all the time? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far, they have not done well at that. But this is a whole different architecture with probably all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different infrastructure also, because it's such it's such different requirements to run all these you know modern LLM flagship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level things. So this is going to be totally different than whatever Siri was running on before. So that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promising in the sense that they have another chance to get it right. Maybe they will this time. And then the other part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is app support. That's still a huge open question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't think we yet have great tooling as developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet to know, like, are we plugging in correctly to the new Siri system with our app intents?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it reading them? Is it indexing them? Like, I think that's still a little bit early in the current betas, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven't actually tried it. So I could be wrong about that. But that's kind of what I'm hearing. But we have that challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, are apps going to be able to really get in there and adopt this? Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that going to be ready this fall? And then secondly, from that, will developers do it? As I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying last time, do developers have the right like the incentive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this? Or do developers want to not be like disintermediated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to not have Siri be the face of their app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their customers? Would developers rather have customers go into their apps to do what they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do? And I think for most big companies, the answer is definitely the latter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. For most small developers like us, we want to do things right by the platform because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're nerds and we're Apple fans. And so we'll probably do it. But that all remains to be seen. I think it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be a very interesting fall and winter to see which big companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adopt this at all and how does all of this scale as everyone gets it?
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing I'm mainly watching for as this rolls out, in addition to things that you mentioned, is what
⏹️ ▶️ John does their iteration look like? Because every other competitor in this space
⏹️ ▶️ John changes all the time. There's new versions coming out all the time, minus the government stopping them from coming out, which is currently a
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. But, you know, that's there they don't wait an entire year to make any change
⏹️ ▶️ John in their agents. They're always tweaking them a little bit. Even if it's not like, oh, GPT 5.4, 5.5, 5.6.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even in between there, there are little tweaks here and there that they make. Apple's not,
⏹️ ▶️ John has never been on that type of cycle. Certainly has never been on that type of cycle with Siri before. Now that they are using this third
⏹️ ▶️ John party stuff, will they have like an interim release? Like, I don't know, like a 27, by 27.3
⏹️ ▶️ John or 27.4? It's like now actually we've swapped in all new models because we've got
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly better ones. That would be great, but that hasn't really been the way. there if they have been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it up with Siri, it hasn't made any kind of noticeable change for the better. It's just been either a lateral move
⏹️ ▶️ John or made things worse. So I hope they keep up with this. I don't know the nature of the Google deal, and it's still not clear
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly how those models came to be, but you can be sure that Google is continuing to make new
⏹️ ▶️ John and better models, new and better Gemini models for itself. Hopefully Apple's deal has something
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not just like a one-time thing. It's like we get access to these models, which are, you know, we're probably like, maybe they were
⏹️ ▶️ John new when the deal was signed or newish when the deal was signed. But over the course of the next year, if those just
⏹️ ▶️ John stay the same, the rest of the industry is going to keep moving forward. And Apple's going to be using, you know, late 2025,
⏹️ ▶️ John early 2026 models when everyone else is you know, moving along. So I hope they have at least
⏹️ ▶️ John a plan to continue to develop that. The whole rest of the stack also obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be developed and debugged and improved and made better. But underneath it all, in the end, are
⏹️ ▶️ John the models. One thing they could iterate on, and I hope they'll iterate on is their world knowledge thing that we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about in an earlier episode where they're not doing Google searches for facts, but they have their own sort of world knowledge index.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple's got to keep that up to date. Apple's got to make sure good info is in there and fix mistakes and keep
⏹️ ▶️ John adding new stuff because world the world changes every day. And so that world knowledge thing needs to keep up with
⏹️ ▶️ John sports scores and holidays and national events and celebrities who are alive and dead
⏹️ ▶️ John and taking stuff from call sheet. Like it just, they can't just like, we'd
⏹️ ▶️ John have a world knowledge thing and we'll just leave it until next WWDC. Nope, you can't do that either. So yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John here's hoping, but like these, we mentioned these things because they historically have not been Apple Strength,
⏹️ ▶️ John to say the least. But Apple strengths can change. So hopefully they're with the new leadership,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully they realize it's not enough to have this big coming out party at WWDC 2026
⏹️ ▶️ John and roll out these betas and say, now we're done until next year because you're not.
