M4 iPad Pro Hands-On, ChatGPT-4o vs. Google AI Arms Race, “I Liked the Internet”
Begun the search wars have. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Huge show this week. We have new iPads. I have my M4 iPad Pro here.
Stephen Robles:Gonna give some early impressions, maybe a little bit reviews. Google IO is this week. We're gonna talk about how maybe exciting or unexciting that was. Also, Chad GPT announced its 4 o model and some pretty incredible examples. So gonna talk about that.
Stephen Robles:Apple announced more accessibility features coming with iOS 18 like eye tracking and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by you, those who support the show directly and we thank you for that. My name is Steven Robles, one of your hosts, and joining me as always, my friend Jason Atin. How's it going, Jason?
Jason Aten:It's very good.
Stephen Robles:It's good. I'm I'm so excited. I got my iPad Pro yesterday.
Jason Aten:Yeah. This is it,
Stephen Robles:the M4 11 inch iPad Pro.
Jason Aten:I think I might
Stephen Robles:be the only person who's gonna have a YouTube video about the 11 inch iPad Pro.
Jason Aten:That that might be true. You might be right.
Stephen Robles:I have not seen many. I don't even know if Apple has even sent, like, review units for 11 inch, out to people. This is not a review unit. I bought I bought this one. This is gonna be my my main iPad, which I'm very excited about.
Stephen Robles:So good talking about that. Did you get I know you got an iPad Air for review. Yep. Do you have one of the new Pros as well or no?
Jason Aten:I do not have a Pro. I have not bought anything still. I'm really good at I'm getting good at this
Stephen Robles:not buying things. Not buying things? Well, I I I'm curious. I'm gonna ask you about the nano texture again if you could recount your memories from the event because Sure. I don't and I'm not gonna say I regret the nano texture.
Stephen Robles:I need to go to the store and actually look at it, but, well, anyway, they will talk about the iPads in a second. Stop trying to get me on that, Jason. Goodness. Trying to get me off topic.
Jason Aten:I literally don't think I've said a word about it except for in response to a question. Just to be clear.
Stephen Robles:That's exactly right. I'm just I'm excited about it. But I wanna thank, 5 star reviews for the show in Apple Podcasts, Cobb RSK and Kevin JT, battery percentage on. It's okay. Nobody's perfect.
Stephen Robles:And c r Peck. This was interesting. He actually listed for all of his devices. He does battery percentage off for iPad and iPhone, thank you, but he has it on for his MacBook, which I thought was interesting. So battery percentage on for MacBook, off for his, like, mobile devices.
Stephen Robles:And CR Peck is also asking for more HomeKit content Mhmm. And we will do that for sure once there's actually HomeKit content to talk about.
Jason Aten:Does I mean, doesn't bearing an Ethernet cable in the backyard count as HomeKit content sort of?
Stephen Robles:That's, that's smart home. I would say that's smart home. I I count that that a smart home. But, no, we're we are gonna talk about HomeKit, because I have some I have some cool things we talk about. Hopefully, at WWDC, which is now quickly approaching, we are, what, 3, 4 weeks away, less than a month, from w w the keynote is on Monday, June 10th June 10th.
Stephen Robles:So we are less than a month away, and maybe maybe HomeKit will actually have a section in the keynote. We it hasn't had one in, I think a few years. So I
Jason Aten:think, like, the HomePod mini introduction was the last time when they had the house set up or whatever.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes Apple TV will get, like, combined with HomeKit stuff
Jason Aten:because That's true.
Stephen Robles:When they announce the you know, it has thread, but only if you get the Ethernet model. And it's weird. But, anyway, I will see. We'll see they
Jason Aten:talk about Hold on. Before you go on, I have to just ask a question about this
Stephen Robles:battery
Jason Aten:percentage on on the Mac Yes.
Stephen Robles:Which is madness.
Jason Aten:But the reason Wait a minute. But the reason So you're
Stephen Robles:gonna say battery percentage on is good on the phone, but madness on the Mac.
Jason Aten:Well, first of all, my Macbook plugged in most of the day, so what do I even care? Well, it's a good idea. Of all, if you have a MacBook Air, again, what do you even care? It'll last you, 3 days. But here's the only reason that this is madness.
Jason Aten:Because I just went ahead and toggled this. Yeah. And what is Apple even doing? Because they put the percentage next to the battery icon. What what even is this, Steven?
Stephen Robles:Which is how it was on the iPhone a long time ago.
Jason Aten:Which It was
Stephen Robles:next to the
Jason Aten:I don't even I don't even understand. That's
Stephen Robles:the key. The number in the battery icon on the iPhone, I'm just gonna say it. It's ugly. It doesn't look good.
Jason Aten:It's also, like, 3 point tall. No one even yeah.
Stephen Robles:I don't
Jason Aten:like it. I don't
Stephen Robles:like it.
Jason Aten:We can debate this more later, but I just think, like, Apple so it's not so much madness that CR Peck has it on. It's the Apple. You could do a better job. Like, there's still plenty of room in that menu bar.
Stephen Robles:I'm gonna I think I'm gonna put it on, let me enable the battery percentage for my Mac studio real quick and, see what that looks like. Just kidding.
Jason Aten:If you could figure that one out, I'm real real impressed, bud.
Stephen Robles:That's why I buy that's why I like desktop computers. I mean, you know, John Sarkeesa talks about this all the time, but one of the things I love not thinking about when it comes to my computer is battery. And that's why Mac Studio is just great. I just never have to think about it. You know what we should do?
Stephen Robles:Everyone should go to our community and tell us what they think about their battery percentage on their MacBook. They just wanna tell more people are joining the community every week. So fun. Thank you for doing that. You can go to social.primarytech.fm.
Stephen Robles:It's free to join. You could talk about the episodes. I have a post each for that. Lots of conversations going on. That's where I announced the live unboxing of the iPad Pro and graduation season.
Stephen Robles:That's a question from one of you guys, listeners, and just a bunch of posts, both from you and Jason and I. Jason's and my and my videos get auto posted there. I used a Zapier automation. I was
Jason Aten:being fancy. Wow.
Stephen Robles:With that, yeah. So you can links to that in the show notes as well. Come join the community, and we're having lots of fun over there. Ask questions about the iPad Pro because I'm gonna be doing a video very soon, and, I don't know if I should call it a review. I feel like how do you feel about reviews?
Stephen Robles:So we're talking about the M4 iPad Pro. I've had it for, like, 16 hours, 18 hours maybe. You know, it arrived like 3 PM yesterday. I think certain devices, when you say you're going to review it, especially if it's like the Apple Vision Pro, like a new product, I do think you have to spend a significant amount of time with it to understand, like, how to talk about it, what are actually the pain points or the advantages. When it comes to an iPad like this one, I have been using iPads for many years.
Stephen Robles:I've been editing podcasts on iPad exclusively for about 6 or 7 years. I've used every size iPad. I had the 11 inch in 2018. I went to the 12.9 inch when it got miniLED. I spent the last 7, 8 months with iPad mini.
Stephen Robles:Like, I have lots of experience with all these iPads, and all the thoughts that I'm about to share about the new iPad Pro, like, they came to me pretty quickly, and so I feel like a week with it is not gonna make that big of a difference as opposed to a couple days with it because of my experience with it. How do you feel about saying review depending on the product and the time that which you have it? You think about that?
Jason Aten:I'm really glad you asked the question again because the whole time you were talking, I was just adding up in my head the amount of money that Steven has spent on iPads. I traded
Stephen Robles:in a lot of those iPads. Okay. I did a lot of trade ins and this. Thing.
Jason Aten:I just was, like, doing math, and so I was I totally lost track of what you're even saying. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Thank you.
Jason Aten:I think it is it's interesting, like, what is a review? So I reviewed the 12 point or no. It's the 13 inch Air MacBook Air that no. IPad Air. I can't talk.
Jason Aten:Words are really hard for us writers. I'm sorry.
Stephen Robles:M2 13 inch iPad Air, the new one.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I got the Air. We'll just we're gonna just stick with that. It's the Air.
Stephen Robles:That's right.
Jason Aten:The 13 inch Air. And, like, so I had it for basically a week to write about it. And in this case, it was actually fairly easy because my take was just it's if you like the iPad Pro 12.9 inches that's what this is, except for has fewer speakers, no ProMotion, and no mini LED. But other than that, like, that's what this thing is. I think that the for someone like you, the important thing is, like, there's a whole bunch of videos.
Jason Aten:That's the first thing people go to look at. And then if you're going to have a take, it has to be it probably benefits from being a little bit more in-depth. Right? Because at this point, nobody is looking for the first impressions things, which is really what all of the videos that publish at the embargo and all the articles that publish at the embargo are. They're just they're just, you know, you know, quick impressions.
Jason Aten:The difference for me with the iPad Air actually was that I have an M2 iPad Pro, and I have, you know, a year and a half, 2 years of experience using it. I know exactly what the M2 is capable of in an iPad. So it was really easy for me to be like, hey. It's just bigger. There were some cool features.
Jason Aten:I did the logic stuff. But for for what, you know, what is a review? Super philosophical question. We had this conversation a couple ago, I feel like. But I think it's fine to call it a review, but I think it's like, the the space where there's, you know, valuable, content to be made is I use this as my primary device for 3 weeks, and here's what I thought.
Jason Aten:Like, that kind of thing.
Stephen Robles:I'm not gonna call my video a review. I do wanna try and get it up soon because there is that diminishing returns of if you post a video about the new product 3 weeks after launches, people are not as interested. But I wanna focus on the 2 things that I use iPad for mainly which is editing podcasts, which is my biggest use case, and sheet music, which I still use occasionally and my wife does. And so I just have to say the iPad Pro, I'd you know, I was not at the event. I did not get that initial impression holding it and such.
Stephen Robles:I know everyone has said it. I know. But I'm gonna say it again too. The thinness and lightness of this device is is pretty stark. You know, when you pick it up for the first time, when I took it out of the box, I was I was really impressed.
Stephen Robles:And I went with the 11 inch because, again, my primary use case of editing podcasts, I hold it in tablet mode the whole time I'm doing it. And over the last few years, I had the 12.9 inch because I wanted that mini LED screen, but it's too unwieldy when I'm editing, like, 2 audio tracks. You know, I'm editing the 2 of us, and it was just it's a really big screen. The mini was great for thinness and lightness, but the screen quality was just not there. I missed ProMotion and scrubbing through waveforms just was not as, good on the Mini because you just couldn't see as quickly, you know, you lose the clarity.
