Primary Technology

[00:00:00] Stephen Robles: Hold on to your butts. Welcome to primary technology, the show about the tech news that matters. And it is the last show before WWDC 2024. We have your wishlist from the primary tech community. So we're going to talk about the features that you all are hoping to see. Plus Joanna Stern at the wall street journal has broken a big story about screen time bugs that people have been trying to report for years.

Quick Sonos Ace review. NVIDIA is now bigger than Apple due to the whole AI and chip race. And plus we have a hodgepodge of other news as well. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, and this episode is quasi brought to you by our friends at SETAPP, but we'll talk about that in a moment. And of course, joining me as always, my good friend, Jason.

How's it going, Jason?

[00:00:39] Jason Aten: It's good. It is so good to be back at a desk with my microphone, with my monitor, with, yes, it's good. And I can hear you and I can hear me. It's yeah, I'm happy.

[00:00:48] Stephen Robles: Jason was at, we, we were secretive last week. Jason was at an undisclosed location last week, which if you listen to the bonus episode or at least saw the title, he was at Lego headquarters.

Right, that's

[00:01:00] Jason Aten: true. Yep. Absolutely.

[00:01:02] Stephen Robles: Oh, I didn't, you know, I didn't ask you this last week and uh, listen, you should go listen, support the show in apple podcast or memorable. And then you can listen to the bonus episode. Jason saw a secret vault of Legos and all that. But as much as you can say, did you get to see any like unreleased Lego sets?

[00:01:17] Jason Aten: No.

[00:01:18] Stephen Robles: Oh, they don't. Uh, they're probably very secretive.

[00:01:19] Jason Aten: They're very secretive. And I mean, it's, I guess it's possible. I saw something that was not released, but they just didn't tell me that that was the case. And, you know, They have, they released like 350 sets a year. So how would I even know?

[00:01:32] Stephen Robles: Okay. Fair enough.

Well, anyway, it's an exciting bonus episode. Jason saw some, uh, secret Lego vaults and such. So tune into that. But dub dub is literally next week as we record Monday, it's going to be huge. Jason's going to be there on the ground, boots on the ground reporting live from the show floor. I guess it's not really a show floor.

Didn't we have this conversation before? I know. I know. I just keep saying it. He's going to be there live and we are going to do a recording next week. Now. Are we allowed to say where you'll be recording the podcast?

[00:02:01] Jason Aten: Uh, that's probably an even more secret undisclosed location than last week. I don't, I don't honestly know.

[00:02:06] Stephen Robles: Okay,

[00:02:07] Jason Aten: well I

[00:02:07] Stephen Robles: won't say.

[00:02:07] Jason Aten: We're going to find a spot. I'm going to find a spot somewhere near WWDC to

[00:02:12] Stephen Robles: record a podcast. So due, due to the finding a spot, we're not going to be able to do a live show. I had mentioned a couple of times we're going to do a live podcast recording. For the dub dub recap, so it won't be live, but keep your eyes and ears peeled because we will have a recap episode of everything announced that evening, so just look for that bonus episode on Monday, looking for it, not like paid bonus episode, but just it'll be available for everyone, a recap of dub dub, then of course we'll do our regularly scheduled program, uh, later that week, uh, real quick, I want to get into all the news, we have, we're a five star podcast, Jason, this is amazing, you alerted me of this, I didn't even know it was possible.

I think I know how averages work in math and I never thought you could get back to a five out of five rating. If you ever, I

[00:02:55] Jason Aten: think there's some rounding involved, right? I think if you're like a 4. 96 or better, they just rounded up to five. So there you

[00:03:03] Stephen Robles: go. Well, we are a five star podcast once again. So thank to everyone who's been giving us a five star rating.

We have a few shout outs to go. I think we're like 186 five star ratings right now. And so keep them coming. We're trying to get to a 200 at least and then. I'll be on that afterwards, but some shoutouts Sonic68 gave us a 5 star rating and reviewing Apple Podcasts. Thank you for that. RedPixel09, he alerted me last week.

So I'm doing video versions of the bonus episodes so you can watch us shuck and jive or whatever. And I tried putting the YouTube link in the episode description. The thing is, in Apple Podcasts, you can read all the show notes. Even for bonus episodes, even if you don't pay for them. So if you caught that, you got to watch our bonus episode for free last week, but that's not the case.

I removed the link. Okay. So you don't, you don't get to, you have to

[00:03:52] Jason Aten: give us the money. I'm sorry. That's exactly right.

[00:03:55] Stephen Robles: So, uh, we'll see what happens. Uh, I'm not sure how to include it. For our Apple Podcasts bonus listeners, I'm gonna have to do a secret code word again. So anyway, we'll, we'll figure that out.

But anyway, thank you for that. Uh, I say this very carefully. This is the username, F 82 FOCK, I think. Is that a meet the parents thing?

[00:04:13] Jason Aten: Oh, I mean that would be, yeah, I hope so. .

[00:04:16] Stephen Robles: Yeah, I think . I think. I hope so. Hope so. Uh, he said pencil tip. Pointing towards the volume buttons. I like how this is now our new battery percentage on.

[00:04:24] Jason Aten: Okay, I want to say one thing. Uh huh. I think that this is very interesting because so if you attach the the new Pencil Pro to like the iPad Air or the iPad Pro for the first time there's this really cool animation so like after you do a software update And there's a, so there's a really cool animation that pops up more than just a little air, you know, Apple pencil thing, and it's pointed up that animation is pointed up.

I want to say that, but I had several briefings with human beings who work at Apple with the new Apple pencil and whatever, and they all point them the other way. Just want to be clear. So they're paid to do it. Okay. This is what I, but hold on, they can't be paid to do it because Apple's UI designers. Did it the other way, right?

So like, there's this, there's this cognitive dissonance between the UI explained, like visual representation on the screen and the way that everyone at Apple does it.

[00:05:21] Stephen Robles: Listen, I'm just glad that our show goes viral for just meaningless things like Apple pencil point. Take what you can get. I'm here for it.

I'm here for it. I just want to say, uh, Farouk, he runs the, uh, YouTube channel. I phoned a great YouTube channel. He tagged me because, uh, this, this pencil orientation thing is now gone. Uh, it's all over the internet. So he sent a bunch of pictures in this, uh, threads post and he sent this picture of a stack of iPads where all the pencils are pointed with the tip away from the volume buttons and then it's got the ones that are on display, tip away from the volume buttons.

Farouk is like going iPad to iPad. Listen, all I'm saying is they're paid to do it. They're Apple employees. You can't trust that. We don't know how they would actually want those pencils to point.

[00:06:03] Jason Aten: But we do know how Apple, Apple wants the pencils to point except they didn't tell the people that designed the UI piece because it's pointed in the opposite.

So who, I think there is no correct. I don't, I don't know. Well, there is an obvious way, but anyway.

[00:06:17] Stephen Robles: So this was last week. I started with a quote that wasn't exactly a movie quote and I forgot to explain it. And what I had said was there's not a wrong way to do it, but there is a right way, which is actually a quote from my wife.

She actually said that because we were discussing the apple pencil.

[00:06:31] Jason Aten: And she's never been in a movie is what you're saying.

[00:06:32] Stephen Robles: No, she has not, not yet. You never know. You never know. But, uh, yeah. So if you were wondering where that quote came from and you were furiously searching IMDB, it's my wife said it. It wasn't a movie.

Anyway, uh, Jerry Arnold, five star rating interview, Jonathan Wiley. He said, we're nerdy, but nice. I thought that was a nice, we have to use it around Christmas time. You know, the nice list, the nerdy, but nice list. Yeah. Uh, Skoti134, thank you for all those 5 star ratings and reviews, and also we're at 965 subscribers on YouTube.

We're actually getting consistent views on the, over on YouTube, so appreciate that. If you haven't yet, go over and subscribe, we're trying to cross a thousand soon. Maybe we could do it by dub dub. A thousand. YouTube subscribers by DubDub. That's the goal. I want to talk about this big story from Joanna Stern, and she's talking about screen time.

I actually found out a way I can read Wall Street Journal articles, Jason, because I have Apple News Plus. Yes. I didn't realize, I didn't realize for some reason that at least Joanna Stern's articles, uh, you can read. So I'm going to put the Apple News article in the show notes. So if you have Apple News Plus, the paid service, like an Apple One subscription or whatever.

You can, uh, you can read it. No ads, not the case with Bloomberg. I found out you do have to pay for Bloomberg articles, but I did a trial because we're going to talk about a Bloomberg article later, and I do like that if I sign up in Apple news, plus it's in my Apple subscriptions rather than like its own standalone Bloomberg account subscription, you know, so I can manage it with all my Apple stuff.

So anyway, you want to read a Mark Gurman stuff at Bloomberg. Well, Joanna Stearns, you can read if you already have Apple News Plus, and if you wanna subscribe to Bloomberg or at least get a month free around dub dub, that might be worth it. , that's what I did. So that that was that arc.

[00:08:12] Jason Aten: Yeah. Otherwise you have to pay a lot of money.

For Bloomberg, it's like 35 bucks a month. Yeah,

[00:08:16] Stephen Robles: 5 35 bucks a month. I mean, I get like, these are old school like news publications, but like, it seems like a lot right. Not a lot.

[00:08:24] Jason Aten: It does seem like a lot. I mean, the information is a lot. It's probably right around the same price. And you know, Bloomberg made their money selling like 100, 000 terminals to, you know, wall street people.

So yeah, so like, it's not a surprise, but it is a lot.

[00:08:38] Stephen Robles: And I have to like, I'm all for supporting journalism and Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg, but also all like the nine to five max and Mac rumors basically summarize all these articles for you. Like not saying it's not to not pay, but anyway, anyway, Joanna Stern.

She had this amazing report and she's talking about the screentime bug. Apparently, I didn't know this bug existed. Where even if you have screentime set where only specific websites can be visited, which is part of the content restrictions that you could set up in screentime, that there was a string of text that Joanna Stern thankfully did not include in this article, so you couldn't easily do it and find it.

But if you have a string of text or characters in addition to a URL in the address bar of Safari, even with parental controls enabled, it would allow you to visit pretty much any website. That could be an explicit content website, pornography, whatever. There's a serious bug, and this has actually been reported starting three years ago by these two gentlemen here in the picture, Andreas Jagersberger and Roe Achterberg.

They reported this bug to Apple. And multiple times Apple responded, we do not see any actual security implications, which is a wild statement. And I feel like. Either they knew about the bug and they were ignoring this, uh, their words or worse. Like they just dismiss this report from these two gentlemen that are reporting this bug, which seems like a very serious bug.

