Apple Unveils M4 Mac Mini, New iMac, M4 Max MacBook Pro, and iOS 18.2 Image Playgrounds is Terrifying
Download MP3Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Another massive Apple week where they announced the M4 Mac Mini, the M4 Imac, and new MacBook Pros, plus 18.1 came out with Apple Intelligence to the public, at least here in the US, and 18.2 with Image Playgrounds. Yes, I got access. Yes, it is horrifying. Plus other news from Netflix, Nintendo, earnings, and more.
Stephen Robles:This episode is brought to you by Notion, Audio Hijack, and Data Citizens Dialogue, and by you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me as always is my co host, Jason Aitin, who guesses the movie quote every week. Jason, this week, it is be afraid. Be very afraid. We're recording on Halloween, so I tried I chose a scary movie quote.
Stephen Robles:I'm like, that's the hint.
Jason Aten:Scary movie quote. I I recognize the quote. I feel like
Stephen Robles:Jeff Goldblum is the star in this movie.
Jason Aten:The fly.
Stephen Robles:There it is.
Jason Aten:That that did it for me.
Stephen Robles:The fly.
Jason Aten:But it was Geena Davis that said it, though. Right?
Stephen Robles:I believe so.
Jason Aten:But yeah.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Jeff Jeff Goldblum said it. Be afraid.
Jason Aten:That you you gave it away for me.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Very good. Jason, we have a a massive show this week. We just I think we just gotta go. We just gotta run.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna be running this entire show. We're gonna do it. Plus, we have a bunch of 5 star review shout outs. Thank you to all of you. Greenie 24 from the USA, 5 stars on Apple Podcast.
Stephen Robles:Grammy story from the UK. Spooky. Mov, which I guess is like spooky.movie, which is kind of funny, like, I like that. I don't know if he changed his name just because it was Halloween for the review. Also mentioned a Bang case which is like a, like, I guess an iPhone case that has an, another action button for running shortcuts.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, I have to check that out. I have a look at it. So very cool. So fun from the USA, dominant pocket. I'm just not saying the people who say they don't put their phone in the dominant pocket, but anyway
Jason Aten:So do the math. All everyone who does
Stephen Robles:just do the math. Do the math. Anyone I don't say. Mtig92 from the USA, dominant pocket. Kyle Coco from the USA.
Stephen Robles:Scody 134, cargo pocket from the USA. That's different. That added a wrinkle to the what pocket you put your phone in. Jmvagg from Australia. It's Gef from Switzerland.
Stephen Robles:Lonely crow. This was this is their first Apple y podcast, which, I mean, technically, would cover all the tech, but I totally understand. Like, we're you know, it's largely
Jason Aten:You're wearing a Mac Pro shirt, so yes, it's fine.
Stephen Robles:That is true. You can definitely say that. Dominant pocket for the iPhone and Mac McAndrew from the USA. Thank you for all those 5 star reviews. Give us 5 star review, rating, and review any country you are.
Stephen Robles:I see them all in Apple Podcasts. We'll give you a shout out. And this is also I think this is the 3rd week in a row I asked for developers who listen and watch the show. We have an app in the App Store. We'd love to, plug it here on the show, and so this one is from the virtual boy.
Stephen Robles:At least that's his name on social media. You'll see him. He has a wallpaper app. Not that wallpaper app. Not that one you're thinking of.
Jason Aten:Controversial.
Stephen Robles:No. No. Not that controversial one. This is a different one. It's called Wall Genie.
Stephen Robles:It's actually all it's AI generated wallpapers, but you can generate them in the app, so you can kind of customize them and create new crew stuff, new wallpapers. These look really cool, the ones they have on the the landing page here. It's free to try. It is a small subscription if you wanna actually make a bunch and download the high quality, but they look very cool. And wall Genie, try a different wallpaper app from, for someone who listens to the show.
Stephen Robles:Thanks Yeah. Virtual Boy for that. Jason, it was like one right after another. Boom, boom, boom. Apple said they were gonna have all announcements all this week.
Stephen Robles:We got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We're gonna go day by day. We're gonna go in chronological order. Monday, 18.1 came out for the public, which included Apple Intelligence, which you talked about at length on this. Quick question, have Did anyone in your family or friends circle, Like, did they download 18 dot 1?
Stephen Robles:Do they have Apple Intelligence? And did anyone have any thoughts about it?
Jason Aten:The only one who has thoughts about it is my 10 year old who only has an Apple Watch and just every time he sees Snoop Dogg is just devastated that he's not gonna have the glowy ring around his watch. Like, that's the one person. No. I it's actually possible that there are, you know, my daughters and my wife have, iPhones. They very well may have may have 18.1 right now and don't know it because it may have just uploaded overnight.
Jason Aten:No. Nope. None of them really care.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:Well, we'll get to it. We can talk about the 18.2 betas at some point. They will be downloading day point to 18.2 immediately because we did spend about 2 hours the other night just making Genmoji and Image Playgrounds. We'll talk about it.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna talk about Image Playgrounds because I finally got access yesterday, I assume, because Apple listens to this show and they wanted me to have access, so we can record about it.
Jason Aten:Nice of them.