Stephen Robles:And so the thinness and lightness of this device is pretty amazing and the Magic Keyboard, I have to say this thing is so much improved over the previous one. Not only thinness and lightness, but Jason. The function row of keys, I always knew I probably wanted it, but the first time I just reached over and adjusted the brightness of my iPad with a keyboard key was amazing, and same for volume. Like, volume and brightness, just those 2 shortcuts on the Magic Keyboard, just my first few hours with this is, like, this is a way better experience overall, Magic Keyboard and iPad and everything together, and how thin it is when you close it. And, you know, because previously, the magic keyboard and iPad pro was like thicker, thicker than a MacBook Pro, you know, and it was really heavy.
Stephen Robles:And this is just it's so thin and light. So anyway, it's I I really like it, and I'm gonna be very bullish on it, I think, with my review.
Jason Aten:I have questions for you about it.
Stephen Robles:Yes, please.
Jason Aten:Because we need to get some of your takes. I I think it's worth mentioning, for context, the previous 11 inch compared to the new one is almost 10% thinner. It's all like that's a thing. I mean, you think it's a half a millimeter, but it was 5.9 millimeters going down to 5.4 millimeters. Like, that's almost a that's almost 10% reduction in the in the in your in the pro the larger one is even more.
Jason Aten:It's it's kinda bananas when you think about it. But I'm curious, what was the thing that surprised you the most about either the keyboard or the the screen or whatever it was. Like, getting that 11 inch in your hands, what surprised you the most? Like, what were you not expecting?
Stephen Robles:Well, one, I I was surprised at how much I missed the 11 inch form factor because again for podcast editing specifically, I do think this is the perfect size. You get the screen real estate plus promotion, and the reason why it it just was so good picking it up because I I hold it like a tablet for, like, 2 hours at a time. You know, that's that's the typical, you know, amount of time I I spend usually editing the show or whatever, and so, like, being able to just barely feel it, you know. And obviously, you hold it for 2 hours, it is gonna get heavier and more awkward, like, as you're editing, and so the fact that it is so light and thin at first means that a longer editing session is gonna be just more comfortable and better to do, and so I think that's what what's, you know, hit me the most, and I I love the 11 inch size. I know there's so many people that are like iPad mini is the best iPad, and I love the iPad mini.
Stephen Robles:It's great for reading, for sure. People love the bigger size. I think one of the things I keep seeing in all the reviews is the whole it's great hardware, hamstrung by the software. You will not hear me say that in my review or here because the software is great for what I use it for. Like, I don't want different software.
Stephen Robles:This software is great. You know, I might say I would love to be able to choose an audio input and output, but that could be an iPadOS in the settings. That's probably the one thing I would hope for, but I think the larger size makes people think it should be a Mac because that's the size of the MacBook Air and it, you know, gets closer to those laptops, but the 11 inch I just think is is is the perfect size for me. I'll just say that.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And I think you make a really, really good point, which is that if it were not for the previous 12.9 and now 13 inch iPads, I don't know that there would be quite as much clamoring for this thing should run macOS or this thing should replace a Mac or whatever. I agree with you. I've always felt like the 11 inch was the perfect iPad size. I feel like it's the perfect size for a device that you want to there was someone who commented on one of our YouTube, last week, I think it was, and was talking about how it should be able to do a boot and run Mac OS and whatever.
Jason Aten:And I'm not quoting the person, but the but the point was like because objectively, it would be better to have one device instead of 2. And if and I don't think that's true because I want my laptop to have a 13 or 14 inch screen. I do not want my iPad to have a 13 or 14 inch screen. I want it to be 11 inches because for all of the things I do on an iPad, it's the perfect size. 11 inches in my mind, the the great size.
Jason Aten:This 13 or this 13 inch Air has is great. Like, it is a fantastic, like, laptop. Of course, all I'm doing is showing you the case, which is very not exciting. But, like, it's a great size. It's a great, you know, form factor.
Jason Aten:It's not a new form factor. Like, we're real familiar with this. It is great though that now you can get basically the same iPad that you could buy 3 weeks ago and say $400. Right? Like, that's Right.
Jason Aten:That's pretty amazing. You get the m two. It's it's fantastic. Yeah. But I think think that if they'd never made a larger size, the iPad would be the iPad.
Jason Aten:It wouldn't be bumping up against that. But for you, I have a question. Like, you have a a Mac Studio. You have a MacBook Pro. Do you think that a 13 inch, had you gone that route, could have replaced the types of things you do on your laptop?
Jason Aten:Because you don't if I unless you're traveling, you do all of your intensive computing things on your desktop computer. Right? And I don't even really know. I don't honestly know why you have a Mac pro, but and and that's no judgment. I'm not.
Jason Aten:We've never really talked about this
Stephen Robles:because I wanted Jason.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Because it was there and it has an m three in it. Existed.
Stephen Robles:And it
Jason Aten:was what was next. We went there because it was next. Right?
Stephen Robles:Thank you. Thank you.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Okay. But like for the types of things that you do on that, would a larger iPad Pro have been a substitute, or are you do you feel like what I was just saying where the iPad should be for iPad things and I use my Mac for Mac things?
Stephen Robles:I think this is gonna be part of whatever video I make about these tests.
Jason Aten:I'm just trying to spoil all your videos.
Stephen Robles:No. No. It's no. It's good because I can hash the idea here. You know, form factor is a big deal in the devices you use.
Stephen Robles:Like you can answer 50 emails on your iPhone, so why don't you? Why do you need a Mac? Right. You can answer those emails on your iPhone. You can attach files, you can put an image, like you can do all of it on your iPhone.
Stephen Robles:Why do you need a Mac for that? But as we could probably all attest to, if you have to write a bunch it's way better to do that with a physical keyboard. And maybe it's a magic keyboard on the iPad, but maybe it's a Mac. And so when I look at like the devices, like, might say, is it overkill? You know, because that's that's the question everybody's asking, is the iPad overkill because it's so powerful or is it overkill to have whatever?
Stephen Robles:And I I wanna go to just mention Jon Gruber's review of the iPad because he was one of the few people that did not argue that it should run macOS and was really trying to and I appreciated his take. And one of the things that he made the distinction about is is something better, is it best, and is something just nicer? And that nicer adjective, I think, is the best descriptor for the iPad Pro versus other iPads, and so I'll come back to that. But to your question, why do I have a MacBook Pro? Honestly, I don't use it often enough probably to warrant having it, like I'll admit that, but when I travel, if I'm going to edit a video, I'm going to edit the video on that MacBook Pro and there's just a there's a few times a year, either when I'm traveling with family or maybe on a work trip, where the MacBook Pro is the device I need in that moment.
Stephen Robles:Do I need it all the time? No. But I need it those times. Just like the iPad, I can, you know, I can edit a podcast in Logic on my Mac, just like I can answer emails on my iPhone. I do it faster and I enjoy it more and I find it to be a better experience on the iPad.
Stephen Robles:And so I think having devices that are purpose based, it's a luxury for sure and like to Gruber's point, like it's just a nicer thing to have, but I want to do that.
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:I want to I want to edit podcasts on my iPad When I'm traveling, I don't want to edit video on my iPad. I tried Final Cut on the iPad Pro, the 13 inches Final Cut is good, and I edited a couple videos on it, but I don't prefer that, and there's also some hand like being able to use animated plugins which supposedly is coming but Apple has not brought it yet, like motion VFX, lower thirds, or whatever. I have it all on my MacBook Pro. It's great. And when I'm doing work like editing my website, it honestly doesn't work on iPad.
Stephen Robles:Like, Squarespace just doesn't function well in Safari on iPad, and so if I'm on the go, that's my MacBook Pro. If I'm sitting here at my desk, it's my Mac Studio, and the Mac Studio is my, like, workstation. You know, it's where I edit my videos but it's also where I record content, where I live stream, I do webinars for work, and so I think each device has a purpose. And when you have the ability to, like, get the perfect device for the use case that you need and for me, the iPad Pro is the perfect device for editing podcasts. The MacBook Pro is the perfect device for editing video on the go.
Stephen Robles:Like, that's why I have them.
Jason Aten:That that makes sense. And I think you're right. I think that there is sort of this like, Gruber's point that it, like, doesn't have to be the best. I think people underestimate, though, the thing about Apple pushing the Apple Silicon in these devices isn't only about power. It's about the efficiency.
Jason Aten:Right? And the more every time they increment that number, what that gives them is the ability to spend on other things. Right? So they're getting the same battery life out of the out of your device as I get on mine, and yours has 2 OLEDs in it. Right.
Jason Aten:And that's because the M4, not only is it more powerful and like the geek bench benchmarks, like it's ridiculous. It's just stupid, but it's also more efficient at the same. And they, and actually Apple made a point of saying like, it can do the same work as the M2 with half the power. So if you're just editing a podcast, you should be like, it'll blow away, especially compared to like your Mac or your iPad mini.
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah.
Jason Aten:But the point is that it isn't just about the brute power of it. Like, we tend to over index on that, I think, because I think Apple looks at it as we're building in so much margin that now you can do the same things and you will get better battery life, which means we can make the thing thinner. We can upgrade the displays. We can do all these other things. You know, they're looking at it from the entire package not just, oh, look.
Jason Aten:Line goes up on the numbers graph for how fast this thing is. Right.
Stephen Robles:And I think that efficiency again, when I am editing podcasts I have equalizer, compressor, noise gate. Sometimes, like, when you were recording remotely, right after the event, you were in that workspace, I actually applied voice isolation to your track to reduce some of the echo, and I did that all in ferrite on iPad. And when I did that on my iPad mini, it's processing those effects live as I'm editing, and that is a processor intensive task 2018 iPad Pro 11 inch was toward the end of its life not the end of its life, but the end of me using it, that editing the Apple Insider podcast, I had to make sure my battery was near full because when I was done with that process it was, like, less than 25%, depending on how much editing and other things I was doing, And so that efficiency, is it is the m 4 overkill? Like, well, 1, why not? You know, if Apple has the chips Yeah.
Stephen Robles:And it's going to put a powerful chip in it, why not? But, 2, like, having that efficiency knowing I can edit an entire podcast episode and not think about battery and I can preview these effects live. And then when I'm ready to export it, it happens in seconds, which I did last night. I exported a podcast episode that I had voice isolation on the tracks so much faster on the M4 iPad Pro than I was comparing it to the iPad mini, but it would be faster than, like, an M1 or M2. Is it a ton faster?