So finally, several years later, now, just recently, they finally, uh, Apple acknowledged that this bug exists. They said that there was a fix in 17. 5. 1, so this specific bug where typing this specific string of characters in the address bar allows you to visit explicit sites, supposedly that is fixed, but thankfully Joanna Stern also mentioned, By the way, screen time is hopelessly broken, and you know, she has a child, and so she experiences it first hand, and we literally talked about it last week, Liz, and you've been banging this drum for, uh, since December, well longer than that, but you actually wrote about it in December, Saying, Hey, it's broken.

So now that Joanna Stern has said it, maybe, maybe Apple will fix it, but kind of a wild bug, right?

[00:10:48] Jason Aten: It's ridiculous. And I should be offended that they don't care when I say something, but they do care when Joanna Stern, but it's also not surprising at all. And that's fine. I just appreciate Joanna Stern doing the hard work for us because this is not the first time that Apple has made a change based on her reporting.

So like, thank you. I actually sent that message to her this morning. Thank you, Joanna Stern. Because this like. It's ridiculous. The iPhone

[00:11:10] Stephen Robles: passcode is yes. And I cloud password reset just single handedly. Hopefully if she fixes her and

[00:11:16] Jason Aten: Nicole win. But yes, the two of them together. Yes.

[00:11:19] Stephen Robles: But if she picks a screen time single handedly because of this and with your support, of course,

[00:11:24] Jason Aten: I'm all.

I'm fine with her getting all of the credit. I just, but to be clear, they did fix a bug. They didn't fix anything else that's wrong with screen time. Like nothing else that's wrong with screen time. And it is. I've even asked Apple about this. I asked them one time in the context of the mobile device management, which is like the enterprise version of screen time, right?

Like employers can set certain things. And I'm like, so I have a question. If I'm an employer and I'm handing out these devices to my employees and I'm counting on. These, this set of restrictions or this set of whatever. And I'm a parent who has a kid using screen time. I have no faith that any of this works.

And they just kind of laughed and like, yeah, this isn't built on that. So what they were really saying is we know that that they didn't say this. Apple, I'm not quoting anyone at Apple, but the implication was, no, this is the real version, meaning the mobile device management, that's like someone's sort of side project.

And again, I. It is unfortunate because I feel like Apple's making a promise as a parent that you can give your kid a device and have some sense of control over the experience they're going to have and that is just not true. It just doesn't work.

[00:12:32] Stephen Robles: The kid part is obviously a big part and that's why I use it with three kids and you use it.

How do you even do that? You have four kids. Can you all be in the same Apple family? Yep, you can have six

[00:12:44] Jason Aten: people in a family.

[00:12:45] Stephen Robles: So you're right at the max. You're like pushing it to the limit.

[00:12:48] Jason Aten: Yeah. But I mean, yeah, so that's why we stopped having kids so that we could fit into an iCloud family. It was, we really planned this out.

We planned this out. It was like, this is the maximum size of an iCloud family. We're done. But I will

[00:12:58] Stephen Robles: say the, having three kids, you having four, when you really use the screen time tools, you notice how bad they are and how buggy they are. But I would also say there are people who use screen time tools who don't have kids.

Whether they're trying to break an addiction or sometimes just want to restrict themselves from certain sites and they'll give a screen time password to a spouse or trusted partner. Like that's very. Like it's an important tool and the fact that it's broken is crazy and I have actually used mobile device management in my work so I used to work at a place where I had about 60 to 70 Apple devices that I managed through Jamf, which is one of these mobile device management platforms and it was amazing like it was solid, you can push software updates, you can restrict things, you can lock things like the wallpaper, etc.

And, you know, push apps to devices and so it's installed automatically, but doing that in the kid, like for kids would be extremely cumbersome, first of all, and it still doesn't have some of the features that screen time has, such as like asking for an hour more time. Uh, for an app, you know, some mobile device management, as far as I know, at least the one jamf that I used, it doesn't have those kind of ease of like, ask to buy or request more time.

So screen time, it needs to work. Like it needs to work on Apple devices. And so Apple has promised, at least to Joanna Stern, that they are going. Like they know it needs improvement now and they're going to be working on it. I don't know if this is coming out too soon ahead of dub dub or maybe they already had things planned, but I'm hoping to hear about screen time at dub dub.

I don't know if we will. Do

[00:14:31] Jason Aten: you think we will? I don't think we will. And I don't think, believe it or not, that it is just a high enough software priority. But the reason that that's crazy to me is because it is a brand promise thing. Like this is, I mean, this stuff should matter to Apple because they're making a promise to To people who are buying the devices to give them to their kids.

Like think about the emails about, um, the green and blue bubbles, right? Where it's like, if we may, if we, if we enable this on Android, then parents won't buy their kids iPhones. They very much care that parents buy their kids iPhones, but parents like it's hard and I'm not suggesting that you would not buy an iPhone for this, but if you buy an iPhone thinking that you're going to be able to have some control over the experience.

And I mean, it's just like our, so our daughters both have phones, our, our sons who are younger both have watches and then they use iPads and on the phones, honestly, sometimes the only reason screen time works is the goodwill of our daughters. And the only reason, so for example, they'll ask for more time for something.

And we're not like unreasonable. Almost every time that they ask, we're like, sure, that's great. But it's also, we just don't want them to spend six hours on Instagram. So we want them to have to like ask and do that kind of thing. But there's oftentimes where they can get around it, right? Where it just stops working.

And they, we actually had to get to a point where we were like, so we, I don't want to be like checking what they're doing every day. You know, you can see how they use their time. But we had to get to a point where it's like, if you don't ask, we're going to have to do, like, it's going to be uncomfortable for everyone.

So would you please follow the system even when you know the system is not working? And the fact that they do isn't because Apple built a great system. It's because we have reasonably decent human beings as Children.

[00:16:12] Stephen Robles: Yes.

[00:16:12] Jason Aten: So, yeah, there's, there's, yeah,

[00:16:14] Stephen Robles: and I will say, I actually discovered it several months ago because I would, I'll go into screen time periodically just to see, like, you know, how many hours are they spending on this or what are they doing?

And for one of my son's devices, I saw so far like web URLs with like 30 minutes. It was YouTube. I actually, and like, it was, I was like that. How is that possible? Like that shouldn't be allowed. Like he doesn't have the app and we had to have a conversation of like, actually that was just opened up for him.

Like he was able to watch rocket league videos on YouTube or whatever. And I was like, okay, well I need your help then. Like you need to let me know. And I get the same thing from my kids. Like they'll text me, like my son texts me, like all websites are allowed again.

[00:16:54] Jason Aten: Yeah.

[00:16:54] Stephen Robles: Like, okay, I go in and honestly, what is the fix?

I go into the screen time settings. I change it to like, Okay. One of the other web restriction settings, change it back. And then sometimes it fixes it. Sometimes it doesn't.

[00:17:06] Jason Aten: Well, and websites are hard because you have to also know every incantation of what, like if, if a site has a mobile site and it's m.

youtube. com, you have to put that in there separately. It doesn't just block them by domain. So like kids are smart. Listen, they figured this stuff out and somebody, some kids obviously figured out this. It's whatever this voodoo incantation to allow all websites or whatever. But even just the ability, like I didn't realize this until recently, because we have a child who was just continuously changing their own screen time passcode.

And it's because if you don't, if you allow account changes, they're able to like go, even if you say you can't change passcodes, if you allow certain things, they can use their own Apple ID to like change things. And it's like, Why is that buried six settings deep? Like the whole point of this is no, they can't change the screen time passcode.

Otherwise nothing. It's all useless. So yeah, come on.

[00:17:58] Stephen Robles: Hopefully Apple iterates quickly on this. You know, we also just need, there's more granular controls ideally. And this is something, when we get into our dub dub request list, you know, I would love to be able to do things like give someone access to rooms in home kit.

But by room and not the whole house, Apple TV needs vastly better restrictions. There's right now, the only thing you can do is really restrict apps by age, and then you have to approve it on the iPhone, which did get better with Iowa 17. It actually just uses, if your iPhone is unlocked, you can, you know, access whatever app you had restricted on the Apple TV with a single tap.

So that's cool, but overall it just needs to get better and more reliable. So hopefully we see those changes quickly. All right, real quick. I want to talk about the Sonos Ace headphones because I did review them or had them to try and I have the video up. I'll put the link in the show notes. They're nice headphones.

Uh, they're 450 nice, you know, and so I compare them a lot to AirPods Max. And to be honest, if you already have an AirPods Max or other high end headphones, the Sonos Ace are kind of a hard sell. I have a bunch of Sonos gear. Like, I use, you know, the Sonos Arc, the Sonos Beam, all this kind of stuff. And one of the main features, really the only ecosystem related feature, is the TV audio swap, where if you're watching on a TV with an Arc soundbar, you supposedly hold the little button on the Sonos Ace headphones, and the audio goes to your headphones automatically.

That's pretty neat. I was not able to get it to work like once at all. I unpaired and paired them. I tried doing it. Like there's an app control in the Sonos app where you can swap. I tried that and it didn't work. Other people have got it to work. That was just my experience, but also I'm not sure what other benefit, like their Bluetooth headphones.

And so if you're in the Apple ecosystem. And this could be a larger conversation about like Apple's ecosystem lock in or whatever. It's really hard to use these in the Apple ecosystem. It's no more seamless than just regular Bluetooth headphones. Like, you know, no auto switching. Using them with an Apple TV is kind of cumbersome.

You have to pair it over Bluetooth manually. I don't know a lot of people like these a lot of people say they sound really good i actually still prefer the airpods max sound over these so i guess i'm just hoping apple updates those airpods max sometime soon and i don't know when it's gonna happen

[00:20:09] Jason Aten: well and when steven says he has a bunch of sonos what he means is he has the most sonos gear he has it all and so so there's.

I thought it was actually really, I watched your video this morning. I watched it at 1. 75 X so I could get through it just to make sure I had gotten through it. So you talked real fast this morning. You would just drink in your cold brew for sure when I was watching this, but I was, I was really intrigued because I know you have a ton of Sonos stuff and probably the only thing you have more of than Sonos stuff is Apple stuff.

So your comparison to Apple max or AirPods max, although you did at one time call them the AirPods ACE, which I loved. You super did. I'll send you a screenshot of it. It was the best. I'm not even picking on you. I was just like, Oh, that's awesome. Um, it's like, you just, you, you so badly wanted to combine the two products.

But I think that the. You know, it is an interesting comparison because it's like, is this a product that they're trying to bring more people into the Sonos system? And if that's the case, I feel like they should have introduced like earbuds, right? Because I feel like a lot more people buy earbuds than over the ear headphones.

