Primary Technology

Stephen Robles: 00:00

David has never had a birthday because David has never been born. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Apple announced a, quote, unquote, new iPad Mini this week. We're gonna compare it to the current model. Plus, Kindle announced a Colorsoft.

Stephen Robles: 00:13

Tesla had its robo taxi event, and SpaceX landed a massive rocket ship. Roster changes at Apple with major executives leaving, and it's gonna be easier to cancel your subscriptions in the future. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh, Audio Hijack, and the generator currently powering my house, but most importantly by you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your cohosts, Steven Robles, and joining me, my friend Jason Aitin. How's it going, Jason?

Jason Aten: 00:36

It's good. I'm really glad to see you back in your normal environment. Though the song sounds of birds in the water was nice.

Stephen Robles: 00:42

I tried last week, I recorded at a lake house in Georgia, and I tried to cut out all the background noise. And as I listened back, I said, oh, no. I heard some chirping.

Jason Aten: 00:50

I feel like that was part of the specialness of that episode, just to be honest.

Stephen Robles: 00:54

Very strange. But it is nice

Jason Aten: 00:55

to have you back on a normal Wi Fi connection. I will say that.

Stephen Robles: 00:58

The Internet is much better. Although, I am literally still on generator power. I think it's a a full week and so the got the whole house. The lights may flicker, that that's been happening. So we'll see.

Stephen Robles: 01:08

But but yeah.

Jason Aten: 01:09

I think you should probably start investing in nuclear power.

Stephen Robles: 01:13

We're gonna get we're gonna get to that too. I honestly do have thought about now the, power, like, battery things for your house.

Jason Aten: 01:21

Yep.

Stephen Robles: 01:21

Because we do have solar panels, but we don't have the batteries. And strangely, you can't, like, run the house on solar power without the batteries.

Jason Aten: 01:28

Right. You

Stephen Robles: 01:29

can't just be, like, a constant, you know, feed thing. I don't know if any, companies went out there to sponsor the show and send me some batter big batteries. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Jason Aten: 01:37

Do it. Do it.

Stephen Robles: 01:39

I never asked you the movie quote last week because I was by a lake and I I was I wasn't because

Jason Aten: 01:43

you were distracted by fish.

Stephen Robles: 01:45

But so was last week the I, Robot quote?

Jason Aten: 01:48

Yeah. And a couple weeks ago. Okay. Let's see. In the last couple weeks.

Stephen Robles: 01:52

Take it easy. Take it just take it easy. Okay? I I should have saved I didn't know Elon was gonna do a We Robot event. I should have saved it for that.

Stephen Robles: 01:58

But, do you know the quote from today? I quote start yeah.

Jason Aten: 02:02

I did not know the quote. I have never seen the movie. I only know that because you told me ahead of time. Normally, Steven doesn't tell me ahead of time.

Stephen Robles: 02:11

I needed time. We start every episode with a movie quote or at least I do, and I try to sometimes I ask Jason to guess what movie it's from. That was from the 2001 movie artificial intelligence which feels, you know, apropos.

Jason Aten: 02:21

Great.

Stephen Robles: 02:22

We have a 1,005 star review shout outs we need to give and while we do, I am going to just be in total shock because last week we talked about phone in your dominant hand pocket or not, and I just of all the things that I have been wrong about, I did not expect this to be the most wrong. I am the most wrong about this.

Jason Aten: 02:40

And the best part about it is I've I told Steven this. I have never been happier about a thing that I just don't even care about. Like, I can't think of something I care about less that makes me more happy than the fact that because I, I, it's just like habit. It's not an, I never made an intentional. Choice about this.

Jason Aten: 02:57

It's just a habit, and yet everyone this has become my superpower is finding the things that Steven cares deeply about that everyone else is like, no. That's not how that works.

Stephen Robles: 03:06

Listen. If there's one thing that, like, Apple y podcasts are good at is, like, teasing out just the most asinine details of Apple device usage, and I think we're, we've done that. We've we've done a lot of that Apple Pencil direction, battery percentage. 1st, I did not think that I so many people would put their phone in their non dominant hand pocket. I just I still don't even understand it.

Stephen Robles: 03:29

But, anyway, that's some of our 5 star reviews. And listen, if you do that, you could leave us a 5 star review this week, and in the comment in the review, say that you put it in your dominant hand pocket or your non dominant. And, listen, everyone who uses the puts the phone in their dominant hand pocket at you, I need you to leave reviews this week and let us know because right now I think there's 2 people that have agreed with me and literally 1,000 that have agreed, with Jason.

Jason Aten: 03:54

Literally the entire Internet. But I I just wanna say, I was trying I actually interrogated my feelings about this. I spent some because I was trying to figure out how did I end up doing it that way. On the show? I thought it had something to do with like sitting in the car and it has nothing to do with that.

Jason Aten: 04:09

I think it's because I sometimes have to carry keys and I actually have to use my keys with my dominant hand. I tried, I literally tried to unlock a door with my non dominant hand. Nope. Could not stick the key in. So I would pull the keys out with my right hand and put them right into the thing.

Jason Aten: 04:23

So they go in my right pocket. Also on most men's jeans, that little copper nub is above the right hand pocket. And I do think that at one point, I realized this is a bad place to put the phone because of that. So I it wasn't like some sort of well thought out thing. I think it was circumstance, and now it's just what I do.

Stephen Robles: 04:42

I just I just can't believe this. Just shout out to Kristen Otto in our primary tech community. You go to social.primary tech.fm because she was one person who agreed with me. She puts in the dominant pocket, and I think there's one other person in YouTube comments. But anyway, Slab Feet from the USA gave us a 5 star rating review on Apple Podcast.

Stephen Robles: 04:59

They fell into the Apple ecosystem 4 years ago. Never misses an episode. Thank you for that. Christian Devere from the USA, iPhone in non dominant pocket. This is the new thing.

Stephen Robles: 05:07

People now have a list of things they do when they leave us a review. They say battery percentage on or off, Apple pencil tipped towards or away from volume buttons, and now non dominant pocket, which is great. Riff8 rocks from the USA, and, we're at the top of their podcast list, moved above some other big podcasts. That's fun. Cheetah Heels from USA, they're a piano player.

Stephen Robles: 05:25

They were talking about 9ths and 10ths as they were talking about hand size, which Love it. Reference acknowledged. Dangerous Dave 27 from Great Britain. He said it's a roundabout, not a traffic circle. Which one did you say it was?

Jason Aten: 05:36

I said traffic circle. I did I you know, the traffic circle I was referring to this came up because I was talking about the full self driving and how it it did not seem to anticipate that it should not go 45 through the traffic circle.

Stephen Robles: 05:50

Mhmm. Mhmm.

Jason Aten: 05:51

There is a sign, I don't know, a 100 meters before what I call the traffic circle that definitely says roundabout ahead. So whatever. I'm happy to be wrong. This is another thing that whatever. I just it's a circle and traffic goes through it.

Jason Aten: 06:04

So They're just Oh, technically, the Wikipedia page just uses them all interchangeably. So

Stephen Robles: 06:08

Well, okay. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Delta alpha Zulu from Great Britain, nondominant pocket.

Stephen Robles: 06:14

You know, it's non dominant hand pocket, but I'm gonna just shorten it for the future. Stephen Greer from Great Britain, he said always light mode icons on his iPhone, because the Apple Watch and Mac don't unify the light versus light versus dark icons. I thought that was interesting. That's, that's the next level. Brown 1709 from the USA, phoning dominant oh, he this was the other the other person.

Stephen Robles: 06:34

The Brown 1709, phoning dominant hand pocket. Thank you. Marcel from the Netherlands, nondominant pocket. Nobody's perfect. Robert I.

Stephen Robles: 06:42

Surface from the USA. Tiazash 93 from Great Britain, Chamond from the USA, and Trappers Hat Stew. I don't know what that name means, but I love it. From Great Britain, nondominant pocket. I don't do and one oh, one shout out I wanted to mention, because, I mentioned this was weeks ago.

Stephen Robles: 06:59

If you're a developer and you listen to the show and you make an app, we'd love to give you a shout out on the show. And so this is from developer Damon. He makes an app called ParentPath, and it's basically an app for your iPhone where you can if you have kids, a great way to kind of track some milestones and different information about your kids, even things, you know, like, doctor's sickness, stuff like that. And, it's a great app. It is free to download.

Stephen Robles: 07:21

There are in app purchases. But, the best part is app privacy. Data not collected. That's what you wanna see, from an app like this. No data collected.

Stephen Robles: 07:29

So if you are a parent and you have kids, you wanna kinda keep track of some of their milestones and information, parent path. That link will be, in the show notes. And if you're a developer out there, DM me in the community. It's kind of the best way. I have so many messages across, like, YouTube and social media.

Stephen Robles: 07:46

But if you're a developer and you have an app, I would love to give you a shout out. DM me in our community, social dot primary tech dot f m, and links in the show notes too, and I'd love to give you a shout out there. So there we go. We got news, Jason. In the biggest air quotes possible, a new iPad mini, and, I'd like to show a picture of it now if you're watching on YouTube.

Stephen Robles: 08:06

Here it is. Holding the new iPad mini while wearing the old iPad mini. That's if you're just listening to the show, come showing the meme with the guy wearing the plaid shirt holding the same plaid shirt. That's that's what this new iPad mini is. Let's be real.

Stephen Robles: 08:19

Let's be real.

Jason Aten: 08:19

Yeah. I mean Okay.

Stephen Robles: 08:21

So here it is. Apple announced the new one. The I think the most egregious part of this whole announcement was that the wallpaper for the iPad mini didn't change. You know, if any like, when Apple announces new products or updated products, they at least, like, do a new wallpaper look, and this was, like, literally copy paste. Like, this is the same wallpaper as the iPad 6th generation that came out 3 years ago?

Jason Aten: 08:41

I think that's right.

Stephen Robles: 08:42

3 years ago. Yeah. Because I I did the review on it, actually with a pilot. So anyway, new quote unquote new iPad mini. You can preorder it now.

Stephen Robles: 08:51

It comes next week, I believe. Yes. I did preorder 1. We'll see if I'll be keeping one because of the next announcement announcement about the Kindle Colorsoft. But I I just wanted to go to the, comparison page.

Stephen Robles: 09:01

Here's the iPad mini 6th generation, the previous model, with the new one a 17 pro. Starts at 499 at double the capacity. Kudos for that. Starts at 128 gigabytes instead of 64. Literally the exact same screen.

Stephen Robles: 09:16

We're gonna have to see about the jelly scrolling. New chip, a17 pro instead of the a15, Apple Intelligence just there, like that's a feature, not on the old one. Same camera, same front facing camera on the portrait side. It is the only iPad now that has it on the portrait side now. USB C Touch ID, no face ID.