Stephen Robles:Terrifying. All terrifying. Every every image playground of me, but my kids were like, do me, do me. So yeah, anyway, we'll get to that. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:18/9/1 came out tonight. Also, we had a press release and an announcement video for the M4 Imac. Apple updated that. Some people were on the fence whether or not the Imac would, get the M4. I thought you were on the fence actually previously too.
Stephen Robles:No?
Jason Aten:About whether it would happen? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't think it was the most likely one.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right.
Jason Aten:I'll admit that, but that's why they did it first. Because it's well, actually, the reason they did it first is obvious because it only gets the m 4. Like, that and they sort of laddered them up.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It gets it gets the m 4 and quote unquote new colors. So I mean there were some comparison images. A basic app guy shared 1, Ordalani, shared some, but anyway new colors, different shades of the colors. The green one looks very nice, I'm gonna be honest, and it was tempting to me, but I bought a different Mac this week which we'll get to in a second.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. So m4 imac, if you were in the market, now's a good time because they were updated. Oh, and USB c peripherals, Jason. We now we now have a USB c magic keyboard and a USB c magic mouse and half the Internet were up in arms because the magic mouse literally changed nothing. It just swapped out the lightning port for USB c.
Stephen Robles:Were you up in arms, Jason? Were you upset about No.
Jason Aten:Because who cares? They listen. They're never gonna change this. And the reason why I have to be nice. I'm getting a reputation as being not nice, but let me just say this.
Stephen Robles:You have to be affable, Jason.
Jason Aten:Yeah. It's true. The point is they don't want you to charge your mouse while you're using it. So they've made it impossible to use the mouse while you're charging it. They the point is this is a wireless mouse.
Jason Aten:What they know would happen is people would just leave it connected to a lightning cable connected to your Mac. Jony Ive does not want that to happen. And even though he's no longer at Apple, his his departure agreement made them commit to never putting that port anywhere else. Now listen, it's how often does a person have to charge a Magic Mouse anyway? Twice a year?
Jason Aten:3 times a year at most?
Stephen Robles:It is.
Jason Aten:For, like, 10 minutes?
Stephen Robles:It is not often. And, you know, it was funny because we're gonna talk about the Mac mini next, but the Mac mini power button moved from, like, the very back to the bottom, and people were up in arms about that, and they were, like, if you as me see on the bottom of the mouse, power button on the bottom of the Mac mini, what is the world coming to?
Jason Aten:Yeah. Apple's falling apart. I can't even believe this. They're about to lose their status as the most valuable company in the world.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. And then that's why Listen. I made this Photoshop. I don't know if you saw this, Jason. I was
Jason Aten:I did see that.
Stephen Robles:I photo
Jason Aten:I was just I thought it was amazing that they brought back the power button because there is no power button at all on the MacBook Pro.
Stephen Robles:I photoshopped the power button on the bottom of the MacBook Pro, and, yeah, that did good numbers too. Matthew Cousins.
Jason Aten:I have a question about the M4 Mac or Imac first before we get too far. There's not a ton to say about it. I know.
Stephen Robles:No. There and so But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, the the only other update, it has the M4, so it's a little faster.
Stephen Robles:You can get up to 32. It comes with 16 gigs of memory standard now, which actually has been updated across the pretty much the whole lineup, which we're going to talk about, because 16 gigs is now the base, and it does support better displays. I'm gonna refer you to the tech specs page for all of these computers if you wanna see how many and what resolution displays these Macs now support with the M4 and M4 Pro because it is a wildly confusing thing. But, yeah, go ahead. What were you gonna say?
Jason Aten:I wanna know. I wanna talk about those USB c peripherals for just a second. Do you think that they had figured it all out and decided to do this last year, but they're like, yeah, but next year, all we're gonna do is add the m 4 and and spice up the colors just a tiny bit. So why don't we just save the USB versions of the peripherals so that it seems people will be happier? Like, this seems like such a no brainer.
Jason Aten:I I can't figure out why
Stephen Robles:Did it take so long?
Jason Aten:It took this long. You know what I mean? And it's so, I mean, they put USB C everywhere else.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:But you if you bought 22 days ago, if you bought another magic keyboard for your Imac, it was gonna still have a lightning port on it. I wonder if it's like I honestly wonder, like, if somebody has, like, a Trello board somewhere and they're like, here's possible features. Nope. Move that one to next year because we don't have a
Stephen Robles:Oh, I do.
Jason Aten:Like, I just don't understand.
Stephen Robles:It's it's possible. Although, so I will say I had been waiting for USB c accessories, and I was, like, okay. Once it comes, I'm gonna because I still use the Magic Mouse. I really like the Magic Mouse. It's my main mouse.
Stephen Robles:I prefer editing videos with it even over the Magic Trackpad, which is sacrilegious for a lot of people. And so I always thought as soon as those USB accessories are launched, I'm gonna jump on it. I did not, Jason, because I was like, one, it's a $100 for a new magic mouse. And I'm like this one would works great and I charge it every other month.
Jason Aten:Twice a year. Like come on. How often do you have to charge it?
Stephen Robles:It's more
Jason Aten:than twice
Stephen Robles:a year. I mean it's maybe like 4 or 5 times a year but even so it's like it's less than once a month, and that's kind of all that matters. And
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Pro to Matthew Casanelli, he mentioned this before, but he basically sets a reminder, like, every Friday afternoon to plug in his things. So over the weekend, they charge, and then he never thinks about it. So because I have there have been times where I get the low battery warning on my mouse, and I'm about to do, like, a live webinar, and that moment is stressful. And so, you know, in that regard, I'm like, sheesh, I wish I had a magic trackpad or some other pointed device because, I don't want my battery to die while I'm streaming live here. But if you actually, you know, just charge it regularly at at least once a month, then you should be good.
