Apple Intelligence Explained, Is Siri Actually Getting Better? An Ode to Magic Mouse
Can a robot write a symphony? Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. This week we're going back in to all the announcements from ww and a lot of things we have learned since the keynote details that I haven't seen anywhere else. So excited to talk about that. Apple Intelligence, iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and Jason was there in person, but he's back from the live from the studio show floor thing.
Stephen Robles:So we're gonna hear his personal episode is brought to you by you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles. And like I mentioned, Jason, you're back. I'm back. You're back at your desk.
Jason Aten:I can't complain about anything. Of course. But it is nice to be sitting here with my microphone and set up. And we've I mean, like, 3 of the last 4 shows, I've been somewhere else, it seems like.
Stephen Robles:You're traveling. You're travel speaking of which, you flew to WWDC. Did you wear the Apple Vision Pro on the plane?
Jason Aten:No. I didn't even take it. And I I actually caught quite a bit of flack for that because, one of the things I had a chance to do was to sit down with some, indie developers who were making apps for the VisionPRO. And and they didn't have Vision Pros with them. And the the PR person from Apple is like, didn't we send you one?
Jason Aten:And I'm like you super sent me one and I super didn't bring you up. Hold on. They didn't tell me I should bring it. In fact this was a thing that was added sort of last minute. So it wasn't like, hey.
Jason Aten:We wanna set this up, and you should bring your VisionPRO. It's that's not how it happened at all. But that she's like, didn't we send you one? And I was like, you guys did. But that's actually why I didn't bring it with me because I didn't wanna carry Apple's $4,000 headset on a plane.
Jason Aten:So I maybe I should have. But here's the thing, just to be super candid about it, like, I flew out Sunday evening and I slept the whole way because I wasn't going to get to San Jose until something like 11 pm, which is like 2 am my time. So by the time I get to the hotel, I'm only gonna get like, 4 hours of sleep before I have to get up and go to Apple Park in the morning. And flying home, same thing. I flew home on a red eye.
Jason Aten:So, like, having the vision bright I'm not watching a movie. I was asleep the whole time. So
Stephen Robles:Okay. Alright. Alright. Okay. I still can't believe you haven't done this yet.
Stephen Robles:Train support now. You gotta try you gotta try it at least once. That's Steven. See what you think about it.
Jason Aten:I just can't get over the fact that people will have to look at me wearing a VisionPRO.
Stephen Robles:Oh, they'll be fine. Nobody cares. Once you do it once when I put it on, I when I finally worked up the courage to put it on,
Jason Aten:it's hard, but It wasn't like it was easy for you, though.
Stephen Robles:No. It's not easy, but you, you know, you do it. But, anyway alright.
Jason Aten:You were just doing it for the views. You were really hoping to be shown on TikTok somewhere.
Stephen Robles:I really wanted to get on TikTok, but, it did not happen. It was too far after all the hype. Nobody cared. It was like months later. So anyway, I wanna talk about the magic mouse later too because that interview MKBHJ I had with Tim Cook was hilarious and, AI gadgets I think are finally dead.
Stephen Robles:But anyway, before we get into all the Apple park and dub dub stuff, we do have some 5 star reviews and a non 5 star review. Thanks a lot. We were a 5 star podcast for 1 week, and so thank you all. We need you all to get to show up.
Jason Aten:We need about we need, like, 90 more 5 star reviews to cancel out the 3 star.
Stephen Robles:We can do it. We can do it. But exciting things. So flaquito 6969, he said he listens to English and Spanish podcasts, but we're his number one Spanish podcast. Or no.
Stephen Robles:English podcast. We don't speak. But I don't know about you.
Jason Aten:Oh,
Stephen Robles:we got a Spanish version. It'll be very short because my vocabulary is not it's not written. But that'll be pretty good. So, yeah, there was a a 3 star review who said great podcast, he had very nice things to say exclamation mark, and then, something something Tesla, and then he was upset about that. So
Jason Aten:I love my Tesla. I've said this many times. So maybe he doesn't like Tesla? I don't know.
Stephen Robles:I don't know. So we're we're gonna weed it out because we're probably gonna talk about Elon Musk at at the end and how what he thinks of Apple Intelligence, but so we we need more 5 star reviews. We can get back up to 5 stars. We're 4.9 right now. But other 5 star review shout outs, Steven 964 and Felix t c.
Stephen Robles:Thank you for those 5 star review and shout and reviews and star ratings. Also, to celebrate, we crossed 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. Huzzah. I should have, like, a sound board, like a ding ding ding. I don't know.
Jason Aten:Do the do the things that do the work do the do the work in Riverside? Oh, no. There's no fireworks. I know, like, fireworks.
Stephen Robles:Turned off the
Jason Aten:that turns off the
Stephen Robles:directions how to do that. Oh, yeah. Because there's, like, the, the reactions.
Jason Aten:Let me
Stephen Robles:do the,
Jason Aten:the
Stephen Robles:fireworks here. Oh, there we go. Look at that. Fireworks. Alright.
Stephen Robles:Now I gotta make sure reactions are on. Exactly. Okay. We did it. Okay.
Stephen Robles:We did fireworks, so we crossed a 1,000. The channel is monetized, which is amazing. So we should make about 3 dollars an episode. That's awesome.
Jason Aten:I've already spent it. I had coffee this morning so
Stephen Robles:I was gonna say it's over but but thank you all so much for showing out subscribing. Our recap video had really good views. There was some audio, things going on, you know, different recording environments. Jason was at Apple Park, which we'll talk about. But anyway, we have a 187 5 star reviews right now.
Stephen Robles:And so now the goal is, 1,000. We need 1,005 star reviews and reviews to get back up to a 5 star podcast. So So thank you. But really, thank you all for doing it, especially subscribing on YouTube. It's been great.
Stephen Robles:So Jason was at Apple Park, did not wear Apple Vision Pro on the way there, but you were there in person. I heard the ATP guys talking about the food, the chairs. They raved about the wooden chairs. So, anyway, I wanna hear all about it. Well, how was your experience?
Stephen Robles:This is not your first time. You've
Jason Aten:been there. I was there last year as well for vision for WWDC, and I've been to a couple of iPhone events and and that kind of
Stephen Robles:stuff. You're regular. You're regular.
Jason Aten:Not as regular as some people, but it yeah. I've been there a couple times, so it's it's fun.
Stephen Robles:Well, but how was your experience this time?
Jason Aten:It was good. Well, I will say this like, no one's gonna care that this is the best part except for last year, it was probably 20 degrees hotter the whole morning. So it was very nice to not be quite as hot. It was it was fun. I was, I ended up I was sitting next to Zach Hall from 9 to 5 Mac.
Jason Aten:He had come up to me. So what they do when you get there is they send all of the press people to this area on the 3rd floor of Cafe Max for, like they have just coffee and pastries or whatever because they basically want you there as early as possible so they can stop letting people in, and then they usher you to where you're gonna go. So they they give you food in the meantime, which is nice. And he comes up to me and he introduces himself, and and that was great. And when we walked down together to find a spot to sit and he was like, we should sit up there.
Jason Aten:I'm like, we should not sit up there because that's the area not in the shade. I was like, I promise you, we should sit 4 rows back in the shade. And by the end, he's like, I'm really glad we sat back here because otherwise, we would have both been, like, completely charred. But it's great. It's it's a it's a lot of fun because it's unlike some events that are media only events, you know, there's a lot of developers there, and they get very excited about things.
Jason Aten:I mentioned this in our recap, but they get excited about APIs and stuff that the rest of us are just like, I don't even know what you're talking about. But they it was a it was a it was a cool environment. It's there's a lot of press people there. There's a lot of developers there. And then there's obviously a lot of Apple people.
Jason Aten:And even Sam Altman managed to make it in. So that was kinda cool. So
Stephen Robles:yeah. That's right. How was the I saw these pictures of, like, these breakfast croissant things. Yeah. Did you have anything there?
Stephen Robles:Was it good food?
Jason Aten:So this is actually kind of funny. My oldest daughter is a huge fan of chocolate croissants. And so basically everywhere I go, I send her photos of whatever their chocolate croissant is. I'm going to send you one of these because it is definitely worthwhile. And so I just sent her this photo, and she's asked me, can you how many do you think you could get in your bag and bring home?
Stephen Robles:I should just smuggle them out.
Jason Aten:And I'm like, if I do, I'm super gonna have to leave right now because they're just gonna kick me out. But, yeah, they the the food's good. Like, it's a little, like, fancier than I'm a pretty simple person, Steven. I don't need, like, super fancy food. But, yeah, it was great.
Jason Aten:It was a lot of fun. So
Stephen Robles:Okay. And then the chairs I'm trying to get this croissant photo. Oh my word. So I have safari open over here and I try like dragging the photo into the Safari window to show it in Safari because that's just how I'm doing trying
Jason Aten:to do
Stephen Robles:it and and basically made the croissant photo the background wallpaper for my safari home screen. So forget it. But I can show it in preview. This is the, this is the croissant.
Jason Aten:Yes. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Those little egg sandwiches that I had
Jason Aten:seen Yeah.
Stephen Robles:From other people. They were
Jason Aten:They were good. And then the other thing was some sort of they called it French toast. It was basically just like a churro with cream cheese and strawberry on the inside of it. It was How
Stephen Robles:was the coffee? Someone said the coffee machines were good too.
Jason Aten:I mean, it's just brewed coffee. Oh, they so okay. Two different things. They have brewed coffee basically everywhere. Cafe Max, they'll also make you a latte or Americano.
Jason Aten:And there's a Cafe Max basically everywhere I went. So this year, I spent a lot more time inside the ring building because, like, if you just imagine the number of briefings that they have to get through and the number of people that they're filtering through those briefings. I mean, they're using their fitness center, the Steve Jobs Theater, and lots of areas inside the ring. And everywhere I went, in every single building, there's a Cafe Max. It's like Really?