Stephen Robles: 09:37

Jason's, probably the one reason Jason might upgrade is Wi Fi 6e.

Jason Aten: 09:41

Can't wait.

Stephen Robles: 09:43

Instead of Wi Fi 6. And it does support Apple Pencil Pro, which might seem kind of, like, meh, but that was actually piqued my interest because I realized when I upgraded to the M4 iPad Pro earlier this year, I'd had the Apple Pencil Pro, and I went to use it on my mini, and I realized, oh, shoot. You can't do that.

Jason Aten: 10:04

Right.

Stephen Robles: 10:05

The Apple Pencil Pro doesn't work on the old mini. So now it will support that, also the USB c one. And you get a bigger capacity as you can get it up to 512 gigabytes now if you want. So, yeah, that's the quote unquote new iPad mini. Oh, and it comes in, Apple's ink cartridge out of ink, since the iPhone 16 launch.

Stephen Robles: 10:24

Here's the colors, Pink. Oh, not the old one. I can't even tell. Here's the blue, here's the purple, and here's the starlight.

Jason Aten: 10:32

I have a quick question. Mhmm. Why do you think that they made it support the Apple Pencil Pro? Because now this $499 device, if you're someone who uses the Apple Pencil is like a $500 or $630 device because they didn't move the camera. That's why it's the that way on the other ones.

Jason Aten: 10:51

Right? That's why on the pros, it's that way because they moved the camera and same thing with the, I have the most them too in my iPad errors, but they didn't move the camera. And so it it's that actually feels like a weird thing to me that they that they made it support the Apple pencil pro. I know that there's technically some different gestures available, but I don't think there's a lot of Procreate users on the on the the iPad mini.

Stephen Robles: 11:14

Well, you know, a lot of people you have to think of the iPad mini as like a mini iPad Air, not a mini base model iPad.

Jason Aten: 11:22

Sure.

Stephen Robles: 11:23

Like, Apple puts it in, like, the slightly higher tier even though the screen still

Jason Aten: 11:27

I mean, it's more expensive. So yes.

Stephen Robles: 11:29

It's more expensive. So I think, you know, the new iPad Air supports Apple Pencil Pro, and so I think it's kind of, like, they put the iPad Mini in that lineup even though it barely got any upgrades. It so I guess that's why. So, like, I don't know. And maybe most iPad Mini buyers are also iPad big big iPad buyers like me.

Stephen Robles: 11:46

Like, yeah, multiple I don't I don't know.

Jason Aten: 11:49

The different question then. Uh-huh. The the in this case, they could have made it backwards compatible with the regular Apple Pencil because there's no camera there. So they could have just made it so that it supported both so that if you had an Apple Pencil and you bought the iPad mini, the new one that you could just keep using that apple pencil. I don't know.

Jason Aten: 12:06

That that is kinda weird to me.

Stephen Robles: 12:07

But then it won't it wouldn't work with the apple pencil pro if they kept the old compatibility.

Jason Aten: 12:12

Well, I'm saying why they could just put lots of magnets. Like, there's no reason. There's nothing there.

Stephen Robles: 12:16

Like, there's no camera on

Jason Aten: 12:17

this desk. Camera there. There's not there's no buttons on that side.

Stephen Robles: 12:20

That that is

Jason Aten: 12:20

Literally, there's nothing.

Stephen Robles: 12:21

Yeah. They they probably should've.

Jason Aten: 12:24

I did like, Jason Snell's take. He wrote a piece in 6 colors about this being kind of weird because they put the 17th, the a 17 pro, which is the chip from the 15 pro and it is the minimum chip required for apple intelligence. So that that's understandable why they would do that. But also if you remember that that is like the chip that is on the old 3 nanometer process, that everything we've heard is that Apple wants to be done using that process as quickly as possible. And yet now they stuck it into a new device, like a brand new device that may not get upgraded for several years.

Jason Aten: 12:57

And I'm curious what your opinion is. I think that it's one of 2 things. 1, they just had a truckload of these in Tim Cook's office. We've talked about that before. And and these are not these have like one less GPU core, I think, than the iPhones did maybe.

Jason Aten: 13:11

So maybe they had a whole bunch of them that couldn't be used in iPhones. So they're like, well, let's stick them in this. Or the alternative is there just aren't that many people that use the iPad mini possibly. And so it's like, well, this isn't the high high production of a device. We can just stick these in there for now.

Stephen Robles: 13:26

I think I think it's both of those. I think it's not a high production device, and they got a bunch of these laying around. The binned version with the less GPU. And so and it's the bare minimum for Apple Intelligence, which

Jason Aten: 13:38

Yep.

Stephen Robles: 13:38

I know everyone who loves the iPad Mini. There's lots of people out there who do. I mean, I I edited podcasts on the iPad Mini for, like, 2 years straight, without, like and it's a great size, it's great for reading, although we're gonna talk about the Colorsoft in a second from Kindle. I know, like, Farooq loves it. Everybody loves the iPad Mini, but I also feel like it's like the iPhone Mini.

Stephen Robles: 13:57

Everybody says they love the iPhone Mini, but then no one buys it. I think there's just very few people that buy it and it's just because it's more expensive and you think of the mass market, if they can spend $500 on an iPad, they can get probably a new iPad Air on sale, like at Best Buy for $500, or an iPad Mini, like, they're gonna get the iPad Air. And the iPad Air has, like, an M Processor. And so you look you know, people, I think, just in their minds, they know, like, oh, the m is the Apple, like, good chip. You know, I've talked to people, and they're, like, yeah, I know I need to get a m laptop or whatever.

Stephen Robles: 14:32

And so I think just in their mind, like, they just will go to the iPad Air. So, yeah, I think it's a product in their lineup, like Tim Cook said, and they just put whatever in there, and, yeah, the the only reason this is probably upgraded is so they can say Apple Intelligence, and then this way, like, a year from now, Apple can say, you can get Apple Intelligence on any and all devices, like, whichever device you buy, which means the base model iPad should probably get upgraded soon because that would not have Apple Intelligence right now.

Jason Aten: 14:58

Correct. Correct.

Stephen Robles: 14:59

Maybe it won't, but we'll see, that's supposedly Mark Gurman I think said early next year but let me ask you this now that we have a press release iPad Mini which was supposedly one of the hardware devices that were coming out soon do you think we'll still get an October event with some m four stuff?

Jason Aten: 15:15

I think we will get some form of release. That's very, very k j way of saying that. I'm I'm hedging all of my bets.

Stephen Robles: 15:23

Something will happen.

Jason Aten: 15:25

I think and I do think it'll be more than a press release. I think that it could be the kind of thing where they do the, like, invite some people to New York or whatever for some stuff. I think that that would be the most likely scenario. I don't think they're doing an event at Upper Park at this point.

Stephen Robles: 15:40

No. No. No.

Jason Aten: 15:40

Big thing where they're gonna invite a couple thousand people. So I I think that that's that's possible still this this month. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, we're getting, like, we're getting closer to the end of the month.

Jason Aten: 15:51

So, like, we should know within days if that's really gonna happen.

Stephen Robles: 15:54

So Yeah. And, I mean, we still could see m 4 Mac mini, the m4 pro or m4 max upgraded MacBook pro, possibly m4imac, USB c magic keyboard and accessories, please? Like, why? This this right here, my magic keyboard, still has lightning.

Jason Aten: 16:12

I mean I

Stephen Robles: 16:13

just Tim Cook

Jason Aten: 16:14

has a lot of lightning ports hanging around in his office. He's gotta keep sticking them in something.

Stephen Robles: 16:17

Just the ports. Just the ports. Just just the ports are hanging around.

Jason Aten: 16:20

Just holes. Just random holes.

Stephen Robles: 16:21

That sounds like a tale like a horror movie. There's lightning ports.

Jason Aten: 16:23

It's Stephen Kingbuck, I think, actually. It's where the lanyards come from. They come out of the lightning ports.

Stephen Robles: 16:29

Okay. That's the iPad mini. I I ordered 1. I don't know if I'll keep it. We'll see.

Stephen Robles: 16:34

Because, honestly, I went to the 11 inch M4 iPad Pro, and it's it's kind of a perfect size because I edit podcasts on it. I've been reading more just on physical books. I actually don't do it, but that might change because Kindle also announced something this week or Amazon announced it, which is the Kindle Colorsoft. It is a first ever color Kindle and a lot of people were saying, like, why would you like most you're just reading books. It's all in black and white anyways.

Stephen Robles: 17:01

Well, anyways, well, you could read comics on it, and it is supposedly a high dpi. I think it's, like, 300 dpi display, so you, you know and you get color covers. That's cool, but this was very interesting to me. I've used Kindles in the past. I've had a Kindle paperwhite, and I do like it.

Stephen Robles: 17:19

The last one I had, it was it was just old, and so I I ordered this one too. It was very expensive weekdays, Very expensive. I guess we'll talk about Sonos as well. But I ordered this whole thing, like, with the little wireless charging pad and stuff, and, this looked it just looked really cool. It's, like, 299 or 279 if you attach it to your Amazon account, when you order and it comes out October 30th.

Stephen Robles: 17:41

Mine says it'll deliver November 1st, so a couple weeks from now, but I don't know. Do you use a Kindle? You can

Jason Aten: 17:46

I do? Remember you made fun of me one time? You wanted to know why I used a Kindle when I was reading at the pool instead of using my iPad mini?

Stephen Robles: 17:52

I'm,

Jason Aten: 17:53

I know

Stephen Robles: 17:54

that was facetious. I know why.

Jason Aten: 17:55

You know, there's 2 things truthfully that I love about it is you can use it in bright sunlight without the battery dying in 6 minutes. Also the battery life, I think I think I charge my Kindle 4 times a year. Like it's just plug it in every once in a while. I, there's never been a time when I pulled it out where I couldn't use it as long as I needed to use it. But the thing about this is I don't understand.

Jason Aten: 18:18

I'm sorry. I was gonna sneeze. I've never heard any. I've never heard anyone asking Amazon to put out a color version, but I hear everyone asking them to just put a stupid page turn button on this thing. And now I I don't understand, like, what they're solving.

Jason Aten: 18:36

Is there anyone asking for a color one? I think it's cool. But like for what people do on a Kindle, I feel like this was not the necessary thing, but for what people do on a Kindle, man, a page turn button was really nice.

Stephen Robles: 18:48

I did see a lot of people saying now that they took away all physical buttons from, like, all models, like, they might get an iPad mini because

Jason Aten: 18:56

Yeah.

Stephen Robles: 18:56

They physical buttons. I guess the only Kindles I had in the past were the paper whites that didn't have buttons anyway, and so I didn't, like and I I use iPads and stuff, so I I don't miss the buttons. But I guess buttons are a big deal, but, yeah, now this is, like, the the e reader lineup, and they do have a new paper white edition. So if you don't care for the color, you basically save a $100. You still get the 7 inch 300 pixels per inch display.