Stephen Robles:Maybe not. Is it slightly faster? And if I'm trying to I'm very time sensitive in a lot of my tasks like as soon as we're done recording, I edit this, the video, the audio, I do the thumbnail, do the episode artwork. And so honestly, seconds are useful and you times seconds by like, I edit podcasts literally every day and those seconds add up, and so even if it is just a few seconds of time saving, again, for my use case, I know this is not for everyone, It's I think it is a worthwhile thing to to have to have a powerful, chip in there. So I don't know.
Stephen Robles:I really like this iPad.
Jason Aten:Yeah. So I I do wanna ask one more thing. And you you mentioned to me, I don't think you have said it while we're recording, that the display itself wasn't for you the most impressive thing. And I mean, compared to an iPad mini though, I promise you that OLED display is pretty impressive. And you have a MacBook Pro that has a mini LED display.
Jason Aten:And my take and again, I didn't I haven't had as nearly as much time with it as you because I only saw it at the hands on, meaning the pro. The one that I had to review was actually the, Air, which does not have the OLED beautifulness. But tell me about that because it sounds like maybe the OLED the the tandem OLED wasn't for you the thing that stuck out the most, but it is still really nice. Right?
Stephen Robles:It's a beautiful display. Don't get me wrong, and and you know maybe if you were doing art and you're really dealing with like colors and textures and procreate, it might even make more of a difference. I will say, I mean, the display is amazing, obviously. The mini LED on the 12.9 inch M2 iPad Pro was amazing as well. The one thing I did notice is I loaded up interstellar because I was like, well, I wanna watch something with a lot of dark blacks in the in the video.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Interstellar is in space. Yeah. And I wanted to see it, so I I loaded it up and when I started playing it on it, I was so bright. Like, the space was really black but the spaceship was really bright.
Stephen Robles:And I was watching the scene when, you know, Matthew McConaughey is trying to dock with the Endeavor Uh-huh. Like spinning. It's a great scene. The music, Hans Zimmer, come on. Anyway, I was, like, I was messing with the brightness and I was at, like, 25%, and I was, like, man, this is bright.
Stephen Robles:And I was, like, let me push this thing to the limit, and I kept raising the brightness, and I got to, like, 75%, and I'm, like, I think I might be losing my vision. I need to go back to him. So I never made it to a 100%. So is that useful in a dark room? No.
Stephen Robles:But I'm gonna edit this episode that we're doing right now outside. I'm a go on my patio, and I wanna see how that brightness works outside because I think that could be a useful, part of this tandem OLED. And also, I didn't realize this about OLED technology. I was listening to John Siracusa talk about it and how OLED displays, like, every time the Pixel illuminates, it degrades in its lifespan a tiny little bit like an imperceptible amount, which a, I've never thought about before. Our iPhones have been OLED since iPhone 10 so it shouldn't bother me, but now I'm like, I don't want my iPad just sitting on.
Stephen Robles:Like the screen was just on on my desk and I was like, you know what? I don't want those pixels working right now. I'm just gonna shut it off.
Jason Aten:I mean, Steven, hold on. Every computing device on the planet, every time it's doing anything, it's degrading a little bit
Stephen Robles:of its headlight. Okay. But the he was talking about somehow, like, LCD displays, something about the backlight or whatever, like it would like, it might have a little bit more longevity, and we're talking about, like, what, maybe 15 years instead of 10. You know, I think we can all attest to it. Like, there's probably some old computer monitor you found in a closet at your workplace, and somehow it still works.
Jason Aten:But You will not be using that device in 10 years, whether the OLED it doesn't matter if that OLED display could still overpower the sun. You will not be using it in 10 years.
Stephen Robles:I know. But it gave me more confidence to say, okay, I don't even I don't even wanna go to a 100% brightness right now because this is just gonna hurt my eyes. I'm like, okay, I don't have to worry about this OLED getting slightly dimmer over time. And if you ever wanna know how imperceptible it might be, find somebody with an iPhone 10 or a 10 s, crank the brightness up, and if it still looks bright to you, then you don't have to worry about OLED. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:If those are OLED screens, it's fine.
Jason Aten:Also, they're very good at managing that. Like, they know that that's true, and they're pretty good. I will tell you the movie the movie you should have put on was Gravity because that's a great HDR movie. When we when we put our OLED TV in our living room, the first thing we put on was the bad batch because that had just come out.
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah.
Jason Aten:And that was pretty great in HDR too. So it is pretty impressive to just like, I didn't know that there was blackness like that that existed in televisions because, you know, all of us who come from, like, LEDs or LCD TVs, it's pretty pretty different. So
Stephen Robles:Everything's just gray. Yeah. Just all grays. Alright. A couple of things because we do have a lot of other things to talk about.
Stephen Robles:I wanna mention 2 reviews. 1 is Tyler Stallman. He had the iPad Pro Nano Texture, in his review, and I'm I've been looking really closely because and this is what I wanted to ask you about because you've seen I have not seen the nano texture yet in person. I'm gonna go to an Apple store and check it out, maybe sometime in the next few days, but he did the comparison of the nano texture versus glossy and, you know, the light dispersion is really cool. This is you're watching youtube.com/primartechshow.
Stephen Robles:The nano texture is on the left, the glossy is on the right in his video here, and he shines his iPhone flashlight like directly on the display and you can see the standard glass. Yep. You know the light is very harsh, it's like a pinpoint, and then he does it on the nano texture glass and you can see it's like much more diffused and you don't get that that harsh light. So obviously it reduces the glare, but I didn't go with the nano texture because I would like the black you're gonna lose some of the dark richness of the blacks and a little bit of the color saturation. I don't know how much.
Stephen Robles:I've seen a couple people on social media talking about, yes, you do notice it side by side. Maybe it's not a big deal if all you have is the nano texture, but do you remember, like, from your in person experience, like, was it noticeable the nano texture color and black representation?
Jason Aten:I don't know. So okay. Yeah. Under harsh light, yes. But it that's because it's doing its job.
Jason Aten:I think the one thing that Apple has made clear is that the nano texture is not like a fancier feature that people should buy because they want the very best of the best. It is a feature with a very specific use case. Right? It is a feature for people who are using it for, like, color correction true tone or whatever, the sensor. Like, the yeah.
Jason Aten:Well yeah. And then there's, like, also an ambient light sensor on the back there as well. Right. So, like, it is it is a very purposeful thing, and it it it goes along with the XDR and the studio display, the x the, displays. It's it's like I bet half the people that put the the nano texture on their physical, like, studio display or whatever should not have done that.
Jason Aten:Like, it's just not. It's for a very specific purpose. And if you work in a print shop with fluorescent lighting overhead and you need to, like, be able to have accurate representations, That's what it's for. It is not just like I had lots of people after I posted mine send me you know, after I posted photos from the hands on asking me, is it more like having a paper, like, you know, is it good for somebody who draws and they wanted to fill a paper? That's not the purpose of this.
Jason Aten:That is not why Apple made this thing. And so I don't know. I think that the color representation is similar. It's it's just that when where it looks most different is when it's doing its job because it's diffusing the light. And obviously, if you're diffusing light across the surface, it's going to look more washed out in that environment, but it is because it's doing what it's supposed to do.
Jason Aten:But underneath those displays are the same. Right? Like, it is just as much contrast, just as much color. It's just that if you have it under certain conditions and it's doing its job effectively, it's reducing glare, but it also could give it the effect of, like, lower contrast. But that doesn't actually make the display lower contrast, if that makes sense.
Stephen Robles:No. No. I get it. Yeah. It's it's the appearance of it because of that top layer.
Stephen Robles:Yep. Okay. Well, I'm gonna go to a store and check it out. The one other review I'm gonna put in the show notes is ifondo. He did a lot of tests with the M2 comparing it to the new M4, one of them being the, angle at which you can adjust it, and there actually is a greater angle of adjustment on the M4 iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard, so you do get a little more angle and I do feel that, just on my 11 inch when I'm trying to adjust the angle.
Stephen Robles:So that's cool. And he also tested like the pressure that you might have to like use to knock it over and he has this crazy tool. I phoned he's he's all these tools like this Yeah. Which measures, like, force, or whatever and so he was measuring and he showed that it would take less force to knock it over the new one because the center of balance is a little different with that function row of keys and how it goes.
Jason Aten:And the base is lighter.
Stephen Robles:But
Jason Aten:Like, there's less to pull over. So
Stephen Robles:Right. It's lighter. So, you know, he did that test, and he did a bunch of other tests as well. So kudos to ifundo. He he was the only one that I thought did a lot of these side by side comparisons, but I will say too the Magic Keyboard trackpad and aluminum base is very nice, feels premium, and it's weird.
Stephen Robles:I remember the first time I had a MacBook Pro that had the haptic touchpad rather than the physical depressing touchpad, and whenever the computer was off it didn't do anything, like, you couldn't feel it depress because it was all electronic. And so I had that same feeling with this one. If your iPad is not connected to the Magic Keyboard, this trackpad does not depress because it is strictly a haptic response. If the iPad is connected even with the screen off like I just had it, it will still click, quote unquote, because it's connected, but you take the iPad off and that trackpad is just a solid surface, and that was kind of a
Jason Aten:It was depressing. There's I was just looking through all of my photos from the hands on and every single one of them with the new Magic Keyboard and every single one of the I mean, I have, like, 8 photos of these things lined up. Every single one of them, they have the iPad angled just so so that the function row is not hidden at all.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:Every single one. And And that means that every single time someone put put one of those down, someone was like they're under very strict, very strict rules. I can't believe though, you haven't talked yet about the most important review, which is the magnet paper in MKBHD's video. He just did a short video showing the alignment of the magnet, and there's literally no reason that's doesn't except for it's cool. It's just very cool.
Jason Aten:Magnet paper is so cool. I did it in my live unboxing too. Oh, you got magnet paper?
Stephen Robles:Just copied MKBHD. Yeah. I have magnet paper. Mhmm. I too.
Stephen Robles:Oh,
Jason Aten:you got magnet paper?
Stephen Robles:Just copied MKBHD. Yeah. I have magnet paper. Mhmm. You know, you can I you know, you can just get on Amazon?
Stephen Robles:I got it got it right here and you can do cool things like, you know, here's the back of the iPad, here's the magnet paper and you can see the Yeah. You know, there are the speakers, there's the magnets, you know, and the Apple Pencil. I did the magnet paper, I'll put my unboxing video in the show notes, but you could see how the Apple Pencil magnets are slightly different. The new one is wider, like the magnets are spaced wider because the cameras and the landscape side. Oh, which, Jason, the camera is not centered.