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#askatp: M-chip release cadence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do at least a touch of Ask ATP. And Amar writes: One of the expectations from Apple after they moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to M-Series chips was that they would have complete control over release cadence. However, it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this cadence is even more haphazard than the Intel era. We currently have a situation where the M5 was released first on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPad of all products, while the desktops are languishing on M4 even M3 chips. I should note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this has been in the show notes for at least a couple of months now. But still relevant somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I also just interrupt here for a minute? This is not more haphazard than the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era was. We were there. Trust me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I lived it, man. Anyway, MR continues. To make matters worse, it seems as if the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studio may not even get M5. We're eight months into the M5 life cycle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes no sense to bring M5 to the Mac Studio now. If you're in the market for the absolute balls-to-the-wall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desktop that would last you seven or eight years, John Syracuse, you have nothing because investing in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M3 Ultra makes zero sense. None of this is because of the RAM crisis. Apple still ships tons of products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with RAM. Is this really by design? I'd be shocked if it is. Or has something gone really,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the premise of this is that they would have complete control over release cadence. They would
⏹️ ▶️ John have more control, but complete control they can never have because they don't fab their chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don't control the world. So they are sideswiped by the RAM crisis. They
⏹️ ▶️ John are sideswiped by NVIDIA becoming TSMC's best customer. Like stuff happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don't know how old this was in the notes, but like everything in it, it's slightly outdated
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the news we just read. But like it, the, we
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of got spoiled by the M1, M2, M3 cycle, where it seemed at least somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ John predictable and under control. And I bet if Apple did have
⏹️ ▶️ John complete control, they would continue a orderly progression like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they don't, and they have to be reactive. And so the current chaos that you're seeing where it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, M6, never mind. We're not even doing those M6s. all the ultra is going to get, we're not going to do an ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John for the M4. We'll just put the M3 Ultra in there, but much too late. And then M5 on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio, that's going to be later too. And actually, it's going to be the only thing. And because we're skipping all the M6s
⏹️ ▶️ John and we're going to do the M7 and Intel might fab it. Like, that's the world. That's the world we're living in right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Intel wasn't more chaotic, but it was worse in that
⏹️ ▶️ John there were long periods where we had nothing. And then when we did get something, it wasn't good. And so at
⏹️ ▶️ John least now it's like there's this menu of things that we think are going to be awesome. And sometimes the things get taken off our menu
⏹️ ▶️ John or pushed out into the future. But every one of those M things, speaking of the M chicks in particular, every one of
⏹️ ▶️ John those M things was tailor-made to Apple specifications for specific product needs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe some of them don't ship and get delayed or whatever. But when we get them, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that Apple very intentionally made that works really well. Whereas Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and Intel, their relationship was basically Apple trying to cajole and coerce and
⏹️ ▶️ John beg Intel to make the kinds of chips they wanted. And Intel saying, well, I guess we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John put a really big integrated GPU because you need it for your laptops. And so we'll put this in one of our chips and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this what you wanted? And Apple's like, I mean, kind of, but like, It was just, it was never,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Intel, Apple was an important customer to Intel, but they, Apple wanted very specific
⏹️ ▶️ John things and Intel would give them a little bit of what they wanted based on the chips they had
⏹️ ▶️ John and the things they could add for them. And I bet Intel thought it was bending over backwards. Like, can you believe we're doing this custom integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU just for Apple, this one customer? Can you believe we're doing this? And then Apple's like, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John would change a lot of stuff about that chip, not just the GPU. And so, yeah, and Apple gets to make its own chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I do think things are better than Intel, but the current situation with the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumored M6 Pro Max and Ultra cancellation, the already past lack of an M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, the studio waiting forever for an M5 and still doesn't have it. I think when the person was writing this,
⏹️ ▶️ John they maybe didn't expect this to be the case, but it still doesn't have it. And I'm going to be happy you get an M5 Max in like
⏹️ ▶️ John December. So, yeah, it's a tough old world that we live in, but it's still better than Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I think the reality is that what Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brings us is Apple gets to design exactly the chips they want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, the chips they want need to be manufactured by somebody. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is both incredibly complicated and difficult. And there's lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco variables and conditions that go into that. And also, as mentioned earlier, Apple is no longer TSMC's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest customer or most important customer necessarily. And so they have to compete for other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vendors for that manufacturer's time and for the yield
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on those high-end lines. And so we like to think like, oh, just when you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the next chip, like every year, you just make another one and make it better. Okay, yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, sometimes you can do that. But what does it mean to make it better? Well, you might be redesigning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that might take a lot of time. It might be really complicated. You might be trying to figure out how do you squeeze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more performance out of the same you know, feature size, you know, so without being able to you know, shrink down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the process yet. And then when you do shrink the process down, well, what if the new process works a little bit differently than the old one? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How did they shrink it? And what does that mean for all the different little tiny gates and stuff that are in the chip? And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things need to be built a little bit differently or things need to be designed a little bit differently when you change the process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a very complicated like, implementation of the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of make a new chip every two years or every year. Like That sounds so simple, but the reality of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is incredibly complicated. And if there is any little bump in the road
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when tackling any of those challenges, that can push the date out or that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make a whole type of chip maybe not worth making or impractical to make, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would make the yield so low that it would be way too expensive and it wouldn't really sell at those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prices. Or you can actually design something thinking it'll work. You can start manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it thinking it'll work and then the yields might just suck for a while or forever. Maybe on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole process, like back when they made like the N4P or N4E or whatever that was.