Stephen Robles: 19:21

You know, battery life lasts even longer on that version. 12 weeks, they say, instead of 8 weeks with the color version. Yeah. No no page turn buttons anywhere. So I don't know.

Stephen Robles: 19:31

Do you wait. So does yours have page buttons?

Jason Aten: 19:33

No. Because, the one that I had that had page buttons died 12 years ago or something like that, and that's fine. Right. But it's like the the screen, especially on the Kindle and the Kindle Paperwhite. The Kindle Paperwhite has a great screen.

Jason Aten: 19:45

Don't get me wrong. But it's not like the best touch experience. And so there's a lot of times where you go to turn the page and you tap in an area and all of a sudden, like, the UI pops up or something and I'm like, wait, what did I where do I have to do this or yeah. I just the button was really nice.

Stephen Robles: 20:00

Okay. Well, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. People people like the buttons so I don't know.

Stephen Robles: 20:04

I'm gonna try it. I again, I I usually buy physical books anyway so maybe this was kind of a bad idea. I also haven't had a Kindle in a long time, so maybe I'll enjoy reading on this. I don't know. It's a lot lighter than a physical book, and you don't have to, like

Jason Aten: 20:16

And you can take a 1,000 of them without having to try to fit them all on your backpack.

Stephen Robles: 20:20

Exactly. Exactly. And then, like, you know, break do you break spines on physical books if you get it? Like, do you?

Jason Aten: 20:24

I don't think so. But my my habit is, like, I'll buy a book on Kindle, and if I like the book, then I'll buy a physical copy to put on my shelf.

Stephen Robles: 20:31

I you know, I do that sometimes too. I do that sometimes too. Anyway, the reason why it was also an expensive week, Sonos announced new stuff. This has been, like, long rumored. New arc, new sub, and so right now you can get these we could preorder the Sonos Arc Ultra for a $1,000 and it it looks exactly the same as as the previous model except it supposedly now has something called sound motion technology.

Stephen Robles: 20:56

Don't know what that means, but Sound Motion Technology is better immersive sound, and you can pair that with the new subgen 4 for $800. Yes, Sonos stuff is expensive. And, now I was joking that it was an expensive week for me, but I'm gonna be honest, I did not buy either of these because I looked at my arc and I looked at my sub gen 3 and I said, you sound great and, I'm good. So and Yeah. I think I think this actually replaced the previous Arc.

Stephen Robles: 21:24

Like, I don't you can't get, like, the old Arc. They're calling it the Arc Ultra, but it's not like you can get the Arc regular or the Arc normal. Like, it's just the it's just the new Arc. So

Jason Aten: 21:36

Yeah. It's kinda like the Vision Pro. There is no Vision. It's just, you can only buy the one that's better. And I do, I mean, I, I, I give you credit because if we know anything about Steven, it's a, he is a sucker for words that sound like important technology that he doesn't fully understand.

Jason Aten: 21:52

And usually that involves spending some money, but I think it's that that's good. I don't know. I mean, everyone I know who has Sonos stuff, including Steven, loves

Stephen Robles: 22:01

it. I enjoy it. Yeah.

Jason Aten: 22:01

I just I mean, maybe if I put them in my house, I would be like, this is better. But like, still, we're rocking the 2 HomePods in the living room, and they're a great sound system with the Apple TV.

Stephen Robles: 22:12

To be honest, like, if you wanted to get a nice home theater setup and you wanted to look at Sonos, the Sonos Beam and the Submini, which are the cheaper soundbar and sub, are actually great. Like, I have the Beam Gen 2, which is $500. You can usually find it on sale close to 300, and then the Submini, which is well, it's, 429 instead of it's, like, half the price. It's 400 instead of $800 actually sound amazing. Like, it's really good.

Stephen Robles: 22:43

So unless you have a huge room that you wanna, like, fill sound in this massive space, the submini and the Sonos Beam is actually a great combo, and then you can if you wanna go all the way, you can pair those with like Sonos Era 100 as rear speakers and like you're set, like it's great. App still has like they're always they're constantly making it out. Sonos is like our app is getting better, everybody relax. I don't know. I just use AirPlay, so it doesn't matter.

Stephen Robles: 23:09

But anyway, this is the first product they've launched since the whole app debacle, so that's kind of apropos. But just I just use AirPlay. It's fine. It's fine. It is.

Stephen Robles: 23:19

We have a bunch of other news that we need to talk about Tesla's robo taxi event, big click to cancel ruling that should make it easier to, change your subscriptions or at least cancel them, but I wanna tell you about our first sponsor today, HelloFresh. HelloFresh. I've used HelloFresh, in the past, getting a new box coming soon. Love HelloFresh. It is America's number one meal kit where you get farm fresh pre portioned ingredients, and you can make seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep.

Stephen Robles: 23:45

Skip the trips to the grocery store, which with hurricane, Milton in the grocery stores have just been madness down here. There's no bread, no eggs anywhere. You got a HelloFresh box, and you make home cooking fun, easy, and affordable. That's why it's America's number one meal kit. Jason, you say you've done a HelloFresh.

Stephen Robles: 23:59

You said your wife enjoyed it. Right?

Jason Aten: 24:01

Yeah. We do. We it was great. I don't remember. We had something it was, like, salmon or something.

Jason Aten: 24:04

It was very, very, very good. It just Very good.

Stephen Robles: 24:07

It's very good, and I enjoyed it because, the kids can actually get involved with cooking. And so we actually you know, they have all the ingredient, the menu and the recipe, and they tell you how to make everything step by step, which I'm not a chef nor am I a lawyer. We've talked about that before. We're like, I'm no chef, but they make it so easy to actually follow the directions and the meals. Here's what's on deck this week.

Stephen Robles: 24:27

These are the kind of meals you can expect from HelloFresh. One pot chicken sausage and chickpea soup. I like chicken sausage, that looks pretty good. You get, one pan pork enchiladas. I like the one pan nomenclature.

Stephen Robles: 24:38

It means I'm not making a bunch of dishes. You know what I mean? Right. Give me a one pan deal. I like that.

Stephen Robles: 24:43

Then a one pan banh mi style beef tacos. All this sounds amazing, and I can't wait to get my box to make all of these things. This is, you know, make the fall the tastiest season yet. You can get kind of fall themed meals with that farm fresh produce, autumn inspired recipes delivered right to your door, and HelloFresh has tons of options for whatever you're craving. You can choose from the changing menu of over 50 recipes each week, plus take your pick from over 100 market add on items, like desserts, breakfast, and snacks.

Stephen Robles: 25:12

Plus they have different, like, themes, so you can do fit and wholesome, quick and easy, vegetarian. You'll always find something to love from HelloFresh. And again, my kids love being involved and kind of making a meal all together. So you can get 10 free meals at hellofresh.com/ free primary. They kinda took our name and turned it, so free primary is the URL.

Stephen Robles: 25:32

The link is also in the show notes, and it's applied across 7 boxes, new subscribers only, and it varies by plan, but that's 10 free HelloFresh meals just by going to hellofresh.com/freeprimary. Remember, it's America's number one meal kit. Jason and I are getting a box soon, and we've loved doing it in the past. So go to hellofresh.com/freeprimary. But thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this episode.

Stephen Robles: 25:59

We gotta talk about this robo taxi event. Yeah. Let me talk about a little little about about Elon. We're we're not don't we're not gonna get anybody mad. We're not getting we're not getting worked up, but Elon had this robo taxi event in Los Angeles.

Stephen Robles: 26:11

And if you wanna see a video, you should watch MKBHD's video. He actually did a ride in the robo taxi, and this link will be in the show notes, and he talked about it. This car has no steering wheel, no pedals. This is supposedly going to be a fully automated taxi in 2027, I believe Elon said. Right?

Stephen Robles: 26:30

Is that what he said? 2027?

Jason Aten: 26:32

Well, he said that production should go into it should go into production before 2027. Correct. Sort of, maybe. But he's not

Stephen Robles: 26:40

And maybe as you said, he'd shave his head if this thing actually gets made before 2027. But, look, there's a there's an image of it. It has very much, Cybertruck vibes. It has, like, the one light bar on the front and the light bar on the back. The doors go up like scissor style, which I feel like complicate the mechanics, but anyway, just 2 seats, big old screen in the middle, and you would supposedly just get in, put your seat belt on, and it drives you wherever.

Stephen Robles: 27:06

The wheels, which look very futuristic, basically just painted gold. Maybe PhD, like, just did is closed in on the, tires, and, like, they look real futuristic, but they just, like, painted the actual rubber tire

Jason Aten: 27:18

parts. They're just continental tires.

Stephen Robles: 27:22

But then let me go back to the, the door thing. There was also the Tesla robot and all that, but, yeah, I won't get into that, but anyway, robo taxi is Jason, is this vaporware?

Jason Aten: 27:34

I mean, I put vaporware directly in my headline about this, that it's vaporware. I mean, but technically, any everything I think this might be, like, Neil Patel's take quote on this, but basically, everything's vaporware till it ships. Right? Like, technically, if you show it. Now in the car industry, it is really common to show concepts before they, like, before they ship.

Jason Aten: 27:57

If you've ever been to the North American auto show, they, like, you'll see a lot of stuff that hasn't shipped or isn't going to ship. The thing is that the car makers are like pretty clear. Like this is a concept car. We're not talking about ever shipping this. Right.

Jason Aten: 28:09

And Tesla did sort of this weird in between thing where it's like, we're, this is absolutely coming, but we're not going to give you basically any details about what might be coming. And so it was, I don't think, I don't think that, I mean, I put in my article that I am almost certain that SpaceX will send people to Mars before Tesla ships these things.

Stephen Robles: 28:32

Wow. I mean, we've talked about Waymo before.

Jason Aten: 28:36

Okay. Then so let's explain the difference, though. Every Waymo has, like, a $50,000 sensor array on it. It has 3 types of sensors, cameras, LIDAR, and radar. Right?

Stephen Robles: 28:48

Yes.

Jason Aten: 28:49

LIDAR is extremely expensive. Those you the the that's where a bulk of that cost is. And Tesla used to have I think they used to include a Lidar sensor. They do not have Lidar in any other devices. And Elon Musk is, like, adamantly opposed to doing that.

Jason Aten: 29:03

They are adamant that they can get there with just vision, which is cameras and AI.

Stephen Robles: 29:07

And let and let's be clear, like, the Waymo because you you have schooled me on full self driving in the past. And, like, this Waymo car, like, if you're watching youtube.com/atparmartechshow, it looks crazy. There's, you know, sensors all over it. Like, it looks like a bunch of contusions on this thing, and it only goes through very set routes.