If you're spending 450 bucks on headphones, you're now competing with like the Bose, the Sony XM fives. I've got a pair of Bowers and Wilkins that I love. Like you, you, like you're competing with. And the AirPods Max were very, very good headphones. And most people probably already have an opinion about them.

And if the question is like, well, what does this, what does this offer that you can not get somewhere else? And if, if the one thing you said that you can get, which is this ability to swap your stuff, that, that seems like a weird feature to me, honestly,

[00:21:45] Stephen Robles: it's, uh, the only reason I get it is I will sometimes with my AirPods Max watch it.

Like if it's late at night. You know, all of our bedrooms are kind of close by. And so if I want to watch like an action movie, the kids are going to hear it. If I use, cause I actually have a Sonos system in the bedroom, I have like a beam, a sub mini and three hundreds. And it's like, well, it's going to be too loud.

It's going to wake them up. So I will get my, even though I have this great Sonos system, I'll get my AirPods max and I'll connect them to the Apple TV. And so I get. Why you might want that? A. It only works with the Sonos Arc, the most expensive soundbar. And that's not the one I have in my bedroom. I have the Sonos Beam.

Sonos says support is coming for the Beam and the Ray, but it's like You just launched your very first pair of headphones and you already have an ecosystem that people love, but most people can't do anything in their current ecosystem with these headphones. Like I couldn't use them in my bedroom with audio swap feature until there's some software update.

And as many people say, and reviewers say like never buy a product today with a promise of a software update tomorrow. Like Sonos is probably going to deliver on that. Like they're pretty good at it. But also like, I just can't use it today because I don't have an arc in the bedroom. So, and the, AirPods max, they just work really great with the Apple TV.

I put them on my head. I opened control center on the Apple TV and it's one click away and Sonos can't compete with that. Maybe that's on Apple. Maybe Apple should open, maybe open some of that control to Bluetooth headphones or whatever. But yeah, I think,

[00:23:15] Jason Aten: I think, well, any of you put in AirPods. Like AirPods pro, you don't even have to like go into control center.

It'll just pop up and be like, push the button. It's like, do you want to watch this? You want to listen to this in your thing? But I did want to pause. You, you have Sona, you have era three hundreds in your bedroom.

[00:23:30] Stephen Robles: Okay, listen,

[00:23:30] Jason Aten: I just wanted, I'm doing math here. I'm not gonna say anything, but I was like doing the math.

I'm like that, that seems like overkill. .

[00:23:38] Stephen Robles: Okay, listen. Yes, yes, they are. Tho I actually got a set of for review, so those are actually from Sonos. Okay. I, the things I have bought from Sonos are my Sonos arc, my sub gen three, my Sonos Beam, the sub mini move one, move two, and uh uh, Sonos one s sells a pair. So those are the ones i got as review units i wanted to put them in my a larger living room where the sonos arc and subgen three are but they need to be only work as rear speakers so you have to have them in the back

[00:24:09] Jason Aten: and

[00:24:10] Stephen Robles: the way our living room is set up it's like behind the sofa is basically the kitchen and like.

Of a bar of like produce so like i literally had no place to put the sonos speakers where they wouldn't be in the way but also could act like we're speakers i set them up that way when i was reviewing them and it sounded amazing like with the sonos arc and the subject three. But it's like they're not convenient here.

And also we don't watch a lot of stuff in there. So I'm like, I guess I'll put them in the bedroom.

[00:24:39] Jason Aten: So this is like checking because that's, that is quite a, uh, that's okay. That's okay. Did you listen to the most recent episode? Actually, not the most recent, but last week's episode of, um, ATP where I don't know if it was in one of their, like, Oh, they're Like late, like the after show or overtime, but Marco Arment has a set of era three hundreds as his desk speakers.

Yes. Yes. So

[00:25:03] Stephen Robles: I guess I can't give you a hard time now. I have a pair of home pod twos as desk speakers, but I will say they work. Home pods are way worse as desk speakers because there's no line in.

[00:25:13] Jason Aten: Sure. So they're also a lot smaller though, than era three hundreds.

[00:25:16] Stephen Robles: The air three hundreds are big. That was my point is they're, they're very large speakers.

If you have them on stands, you know, and they're off the desk, maybe a little bit, but anyway, I do want to just want to say, I agree with your point. Sonos definitely should have done an AirPods pro competitor first, because that price point, I think you can overlook a lot of the, uh, ecosystem disadvantages of the Sonos stuff.

Because like people buy other. You know, wireless headphone style things. I got my little Bowers and

[00:25:46] Jason Aten: Wilkins ear buds right here. Bowers

[00:25:47] Stephen Robles: and Wilkins. I've, I've tried like the Behringer ones and Behr dynamics. So yeah, I think they should have gone this way in like the 200 range undercut the AirPods pro a little bit.

And I think it would have been a more compelling thing and still do the TV audio swap feature and it would have been a little more compelling. So anyway, we'll see, we'll keep testing it. This is great. Uh, Instagram, they're testing unskippable ads. Wonderful. Jason's fiercely shaking his head. This is from tech crunch and their Instagram is testing ads where basically.

Unclear. I think whether it's going to be in the feed or stories, I feel like it's going to be in the stories and reels most likely, but where an ad will pop up and a counter counting down and you will not be able to skip it, you can't swipe away. You can't tap away. It would just be an unskippable ad.

And some might say, well, YouTube, which you might be watching this podcast on YouTube right now, they have unskippable ads sometimes too. A, that's kind of up to the discretion of the creator. You can choose whether or not they're skippable or not skippable. But B, YouTube premium is a thing, right? And you can pay for no ads, which do you, do you pay for you?

[00:26:51] Jason Aten: Yeah, it's the best subscription service you can possibly get is YouTube premium. Like no question,

[00:26:56] Stephen Robles: especially family wise. Like I pay for it and there is a higher tier, but then you can share it with like five or six people. So Yeah. I

[00:27:05] Jason Aten: just recently renewed ours or whatever. And I was telling my wife, I'm like, if you see this YouTube charge, that's what it is.

And she's like, well, what is that for? I was like, it's so we don't get like ads on YouTube. And she's like, Oh, I just didn't know there was ads on YouTube because we just, we, she's like, please don't take that away. Right? Like,

[00:27:20] Stephen Robles: it is a different world. Cause sometimes I'll be logged into a different YouTube account, like for Riverside or whatever.

And I'll go to watch something. I'm like, Oh my goodness.

[00:27:28] Jason Aten: I don't understand who lives that way. To be honest with you, like YouTube premium, best thing this though. Is the worst thing in the entire world. And you know what, there is a way you can skip these ads. You just close the app and that's probably what's going to happen.

I, you know, okay. There's a quote in this tech crunch article that you linked to, and it says it's from a meta company spokesperson. Cause no one wants to put their name on this. And it says, we are always testing formats that can drive a value for advertisers. And the important thing you have to understand is like, there's a finite amount of value and it either goes to the user.

Or to the advertiser. So every time that they drive value for advertiser, they're taking value away from the, the user, right? Because you're making the experience worse. And the goal should be a hundred percent of the time to find that sweet spot where the experience for the user is like, you could actually argue that personalized ads, If you're going to have ads is a value add to both the advertiser and to the user, right?

Because it's like, if I have to see ads, I might, it's like, it's like just open apple news plus or apple news and look at those ads and you'll realize what a bad ad experience looks like. At least when you're on instagram, it might make you think that they're listening to you, but like at least the ads are like relevant.

But this is the kind of thing where they're saying, no, we're literally going to take away from the user experience in order to drive value for advertisers. I think I'm going to write about this. I'm making myself a note,

[00:28:48] Stephen Robles: I think you should and a meta threads and stuff. It's going to, we're going to get ads everywhere pretty soon, like threads right now.

And I've seen Gruber posting about this. Threads right now is like this nice utopia of like, not that it's great and the algorithm still needs some work, but there's no ads yet, guarantee you in the next few months, like, it's going to be ads everywhere.

[00:29:11] Jason Aten: Yeah.

[00:29:11] Stephen Robles: And it's probably gonna be great quality ads.

To your point, when I go through Instagram stories, like, those are good ads, meaning they're applicable, a lot of times the things I'm interested in. Even if I see a repeat ad, it's might be something that like I'm considering buying. And so whatever tuning they've done to that ad delivery, like it's pretty good, but.

Unskippable ads. Like I'm just, yeah, I'm not a, I'm not a proponent of force quitting apps, like swiping up to close them because you shouldn't because iOS is better at managing all that. But if you see an ad from Instagram, that's unskippable, you can close that out.

[00:29:42] Jason Aten: Yeah. This is, it's just, it's bad. It's so bad.

I mean, I thought it was bad when they started putting threads ads. So meaning ads, promoting threads in Instagram, right? Like they mean that's super annoying where they're like, we've updated threads, go check it out. And I'm like, I get why you're doing it. And I don't mind because I can just not tap on it.

Right. But, but it's a lot like people criticize Apple for putting essentially ads in the settings app where they're like, did you want to subscribe to Apple one? Did you, do you want to check out Apple music for three months for free? Like when you're, we're basically abusing your own platform to promote something else of yours.

Like that's when it starts to get bad, but again, at least you can ignore it. You can just close it. You can just not tap on it. But this is, man, that's a bummer. I'll

[00:30:24] Stephen Robles: also say Facebook. I don't go on Facebook very often. I try not to ever. But like I posted some pictures of my kids dance recital and so I will go on Facebook because there were some friends and family commenting and so I scroll the news feed for a second and I I knew they were doing this but I seeing thread posts in the Facebook news feed that are almost indistinguishable from just regular Facebook posts and I thought I was looking at a Facebook post and I would and I tapped it I think either to comment or I Like it or something and then it throws me over to the thread app and I'm like this is a terrible experience

[00:31:00] Jason Aten: right

[00:31:01] Stephen Robles: one Like I understand why you're doing it.

You're trying to trick people into like going over to thread, signing up and being over there also. Like I'm already in a news feed, text based app, Facebook. Don't send me over to threads where like, and I can't engage with, with that threads post in Facebook. That's why they're throwing me over to the threads app.

Like this is not a good plan. Don't do

[00:31:21] Jason Aten: that. And even worse, just think about this, Steven. They are willing to take you away from the Facebook feed to send you to threads, but they deprioritize news content with links in it because that would take you away from the Facebook feed to go to someone else's website.

So just like think about how actually devious what they're doing is because they're like, no, no, no. We want everyone to stay in the Facebook feed unless we can use that audience to go somewhere else. There's, they're prioritizing. This is like net neutrality all over again, man. They're like prioritizing their own stuff to send traffic, which is a thing they will not do for anyone's Facebook.