Jason Aten:They did everywhere. The fitness center has its own Cafe Max. The inside the ring, I walked past several places that said with people with shirts that say Cafe Max. And then there's the huge Cafe Max that has the giant sliding doors. That's basically where everyone sits is just outside of that, and the stage is just opposite of it.
Jason Aten:So they I mean, working at Apple, you do not run out of coffee. Like
Stephen Robles:That's amazing. That's me. I wanna show you my safari window now. This is what my safari looks like now. It's, it's your croissant photo.
Jason Aten:Oh, I'm so sorry.
Stephen Robles:It's hilarious. I'll change that a little bit. One thing, I think it was Marco or John Sergues who was saying so those wooden chairs that you sit in because I I look at these pictures that people post of like the viewing area and I'm like, man, those chairs, they don't look comfortable on the face of it because they're just they just look like wooden chairs. But is it are they comfortable?
Jason Aten:Yeah. I mean, there are 2 well, there's 2 different types of chairs. First of all, there are the wooden chairs that are basically, I think, the Cafe Max chairs. And that's towards the back, that's where the the media people sit. Then Then there's actually a second type of chair.
Jason Aten:I'll send you this so you can update your background for Safari, which are where the developers are sitting. And they actually look like they're sort of like a fabric y type chair. But the the wooden chairs are fine. Like, there's nothing they're they're very nice. They feel like a very solid wooden chair.
Jason Aten:It doesn't feel like something you find in, like, a classroom at a school or something like
Stephen Robles:that. Right.
Jason Aten:Are they comfortable? Like, I don't know. I mean, as comfortable as a wooden chair could be, I guess. So
Stephen Robles:I mean, you could sit through a 2 hour keynote and you were fine.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Absolutely. Totally fine. Yeah. So
Stephen Robles:Yeah. These fabric chairs are interesting. So even with that covering over the top, it still gets hot up there?
Jason Aten:Yeah. So I guess well, I gotta send you one more photo while we're doing this. So you'll this will help you understand
Stephen Robles:I got so many safari backgrounds, you know, that I can just I
Jason Aten:just wanna help you out. I mean, I can send you the rainbow stage. Okay. So I just sent you one. This will give you a good picture of what you're looking at is from upstairs out into Cafe Maxx where there's a seating area.
Jason Aten:Then there's a gap that you'll see with where there's a lot of sun. Right?
Stephen Robles:And
Jason Aten:that's kind of where we are sitting in. So there's a gap between the building, the ring building, and then that canopy that they built. So if you're sitting in the wrong spot, you're gonna get toasted. So
Stephen Robles:So were you sitting like inside inside?
Jason Aten:No. So if you look at that giant screen, the left hand side there on the other side of that, we were basically 6 rows in front of that. So Oh okay. Okay. Yeah.
Jason Aten:This
Stephen Robles:is and one day I hope to visit this. I mean this is just crazy. And again, HP guys are talking about the glass sliding doors.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Just
Stephen Robles:how massive they are.
Jason Aten:I mean, that's just the employee, like, cafe. Like, that's where they that's where you go to eat lunch if you work there.
Stephen Robles:Because, I mean, there's tree. Like, there's a little tree inside there, like, multiple trees. Yep. That's awesome. Well, it's very exciting.
Stephen Robles:Glad you got to go. And you got to record an Apple podcast studio, which is very exciting. So one half of us have been there. One half of this podcast.
Jason Aten:I saw your face there, Steven. You've basically been there.
Stephen Robles:One and a half. One and a half. One of us. We got 1 and a half of them there, so it's exciting. But, anyway, I'm glad you got to go.
Stephen Robles:Glad you're back. So more stuff. A bunch of I had so many questions after the keynote, especially about Apple Intelligence and, you know, someone said we shouldn't say the s word so much. So how do how do we how do you say the s word so you don't trigger out all everybody's HomePod?
Jason Aten:Shoot. No. I'm sorry. That's the other s word. That's what we say at our house when our kids sorry.
Stephen Robles:Not bad s word.
Jason Aten:Wrong s word. I thought you were worried about us getting this explicit tag. You're just not wanting to set off everyone's HomePods. Oh, okay.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:You can just say, hey, hey, iPhone, I guess.
Stephen Robles:Hey, iPhone. Yeah. But hey, ding I like hate dingus.
Jason Aten:But I mean, that's sort of like the generic whether you're trying to talk about Alexa, whatever, Google Assistant, all those things. Listen. So here's the thing. I get it. Don't mean to be setting up people's devices.
Jason Aten:At the same time, other why are any why do you have that on your HomePods anyway? Right. Turn it off on everything. We've talked about this. It should only be on your watch and on your phone.
Jason Aten:And I'm pretty sure isn't there like a setting where it recognizes basically only your voice? Like, a personalized setting?
Stephen Robles:That doesn't work. That's one that's one of the problems with the HomePods. I have
Jason Aten:Well, then that's why you just turn it off on the HomePods. Exactly. So should Well, maybe I do.
Stephen Robles:But I have it I think it's personal requests.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And
Stephen Robles:if you have personal requests enabled, it's supposed to recognize your voice specifically, but it still it still answers to everybody. Like, I don't there's not a setting to say, don't listen except for my voice. It's just that then you can do personal requests like text so and so and your home pod will do it.
Jason Aten:Or like what's on my calendar or something like that.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. If you guys want what's on my calendar, but it can still be activated if someone says it. So, but what what let us know, leave us a 5 star rating and review, and let us know what word should we replace, s I r I, because it was not rebranded, that's still the name. I wanna talk about Apple Intelligence first because I had I kept like rapid firing questions to you, because you had you got to get some information, but right before we do, what and how many devices are you running the beta on? That's the question.
Jason Aten:Yep. Okay. Great question. So right now, I have it installed on, a MacBook Air, not my primary device. I have I I've installed macOS beta.
Jason Aten:I have installed iPad OS on, again, not mine. So here just to be clear, I I have a couple of review units that I've, like, neglected to send back. And I thought before I send them back, I'm gonna just put the betas on them and because there's no pressure. So I have the I'm running I Ios 18 beta, iPadOS 18 beta, and macOS 15 beta. I could not figure out how to get the vision OS 2 on because it doesn't give me the ability to just turn on the developer, beta.
Jason Aten:And so then I tried then I went into the developer website, went through the whole hassle of logging in, downloaded the image, and the vision pro's like, what do you want me to do with this? I don't know what to do with this.
Stephen Robles:Well, you probably need a developer strap to use the image file.
Jason Aten:I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, but this thing's like, dude, this is not a Mac. What do you think you're doing downloading things to this?
Stephen Robles:So it doesn't I I actually hadn't tried it because I was like I was gonna do the beta, but I'm like I mean turning photos into 3 d sounds cool, moving icons around the home screen fine, but that wasn't enough for me to, like, go through the hassle. And I I didn't try that.
Jason Aten:I wanna do the Mac. I wanna do the Mac projection. That's the thing I wanna test.
Stephen Robles:But that's not that's not even in the beta yet. That's not what I've heard.
Jason Aten:Well, then I'll wait. Well so but the problem is it's like the instructions say go to settings, software update, beta updates. But I don't have that beta update. Like, it doesn't show up. There's not that option.
Jason Aten:It is on all my other devices. And it's, like, weird because I'm still logged in with the same Icloud. I wonder if there's a setting for logging into your developer account because not everyone has the same developer account as Apple ID. So I wonder if there's a setting somewhere for that. So maybe I need to just dig in a little bit, and it doesn't recognize.
Jason Aten:So anyway.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Alright. Well, I am running it on my secondary iPhone. I have the iOS 8
Jason Aten:But you're not gonna get any of the features on that. You're not gonna get any of the Apple Intelligence on that. Okay.
Stephen Robles:No no Apple Intelligence on this, which Apple Intelligence is not a part of any of betas now. Yes.
Jason Aten:And I'm Right.
Stephen Robles:I'm inclined to think it's not gonna be until release. Like, I really don't think it's gonna be even in, like, later betas.
Jason Aten:They did say summer. They said it'll be available in summer? Yeah. So they just they said it would be available to developers this summer, and that it'll be in so this is why it's confusing. It says it'll be available in beta as part of iOS 18.
Jason Aten:What that means is when it releases in the fall, it'll be in there, but they're going to be labeling it as a beta feature, Right? Once it's publicly released. And then it just says that it'll be available, to developers this summer.
Stephen Robles:So yeah. Okay. Then maybe maybe when the public beta is launched in which comes July, usually the 1st or second week of July, maybe we'll see it then. So at that point, I'll have to think about whether or not I'd do it.
Jason Aten:Public betas are pretty safe. The worst thing that happens is you end up losing some battery life, but you've got a pro max. It'll be fine.
Stephen Robles:Well, the battery stinks right now anyways. Because I still have, like, 300 cycles, so it doesn't matter. But so I'm running it on, spare, you know, my secondary iPhone, which look at look at the dark icons there. Look at that. That's pretty cool.
Stephen Robles:And my iPad mini, which, was my trusty iPad for so long, I I put it on there and and then immediately thought about, like, what am I doing with it on my like, there's nothing on the iPad. There's no features there. There's there's no I was 18 to gave me nothing here.
Jason Aten:Well, if you because yeah. Because the mini doesn't yeah. No. The mini supports the Apple Pencil, so you can use math notes.
Stephen Robles:His math notes here? Yeah. Oh, you know, I didn't even search for the calculator app after I did the beta.
Jason Aten:Yep.
Stephen Robles:Oh, look at that. I have the calculator app on my iPad mini.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And you so you can if you have an Apple Pencil paired to it, if you click the little calculator icon there, it'll ask you if you wanna switch to math notes, and then you can start a new note. And then you can Wait.
Stephen Robles:What what what calculator icon?
Jason Aten:Done there in the so if you're holding it in that orientation
Stephen Robles:Oh, I see. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Yeah. See? Yep. There you go.
Stephen Robles:Oh, math notes.
Jason Aten:Yep. There you go.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Well, here's let's do this live on air. So I'm gonna put the app my Apple pencil just connected it there and now let me how do I draw something here? It didn't pair. Oh, boy.