Jason Aten: 29:23

Yep.

Stephen Robles: 29:23

Like you you cannot take this to any destination, very set routes. I imagine if the Tesla robo taxi were ever to be a thing, it would Elon would probably want it just like anywhere in Los Angeles or anywhere in San Francisco, which again, it increases the challenge not only because you don't have lidar and these other sensors, but you're also introducing more varied what but is is there anything to the point that because full self driving is a feature in Tesla cars right now, that Tesla might have more data to support this kind of self driving thing, or is that moot?

Jason Aten: 29:55

Well, that's an important point because Tesla literally has cameras on millions of vehicles. Even vehicles that don't have a full self driving still have cameras on them. I have not looked at the terms of service. I don't know if it's like gathering external information to like send back, but that's, I mean, that is a real advantage that, that Tesla has in terms of gathering data. How do humans respond in situations?

Jason Aten: 30:19

How do, like, different cars respond in different situations? That's true. The the truth is just like I so I was driving that model 3 for a while at full self driving and you turn full self driving on and it starts raining and it's dark and it's like, yes, sorry. You're out of like right? So imagine having a robo taxi that just doesn't work when it's dark and rainy.

Jason Aten: 30:39

Like, when do you need a ride the most when you don't wanna walk down the street is when it's dark and rainy? Like, come on.

Stephen Robles: 30:44

But So you land at a LAX. It's raining, and it says, yeah. We'll take you somewhere. It takes you halfway the route, and it's just like, oh, sorry. Like, we can't Sorry.

Jason Aten: 30:51

You have to get out now. The scissor door is just open in the flood of rain. No. I mean, it's but the the the reason is Tesla or Elon Musk is adamant about only using vision because it is so much less expensive. Mhmm.

Jason Aten: 31:03

And the truth is that if autonomous driving if autonomous vehicles are gonna become a thing, the cost structure has to go down. This is this this is like a parallel story to SpaceX. The whole reason SpaceX is making their rockets reusable is it cuts the cost of a launch from, like, a few $100,000,000 to, like, 2 digit $1,000,000. Right? Like, it's like a it's a huge cost savings, and it that's the only way that it becomes viable.

Jason Aten: 31:24

The same thing is true with full self driving or autonomous vehicles in general. But I just don't think that this first of all, like, they're gonna sell this for less than $30,000. There's no way. There's just no way that they're gonna sell it for less than $30,000. Oh,

Stephen Robles: 31:37

that's something like, people if you remember the Cybertruck announcement, I believe it was gonna be, like, 40 something thousand. It was gonna be the base model Cybertruck. That was like

Jason Aten: 31:45

the announcement That's 95,000 is the base level. So like

Stephen Robles: 31:48

the price yeah. I don't I just ignore the current pricing thing but you know it's it's interesting I I don't know 2027, you know, almost in 2025 so we're talking like 2 years less than 2 years away. I imagine this would be much farther off, but what complicates it so that was the WeRobot event where there was, like, the robo taxi. They also showed off this, like, weird bus thing. I'm not really sure what that was.

Stephen Robles: 32:09

And then, like, the robots.

Jason Aten: 32:10

The roboven. Not the robo van, the roboven.

Stephen Robles: 32:15

I did not sign it anyways. That's okay.

Jason Aten: 32:18

That's what that's what Elon Musk said. He said some people are gonna wanna call it the Robovan, but it's Robovan, which I think he was just joking because this is he has this weird sense of humor that no one is, like, are you joking? Are you being serious? But I

Stephen Robles: 32:28

think it's a riboflavin. That's what they that's what they

Jason Aten: 32:30

told me. I think you're absolutely right.

Stephen Robles: 32:32

Riboflavin. But also, like, in the same week of this event was also SpaceX. It was the first time they have caught the rocket booster. This is actually the video, and I'll put this link in the show notes from the Associated Press. This is incredible.

Stephen Robles: 32:47

Like, this is amazing. Like, seeing this, it looks like some futuristic, like, sci fi movie, counting like, amazing. SpaceX accomplishment. And so it is such a weird, like, dichotomy to have this WeRobot event with the robo taxi, maybe it'll come, maybe it won't, and then actually, like, doing something really significant, like, amazing achievement. Anyway, you and you wrote about this.

Stephen Robles: 33:13

So how do you like, what is this juxtaposition? How can Okay.

Jason Aten: 33:17

Here's the bottom line. On Thursday, there's this WeRobot thing, and then over the weekend, there's this space ice thing. And the contrast between these two things is, like, could not be more striking. One of them is a hyped up mostly ridiculous demo of a vaporware product that we're not sure we'll ever ship, at least not on the timelines that anyone is promising. And the other one, arguably, the SpaceX is maybe the most significant technological advance of our lifetime because what they demonstrated by the ability.

Jason Aten: 33:46

First of all, they it's a 23 story tall rocket that they just caught out of midair, like with these, they call them the chopsticks. And if you watch the close-up, there's these, what they call the nubs or the nibs that just like land and just set right on it. And it's just like, it is mind blowing to think like that. They just pulled this off. Yeah.

Jason Aten: 34:08

And, people used to give SpaceX, like, a hard time because they'd they'd launch one of these things and then it would go up in this and and it or it would blow up. Yeah. But that's because they are making these things at a factor of, like, a tenth the cost of what other rocket companies were making. So they can blow up each rocket. They can rub 10 rockets and they have accomplished so much more.

Jason Aten: 34:29

They have this iterative approach. Right? And that is like by design. It's like, it went up. It did this thing at this thing.

Jason Aten: 34:34

Okay. And then it blew up, but we don't care about the blowup part because this is just a test. And this is such a huge thing because Elon Musk has said for a long time that the goal is to put people on Mars or to be able to, to send people back to the moon or just to, you know, habitats in different places. You can't do that. If it takes 3 weeks to move this rocket from wherever it crashes in the ocean or lands on a thing back to the launch pad.

Jason Aten: 34:57

But when you can land it on the launch pad, now you move closer to something more akin to air travel. Right? Not, not exactly the same, because this is still gonna be a lot more expensive and you don't have like 7,000 rockets taking off every day. But even if you aren't going to Mars, think about if you could have one of these things and now suddenly going across the Pacific ocean takes like 40 minutes instead of 14 hours. Right.

Jason Aten: 35:19

It is the economic possibilities here are unbelievable. And I think what's interesting is, and I'll just make this point briefly. The reason the two things are so different is Tesla's a public company, and its valuation is almost entirely based on its promise that it will unlock this fleet of robo taxis that people will buy. And then when they are not going places, other people will just get in them and they'll make money. So the owners will make money off of the things that they buy.

Jason Aten: 35:50

And that's why Tesla's like a $750,000,000,000 company right now. SpaceX is private. They're not a public company. They don't have to impress investors. Right?

Jason Aten: 35:59

They are just gonna keep iterating on this and keep working on this and keep doing this until they get it right. And so they're actually like shipping. Now they still are like a little bit later than they promised, but like, I don't know. They're not trying to pipe up a bunch of investors just to get more money so they can keep keep doing this stuff.

Stephen Robles: 36:15

Right. I think yeah. It's a great article. My thing is I don't wanna talk about Elon as a person. I'm talking about, like, for real, like,

Jason Aten: 36:24

talking about him as a meme.

Stephen Robles: 36:26

It's more so it's more like the issue with the Internet and social media nowadays, like, the lack of like, there's no nuance, you know, that's that's the bottom line, like, social media on the Internet, like, there's no nuance. And so you have this guy, Elon, who here at SpaceX is doing, like, genuinely impressive groundbreaking things. He's also announcing robo taxis, which is kinda weird, but okay. And then he also owns a social network, and 1 I think one of the, you know, 2 things can be true at the same time that, like, SpaceX is doing really cool work, Tesla might be announcing vaporware, and also something bad might be happening in the 3rd place, and, like, all those things can be true at the same time, and I don't think a lot of people, because of the Internet, can grasp the nuance to differentiate that. And I feel like people see this rocket launch, and they're landing, and it's amazing.

Stephen Robles: 37:24

And it's like, okay. Well, Elon Musk is a genius. That means everything he does must be great. And that is where, like, there's a breakdown. Because I'm still on x, and, like, it's not great.

Stephen Robles: 37:38

It's like the content moderation is not great. The spam is just wild. Also, just know to throw it a shade to threads too, like, their algorithm is crazy too, like, no one's, like, doing great in this short form, posting social media thing, but also, like, Elon is very active in, like, the political side, like, he was literally at a Trump rally early, like, last week, and so it is increasingly difficult, I think, for people to separate these things. And when someone accomplishes something great, it's like, I think people apply that greatness to everything they do, and listen, I might play trumpet really great, but I really suck at playing drums. Like, you know what I mean?

Stephen Robles: 38:26

Like, because you're good at one thing, even if it's tangentially related, like in music, it doesn't mean you're great at all the things. And I and this is not just about Elon, this is just kinda about the Internet in general, I I worry about people's ability to parse the nuance out of these companies, out of these people, because also it's, like, it's even less company based and more person based. Like, people ascribe, like, they think Elon before they think SpaceX, Tesla, and X. You know, they just they think about as the person. They just kinda refer to that, and so it becomes like a blanket statement for all the things that, like, Elon or whoever is under.

Stephen Robles: 39:04

And so I I'm just and then throwing AI generated junk and all this other kind of stuff. We're gonna talk about Adobe Generative Phil in a second. Like, throw in all that to complicate matters and I'm just, like, long term, I'm I'm concerned about, like, what this means for how people think about these things and the ability to parse out the details, and I think that's important, like, to be able to do that. I don't know. Am I am I talking crazy?

Jason Aten: 39:30

No. Because no. It's really pretty simple. You you've hit it on the head. I'm just gonna be more blunt about it.

Jason Aten: 39:35

Elon Musk, not a good role model, not a great leader, extraordinary visionary. Like, those things can all be true. Like, I don't tell my children, you should look up to this guy as an example of how you should treat people. But at the same time, like there are people who are a force of nature and are able to make other people accomplish things that wouldn't otherwise be done. And he has proven like the model 3 is a great example.

Jason Aten: 40:02

The model 3 was like a horrendous production process, but they shipped it. And it is probably the most important car, like vehicle that has been built in the last 50 years because it was the 1st mass market electric vehicle for a long time. It was the single most popular vehicle that wasn't a pickup truck in the world right now. I think it's the model y, but the model y and the model 3 combined for, like, they sell more vehicles than like the next 30 cars combined or something like it. It's stupid.

Jason Aten: 40:30

That they may not be an exact quote. Don't send me feedback on that. But my point is they are the 2 most popular vehicles sold that are not the Ford F150. And I so, like, you have to be able to look that and say, that's that is amazing. I still don't think I drive a Tesla.