Stephen Robles:So
Jason Aten:Also, if you charge it for 90 seconds, you can get through a webinar for sure.
Stephen Robles:And that's typically what I do. And I'm like, I don't wanna keep this lightning cable around anymore. But also, I have an iPhone 14 that I film with sometimes, and I connect it with the lightning cables. I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna save the $100 and put that into an SSD upgrade for my Mac Mini.
Stephen Robles:But we're gonna get to that. Don't try to do
Jason Aten:that. Though, Steven, I'm still using the best Apple Magic Keyboard, and this thing still takes double a batteries.
Stephen Robles:I don't know how that's
Jason Aten:I could get one of these.
Stephen Robles:How was that the best?
Jason Aten:Feel? No. No. It's the feel of the key. Listen.
Jason Aten:I'm a writer. I write 5,000 words a week. No. I don't care about touch ID. I don't care about whether it use.
Jason Aten:Why why do I
Stephen Robles:need to tell when you have my keyboard? You're gonna buy something while you're on your Mac, and you need to I don't know. The double tap on the watch, though, I feel like it's not as
Jason Aten:Also, there's a touch ID button literally, like,
Stephen Robles:right there.
Jason Aten:It's so close. It's just
Stephen Robles:right there. Use a MacBook Pro. It's not a desktop.
Jason Aten:Yes. As a normal person does.
Stephen Robles:No. No. But I have a Mac Studio. So if I didn't have the Magic Keyboard, like, there is no touch ID option. Anyway, this is why this is why people leave us 5 star reviews and say, you're not affable.
Stephen Robles:Okay? This this
Jason Aten:They what they meant is I'm just contrarian. I'm ornery.
Stephen Robles:You're ornery. Ornery.
Jason Aten:I'm very affable.
Stephen Robles:The other guy I'm comma, ornery.
Jason Aten:I'm I'm affably ornery.
Stephen Robles:Ornery. But anyway, that that's the Imac. It's a nice upgrade if you're in the market for it. I was close to I was close to getting one, because I was, like, this would be a great family computer. The kids could, like, use Final Cut on it, but I was, like, it's it's day 1 of a week of announcements.
Stephen Robles:Something more is coming, and something more did. On Tuesday, Apple released this guy. The totally redesigned Mac mini. I'm gonna refresh this page just if you're watching so you could see this animation one more time. Best animation for intro product that I think yet, I think this might be the top one.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm. It's really it's really good. That was a really
Jason Aten:The pirate flag is good. I would give them.
Stephen Robles:Pirate flag is good, and also the little, like, 2 or 1 and a half minute stop motion Mac mini video, very good. Very good.
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:There's no hydraulic press in sight. It's great. It's such a good ad. But this thing is so tiny, Jason. It is 5 inches square, and if you were wondering, the Apple TV is 3.6 inches square, so it's just a little bigger than an Apple TV.
Stephen Robles:The new Mac mini is 2 inches tall, which is taller than the Apple TV, but it's just so tiny, and it's packed with ports. It's packed with power. Sorry. I don't I was going for alliteration, I guess. But just Well,
Jason Aten:for context, the size of this thing, a CD case is 4.75 inches.
Stephen Robles:There you go.
Jason Aten:So it's roughly the footprint of a CD case. Now I understand that most of our listeners don't even know what I just said.
Stephen Robles:No. They know CD. Seen a
Jason Aten:CD in our life.
Stephen Robles:They know CDs.
Jason Aten:Leave that in your 5 star review. How many CDs do you still have in your home?
Stephen Robles:You have a books? You know, the whole book.
Jason Aten:I think the over under is 6, I'm guessing, for most people.
Stephen Robles:But this this thing is super interesting because, one, you can get it with the M4 Chip, which is cool, but also introduced the M4 Pro. You can get it up to 12 core CPU, 16 core GPU. So this thing can be a little powerful machine, you know, if you want to do video editing and such. And it's got the ports, Jason. It has 2 USB C on the front and a headphone jack, and then on the back, 3 Thunderbolt ports.
Stephen Robles:Thunderbolt 4, if you get the M4 version. Thunderbolt 5, if you go with the M4 Pro. Gonna talk about the differences there. I'm gonna try to in a second. HDMI, ethernet, power, and the power, like, adapter thing is still built in.
Stephen Robles:So it's still just like that infinity barrel cable to charge this thing. So cool, and I love this thing. And it's still 5.99, like, you can get this for 5.99, Jason. Why? You can
Jason Aten:get it for 4.99 with an education discount.
Stephen Robles:Mind blown. Mind blown. So the the new Mac mini is awesome. The display situation with the M4 Pro, again, I'm gonna refer you to the tech specs page because, like, the M4 can now support 3 displays, 2 at 6 k, and then 1 at 5 k, or the M4 Pro can support 3 displays at 6 k at 60 Hertz, and then one display anyway, you should just look at this page. I'm just showing you.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I'm gonna link this in the show notes. Just look at this page.