Stephen Robles:Oh, Apple Pencil Pro. Does that work with iPad mini?
Jason Aten:No. You have to use a normal Apple Pencil, bud.
Stephen Robles:Forget it.
Jason Aten:It's over. We've been through this.
Stephen Robles:Compatibility. Hang
Jason Aten:on. I have a drawer full of Apple Pencils. Do you want me to just send
Stephen Robles:you one real quick? Just give me one real quick.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Just hand it over. Yeah. That would be amazing if it worked that way. Now that is the,
Stephen Robles:like, AI we need. That is the we need the the particle,
Jason Aten:everything. It's not AI at all. It's just defying physics. But anyway
Stephen Robles:Okay. Alright. Apple Intelligence. I had so many questions. I think still people are wondering what does this mean for Hey, Dingus on non Apple Intelligent Devices, which I think we can answer that right off the bat.
Stephen Robles:For non Apple Intelligence devices like this iPhone 14 that I use as my beta device, it's the same. Hey, dingus is the same. It's not getting Yeah. All the improvements.
Jason Aten:I did specifically ask this, and it was actually okay. So, like, the people at Apple are wonderful. I just have to say that. But when you ask them questions, you have to be really careful how you ask a question because the way that they'll answer it, you have to make sure you're interpreting it based on a certain thing. So, anyway, the the basically, the gist I got was that it'll be what you just said, the same.
Jason Aten:And then I had to clarify, the same as what? Same as it is today or the same as what we're talking about for Apple Intelligence? And it's, like, basically the same as it is today. So anyway but it will be basically the experience. That said, I do think that there are some improvements that are coming to the way that they've sort of architected Siri, that even if the Apple intelligence features are not there no one said this outright, but the sense I got is that Siri should be better for you know, they've they've done some work that'll make hopefully Siri better, and I think some of that involves the way it can parse your request and stuff.
Jason Aten:But you're not going to have access to the models on your phone, and you're not gonna have access to just send the stuff to chat gpt. So that means that you're not getting any of those additional features. But I do think I don't wanna I don't wanna say, like, it's not gonna get any better because I do think that there are are some things about it that they are trying to make improved. Yeah. But you're not gonna get the cool I don't think you're gonna get the cool ring.
Stephen Robles:Cool ring, the outline of the phone. And like you won't be able to ask it the kind of complicated queries like in the keynote where I forget the presenter or even like Craig Federighi was like, will I make it to my daughter's plate tonight with this event? I can't do anything. Like, that's Apple intelligence stuff.
Jason Aten:I mean, you can ask and you'll get the same What? Response that you get now.
Stephen Robles:Here's some web results for musicals. Yeah. That'll be that'll be the result. So basically non Apple intelligent devices, which it's pretty wild, like the newest iPhone 15 will not get Apple Intelligence. Like it's only the pro.
Stephen Robles:And that got me thinking, just speculating, this fall with the iPhone 16, I wonder, will it just be the 16 pro that gets Apple Intelligence, or will the, you know, base model like the 16 and 16 plus, will they have a chip capable of Apple Intelligence? Because that seems like a big selling feature and getting people to upgrade even if they're on the non pro devices. You know what I mean?
Jason Aten:Yeah. So should we talk just a minute about the reason for why certain devices can do this and some can't? Are we at that point yet or should we hold off for a minute?
Stephen Robles:I would know. I would love to hear. So why?
Jason Aten:Yeah. So I think okay. It's people because people keep asking this, and this is I've had this long conversation on threads, and and people are very seem very, like, flabbergasted. Because what I said on threads was that the m 4 because people were real disappointed that the iPad with the m 4 didn't get any magical features in it. You can't do anything that the other m devices can do.
Jason Aten:And the reason is so, basically, Apple Intelligence has 2 tiers. Think of it that way. There's 22 things that can happen. 1 is there are a lot of things it'll just do on your device entirely. Right?
Jason Aten:Because it is it it actually has the models. Apple has built models, and they will be on your device. So a lot of the things you'll do, the phone will just handle that or your Mac or your iPad or whatever. Then there's the next level of that, which is where it's gonna send it to the cloud for the private cloud compute. And, essentially, you have to just think of that as, like, an ancillary processing unit for your phone.
Jason Aten:It's meant to be transparent. You're not supposed to be distinguishing between. And so I asked Apple, what distinguishes the difference between a query that you might ask that's gonna be handled on your phone and one that will require private cloud compute? Is it the type of query, or is it the the processor in the device? So because what I really wanted to know is, like, can an M4 iPad do more things on device than an M1 Mac or an a 17 pro phone?
Jason Aten:And they said it's based on the query. The reason is the stuff that the on on device models can handle is the same, and it's because of the RAM. Right? So only devices if you think about that now this just to be clear, Apple didn't specifically confirm that it was the RAM. But if you figure if you do the math and you look at what are the devices capable of doing this on device, they are all devices with 8 gigs of RAM.
Jason Aten:Right? So the iPhone 15 does only has 6 gigs of RAM. The 15 Pro and Pro Max have 8 gigs of RAM. And every m series oh, every m series sorry. I got real excited there.
Jason Aten:Every single m series laptop device or period, like, iPad, they all have 8 gigs of RAM, at least. Some of them have 16, whatever.
Stephen Robles:I was about I was about to try and improve that wrong, but I looked at the m one iPad Air, which in my mind is like the, you know, leaf
Jason Aten:floor m one device.
Stephen Robles:But that, like you're saying, is 8 gigs of RAM.
Jason Aten:Yep. And so the in in that makes sense because the m series on a chip, that RAM is a part of that series on a chip. So they all they don't, like, take away some of the RAM. You can't get it with, like, less or more. So in order to have the model on device, it has to have 8 gigs of RAM.
Jason Aten:So Apple is not arbitrarily gating this because they're just trying to get you to upgrade. It's because you literally have to have the entire model in memory in order to run these queries. So devices that are capable of doing that. Now that doesn't mean that the m four iPad or the M3 Max MacBook Pro won't do certain things faster. But but if you think about it, the limitation there is the types of queries that Apple could fit.
Jason Aten:You'd like to address with the models on the phone, and those are gonna be I don't I'm not an AI expert. I'm not a large language model expert. So somebody may know that I'm also not a lawyer or a doctor or a physicist. Whatever.
Stephen Robles:We're not detectives.
Jason Aten:I just write things on the Internet and read a lot of stuff. Right. That would be really fun. But anyway, The Greatest Showman, my kid just watched that a couple of days ago. So Circus would be fun anyway.
Jason Aten:But speaking of which, we watched Wonka the other day and I I could have told you there were so many times when I'm like, is this just the greatest showman? Are we? What movie are we watching right now? First of
Stephen Robles:all, it's showman, not showman. But but the Greatest
Jason Aten:showman. Showman. Is that whatever.
Stephen Robles:Well we need to. Well what
Jason Aten:yeah you just interrupted my interruption. So sorry. Anyway moving on. So the I think it's just important to understand that like it's not going to do the m four is gonna be capable of doing some things faster. But if you are doing a thing that requires private cloud compute, which is the more advanced thing.
Jason Aten:So, again, Apple won't specifically clarify this because they honestly don't want you thinking about it. They should all just be transparent for you. But you can imagine, like, the image playgrounds. If you're doing that, for example, and that requires private cloud compute, it's gonna be just as fast on any device that's capable of doing that because it's not handling it on device. So I think that's an important way to think about it.
Jason Aten:But to answer you, what you were getting at was next year's iPhones. I I can't imagine there's a scenario where next year's iPhones will not have it a minimum of 8 gigs of RAM. And I know there have been rumors about how they're gonna do the chips. At a minimum, you would think that the iPhone, the next iPhones, the iPhone 16, even the base model is gonna get the a 17 pro. Right?
Jason Aten:Like, it should have that or is I mean, don't you think? Like, there's not
Stephen Robles:gonna be a 18 that has 8 gigs of RAM.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Well, okay. Fine. But I'm saying the minute the floor would be the a 17 pro. It's gonna be a better chip than that.
Jason Aten:So
Stephen Robles:So that makes that makes sense, the 8 gigs of RAM. I imagine, like, neural engines have been getting bigger with the m series chips, so I imagine some like you're saying, processing will be that. Okay. So that's why the chip gating for Apple Intelligence and also why an m four and m one, like, there's not gonna be a difference in capabilities. It's just Right.
Stephen Robles:You know, the case of RAM. A couple other details about Apple Intelligence, Apple said it's gonna be English only and one of our listeners asked, what about the UK as far as UK English? And I've I've not been able to find a direct, answer on that. Is was that, like, US English only at launch? Did you know?
Jason Aten:So I believe that it's that the original launch for Apple Intelligence is only in the US and in English. Right? So there are 2 totally separate things, I think, in order you have to, like, think about. So what it says is, like, it won't be available in the UK, period, whether you speak English, US, English, whatever. Once it expands to other countries, I'm sure that they will address that.
Jason Aten:Like, now they did say that if your device language is set to US English, right, that you you'll be able to use it. And so, like, I don't really know how that exactly works, but they are intending to expand to that, I think, as quickly as they can. It's just if you think about it, you have to basically reproduce all those models in different languages. So
Stephen Robles:And this is so the footnote on the Apple Intelligence web page is what I have here. It'll be in the show notes. Apple Intelligence will be available in beta on iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later with dingus and device language set to US English As part of the 18 updates this fall, some features, additional languages, and platforms will be coming over the course of the next year. It also talks about Apple Intelligence compatible devices and has the list at the bottom of that site, which I think it was Parker Ortolani pointed out, that M1 MacBook Air that's like $700 at Walmart right now will be capable of Apple Intelligence
Jason Aten:Yep.
Stephen Robles:And is an amazing deal.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Well and this is one other thing I think that's also a good distinction to make. See, I wanna like, I feel like we're creating, like, the authoritative record right now about all like, what is Apple Intelligence? What is Apple. Because there's a separate thing that Apple is doing.