Jason Aten: 40:45

I finally got my model S back just yesterday. It is the best car I've ever owned. I mean, the full self driving on the model 3 wasn't great. I can acknowledge both of those things. Also, I think Elon Musk is like crazy in my article.

Jason Aten: 40:57

I shouldn't say like crazy. I mean, like the way he behaves is like, it's crazy to think about. I put like, listen, there's a lot of reasons to not be a fan. The politics is a great example, but if you interrogate that for a minute, think about it. The California coastal commission just said, it's not sure if it's going to continue issuing permits to space X to keep doing these launches.

Jason Aten: 41:17

They launch out of Vandenberg air force base and Vandenberg air force base wants them to launch even more often. SpaceX has a lease there on the launch pads. And they're like, yeah, we're not really sure we wanna give you more permits. The FAA like takes months or weeks to like issue permits for these flights. And they're like, no, we need to do this.

Jason Aten: 41:33

Like, we need to launch this rocket every week. We need to do this. Like, and, and so it's really not surprising. I'm not arguing politics here, but it is not hard to understand why Elon Musk could be like, I think I'd like a change in the administration because what I'm currently getting is a lot of friction. Maybe some of the friction is like justified, but that's hard to believe when you look at the reason that the California coastal commission has said that they are not sure they're going to continue issuing permits is because of the way he posts on acts.

Jason Aten: 42:02

So like, it is so such a complicated thing. And like, and at the same time you look at Elon Musk and you're like, maybe you should just lay off the post on X a little bit because maybe, like, I think it's your European union just is debating how much money it should find X because of its violation of what it calls with the DSA, the digital services act or something like that, which requires companies to prevent certain types of like hateful content on their platforms. And they can find them up to 6% of their global revenue. And they're like, well, maybe we should also include SpaceX's revenue and the boring company's revenue. It's like, because he owns those companies.

Jason Aten: 42:37

Like they're privately held companies. And so it's like, maybe you're not being your best advocate by behaving this way. And it just makes it complicated for everyone because on one hand, cyber cab, I don't I mean, I I'm not gonna shave my head. I will watch MKBHD shave his head if they do it. That's what I'm willing to do.

Jason Aten: 42:54

I don't think it's coming anytime soon, but the SpaceX stuff is just like no one no one is doing anything close to that.

Stephen Robles: 43:03

So listen, I know every anytime we talk about Elon or Tesla, you you people might get mad. So here's what I need you to do. If you're listening to us still, go leave us a 5 star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You could say you were wrong about Elon and then what you do is you go to social.primarytech.fm and you can leave comments on the episode post that's gonna go up right as the episode launches and you we can all argue over there in the comments. And, you know, I I'm not super into it.

Stephen Robles: 43:29

I just again, Jason wrote the article, and so you should go read that. I don't know. I just hear people talk about Elon, Tesla, x, like, family members and friends, And I and I just think in my head, like, you know, I don't I don't say a lot. I don't argue, whatever. But I'm always like, I feel like there's nuance here that's that's missing.

Stephen Robles: 43:47

And I and and that I think is I don't know. If we maybe if we do anything as a podcast, we can bring Nuance back. That could be our first shirt. Let's bring Nuance back.

Jason Aten: 43:57

I'm here for it.

Stephen Robles: 43:58

So, alright. Well, one other thing before we take a break, and this is the click to cancel. It's actually pretty big. But if you've ever signed up for a subscription and then you have to, like, basically send a carrier pigeon to cancel it, because they make it really difficult, well, the FTC just passed the, laws where the way you sign up for a thing, that companies have to let you be able to cancel with that same method. So if you sign up online by clicking a button for something like a gym membership or maybe the New York Times, that you'll have those companies will be required to let you cancel using the same method, so you don't have to call to cancel if you just clicked to sign up.

Stephen Robles: 44:39

And I think, hopefully, this happens really fast, and all the companies have to abide by this. I'm not sure of the timeline, but this is, I think, a a example of a good law and keeping people in check. And you have a couple articles about some difficult and easy companies that

Jason Aten: 44:54

Yeah. Well, and so just so people know that they've written a rule. Once it's published, the rule will be once the rule is published, then the companies have a 180 days to comply with this.

Stephen Robles: 45:03

Oh, okay.

Jason Aten: 45:04

And the reason for that, I actually didn't realize I'd written about this rule before. I just remembered writing about Sirius XM in the process of trying to cancel a subscription where you literally had to, you go to cancel and it doesn't even give you an option to cancel. It says no, thanks. Chat with an agent to cancel. You have to chat with a person in order to do it.

Jason Aten: 45:22

And what do you think that person does? They just spent an hour of my life trying to talk you out of canceling the subscription. And then they're like, well, we'll cancel it, but you have to still pay for a year of the service. Like the whole thing is like ridiculous. The way the companies do this, a lot of like newspapers were like this for a long time.

Jason Aten: 45:40

You couldn't cancel them online. You had to call and talk to a person who spends like all this time, just trying to get you to like stay, they'll offer you all these deals or whatever it might be. What do

Stephen Robles: 45:50

they call that department of companies? Isn't it like a

Jason Aten: 45:52

customer retention,

Stephen Robles: 45:53

customer retention. Yeah.

Jason Aten: 45:54

It's I think it's the, I hate our customers department, which is really the thing that's crazy. It's like, why are you spending so much effort trying to force customers who don't want to be your customer to stay? Like you really just think so low of them. They're just like a few dollars a month. It just does not seem worth it.

Jason Aten: 46:11

And you contrast that with Netflix. I just sent you the link to the article I wrote about that because there, if you go to there, if you scroll down in this article, if you go into your Netflix account, there's just a giant scroll down in this article, if you go into your Netflix account, there's just a giant button on the membership page. It just says cancel. And if you click it, I think it, like, takes you to one more page to confirm, which seems like a reasonable thing because, you know, you don't want your kid going in and just clicking that button or whatever, but then you're done. And they're like, we're sorry to see you go.

Jason Aten: 46:33

Your stuff will be here anytime. Just come back. And we did that. We wanted to watch. I think it was like the Simone Biles documentary.

Jason Aten: 46:39

So we just repaid for a month. And then when we were done, we just canceled it again. Like, it's amazing. Like, everything should be like this.

Stephen Robles: 46:46

I totally agree. I have done the same thing with Netflix. Like, I would cancel for a few months, signed back up to watch The Crown. I haven't canceled yet because we haven't finished watching it. So I'd watch that terrible Jennifer Lopez space movie with, Simului or, you know what I'm talking about?

Stephen Robles: 47:02

You've seen that thing, Atlas or something?

Jason Aten: 47:04

Yeah. I know what you're talking about, but

Stephen Robles: 47:06

So anyway, yeah, that this is great. I mean, yeah, Netflix is, like, makes it easy to cancel, sign up. That's what a company needs to do. This law will help that. Great.

Stephen Robles: 47:14

Also, just Netflix just for a second because I listen. I like cheesy action movies. Well, I think I used to like them. I think the problem is that I'm getting older, maybe I don't like them as much. And, like, the I don't know how to, like, tell the Netflix algorithm.

Stephen Robles: 47:29

Maybe I need to just watch, like, documentaries for a while on Netflix so it, like, retrains it. Or maybe I think there might be a button where you can say, like

Jason Aten: 47:36

You can take it out of your history. Just go into your account and go to your viewing history, and you can just delete things from your viewing history.

Stephen Robles: 47:42

Well, I need to do that because there's all these Netflix originals that look like cool space action movies, and I it always tricks me. I'm always, like, yeah, I think I would like that. And then I do this like, I never used to do this, but now I'll basically, like, fast forward through a movie. Like, I basically, like, I'm just watching the tiny thumbnail at the bottom. I'm just, like, clicking forward, and I'm, like, nah, I don't think I'm gonna like this.

Stephen Robles: 48:03

I mean, the actors I would like, and it's in space, and there's action, but but no. So I think Netflix, the original content, they have some great shows, I guess, I'll, you know, enjoy The Crown, at least you're still watching it, but the the movies, I don't know, they've had some cool ones, like, I'm cool with Red Notice, I'm cool with, The Gray Man, you know, doing those kinda, like, things. It's fine, like, they're not, like, Academy Award winning, but they're fine, but yeah, I gotta retrain my algorithm.

Jason Aten: 48:27

Yeah. The thing is you Netflix will let you delete things from your history, but you'll never be able to get them out of your head.

Stephen Robles: 48:36

That's that's the AI I need. Wait. No. That's that's total recall, isn't it? That's a whole movie.

Jason Aten: 48:41

You just need to

Stephen Robles: 48:42

In plane memories and air fry. Anyway

Jason Aten: 48:44

Well, men in black, same thing. You just need one of those buttons. Neuralizer. Just bloop.

Stephen Robles: 48:47

Yeah. The neuralizer, of course, men in black. You know, it holds up, by the way. I watched the first one with my son the other day.

Jason Aten: 48:53

It holds The third one, not so much, but yeah.

Stephen Robles: 48:56

Let's not switch the third one. And then you got the international with Chris Hemsworth, you know, it's a you know, the the original. The original holds up pretty good. Alright. We still need to talk about Adobe Max, its generative fill video, and then Google and Amazon literally getting into nuclear power, which is wild, but I wanna tell you about our second and final sponsor, one of my favorites, Audio Hijack.

Stephen Robles: 49:14

Yes. They are still sponsoring the show. We are so appreciative. Let's just save 20 per just go right now to macaudio.com. You can get Audio Hijack.

Stephen Robles: 49:22

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Stephen Robles: 49:42

I've been using it I don't even know how many years. I mean, over 5, 10 years. They've been around a long time. I think they're celebrating an anniversary, actually, of this year. So anyway, you get Audio Hijack, here's what you do.

Stephen Robles: 49:52

If you wanna record from a USB mic, an audio interface, maybe you just wanna record the system audio from your Mac, maybe from an application, you could do it all with Audio Hijack. And they have amazing, like, this, drag and drop block mechanism. So you basically just build this little chain, you put your audio source at the beginning, you put some of the effects, Audio Hijacks has amazing effects built in, like magic boost to boost the volume. You can do EQ. I do a little, levels, and so I actually have the levels in the menu bar of my Mac right now, so I see whenever I'm talking, I see the little levels, gives me confidence, I know everything's being recorded.

Stephen Robles: 50:27

You can do all of that, EQs, compressors, all in line and then you can record it. Record multiple versions of the file. I can record an MP3 and a WAV version with 2 different blocks right here on my Mac using Audio Hijack. Plus you can do amazing things like live stream with it, route the audio using loopback. I've done that lots of times, setting up like complicated audio setups.