Jason Aten:Well and this explains why the Imac only supports 2 external displays because it the m four can only support 3 displays, and one of them is built into the Imac. Right? So you can still connect 2 external displays. And I think they can be up to 6 k because the external or the internal display is, like, what, 4 and a half k on a on a 24 inch Imac? It's not a 5 k
Stephen Robles:because
Jason Aten:that's you have
Stephen Robles:to have
Jason Aten:a studio display for that. So so, yeah, it's it's very complicated. We don't actually know any of the things we're saying right now.
Stephen Robles:I read it from the page. That would that information good because I read it from Apple's text. No.
Jason Aten:No. No. I don't mean that we're wrong. I mean, we don't know what we're saying.
Stephen Robles:Oh, absolutely. That is absolutely true. That is absolutely true.
Jason Aten:I'm not saying we made that up. I'm just saying that the words have no the words have lost all meaning
Stephen Robles:to me. That is absolutely true. This is the bento box for the Mac mini. You can get it up to 8 terabytes and 64 gigs of unified memory, and it starts at 16. So once again, this entire lineup starts at 16, which makes that base model, except for the 256 SSD, really attractive, but because I don't know if you tried this.
Stephen Robles:If you spec out a Mac Mini, this this is not so much Mini in price, if you know what I mean. I'm gonna go all the way. Let's go with the, did I get the M4 Pro here? No. That's the M4 Chip.
Stephen Robles:Hold on. Let me go back. We're doing this live on the show. I got a M4 Pro, and the M4 Pro is how you get up to, like, 64 gigs of RAM. You need to have the most expensive chip.
Stephen Robles:I'm gonna max this thing out. 8 terabyte storage, which is a $24100 upgrade. You can spend 47100 US dollars on a Mac Mini if you really want it.
Jason Aten:Listen. That that 8 terabyte SSD up up Yeah.
Stephen Robles:That
Jason Aten:grade should come with a Kia Soul. Like, seriously.
Stephen Robles:It's so it's something.
Jason Aten:It's $24100 just for that upgrade. You can buy in a 4 terabyte SSD for, like, $450 from crucial.
Stephen Robles:I know. I know. It it should at least come with a magic mouse with USB c. You know what I mean? Oh my gosh.
Jason Aten:It should come the thing should at least have an SD card slot reader in the front of it if you're gonna do that. I don't understand. Like
Stephen Robles:That actually is a good point. I actually forgot about that. The SD card slot is removed, which was a part of the Mac mini like the previous M2 version. So no SD card slot is one of the reasons why I'm holding on to my Mac Studio, and I'm hoping I I posted this too. This thread also did numbers.
Stephen Robles:I posted a picture of my Mac Studio because I am one of those people. I use all the ports. You know what I mean? I use every part of the Buffalo, and every port here, and people were like, I use a Thunderbolt dock. Listen, there's a thun there's 2 Thunderbolt docks I think already plugged into this thing.
Stephen Robles:But anyway, it's connected to my studio display, my ATEM Mini Pro video switcher, my RODECaster Pro 2, then I have a Thunderbolt dock with 3 external SSDs plugged into that. I have Ethernet. I have my Stream Deck, my Stream Deck pedal. I have my keyboard from Keychron connected via USB. No, I'm not doing Bluetooth because it's too much latency, and the HDMI out is going to my Blackmagic ATEM Mini as a video source.
Stephen Robles:No. I'm not using the headphone jack because my RODECaster Pro 2 does that. But anyway, I use it all, Jason.
Jason Aten:Did you just say your keyboard has would have too much latency with Bluetooth?
Stephen Robles:The Keychron. The Keychron does. The magic keyboard doesn't. The magic keyboard is like instant, but the Keychron ones you like press a key and it's like, I'll think about it. Give me a minute.
Stephen Robles:You know? It's like one of those.
Jason Aten:Okay.
Stephen Robles:You gave me a little bit of Robert De Niro face.
Jason Aten:No. It's alright.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to say is if you get the M4 Pro and we're gonna talk about when we get to the MacBook Pros, the M4 Max, the thunderbolt ports turn into magically magically convert to thunderbolt 5. So these are the 1st Macs with Thunderbolt 5 support. This is gonna get you higher data speed.
Stephen Robles:I'm gonna put a link to this Macworld article in the show notes, but you can it supports up to 8 ks monitors over Thunderbolt 5, whether or not the Macs support that is a Mac OS thing, but anyway, Thunderbolt 5 is a spec, supports up to 8 ks monitors up to 540 hertz. I don't even know what you do with that, but anyway, the more bandwidth is the bigger deal, which I think they didn't have the number on here. What is the number?
Jason Aten:It's, so it's 80 gig gigabits per second. Bytes gigabytes per well, it's the g b s.
Stephen Robles:You're a gigabyte. I don't
Jason Aten:know which one it is.
Stephen Robles:Bytes per second because you're gigabits.
Jason Aten:Gigabytes per second.
Stephen Robles:People yell at you when you say bits and it's bytes and when it's you say
Jason Aten:So that's why I'm just admitting I have no idea. So it's g
Stephen Robles:b p
Jason Aten:It's 80 of them. Yeah. It's 80 of them in both directions.
Stephen Robles:As opposed to 40.
Jason Aten:So for that's 40 was. Yep. So that's for data transfer. But then it also can support up to a 120 Yes. For supporting those, those monitor configuration.