Jason Aten:And if you think about the keynote, a lot of the features that they showed off in the first 45 minutes, they didn't use the phrase Apple intelligence at all. Right? They talked about machine learning. Okay. All machine learning features are dependent on the neural engine on the chip.
Jason Aten:Right? So, yes, the, m 4 iPad should do all of those things faster because it's got a, I mean, I think that they said, correct me if I'm wrong, that the neural engine on the M4 is like twice as fast as the neural engine on the M3. Something like that. So I don't know. But I mean, the point or maybe they were comparing it to the m 2, but regardless, like, it's gonna be significantly faster for all of the machine learning type tasks.
Jason Aten:So that's things like in the, you know, identifying faces in photos. Right? That's a machine learning task. There's a lot of these things that are under the machine, you know, learning umbrella, and Apple is being pretty specific about how they distinguish between those things. So machine learning is like those types of, tasks that require the neural engine, but those have been around since the m one.
Jason Aten:Right? You can keep doing those things. You'll just be able to do them faster. Apple Intelligence is like integrating the ability to parse a phrase or a term or query, looking at your data on your device to provide you back with an answer. And then there is the 3rd level of it, which is the integration with outside chatbots, large language models.
Jason Aten:Right now, that's just chat gpt. That's separate entirely. ChatGPT has nothing to do with Apple Intelligence. It's not powered by Apple, you know, Apple.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. And I think that's a good distinction again because there's been a lot of confusion about ChatGPT. Is it built in?
Stephen Robles:Whatever. And so, the live talk show that happened Tuesday evening, I watched it in Apple Vision Pro in 3 d, the biggest shout out to Sandwich Video and Adam Lisagore, because as far as I know, I think it was like the first live streamed 3 d thing that you could experience in Apple Vision Pro. Yeah. Like streamed live. The stream went great.
Stephen Robles:There was, you know, a couple's, freezes in the video for, like, half a second, but the audio was flawless throughout. And you could actually, like this is a new app on Apple Vision Pro from Sandwich where you have a theater environment and you can choose where you want to sit in the theater, back, middle, front, side, or side. Spatial audio actually changes, so if you put yourself, like, on the right side, you'll hear the video audio coming from, like, the middle. It was a really great experience, and these were some, I think, of the, most revealing information about Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT, but Craig Federighi in that interview said, a, ChatGPT integration is off by default when you update your devices. So it's off by default.
Stephen Robles:What happens is the first time you ask it to do something that Apple Intelligence cannot do, maybe it's world knowledge, maybe it's, like, write me a first draft of an essay about Theodore Roosevelt or whatever, the first time you ask it, it will prompt, do you want to send this to chat gpt? And from then and forward, it will always tell you, do you want me to send this to chat gpt? Like, the box, like, it'll be very clear whenever you're sending it to it. And lastly, there is a setting where you can just tell your iOS devices or your Mac, never ask about chat gpt, Just never enable it, don't prompt me about it, and I never want to see it, like, come up again, and I guess Apple Intelligence will just tell you, like, no. I can't do that, in the future.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:And to be clear, if you choose that option, it won't send like, you can't just cause it's gonna be annoying if you're using it that every single time you have to say, yes. Please share. Saying don't ever ask me means it'll never send it to chat gpt. It's not you there's no setting for send this to chat gpt, and please don't ask me. That's unfortunately not an option at this point because it's gonna be real real obnoxious if it's something that you use all the time.
Jason Aten:Right.
Stephen Robles:Now we're gonna come back to the the talk show live because I think there was some other interesting tidbits. I will say Gruber, you know, he was lobbing a lot of softballs to him which like Gruber would like ask this long question which was really more of a statement and then Craig and Giles would be like, yeah we agree. Well said John. Like that was literally 3 or 4 things that happened during the interview. But to Jon Gruber's credit, he asked Joss, where's the money going?
Stephen Robles:Which direction is the money going between OpenAI and Apple? To which JAWS said, nope. Not answering. Like Mhmm. Just straight up.
Stephen Robles:It was that question and there was a question about what chips are in the Apple servers running private cloud compute, and there was this funny moment. Did you get to see it? Did you watch it?
Jason Aten:I didn't see the talk show yet. No. I tried and this this is the reason I should have taken the VisionPRO on the plane.
Stephen Robles:Yes. You should have taken the VisionPRO for this. The recording is not up yet so you had that's why I that's why I wanted to watch it live too. Gruber asked a Federighi what chips are running private cloud compute, to which Craig Federighi turns to Jaws and he's like, are we saying? Like, can we say?
Stephen Robles:And Jaws is like, no. We're not saying. And Craig is like, we're not saying.
Jason Aten:But okay. But I do and I said this during the our other recording, I said it was the M2. Turns out, I don't know why I said that. I mean, I don't there wasn't like a slide that said M2, except if you do the math, if you think about it, it's pretty obviously the m two ultra. There is no m three ultra at this point.
Jason Aten:Also, Apple wanted to get off the m 3 so bad that they put the m 4 in the iPad Pro. So there's no way that they were like, let's order some more of them because TMC wants nothing to do with making the m threes anymore. So the m two, some version of it makes the most sense. And the m two ultra is like, isn't I think the m 2 Ultra is still the fastest overall performing, like, system. Core.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And and again, like, this isn't CPU load. This is like GPU load and neural engine load. But even still, I think it's I think it's pretty safe to say that it's an m two series chip. But but it is true that Apple is not saying that, and I don't know.
Jason Aten:I just made it up.
Stephen Robles:So they're not saying what chips are in there, and and they did not say which way the money was going. Again, the HP guys had some pontification about which way it might be going because, like, who is really benefiting from this arrangement? And honestly, you could say both, Like, Apple is benefiting because LLM and AI features are gonna be built into the OS that they don't have to offer themselves yet, like write a bedtime story or whatever. And so Apple gets that benefit where they can tell their users you have all these capabilities built in, but ChatGibt also has the benefit of their product is gonna be built into devices off by default, but still built in, which is a huge, like exposure advantage. You know, you're gonna have millions of users that can just turn on ChatGPT and start using it, and might encourage users to then upgrade to ChatGPT plus or, you know, more queries, faster access, things like that.
Stephen Robles:So it does seem mutually beneficial, but I had like, there's gotta be money going one way or the other. And and Gruber was, like, can we get a Eddie out here? Like, can we get Eddie Q to talk about this deal? And then Joss was, like, yeah, and a bottle of tequila. It's a it's just a funny moment, in a talk show.
Stephen Robles:But but I think it is clear money is going some direction. They are just not talking about
Jason Aten:the original. Okay. So this is interesting because, Ben Thompson has a theory that there's actually no money going back and forth for this. Is that that was the reason that Google wouldn't sign a deal because Apple wasn't willing to pay for, that particular access. And that OpenAI is like, yep.
Jason Aten:Put us in there. Put it plug us in. Let's do this. Let's let's be the default option for now that you still have to turn on. And that the reason for that would be, yes, Chad GPT is already the, like, brand leader.
Jason Aten:Like, I think someone said that they're like the kleenex of AI. Right? Like, they that's the brand that everybody knows, Chad GPT. And that they do. They they can have the opportunity to upsell people to a paid thing.
Jason Aten:And then at some point, I think this has been Thompson's take that he he can totally see an auction where where Apple is getting paid to be the default place just like they do for search, But that Apple doesn't care right now because this is not fundamental to the experience. It's just additive to the experience, so they aren't gonna be paying for that even though it's very expensive. So I lean towards that particular take that at this point, there wasn't any money exchanging hands and that at some point, they're gonna allow well, actually, Federighi so there was another conversation that was Federighi and John, Gian, and Drea in the afternoon. We talked about this a little bit earlier this week. And during that, the you know, Federighi specifically said, like, Google Gemini.
Jason Aten:Like, we would like to have these other people in there. So I think it's like I think that I don't know that there's any money exchanging hand at this point. I think it's all about, like, taking taking it's like a land grab. Like, let's just get into the right spot. So
Stephen Robles:And and OpenAI has the advantage of being exclusive right now unless and if it's just the 1st year, which I can imagine just like you can change your search engines in Safari even though no one changes it off the default, it could be you have OpenAI, you have Google Gemini, you have Perplexity, that one day you can have those options just into the settings of your Mac and your iPhone. And then at that point, Apple can be like, just like Google pays us to be the default search engine, now you can now you may pay us Right. To be the default AI engine, part of it. But I also think even longer term, there will be a day where that just goes away, and Apple just has the LLMs proprietary first party, unless, like, Chat gpt and and these other services keep advancing so fast that Apple can't catch up, which we have to talk about training data in a second because that actually came out in the live talk show as well, but, anyway, I'm I'm also inclined to think maybe there is no money changing hands right now, which can we and I just I just have to point out the the crazy nature of this AI these AI arrangements.
Stephen Robles:Microsoft has a 49% stake in OpenAI. Microsoft Meaning,
Jason Aten:they've given OpenAI, like, $11,000,000,000 just to be
Stephen Robles:clear. They've given it so a lot of money going that direction. Right? And OpenAI and Chat GPT powers Copilot, Microsoft's AI feature. And now the same company, OpenAI, is built into Apple's operating systems as part of Apple Intelligence, And, like, what a strange time, like, for this, like, intermediary, namely OpenAI, to be so heavily embedded in the 2 biggest players when when it comes to desktop operating systems, and, you know, Google Gemini, you know, they obviously have the most used mobile platform worldwide, and not the US, but worldwide.
Stephen Robles:And for them to just I don't know. It feels like they're off to the side. I don't know. It's just strange.
Jason Aten:Well, what's even more crazy about that is that I just said that, basically, Microsoft's given them $11,000,000,000. What they really gave them are credits to use Azure. Right? That much money worth of credit. So what that means is
Stephen Robles:Oh, yes.
Jason Aten:Apple isn't paying anything, we we think, for OpenAI. And yet all of these customers all of these queries are gonna be running on Azure servers from Microsoft that Microsoft is giving to open AI for basically free for them to take queries from apple users. Microsoft's not getting any money from apple, but even though all of this work is taking place on their servers, just start to do that math in your head. Now and I just wanted to clarify one thing, which really is pretty insignificant. There is a the reason for the AI I'm sorry.