⏹️ ▶️ John B was the one that only Apple ever bought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Because like it turned out that was just super expensive and not amazing yields forever. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just has kind of the nature of the process. Like All of those things are really complicated. So by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bringing in the design, that helps a lot, but it doesn't avoid the inherent complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the rest of that system. So Apple does a really good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally in lots of ways of hiding the reality of the complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their supply chain and design process from the customers. That's part of the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the recent price changes were kind of were so surprising because Apple, like Apple went through all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of COVID without really ever being out of stock of anything for very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long and without really being short supplied on components and without really changing any prices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were the only ones. Everyone else had massive supply chain problems during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those years for again, for very good reasons. But Apple didn't. Now, I'm sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind the scenes, they were putting out fires constantly, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hid all that from us. They masked it all with just execution and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competence and buffers and whatever else they were doing. We never felt that from the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple presents the impression of simplicity. We've gone from the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the M5. It is 15% faster in this way. It is 30% faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this way. Everything kind of costs the same and here you go. But behind the scenes, that's really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated and they're hiding a lot from us. So sometimes they're able to, most of the time, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to hide that complexity. Sometimes they're not. So in a case like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have the really huge ultra chips, that's kind of an edge case. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are the hardest runs to make in certain ways. They are probably the lowest volume sellers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They probably have the lowest yields. That's a complicated chip to make. And things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that work for a chip generation, for all the other chips they make, might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not work for the Ultra chip or whatever it is. So I am not surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see bumps like that, to see, oh, sometimes the big studio is going to skip a generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. That happened before with Intel. And Intel had their good reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it's happening now with Apple. And Apple has also good reasons. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just inherently inevitable when you're doing things of this complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ John If these M6 rumors are actually true, it will be interesting sometime in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John to find out, did Apple actually design an M6 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John an M6 Max, and an M6 Ultra, and basically just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann had to throw out
⏹️ ▶️ John that work? Because like because if the rumor is that like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is motivated by multiple crises. One, the difficulty of getting manufacturing, but two,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that like ai doing local AI is super important. And apparently the M7 design has some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of advancement that is significant advantage for on-device AI. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can see Apple saying, I know, I know, like the M6 Pro, Max Ultra, they're great chips. You all did a
⏹️ ▶️ John great job. And it's going to be a shame to throw it away. But like uh if we can get
⏹️ ▶️ John the M7 six months sooner by just not doing the M six, we should do that because it's more
⏹️ ▶️ John important. Like, and, and I, I honestly, I think that's a reasonable call. Like if the M seven actually is better,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would rather have that six months early and just skip the M sixes. But if you, if you just paid all your employees
⏹️ ▶️ John to, to design those things, maybe they've been test fab. Like it's just, it's just such a shame to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we spent teams spent you know, years working on these chips and we just have to go,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, that's, I mean, it's like, you know, people who make a movie that never gets released. Like the movie is finished and done, the studio kills
⏹️ ▶️ John it for a tax write-off. I feel bad if that's the case. Now, maybe this rumor is not true and those m chips
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to come out. And maybe they just literally never designed them, although I don't think that's the case because the design timelines
⏹️ ▶️ John on these are long enough that they have to have been working on them. Or maybe they made the decision three years ago and it has nothing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Ram crisis. We don't know because, again, they're just rumors, but there are many plausible
⏹️ ▶️ John scenarios that are just a damn shame, you know, like, especially if you're on that team. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and I bet like M six, like what they've done with the, the M series has shown,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there are good years and bad years, but none of them have been stinkers. Like they've always, sometimes they're interesting in weird ways or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like all the M chips are good, you know, and they've all made advancements in
⏹️ ▶️ John some way for certain applications. And again, I think we were spoiled by like, they're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to come out with an M series. It's going to have a number on the end and there's going to be a non-suffix one, a pro, a max, and
⏹️ ▶️ John an ultra. And the ultra is going to be two maxes together. And they're just going to increment that number every year and it's going to be smooth sailing. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John family just disintegrated. Like, it's like that. That cadence is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John not plausible in the current world because if you map it out and you see
⏹️ ▶️ John the release cadence and how they've kind of spread and distributed and holes have been formed
⏹️ ▶️ John where certain chips just never arrive and we're getting more holes and more delays
⏹️ ▶️ John and more like, you know, as Amar points out, like it seemed really weird
⏹️ ▶️ John when like a new M chip would debut on an iPad. What is the M stand for my pad. Like it's it's
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be a Mac chip and it comes out on iPad first. That's just the way it worked out. And yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm still happier in this era. I'm even as disappointed as I am with the lack of high-end chips. And I do, I
⏹️ ▶️ John do remember, in case someone's going to write in about this, way back at the beginning of the M series or maybe somewhere in the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle, like there was some rumor from someone saying, yeah, all the all those quad chips, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumored M1, that was going to be like four maxes stuck together, that chip was canned. We couldn't do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at some point, there was a rumor or something that was saying like, and by the way, don't keep your hopes
⏹️ ▶️ John up for any other sort of like quad type chip because the roadmap has been laid out. And the earliest there
⏹️ ▶️ John could even possibly be a monster chip like that is the M7 generation. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that was, that was years ago when I came out. And all they were saying was, I've seen
⏹️ ▶️ John the roadmap for M1 through M6 and it's not on there. So they weren't
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that the M71 was going to be that. They were saying that it's not M1 through M6. And I think we were on like M2 or
⏹️ ▶️ John 3. And you're like, oh, really? Not until M7. M7 is the future. That's so far away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here we are. The M7 may arrive. And I mean, back then, they weren't saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John the M7 generation was going to concentrate on on-device AI because that wasn't really a thing back then.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now it is. So, again, I don't expect a quad type thing for the M7. I would still love to
⏹️ ▶️ John see an Ultra that's not two maxes stuck together, but it doesn't seem like that's in the cards either. So yeah, like I said, I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for the M7, but I am excited that I'm excited that this rumor says that Apple is so excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about the M7 that they're willing to sacrifice, you know, what, three quarters? I can't do fractions.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco line, all of
⏹️ ▶️ John their M6 line, except for the single, presumably single die, no suffix M6, that they're going
⏹️ ▶️ John to sacrifice all of those just so the world can get the M7 a little bit sooner. And I say,
#askatp: Languages for LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's continue with Matthew Southworth, who writes, I enjoyed the discussion about languages in the overtime segment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of episode 696, including Apple's assertion that Swift can be used as a replacement for languages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from C to Perl. It occurs to me that if code is being developed agentically, the choice between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lower or higher level language might differ. If no human is going to review the code, shudder, maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bots should work closer to the metal for more efficient code. Conversely, maybe the wealth of available libraries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for open source frameworks would make sticking to those frameworks more effective. I understand what Matthew's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going for here, and I'm curious to hear what you two think. But the thing that struck me about this is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe it's just that I haven't seen it, but I got to imagine there's not a lot of like ARM or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey x86 assembly code posted online. I shouldn't say not a lot. Nowhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much assembly code, for example, posted online as there is C, C ⁇ , Swift, Perl,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PHP, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're relying on a thing that needs a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole corpus of data to train upon, I would think you would want that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to be the language that it has the most data about, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, something like a C ++ or perhaps Perl or whatever, you know, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the LLM knows so much about whatever the language is, and it's seen so much code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from whatever the language is, that it's going to, it's, it's more likely to do a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job as opposed to like assembly, which I got to imagine, there's not near as much assembly floating around the world as there