Stephen Robles: 50:47

It's just amazing. So here's what you do, you go to macaudio.com, just buy it all, just buy everything, audio hijack, all the bundles, it's all great. Piezo, if you just want a simple audio recorder and, you know, QuickTime sometimes could be a little flaky, just get Piezo, it's a great little app, and you get 20% off when you use the coupon code techxx. Click the link in the episode description, macaudio.com. Our thanks to Audio Hijack for sponsoring this episode.

Stephen Robles: 51:13

Alright. Adobe Max conference is happening right now. I think it's in Miami, actually just a few hours away from me. They're announcing a bunch of wild things with Creative Cloud, Photoshop. I saw a demo where you could basically resize a graphic into, like, multiple aspect ratios, and Photoshop will just do it for you, But you had mentioned this to me and then looked up this video.

Stephen Robles: 51:32

This is generative extend in Premiere, the video editing application, and so I'm gonna put this link to the YouTube video in the show notes. And just a quick word, Apple Podcasts, if you listen there, cuts off show notes after 4,000 characters. So there's a bunch of links that I say I'm gonna put there, they're there. Apple Podcasts just cut them off, so you can go to primary tech dot fm. You get all the links, in the show notes, or just use Pocket Cast or Overcast or Castro.

Stephen Robles: 51:58

They all show all those show notes. Anyway, this is the, video showing degenerative extend, and basically, in, like, Premiere, let's say you have a shot, you can literally just extend the end of that shot in Premiere, and it will use AI to generate more footage of that shot, and it is imperceptible. I mean, we're watching this live demo right now. Wild. Wild.

Stephen Robles: 52:24

And this feels like a like, an ideal use for AI, because when you get that fully AI generated video, it can look pretty crazy. Like, Andrew Edwards on the threads post clips of these crazy AI generated videos all the time. But because it's extending footage that's already there, I imagine it's gonna be much more realistic and look like real footage. And, man, like, this looks wild. Yeah.

Stephen Robles: 52:48

It's crazy.

Jason Aten: 52:49

I would I watched the keynote where they were talking about this and the person was actually doing this live. I will say it doesn't it's not quite this fast. They've done a little bit of time. I see. Okay.

Jason Aten: 52:59

Magic here takes a little bit longer as you would imagine AI generated video would take. But the, in the keynote they had a guy, I think he was either like skateboarding or doing parkour or something like that. And he just like was tumbling. And all of a sudden it just like continued on, like they did it. And it's, it is just, so it's just wild that this is the case.

Jason Aten: 53:19

I raises a whole lot of questions that we don't have time for. I will just say that this feels like though, the kind of thing where, so the, the way that generative AI keeps being pitched, I keep wondering like, who would do that? Even like the writing tools and stuff that apple has talked about. I'm just like, could you didn't have any better ideas? Like, come on.

Jason Aten: 53:40

The way I use generative AI, I use chat GPT almost every day. And it's fantastic for things like you could take a transcript of this show and say, give me a 5 sentence description that I can use for a podcast. And it would, it'll nail it every single time, every single time. It'll do a fantastic job. But other things are like, great.

Jason Aten: 53:55

This feels like somebody who was like, we know what our people really could use and we're going to do this because there's so many times where you need to LinkedIn it, but you don't want to, you know, you can LinkedIn a video clip by making it slow motion. Right? Like you can just like do it, but I don't want it to be slow motion. I just want like another second. I just need 24 more frames or whatever it is.

Jason Aten: 54:14

And it's like, yeah, I can do that for you, and Premiere will just do that all right in in in the thing, so

Stephen Robles: 54:19

Which is wild, so yeah. I mean, they're making it valuable to continue subscribing to Creative Cloud. I actually personally use things like Pixelmator Pro, and I use Final Cut, which, you know, when it comes to Final Cut I love Final Cut. I edit in it every day, but man, is it behind when it comes to the features like getting a transcription of the video in tran in Final Cut.

Jason Aten: 54:40

Yeah. A

Stephen Robles: 54:40

lot of the tools like in Premiere and DaVinci just not there. So

Jason Aten: 54:43

I would I'm sorry. Side note because, you know, that's the phantom name of our podcast is side note. But I, yesterday, for the first time in a very long time, took did some senior photos for someone who was like, hey. Our senior photographer or photographer moved or something. We wanted to do something, and I was like, yeah.

Jason Aten: 55:00

I'll help you out. They're family. So it's fine. And a couple of the photos had a distract like, a, fire hydrant and a small building in the background, and they were real out of focus. I was shooting at 200 millimeters, like, f 2.8.

Jason Aten: 55:12

So they were, like, out of focus, but I'm like, I still want them gone because the people in the photo would have known what they were. Right? You know what I mean? It's that kind of a situation. So I use Lightroom, and Lightroom has a remove tool, and it's very good.

Stephen Robles: 55:25

Yeah.

Jason Aten: 55:25

I took the same photo, and I put it in Apple Photos, and I hit the cleanup, and it was better. It was better.

Stephen Robles: 55:31

Oh. Listen. It is good. Like, I made a whole video on it, and, like, we had, photos in, like, Times Square when we went to New York City. And just removing people in the background, like, it is very good.

Stephen Robles: 55:43

It's not perfect, but it's good.

Jason Aten: 55:45

I mean, it was way good enough that I'm, like, I don't have to do this brush thing in in, Lightroom. I'll just True. Pop it right in. So yeah.

Stephen Robles: 55:52

It's true. There's a lot of potential for Apple Intelligence, which maybe it'll come out someday.

Jason Aten: 55:56

Yeah. If we ever see it. Lots of potential.

Stephen Robles: 55:59

Fully the end of this month. Mark Gurman, he's out there being, like, I've had many comes out, whatever, and Apple Intelligence is 4 days later. Like, he's just out there saying it, so we'll we'll see.

Jason Aten: 56:08

He's just reading from a teleprompter. He's, like, here's what's gonna happen.

Stephen Robles: 56:11

Here's what's gonna happen. I mean, he's yeah. He is the Apple leaks culture right now. I don't know. I wanna know how many how many people does he have inside?

Stephen Robles: 56:18

That's my thing. Because it can't just be one person.

Jason Aten: 56:20

I mean, unless it's just Tim Cook. They have they have breakfast twice a week. He's like, listen. I need to get rid of some of these, a 17 pros. So what we're gonna do is release this thing.

Jason Aten: 56:32

I need you to prime the pump for me.

Stephen Robles: 56:34

That is the conspiracy theory of the year right there that Mark Kerwin source.

Jason Aten: 56:38

Yeah.

Stephen Robles: 56:39

Tim Cook himself. He's like, listen, I'm out of here in a couple of years. I'm retiring. I'm just gonna I'm gonna call up Mark Gurman. Real quick, this I saw the couple articles here.

Stephen Robles: 56:47

I just thought it was crazy. So Google actually has signed a deal to invest in nuclear power. I have to focus very hard when I say that word, because I have the tendency to say nuclear, and then everybody uses it.

Jason Aten: 56:57

George Bush.

Stephen Robles: 56:58

Is that what you all know? Nuclear. I try to pronounce it like new clear. I try to say those two words, but together. That's

Jason Aten: 57:07

not bad.

Stephen Robles: 57:08

Anyway, Google and Amazon, this was just this morning, have signed deals to go nuclear, investing 1,000,000 of dollars in this. I just seems wild to me, seems a little bit like a plot point of a disaster movie, that'll take place 10 years from now, that AI Gemini takes over the power plant. There's there's tons of movie plots here just waiting to be written, and that's gonna it's gonna be great. But I just thought

Jason Aten: 57:30

I thought

Stephen Robles: 57:30

it was interesting. Look here. Nuclear

Jason Aten: 57:32

This is how this is how the AI turns us on to paper clips is all the nuclear plants. Right? Cause that was the thing, the paperclip problem that was like the doomsday scenario. But I, well, I think it was Ben Thompson who, who pointed out the AI, these server farms are actually the perfect scenario for, for nuclear power, because if nuclear power puts out a ton of energy without emissions,

Stephen Robles: 57:56

right,

Jason Aten: 57:56

it's enough energy to power these things, but also nuclear power requires a consistent draw. Right? You can't, you just can't fire up a nuclear plant and have it just sit there. It doesn't idle, like you don't go up and down to match, like, whereas a coal plant or a natural gas plant, you can just like turn a knob and be like more gas, less gas or whatever. But like nuclear plow power is a little bit less nuanced in that sense.

Jason Aten: 58:18

And so having something that will consistently just take the power. Like, give us we'll take all the power you have, and we'll just more AI things as we get the power. So

Stephen Robles: 58:27

All the generated things. This is, this would generate from nuclear reactors to generating a little longer piece of footage in your premier project.

Jason Aten: 58:35

That's what generative AI means.

Stephen Robles: 58:37

That's that's the whole line. Also, TSMC, again, riding the AI demand train, making money.

Jason Aten: 58:44

Yeah. There you go. I mean, they make all the chips. And right now, lots of people are buying chips. And so TSMC's profit their profit doubled 50%, I guess it was in the last quarter.

Jason Aten: 58:54

Like, it it not doubled 50%. It increased 50% the

Stephen Robles: 58:56

last time.

Jason Aten: 58:57

But, yeah, TSMC, just in case our listeners don't know or care, which is fair, they make all the chips for Apple. Right? That's that's what you need to know, and they're selling lots of chips.

Stephen Robles: 59:06

So Selling lots of chips. Lots of chips. But, also, I'm glad you mentioned Apple. Have been some changes to Apple's roster? This oh, by the way, this is what a Bloomberg article looks like when you hide all distractions, but you don't have a subscription.

Stephen Robles: 59:17

This is what you see. Just a grayed out title. Anyway, Apple's chief people officer exited. This was

Jason Aten: 59:24

Deidre O'Brien was the head of retail and the head of people. She actually was the head of people first. Yeah. And then when Angela Aarons left, she took over this retail. Yes.

Jason Aten: 59:34

And then she also took over, like, the online store. So all of selling things and all of the people and stuff, they hired a chief people officer from Medtronic Carol surface, and someone apparently realized that Microsoft sells a product named surface. And so now Carol surfaces leave. That's not the reason why, but she, but it's been less than 2 years. She's leaving.

Jason Aten: 59:56

This is a thing that seems to happen from executives that come in from other companies. This happened with their most recent chief communications person, p their head of PR. It happened with, what, someone like Angela Aarons. It's happened with the pre the the, retail guy before that. I don't even remember his name because he was there for such a short amount of time.

Jason Aten: 01:00:13

It just seems to happen to people who come in from the outside. Like, they just don't last very long at Apple. And so now Deidre O'Brien will be still over retail and and and online retail as well as people.

Stephen Robles: 01:00:24

And it's not just new people because Dan Riccio, who was most recently over the Apple Vision Pro, but he's been at Apple for over 26 years. He was the SVP of hardware engineering, in 2012, various roles, most recently again led the Apple Vision Pro team. He is stepping down, as well, transitioning out. So you have 26 years. Just interesting roster changes, people leaving, curious.