Jason Aten:What do they call them? Copilot plus PC standard or whatever is that Microsoft is trying to move a lot of that stuff to their own on device language models as well, which is why they require 16 gigabytes of RAM. And so but it is still just sort of, like, mind bending that it's like Microsoft is like, yeah. We want you to be part of our service. And it seems like the implication would be, while it's not an exclusive arrangement that we would get, like, the first so we're paying you.
Jason Aten:We're giving you free credit so that we can do our thing, and now you're using part of that so that Apple can do its thing. Tenuous. Yeah. Nadella's gotta be so mad.
Stephen Robles:So it's so crazy. Alright. I'm glad we're going this far in-depth. This is gonna be the episode that when someone asks about Apple Intelligence, you send them this episode.
Jason Aten:Absolutely. And you
Stephen Robles:and whenever whoever you share it to, say after you're done listening, 5 star rating and review in Apple
Jason Aten:Podcasts. Absolutely.
Stephen Robles:A couple other things, realizations. Chatbot interface, namely like the Chat GPT app on Mac or whatever where you can just ask queries, it seems like that is not a thing that will exist on Apple's operating systems. I mean, you could say that, hey, dingus is somewhat that, but the reason why I was asking is, like, my workflows that use ChatGPT, which, just as an example, when I make a video for YouTube, I transcribe it as it's uploading to YouTube, I take that transcription, I put it into ChatGPT using TextExpander, which automatically puts one of my prompts that asks it for a title description and tags, and then ChatJPT just generates that from the transcript. And I use now I use the the Mac app, for ChatJPT to do that. It does not seem like there's going to be an easy way or a way to do that even with macOS and Apple Intelligence or iOS.
Stephen Robles:Does that sound accurate?
Jason Aten:Well, yes. Not a first party native way to do that, but you obviously can still use the chat gpt app. And you can imagine there are a lot of scenarios like the one you just described where you very well might wanna just keep doing that. Also, like, the impression I get is that this whole thing is so locked down because it's Apple, that there are a whole lot of things you're not gonna be able to say to Siri. You know, give me a story about an unsolved murder from you know, like, it's not gonna do a lot of things, so you'd still wanna do.
Jason Aten:But it's not I don't think this is a scenario, like, where so, like, right now, one of the things that was fun is to, like, play around with the lock screen and stuff like that. And I don't know if this was true before, but, I I just put a chat gpt, widget on the on the thing. I don't know if that was there before or not, but it's like the, you know, the voice one. So you still might wanna just, like, talk to chat gpt outside of the very carefully curated gated community that Apple has built around its voice assistant that we can't talk about.
Stephen Robles:Like because I was looking at the Apple intelligence page here, and, like, the writing features that you'll get, like, when you select text in an email or a note, you know, basically has the proofread option, which goodbye, Grammarly. We hardly knew ye. You can have
Jason Aten:the ye. Assuming it's good. Assuming this is good. We still don't we don't know that yet. But yeah.
Stephen Robles:Don't know that yet. I imagine it's gonna be pretty good.
Jason Aten:Also, it's also not gonna try to stick its little bug in the middle of every text field. Meaning, like, in Slack, you can't even hit the send button because the thing you just just sits there. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:I don't have Grammarly installed. Like, if I ever really wanted to use it, I just copy and paste it on the website because the the built in one is just super annoying. But anyway, so this little box that comes up for Apple Intelligence, all you have is the proofread, the rewrite. You have, you know, make it friendly, professional, concise, and then stock options of summary, key points, table, and list. So it's not like you can give it a prompt, a specific prompt for Apple Intelligence.
Stephen Robles:Whereas, it seems like on the ChatGPT integration, like, if you look at the very bottom of this page, you can select a bunch of text, say, in a pages document and literally put a prompt for ChatJpT there. Now I'm not sure if this will work how I usually use it, like give me a YouTube title description and tags from this text that I have highlighted. It seems like maybe it would work that way, but my workflow with ChatGPT and TextExpander is probably still gonna be easier. But it it just seems like there's no chatbot interface per se for Apple Intelligence or even Chat GPT that's built in to the OSes.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I think that that's sort of true. I mean, you could argue because, like, the previous screenshot you showed, describe your change. I mean, that's essentially the same kind of a thing where you where you can type to it right there. Like, that top thing is type like, make this more exciting and add, like, whatever to it.
Jason Aten:You can you know, because essentially, all of those other things are just precanned props. Right? That's all that those are. This is like, nope. I wanna make my own prompt.
Jason Aten:So but I think you're probably right. There's there's still going to be a lot of use cases where people are gonna still just wanna use chat GPT or Yeah. Whatever.
Stephen Robles:Exactly. Yeah. Alright. Couple of the small details. The when you update your device so let's say you have an iPhone 15 pro, you install iOS 18, now you have Apple Intelligence on there, it assume I assume, like, even now when you do a big iOS update or get a new phone, it's gotta index all the things, because spotlight has always been a thing, and it's indexing your entire phone for that.
Stephen Robles:Now it seems like with Apple Intelligence, it's just gonna index way more stuff. Like Yeah. It's and your device is just gonna get so hot the first time you update as it chunks through all this stuff. But I assume the the LLM, meaning the on device LLM, when you update to iOS 18, basically just gets installed on your device. So that seems like a one time, like and so if you ever move device or upgrade your phone, it's just that LLM is built into iOS.
Stephen Robles:Again, in a second, just correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, but the LLM is built in. And then the semantic index, which I'm just gonna think about it as a more complex, more in-depth spotlight indexing. Like, it's just indexing way more stuff, like your text messages, your emails, all your calendar, all this kind of stuff. That that stuff will have to be reindexed, say, when you upgrade to the iPhone 16 Pro, but you're not necessarily retraining a model because the model is already trained and being installed on your device. It's not like a model is being trained on your data on your device.
Stephen Robles:It's just that your data is being indexed so the model can refer to it in the semantic index to then process your queries. That sound right?
Jason Aten:Yeah. So I was looking through some of the notes that I had, and one of the one of the questions was like, well, if you get any devices, I have to retrain the models. No. The models have already been trained, and they're just on your device. Like, that's not a thing that's happening on your device.
Jason Aten:In fact, Apple is very clear that it won't use your information to train its models. Right? Because the model is like the global thing. That's the unit. Like, it's what is everybody gets the same models.
Jason Aten:Right? The semantic index was sort of explained to me as a volumetric index of the relevant topics on your device. So, essentially, what they're saying is, like, it what it's gonna have in it is all of the things on your device related to, let's say, coffee. Right? So that if you ask a question about coffee, it's like, well, here's the text messages that have coffee in it.
Jason Aten:Here's their photos and have a cup of coffee in it. Here's the emails you got about your last trade coffee order. Here's the like, so all of that's gonna be in this place. And then it will also be connected to all of, like, say, the people. So, like, if you asked a question to it, say, what was that coffee that Steven recommended to me when we were in, at apple park, which would be a cool thing to be able to say, because I'm looking forward to Steven being able to be there at Apple Park with me and recommend coffee.
Jason Aten:But, like, it would be able to go and be like, oh, here's the coffee thing. Here's the connection that it oh, man. I gotta stop hitting my microphone. The connection that I You
Stephen Robles:have to watch a YouTuber.
Jason Aten:I actually have to do stuff. I noticed that during the, during the video of the our conversation at the park, I use my hands a lot when I'm doing an audio show. Whatever. It's your fault for making this thing behind YouTube. But anyway,
Stephen Robles:no more watching it. It's a YouTube grade for those hand motions.
Jason Aten:Yes. Anyway, so it'll be able to make all of the that's what the some the semantic index is doing is making those connections, and then it decides based on all of that stuff. Is this a thing I can process on device, or do I need to send it to the private cloud compute? So Right. Yes.
Jason Aten:That thing would have to reindex when you get a new device, I think. Although if you're copying it over, I don't I did not get clarity on whether or not that's a thing that's like, can be put into an Icloud backup. Like, Like, you know what I mean? Like if I back up my device, will that copy over? And my guess is maybe no because your photos reindex after you get a new device even though you're just copying over the exact same information.
Jason Aten:But that information is tucked away somewhere behind a lock and key that not even your new phone can get to.
Stephen Robles:And that is I was wondering is maybe one day, not it's not now, Apple has not said now, but that maybe one day your semantic index because it would be really valuable if it was cross devices. Like, it'd be really valuable if you everything you do on macOS and your iOS device and your iPad is all a part of the same semantic index. So when you ask, hey, dingus on your phone about something that you maybe made on your Mac that is not syncing to your apps, you know, which is one of the advantages of Icloud and all these apps, like, Bear Notes. You know, I use Bear Notes, but I imagine come the fall or whenever Bear updates that all my Bear notes will be a part of the semantic index, and that information will be searchable by Apple Intelligence and all my notes synced to all my devices. So it maybe doesn't matter.
Stephen Robles:But for things that maybe are local per device, maybe you have a file on your Mac. Like, I put files in my movies folder when I'm working on video projects that doesn't sync to Icloud, and that file is just on my Mac. So it would be amazing if I could ask Apple Intelligence on my phone, hey, dingus, where was that video transcription that I did about, you know, the Sonos Ace headphones, and for my iPhone Apple intelligence to say, oh, that is in this folder on your Mac, which it seems like it could not do that right now. And I was just I was trying to log in to the Icloud website because I was curious With Icloud photos, things like faces and all those, like, trainings that it does, I do feel like that information syncs to your Icloud photo library because that's a known you toggle it on, you know, your Icloud photo library. And I'm just now I just logged in.
Stephen Robles:I didn't realize with my, I got these notifications, like, I because I have all the advanced data protection on for Icloud, I got, like, 3 notifications, and my Mac was like, looks like somebody's logging in your Icloud account. Do you wanna allow it? And I was like, I just I just went there on my Mac. Yes. I would like to go there.