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Matthew's question here is, you know, again, one of, one of the many traps that
⏹️ ▶️ John the LMs lead us toward, which is it's so easy to map onto
⏹️ ▶️ John them the things that we uh, have been exposed to in like science fiction media.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that, well, yeah, we have these high-level languages for us, but computers are computers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so they don't need to, they're unlike us. And they're unlike us in the ways that I
⏹️ ▶️ John have seen computers be unlike us in the movies, which is things that are nonsensical to us, computers can understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why bother with these high-level languages when computers can just understand the binary language of moisture
⏹️ ▶️ John evaporators? That's a reference, Marco. And Casey. They can just
⏹️ ▶️ John understand the machine code. So they don't need. And in some respects, they're on the right track in that computers aren't
⏹️ ▶️ John like us and they have different strengths than we do. But the other respect is they're like LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John are not movie computers. Like, oh, computers understand binary things. Therefore, they should need to use high-level languages.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as you just pointed out, Casey, LLMs, how LLMs, how this specific technology
⏹️ ▶️ John works is training data is the thing that determines like their training
⏹️ ▶️ John determines what they are. And you need lots of data to train them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you're looking for lots of data, there's lots of C code, man. There is less
⏹️ ▶️ John assembly. And you can say, well, the C code turns into assembly when you compile it. So why don't they just learn from that? And that gets to
⏹️ ▶️ John my second point, which is computers also benefit from all the same
⏹️ ▶️ John things that humans benefit with high level languages, in that there are
⏹️ ▶️ John they don't have to think about certain details when they're using a higher level language. And then there can be certain
⏹️ ▶️ John assumptions they can make about how the high level languages work because languages like C and other languages provide
⏹️ ▶️ John some guarantees about how things work. Not that you know exactly what assembly will be created by the
⏹️ ▶️ John compiler, but there are certain, that's what a high-level language provides. It provides certain behaviors
⏹️ ▶️ John above and beyond the behaviors defined by assembly itself. You do lots of things in assembly, but from C, there's a
⏹️ ▶️ John subset of those things. These structures will always give these guarantees, so on and so forth. Now, obviously, there's undefined behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of stuff in C, but I'm just saying, like the benefits of high-level languages, those benefits
⏹️ ▶️ John also benefit LLMs. It makes them able to write code without
⏹️ ▶️ John worrying about those low-level concerns the same way it does to us. Even though we operate
⏹️ ▶️ John differently, that combination of things I feel like can't be overcome, the massively larger amount of training data
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fact that they can work better in high-level language. Then I'll add a third one, which is if you're paying per
⏹️ ▶️ John token, you want to use a higher-level language because the bottom line is there's fewer characters
⏹️ ▶️ John produced. There's just fewer. At the minimum, there's fewer output tokens, but probably there's also
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer input tokens because if you're feeding it some source code and say, what's wrong with this? I'd rather feed it a paragraph of
⏹️ ▶️ John C instead of a much longer several paragraphs of assembly because, yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ John takes more instructions. That's the nature of high-level language. So I know what Matthew's getting at, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I just think it's like it's barking up the wrong tree. Like they're not movie computers. They're not magic.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don't you know, speak in binary. And you know, wouldn't they be more comfortable in binary? Because they're computers or robots. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John They're large language models. They deal with text, pieces of text. They don't deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John them the way humans do exactly. like They don't even go a letter at a time. Those tokens aren't necessarily single
⏹️ ▶️ John letters. it's like how can How can it make sense of things when it's doing like pairs of letters or three? like It doesn't make any sense. It's like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they're not exactly like humans, but they are in fact large language models. And they turn all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John into numbers and build these giant.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I should, we should have eternal links to those uh three brown, one
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the way they work is not like the way humans work, but in the end, you should at least consider
⏹️ ▶️ John how they work, which is they get trained on data. And yeah, there's a lot more C code than assembly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the I kind of mused a couple of months back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, have have we developed the last programming language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that, or at least like the last widely used programming language? And what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean by that is like, do we have any reason to make new languages now, really, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mass use? Because my thinking on that was like, LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have now been trained on all the languages that we have, you know, like that people publish code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for in large volumes. They are not surprisingly really good at JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there's a lot of JavaScript out there right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They're pretty good at Swift. They're pretty good at C. And then as you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of get down the less commonly published languages on the web these days, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay at PHP. I'm sure they're okay at Ruby and Perl and Python. You keep going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down a little bit lower in the usage list. I'm sure they've seen a lot of Java
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe they've seen a little bit of Objective-C. Maybe they've seen a little bit of regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C, probably a lot of C ++ but maybe not so much Rust. You start to get the lesser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used languages. And if you're doing LLM-based development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on what they've been trained on, as John was saying, probably they're going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be best at the languages that they have seen the most. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking generally on that is like we probably want LLMs to be writing whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the most popular language that can be used to develop the type of app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the platform that they're building. So if you're making a web app, you probably want it to be making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JavaScript on the back end and the front end for that. If you're making an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, you probably want to be using Swift, that kind of thing. And now that we've had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these languages out there and training the LLMs, willingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not, does it make sense to invent a new language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that would be kind of from scratch from the LLM's perspective?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If we're going to use LLMs to help us write code or to write it for us most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time in the future, which does not seem that remote of a possibility, shouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we use a language they've been trained on? Which kind of means why would we ever make another language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again? But that being said, LLMs are also getting really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sophisticated all the time. And that keeps getting more and more the case. As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they get smarter, they They have more training, they have more parameters, they have more sophistication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their harnesses and their prompting and everything else. What we are seeing, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that over time, LLMs will actually not even care what the language is they're asked to generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they're they are thinking kind of higher level. They're seeing higher level patterns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they will have just as easy of a time generating one language as any other language because they're just kind of outputting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco patterns. And the training data was more about building those mental patterns than the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it must be this language, you know, printed out this way. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, right now, the answer is if you're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to have an LM write code, make it a popular language. But I bet in the fairly near future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the answer will just be who cares? It doesn't matter. Let the LM write whatever it wants to write.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if there's anything in the way LLMs currently work that will help it in not care about the language.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because in the end, it has to know the syntax and output it. And it very much will parrot