Like, as someone who writes things on the internet, Facebook used to be a huge source of traffic on a, on a regular basis. And it is like zero at this point.

[00:32:07] Stephen Robles: When you can like basically trace the death of BuzzFeed. Oh yeah. To this change that Facebook did. Absolutely. Yep. Like that's, that's that thread. Uh, another, I think I mentioned it before, but a great book is Traffic, uh, by, I forgot who it was.

Ben Smith. It's great. Yes, Ben Smith. And he talks about kind of the history of that whole age of the internet, sharing, you know, Basically links on Facebook was a business that can, that is not a business anymore. You can't do that. Right, right,

[00:32:31] Jason Aten: right. Yeah.

[00:32:32] Stephen Robles: Um, uh, so all right, quick news bits and then we'll take a break, but I want to talk, the, uh, thread radio was discovered in a lot of Apple's recent devices, even though Apple did not promote it.

So this is Jennifer Tuohy from the verge. I heard her on a recent verge cast and this is her article, but basically thread radios, if you weren't familiar as a smart home thing. basically allows for more stable and lower power connections between smart home devices. Thread radios are built into HomePod 2, HomePod mini, the newer Apple TVs, and then there's a bunch of smart home devices that have thread radios built in like Eve smart plugs and some shades and things like that.

Well apparently there's thread radios in a bunch of Apple products that Apple did not mention, namely the new M4 iPad Pro, the new M2 iPad Air, The M3 MacBook Airs, the M3 MacBook Pros, at least M3 Pro or M3 Macs, and the iMacs. Also, all of these have thread radios built in. Apple never mentioned that in the announcements or in the events.

And it could be that these thread radios are not active yet. They're reported in the FCC filing. That's how it was discovered. But it might be that they're, they're not quote unquote on. Which could be like this happened before with HomePod minis, where when HomePod mini launched, Apple did not mention the temperature and humidity sensor that was kind of hidden in the HomePod mini.

And it was later I fix it, did a tear down and they were like, this looks like a temperature and humidity sensor. And then later with a software update. You could then use your HomePod mini in home automations and see the temperature and humidity data, uh, from the HomePod minis you already had. It just took a software update to show those sensors to the software.

So this could be a thing where maybe we'll get a software update in the near future, where now your other Apple devices can act as thread radios, which would make sense. You know, if you have a lot of Apple devices, but only. You know, one apple tv in a far room, then this could help facilitate some of that smart home connectivity.

So Jason, do you care at all about thread?

[00:34:36] Jason Aten: I was, I thought we were still talking about Facebook here and I'm just kidding, this is a weird transition. No, I I'm smarter than that. I, the, I thought the interesting thing about this is it at first it's like, well, maybe this is just a thing that's a part of these system on a chips, right?

But the M two iPad pro does not apparently have a thread radio, right? But the M two iPad air does. So it's not just, or for exact, for that matter, the M two Mac book airs, yeah. So there's more to it than just that. I don't care that they're putting things in there and not telling us because it's not like this is taking away from the, it's not like this is a thing that's going to eat up so much of your battery that you should have known that it was there, right?

I think that that's fine. And it's not like when, um, Amazon was doing their sidewalk network where they're essentially turning every single device you owned into a mesh network that people could be walking by on the street and like be connected to that. I don't, that's not what, This is, I think it's weird that they're doing it and not talking about like the fact that they did it and they weren't talking about it makes me think that this is just something that comes with the system on a chip.

But again, it can't be that because there are devices that have these chips that don't have the thread radio. So

[00:35:39] Stephen Robles: exactly. Yeah, well, curious. And unless a piece of news before we take a break, the humane AI pin, it's back, man, it's back. It's. It's back in the news by hook or by crook. Yeah, we're still talking

[00:35:51] Jason Aten: about it.

[00:35:52] Stephen Robles: Still talking about it. Apparently, Humane has sent out an email to a lot of users. Strangely, I did not get this email. Even though I have a Humane AI pin. That's because you don't

[00:36:00] Jason Aten: charge it anyway.

[00:36:02] Stephen Robles: Well, yeah, I'll mention that in a second. It's not a problem. Apparently, the charging case, you know, I didn't even bring it with me.

I should have. It's like the egg shaped case that you can put the pin and battery into that We'll charge the pen and battery when you're away from home or whatever. Humane is saying out of an abundance of caution, this is a statement they sent by email, we are reaching out today to ask that you immediately stop using and charging your charge case accessory.

Due to an issue with certain battery cells for the charge case. Uh, and I think it's not here in this email, but that it might catch on fire. And so it's going to explode. That's exactly what they're saying

[00:36:40] Jason Aten: is it's

[00:36:41] Stephen Robles: going to explode. This seems very strange. Now, months later, after the launch, after their announcement, and then after the launch to discover this issue, which a means maybe there wasn't a lot of internal testing on this egg shaped charger B apparently there's not been enough users experiencing the issue.

For several months even though these pins are in the wild for it to come up sooner and see nobody cares because everyone stop wearing their pin nobody's been

[00:37:08] Jason Aten: charging him for a while now so

[00:37:09] Stephen Robles: that was one of the most annoying things about it i was trying to wear regularly and there came a point where it was just frustrating because i didn't know how the charging work.

Like there's a charging pad, and I can put the pin with the attached battery booster on and put it on the pad, and that charges everything. And I understood that, but that egg case, I was like, does this charge wirelessly? Like, if I just charge this egg, do I put the battery booster in the egg? And does that charge just the battery booster does have to be the pin and battery booster in it like i never understood how it works so i just never really use that.

And also i was so tired of charging it and didn't find enough use case i stopped wearing it it's not been charged for weeks

[00:37:54] Jason Aten: i will tell you though like as someone who has a. Ziploc bag full of sand with a battery in it that my 12 year old took apart. A lithium ion battery. You should not, if they tell you to stop charging it because it might explode, you should stop.

You should just not charge it and not use it. I hope they do. I hope there's like a step two, which is like, send it back. We can't send it back. There's no way they're going to let you send it back because the post office will be like, nope, we don't want that. Forget that. Is there anything dangerous in here?

I'm like, ah, no, not did you know? The post office, if you get an, If you get a laptop and you open the box, you can't send that back from the post office. They will not allow you to send it back if it's been opened because they ship their stuff on other people's planes. Right? They literally told me this one time.

I'm like, FedEx will let you do it and they're like, well, they own their own planes and if they blow up, that's their problem.

[00:38:39] Stephen Robles: Same thing with UPS.

[00:38:41] Jason Aten: Right, same thing with UPS. But, uh, but the post office, they send their stuff on other people's planes and so apparently it's bad if they blow up.

[00:38:48] Stephen Robles: That's not funny, but that's pretty funny.

[00:38:51] Jason Aten: It's funny that that was the response I got from the person at the post office. It is not planes blowing up. Certainly not funny. I a hundred percent agree. But anyway, yeah, I think that you should stop using it anyway.

[00:39:03] Stephen Robles: And I'll be honest, like the rabbit are one and the humane ad pin. Like, I feel like the interest in these devices.

Is clearly just like a point on a graph like from january to april of this year it was spike drop no one cares and i think. The innovation that opening i which are gonna talk about the possible deal with apple opening i. Companies like apple their big dub dub announcement that's all the AI people want like it's innovative enough I can use the chat GPT app on my phone and it's pretty great it's better than these hardware devices another device in your pocket is just not sustainable wearable or otherwise like I just didn't it just wasn't useful enough so my rabbit r1 is sitting uncharged on a shelf.

My humane AI pin is sitting uncharged on my nightstand , and I haven't, I haven't taken the last step of actually unplugging the humane AI pin charger and just putting it in a drawer. It's done. I haven't done that yet, but I'm very close. 'cause I'd like to reclaim the space on my nightstand.

[00:40:07] Jason Aten: I just want you to think about how much Sonos gear you could have bought with what you spent on those two AI devices.

[00:40:12] Stephen Robles: There's no more Sonos to buy. I bought them on, so that's the thing.

[00:40:15] Jason Aten: But you could put a, you could upgrade the soundbar in your bedroom and then you could use your headphones.

[00:40:18] Stephen Robles: Jason, I wish you hadn't said that. I know. I'm really sorry.

[00:40:20] Jason Aten: I apologize to your wife right now.

[00:40:23] Stephen Robles: No, no. You know, I bought all that when I was building my house because, and it was like, I was building it into the cost.

I was like, I just want to, I want to put sound in all the rooms from the get go and it was worth it. All right. All right. So we need to talk about open AI and Apple. And I want to talk about Nvidia, which is now bigger than Apple when it comes to market cap valuation, which is wild, wild to me. We're going to talk about that in a second, but first we're going to do something very different.

This is not an ad read because frankly set up has not sponsored the show and to be fair like we're growing i posted actually an image the other day we crossed fifty thousand downloads for the show which is. Amazing yeah it's amazing like honestly when you look at the podcast landscape especially for shows that have just started or only have a couple dozen episodes which is literally us.

You don't see these kinds of numbers and so the fact that we launched this year in January, which it feels like we've been doing it for longer. I don't know. It

[00:41:16] Jason Aten: does, but yeah, January.

[00:41:18] Stephen Robles: It's weird. It's weird. But anyway, so we're, we're growing 50, 000 downloads is amazing. Uh, from start to now. And so per episode, you know, we get a little over 2000 downloads.

We're getting close to a thousand on YouTube, but sponsors really only look at a podcast when it's like 10, 000 or more downloads per episode. So we're not there yet. I believe we'll get there soon. So we're going to try something different because it's not a sponsor. But set app, which I use, I use a lot of the apps in the set app bundle.

They're actually doing this like affiliate contest. And so they're doing like anyone who uses affiliate links for set up, you know, whoever gets the most signups for affiliates, they're going to award like a bonus prize or whatever. And so we're going to try it. And even if we don't win the prize, if you sign up for set up through our link, Then we'll get recurring affiliate revenue and that'll be support for the show and set up is 10 a month.

You get a bunch of apps with set app and I'll share just some of the apps that I use personally because and you know, I have no ad reader like bullet points or call to action. So this is like the most casual ad read I've ever done. Uh, but I will say clean shot X is a great screenshot tool. It's what I use.

Phenomenal. Yeah, it's phenomenal. It's what I use. Every time I record a podcast or like record a video screen grab, I use clean shot X Downey. I can't really talk about what it does because this video goes on YouTube and they get a little ornery about that.