Jason Aten:I told you this.
Stephen Robles:I know you told me that. I know. Everybody knows this, but I was like, you don't see it. Like when you're just using the iPad, you don't even see the camera, so it's not a big deal. But it's not it's not centered.
Stephen Robles:There is something in the center.
Jason Aten:It's close. It's I mean, it's it is there's a there's a housing of the face ID sensor, the camera, and probably, like, the flood illuminator that are essentially centered. It's just that the actual front facing camera is the leftmost of those things, and so it is not in the center.
Stephen Robles:Someone also showed that the new iPad Pro is thinner than a MacBook Pro lid. I think the 12.9 specifically is either the same width or thinner to which they said there's no reason why Apple can't have face ID. Uh-huh. MacBook Thickness. Which I that is the other thing coming from the iPad Mini after 7 or 8 months.
Stephen Robles:Face ID on an iPad is the best. Because it feels like you're using a computer when it's in the magic keyboard, but anytime you have to authenticate for like Icloud passwords or Apple Pay, it just does it because you're just you're already looking at it. And it just
Jason Aten:and it's That is the thing I noticed the most reviewing this 13 inch iPad Air. The number of times I just sat there staring at it, and I'm like, why won't you do something? And it's like, I will. You just have to touch me first. And I'm like, why won't you do something?
Jason Aten:I'm swiping up. And it's just like, nope. And I'm like, oh, I have to. And so that was the moment when I had to register both fingers because you hold it differently. Yeah.
Jason Aten:But, Steven, I need you to do something. I need you to look at your iPhone. Okay. And I need you to look at the camera placement on your iPhone. Oh, yeah.
Jason Aten:It's behind you. You can't you look at it.
Stephen Robles:Oh, I mean
Jason Aten:Yeah. You can't do that.
Stephen Robles:But here's the thing. You know what?
Jason Aten:I think it's it's we've captured it. Here's the thing. Your iPhone camera is
Stephen Robles:not centered either. I know. I know. Let's see. I just stopped I just recorded for a behind the scenes video.
Stephen Robles:Stay tuned for me.
Jason Aten:And by behind the scenes, he means he recorded his behind.
Stephen Robles:So it this phone is so hot right now because I was recording pro res to an external SSD. So hot. My hand this my hands are burning right now.
Jason Aten:But your camera should still be in the same place no matter how hot it gets.
Stephen Robles:Listen, the dynamic island. That's the iPad just needs a dynamic
Jason Aten:It has one. You just can't see it. It just blends into the bezel.
Stephen Robles:It's just a very static island. It just It's not dynamic
Jason Aten:at all. It's boring. It's depressing. It's not
Stephen Robles:dynamic at all.
Jason Aten:Okay.
Stephen Robles:Listen, it's I'm gonna do a a full video on the iPad Pro. We'll spend a week with it, but are you gonna upgrade to the new one? I mean, you got your M2 iPad Pro. You're just gonna.
Jason Aten:I don't know if I will upgrade to it. I mean, the OLED screen would be really nice. But, again, if I'm using a MacBook Pro with the mini LED I know the OLED's nicer, but, like, if I just needed a portable, really nice display, the MacBook Pro has that. The m two is just so good at this point, the m two iPad, Pro that I have. And I don't know that like, I don't wanna replace the Magic Keyboard.
Jason Aten:The actually, here's the thing. The main reason I don't think I'm gonna upgrade anytime soon is that they no longer make the best iPhone case of all time. I mean, seriously.
Stephen Robles:The Smart Keyboard Folio. I did a whole video about why I ditched the Magic Keyboard with my 12.9 inch for the Smart Keyboard Folio because it was a great and, Chris Welch at the verge, he did, like, an entire article Yeah. Bemoaning the fact that Apple's not making it anymore, which I think is a mistake. Logitech, somebody, make a smart keyboard folio for the new iPad. I will get one.
Stephen Robles:Alright, we got other stuff to talk about. Chadjpt 4 0, Google IO, which that section of this podcast is probably going to be the end of it, let's be honest. No, we and then, Jason's going to yell at me about the direction I put my Apple Pencil on my iPad because apparently I'm doing it wrong. I'm holding it wrong.
Jason Aten:And I didn't have an opinion about this until it came up. And then I realized there is an obvious answer to this, and it's not the one that Steven has chosen for his life. So
Stephen Robles:we we will get to we'll get to that at the end. But before we do, I wanna thank those who support the show directly and if you have not yet, we would appreciate your support. You can do it either in Apple Podcasts and you get an ad free version, meaning you won't get this segment or ad that will be coming in the future, but more importantly, you get the bonus episodes. You can listen to the entire back catalog of bonus episodes, which is Jason bearing an ethernet cable, very exciting. We talk about the death of physical media, we have, Jason talked about Tesla for a while and we we have a bunch of great bonus episodes, so you can access all of that by supporting the show.
Stephen Robles:You can do it directly on Apple Podcasts or go to primarytech.fm and click bonus episodes and you can support the show there. And if not, you can give us a 5 star rating in Apple Podcasts and or Spotify. There's ratings over there too. Spotify is actually crossed as the number one podcast listening app. Did you see that?
Jason Aten:I think I saw it because you probably posted it.
Stephen Robles:I did, but I probably posted it which is which is pretty wild. That is not the case for our show. Our show is
Jason Aten:Imagine that.
Stephen Robles:70% Apple Podcasts, just so you know. And then it's like Overcast is next and then Pocketcast Mhmm. And then like every other podcast app and then Spotify.
Jason Aten:I'm proud of our audience. I'm glad to see Overcast and Pocketcast up there.
Stephen Robles:It is. No. It is great. And listen, you but wherever you listen to the podcast, we appreciate it. And so keep listening, give the show a 5 star rating and review, and if you could support the show, we appreciate that as well.
Stephen Robles:And now, let's get back to it. OpenAI, I preempted it. It was this was the first event of the week actually, which was where they OpenAI had their keynote, like, Monday at 1 PM, and then Apple's iPad review embargo, and it was at 5 PM.
Jason Aten:Yeah. It was a weird time. It was a very weird time.
Stephen Robles:Weird a weird time. And, you know, MKBHD did not have a review video when it went up, but then he also announced he's, like, made the USA Frisbee team, which is wild.
Jason Aten:Well, and it's not the first time he's actually missed one of these, like, missed an embargo. It's not like we
Stephen Robles:Each HO is
Jason Aten:We don't get, like, companies don't get to tell us you have to publish it this time. They just ask you, please don't publish before this time. And everyone generally, it's an accepted principle that you respect that type of a thing, but he can publish it in in his exempt KBS. He can publish whatever he wants and 3,000,000 people at least will still watch it. It doesn't matter.
Stephen Robles:He could he could publish this review 3 years
Jason Aten:now when
Stephen Robles:we have an m 7 iPad Pro. Doesn't matter.
Jason Aten:It's like a retrospective on the m 4. We hardly knew you.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. 5,000,000 views.
Jason Aten:That's great. And good. And like, I'm that's to his credit. Right? Like, yeah.
Stephen Robles:Absolutely. And, you know, those of us who are trying to do YouTube and stuff, remember, he's been doing this for, like, 14, 15 years. And he's been, like, this is all he's been doing and he's amazing at it. You know, I I appreciate his his viewpoints. But OpenAI announced the next model of ChatGPT.
Stephen Robles:This is ChatGPT 4 o. O stands for Omni, and they had some pretty wild demos during their keynote. I'll link to this page in the show notes which you can replay it. It's a pretty quick video. I mean, it's like 26 minutes, the whole announcement.
Stephen Robles:And, you know, for a newer company, I thought they did a really good job at a quote unquote live event, which they actually had a live audience for this event. It was probably all OpenAI people, but they had a live event, they streamed it live, and they did some demos. A couple of the major differences with GPT 4 0 for Omni is the multimodal Jason, I feel like I heard the words multimodal effect. Yeah.
Jason Aten:What does that mean?
Stephen Robles:Multimodal means if you're in a conversation with Chat GPT or Google Gemini, you can be talking to it via your voice and then turn on the camera and show it something, and, like, you've now switched modes from a voice conversation to an camera image driven exchange, and the large language model will follow you across those mediums. And so you can talk to it and then like in the demos here it shows a math problem where he showed opened the chat GPT 4 0 just running on his iPhone, it's just the GPT app, which you can get right now. Shows it a math equation, and GPT, like, walked through it. Didn't just give him the answer, he actually asked GPT 4 0 to be like, don't tell me the answer, just give me hints if I need them as I solve this. And so the mode being the camera of your device is interacting with chat gpt and is talking to you.
Stephen Robles:Honestly the the demos were very impressive. One of the more impressive things was just the voice and the like what it sounded like and how it actually interacted with the demo people because it sounded way more natural than a lot of these robot voices. It sounded even better than, like, gbt 4 on your iPhone now. It was a little it was a little too snarky at times, which I think Gruber mentioned, like, it was a little little saccharin. I don't know what that word means off do you know what saccharin means?
Jason Aten:I mean
Stephen Robles:Put you on the spot.
Jason Aten:In that context here's the thing, Steven. Sometimes you throw out words that almost mean the thing that you mean for them to mean, but they
Stephen Robles:they don't Wait a minute. Wait
Jason Aten:a minute. Mean it. So I'm trying to
Stephen Robles:You're calling
Jason Aten:out loud. Interpret what you think it means.
Stephen Robles:Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I wanna put saccharin here in my look up
Jason Aten:the words that sentimental or, like, excess
Stephen Robles:Excessively yeah. Yeah. Actually, sentimental is actually for the difference. That's pretty good news.
Jason Aten:I'm a
Stephen Robles:Excessively sweet.
Jason Aten:Words are my thing, buddy.
Stephen Robles:Now I wanna go back to saying I I say words that almost mean what I wanna mean. What do you what do you mean?
Jason Aten:I mean, occasionally, I listen to other podcasts that Steven does, and he'll spend a whole segment talking about, what was the
Stephen Robles:You're talking about the aphorism.
Jason Aten:Euphemism. Office.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I said so Jason is talking about the movies on the side podcast, and you're talking about one episode. Now, you're you're implying this is something I do regularly, which I don't think There
Jason Aten:was a couple other times, but it's fine. It's all good.
Stephen Robles:I said euphemism when I meant No.