⏹️ ▶️ John back code structured similar to what it's seen. So I don't think it's becoming language independent. But to your earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John question, I think it's important to ask, like, why do we make new languages? Forget about LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why do we ever make new programming language? Why don't we, Aren't we in the same situation of like, well, all these programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John were trained in the languages that exist and we should just keep using them? Why bother making a new language at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because when you make a new language, people don't have experience with it. They haven't seen it before. They don't know it. Now they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to learn it. And it's just, it's a big hassle. But the reason we do it is because the new
⏹️ ▶️ John languages offer some benefit that the other language didn't. Just look at Apple with Objective-C and with my
⏹️ ▶️ John Copeland 2010 articles where I was saying, hey, Apple needs a modern language. Everyone was loving Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2010. And I was like, no, they have a looming language crisis. They need another language. Objective-C is too
⏹️ ▶️ John low level. They need a modern language. And there was pushback from Objective-C developers saying, Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John is great. I don't see why you think we need something different. We've all been using it. All the frameworks are written in it. All the apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are written in it. Why do you need another language? It's just, it's going to be worse in every way. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John people are going to suddenly start with zero years experience with this new language. They aren't LLMs, but they have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John issue, which is like, well, we're already trained, so to speak, on Objective-C and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything's written in Objective-C. So what the hell are you doing? And the answer was, existing languages
⏹️ ▶️ John have problems. It's difficult to write correct, bug-free, secure code in these languages because they have undefined
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior, they have pointers, like, you know, manual retain release before the days of Arc, all
⏹️ ▶️ John that other stuff. Like we've shown that it's really difficult to write this correctly. LLMs are no different.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will make more mistakes in a language that allows them to make more mistakes. They'll make more security
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. They'll make more bugs if it is more possible in the language. That's why a memory
⏹️ ▶️ John safe language will, humans will make fewer memory bugs in a memory safe language, and so will LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's why we keep making new languages. That's why we made C instead of doing everything in assembly. That's why we made all these higher level languages
⏹️ ▶️ John is because they provide a way for a thing of some skill, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John that's a person or an LLM, to write fewer lines of code, which is fewer tokens for LLMs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it's less work for humans, and to make fewer mistakes because of the design of the language. And I don't think
⏹️ ▶️ John that will change. Um, Because like, it's not as if Swift is going to be the end all be all
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems like C is going to be the end all be all when everyone moves on to C, but then, you know, C ⁇ and Objective-C come
⏹️ ▶️ John along. It's like, well, I guess that's a little bit better. And then the memory safe languages. Why is Rust popular? Why is everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John rewriting all their C ⁇ and Rust? Because human LLM, either way, fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John security bugs, fewer you know memory bugs like just It's just safer,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And for all the benefits that we see in Swift, all the things that the Swift compiler does and
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift language does are so focused on trying to make certain kinds of bugs, if not impossible,
⏹️ ▶️ John then either really hard to do, or a lot of Swift design is like, we have to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do this, but every time you do it, we're going to put something in the code so it's easy for
⏹️ ▶️ John both a human and an LM to find. For example, if you search your Swift code for the word unsafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John U-N-S-A-F-E, that should point you to a lot of places where you're doing a thing that bypasses
⏹️ ▶️ John some protection. And that's easy. That's easy to grep for. It's easy to RG
⏹️ ▶️ John for for recursive grep in these agents. And so there will be some language after Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John that is better than Swift in the ways that Swift was better than Objective-C. And humans will want to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so will all the agents. If we get to the point where humans don't
⏹️ ▶️ John want to make a new language because they can't imagine a way that a language can be better, then we'll be at the end of history and
⏹️ ▶️ John we don't need to know any more programming languages. But that's not going to happen in my lifetime for sure. I mean, I don't know how long Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to go, but Swift does still let you do a bunch of unsafe stuff. And 200 years from
⏹️ ▶️ John now, someone's going to think it's barbaric all the unsafe stuff that we can do in Swift. It's like, why did they even allow that
⏹️ ▶️ John in a language? Like, well, they had to because it was trying to replace C code and the certain things you can't do and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they're 200 years in the future. It's like, our languages don't allow that at all. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we have so much safety guarantees and mathematically provable correctness and impossibility
⏹️ ▶️ John of security flaws in these five realms. And we're fighting these other realms
⏹️ ▶️ John that you hadn't even thought of for quantum computers and stuff like that. But of course, we got all those basics solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I think we'll continue to have new languages. And I think everyone will benefit from
⏹️ ▶️ John them, language models and human alike.
#askatp: Vintage computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Phil Kim writes: Do you collect vintage computers? If not, which three vintage computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you like to have in your collection? I do not. I will say, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not an official answer of mine, but I will say I happen to hold the MacBook Adorable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier today. And I keep thinking about like the Intel CPU conversation from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier, and I held this thing, and it just is so amazing. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know we've talked about this a hundred times, make it 101 now. A modern cut of that with Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the inside would be so amazing. But anyway, to actually answer Phil's question, I grew up on ThinkPads. That's what I'd want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would want a ThinkPad 701c, which is what you would know as the one with the butterfly keyboard. Kids look at Wikipedia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We'll put a link in the show notes. And I would also want a ThinkPad T30, which was, I think, I'm pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was my college computer. I freaking love that thing. It was incredible at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would probably ask for two ThinkPads. John, you would want the entirety of every Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has ever been made. So Marco, I think your answer will be much more interesting. What would you want?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don't think I would really use one. I think that the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is… Oh, I never use it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The answer is like, I really shouldn't go buy vintage computers because I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won't use them. Whenever I've bought, you know, like I bought my Palm Pilot that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I talked about, like I bought, I bought a Palm 5X a couple of years back off eBay because you can get one like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand new condition for like 25 bucks. And it's it was fun playing with it for like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an evening. But as it turns out, modern computing devices are way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than old ones. Who knew? You know, if I was going to have, if we were going to do a video show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wanted to have a background that looked cool on video, right i get you know i get like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trash can Mac Pro and put it on a shelf and stuff like that. Like I, you know, I would have that that kind of fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vintage computer stuff basically as scenery behind me in a video, which many people do for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this reason. But to actually use them, to actually try to keep them running and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them, one of the problems you quickly face, which is something that you don't really face with game consoles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that computers really rely a lot more on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem around them. Especially once computers became mainly internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terminals. Well, how, if you have a vintage computing device of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind, first of all, what kind of Wi-Fi radio does it have? Does it even have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi radio? Does it have networking? If not, how are you going to get any software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto it? What is it going to do? And then, if you can get it to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect to the internet, if it's that kind of device, will it support any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern TLS protocol to be able to connect to any server today?