Jason Aten:So it'd be a 100 you get 80. In that case, you get a 120 out of the computer and 40 back
Stephen Robles:to the computer. Which is what you would use.
Jason Aten:Push those huge displays. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Which you would use for displays because you're sending board data to the display, from your computer. Also, more power throughput. You can get up to 240 watts through Thunderbolt 5 as opposed to the 140 from Thunderbolt 4. So Thunderbolt 5 is real. I mean, it's a thing.
Stephen Robles:I don't know what I would do with it, but it's it's cool.
Jason Aten:You can run your pressure cooker off of your Mac Mini.
Stephen Robles:Well Yeah.
Jason Aten:One thing we missed, though, that's but when we're while we're talking about displays Yes. On the Imac, it just realized that we didn't talk about this. But you can now get the nano texture display on the Imac.
Stephen Robles:That is true. So I
Jason Aten:was thinking about, like like, they're bringing that everywhere. It was on the, Studio Display and the XDR and then on the iPads, and now it's on the Imac, and we'll talk about the MacBook Pros in a minute. But, like, I feel like they're they're, like I don't know. Like Nano We don't think I mean, the Mac mini doesn't matter because you have to bring your own display anyway.
Stephen Robles:BYOD.
Jason Aten:I just exactly. Bring your own access I think it was wasn't it BYOKM
Stephen Robles:Keyboard mouse display KMD.
Jason Aten:Something like that.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. KMD. Yeah. But Just
Jason Aten:bring it off.
Stephen Robles:Now I did not get a nano texture iPad, and I still wonder if I regret that. I don't know if I regret it or not. I've went to the store and, like, looked at it. I look at it from the side, and it's, like, Apple Store lighting is perfect anyways, so it's, like, there's no glares anywhere anyway. So I'm not did you do you have any nano texture anything?
Jason Aten:Well, no. And I really did not want a nano texture display on my iPad, but then I put a paper, like, protector on it.
Stephen Robles:You did the thing anyway. Okay.
Jason Aten:But at least now I could take it off.
Stephen Robles:That is true.
Jason Aten:If I wanted to.
Stephen Robles:That's true. John Gruber was out there saying he wants a nano texture iPhone, and I'm like, I don't know if that'll happen, but
Jason Aten:You can buy screen protectors for that too.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I know, but but nano texture etched. Anyways, so the M4 Mac Mini, I do wanna 2 other quick things. In the announcement video, there was a quick aside to Final Cut and Apple was like, and in the new version of Final Cut, you'll be able to transcribe for captions and it's like, wait a minute, What? Like, this is not a thing that you can do in Final Cut right now.
Stephen Robles:There's no transcribing anything, and so they show the screenshot of Final Cut. It's a project. There is a tool, like a little magic wand tool, which is not in the current version of Final Cut. Then there's a transcribe to captions, and it shows the captions appear on this, like, vertical video. I reached out and got we have nothing to announce at this time, so I don't think, there's no more information on this, but it seems like there will be a new version of Final Cut coming.
Stephen Robles:Maybe I mean, the all these Macs actually come out next Friday, so if you order them and you got it for, like, day 1 shipping, it's November 8th next Friday. Maybe we'll see a new version of Final Cut come out alongside these new Macs. A lot of times you see software updated, but I'm very curious about this transcribing because if final like, this would be huge for Final Cut because Premiere does this, DaVinci, so many services transcribe your content, even let you edit via text, like Riverside, and also Premiere, but Final Cut's been kind of behind on this, and so this hopefully means transcribing your content. We'll see, but
Jason Aten:Yes. Well, okay. My understanding
Stephen Robles:Yes.
Jason Aten:That's how I'm gonna say this, of what this is is basically the Instagram ad captions feature. Right? Yeah. So and that's why but it's I don't think this is gonna have any editing implications.
Stephen Robles:Probably not editing, but but I I mean, if it's transcribing for captions, it's transcribing your project, and ideally, I would like, the reason why this is a big deal for me is when I export from Final Cut, I basically generate an MP 3 file that I throw into transcriptionist to get a transcript to run through ChatGPT. And so if this can cut down on that step and let me export both the video file and a text transcript and SRT transcript for, like, YouTube captions, this would save a lot of people a lot of time. So that's why I'm excited.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And that may be true. This was I I think, again, my understanding is this is sort of in the context of they're using some machine learning slash AI slash something something something to improve the ability to make vertical videos. Right? Because they have like a smart conform feature, which will do a better job of following the subject even better than it was like than it was in the past.
Jason Aten:And essentially, what they want you to do is do all of that work in Final Cut to the extent that you can, and then you can share it on TikTok or on Instagram or on wherever. So I I feel like what you're saying is yes. That'd be wonderful. I think that this is more like downstream of all of that. I don't know that you'll be able to export these.
Jason Aten:I could be wrong I mean to not I
Stephen Robles:Well, we'll see.
Jason Aten:I mean We
Stephen Robles:we will see. I'm I'm excited for it. It was the throwaway line in the video, and it's like, you gotta listen closely. These these guys, they they sneak it in there. A very cool announcement video, by the way, where, Jeff Ternes, he, like, unveils the Mac mini, and then you fly through the port on the anyway.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm. I thought that was fun. Right before, we take a break, you had an article. You were showing off the Mac mini. Were you most excited for the Mac mini after this full week of
Jason Aten:Yeah. I mean, my point was that the Apple is just showing off. Now I acknowledge in my article that I've said that four times now the, 4 macbook pros or I, excuse me, ipad pros were just showing off the M one MacBook Air was just showing off like the point. But with the Mac mini, the difference is they were able to do things that no other computer company can do. They made this.