Jason Aten: 01:00:49

He'd he'd been Dan Riccio had been kind of on the way out because he used to be the head of hardware engineering, and then John Tournes took that role. And Dan Riccio kinda, like, took on a special projects sort of role, which was turned out to be the vision pro. They've launched the vision pro. He's like continuing phase 2 of his retirement. And, but I think the funny part of this was he just was at an event where he was like speaking and he's like, yeah.

Jason Aten: 01:01:12

I'm retiring. My last day is tomorrow. It's like it's like, wait a lot.

Stephen Robles: 01:01:16

One day notice.

Jason Aten: 01:01:17

Wait a slip. I mean, I'm sure that people at Apple knew that, but, like, he that's how it was, like, announced. He's like, yeah. I'm I'm done.

Stephen Robles: 01:01:23

I'm I'm out.

Jason Aten: 01:01:24

Tomorrow, I turn in my badge.

Stephen Robles: 01:01:25

Peace. There's that. Okay. And, final before we get to personal tech, we have a couple personal tech things, but you interview the Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, who I've seen a lot of the the founder mode posts around which supposedly originated with a talk he did, and maybe you could explain that. But it was a great interview.

Stephen Robles: 01:01:43

We'll link Jason's article in the show notes. But you guys also talked about, like, Apple founder CEO dynamics and Tim Cook for Steve Jobs. So it was a it was a great interview, but yeah. Tell me about

Jason Aten: 01:01:52

it. Yeah. Well, so this was the second time I've interviewed Brian Chesky, the founder and CEO of Airbnb. And like, not only the interview was supposed to be about their winter release of software, but we ended up spending most of the time talking about founder mode and related leadership principles. But anyway, founder mode came from an essay written by a guy named Paul Graham, who is who is a cofounder of Y Combinator, which is like an incubator for startups.

Jason Aten: 01:02:15

Right. Airbnb was a Y Combinator startup. Brian Chesky was invited back to an event with, like, their top 200 alumni. So these are all founders of, like, multibillion dollar companies. And he was just asked to sort of share his leadership journey.

Jason Aten: 01:02:29

He was thinking he was gonna talk for 20 minutes. He ended up talking for 2 hours. And, and then about that talk, Paul Graham writes this essay talking about founder mode. Brian Chesky had said something about how he'd been given advice early on that what he should do is like turn into like a manager instead of a founder and delegate a lot of authority and, and, and sort of, and, and, and basically Paul Graham sort of made this distinction between founder mode versus manager mode. And, it was really funny because one of the first things that Brian Chesky told me in the interview is like, I never said founder mode.

Jason Aten: 01:03:04

I've never used those words. He's like, I do like that phrase except for the fact that it seems to pit founders against managers. Mhmm. The the general gist of it is just that he thinks that the, one of the things that founders do well is they are especially in the early stages involved in everything. And then there becomes this temptation to sort of hire people and delegate everything to them.

Jason Aten: 01:03:27

And he thinks that that's a mistake. He thinks that found that the leaders should actually stay involved in the details. And he uses the illustration of Johnny Ive and Steve jobs. And he, he said, he asked Johnny, I've Johnny I've loved from like, did some stuff for Airbnb. So the 2 of them know each other very well.

Jason Aten: 01:03:44

And he asked him, like, did you ever feel micromanaged by Steve Jobs? And Johnny Ives said, no. We had lunch together, I think he said every day or every week, and we went over everything we were doing, but Steve Jobs never dictated to me what to do. He was my partner in sorting through ideas and that kind of thing. And so then I asked him, I said, do you because we released the whole interview as a podcast episode.

Jason Aten: 01:04:05

Not this podcast. Sorry. Don't don't mean to be confusing. I just wanna be clear. People would be looking in the feed for it.

Jason Aten: 01:04:09

It's not there. And I just asked him, I was like, did you, who do you think that like, should be the next C or what type of person do you think should be the next CEO? Because he's very high on Steve jobs. And I'm like, but you could argue Tim Cook by everything that we would measure a CEO by has been a far more successful CEO than Steve jobs was. And, he, he basically just pointed out like, well, you know, the iPhone was a Steve jobs thing.

Jason Aten: 01:04:36

And that's entirely the reason that Apple's a $3,000,000,000,000 company, which is a 100% true. So I think his point was if apple is going to introduce new products and he said, they don't all have to be iPhone scale, but they do need to have some sort of innovation. And that it might be good to have someone who thinks more like founder than someone who's just a manager. So

Stephen Robles: 01:04:58

I thought yeah. I listened to that. It was great. And I think he's right. Like, Steve Jobs, obviously, the iPhone, the iPad.

Stephen Robles: 01:05:04

You could argue that the Apple Watch, AirPods, obviously, Apple Vision Pro, all launched under Tim Cook. How much Steve Jobs? I mean, surely he would have I don't know if AirPods came out, like, 2015 or 2016. I don't know if

Jason Aten: 01:05:16

Those are Tim Cook. Those are Tim Cook.

Stephen Robles: 01:05:18

Those are all Tim Cook. Apple Watch, I imagine Steve Jobs was aware of. Yeah. At least in the testing, that that would have been the same thing. But anyway, you know, if you look at the innovation versus, like, the stability growth, I feel like it like, it makes sense that path of, like, Steve Jobs introduces these groundbreaking products, Tim Cook as the nuts and bolts guy, like, grows that and adds some products to it to this point.

Stephen Robles: 01:05:40

I do think that today, as we're on the cusp of 2025, that be with the rise of AI and, like, the gadgets of yesterday, which obviously they're not yesterday, like, we all use an iPhone, but when we think about, like, the phone, it is hard to be as excited about that as the, like, new product categories today, because the phone is very it's like a mature product. It's like, yeah, you get excited when you get a new sofa, but no one's, like, reporting on sofas. You know what I mean? Like, it's a long standing product. It's very different analogy, but I think Apple does need to have maybe someone after Tim Cook that is, like, more forward thinking, obviously needs all the the people behind them, like, another kind of Tim Cook behind the scenes, like, continuing to rein things in and keeping the money going so they can continue innovating.

Stephen Robles: 01:06:29

But I think we are entering a a phase now where, like, I think the economy and customers are going to reward new innovation now and less so kind of the iterative improvements, which Apple is great at, and, like, you could argue that maybe it's not all iterative, like, maybe the 16 Pro Max camera is actually significant and not iterative. But I think in the minds of people, in the minds of culture, like, now is the time to really, like, put the gas on, let's throw stuff against the wall maybe, see what sticks. Like, Meta's Orion glasses, they don't exist, you can't buy them, but I think that there was a lot of excitement generated around those. And likewise, it was short lived, but the hype around the Humana pin in rabbit r one, which is now hopelessly dead, like if Apple could create something with that hype and excitement, but then actually deliver on the promise, unlike all these other companies, I think it could really set Apple up again for the future. And even in the little things like, you know, I talk about a lot about podcasting on the Riverside YouTube channel, and one of the recent data points was that Apple Podcasts is now like 3rd place in podcast consumption.

Stephen Robles: 01:07:34

More people watch podcasts on YouTube and listen and watch them in Spotify than people use Apple Podcasts worldwide, and that's an interesting data point, because Apple Podcasts was number 1 for years years, like it was literally Steve Jobs with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, and Steve Jobs, like, working the iTunes interface on stage talking about podcasts, like it was Apple spearheading podcasts for a long time and it's Apple has not done as much in the podcasting space. They've done lots of stuff, like Apple Podcasts app has come a long way, but when it comes to like innovation and adopting what is happening now, Apple's just slower. And, like, video and podcasts, like, we do a video version of this podcast for a reason, because there's lots of people that prefer to see podcasts that way, and it's a great way to discover, and Apple does not have a good way to watch or create video podcasts on their platform. Like, yes, you can have a video podcast RSS feed and put that as a separate show in Apple Podcasts. The peep the only people that do that and have the time to do it are, like, Twit.

Stephen Robles: 01:08:36

Like, the Twit network does that, and pretty much nobody else. Like like, you can't sustain it. So I would like to see Apple maybe continue pushing on innovation in areas where they've been sitting for a while, and something like Apple Podcasts, not so much the app, but as, like, a service and as a back end. And then also, yeah, it'd be exciting to have kind of that founder mode energy and, like, new product categories in the coming years.

Jason Aten: 01:08:59

Yeah. And he's Brian Chesky said that he believes that as often as possible, the CEO should be the chief product officer. And if you look at that was the model, Steve Jobs. He was the chief product officer. Tim Cook, no one has ever accused of being a product guy.

Jason Aten: 01:09:13

Right? And what Brian Chesky did tell me was he thinks that it would behoove Apple to contemplate at some point in the future having a CEO who is a chief product officer. And I think it's really interesting. He said that, Tim Cook has done a fantastic job of quote scaling Steve's vision. So, and if you think about it, it's so hard to, you know, you can argue.

Jason Aten: 01:09:32

And I just made the argument a couple minutes ago that Tim Cook is a far more successful CEO because he's increased the value of the company and he's returned so much money to shareholders and yada yada yada. But all of that was on the back of the iPhone. And all of those products, the Apple Watch doesn't exist without the iPhone. Right? It's just an accessory.

Jason Aten: 01:09:48

It is AirPods. Both of those are just accessories to the iPhone. So Tim Cook is the services play is literally just to play on the iPhone. So all of the things that Tim Cook has done that have grown Apple have just been extending the dominance of the iPhone into all of these different areas. The iPad, I think you could even argue it was just a big iPhone.

Jason Aten: 01:10:08

I mean, it literally ran iPad. Oh, I mean, iOS for a long time and it's iPad OS is just basically iOS, which means that so is vision OS right? The, the, the vision pro is the example of it's not an extension of the iPhone. It's like, it's like the, with the least extension of the iPhone. You could argue maybe it's an extension of your Mac sort of, because its most useful function is as an, is a great monitor for your Mac or whatever.

Jason Aten: 01:10:35

Like you have a giant thing, but I think, I think that, Brian's point would be that Apple's next Tim cook was the right CEO for the phase that apple was going through, which is let's maximize this singular consumer product. It is the most important consumer product ever. The iPhone is, and Tim Cook was like the perfect person to fine tune that and extend it and even grow that business. But he's not going to be the person who is going to come up with whatever the next thing is. And I, we even talked about, you mentioned the Ryan, we talked about Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and never have walked out and done a demo like Mark Zuckerberg did because Mark Zuckerberg can literally not be fired so he can just do what he wants to do.

Jason Aten: 01:11:16

He can walk out and he'd be, he's like, these are the cool things we're working on. I'm growing these crystals in my basement and they're $10,000 a piece. And at some point, you know, if not Zuck, then who, you know, whatever his shirts is like. So yeah. I do encourage people to listen to the interview.