[00:42:37] Jason Aten: I use it every week, just to be clear. I

[00:42:40] Stephen Robles: use it.

I use it every day. Jason,

[00:42:42] Jason Aten: I don't do as much YouTube as you, but I will tell you that I use it without saying what it's for. Every time there is a event that happens, That I can't be at in person, but I would like to have that video available to transcribe or whatever. Downey is, is essential.

[00:43:00] Stephen Robles: It is essential.

It does exactly what you

[00:43:02] Jason Aten: think it does. So

[00:43:03] Stephen Robles: it's amazing. I also have a video on my website. I couldn't put this video on YouTube because again, it's whatever, but I use Downey and transloader in combination. With hazel. Anyway, I'll put the video. I can't talk about it. We're gonna get canceled. Ulysses. Isn't that you're writing?

I

[00:43:19] Jason Aten: use it. Every single thing I write that I published on the internet. I use Ulysses like every single thing you skipped over bartender, which is an essential tool.

[00:43:26] Stephen Robles: Well,

[00:43:26] Jason Aten: but

[00:43:26] Stephen Robles: Bart, did you see the news?

[00:43:28] Jason Aten: No

[00:43:29] Stephen Robles: bartender got bought out by some unknown developer. And so I hope it's not

[00:43:33] Jason Aten: bending spoons because I will just, They didn't,

[00:43:36] Stephen Robles: they didn't say, but like this developer, like apparently it's pretty shady.

It's going to be all over all over social media. Everybody's like bemoaning this change and are now looking for alternatives to bartender. But here's the great thing about set app. You pay 10 a month to set up and you can use all these apps as if you had bought the full versions for that 10 a month.

Which is an amazing deal. Like, I don't even know how they do this, but you can use Downy, CleanShotX, Ulysses, MindNode is another great one.

[00:44:03] Jason Aten: So wait, download Bartender now and never update it.

[00:44:06] Stephen Robles: Never update it. Seriously. That might, that might be the answer. That might be the answer. And you could do that with the setup thing.

CleanMyMac X, great for like finding big files on your Mac, or if you're going to delete an app and you want to make sure to get rid of all the little files in the library, CleanShot, uh, CleanMyMac X is great for that. Paste great clipboard manager. If you've never tried a clipboard manager before, highly recommend that do is another great to do app.

I know a lot of people love that. I've used jump desktop in the past to like VNC into max remotely. Anyway, there's a bunch of great apps that are a part of set app and you can get access to all of them just for that 10 a month. So here's what you do. There's a link in the show notes today. If you click that and sign up for set up, then We get a little bit affiliate kickback from that and you get to enjoy a bunch of cool apps.

And so that's it.

[00:44:50] Jason Aten: Yeah. Try set it. I mean, I gotta be honest, like clean. exe and Ulysses alone are worth the subscription. Like seriously,

[00:44:58] Stephen Robles: because Ulysses is a subscription anyway, right?

[00:45:00] Jason Aten: Yeah, I think I, I pay like every year, but I don't. I could be completely making this up, but I probably pay like 50 bucks a year.

That's half of the subscription to this, right? Like, right, exactly.

[00:45:10] Stephen Robles: And like downy clean shot. I like, anyway, they're all, they're all great. So try that out. But if not, you could support the show. Give us a five star rating and review an Apple podcast or support the show directly. We really love that 5 a month.

And you get the bonus episodes to think I want to talk about printers today. It's like about printers and it was episode plus you can hear jason's lego adventure from last week Yeah, and you can hear uh, talk about the death of physical media You get access to all the bonus episodes directly on apple podcast five dollars a month Or you can click the bonus episodes link at primary tech

[00:45:41] Jason Aten: Yeah, there's some good bonus episodes, by the way.

In fact, the bonus episodes are probably usually better than the regular one. So you should know. That's not

[00:45:46] Stephen Robles: true. Okay. Sorry. Am I doing it

[00:45:49] Jason Aten: wrong? I'm sorry. That was a good selling point. That was a good selling

[00:45:51] Stephen Robles: point. All right. I saw this news, but you, you'd put the article in NVIDIA, which is the maker of all the GPU cards that AI runs on.

Basically their stock is going crazy. Like if you look at the last year, like June to June, I think it's quadrupled in value. It was like 300 something and now it's 1200 something. Yeah. But it's even now more valuable than Apple with a 3. 01 trillion market cap. I don't even understand what that is. I just know it means that they make a lot of money.

[00:46:17] Jason Aten: Well, it actually doesn't mean that they make a lot of money, but they do. Their market cap is basically if you just added up all of their stock, however many stock, how many, how many shares of stock do they have out in the world? Multiplied by the price of that stock, right? So it's essentially saying this is the value of the company.

So if you wanted to buy the company and you were going to buy all of the shares, you'd actually have to pay more because. You'd have to convince people to sell their shares. But the point is that's what they consider the market cap. So that's the largest. So for a long time, Apple was the largest company in the world.

Then Microsoft passed it. Now, NVIDIA has passed Apple, making it the third largest and NVIDIA is now the second largest. And there's probably like it's I think it's a foregone conclusion that it will pass Microsoft at some point. And it's in the, there's a couple of reasons why one, they're just making a ridiculous amount of money right now because they sell the chips that everyone is using for like training large language models and running that stuff in the cloud.

They, they, they're, they're the H one hundreds, which is what everyone is buying. I think they're like 30, 000 a piece or something like that for these, for a GPU. Yeah. For these GPUs and they're about to announce the, well, they actually have announced the H 200 and the next generation, which is called Blackwell and the generation after that, and people are still buying the H 100 because they have to, because they cannot, like no CEO at a tech company right now that is Even tangentially related to AI can afford to not be investing money in this right now because they'll, they will get fired because it would just be a terrible business move even though it's like incredibly expensive.

Did you see the new, there's this big story about Elon Musk. Tesla bought a bunch of these and he just randomly diverted like 500 million worth of them to, to X. So like Tesla paid for these things and the boxes came into the warehouse and Elon Musk walked through, he's like, take these 15. Put them over there, which is actually not the way it's supposed to work, by the way.

But so they're just riding this wave and it's going to be real interesting to see what happened. I mean, there's absolutely an AI bubble. That does not mean that AI is not a real thing. But right now the like core definition of a bubble is like this irrational. Growth that isn't necessarily pinned to reality.

And all of these companies are spending unbelievable amounts of money. And the reason they're doing it is because the other companies are spending unbelievable amounts of money. So they have to, it's like this vicious crazy cycle that just keeps going. And so it has made NVIDIA the second, uh, most valuable company, the CEO Jensen Wong.

He's like going to be the richest man in the world at some point because of, because of this. And so, but here's the thing, uh, It's a bubble bubbles pop and video will be fine, right? They're just, they're just taking out as much value as they can. And the crazy, like they make money no matter what, because they basically have invested in like all of these AI startups and they're take, they take massive amount of the profit out of all of that.

And it's just like, yeah, it's crazy. If you look at what they call their, it's like their, uh, server revenue versus like What they sell you. If you buy a gaming PC, it's just like, there's no comparison. So,

[00:49:32] Stephen Robles: well, I had no idea about the cost of these graphics cards. I just looked at, apparently you could buy it on Amazon, Nvidia, H 100 graphics card, 30, 000.

[00:49:41] Jason Aten: Yeah. I would be super, super questionable about like, what does it say? Brand generic because

[00:49:47] Stephen Robles: I'm not even sure. It's

[00:49:48] Jason Aten: real hard to actually get them. So I don't know if you, I don't know what would show up at your house for 30, 000. I don't know.

[00:49:55] Stephen Robles: I don't usually do this. Let me do it. Let me just do a straight up Google search here.

The H 100. Oh, this is the NVIDIA website.

[00:50:01] Jason Aten: Yep.

[00:50:01] Stephen Robles: So, but this is one of those, you probably can't even buy it directly from NVIDIA, right?

[00:50:05] Jason Aten: No, probably. Well, I mean, if you're apparently, if you're Elon Musk, you can, you can just call it, call up, call them up and be like, how do I buy one of these things? See, this

[00:50:13] Stephen Robles: is, this is how, you know, when you're in like the, the enterprise world is when you click on a PR on a company's website and it basically brings up a PDF in like a window and you just.

You're just scrolling PDFs, looking at charts

[00:50:25] Jason Aten: and there's no buy button.

[00:50:27] Stephen Robles: There's no buy button. If there's no buy button, you can't afford it. That's right. That's how that goes. That's right.

[00:50:31] Jason Aten: So their data, what they call data center revenue, which is basically H one hundreds was 22. 6 billion out of 26 billion.

Their total revenue is 26 billion, 22 billion of that was like data center revenue. And it's up 427 percent from a year ago.

[00:50:49] Stephen Robles: Yeah. They have four times and that's like, that's their stock price four times a year ago. Listen, now this can be the second regret. I have the first one was GameStop now in video.

[00:51:01] Jason Aten: I don't think you should regret the GameStop.

[00:51:04] Stephen Robles: I'm not a gambling man, but the, that, that game stop, uh, there was a lot of X's on that, how many times it went up and

[00:51:11] Jason Aten: then it went right back down. So it was a time to get out at the right

[00:51:14] Stephen Robles: time, Jason. Yeah. You got to know when to hold them and you got to know when to fold.

[00:51:17] Jason Aten: So the thing is you actually need a time machine. Because it's kind of, I saw, I saw a meme online about how dune was the most expensive ripoff of star Wars ever because, because Frank Herbert had to invent a time machine to go back and write his book 10 years before star Wars, right? It's like he watched all the star Wars trilogy and then he decided to write dune, but he had to invent a time machine to go back because dune, he wrote the book.

Like what is it? 10 years before Star Wars came out, you need a time machine to go back and buy NVIDIA in like 2005, right? I will say I got married

[00:51:54] Stephen Robles: in 2008 and I remember back then, like we didn't have a lot of money, but I remember the Apple stock was like, Something like 40 a share and 2008 was only a year after the iPhone came out, which was still not before the huge ramp up and apple has gone up and then the stock has split multiple times.

And it's like if we put our entire life savings, which wasn't much at the time in apple stock, but we didn't,

[00:52:19] Jason Aten: yeah, there was a point. So when I was. It was earlier than that. It was probably like 1999 I bought one share of Apple stock for 33 and the reason I did it is because I actually have the certificate sitting in a safe.

I bought one. It's a one share of Apple stock. When I started covering this stuff, I sold that stuff because I can't like, I do still have the one share and the only reason I still have one share of Apple is because I have the certificate. Like you can't, if you buy a stock on like, you know, Schwab or whatever, like you trade, you don't get the certificate.