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not. If it is, say, an old iOS device, will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it have like the right code signing support server-side still running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to let it do any, you know, install any software, you know, run any app? like You start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running into problems like that with a lot of kind of mid vintage computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipment. Now, if you go back far enough to stuff that didn't really use the internet for anything or didn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need the internet for anything at least, you start having more options of like what you can get running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and do something with. uh But then, you know, it is more of a novelty. It's like, okay, well, i can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can, you know, boot up classic Mac OS and do what? Like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I going to do in it, right? All I did my whole childhood was boot up classic macOS and do what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no internet. Right. Like, and that's, I mean, that is how I used my entire first computer for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time that I had it was like, yeah, I would, you know, have a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games. I would have QBasic, and I would turn it on and do what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for hours, like, sure. But to do that today, I don't know. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm never bored. So I'm never looking for something like that. Like, I always have a million things I want to be doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don't think that kind of hobby is for me. But it's the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that I like watching, like, when other people on the internet do cool stuff with vintage computers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like watching to see what they do with it. It's a fun thing to kind of see, breeze through like a social feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a blog post or a YouTube video. But that's not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it fascinating this question about collecting vintage computers. Marco goes to what are you going to use them
⏹️ ▶️ John for? And I will point out, much like collecting books, collecting books is a different hobby than reading books.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes they're combined, but not always. So the idea that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would actually have to use these computers you collect is like, no, sometimes collecting is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann and it's not the
⏹️ ▶️ John using of computers. And on your second point about what are you going to do with them, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows the bifurcation in both your knowledge of the scene and also in,
⏹️ ▶️ John sadly, the technology. You're very familiar with old iOS devices. And one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the shames about them is if they don't have a good jailbreak available for
⏹️ ▶️ John you, it's sometimes difficult to get those more locked down iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John to you know, do interesting things uh because like, again, if you don't have access to
⏹️ ▶️ John a good jailbreak, uh you're limited to what they used to do. And if like the servers aren't up or the software doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John work, or as you said, the TLS, blah, blah. But in the realm before closed down platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ John man, people are adding Wi-Fi to Mac Pluses. Okay. Like there there are web browsers written for classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS with modern TLS. People are writing them today. Today they're writing them. They're
⏹️ ▶️ John writing them in like people. I think someone just is writing a bunch of apps in Swift. Steve Troutman Smith
⏹️ ▶️ John was just porting his apps in Swift to classic Mac OS so it can run like a 128k
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and stuff. Like this, for the computers that are not locked down, people just write stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or have LLMs write stuff. So yeah, none of the old web browsers work. Fine. They write a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they write a new web browser to run on a machine with 128 kilobytes of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John that had never seen the internet. And, you know, they have a little for Wi-Fi hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have like, you know, little peripherals that you can buy and plug into your Mac SE. And now your Mac SE is on
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi. And it doesn't even know what TCP IP is, but it's like there's like an Apple Talk interface to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just the stuff out there from internet computers, that's a whole separate hobby. There's collecting them. Then there's, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have them, and I'm going to like make them work in the modern internet. I see someone wrote a Slack client for it. Someone recently
⏹️ ▶️ John was showing a Markdown editor on a classic Mac. Like this is stuff. It looks so weird to see
⏹️ ▶️ John like on a nine inch monochrome black and white screen on a computer from the 80s and someone's writing
⏹️ ▶️ John Markdown and they, you know, like do two asterisks around something or one or whatever it is in
⏹️ ▶️ John Markdown. And then the text slants and becomes italic. It's just people have weird hobbies.
⏹️ ▶️ John For me, I do collect vintage computers. I don't collect
⏹️ ▶️ John them to use them mostly because I don't have time and space and place to use them. So it's more of just a collecting, collecting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But the other thing is, I only, for the most part, collect things that I use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I already did this. I lived it. I had these computers as my one and only main computer that I used for
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years and years.
⏹️ ▶️ John similar computers. Like, for example, I have a Mac 2FX because I always wanted one. I never had a Mac 2 fx because it cost so
⏹️ ▶️ John much as a car, but I bought mine for 20 bucks. Many, many, many years later, I just always
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to own one because it was such a cool computer, but I had its peers. I had i had computers of
⏹️ ▶️ John similar power in within a few years of that or, you know, whatever. um And
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco, I don't particularly have any desire to use older worse computers. A,
⏹️ ▶️ John I already did that. I used them when they were older, worse. And B, I like new computers that are better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do like collecting them as little art objects and sentimental things.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's why I have a NextCube and a NextSlab. That hardware is so gorgeous. And I did, in fact, use
⏹️ ▶️ John them when they were contemporary in college and thought it wouldn't be cool to have one of these someday.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I bought those for like 20 or 30 bucks at the MIT swap. So I have so many things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which three vintage computers would I like to have? I think I have basically everything that I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John For a while, I wanted to get an E-mate. I always wanted to be on the lookout for one, but I didn't really want one, one. Like, I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John super into them. It's just it was a shame that I never found one. So E-mate's kind of in there, but honestly, the E-mate's kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly. Um, I don't have a Newton 2000 or 2100
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Um, But I mean, I think I saw one of those and it was just too much. I'm fine with not having
⏹️ ▶️ John that because I never actually used that one at the time. I don't know. I don't think there's…
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have a Trash Can Mac Pro. I've got all the big Mac Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John that I want. It's kind of sad that my 2008 Mac Pro, the front of it
⏹️ ▶️ John was dented by a vacuum cleaner. It's tough. It was back when it was on the floor. It's one of the reasons my
⏹️ ▶️ John 2019 Mac Pro was elevated up off the floor. No danger to vacuums. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I'd like wheels for it. I just have the one wheel instead of the four wheels. I don't know. I'm sure I could think of something, but
⏹️ ▶️ John here the, I mean, my wife's listening to this and saying, you do not need more vintage computers. And she's right. I
⏹️ ▶️ John need to get rid of, I
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of tons of computers before I think about even getting another one of them. I did, I did
⏹️ ▶️ John bring the trash can in because it's small and I did want one of those. So I got a trash can. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, my, I think the main thing is which 30 computers are you going to get rid of, not which three
⏹️ ▶️ John would you like to have in your collection? Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to our sponsors of this episode, Factor and Quince. And thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about the Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Enterprise NAS, a new offering from Ubiquiti. You know we love Ubiquiti and we love NASs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're going to be talking about that in Overtime. ATP.fm slash join if you want to hear that and hear so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much other stuff. Thank you so much to 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at 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