Jason Aten:I mean, also, by the way, this is not a Mac mini. This is a Mac studio menu. Right. Just look at it. It's a Mac studio mini that that design language is, has nothing to do with the previous Mac mini.
Stephen Robles:People are like, oh, I'm going
Jason Aten:to get taller. Yes. It got smaller than the Mac studio. This is the Mac Studio Mini is what this thing is. Right?
Jason Aten:Like and so, it has ports on the front. That's all you need to know.
Stephen Robles:Ports on the front. Ports on the front, I feel like, is, like, the form factor differentiator because the Mac Mini, at least, has
Jason Aten:never had. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so I feel like my my my just takeaway from this thing, I haven't used one.
Jason Aten:I haven't even touched one at this point. I'm looking forward to potentially reviewing them in the future. But, like, it is Apple doing things that it can only do because it controls the entire stack. All of this is just made possible by Apple Silicon, and it turns out that Apple is very good at making its own chips. Like, they just are.
Jason Aten:Like, we we know this is true. We know what the m 4 can do. Yeah. I have an M4 iPad Pro right here. You have one as well.
Jason Aten:Like, we there's no surprises in terms of this, and this will just be better. Why? Because it has a fan. Right? Like but if you think about the M4, like, they can put it in an iPad.
Jason Aten:It doesn't need much space. That's true. That old footprint of the Mac mini was just, like, ridiculous how much empty space was in there. In 2,011, that form factor had an optical drive in it.
Stephen Robles:That is true.
Jason Aten:Right? Like, there was a super drive in them. It didn't stick around for very long, but the first one had a super drive. Yeah. So I just I think it's I think it's impressive.
Jason Aten:I think it's Apple doing the things that it can do. Like, this is the this is sort of, like, the logical form factor for this computer, And I'm glad they got there.
Stephen Robles:And this this was the one thing I bought this week. The Mac the MacBook Pros tempted me. I checked my trade in value, and I thought that this is really not worth it. My M3 Pro is so good. Like, I don't know why.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm. So but I got the Mac mini because I have a Mac mini right now. It's an I7, an Intel, Jason. I almost wanted to spit when I said that. It's an Intel I7, and it runs my Downy Transloader workflows, HomeBridge, stuff like that.
Stephen Robles:It's the computer that I'll remote into sometimes if I'm, like, away, and I wanna replace that. And so I'm going from an Intel I7 to this M4 Mac Mini, and I'm gonna connect it to like, the Mac Mini lives in my entertainment center, and so I'm actually gonna connect it to my receiver via HDMI also, because I'm like, maybe I don't know. Just see, like, what does a downloaded movie look like when I play it through the Mac Mini? Because I believe it can do all the Dolby Atmos and everything. I wanna try that.
Stephen Robles:And also as a family computer, if I hook it up to the TV, I have an excuse to buy USB C peripherals. But also I can then tell my kids, like, if you wanna use a Mac because you wanna do Final Cut or you wanna do Logic on a faster computer than your iPad, you can come to the living room and just pick up this keyboard and mouse and you got this this m four Mac mini on the family TV. So, yeah, I'm excited for that.
Jason Aten:I I think it's interesting the number of people who are very excited for the Mac mini and are gonna basically stick them in a closet or
Stephen Robles:That's what I in your time. It says
Jason Aten:That's why
Stephen Robles:they're the best.
Jason Aten:It's just They're the best. But I'm like, this is a this Mac mini is an is a reasonable upgrade for
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah.
Jason Aten:A lot of things. Like Oh, yeah. It's especially now that they come with 16 gigs of of memory. That's Like,
Stephen Robles:that's That's the deal. Yeah. That's the deal. We have a ton more announcements to get to, but I wanna thank our first sponsor, Audio Hijack. Listen, when you get that new M4 Mac, Imac, Mac Mini, and Mac or whatever, this this should be one of the first apps you download and install because Audio Hijack is the best way to record audio on your Mac from any application, from USB mics or audio interfaces, everything, and they just updated Audio Hijack with a new feature.
Stephen Robles:I don't even know if it's on his landing page yet, but I got an email. If you do iPhone mirroring to your Mac, Audio Hijack can now record the audio from iPhone mirroring. Wild, that's the power of Audio Hijack. It's not using Audio Hijack right now to record the audio of this podcast, and I use it all the time. Every time I record a video, Audio Hijack is recording the audio in the background.
Stephen Robles:I love it because it's easy to use. You put the blocks, whether it's inputs, outputs, recording the files to MP 3, WAV, record to multiple formats at the same time. You can record an MP 3 and a WAV, just add more blocks, and Audio Hijack can handle all of it. And I love how Audio Hijack lives in the menu bar. You can run any of your custom sessions at any point.
Stephen Robles:That's what I did right before we started recording. And then you can actually get levels in the menu bar. So I'm looking at my Mac menu bar right now and actually see the levels of my microphone in the menu bar. I can always look up and make sure I know I'm good, it's being recorded, getting signal. And again, it's just super powerful for recording, live streaming, recording from apps, whether it's Safari or any app on your Mac.