Stephen Robles:And on my phone, I had a a thing there too. But I was looking here in on icloud.com, which has all my photos, it does appear again, listeners, you can correct me if I'm wrong, that things like faces are not here. Like, I cannot browse my photo library by people here in the Icloud, website. So it seems like that facial recognition that it's doing is, like you're saying, is always on device. Yep.
Stephen Robles:And so the faces you see on your iPad versus the faces you see on your iPhone, like, those are locked to device, and that's why And
Jason Aten:they can be different. It's it's mind blowing. They can be and it's if you think about it, like, it is it is easy to say, like, yeah, that should just follow across every device. I'm sure that there's, like, legitimate reasons why that's not the case. That they just are not like, if you just imagine they had to build a what they kept calling a secure tunnel to the private cloud compute in order to do that, it's like they have their own, like, it's well, it's probably similar, like, the private relay or whatever kind of thing, and it's not surrounding the data.
Jason Aten:So, like, yeah, that's it is funny that we're, like, complaining that this amazing thing is not more amazing, but I'm guessing, like you said, it'll be there eventually. Like
Stephen Robles:Yeah. And I'm not I'm not complaining at all. I was just trying to wrap my head around what is the device doing? What is Apple Intelligence doing? And one of the other things, I will say private cloud compute, Craig Federighi at the live talk show interview, which will bring up some points there and then we'll move on, but he, like, described private cloud compute and how the authentication works and how your iPhone won't even talk to a server if the image doesn't match something else.
Stephen Robles:And again, like, I was just reminded that I forgot what term that we prefer. I don't know if it's geeks or nerds, but Craig Federighi is one of them. Yeah. Because when he explained private cloud compute, it's like during a live talk show, like, he's just spitballing, describing in detail the authentication and why it's private and secure. It just I I he lost me, like, I just don't understand those things.
Stephen Robles:But a lot of work went into making it private.
Jason Aten:Yes.
Stephen Robles:So a couple of details from the talk show related to Apple Intelligence. John G'Andrea was actually the 3rd guest of the talk show, so it was Joss, Craig Federighi, and JG, which Yep. John Gruber, JG. John G'Andrea, jg. Greg Jozowiak, g j, and then Greg Federighi.
Stephen Robles:So a lot of g's and j's, but John Gruber asked John G'Andrea about training data, which this was interesting because Xcode, one of the features of Apple Intelligence is going to be code autocomplete and being able to generate some code there. They ask, like, what did you train that on? Because obviously the the wrong answer would be, oh, all the apps in the App Store. Like, that would be the wrong answer because then developers would be like, you just trained the thing on the code that I wrote. That did not happen.
Stephen Robles:That is not the case. It sound like as John DeAndrea was explaining it, it was basically Apple's apps, xCode, like the LLM was trained on that, and they also talked about synthetic data, meaning basically, like, building, I don't know, fake processes or workflows or apps that you know, basically saying, like, here's how you build an app that does x. And then it showed the Apple's large language model that code so we could learn from that. So when it comes to Xcode and that data, they said they did a mix of, like, synthetic data and proprietary stuff directly from Apple. When it talked about how did you train the LLM on other data, this is where it gets a little wonky, and correct me if you've heard something different, but it seems like Apple did train its own LLM on, like, the publicly available information, namely the Internet.
Stephen Robles:And there was this throwaway line where it said they gave publications the ability to opt out of that training data. Didn't I couldn't tell if it was, like, before they indexed it or after they were like, hey, b t dubs, we just trained our LLM on the Internet. Do you wanna be a part of that or not? Like, it seemed like maybe that was afterwards, but Apple did say it was trained on publicly available information and unclear how much. Like, was it YouTube?
Stephen Robles:Was it the New York Times? Like, that we we're not there's not that details. Unless did you hear anything different?
Jason Aten:Well, so this is a thing. It's interesting to me how they I I can't wait to actually hear the talk show and to to hear how they talked about it because this was another question that came up in the interview with iJustine. She she did the q and a the the afternoon after the keynote, and she just asked them, like, so where did where what'd you train it on? And I think it was JG who answered the question. You know, we did we trained it on publicly available information, and then he talked about some textbooks and he talked about like other stuff and licensed content.
Jason Aten:And I think somebody was like, we gotta be careful how we talk about public because that just means we trained it on the Internet, which is a thing that there are a lot of people really angry about. And so I I think Apple's kind of, like, getting some pushback for that. So I think they're trying to be a little bit more careful. Yes. They obviously trained it on the Internet.
Jason Aten:Like, that's how you train a large language model. The only way to get enough information to do that is to train it on like all of the things that we write on the internet. And I think that, you know, Apple's trying to be real careful about that. I think that they're like getting some pushback. And because the obvious answer for what did you do?
Jason Aten:I I a 100% would agree that they did not train the x code auto, you know, complete whatever on developer apps. Like, I'm I'm sure that that's the case. Apple probably means that, but that doesn't mean that they didn't, like, point their thing at Stack Overflow or whatever. Like, you know what I mean? That that's Sure.
Jason Aten:So what basically what Apple has done is they've created like, you can now filter out just like you can the Google robot. Like right? Everybody has a robots dot TXT file. Right? Like, so, like, you can just put Apple's robot in there and say, nope.
Jason Aten:You can't. But the again, this is such a weird thing for companies to say because everyone knows you've already taken the information. Just telling us that you now can opt out. Doesn't do anything about the models are done. Like it's, they've already made the model.
Jason Aten:They're not gonna go back and take your stuff out.
Stephen Robles:Right. And so and the robot txt file that you're talking about, when you sort of think about a website, you know, there's a lot of pages that live on a server for a website, and one of them is a robots dot txt, which if you have that file on your server for your website, it will basically signal to large language models that are scouring the Internet, like, don't don't nothing to see here. Don't stop here. Just just keep on going. Neli Patel at The Verge just talked about how their robots TXT file, I think they put OpenAI's chat gpt saying, like, you know, ignore us, please, which, I mean, let's be honest, it's a text file.
Stephen Robles:I'm, you know, I don't know. I mean, I guess they have to do it. I don't know if it's, like, a legal thing, but, you know, whether or not they actually ignore it, but they would no website would know to have put Apple's LLM in their robot text file because it was just announced. It was already trained on all the stuff. So that that all seems, I don't know, interesting.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:I mean, if you look at the verges, there's a whole lot of pages that they are like they're they're disallowing the Apple bot. They're disallowing GPT bot. They're which is weird because they have an open AI deal, so they're probably just sending them to them differently. But, yeah, you can you can see on any website what is being disallowed and you can actually disallow specific pages. So you could be like, well, I want Google to be able to index this part of my website, but not this other part of the website.
Jason Aten:So, yeah, it's real it's real interesting to be like, yeah, the Apple bot disallow except for they've already got too late.
Stephen Robles:Is it is it, oh, okay. So this is
Jason Aten:Slash robots dot txt. It's just a text file. Yep.
Stephen Robles:So any website .com whatever slash robots.txt. You can just put that in the address bar of whatever website you're curious about. So I just did it here for The Verge. Yep. This is basically the text file.
Stephen Robles:So you could see disallow the Googlebot news. Yep. User agent. This is a bunch of things.
Jason Aten:So that's basically they're saying no one should be indexing those pages.
Stephen Robles:The ad those pages. GPT bot. No. Amazon bot. There's Apple bot.
Stephen Robles:Yep. You know, I'm curious how they knew it was that. Anthropic. I mean all these things, Facebook bot, perplexity bot, you know all these bots they have they have disallowed, so it is fascinating. We live in a weird time, Jason.
Jason Aten:Yes.
Stephen Robles:The last thing I wanted to mention from the talk show interview and then we'll just touch on a couple other things and then we have to get to the magic mouse. That's the most important thing.
Jason Aten:It is.
Stephen Robles:The during the live interview, Gruber was asking again, after a lot of softballs, he wanted to ask about the DMA and the how laws or whatever, and sometimes Apple will apply a change they have to make with a certain law globally. He mentioned the Japanese Trade Commission, with the anti steering, you know, allowing developers to put links in their apps to their website. And that was a law passed in Japan, but Apple made that just a global change. They were like, okay, like, we're just gonna change this for everybody. So Gruber brought up the DMA, the 3rd party app marketplaces, things like that, and saying, like, how do you think about maybe applying those changes to everywhere?
Stephen Robles:And when Gruber mentioned DMA, there was a literal whoop from the audience in approval, which everyone once the talk show live goes up as a recording somewhere, you have to watch it, because Craig Federighi's reaction was so unfiltered. When he heard that whoop, he was just like, really? And and it was such a it's such just like a, you know, a moment where it was passed to the apple veil, and you can just see, like, Craig Federighi does not like the DMA.
Jason Aten:Right.
Stephen Robles:No. The whatever the European Commission is doing. And, you know, he had a couple seconds of reaction. He was like, okay, whatever, you know, and he just kind of brushed it off. And he went in, and I and I think back to how you have described his talk at Web Summit several years ago, genuinely believing that this is a security risk.
Stephen Robles:And he again reiterated it just a couple nights ago at that live talk show saying, like, protection of users, privacy, and security. He made the comparison to say, with a phone and an iPad, you can hand it to someone and just say, have fun. Download whatever apps, do whatever, and you and he said, on stage, he's like, you can't say that about the Mac. Mhmm. You can't just say, here's a Mac, do whatever you want.
Stephen Robles:Implying, the reason being, the App Store, because you can't install any software that Apple has not approved on an iPhone or an iPad. And so there is still a picture, obviously in Craig Federighi's mind, and I assume in Apple's culture as a whole, that that App Store gatekeeping is what is protecting users. I really wanted Gruber to do a follow-up question about like, how about those like gambling apps or those in app purchases that are $500 a week that somehow got through app approval? Like, I think those are legitimate questions if you are so hard standing on this point. But it made it very clear, like, whatever Apple has to do in Europe to continue selling their devices, namely opening it up to third party apps and marketplaces or whatever, they do not plan to do globally until they are forced.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And
Stephen Robles:that just that was abundantly clear.