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Syracuse. It's accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Casey’s tech-support question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I have a weird technical support question, and I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have done something wrong, but I can't figure out what the heck it is. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have four, I generally have my devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a focus mode that only lets through like a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contacts. And I didn't think about it until just this moment that I should have tested this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue outside of that focus mode to see if that focus mode might be part of the problem. But let's assume it isn't.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the issue that I have is particularly on my watch, this is most egregious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my watch. I will feel the tap tap when those people that are blessed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through that focus mode text me. I'll feel the tap tap when I'm not in the focus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, which is not common, but it happens when I'm not in the focus mode. And I'll feel a tap tap when people text me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are, you know, just regular people or people that are not special enough to be in my, you know, almost all the time focus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. However, I am almost positive that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never get a haptic notification when Aaron texts me, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crappy because the one person I want to always get a tap tap
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this an elaborate setup here for you to try to, for us to try to like excuse
⏹️ ▶️ John you from something that you're hearing about?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Partially. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that I'm not answering your text. They never tap on my phone. Listen to the next ATP and I'll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Yeah, I mean, that is a little bit of this, but like she, we haven't had any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular conversation about this in a fair bit of time now, but there are times that she wants a semi-urgent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey response from me and very understandably gets a little perturbed when I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I didn't even see your text. Now, I will note that I had way back when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up a custom like um, haptic notification on the phone for when she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calls. Like you can, there's a way, I think it's an accessibility. There's a way to set up a custom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buzz basically when she calls. And since my phone is always silent, my watch is always silent insofar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it doesn't make verbal or not verbal, but it doesn't make audible noise. But there's got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be something I have done wrong that is causing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to not receive the tap tap when she sends me a text on my watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for the life of me, I can't figure it out. I did look and in the contacts app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are a bunch of different toggles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can do. And one of them is, you know, silence notifications. I'm sorry, that's not in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contacts. That's in the messages app. One of them is silence notifications. I'm looking at my phone when I say this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, maybe this exists on the watch and I've somehow turned it on and I don't know it. But on my phone, I see,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sorry, it's hide alerts, which is off. And then I generally don't send read receipts, read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receipts, whatever you pronounce it, but I have those on for her. I have show and shared with you turned on. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share focus status turned on, which I also don't typically turn on for most people. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she is like as special as I can make her be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage on my phone. And for whatever reason, I cannot figure out why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my watch does not do a tap tap when she sends me a text. Oh, actually, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly true. Interesting wrinkle. It seems to be when she, it's only when she sends me a text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the conversation between only she and I. We're on a zillion different group chats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where she will break through. Like, for example, in focus mode, which is what I want for the record,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she will break through in a group chat where none of the other people in the group chat are blessed in this particular focus mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And she'll break through in the group chat messages. But if she sends me a private message, so to speak, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it. Both in the sense that I don't receive it and also I don't understand what's happening. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's, I, I, I am, this is a call for help. This is, this is one of the advantages of being on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is that you can ask for help and crowdsource this. What have I done wrong? It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to be something I've done. What have I done wrong? Please help me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to know because I have exactly the same problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you serious? A lot of husbands seem to have a technical reason why they're not answering their wife's texts in a
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann timely manner. Interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not good for spousal relations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not, Marco. Let me tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I can confirm it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really not. And I would, please, if you figure out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer, let me. So, okay, my theory. So I wear an Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I'm usually when I am like not getting these messages, it is almost always when I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at my computer. Now, I'm always at my computer. So that might not be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything, but yeah, I don't know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, but there is something about like me being at my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where my theory is that like one of the devices is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of saying, I got this. I'm currently being used. I'll alert the user. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other ones don't. I don't know. Another theory is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I'm in the middle of doing something in the middle of my tremendous monitor, if a notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes up in the corner, maybe I just don't see it. Like maybe it, if I'm really focused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, I mean, like no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly, this happens to me a lot because remember, I'm going three up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And if I'm looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the leftmost monitor and the notification is actually on the upper right-hand corner of my central.
⏹️ ▶️ John you have it blessed to like make sound for her too? You don't have sound notifications. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just for the one person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On your Mac. I mean, I would love to do that if such a thing is possible. I thought I did do that, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But maybe the answer is maybe on the Mac. So you can set notifications to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show momentarily or to stay there until you interact with them or dismiss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Maybe the answer is just to turn message notifications on in the way that they just stay there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think I did that for her.
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You say that until you have stacked up 8,000 notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so I am genuinely gobsmacked that you also have this problem, Marco. And I wish I could tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, yes, there have been some issues between she and I from time to time when she really needs a response and I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't give it to her. And she's right. Like, I'm not trying to paint myself as correct. I am not. She
⏹️ ▶️ John What does she do with it? Did
⏹️ ▶️ John call you in that case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Well, sometimes we're in the, you know, we're in the same house. That's the other thing that's hilarious. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she'll just scream my name instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That works too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But, you know, something I want to talk about in a future episode of ATP is just how ridiculous and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hilarious it is that when you have a couple that works from home, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much of our conversation during the day is done via text message? We're in the same freaking house. Like it's so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not necessary. Our house is not that big.