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Stephen Robles:All of their stuff, 20% off with the coupon code techxx, and I'll let them know you heard about it here on Primary Technology, macaudio.com /primarytech. The link is in the show notes. Techxx for 20% off. Thanks to Audio Hijack and Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this episode. So good.
Stephen Robles:That's crazy. You can record the audio from your iPhone mirror. Well, are you still using that? You still use an iPhone mirror a lot?
Jason Aten:Yeah. Although the the most common use case where I use it is a notification pops up on my Mac, and I click on it not thinking, oh, that was an iPhone notification, which is actually the way it should work.
Stephen Robles:Right?
Jason Aten:And then all of a sudden, the thing pops open, and you get to see the little letters filling up or whatever, and then it pops open. And I'm like, I should have just picked up my phone. But it is nice that I don't have to. Like, I can just look at it because a lot of times, like, my phone is either being used like it is now as a camera or it's sitting over there charging or whatever. So, yeah, I do I I use it.
Jason Aten:I like I don't do some of the fancy things you can do. I saw a demo of, like, CapCut where you could just drag video files from your desktop on your Mac into it and then export them back over. Like, that's it's pretty cool.
Stephen Robles:And it's cool. It is cool. Alright. Then on Wednesday of this week, we got the final Mac announcement for the week, which was the new M4 and M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro. Actually, 3 models of MacBook Pro, now all updated to the M4.
Stephen Robles:Not only do you get that more powerful chip, still comes in 2 colorful options, silver and space black. That's it. Well, you can get space black on the base model M4 MacBook Pro if you really wanted to now.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Because they got rid of space gray.
Stephen Robles:That's right. No more space gray. It's all space black. And if you look really closely, if you're watching on youtube, youtube.com/atprimarytechshow, you know that wallpaper on the MacBook Pro? You know what that spells out, Jason?
Stephen Robles:You don't need to buy this because you already have an m 3 pro. That's what it actually spells out to me. I don't know if you know that.
Jason Aten:M3 Pro?
Stephen Robles:No. It's it actually spells pro, supposedly.
Jason Aten:Yes.
Stephen Robles:I know. I was I
Jason Aten:was just kidding.
Stephen Robles:But anyway, that's the MacBook Pro. Here's the bento box from the announcement. So you can get up to 8 terabyte SSD, up to a 128 gigs of unified memory, which is wild. If you get the M4 Pro or M4 Max version, you can get Thunderbolt 5, with those ports turned to Thunderbolt 5. Also the base model MacBook Pro, the regular M4, now has a 3rd Thunderbolt port which it used to only have 2, so you get an extra port.
Stephen Robles:And there's a bunch of like technical specs about the chips and all that kind of stuff. I would refer you to the Accidental Tech podcast if you really want to nerd out about chips and all that kind of stuff. And nano texture display you can now get on a MacBook Pro. Matt is back. Matt is back.
Stephen Robles:They, they didn't use that tagline but I think they should have. Matt is back.
Jason Aten:I'm I'm glad they did not, but
Stephen Robles:Matt is back. M a t t e. Anyway, also the tech specs page, if you wanna know, like, what displays these things support, it is, you know, it's a lot. I'll just, you know, you could just look at that for a second. That's all the things.
Stephen Robles:You got DisplayPort 2.1 with Thunderbolt 5. HDMI out can support up to 8 ks resolution at 60 or 4 ks at 240. It supports a lot of displays, a lot of displays.
Jason Aten:And
Stephen Robles:I checked my trade in value for my M3 Pro MacBook Pro and I was gonna get like 900 something dollars for it. And so if I were to upgrade like to an equivalent M4 Pro, I would have to, like, pay out, like, $1700 and also, like, for what benefit? I don't use external displays with my MacBook Pro. I don't like, the videos that I edit, I wouldn't experience any difference in speed.
Jason Aten:So
Stephen Robles:I just want I want everybody to know I'm I am safe from upgrading unnecessarily my MacBook Pro. Mark said. But it's cool.
Jason Aten:Oh, yeah.
Stephen Robles:Nanotexture. There you go.
Jason Aten:I think the MacBook Pros are they seem uninteresting because they look the same, right? With the exception of the base model, which now gets the extra Thunderbolt port, which is a big deal, to be honest. Like you get if you're using a MacBook pro, like the MacBook Pro is essentially the Mac studio that you can put into a backpack and take with you. And you saw the back of of Steven's Mac Studio. It's just full of cords and stuff.
Jason Aten:Right? So give people all the ports they want. It's a pro computer. The thing about that base level base model, you know, it it in my mind, it feels like why would anybody buy the m four MacBook Pro? But then you realize, like, you get 36 gigs of memory with that thing.
Jason Aten:Like, you it's, like, not a bad deal to to, you know, to but once you, like, start to spec them up, you can, like, get a bit like, the they're that's a good computer. And I think that the m 4 pro and m 4 max, which we haven't seen in person yet because, right, the only one we've seen is the m 4, and it's in an iPad. So we don't really understand the performance of these things. I I think that the m 4 pro and m 4 max are going to be a more significant increase in performance over the m three versions than the m three was over the m two.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. For sure.