Like you just don't, but I. Like that's cool. So I still have that. It probably doesn't even say Apple Inc. It probably says like Apple computer on this thing. I should look. But anyway, because of how many times it split when I sold off what I had gotten from that one share, it was like four, 4, 500 or something like that from buying one share for 30.

Now I had to sell it because again, I, it's not really ethical to write about stuff that yeah. And I'm like, well I'm keeping the one paper certificate that I have just because I'm going to keep that. But yeah, anyway.

[00:53:18] Stephen Robles: No, that's fine. No, that's fine.

[00:53:19] Jason Aten: I should have bought a thousand shares is what I'm trying to say.

[00:53:21] Stephen Robles: Say, yeah. Well, speaking of Apple, dub dub is next week and Bloomberg has this article, Mark Gurman, once again, saying that Apple has inked the deal with AI. This AI generated image of Tim Cook and Sam Altman is just insane. I don't even know. I get it. I feel like

[00:53:39] Jason Aten: Sam Altman looks like the next Spider Man, the next Peter Parker in that, in that

[00:53:43] Stephen Robles: image in like a budget, like Madam Web.

I don't want to see it. But anyway, so Mark Gurman never wrote this. I should have shared the Apple news article because I actually have that. But anyway, basically, I read the whole thing and it's basically like Apple's going to announce on Monday a partnership. That's what German is saying. We're going to see it, I guess, an OpenAI powered something or other.

I'm curious to what extent and to what length Apple is going to say the partnership exists. A lot of people were like, uh, can't believe, you know, Apple's just outsourcing all their software development to whatever now. And it's like, you know, when the iPhone launched, Google Maps powered the maps. Google search is still the default search engine in Safari.

YouTube was pre installed on the iPhone when the iPhone first launched. Like, yeah, it's not the first time it won't be the last. Also in the government's article, he says, this is probably a temporary thing until Apple develops its own LLM in years coming. It's going to be interesting. I don't know how it's going to be implemented and still mitigate things like hallucinations and false information.

I think is what's most interesting to me because you can't just shove Chad, GPT, and Siri. And Apple then can't say like, yeah, ask it whatever you want. And it'll tell you the right answer, because if it's just strictly powered by chat, GPT, like it's not, there's a chance it won't be accurate. So I'm just very curious how Apple is going to frame this partnership, where it's going to be partnering.

Maybe it'll just be in like the. We're going to summarize stuff for you, or I don't know. I'm just curious how they're going to position it. But Gurman saying Monday, like it's happening.

[00:55:13] Jason Aten: Yeah. And I, that totally makes sense. I wouldn't bet against this, that there's, that they're going to announce it. I know a lot of people in the tech sphere are like, why, you know, Sam Altman has kind of shot his reputation.

Would Apple really want to go ahead and do, but most people aren't paying that close attention to that kind of thing. Right. They're just, they're thinking about like how terrible Siri is and maybe this will make it better or whatever. And I think that the key for the, you know, what you're talking about with like hallucinations and stuff, and because that's when you like when you don't have boundaries around where it's what it is using to come up with information.

So I could see a scenario where Apple is using. Maybe chat GPT or something from open AI to understand what you're asking Siri. And then somehow Apple has the parameters around like, where is it going to go to? Well, where is it going to go to get that information? So it's like, Oh, what you're asking for right now is a.

So let's do the web search and then let's have the chat GPT summarize the web search for you. So it's not like I found some links. So it's not like it, I don't think it's going to be when you ask Siri for something behind the scenes. It's, you're really just asking chat GPT. Like I imagine that Apple is using the API to power some of that stuff.

I heard an interesting idea. I think it was on connected maybe cause they do their little draft or whatever. And they were talking about, well, what if there's a, the ability, cause there's been this rumor that the next iPhone will have a, a separate button for the camera or whatever, that maybe when you push the action button, it will enable the camera and it will do sort of what the demo that Google showed off with Gemini, where you could point it at something and be like, what is this?

Or translate this for me or talk, you know, and those are the types of things that chat GPT would be. Much better at than Siri, for example, because the interesting thing is Apple already does all that stuff on your device in photos. If you take a photo of something, it will do all that. It just doesn't do it for you live.

So,

[00:57:08] Stephen Robles: right. Well, and that's the question is speed wise, because I do think Apple is gonna want to tout how fast it will get you these answers or do these things and if you use chat GPT now, like it's not super fast, especially if you're asking it to summarize something or if you're doing like the voice conversation thing, like you do have to wait a while.

So I'm curious how they can do that. And, you know, I made a video, this was back in the AI gadget era a few months ago that I was talking about this stuff, but I know it's pretty recently, but Siri has actually gotten good at pulling knowledge like from the web. So like, I'm actually going to try, I'm gonna try web search.

What's a movie that stars both Michael Fassbender and Kevin Bacon. And like pretty quickly, it's showing me a web search. Uh, like it, but it's pulling results from like Wikipedia, IMDB and michaelfassbender. org, but like, it gets me that answer pretty quick. Sometimes, a few times when I asked that question, it actually presented it not as web search results, but as what it calls Siri knowledge, and it'll just be a banner with the answer.

And it'll say from whatever if you want to tap it. So like that's pretty quick. So I don't imagine that Apple would want to go backwards, you know, if it's a second or two, that's different. But if you're having to make that query and then wait like 10 seconds for an answer, that seems like a lot of work for like Siri or chat, GPT to translate that and then do the web search and then bring it back, chat, GPT to summarize it.

So I don't know. I'm curious how it'll be.

[00:58:33] Jason Aten: Yeah. And I think the killer app there is clearly developing a system that understands what it should do with your query. Because if you ask, what's the weather today, it should not be in using chat GPT, right? Like it should just be pulling that API and be like, here's your answer.

Or if you ask who won the, US women's national team soccer game the other night. Like that's a thing that it was like, okay, that's a query. We should just go to ESPN dot com or whatever it's using for that. But then if you ask a question like that, it needs to know, like, so there is some like the intelligence part of the artificial intelligence is knowing what do I do with this person's query that will get the answer the fastest because you might be able to use the.

Full bore chat, GPT four Oh, for that question. But that might not be the most, like, you don't need it. It's like, why it's like, it's like driving your Maserati to the grocery store to pick up a gallon of milk. It's like, we could have just taken the, uh, what is it? What did you call it? The hamster mobile.

[00:59:26] Stephen Robles: Oh, yeah.

It's take the key assault. Yeah. There you go. So, uh, well, so it'd be interesting to see how they position it on Monday. We're going to hear more. And I also think this was interesting news in relation to that. Is the chat GPT app today if you go to the latest version on your iPhone, it actually has enabled background conversation.

So if you start a voice conversation in the chat GPT app, you have to go to the app settings and enable this. Where you can basically navigate away from the chat GPT app. And continue to have that voice conversation and interact with chat GPT as you're using your iPhone and doing other things, which seems like I don't know of many other apps that have this kind of ability to, you know, continued like their apps can do things in the background, obviously, like audio playback is an API that podcast apps have, and some apps can do like, like background process completion.

I think it's something like an app can finish, like Dropbox can finish uploading your file, even if you navigate away. But this kind of ongoing conversation, like I was not familiar with this kind of API available to third parties. So I just think it's interesting in light of what we might hear on Monday that, like, you could do this today now with chat GPTF.

[01:00:36] Jason Aten: And it is kind of weird because there, you just talked about like the Dropbox, but on the other hand, if you upload an Instagram story, Instagram says, keep Instagram open or else it won't. And so it's like, does, as Apple, just smart enough to not give meta these entitlements because if you let the continue having a conversation, well, there's nothing.

Anyway. Metta. Well, it does have the AI feature now, but it's like people already think that Facebook is listening to everything you're doing. You don't actually want it to literally be listening to everything you're doing. So I don't, I don't know how they parse that, but it is kind of interesting that somehow chad GPT, they're allowing it to do this.

[01:01:07] Stephen Robles: That is what I will see Instagram. If you're like uploading a story and navigate away, the Instagram will go into the dynamic island. And it'll show you a percentage, uh, circle completion and it will complete even if you're not in the Instagram app. And I think they're doing that kind of dynamic island thing to work around the system, which meta has always been a little shady about working around the system.

Let's be honest, like background audio, like if you ever open an app and if you're listening to a podcast and the music and it stops when you open that app is because that app is taking over the background audio process. And i think apple fix this like it's not like that app can keep running in the background just because it's faking audio but maybe can't which i notice with twitter i notice with circle i don't know why i think we talked about you mentioned that last week like yeah why does the audio stop i

[01:01:52] Jason Aten: don't know i mean they do have an audio player but it is doesn't auto start playing so that's part of honors it would make sense if you go into our episodes and you start to play the episode because i think you can do that but i don't but it doesn't It's not like it needs to stop whatever else audio you're playing in prepare for I'm ready.

As soon as you hit, as soon as you hit go, we're ready to go play. No, just, I just want to read the things that people said, like, I don't need, yeah, we don't need this.

[01:02:16] Stephen Robles: All right. Before we get to our community dub dub list, I want to mention, this is a, I think an open letter called the, a right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence.

This was signed by former OpenAI employees, I believe former Gemini employees, and some anonymous current OpenAI employees. And this letter is calling for companies to be open about the risks, you know, that are associated with this development of AI. And it's trying to say like, You know, it's a, it's a long letter.

You can read about it. You can actually see the, the people who have signed it openly. Yeah. And here's from Google deep mind, uh, the former employees and then current, uh, open AI employees that are marked as anonymous and is basically saying, you know, they want their company to companies to be open about these AI things.

And I've just thought this one line was interesting. These risks, About AI range from the further entrenchment of existing inequalities to manipulation and misinformation to a loss of control of autonomous AI systems, potentially resulting in human extinction. They literally put that in the letter.

Jason, this is former Google and open AI employees. So, you know, that's cool. I guess they're worried about that. I think,

[01:03:32] Jason Aten: I think as an intellectual exercise, That's a possibility, right? Like you, once a computer is able to generate like its own code, right? But, but it's like, we don't have to go too far down this because my brain, I don't think I'm wrapped around it, but I do think that this is the reason why there are isolated systems that control certain things because humans try to do all sorts of nefarious things on the internet, right?

Like take down power, like, you know, people who have, you know, they want to Ransomware is a real thing. So you like try to get into the power grid so you can take it over so that you can get someone to pay you a bunch of money and that kind of stuff. So like, we're already trying to figure that out. Like a robot is not necessarily going to be more successful about it unless the robot is somehow in cohorts with the robot on the other.

Like, I don't know, but I didn't have time to read it. So I did just ask chat GPT to summarize it for me.