⏹️ ▶️ John son will call me from his bedroom. I'll be downstairs and he will call me a phone call from his bedroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I mean, this is, we, we don't live in big houses. This is a regular size house, but yet this is what
⏹️ ▶️ John he could just yell. I would hear him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Anyways, but I've got to imagine that I have, been, apparently we,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I, have set something wrong, but I will be damned if I know what.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me give you my third data point here that might help you. I have this problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in reverse, my wife tells me, oh, I didn't see your text because my phone didn't vibrate
⏹️ ▶️ John or my watch didn't vibrate rather. Interesting. And what I think is, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was on the right track with like, we know Apple devices in theory coordinate with each other. So they don't all have
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications. So one of them's got to say, I've got this. And the other data point is
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't wear a Apple Watch, but my wife does.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don't have a problem of
⏹️ ▶️ John not seeing her messages. She doesn't see mine. She's wearing an Apple Watch. Now, my question for
⏹️ ▶️ John all of you is like, when you're wearing the watch, okay, maybe the watch doesn't vibrate and you
⏹️ ▶️ John expected it to. But does the notification show on your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Does your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it doesn't because it is the watch has handled it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, obviously the watch hasn't handled it because you're saying your watch isn't vibrating. But like, I do wonder if adding
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch to the mix is the thing that that exposes whatever Apple bug. First of all, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John saying I'm calling this an Apple bug because so many people, like my wife and everyone else, always
⏹️ ▶️ John ask me questions exactly like you just phrased it, which is like, I expect to get a notification and I don't. And very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very rarely it is a question of settings. Much more likely it is, you've got a dozen
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple devices. And honestly, I don't even know what's supposed to happen here, but we can demo it. We could be two feet
⏹️ ▶️ John from each other. And my wife will say, send me a text message. I'll send it. And she's like, nope, no vibration, no notification,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, but then the next time I'll do it, it will or whatever. So I think it's Apple Bugs plus Apple Watch that
⏹️ ▶️ John causes this problem. And the solution is, I'll get rid of your Apple Watches.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. The other thing I would say, Casey, is I'm very suspicious of your focus mode as well. So I would do some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experimentation without the focus mode. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John turn everything off,
⏹️ ▶️ John turn like, I am open to the entire world because honestly, who's trying to text you during the day? It's fine. Just leave
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself open to the world and see how bad it actually is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I recall correctly, so the, my general, I haven't messed with this in literally years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my general focus node um, like routine is that when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sit down to work at about eight in the morning, I go into a work focus mode and you two knuckleheads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can break through. Mike can break through. There's a couple other people that break through. But generally speaking, it's one of those situations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I will see it when I will see a message when I go to the messages app. You know what I mean? Like it's not going to notify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me Um, if, if, if some random schmo sends me a text. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then in the, once the kids are home from school, granted, it's summer now, but once the kids are home from school, I go into this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this kind of universal focus mode. I call it personal. What that basically means is family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can break through and basically no one else. Um, I actually genuinely don't remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I have you guys and Mike on there or not, but um, for the most part, in the personal focus mode, which is what I live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, basically from the time the kids get off the bus until their bedtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it's pretty much only family that can break through. And then in the evenings, typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm pretty sure they all get turned off and I am in like wide open, no no focus mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wide open mode. Um, And I think you're right. I do need to experiment with this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it's worth experimenting with my custom vibration, even though that is only for phone calls, if I'm not mistaken, but I should experiment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that. But I just don't understand why she, the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person I always freaking want to get texts from or notifications from, is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only person I consistently don't get them from. And specifically in the conversation with just the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, because like I said, she will poke through on group chats. Like a group chat will be popping off when I'm in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the personal focus mode. And I will see only her messages, which is chef's kiss. That's exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I want. Because whatever it is, she's saying, wherever she's saying it, I want to know and I want to know immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for whatever reason, when she sends something in our private channel message,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever you want, a conversation, I guess, then it won't, then it won't notify me. And it's driving me freaking crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, you're highlighting the fact that she's special and that she has different settings than everybody else. So maybe unspecial her
⏹️ ▶️ John and make her have the same settings as everyone else.
⏹️ ▶️ John do some experiments with her two feet away. At least at the very least, this will give you more plausible cover when she thinks you're ignoring her
⏹️ ▶️ John messages. And you say you don't, because if you do that experiment for a while until she's sick of like send me a text,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey literally sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John next to you, hell, put your watch on her wrist
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and say send, send me a text, send a text,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Of course, if it backfires on you and it constantly vibrates every time she does it, she's going to give you quite a look. But
⏹️ ▶️ John uh I'm taking all you at face value here and saying this is not elaborate cover for your past sins, but is in
⏹️ ▶️ John fact an actual technical problem, which I have no problem believing because Apple's notification system is very buggy. So, And like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I'm on the other end of it. I'm on the one who's the watch wearing wife is telling me, oh, it just never vibrated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let me ask you. So I'm looking at my personal focus and I'm looking at my iPhone and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have turned on intelligent breakthrough and silencing, which I don't think that's really relevant because of anything, that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make them come through, not come through. Anyways, so in the people category,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, you know, you guys, Mike, Aaron, and a couple other people, basically like a couple family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey members and like this, basically the school trunk line. So then I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some apps that can break through, although not many. And below the people and apps section, there's an options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing or navigation link basically, where it says notification options. And it appears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that everything on this screen is under the auspice of silence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications. So there are four different options. Show on lock screen on or off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have it off. Hide notification badges. I have it off. Silence notifications, I have as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always. And, And then I'm sorry, a different section is appearance, dim lock screen, which I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have off. So it's, so if I'm reading this right, silence notifications is show on lock screen off. Hide notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey badges off. Silence notifications always. But again, that's for the silence notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then additionally, there's an option for appearance, dim lock screen, which I also have off. So I don't think that's it either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's got to be something I've set up wrong, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you only want answers from spouses or are you taking
⏹️ ▶️ John single people as well?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I will take it from anyone. Truly. I know you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding, but I'll take it from anyone. If you have an answer, I'd love to hear it.