Jason Aten:When you meant idiom. It's fine. I'm sorry. You're gonna cut all this out. Poor Steven.
Jason Aten:No. No. Okay. Let's go back to OpenAI because there was something that was really interesting about this. I'm gonna just bring us back on track since I'm the one that derailed us, and I apologize.
Stephen Robles:No. No. It's it was a great demo. I I was impressed. I actually I I paid for chat gpt plus, because I use the API in a lot of shortcuts even for this podcast.
Stephen Robles:When I'm ready to show notes, I'll throw it like several article titles to come up with like a podcast episode title ideas and then I'll massage it after that. But GPT 4 0 you can use in the app, and I just have to say the iPhone and iPad app is really good now. It used to fail, like, that action used to fail a lot of the times, and so I went with Federico Viticci's sGPT shortcut, but now the app is actually really good and the shortcuts action you get with the Chagapiti app is really good. So that's been working really well. I find the large language model to be even better at summarizing and coming up with ideas, and they announced a Mac app, which this is the most frustrating thing, Jason.
Stephen Robles:You can find the link to download the Mac app, but your OpenAI account has to be, like, enabled to use it. So I literally have the Mac app installed on my computer, I can open it up, I can click log in, and then it says, oh we're sorry your account's not ready for the Mac app. And I'm like just give me the Mac app, JGBP, Because because I would run a bunch of shortcuts on my Mac. But anyway, what what do you find the most interesting?
Jason Aten:Well, the thing I think that was, like, the most interesting is that they this whole event in Sam Altman was not up there at all. Like, it was really interesting that they had this that the CEO was not the one presenting. They had serve other people. There's a couple of things I thought that were worth well, first of all, if you ever want to know, this is this is a true thing, Steven. If you and this is a pro tip for our listeners.
Jason Aten:If you ever want to know when open AI plans on making a major announcement, all you have to do is look at the calendar and find out when Google is about to make an announcement. No. I'm not this is true. The last several times that Google has has had an event, OpenAI just just preempts them like the day before. So which tells you a lot.
Jason Aten:I think it was maybe Ben Thompson on Dithering who may, like, made the point. Like, that just tells you who OpenAI is the most afraid of. Right? They are just that's who they're the most worried. And the reason is pretty obvious.
Jason Aten:Google has been working on this a very long time. They have not done a great job talking about how they've been working on it. We'll get to that. But Google is the company that has the ability to do this at scale in a way that nobody else can. Right?
Jason Aten:Like, they run the world's largest they have more servers literally than any other company. Like, they they just have the ability to do this in a way that no one else does. So it makes sense that OpenAI is is worried about them. The the other things I feel like that it's worth mentioning, this is the same. This is just, GPT 4 still.
Jason Aten:It's the same language model. This is not GPT 5, which is an entirely different model that they have to train. But what they did is they made it faster, like a lot faster. That and that is is, from an experience perspective, really important because if you're used to having to type something into OpenAI or to chat gpt to, like, the app or to the website, Then you wait for it to do a thing, and then you find out that it wasn't right. So it's like, oh, I gotta I gotta figure out a different question.
Jason Aten:The number of times that my second question to OpenAI is, are you sure that's right? And it'd be like, oh, no, actually, you're right. I was wrong about that. Let me, and I'm like, I mean,
Stephen Robles:that's a good pro tip. I haven't thought about it.
Jason Aten:If I'm asking you a question and I know that the thing you told me is not correct, then what are you even doing for me? Are you sure? Seriously, Are you sure that's correct? And it'll go back and do some more, some more work, but now you can just interrupt it. You can be talking to it.
Jason Aten:You can just, if it's telling you a thing, you can just hang on. Actually, what I meant for you to do is this or whatever. And it's and it's almost it's not real time, but it is, like, way, way faster. So that just means that it's going to the adoption rate for it become besides or, you know, it it moves from being a novelty that people might use every once in a while for entertainment purposes to an actually useful thing because it's so much faster. And, yeah, it's a multimodal, so you can you can use you can it'll accept more than just text.
Jason Aten:It'll accept voice. It'll accept photos. It'll accept all these different types of things. And you can use those things, and it will work on on them. And then also, they're making a lot of stuff free, like for free users.
Jason Aten:You don't I mean, if you're paid, you get, you know, better access and more access to it, but
Stephen Robles:you get more, more. Yeah.
Jason Aten:But they're I mean, they're they're, like, they're all in.
Stephen Robles:Well, and the other impressive thing was with the Mac app, you'll be able to screen share with chat gpt, and so they have several examples where they're talking about a graph. Another one, they're talking about code, and code and how it's being represented like a weather forecast, And it was just asking chatgpt, how do I adjust this code to do what I want? Which seems like an amazing tool. Also, a huge opportunity for someone like Apple who makes a coding application, namely Xcode, to build this kind of large language model assistance into its app. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:So you could just just do it. Or or you're trying to build a shortcut and then it could just kind of walk you along like formatting a date and it can just help you and you could just say just format my date like this and it puts in the right, you know, Unicode or whatever to do that. But I do it's impressive. I thought it was funny. Humane actually said that they were immediately integrating chatgpt4 0 into the humane AI pin, so so requests are automatically on this newer model or not newer model, but this updated model.
Stephen Robles:And so, you know, I'm gonna try my AI pin again. I'm not wearing it right now.
Jason Aten:I noticed. I was actually gonna send you a text message before we started recording and ask you where you were going to wear your iPad Pro for the I mean, when you had when you had the Vision Pro, you had to wear it. When you had the humane AI pin, you had to wear it. Where are you gonna how are you gonna how are you gonna wear that thing?
Stephen Robles:Put it right here in my I right here in my car. You
Jason Aten:know that that's not actually the more impressive side of that thing, but okay.
Stephen Robles:Well, I didn't yeah. Fair enough. But anyway, it's interesting and I wanna return back to OpenAI when we talk about Google because The Verge had a great article and lots of people were talking about it like, who is going to win? Will OpenAI make ChatGPT good enough to replace search? Or will Google make search close enough to like an AI tool to obfuscate ChatGPT?
Stephen Robles:And like that's kind of the war going on which is why I did the opening line, begun, the search wars have. Before we talk about them together, let's talk about Google IO Yeah. Because that was also earlier this week. I don't typically watch it live, but I was like, you know what, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna watch Google IO live. And Jason, this was a 2 hour keynote that made me so thankful for the Apple fast paced keynotes that we get at WWDC, I really struggled.
Stephen Robles:And there was a lot of people on social media that said the same thing, like, this keynote in general, there were a couple interesting things they announced which we'll talk about, but overall, just the pace, the names, they they have so many names of products which half of them will probably not exist in a few years killed by google.com.
Jason Aten:The names or the products just to be clear.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. The name the names or the products. So as I was watching, they started out with something impressive, like Sundar Pichai was talking about some of the AI tools they're gonna bring to Google Photos, and a couple things you'll be able to do is, like, you know, show me the progress of my kids swimming, how they, you know, how they learn swimming. And Google Photos will actually use face recognition to pull photos of your kid and photos of them swimming and, like, put together a little slideshow showing you the progress of that. Or you can ask questions like this.
Stephen Robles:Again, if you're watching the video, you can ask it for, what's my license plate number again? And so if you've ever taken a picture of your license plate, it'll show now Apple Photos might be able to do that too, like right now. Search is hit or miss sometimes with photos, but those those are cool features with the AI photos and Google Photos. Okay. Fine.
Stephen Robles:And I think the bigger thing is the AI overview that Google talked about, which is basically what is launching now. AI overview is going to basically come to search, and for your Google search results, you're gonna have basically that AI content at the top and then search results underneath, and I think that's the more controversial thing. But then after that, all I heard was a bunch of word salads Okay. And our deep mind and all the stuff.
Jason Aten:Okay. So a couple of pieces of context that might be helpful. So I was at Google IO last year. I did not go this year for reasons, mostly related to the fact that we have 4 kids and stuffs going on, and it just it was not worth the trip to fly out there. Google IO is similar to WWDC.
Jason Aten:It's focused on developers. But what you have to, like, remember is that Apple is, well, one better at marketing, and so they package the story differently. Right? They package the story for a wider audience in that keynote. Whereas Google's IO keynote is really targeted at like developers primarily.
Jason Aten:And so that's why it's just a whole, it's just a list of things. It's It's like, let's talk about this and then let's talk about this and let's talk about this and let's talk about this. And 2 hours later, you're like, I don't know what you talked about. It's just a lot.
Stephen Robles:And I think a bit a big distinction there is, like, you know, Apple will mention, like, metal for the Mac and how, like, that software piece, you know, can help developers develop games, better graphics, whatever. And it's like a maybe a 10 second mention of metal, the technology, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like Google will take a topic like that, some kind of, like, deep developer tool and make that a 20 minute segment of the keynote that
Jason Aten:Yeah. And it's kind of like Google is taking the WWDC keynote and the state of the union keynote and combining them. Right? And so it's it just is a lot more. And, you know, I think, generally speaking, like, I haven't written about it yet.
Jason Aten:That just tells you how how much there was. But what I my my overall thing is, like, Google's AI problem isn't the tech. It has it has the tech. It's better than any body else, and it has this ability to scale beyond what anybody else does, especially OpenAI, who obviously, they have a partnership with Microsoft, which helps. But even still, Microsoft's cloud business is not tailored specifically towards a thing that Microsoft does, whereas Google's business is tailored like, it's search.
Jason Aten:Like, there are trillions of search queries all the time, and they can just type something into Google and tell me how fast the blue links come back. It's like instant. Right? Because they know that speed matters and stuff. My thing is their their problem is the story.
Jason Aten:They're not very good about talking about it, and that's because at Google, all of those things that you saw are all handled by different people. Like, they're all just distributed across a 100 different teams. And and it is it's, like, super interesting. And a lot of the stuff that that you mentioned, even like the search and photos and stuff, a 100% makes sense that Google would be able to do that. Right?
Jason Aten:They're one, they're searching. Their thing is search. They should be really good at that. I don't even think of that as AI. That's just they've been doing that.
Jason Aten:Like, Google Photos has had good search built into it for a long time. Apple photos has had good, pretty good search. I mean, built into it for a long time. You could the whole thing that they added where you can, like, you have a picture of a cat, you can swipe up. It'll tell you what kind of cat it is.
Jason Aten:Like that's that's not AI. The phone itself doesn't know anything about cats. It doesn't. It doesn't know that cats are a thing that exists in the world. It just knows that like photo equal this, these bits equals this until we return this result.