[01:04:23] Stephen Robles: And it said, don't worry about the human,

[01:04:25] Jason Aten: it's totally fine. It's not going to be a problem. No, I just say. This article written by current and former employees of frontier AI companies acknowledges both the immense potential and significant risks of AI technology, but chat GPT is fine.

No, it doesn't say that part, but I didn't, I just had to, I just had to tell me what this says. So,

[01:04:46] Stephen Robles: so I, the only thing I'm asking is that these large language models like chat GPT and whatever Apple does and Google, Just don't bring those chatbots near the Boston Dynamics

[01:05:00] Jason Aten: robots. Oh yeah, that's true.

[01:05:02] Stephen Robles: Just don't do it.

I was trying, I was trying to get the video real quick because the, the latest Boston Dynamics robot. It's the new atlas model we talk. I feel like maybe we show we did we did show it. I feel like I thought I thought it'd be worth just showing again. I mean, this, this thing is literally terrifying. Here it is.

And, uh, you know, highly don't recommend this thing. Get a hold of a large language model. That's all I'm saying. Let's let's not put chat GPT in this thing because that looks like a laser. And I feel like it would take me. Yeah, I mean, the head is literally laser shaped.

[01:05:34] Jason Aten: That's

[01:05:34] Stephen Robles: true. That's a very big laser.

Yeah i mean that it's a big laser and like i've seen what the atlas robots can do and they had this thing like get up from a laying down position in a very odd way which was was traveling oh here's the video yeah and uh you know i'll put this link in the show notes again so you can all just watch this as you think about the ai developers saying the extinction of the human race look at look at this thing jason

[01:05:58] Jason Aten: yeah listen steven i asked a follow up question to chat dbt

[01:06:02] Stephen Robles: stop giving it ideas.

[01:06:04] Jason Aten: I said, should we be worried? Okay. So based on this, should we be worried that AI will lead to the extinctions of humans? And it did the thing that Chad GPG does, which is like, well, the possibility, but by the way, reasons for concerns, mitigating factors, expert opinion. I'm like, I didn't. So I said, stop, I asked you a yes or no question.

Should humans be concerned about extinction due to AI? And it said, yes, humans should be concerned about the potential risk of extinction due to AI. While the probability is uncertain, the possible consequences are severe enough to warrant proactive measures to ensure that it is developed safely. So, that's a quote from ChatGPT.

[01:06:40] Stephen Robles: It's

[01:06:41] Jason Aten: making plans.

[01:06:42] Stephen Robles: It's over. It's literally admitted on air. Oh my goodness. Well,

[01:06:47] Jason Aten: I'll screenshot this for you and send it to you.

[01:06:50] Stephen Robles: Please do. Awesome dynamics. Just keep your robots away from that stuff. That'd be great. Don't, don't put it together. All right. This is our wishlist from the primary tech community.

I wanted to share some of these points. Great suggestions here. This is the actual post. You can keep adding your comments if you'd like. I'll link to this in the show notes as well, but. VJ was saying would like a number row on the top of their iOS keyboard, which is funny. He said this because a lot of times I'll show fantastic Cal on my iPhone in like a video or whatever.

And people see this screen right here, which is the actual picture. My brightness all the way down on this is the, this is the fantastical, like event creation thing. I don't know why it's so blurry, but we

[01:07:33] Jason Aten: also can't see it because you're sharing your screen.

[01:07:35] Stephen Robles: Listen, Jason, I'm just trying to help people out here, man.

I appreciate it. Appreciate it. So this is. The fantastical event creation thing. And there's like a number row on top of the keyboard. And every time I show that screen on a video, people are like, what third party keyboard is that? Like, actually, it's just fantastical. So they've, they've somehow managed to figure it out.

And, uh, yeah, it'd be cool if you could enable that on the iPhone too. Yeah. You just need to use

[01:07:58] Jason Aten: fantastic. L is your keyboard for everything.

[01:08:01] Stephen Robles: It's just, just do all of your text writing in fantastic. And then that's what I do. Yeah, there you go. Uh, this is Louis tool. You saying let's let's see the action button.

Bring up spotlight search, which I think is a good suggestion. I feel like that should be a. Shortcuts action this way you can make a shortcut that then open spotlight a lot of people are saying more customization on the lock screen on iPad which makes sense as a huge canvas there and let's see also a home pod mini like with a strip of the screen like that we've been asking for for a long time yeah I totally agree want that definitely want that.

Let's see, we have a Jason edge here. He had a lot of suggestions, text formatting, and I message I've actually, I'd be down for that because there are some times where I'll put like asterisks around a word to emphasize it

[01:08:48] Jason Aten: and

[01:08:48] Stephen Robles: I would just bold it. But I would want Markdown, Jason, and I feel like Apple is opposed to Markdown.

[01:08:53] Jason Aten: It's not that Apple is opposed to Markdown. It's just that 99. 999 percent of people using messages don't know what Markdown is. And so it'd be kind of a ridiculous amount of mental overhead for someone who just wants to bold when they tell their kid, no, come downstairs right now for dinner.

[01:09:09] Stephen Robles: That's what I use intercom for.

But I'm just saying you don't need

[01:09:11] Jason Aten: markdown for that. I

[01:09:13] Stephen Robles: know. I just would like note, like Apple notes. I feel like it should support markdown. I don't know why it doesn't. I don't know if it's because it's not an Apple scripting language.

[01:09:21] Jason Aten: Yeah, I don't know.

[01:09:23] Stephen Robles: Improvements to notification was something a lot of people asked for.

Improvements to the home app, you know, like I mentioned, I would love to see. You know, individual room access, like give someone access to the smart home devices in a room and there's more suggestions there too. Yeah. Also mail calendar mail and calendar. I feel like it's two of the longest tooth apps, like just not had a major overhaul in a long time.

But honestly, like mail is fine for me. I just want that snooze feature to actually snooze an email

[01:09:49] Jason Aten: or a real share sheet that lets you like automatically send things to things or whatever.

[01:09:54] Stephen Robles: Because I actually had, I had video about chat GPT shortcuts on my YouTube channel, which was really popular. And a bunch of people were asking me like, how can I do these shortcuts with emails?

And it's like, if there was just a share button, it'd be so much easier because you could just hit share, pulls up the share sheet with shortcuts that you've built and you could just run it, but you can't do a share sheet with mail, which is totally wild.

[01:10:14] Jason Aten: You want to know what the golden age of managing your email was, was the previous version of spark.

You just can't do it with the current version, but you can still use the previous version if you want, you could literally just drag an email. From spark over to things and it would create a task with that. And it would have a link, a deep link back to that email message in spark.

[01:10:34] Stephen Robles: That, that is not,

[01:10:35] Jason Aten: that was just amazing.

I mean, I know you can, there's, you can now do it with a combination of key strokes, which is fine, but man, wasn't, it was so nice to just be like, bloop, drag that over my, to my to do list and deal with it later. So

[01:10:45] Stephen Robles: that is, that would be nice. Um, UA, he has a bunch of recommendations. I think he, he just needs to send this directly to Apple.

He's talking about things like global shortcuts, which. I'm also going to say universal clipboard, like, especially on iPad, where you can actually have clipboard managers, which could be a third party solution. The Apple doesn't have to do it themselves. It should be nice. You want the native terminal on iPadOS sounds like he's asking for computery things on iPad.

Careful, careful with that. And he has a bunch of other great suggestions. Again, a link to this post will be in the show notes. You can just sign up for our social community here and you can access it all. RCS, which is interesting. Like Apple announced RCS support was coming. What happened to that, Jason?

Where's it at?

[01:11:28] Jason Aten: Uh, it's, it's coming. Okay. RCS is that we don't talk about future product announcements. Oh, wait, we don't talk about past announcements that haven't happened yet. I don't know. I don't know. Like

[01:11:38] Stephen Robles: Eli Romeo, he was at Romero. He was actually saying he doesn't want the flashlight and camera buttons on the lock screen.

This

[01:11:45] Jason Aten: was a thing that people talked about when they added the ability to add widgets to the lock screen, right? That it's like, but what about those two down there? Why are they odd? Like, what is it that's special? And I mean, listen, they make sense. What are the two things that if you just pick up your phone that you might immediately want to do without having to unlock and do it?

And it's like, turn on the flashlight. Yup, that's a thing that people want to do. Or, I want to quickly take a camera. Or take a photo, like, and if you don't have the action button assigned, but first of all, if you don't have an, an iPhone 15 pro or pro max, so you don't have an action button and you don't have it assigned to the camera.

Now you have it. It's, I mean, I think that there's probably a whole lot of historical data that apple has that says, what are the two things that people want to do? If they just immediately pick up their phone and have to launch something, it's probably flashlight and camera. So I don't think they're going anywhere.

[01:12:31] Stephen Robles: But I, I would be down for one being customizable, like maybe make the flashlight, like the action button menu where you could, I would love to run a shortcut from the lock screen, you know, as you do. Cause I also, I actually, when I want to take a photo, I actually do the swipe on the lock screen more than hold the button.

You know what I mean? Cause you can just swipe, you can,

[01:12:51] Jason Aten: but you have to know that or have to do it accidentally. Whereas if I just like my, my two year old just started doing a thing that I really want to capture. I'm not thinking like, what's the magic, you know, finger swipe that gets me to think you can run shortcuts from the lock screen.

I have one in my widget shortcut widget up in the thing,

[01:13:07] Stephen Robles: but the widgets I find this is what, this is another thing. Cause I'll just say here, Chris is asking, I just want things to work that goes to lock screen widgets because there's a lot of lockscreen widgets that will just stop working. And I will say sometimes it's third parties and I feel like there's probably an API issue there where Apple is like quitting apps or whatever, but I find lock screen widgets to be a little flaky.

[01:13:26] Jason Aten: Really? So I only use here, listen, I only use two shortcuts. I have one that if I tap it, it sends a text message to my wife that says headed home. Cause I do that six times a day, right? There's one of those. That one's not on my lock screen though. Sorry. The one that's on my lock screen is that I can tap it and I can type in an idea for an article and it creates a new sheet in Ulysses and then it adds it to my things to do list and it works every single time.

Okay.

[01:13:53] Stephen Robles: Yeah. By the way, I don't know. James, James was saying, this is a reminders issue where if you type, if you're on iPad specifically with a keyboard. You can type in a reminder and it makes it very difficult to like, choose a time. Like it won't auto complete. If you say like tomorrow at 4 PM, it does this weird behavior where it won't like let you actually create a reminder with the alert that you're specifying.