Jason Aten:Well, and one thing I think that is probably I don't know Craig Federighi. Never met him. This is just sort of conjecture, but he does seem like a true believer when it comes to the software side of this. Right? Craig Federighi has nothing to do with the app store.
Jason Aten:That's Phil Shiller. Right? Like, in in Tim Cook and whatever. Obviously, he has a little bit to do with it because he's the head of software engineering. But and so, like, it's a software thing, but it's also part of the services business, not part of the soft like, it's it's not the same teams that are making final cut in mail and notes or whatever that's in or the operating systems.
Jason Aten:I think from his perspective, he means what he's saying about, you know, we can look at it and be like, well, the reason you guys care care so much about the app store is because that's where the 30% comes from. And if if people can make their apps available somewhere else. But I do think I think there's a piece of it that is is authentic coming from Craig Federighi where he's like, the reason that the App Store is such a good thing is, you know, not that App Review, you know, can go through and be like, hey. Literally, hey. You guys have to put in a subscription to your thing to get money.
Jason Aten:What Craig Federighi probably cares about is the fact that, no, the reason App Store review is so valuable is you can't put in an app that will just steal all your personal information or access the things that other apps are doing. You can't do that. I mean, it's true that on the Mac, absolutely, you can do that. And one of the the reason I believe this is that one of the demos that I have was on privacy and security. And one of the things they just talked about is the changes they made to the way that apps get access to your local area network and Bluetooth.
Jason Aten:They've changed that. Right? So if you wanna connect a device now, it's not gonna have the ability to be like, actually, it will show you if you say and this actually just happened. I was turning off my molecule. And so it's like, do you this thing device wants access to your network.
Jason Aten:Here are all of the devices on your network it would get access to. Do you want it to do that? So I think that they care very you know, from Federighi, I think that that's authentic. What's funny to me is he probably thinks people who are at the talk show live are the most die hard of Apple fans, which I think is true. But also what he doesn't realize is that so he's thinking they'll give us the benefit of the doubt that we obviously have the right intentions.
Jason Aten:What he seems to miss is, like, diehard Apple fans are the biggest of nerds, and they are the ones who care the most. And also it's a developer conference. These developers care very, very much about this kind of thing. So it is sort of funny that cognitive dissonance that must have been going through his brain at that moment of like, You really? That's really the reaction you guys have for this?
Jason Aten:Yeah. It doesn't surprise me at all, though.
Stephen Robles:Because there was also a whoop for when he mentioned documentation for Swift. And so rightly so. You know?
Jason Aten:He thinks that yeah. That he was expecting that one, probably.
Stephen Robles:Right. So it was it was just fascinating. So I recommend, watching that the talk show when it comes out, especially when John, Jay and Jerry comes out to really talk about Apple Intelligence and the training data. So highly recommend. That was we did we just did a whole hour on Apple Intelligence and I think that was worth it.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I agree.
Stephen Robles:I think that was worth it. So real quick, I wanna mention the setting that you you literally wrote a whole article about because I think you saw it in person, but mirroring your iPhone to your Mac in macOS Sequoia. Are you excited about that?
Jason Aten:I'm super excited about it. I think that it's, like the reason I think this is awesome is it is the kind of they talked to this is like an extension of continuity. Right? Continuity is the thing that essentially lets you do the universal clipboard, universal control, which is where you can, like, have one mouse and slide it off of your thing, and it'll end up on your iPad. And then also, like, continuity camera.
Jason Aten:It's also what is allowing you to virtualize your Mac inside of your Vision Pro. A lot of people were like, so can I virtualize my phone into my Mac and then virtualize my Mac into my Vision Pro so that I can control my phone from my Vision Pro? And the answer is no. You can only have one continuity session happening at a time. Sorry.
Stephen Robles:Oh, so you can't do that?
Jason Aten:No. You cannot do that.
Stephen Robles:You can't have your iPhone mirrored to your Mac and then start the Mac display and vision pro?
Jason Aten:Right. Yeah. That's like inception level versions of continuity right there. You cannot do that because you can only have one. You can only have one continuity.
Jason Aten:And there actually are security reasons for that. I don't know what they are. So when somebody ask
Stephen Robles:what anybody say, like, why can't then I mirror my iPhone into vision pro directly?
Jason Aten:I I did not think to ask that, but I think that the reason has to do with the fact that it's running iPad OS and not, like, I mean, there's just that's just not really built into that, I think, at this point. But I mean, here's the thing. You can basically virtualize your Mac onto your iPad using sidecar. Right?
Stephen Robles:Oh, right. Yeah.
Jason Aten:So, like, in theory, you should be able to I don't know. This would be nobody asked this, but can you, like, mirror your iPhone onto your Mac and then using I bet you you could actually do that. I bet you you could drag it over to Sidecar. Yeah. Because it's just treating it as a separate monitor at that point.
Stephen Robles:So if I if I FaceTime somebody and share play control their device because that's coming in iOS 18, can you then mirror that device onto the Mac then into car not carplay. I think you should just take
Jason Aten:the Vision Pro off at that point and just use your phone if that's the problem that you're happy. But anyway, it was very cool. I think it's actually super useful. The number of times where you the reason is like the whole notification thing, right? You you don't have to have your phone open when you're working on your Mac.
Jason Aten:The you don't have to have your phone open when you're working on your Mac. The notification will just show up. And if you click on it, it'll just virtual you know, mirror your phone onto your onto your Mac's desktop, and you can just interact with it. And, yeah, I I thought it was very cool. It was an impressive demo.
Jason Aten:I was kinda mad that I can't actually do it right now, but I'm looking forward to
Stephen Robles:it. I'm excited to try it. I don't wanna complain about iPad OS because there's just this you know, that's that.
Jason Aten:There's no journal.
Stephen Robles:Maybe one day more.
Jason Aten:At this time. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Let's go for that another time. We're gonna talk about how Elon Musk's reaction to all the Apple Intelligence was kinda wild. I mean, he fundamentally didn't understand what it was, like he replied to Tim Cook announcing Apple Intelligence saying, don't want it. He got community noted.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Well, he gets community not noted a lot. Let's be honest. Did Tim Cook respond to that tweet?
Stephen Robles:No. Tim Cook never. He doesn't reply.
Jason Aten:Right. Well, he just invites them for a walk. That's the best part. Elon Musk was actually just mad he didn't get an invitation to WWDC. And so he's he's trolling Tim Cook, hoping that he'll get invited for another walk at Apple Park, because that's literally what Tim Cook did the last time that, because remember he was, like, all mad about, like, they're not getting a deal off of the 30% cut on his Twitter premium or whatever.
Jason Aten:And, Tim Cook never responded, and then we find out that there's, like, a photo of their silhouettes, like, at the park where they, like, went for a walk or something.
Stephen Robles:I do remember I do remember that. Also, I mean, MKBHD replied to Elon Musk trying to explain that Apple at no point sends any of your data to OpenAI without explicit user permission, because he was Elon Musk was saying, like, he's gonna put people's iPhones in Faraday cages.
Jason Aten:Yeah. But here's the thing. Okay. This is what I wanna say about this. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Are you not gonna let people buy Windows PCs anymore then? Because every single one of them being sold essentially from this point on is gonna have literally chat gpt built in to Copilot. Right? Like, so this is a re are they gonna be running Linux Linux computers there for like, what are the what are you doing?
Stephen Robles:Anyway. Okay. I don't wanna get any more 3 stars.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I'm sorry. That's But I love my Tesla. I super love my Tesla.
Stephen Robles:I still want a Tesla. I mean, I would like to buy a used one. Anyway, I'll put Jason's article because he wrote about, Elon Musk's reaction to that, which is pretty wild. The other things oh, I'll just say real quick. I I actually got my, my AI devices out of the drawer
Jason Aten:Oh, wow.
Stephen Robles:For this segment of the show, which is gonna be 30 seconds. These things are dead. All these things are dead.
Jason Aten:You mean you haven't charged them in 3 weeks?
Stephen Robles:That too. But also they're just like it's over.
Jason Aten:They have no purpose anymore.
Stephen Robles:If if someone had a tombstone, basic Apple guy, if you wanna make this image, please do it. You have to share it on your social media. But rip AI devices, January 2024 to June 2024, 6 months. I don't know what animal has a 6 month lifespan, but that's what these had.
Jason Aten:Cicada, maybe? Those are, like, the cicadas of the Cicada. I don't
Stephen Robles:know. Like, 2 things. Joanna Stern did a great human AI pin review video, which I think the most useful feature that she uncovered was translation. But it wasn't great, it wasn't super reliable, but it was one of the best features it had.
Jason Aten:Yep.
Stephen Robles:If you remember, Jason, Apple announced a standalone translation app for what device?
Jason Aten:The watch. Listen.
Stephen Robles:Apple.
Jason Aten:I feel so vindicated because have I not? I I have been very consistent that the killer AI device is the Apple Watch. I mean, it doesn't do any AI stuff yet, but this is where that should live. And just think I mean, I don't know. This thing is not running an m series processor, so I don't think you're gonna get, like, Apple intelligence in Siri on this particular The translation
Stephen Robles:is probably gonna be great
Jason Aten:on it. Yes. And, and the fact that it think about it, like I can, if I can ask. Dingus or whatever we're calling her now, so that we don't upset people's home pods, by the way, just turn the feature off on your home pod if you're gonna listen to this. This should just be like I
Stephen Robles:turn it off of my
Jason Aten:The minimum requirement for listening to primary check is you have to turn it off. But if you ask it on your watch, I think
Stephen Robles:one of the things. Yeah. My, my, my, my son has a, OG home pod in his bedroom. And every time I open the home app, I kept seeing one accessory not connected. And I would go in, and it would be his HomePod.