Jason Aten:So that's great. I think Google just has a problem with how they talk about it. And what will be really interesting, you you mentioned the AI overview, which essentially replaces their search generative experience. And let's be honest, AI overview is a much better name, but give Google credit, than search generative experience. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Jason Aten:But what and those are those are, like, if you were saying you could type into it, I'm going to Boston next week, and I need 3 places to schedule reservations for dinner meetings that are close to the hotel I'm staying at. You can never type that into Google right now. Google will be like, here's the top results for Boston. Yes. I know it's a city in Massachusetts.
Jason Aten:That's not what I needed. You know? Here's information on
Stephen Robles:the river.
Jason Aten:Or here's the airport or I'm who whatever. But this will, like, actually go through and it'll actually run multiple searches. It'll be like restaurants in Boston near this, like, whatever it would be with suitable, like, reviews for quiet environment or whatever. So, like, that's great except for what if you're the website that posts, like, what is it? Like, eater or that kind of thing, and you count on writing stories like that and getting the traffic from Google.
Jason Aten:And now you're not going to be getting that traffic because Google is gonna be doing all that work. And you can argue that that serves the user, except think about this. Play this out for a minute. Yeah. What happens when people are like, well, forget it.
Jason Aten:Why would I make this content anymore? What will Google then do? Where will it be getting this information from?
Stephen Robles:And that's so this is the AI overview. One of the examples they showed, like so, you know, yoga places, studios in Boston. And so rather than sending you to a website that is listing the top places written by a human, This is basically just pulling the Google Places business results, I assume. Yeah. And telling you like these are the best.
Stephen Robles:And that's the top in the AI overview and that's pretty much what you'll get unless you scroll like way down. Yeah. And then you can see them on the map. People are like even in this little example, like, Google is not showing any blue links to websites after several scrolls, it seems like. And they had another one where, you know, it might be useful, like they had a planning recipes or, you know, meal planning.
Stephen Robles:And they're basically like, you know, ask for recipes or whatever and ask it to plan. Oh, and they also so one of the multimodal things they did too was, you know, using the phone the camera on your phone and Google search, you could say, what's wrong with this record player? Why isn't this needle doing its thing? And they asked one of those questions about a camera, and Nilay Patel from The Verge was like, the answer was wrong. Like, the answer like, it would not they like, in the camera thing, it was like, why is this arm on the camera not, extending?
Stephen Robles:And the thing that the Google search result told them to do was like open the back and do something. And Neil, I was like your film will be ruined. Like, you'll lose all your pictures. So I think that is a big problem. Are you actually gonna give, like, accurate troubleshooting tips to someone and they not ruin their film?
Stephen Robles:But also to your point, like, if Google if you ask it for a 5 day meal plan, which is cool that you can ask it that. Like, it's cool rather than trying to, like, search for a recipe for this or recipe for that and then make it into a meal plan, being able to ask Google, give me a 5 day meal plan with these specifications, and it just pulls those recipes for you. Okay. Cool. But to your point, it's pulling that data from actual websites and just presenting it to you in a way that obfuscates the need to visit that website.
Stephen Robles:So SEO, which has been a business of the Internet for decades, I feel like it's not gonna matter much. Well,
Jason Aten:okay. Three thoughts. 1, because you just threw that one out there. I I Sorry. I feel like SEO as a thing could deserve to not matter as much.
Jason Aten:So we'll just I'm not gonna I gotta be careful because they're you think that we're gonna get feedback from Tesla? Well, I'm just saying the SEO, like the I do not anyway. So that's one thing. The second thing is, I guess the one thing we have going for us is the currently Google's incentive is still the blue links to some extent because that's what it monetizes. Right?
Jason Aten:So Google can't go all in on just the the AI overviews because it hasn't figured out how to monetize that yet. It still has to have I mean, it was it's like search revenue is, like, $175,000,000,000 or whatever, and that's just sponsored links on the blue on the on the search results page. So that is I mean, there are a lot of negative consequences of that. Like, the fact that there's 10 ads before you get to any organic links. Like, that's bad.
Jason Aten:Yeah. But at least we
Stephen Robles:And then it's ready to post after that.
Jason Aten:Yes. But at least we at least we know that those aren't gonna completely go away yet because that's what Google monetizes. I'm sending you a link to, one of the videos from from it's a threads post where somebody linked to one of the videos. And it's I mean, the future is really cool. This person's, like, walking around an office with their phone, and it's like, you know, what is this thing?
Jason Aten:And or, like, it's asking it questions, but and it's look with the camera looking at different things. And then it gets to the end, and it's like, tell me where you saw my glasses. Right? Like and it's like and and it goes back and it remembers it was on the desk next to an apple. And it's like so it's it's it's a very cool it's a very cool thing, to be honest with you, but it's, you know and, obviously, this is a demo.
Jason Aten:So how well will this actually work? I don't know. But it'll like, the person, like, points at it and says, what part is this? And it tells it it's the Tweeter or whatever. So, like, all of those types of things are very cool.
Jason Aten:Like, there are lots of very like, Google is good at this. It it knows what it's doing in terms of this. So Yeah. I I think that in in OpenAI at this point doesn't have anything that can compete with this sort of stuff. Of course, this is probably only gonna be available on the Pixel, so none of us are gonna get to use it anyway.
Stephen Robles:Well, for like 3 months, and then they'll bring it everywhere.
Jason Aten:So then the last thing I was gonna say, though, what's striking, and this is like, I think find this fascinating is if you go to a Google Google's homepage and you type in a search, you know, you have the little options to filter by, like, news, by images. They've added one for web. So if you want to only have blue links, you can, you can actually just click on web and it will only give you results from the web, which is like says so much about the current state of both search and of Google, that they have actually added a filter if all you want are links from the web. And it's funny the way they talk about it. It's like in some searches, it'll be a default option for you to click on.
Jason Aten:And on some searches, you're going to have to click on the more to get to get to the web.
Stephen Robles:For what it's where I just Googled myself. I didn't know what to do real quick. And, yeah, you can just get the blue links. It was under, like, the more tab, like it wasn't one of the main things on it, but that's a cool mode. I would I'll call
Jason Aten:I would set it to default if I could.
Stephen Robles:Like say well, that's that's the thing. And and this is the last thing I'll talk about Google IO and bringing OpenAI back into it is this part in the keynote where Google said Google will do the Googling for you, which is a fascinating, like, admission to just say, like, our goal is that you don't have to Google. Like, well, like, I under I understand the the turn of phrase. I don't know what the right word is, James.
Jason Aten:Well, listen. Do you wanna know what's most hold on. This is the most amazing thing about that slide that they're that that person is standing in front of is for years. I've been in briefings and been corrected. Google would insist that the way you talk about the thing you do with Google is quote search with Google.
Jason Aten:Google was not a verb. Like they did not want you to use the phrase, like I'm going to just Google it. Oh, it didn't matter. Everybody did. And now on their stage, they have a slide that says Google will do the Googling.
Jason Aten:It doesn't say Google will do the search with Google for you. It's like, I don't know if this is just they've laid down and they're like, fine. You win people or, like, somebody in marketing wasn't paying close enough attention. I just think it's interesting that they, like, they've changed that now because it's like, this is the thing that everyone does anyway. And and, yeah, Google's basically saying and it's kind of what you were talking about.
Jason Aten:Like, it's gonna go and do the search for the yoga places in Boston, and it's gonna search for your location that you were at, and it's gonna get then search for rankings and reviews, and it's gonna put all that together. And it might be doing 5 searches in it, but it's only gonna give you one set of results.
Stephen Robles:This is probably the best marketing thing they did this entire keynote because the vernacular is Google is a verb. Yeah. I hear celebrities say it, it's said in TV shows or whatever like just Google it. You know people don't don't even say search.
Jason Aten:Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
Jason Aten:I'm sorry to interrupt. I hate, but
Stephen Robles:No. Good.
Jason Aten:Okay. I am so glad you brought this up, and this is such a tangent, but I wanna
Stephen Robles:I did not know that Google search was gonna be the most passionate topic.
Jason Aten:Okay. But here's the thing. I mean, this sincerely. I want everyone who listens to this episode to find somebody that they know who is under the age of 20 and say to them, if you are trying to find a piece of information on the Internet, what do you call the thing that you would do? None of them will say Google it.
Jason Aten:Not a single one. I promise you. You know what they say? I'm gonna search it up without fail. I don't, I felt like, is there a Tik TOK video that I missed where this became a thing?
Jason Aten:Because this is what all of my, my children will come up and be like, could you search it up for me? And then I was at a converse I was having a conversation where we were, like, interviewing someone, and the person was like 19 years old. And the question was like, how did you find out about whatever? And they said, I just searched it up. And I'm like, hold on.
Stephen Robles:That's fast.
Jason Aten:When you say you searched it up, what did you I just went to Google dotcom and searched it up or whatever. I'm like, you didn't Google it? And they're like, I searched it up.
Stephen Robles:Interesting. Well So
Jason Aten:maybe that's why Google is calling it Google. They wanna bring it back. They they want the brand recognition. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Because it it was a brand for a while. I you know, it's interesting. My so my kids, they have a lot of screen time restrictions on their devices and we don't allow like open Google search because as anyone would know, like you The
Jason Aten:Internet is a dark and scary place. Yes.
Stephen Robles:Right. So what I have done for my kids is given them a chat gpt shortcut that they can track.
Jason Aten:Because that's less dark and scary for sure.
Stephen Robles:At least it's just text, you know, it's it's only text based especially when you just run it through the shortcut and they use it like a search engine because they don't have another search engine. Engine. Like they'll ask Siri but as their experience has shown, Siri is not gonna be super useful in a lot of queries. So they'll just type in this shortcut and get an answer from chat gpt. Whether or not it's hallucinating remains to be seen.
Stephen Robles:But I I find that interesting. That's just what my kids experience. I'll be curious to our listeners and viewers, if you have kids under 20, you know, what is their vernacular when it comes to search? But that's a that's a interesting
Jason Aten:Yeah. And the biggest takeaway there is that Siri is not dark and scary. She's just dimwitted. Right? She just doesn't know.
Jason Aten:She just can't help you. Maybe that'll change it for 3
Stephen Robles:weeks. Man.
Jason Aten:They it
Stephen Robles:really does need to because the last thing I'll just put this article. You know, Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the Internet. There's an article from The Verge by Alex Heath. I think it's actually part of the newsletter. But this is the question right now.