Jason Aten: 01:11:34

If you go to the article, there is a there is a link to the full conversation that we had. It was it was fun.

Stephen Robles: 01:11:39

Yes. You just listen to it. Alright. Well, let us know. What kind of CEO does Apple need next?

Stephen Robles: 01:11:44

You can comment on the post in our community. Alright. Quick, personal tech. 2 a couple quick things. So 1, do you still subscribe to iTunes Match?

Jason Aten: 01:11:52

I think so. I don't ever really pay attention to it. I think you do.

Stephen Robles: 01:11:56

Every year every year this comes up, I get the email, $25 a year, just cheap enough to just so the point of iTunes Match back in the day was if you had m p threes that you ripped or like someone gave you a mixtape CD or whatever, which is a funny phrase, but anyway, you ripped the CD or you had your own m p threes that you loaded into your iTunes library, paying for iTunes match would basically iTunes would match it if it was an actual song. So if it was Superstition by Stevie Wonder, let's say you had that off a ripped CD, iTunes Match would basically give you the higher quality iTunes Plus version in your, you know, Apple Music account, basically, even though you never bought it originally. So that was the purpose of iTunes Match. That part has been part of Apple Music for a long time. So even if you don't pay for iTunes Match, if you had those ripped CDs and let's say you had the song Superstition in your library, if you had stopped paying for iTunes Match but did subscribe to Apple Music, you would still have the song Superstition in your library, mostly because it's just there.

Stephen Robles: 01:13:07

Like, it's already in Apple Music.

Jason Aten: 01:13:08

Right.

Stephen Robles: 01:13:09

So doesn't matter. But iTunes match also, if you had uploaded m p threes that weren't necessarily songs, iTunes match would save those in the cloud for you, and you could download them anytime in the future. Here's my situation, because everybody yells at me that I'm still paying for this. When I was in college, I recorded all of the music department concerts. I was a music major, and so I have all of the wind ensemble, orchestra, all the concerts, choral concerts.

Stephen Robles: 01:13:35

I I saved all those. I think, yes, they're in my Dropbox somewhere, but they're in my Apple Music library, and I can listen to them whenever, and they're just there. And so iTunes Match, uploaded those m p threes, and it's saving in the cloud. Supposedly, the Apple Music subscription does that also, where it will save those m p threes that are not matched to a song, like, by an artist. I don't trust it.

Stephen Robles: 01:14:00

I don't know what's gonna happen, and so I'm going to pay for iTunes Match until they either cancel it or I die. And that's, that's all I have to say about that.

Jason Aten: 01:14:08

Wouldn't the easier solution I mean, I was just trying to figure out if I'm subscribed to this, and I can't actually find anywhere in the interface to tell. Like, it's You

Stephen Robles: 01:14:15

go to subscriptions on your iPhone and see if it's there.

Jason Aten: 01:14:17

Well, my iPhone is my camera right now, so I can't do that. So I'm not gonna take that down.

Stephen Robles: 01:14:21

You gotta go to your iCloud subscriptions and

Jason Aten: 01:14:23

then Well, I was just looking in my, in the apps in the Mac App Store to see if I can log in. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Wouldn't the easier solution for you to be just download those songs and have them on your computer? Yeah. I don't

Stephen Robles: 01:14:33

want yes. Just just checking. I don't wanna hear about it. I don't wanna

Jason Aten: 01:14:36

make sure I'm not missing something obvious here.

Stephen Robles: 01:14:38

I don't I don't know all the things that are in there, and I don't wanna take the time to, like, sort my library and try and search for it. So anyway

Jason Aten: 01:14:46

in that case, 24.99 a month is a deal for you because it's avoiding having to do any work. So there you go.

Stephen Robles: 01:14:51

That's right. I don't know how many years I have to pay for it that will commensurate with the hours I would spend going through my library. We've probably crossed that Rubicon already, but anyway, I'm gonna keep paying for iTunes Match forever.

Jason Aten: 01:15:00

That's the

Stephen Robles: 01:15:01

bottom line.

Jason Aten: 01:15:01

There you go.

Stephen Robles: 01:15:02

That's the bottom line. And I also wanna share my most viewed piece of content that I've ever made. This right here.

Jason Aten: 01:15:08

I feel for you.

Stephen Robles: 01:15:09

I was helping my daughter with something on her iPad, and she went to set an alarm because it was around bedtime. And she opened the clock app on her iPad, and I saw this monstrosity. She had, like, 30 something alarms that said 9 AM, and it's not like they were custom songs or whatever. They're just it's all 9 AMs. So I I posted on threads, I may have failed as a tech dad, this is my daughter's iPad.

Stephen Robles: 01:15:30

Jason, do you see how many views this post got?

Jason Aten: 01:15:34

Millions.

Stephen Robles: 01:15:35

2,300,000 views. Number 1, I don't know what I'm doing as a content creator apparently because I can get millions of views if I play the game right. That's number 1. Number 2, the threads algorithm is hopelessly broken, like I don't understand why this made such views. And then I did a follow-up, like failed tiktag thing, and I guess this could be my meme if I wanted it to be on threads, but I'm not monetized, so I don't care.

Stephen Robles: 01:15:59

But like, what? 2,300,000 views. But anyway, this is a lot of people said in the comments too, like, this is a problem with Siri, because if you ask oh, sorry, I said the name. Anyway, if you ask it to set an alarm for tomorrow for 9 AM, it'll just keep creating alarms and your thing. You can say, turn on my 9 AM alarm, and it will just toggle on the alarm you have set and it won't create a new one.

Stephen Robles: 01:16:23

But if you just say, set an alarm for 9 AM, it'll create a new one every time. Now, yes, you can also ask the assistant, delete all my alarms, and it will do that too, but this is funnier and so we just left it.

Jason Aten: 01:16:35

Well, I just realized it is not just the, voice assistant who shall not be named because it turns out I'm actually not using my phone as a camera. I'm using a different phone as the iPhone 16 is a camera. I just realized that because I picked up my phone.

Stephen Robles: 01:16:47

Many phones.

Jason Aten: 01:16:47

Well, I apparently, it's not just the voice assistant who should not be named because this is our Alexa app and our daughter just has like the same thing every day. She sets a new alarm for whatever time. And I'm just like, do you just have to turn it on? Like there are 39 alarms in here for 5 am and then there's another 30 for for 5:15 AM. The funny thing is she doesn't even get up until 5:45.

Jason Aten: 01:17:09

So why are there 60 alarms set?

Stephen Robles: 01:17:12

Oh, yeah. This is gonna be our next asinine thing, but, well, how do you do your alarms?

Jason Aten: 01:17:17

I just use I just use the sleep feature on my iPhone, and it just sets an alarm for whatever 5 AM.

Stephen Robles: 01:17:23

And you don't set any additional alarm?

Jason Aten: 01:17:25

No. I get up pretty I use my watch. Oh, yeah. I just get up. Yep.

Stephen Robles: 01:17:29

So so if you look in your clock app right now on your iPhone, how how many alarms does it say?

Jason Aten: 01:17:34

Well, I mean, I have a lot of different alarms in there, but they're for, like, other re like, I do have they're not all set for the same thing. It's like, for some reason, I needed an alarm. So I'll just, like, set an alarm for different things.

Stephen Robles: 01:17:45

Okay. Okay.

Jason Aten: 01:17:46

But, I mean, I do have, like, a 504 alarm that if I really have to be up, I might set that as, like, a backup because my other one will go off. And I don't think it goes off on the this is usually why I have an alarm set. It does I don't have the sleep thing. I have not do its thing on Saturday Sunday. Right.

Jason Aten: 01:18:00

Right? And so I'll set, like, if I'm not up by 610, I should get out of bed. But I'm On a Saturday? I never I never sleep past 7 o'clock. I can't.

Stephen Robles: 01:18:09

So I use the sleep feature also, but also, you know, I got some backup because, you know, if I wake up at 7, you know, I put that 7:15 to 7:30 just just to be sure. You know? Just to be sure. You know?

Jason Aten: 01:18:20

I do have a request for, David Smith because I use his sleep plus plus app.

Stephen Robles: 01:18:25

Yeah.

Jason Aten: 01:18:25

But the sleep plus because it gives me a score, which I really like having a score, but it assumes that I'm up at the time that my sleep schedule. And no matter what, because the phone goes out of sleep mode or whatever. So it'll be like, oh, you got up at 4:59 and you only got whatever amount of sleep. But if I decided, no, I'm going to actually sleep a little bit longer, it doesn't it stops counting that sleep. It's really weird.

Jason Aten: 01:18:50

So it needs to, like, be a little smarter there, David Smith.

Stephen Robles: 01:18:53

Okay. Alright.

Jason Aten: 01:18:54

Use some of that use some of that widgets with money and make sleep plus plus a little bit better.

Stephen Robles: 01:18:58

Do you so you don't snooze? You don't snooze alarms?

Jason Aten: 01:19:01

I should not say that I never snooze an alarm. Sure. But if it's but when I reach over and it's on the very fancy whatever stand that you sent me that looks sort of like the AI robot that's going to kill me someday, I just always hit the done button or the off or stop

Stephen Robles: 01:19:15

or whatever.

Jason Aten: 01:19:16

But on my watch, most of the time, my watch wakes me up, and I just hit the done, and I'm good.

Stephen Robles: 01:19:21

Amazing. I need I need to get your your ability to wake up. That's pretty good. Alright. Let us know how many alarms you have set in your device.

Stephen Robles: 01:19:27

You can leave a comment on the post social.primary tech.fm. If you haven't yet, leave us a 5 star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. We'll give you a shout out at the top of the show. Thank you to everyone who did that this week, and you can support the show. You get an ad free version and a bonus episode every week.

Stephen Robles: 01:19:42

You can support the show directly in Apple Podcasts, And if you go to primary tech dot FM and click bonus episodes, you could support us there. I've had more and more people ask for the video version of the bonus episodes. Those do exist. If you support us through Memberful on the website, the links are just in the show notes. I can't put them in the show notes because I have a podcast because then just anybody could see it because even if you don't subscribe.

Stephen Robles: 01:20:03

So, anyway, I now have a playlist link, and if you, I'm gonna do a secret code word in the bonus episode. And if you DM me that word, I'll send you the playlist for all the bonus episode videos as well. And, we'll do that in a second. We're gonna go talk about Nissan finally got his Tesla back, and he met a famous person. I do wanna hear about your famous person experience.

Jason Aten: 01:20:19

And it wasn't the CEO of Airbnb.

Stephen Robles: 01:20:21

He was not. No, no. At LAX. So we're gonna go record that bonus episode. Again, links to everything is in the show notes below.

Stephen Robles: 01:20:27

Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.