Stephen Robles:And so I finally asked him, I was like, did you unplug your HomePod? He was like, yeah. Whenever I'm talking in there, you know, the dingus just turns on randomly and and it's whatever. And I was like, whenever you unplug it, it shows us like an accessory is disconnected. I can just turn off the Hey Dingus.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:He was
Stephen Robles:like, oh, okay. Yeah. I'll plug it back. In. So, like Yeah.
Stephen Robles:This is such a widespread issue that my 11 year old son is, like, just unplugging his home pod so it doesn't listen. He's like nuclear option there.
Jason Aten:Well, we the reason we did it first was because our daughter we have a daughter named Macy, which when you say that out loud in the house, sounds like, hey, the thing. And so constantly we we like, Macy, come to dinner and I can't help you with that. Like, constantly see it. Like, here's a web result. For Our home pods are just constantly, like, would you like to ask me something different?
Jason Aten:I don't know. It's just crazy. But anyway, I I can totally see, like, the ability to ask a question to your watch and then your phone being able to handle it. Right? Because that's essentially what your watch is anyway.
Jason Aten:So
Stephen Robles:So this translation was one of the key features, not it. The other key features like catch up, which couldn't even see the text messages on your phone, which is useless like Apple Intelligence, totally just Sherlock'd all of that. So any value that the iPad had by itself is now gone. And then the Rabbit r one, which the selling point was the large action model so it could order DoorDash, which I tried a bunch of times and it never He's
Jason Aten:still waiting for his cheeseburger.
Stephen Robles:I'm still waiting for the coffee and bacon egg and cheese that I ordered 3 months ago. But
Jason Aten:If it shows up, do not eat it. If it if it comes at this point
Stephen Robles:It's been sitting in a dude's car for 3 months. Well, it errored out. You could watch my r one video. It errored out. And I'm gonna do a video just talking more about this, but the large action model, a, shortcuts already has this, which, you know, Nilay talked about on the vergecastic, you could basically put a McDonald's order in a shortcut and order it all with a single tap.
Stephen Robles:Starbucks has done this for a long time. Like, I don't really have a Starbucks order in my shortcuts, but I could tap it, and it just orders it to the location Starbucks that I have specified. So, like, shortcuts could already do large action model stuff. Now with Apple Intelligence and App Intents, like DoorDash, which I imagine they will, I mean, I'm sure DoorDash just wants more people ordering more DoorDash, Build it into Apple Intelligence so you can ask, hey, dingus. Order me a bacon and cheese from DoorDash, and it will 100% be able to do it.
Stephen Robles:So Rabbit r 1, also then.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Well and several times, both during the keynote and in briefings and in other places, Federighi talked about, like, Siri will be able to understand and take actions on your behalf. Like, that is the goal of all of this. And I use the example, like, wouldn't it be amazing if if you email me, Steven, and you're like, can we move the recording to a different time? And on its own, Siri can, like, analyze the calendar and be like, actually, that time doesn't work and pop up a note vacation on your phone that says, hey.
Jason Aten:Urgent message from Steven. He needs to move it. Can I suggest this? And it'll just email him back email you back on on my behalf. Like, that is the stuff now that Apple can do that none of those devices can do.
Stephen Robles:Right. And Apple already talked about in the keynote the third party integrations. They talked about superhuman, with email. I forgot what else they talked about, but I'm sure Fantastical will be a part of that. Like, it's all going to be there.
Jason Aten:Yep.
Stephen Robles:So large like, it's they're done, I'm sorry. Yep. Like I was optimistic at first, but they're all gone now, they're all alright, we have a bonus episode I want to talk about backpack and and well backpack or not backpack, that was your your your prompt. But last thing for the episode, MKBHD interviewed Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. Okay.
Stephen Robles:It's it's a great interview. Everybody should watch it. I will, I will put the link in the show notes. But he did like this, one of these blind rankings, which is popular on social media, which I will just say Tim Cook did not understand the the assignment and he never ranked any of them. MKBHD was gonna say, I'm gonna give you 5 Apple Devices and I want you to rate it 1 to 5, but you don't know what devices are coming.
Stephen Robles:So, you know, whatever rating you give it sticks.
Jason Aten:Right. This is
Stephen Robles:how this works. Like, this is a common thing.
Jason Aten:Yeah. So you might start with, like, the iPhone. You're like, well, is that the best thing he's gonna ask me about? Or is it, like Exactly. Where does it fit?
Jason Aten:So
Stephen Robles:And I think the first thing he asked was, like, the MacBook Air. I think, which is a good first one because that is, you know, very meaningful or whatever. So Tim Cook waxed poetically about the MacBook Air, about the moment Steve Jobs took out of the envelope, never ranked it. Never gave a number. To be clear, Tim Cook doesn't number any of these devices.
Stephen Robles:Right?
Jason Aten:He loves all of his children the same. Right.
Stephen Robles:Kudos to Tim k b h d for trying to actually put number rankings on these devices. But there's a moment when he asked about the, see, he's asking about the, the MacBook Air. They talk about that. And so MKBHD says magic mouse. This is the this is the moment which MKBHD shared this clip on social media.
Stephen Robles:But there's like the stare that MKBHD I so wanted him to just look at the camera for half a second as like an office thing just to like let it let the audience know. He knew what he was doing. Look at him, like, nodding in this thing. Just watch the whole interview, or you could fast forward to the 12 minutes where he asked about magic mouse.
Jason Aten:Yeah. He talks about the ergonomics of the magic mouse and it was just delightful.
Stephen Robles:But all that to say, I'm gonna do a poll in our community today. I wanna know what pointing devices people use. But But I post it on social media because I genuinely believe this, like, I use the Magic Mouse every day. This is my Magic Mouse right here. I have the black one from, like, an old Mac Pro or whatever, and, like, here it is.
Stephen Robles:I'm using it right now. I'm training this whole podcast. It's what I used to click. So what and what do you use, Jason? What is your main point?
Jason Aten:I use I mostly use the MX 3, but I have them. I mean, I carry I do carry a Magic Mouse with me in my backpack because it is super, like, light and thin, and that's great. So if I need a mouse going somewhere I use the magic mouse for a very long time. It's great. Just a side note to you for the magic mouse.
Jason Aten:Apparently, if you have a magic mouse and you do the iPhone mirroring, you can do all the same things that you can do on the track, like you can swipe, scroll, tap, whatever with the Magic Mouse. So
Stephen Robles:Okay. So here's the deal. I understand this thing still needs to be USB c and not here so you don't have to put it into turtle mode to charge. I understand that is a major flaw, although I don't really charge it that often so it's not a big deal. I find this to just be my perfect pointing device.
Stephen Robles:I have an MX Master 3, I have it sitting in a drawer. I tried it, and, like, I tried programming the horizontal scroll wheel to, like, go left and right and I was like, I try I did all that, and I just could not just don't like it. I was not as fast with it. It felt not as responsive, not as fluid. And the magic trackpad a lot of people love the magic trackpad, especially video editors, like pinching and zooming or whatever.
Stephen Robles:And I like, something about the magic trackpad and the way I had to hover my hand over it, and maybe I just was doing it wrong, I was holding it wrong, but, like, my hand would just get, like, RSI, like, it would get feel strained to use it for hours and hours. So I couldn't do the magic trackpad because video editing is a lot of what I do, And so the magic mouse, with me being able to swipe horizontal and vertical, whichever, I do the 2 finger swipe to go between spaces all the time. Like, I use spaces a lot, and it's just so fluid, so fast. I am a fan of the magic mouse, and I just wanted to say that.
Jason Aten:I I agree. I do like the magic mouse a lot. The there are only 2 advantages to the MX master. Well, here's the thing I like. I like that I can connect it to 3 devices and just tap to switch between them.
Jason Aten:So so, like, I have 2 Macs and an iPad, and you can just which one am I using? Whereas the magic mouse, you have to, like, reconnect it to its umbilical cord to its mother in order to get, you know, paired with the right imagine if every time you needed to eat, you had to reconnect to the umbilical cord. That's basically this thing.
Stephen Robles:I don't even wanna think about it. It's it's terrible terrible analogy. I will say No.
Jason Aten:It's actually perfect. It just highlights how ridiculous it is.
Stephen Robles:Universal controls actually makes it more useful because, like, I drag files to my iPad all the time. Like, for this podcast, I'll drag the WAV files from my Mac to my iPad. Another reason I'm looking forward to iPhone continuity on Mac is dragging video files from my iPhone to my Mac, because I film with my iPhone a lot, and I find AirDrop still fails just enough to be super annoying. And universal control when I drag files is like 99.9% reliable. So I'm looking forward to that reliability.
Jason Aten:But Yeah. If you had faster Internet, it probably wouldn't fail as often.
Stephen Robles:You know what? I think that's the problem. I think I need to get faster Internet. I installed a Wi Fi 7 access point the other day. I don't know if we'll talk about that.
Jason Aten:I actually thought you were gonna just hang up the
Stephen Robles:call on me when I said that to you. Yeah. Yeah. I like the magic mouse. I would love to know if you also love the magic mouse.
Stephen Robles:If it's your main pointing device, You can let us know in the community, social. Primarytech.fm. I'm gonna do a poll, I want to know what everybody's using. You can also leave us a 5 star rating and review, help us get back up to a 5 star podcast because we're 4.9 right now, which is still really good. Thank you all.
Stephen Robles:But let us know, magic mouse, trackpad, or other mouse in your review. And, we didn't even have I didn't even have time. I was gonna mention Setapp. We're trying to do the little, like, affiliate thing. Anyway, there's a Setapp link in the notes.
Stephen Robles:Try Setapp. It's great. Support the show. I just wanted to we were so into it. I didn't I didn't wanna stop.
Jason Aten:It was such a good conversation.
Stephen Robles:So yeah. So that's that. We're gonna go record a bonus episode, and you can listen to that when you support the show at primary tech dot f m. Click bonus episodes or directly on Apple Podcasts. We're gonna go do that.
Stephen Robles:Thanks for listening. Drop your Apple intelligence questions to us as well, and we'll talk about more all summer. We're gonna talk about it all summer. And, yeah. That's fine.
Stephen Robles:Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.
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