Stephen Robles:These two companies, Google, who has owned web search, and like I mentioned before, SEO has basically been an entire business just for Google. Yep. You know, it's every website, every I used to build websites for clients on Squarespace, and the number one question was, and just do whatever SEO you need to to get me on the first page of results. Just bring those with
Jason Aten:stuff on there and
Stephen Robles:It just which was always be like as soon as I heard a client say that, I said, okay, never mind. I'm not making the website for you because I knew there was no magic potion. You know, for many years there are ways you can hack it. People would put lots of text in the headers of their website or put text that was the same color of the background of their homepage to try and game SEO, and obviously Google has gotten much better at that. Now we still have kind of SEO games we've talked about on several episodes ago, websites like CNET that typically has nothing to do with mortgage rates or mattresses, but we'll do articles about that because it's good for quote unquote SEO, because that's what people are searching for.
Stephen Robles:We are living in this space now, again, The Verge talks about it a lot, where web search, and we've talked about it here, has become less useful. These AI tools have become more useful, and now these two companies, Google and OpenAI, are I don't know. I I think there is going to be one methodology that wins out. I don't know. I I am nostalgic.
Stephen Robles:Maybe it's because this has just been my experience. I liked the Internet and how it worked for a long time. I liked being able to search, give me the top home kit doorbells, and find an article on imore.com or whatever that told me the top doorbells. Like, I appreciated that ability. I don't know, even if the source is still imore, I don't know if I want Google's AI overview to show me the 4 doorbells at the top of the page with the name and links to buy it, and not show me the Imor article.
Stephen Robles:I don't want that. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe most people do want that because it saves them a click to a website and having to read it, which I but I think that will be a a loss. I think that will be an overall loss for the Internet. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:Am I thinking about this too deep? No.
Jason Aten:I don't think you're thinking about I just wrote down, I like the Internet. It's like the first line of the obituary for the Internet. I'm gonna save that for for for something. Maybe the title of a future book or something. Anyway, I think that
Stephen Robles:But do you feel similarly? Like
Jason Aten:So I have a hard time believing that the long game for this could possibly be to completely replace the way that we know searches. Now again, searches that we know it is not great because it's full of mostly garbage. Like at this point, most of the results I had to look up a recipe on Sunday morning for something, and I just threw my phone across the room. If because first of all,
Stephen Robles:my grandmother came over.
Jason Aten:So because exactly. It was like for monkey bread and I'm like, the first thing should be the, you know, the ingredients and the instructions. And then if you want to tell me a story, but not only is there 700 words of just garbage on this page before you get to anything. Also those 700 words were separated by no kidding, 35 ads. Right?
Jason Aten:So you get like 3 sentences, add 3 sentences, add, and you're just like, what are we even doing? The in the problem is that's traffic, then you can monetize that traffic by showing ads and you've made the experience so terrible. Like, I'm not kidding you. I wanted to throw my phone across the and I just made up a recipe on my own, and, you know, it was really good. I should write an article about that.
Jason Aten:I should just but I just feel like it's so obviously. But at the same time, at some point, if Google stops sending traffic to those websites, which in that particular case, maybe that would be good. Maybe we should not have it sending traffic to that. But if, if that were to happen, people would stop writing, publishing recipes on the internet. And then what would Google do?
Jason Aten:Right. Is it just like, oh, well, there's enough content on the internet today that if no one creates anymore, we'll be good. Like, I just can't see that as being the case. The other last thing I'll say about it is I don't think most people are getting the search generative experience or the AI overview at this point. I think that was a thing you actually, like, had to sort of opt in.
Jason Aten:And so I don't even know how much of a impact. Right? Again, because Google doesn't want it to make a hue they just need to stay a little bit ahead of open AI. It's kind of like when tech companies go to Washington, and they're like, please regulate us the way that we ask you to regulate us. Google's like, yes, we should definitely replace search with something that we come up with that's better.
Jason Aten:Right? Like, they just don't wanna be it's like if you're gonna be disrupted, you should do it yourself. So
Stephen Robles:So the last thing I'll say, I don't mean to be super philosophical, but I was talking to my wife the other day about our early Internet experiences, which I don't know where you landed, but AOL was my initial experience. Right? America Online, AOL Instant Messenger, and it was an amazing experience because you could connect to someone over the Internet in real time, and it felt like a human connection just, you know, over a long distance. Message boards in the early days. You could find people that were as passionate about a topic as you are and read their messages on a board, and the basis was still that human connection.
Stephen Robles:And today, I still feel like maybe I'm naive, But if I search for a recipe for monkey bread, if I were to actually find a recipe on a website that was written by a human being, and the recipe was really good, maybe he was a little snarky, and so I'm I would likely to read more of his stuff, that I would then develop a connection with that person who makes that website. And now when I wanna find a recipe for pumpkin bread or whatever, then I would go back to that person's site first and see if they had one before searching, and I think that was the magic of the Internet for such a long time, the ability to connect to someone else over great distances, whether it was a recipe or you had a passion for pens, I don't know. But that connection, like, this change, I feel like erodes that. The SEO game has muddied it for years, like you were saying, because people have just put filler text in it, you know, meaningless. But I I don't wanna lose that.
Stephen Robles:I still feel like that's one of the great things about the Internet. And so I'm I'm not sure how that's gonna go in the future.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I you're philosophical. I'm unfortunately not it's depressing. We've this is the 3rd depressing thing we've had to conversation. It's just it's sad because it's just like, yeah.
Jason Aten:I agree with you that it's, you know, and as somebody who makes their primary living from people reading things that they publish on the Internet, it's just it just all feels like sometimes roulette. Like, what, like, what is what is it even what are we doing?
Stephen Robles:And Jay Clouse, who's an awesome creator, and he makes stuff for creators. You know, he talks about it. He said, you don't have an audience. Like, whether you have a YouTube channel, a podcast, a website, a blog, a newsletter, It's not that you have an audience of a bunch of faceless people. You actually have a bunch of 1 to 1 connections with people who are interested in your work.
Stephen Robles:And you probably experience this as a writer. I'm sure you have people who email you maybe regularly about some of your topics. And I have people that do that too, like with the podcast, our community now. It's really a bunch of 1 on 1 relationships, not just one to a faceless audience. And I feel like this change in Google search and AI is trying to move the Internet to that faceless audience.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. The feel, and I don't like that. I I don't want that. And even if it helps me plan a 5 day recipe meal plan better, I don't think it's a worth trade off. And maybe you could do both.
Stephen Robles:Maybe there's some, you know, utopian future where we can do both, where you get the 5 day meal plan and you find a great recipe creator and you get connected to them, but I don't know how that's gonna work.
Jason Aten:Well, you know what happened? Back in 2008, Apple introduced the App Store, and apps became a thing that people didn't pay for anymore. Right? Their 99¢ is like an I know like, I've recommended apps to people before subscriptions were a big thing, and the app would be $5 and people like, why would you pay $5 for an app on your iPhone? It's like, cause it took the person 3000 hours to make it like it's worth the $5.
Jason Aten:Right? And so the thing is that the, the amount of what we'd be willing to pay for a thing, even the thing that has value to us has just decreased almost to 0. And that's because the internet made it basically free to distribute things. And so and my you could you could distribute things for free. You could then capture a bunch of traffic.
Jason Aten:You can monetize that traffic with ads instead of charging for things. Well, once you, once you start doing that, now your incentive is just to attract as much traffic as you can and cram as many ads, like go to any local newspapers website. And it is just like, come on. What do we do? Like, this is impossible to read.
Jason Aten:And sometimes you'll go to a website and you're like, oh, I have an ad blocker for that. And they're like, well, then you can't read our site. It's like, I get it. Like, again, I a 100%. The problem is the only real seems like viable business model at the moment, I don't know that it's sustainable, is collecting pennies in ad revenue from as many people as possible as opposed to collecting $10 a month from some people who actually really value you.
Jason Aten:Because finding those people becomes harder and harder without just trying to do the thing that scales, which is, like, make it all for free and make the garbage. Hopefully, Google pops your thing up. It's just so, yeah, it is it is it's very unfortunate.
Stephen Robles:Well, let's talk about something happy before we talk about my Apple Pencil orientation, which is that Apple pre announced a bunch of accessibility features that's gonna be coming to iOS 18 later this year and they're amazing. The first thing being this eye tracking feature, which is you can control your iPad with your eyes. You'll be able to just look and, so I assume, blink and select things on screen. Amazing for accessibility. So eye tracking on the iPad.
Stephen Robles:They also announced a bunch of other features like music haptics, which is really cool, vocal shortcuts where you don't even have to say the magic words, you can just have your phone do things, you train it for a specific phrase and it'll just do it, which is awesome. Vehicle motion cues to help reduce motion sickness. I am very curious if this actually helps, people on their devices, like, these little dots are kind of floating around the screen to match the acceleration or direction of the vehicle, which seems amazing and wild, and I I would love to know if that really does help. I've seen those crazy goggles with the water in it. Have you ever seen those?
Stephen Robles:No. The glasses with the water in it?
Jason Aten:Did you wear your VisionPRO in your pool? Is that what is that what you're talking about?
Stephen Robles:Oh, it's these big goggles that has, like, water filled up to the halfway mark around these tubes around the goggles. And if you wear it in the car, I guess the water, how it moves with gravity, it supposedly helps reduce motion sickness. But this is a much more elegant solution.
Jason Aten:Well, and the thing is the reason people get motion sick in their car is you're staring at your phone, and your body feels movement, but your eyes aren't registering the movement. And so there's that that disconnect causes the motion sickness. I think this is genius. I I'm gonna write about it because I think this is this is very cool. And I think so Apple started doing this.
Jason Aten:Like, last year, they did this. They they sort of announced a bunch of accessibility features right before WWDC. And it might be that they just don't have room to talk about all of this in the keynote. Sure. But this is really important stuff for a lot of people.
Stephen Robles:Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I think it's it was a World Accessibility Awareness Day. They've been announcing it. They've been announcing these features annually on that, annual celebration.
Stephen Robles:So this is so cool that the eye tracking especially, you know, I think about, I don't know if you remember like old documentaries like with Christopher Reeve or Stephen Hawking, and they would have these incredible computer setups that allowed them to control computers with their eyes, you know, with very limited physical interaction. And now, just to have it built into an iPad, wild. Like, just
Jason Aten:I mean, it's not that surprising when you consider they built the VisionPRO. Right? And I know this is not exactly the same thing, but it I'm super glad to see I I mean, you have to think that they learned some things from building the VisionPRO that made it possible for them to do this because, really, it's just using the front facing camera to watch your eyes. Like
Stephen Robles:And they also did some things with VisionPro like these live captions when someone's talking to you and if you were wearing Apple VisionPro, which that's pretty cool. And like language wise, you build translation into this which I didn't know I don't think translation is built into it right now but I imagine that would be coming. That would be awesome.