It's a weird behavior. And it's just, I think it's a bug, but that definitely needs to be fixed. And a couple of the quick ones, uh, these were from the previous post. Robert Slavinsky said, updated HomePod mini. I'm for an updated HomePod mini for sure with the screen. I just want one with the screen, honestly.

People saying better Siri. Of course, new home kit product categories. Yes. We talked about the last week, hoping we get home new home categories. Jeremy tech X tech X forgive me. I probably mispronounced that, but he actually talked about, there's a new app that has like a 3d floor plan. Of your home kit devices.

I forget what the app is called. And so he was saying like, we'd love to see that in the home app. That would be totally cool. Uh, Martin rag was saying pair multiple home pods, more than just two, which I think would be great. I know I have a lot of people who like, I have four home pods. I want to connect them all in a room.

You know, can I make it one big group? I think that would be cool. That would be useful. And you compare two home pods as a home theater, quote unquote, with an Apple TV, like it'd be cool if you just get five home pods and do like five, one stereo or five once around, but probably not going to do that, but that'd be cool.

And then Ryan off had a great list scheduled text messages. That'd be pretty wild. Standalone password app, which I mentioned last week. I definitely want that. Uh, improve stage manager on iPad. You know, I think there's probably a lot of iPadOS needs there. Uh, single tile widgets that are the same size as app icons.

This a hundred percent because the single, like the smallest widget you can get still takes up four app icons. So it would be cool to have kind of a smaller widget option and a revamped share sheet. I do think the share sheet could use some work and let's see a better notification system on macOS, which I have seen some complaints recently, like macOS and notifications is pretty rough.

Like it can be

[01:16:03] Jason Aten: right. I want Ryan, Ryan, I want to know what would a single tile widget do? Like, what can you do in a single tile, like the size of an app icon that could be actually a widget unless it's like launch shortcut, which you can just do that.

[01:16:17] Stephen Robles: You can do that. You know, if it was like fantastic Cal, I think about again.

You can just, can you decide what's on the app? Like you,

[01:16:28] Jason Aten: there's several different widget options. Is that what you mean? Widget

[01:16:31] Stephen Robles: options, but it would be nice if like the fantastic Cal, like if you just had it on your home screen and it was today's date, like just the number.

[01:16:37] Jason Aten: Yeah. But that's not a widget.

That's just, you want a different icon.

[01:16:40] Stephen Robles: Yeah. But how to be live, you would have to update. Because if it, like if it was a static icon,

[01:16:44] Jason Aten: yeah, I don't use the fantastica icon, so I don't remember, like, I don't have the app on my home screen. I just have a widget because that's how I launch it. So I can't remember if it, but like on Mac OS, it does just shows you the date.

And if you have it, if it's open and just you can, you can choose,

[01:16:57] Stephen Robles: I would think so. Like the apple podcast widget, you know, it looks nice, you know, it's fine as like a four icon thing. But if that was just like a single,

[01:17:07] Jason Aten: it would just be the app icon

[01:17:09] Stephen Robles: target gets small, but just to be able to press play, it would be.

Just right there on the icon rather than the full widget. I don't know. I wouldn't have to think about that because they are small. Like the touch targets get really small. I

[01:17:20] Jason Aten: just don't know what the benefit I could, I could understand like a two, a one by two widget where you could like have something, but otherwise I'm just like what you're really asking.

They do have a thing. It's called app icon. So

[01:17:31] Stephen Robles: I don't know. Yeah. I think a two, a two icon widget would be good because then you could have like the Apple podcast widget still with a play button and be able to tap the play button and it would be a, it'd be it.

[01:17:40] Jason Aten: Steven. I have one. Can I say one? I have one that came up from last week that I hadn't slept in a while last week, so I wasn't thinking about this, but you were talking about this in your Sonos AirPods Max thing about the ecosystem benefits.

I desperately, now that they've fixed screen time, now they haven't, but I desperately want them to fix the thing. Where your air pods become schizophrenic connecting to multiple devices unless you turn off the that you have to set it to only connect when it's the last connected device because the number of times because what they're basically saying is you can only use one of your devices at a time.

So if I'm on my Mac and I'm listening to one of your really good YouTube videos and I hand my iPad to one of my kids and they start playing Minecraft, all I hear is Minecraft all of a sudden and you stop and then I. Pushed you again and it goes back to you. And in the meantime, my kid's trying to figure out what's happened because their sound has stopped.

And so they start furiously turning up the volume and then it comes back on and it's in my ears again. Right. And then if somebody else is using, cause we do have like an iMac that also has my iCloud. And so then they, that person starts doing something and I'm just like sitting here, like. I feel like I'm getting like remotely shocked or something, not even knowing

[01:18:49] Stephen Robles: what's happening.

You can't turn off auto switching per device.

[01:18:52] Jason Aten: You, so I have gone into every single device and said only auto connect if it's the last device connected. But the problem is now, I mean, every time I go on, I have to actually connect, like I have to manually choose, please connect to my AirPods. And then you sort of defeat the entire benefit of having the AirPods, the automatic switching.

Apple, it is not working. It is not. It is. This is not the experience you designed for people.

[01:19:15] Stephen Robles: I have the answer. I don't know that they'll do this, but I think this, I think this would actually work. What if in the control center, which one of the rumors that they're going to update the control center. You have lock orientation and you could also have lock AirPods.

So if you have your AirPods connected to your iPhone, your Mac, you go to the control center and you lock it. So no matter what other Apple device you have, that's logged into your iCloud account, that gets turned on or used, it doesn't switch. It just stays on the device that you have locked connection with this AirPods.

[01:19:46] Jason Aten: I feel like that would work. Or even better. Well, the problem is somebody would leave that on and then be really mad that they couldn't use it on the other device. Ideally, it's all your devices. Like you,

[01:19:54] Stephen Robles: it would be your Mac, your iPad, your iPhone. And you know, there could be a little warning that comes up that says, Hey, these are locked over here.

Do you want to move it? Cause they have that move icon that'll come down as it usually

[01:20:05] Jason Aten: says it's moved. It tells you after it's happened. And then you can be like, if you're smart enough to know that the little arrow means click this and it'll come back with, I do think it should be a proactive thing.

It's like, we've noticed you, you started doing something on this other device should the AirPods bounce. But here, my point is though, if they're doing all of this AI stuff. Learn, learn that when I'm watching Steven's YouTube videos, I don't want anything to interrupt me. I don't want to stop listening to his thing.

I don't definitely never switch. When someone starts playing Minecraft, never.

[01:20:36] Stephen Robles: There've been a few times too, where I don't know why it happened. I don't know if it's because we've set up like share audio with one of my kids, AirPods at one point, but they'll have their iPad and they're going to watch something on Disney plus.

And they put in their AirPods and somehow. One of my devices that was playing a podcast. We'll go to there and pods. And like they start hearing my voice and it's like, ah, that's what I hear from the other rooms because, because they started hearing my voice in their ears. Like, what is this?

[01:21:02] Jason Aten: Yeah, I'm just saying the apple, come on, fix.

This is like, this is, this is another one of those you're promising an experience and it's just not working the way you think it is in the real world because most of us don't have like just one thing connected to them. So like, yeah, help us out.

[01:21:16] Stephen Robles: Oh, we need to get our bonus episode. But I want to throw this in just one real quick.

I'm hoping you can answer this for me. This is a short personal tech segment. I saw someone post this on threads the other day and it was the most relatable thing I've ever seen.

[01:21:27] Jason Aten: Yeah.

[01:21:27] Stephen Robles: Someone tell me why when I'm doing a search in Safari in the address bar that I can never hit the space bar consistently and I just put periods between all my words.

Do you ever do this? A million

[01:21:38] Jason Aten: times, but I can tell you the answer because I read Ken Crescendo's book. Wow. What is it called? Creative Selection. Is that the name of the book? I think.

[01:21:44] Stephen Robles: Creative Selection. Yeah, I read it too. He explains all this

[01:21:46] Jason Aten: because the, the touch targets for the various devices, for the various.

Keys change based on what it thinks you're going to do next. And if you're typing into a URL, the obvious thing you're going to do after you type a word is to put a period. So it doesn't matter where you hit that period or hit, as long as you don't hit go, obviously. So the touch target, that, that. Period is actually like three times larger.

So unless you hit like the far left side of the space bar, that space bar is actually a period, right? Because the touch targets for those letters in keys change based on what it thinks you're going to do next, even though the actual UI doesn't change. And it honestly. That was the, that was like the smartest thing they did in Dev developing the keyboard, because that way you don't have to worry.

Like people like Steven and I, we have like not tiny fingers. I mean, I guess, I don't know if Steven has tiny fingers or not, but I do not have tiny fingers. And so I'm thankful that when I'm typing the word what, and I type a w and I hit over where the H is, even if I don't quite hit it, it knows like the most logical thing to come next is an H.

So that's, that's your, that's the reason why.

[01:22:53] Stephen Robles: I just, I was just realizing like that period is not there usually when you're typing, like in a text message or mail. It's only there in Safari because whatever. And I guess I naturally hit the space bar way over on the right with my right thumb, which I imagine most people do if you're right handed, if you're left handed, I imagine you hit it more on the left side.

And maybe you're typing emojis in all your Google searches. I'm just saying, I'm telling

[01:23:13] Jason Aten: that that is the reason why I'm not saying that, like, it's a good experience because yes, I hate it. And then I'm like, Oh yeah, I have to actually hit the space bar farther over. But if you get into a habit of hitting like where the S or the P is on the word space, it'll, it'll actually register a space.

So That's why.

[01:23:29] Stephen Robles: Well, there you go. All right. Well, that's our dub dub. Next week. Dub dub. Monday at 1 p. m. Eastern is the keynote. Jason's going to be reporting live from the show floor. It's the big game of Apple events. The big game. It's a beautiful show. Let me

[01:23:43] Jason Aten: just tell you, the floor, the floor is really nice.

[01:23:46] Stephen Robles: Yeah, the floor is really nice. So it's going to be grass. You're going to be outside. I

[01:23:48] Jason Aten: mean, yeah, it's mostly concrete where we'll be, but yeah.

[01:23:51] Stephen Robles: Oh, okay. Most concrete. Anyway, the keynote's at 1 PM. I'll be live tweeting and posting about it and then I'll try and do a recap video, but then we're going to podcast that evening and then we're not going to be live streamed, but look for it to be published very quickly after we're done.

And you can hear our takes on everything that happened at the dub dub. I think it's going to be a big one. German was saying this might be the biggest. Apple event in like, what, 10 years or something like going to be big, going to be, it's going to be huge. Anyway, tune in Monday for that. Thank you for your support.

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