Jason Aten:I agree.
Stephen Robles:Talk mhmm. Yeah, it'd be very cool. So anyway, opening to that newsroom article. Alright, we have 2 topics here, Jason. What what should we put in personal tech quickly, and what should we put in the bonus episode?
Stephen Robles:My Apple Pencil direction and you using the Apple Vision Pro every day. I think
Jason Aten:that Vision Pro every day should go in the bonus bonus content.
Stephen Robles:Okay.
Jason Aten:Alright.
Stephen Robles:So let's talk about alright. Let's get it. So our bonus episode is gonna be what Jason is doing in Apple Vision Pro every day, which is good because then I could talk about something that I couldn't talk about publicly.
Jason Aten:Okay.
Stephen Robles:And I'll do that in both
Jason Aten:of those. Oh, there's a good there's a good incentive.
Stephen Robles:Yeah, here's my iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, this grip works with the, squeeze gesture functionality, so I can actually use the squeeze gesture with the Apple Pencil Pro. I have the tip facing towards the volume buttons because when you hold your iPad in portrait mode, which is how the logo is oriented, the tip is facing up. How it should be?
Jason Aten:But why should it be facing up, Steven?
Stephen Robles:It just feels right. It feels right. Okay.
Jason Aten:So hold that iPad in your hand. Right like you are.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Pretend like you're about to write something. Take your take the pencil off and start to write. Take the pencil off.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Hold on. Hold on.
Jason Aten:What is Yeah. What just happened there? Steven? Watch me. Look at this.
Jason Aten:Oh, it's in the perfect position. Like it's perfect. Steven, this is like, this is the easiest thing in the world is like, this is the objectively correct way. And it's even true here. Watch if it's in this direction and you pull it, it's perfect.
Jason Aten:You tried to trick us here, but it's like, Steven, this isn't even complicated. There's there's no debate. Why would you, why in the world would you think that it's more like your hand is built in a certain shape, right? You have a claw here. You have a pencil holder device and you pick up the pencil and it's just perfect.
Jason Aten:And then you put it back and you pick it up and it's in the right position and you put it back as opposed to this weird nonsense where it's like, hang on. Let me turn my pencil around before I could use it. Why? And then I have to turn it around again to put it back. Why would you do that, Steven?
Jason Aten:Okay. Defend yourself. Yeah. Exactly. Listen.
Stephen Robles:I I have no defense. I I actually saw my my wife's iPad Pro, and I saw how she put her Apple Pencil, and I was like, oh, no. She does it that way too. Listen, I get I get it. Okay?
Stephen Robles:Everybody's been tweeting at me. Andrew Clare, also great YouTube channel. Appreciate you following the show. I I wish I don't have a Jason is just mocking me now.
Jason Aten:I'm just I'm trying to help you. It's like a repetitive thing if you just get used to doing it that way.
Stephen Robles:It is. So he he sent me there's a, like, starting a quick start guide in the iPad Air. Did you get this? Yeah. Did you get this little quick start guide?
Stephen Robles:So he sent me this quick start out here, I found the tweet, okay? Hey, this is Andrew Clare, he's he's on X, He he tweeted this at me. I don't know what to say. Tweet, post, whatever. Anyway, he sent me the image of the of the start guide.
Stephen Robles:I'll put a link to this in the show notes. And it has Apple's own quick start guide
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Showing the Apple Pencil oriented tip down. Every product marketing image of the iPad is the tip down. I know. I know that's how it's supposed to go. K?
Jason Aten:Well, the funniest part about this, Steven, is until this came up, I have never once thought about this in my entire life. And if people when when people ask, like, which direction do you put your pencil? I'm like, I honestly don't know. I have to look. And then I'm like, wait.
Jason Aten:There is an obvious way to do this.
Stephen Robles:I don't know what's wrong with that. I don't know why.
Jason Aten:This is I'm so happy. I don't
Stephen Robles:know why because this also, like, blocks the volume buttons when you put the Apple Pencil this way, like, so you can't get that volume button, where Where if you do it this way then the volume button is, like, clearly accessible? I don't know I don't know why. I've always done it this way since 2018 when the first iPad came out, so I have, like, 6 years of experience doing this. I think it's just a visual thing, where to me it's like it's like a spaceship. It's like the Saturn 5 Rocket.
Stephen Robles:You know what I mean? If I'm holding my iPad in portrait mode and it's it's vertical, like, the the rocket ship is taken off.
Jason Aten:Yeah, but see on this one it just looks like the side thrusters will be about to blast down.
Stephen Robles:That spaceship that spaceship is Tesla stock right now. It's just plunging right to the ground. It's just going straight down. I, sorry if I offended all my Tesla listeners. Listen, I like, I understand.
Stephen Robles:I understand. This visually, I don't know why. It just doesn't look right to me. It just it looks weird.
Jason Aten:Steven, if you would will just leave your pencil the correct way for a week, I'll give you $1,000. And I think I'm just kidding. I take it back. I didn't say that. But I feel like if you did that for a week, it you'd be over it.
Stephen Robles:Alright. I'm gonna do it. Alright. I'll do it. I commit I commit to putting my Apple Pencil backwards on the iPad and and we will see.
Stephen Robles:I mean, I get I get it. So now wait a minute. So if I'm holding it in landscape, I have it supposedly in the correct
Jason Aten:orientation. And you still grab it. Look. Boom. There you go.
Stephen Robles:Grab it. I yeah. I do. I get it. I'll commit to a week and we will revisit this in our personal tech next next week.
Jason Aten:I'm so happy.
Stephen Robles:It just looks backwards. It just looks backwards.
Jason Aten:But I'm saying if
Stephen Robles:you do it for
Jason Aten:a week, it won't look backwards. Okay.
Stephen Robles:I'll try. I will try.
Jason Aten:This has been my favorite personal tech segment we've ever done because this is the thing I didn't care about until you made me think about it. And all of a sudden, I'm like, wait. There is an answer for this.
Stephen Robles:Basic Apple guy, I don't need you gloating on social media. Okay? Because he's yeah. I know he's been posting, product photos for forever. One one actual question.
Stephen Robles:When did Apple stop putting replacement tips in the box of the Apple Pencil? Because I thought the last time I bought 1, which was actually semi recently, it came with spare tips, and the Apple Pencil Pro does not. Just no. You just the one tip. That's all you get.
Stephen Robles:No?
Jason Aten:I don't remember because most of the Apple Pencils laying around here were sent to me as review units, and all I ever do is take the pencil out. And I don't even, like, look in the rest of the box. Listen. My habit for oh, this is the thing we need to talk about, Steven. I cannot believe we haven't talked about this yet.
Jason Aten:We may have to save it for another bonus episode. But the only two things I ever do whenever I open basically anything that's not like a computer is I take out the accessory and I take out the stickers.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And now there's no more stickers.
Stephen Robles:I never used a single sticker.
Jason Aten:Steven, you
Stephen Robles:I've never there's one on my car because my son snuck it on there. I never intentionally used a sticker. Never not even one sticker. Steven? See, Jace came to find it.
Jason Aten:Oh, no, Steven. I haven't listen. I've never once used them. Do you wanna know what I've done with them? They are all
Stephen Robles:What? Right here. I have no idea what Jason's about to pull out. You could give me all day. I would not guess what I'm about to see with my eyeballs.
Jason Aten:I can't find it. But I have an envelope, and in the envelope are every Apple sticker I've ever gotten. I have the apple stickers from the very first power book I ever bought. Every single one in an envelope. I've saved them all for why.
Jason Aten:I don't know. Like, what oh, but this one is really nice. This is like a metallic sheen on them, and they started putting, like, the dark ones in there. Yeah. This one's yeah.
Jason Aten:I don't even know where these came from.
Stephen Robles:Is that a midnight? Is that a midnight Apple logo?
Jason Aten:That is a midnight. That's
Stephen Robles:a midnight.
Jason Aten:That's a midnight. Oh. Came with the MacBook Air.
Stephen Robles:Now that's a cool that's a cool collection.
Jason Aten:That's what I'm saying.
Stephen Robles:That's pretty cool. Okay.
Jason Aten:And they've been doing it since 1977. The the Apple 2e came with Right. Colorful stickers.
Stephen Robles:Listen, I'm not I'm not here to put Apple on blast. I feel like, you know, the whole environmental responsibility, cool. The two mistakes were fine woven and stickers. People are mad about the stickers.
Jason Aten:The 2 mistakes are Oh, fine
Stephen Robles:woven is
Jason Aten:not taking the stickers out, not making them in the first place. Okay? I just wanted to be clear. No.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. Taking them out, even ijustine, which ijustine rarely has anything negative to say, and I don't know if she said anything, but when she was unboxing her iPad Pro, she said, no sticker, and she looked at the camera and gave a look. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:And I was like, I think that's the first break in character for iJustine I have ever seen. Yeah. Think it's the sticker.
Jason Aten:I will I will I wrote about it. I'll post the article in our community. And if you're a member of our community, you can tell me what you think.
Stephen Robles:About the stickers? Yeah.
Jason Aten:About them taking them out. And if you've collected stickers and all that kind of stuff.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Yeah. I'd like to say okay. Well, join the community, social.primarytech.fm. You can hear about that.
Stephen Robles:You can yell at me about the Apple Pencil there as well. I'm a try it for a week. I'm committing to the week. Maybe I will vlog my experience to the community. Oh, there's the envelope.
Stephen Robles:So many stickers. Oh, he just
Jason Aten:dropped them all, so it's gonna be some of them are even on round paper.
Stephen Robles:That's kinda cool. That is kinda cool. That is I'll I'll give you that.
Jason Aten:Thank you very much.
Stephen Robles:So we alright. Well, read Jason's article about stickers. Support the show in Apple Podcasts or primary tech dot f m. Click bonus episodes. Also give us a 5 star rating and review in Apple Podcasts has helped us on the charts.
Stephen Robles:We appreciate it. We're gonna go talk about what Jason is doing. I don't know why I'm so upset about it. What Jason is doing with his Apple Vision Pro every day, because I I yeah. I'm very curious.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time.
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