Jason Aten:And I think this is, like, the real deal. And
Stephen Robles:Apple just kept comparing things to, like, the M2 and even the M1 in the announcement videos, like, yeah. Yeah. Those are the comparisons. But, I mean, you can this is the base model M4 MacBook Pro. I mean, for $1800 you can get the 16 gigs of memory, a terabyte SSD, and you get an M4 Chip all in the MacBook Pro body style, which means you get that HDMI port, you got all the thunderbolt ports, SD card slot for $1800.
Stephen Robles:That's a good deal.
Jason Aten:And and, like, the display. Yeah. I mean, that display, don't don't underestimate that display. Yeah. That that HDR display, like, it it and and they made it brighter.
Jason Aten:Right. It's capable of being brighter when it's not an HDR mode to the SDR mode is brighter now, which if you're someone who works outside with a MacBook pro occasionally, like the fact that you can get the nano texture and the thing just gets brighter, honestly. And you, you talked about the middle one there, the base one, right? So it's like what? $141600 even with a 512.
Jason Aten:Like if you were debating between upgrading your MacBook air and buying the base model, M4 MacBook pro, and you don't travel a ton. So you aren't worried about the difference in the weight. Honestly, that base model is like that's a pretty good deal.
Stephen Robles:It's a great yeah, it is a great deal. And like you were saying, a 1,000 nits of brightness on these newer models for standard dev content, like not HDR, as compared to 600 nits on the previous model. So that's a big difference in the max brightness. Plus these can now dim to 1 nit in low light situations, whereas the previous was 2 nits. I don't know how much difference that is in reality, but
Jason Aten:It's half. Fair enough. It's half.
Stephen Robles:Half a nit or half a half the brightness. Half the difference. One one nit as opposed to 2 nits. So, yeah, that was the whirlwind of Apple announcements this week. Pretty solid.
Stephen Robles:Jason, why do you think they separated this into 3 different because they actually did videos for each thing, and if you put all the video times together, you have about an hour event, which like last year's scary fast event, like, I think last year's scary fast event was actually, like, 30 something minutes, like, it wasn't even an hour. Like, they could have done one big event even if it was just a streaming thing. Why do you and they had people, at least influencers, some, go out to LA to see these computers in person. Like, I saw, Andrew Edwards, iJustine, The Verge was there. Like, they actually went in person and got to take pictures of all this stuff.
Stephen Robles:Why do you think they did 3 instead of 1? Just change it up.
Jason Aten:Well, I mean, there's 22 things I have thoughts on there. 1, it does seem as though Apple is just trying different things. Right? The iPhone event and WWDC are the only ones that are like, we know exactly what's gonna happen every year. They're gonna do this developer conference.
Jason Aten:Here's the format. They're gonna invite people to Steve Jobs Theater for the iPhone event. Everything else, it seems like they're just sort of experimenting. Right? The the m four iPads was just like they did a thing in, I think, London and in New York City where they invited people to do, but they invited people to a very small space to just watch the video, like the same thing you could have watched yourself.
Jason Aten:Right? It's like, so I think they're just, they're just trying some different things. And this is another iteration of that. Because you're right, this could have just been a Mac event. But why wouldn't you want 3 days of coverage on something if you you know, like, why would you want one day of coverage if you can get 3 days out of it?
Jason Aten:Right? Because people are talking about these and they laddered them up. So they talked about the m four pro, then they talked about the or excuse me, the m four and then the m four and the m four pro and then the m four max. And so they're sort of building on it, which is the reason why I thought, like, oh, man. The Mac Mini should be last because it's the most exciting one.
Jason Aten:It's the biggest difference. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:But then
Jason Aten:I'm like, yeah. But you can't talk about, like, the pro and max and then go back and be like, this one like it's the pro.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:So I think that they just were like, why wouldn't we want 3 days of
Stephen Robles:Coverage.
Jason Aten:Press coverage instead of just one.
Stephen Robles:They did it felt like they took over the week because even I was, like, scrambling, like, yes, we're a tech show, not strictly Apple. And so I was just, like, trying to find, like, what else happened this week? But it was all Apple, like, all week, pretty much everywhere. I mean, there were some things we're gonna talk about in a little bit, but yeah. I mean, they got 3 days of coverage.
Stephen Robles:Their earnings call is today as we record on Thursday. I am not you know, I don't know, but they probably made a lot of money. That's usually the earnings report.
Jason Aten:Or maybe they didn't, and they were just trying to make us all look and look at these pretty Macs. I I don't think that's true. So don't Yeah.
Stephen Robles:We'll have to see. We'll report on that next week. They're earning calls, like, late in the afternoon.
Jason Aten:We can report on it right now. They made a lot of money.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. They made they made a lot of money. The other update, which was very quiet, but I found significant, and you wrote an entire article about this, the Mac
Jason Aten:Biggest deal of the whole thing. The biggest deal
Stephen Robles:of the whole thing. The MacBook Air, which I I threw a wild card in my predictions, I was like, this it would make sense, I thought, to throw an M4 in the MacBook Air also, because I'm like, M4 Imac, M4 Mac Mini, you're updating the MacBook Pros, why not just throw the M4 in the MacBook Air? I'm curious if you have a theory on that. But they announced that the MacBook Air, the M2 or the M3 I believe, you actually starts with 16 gigs of unified memory, doubles that likely, I think well, it's not an Apple intelligence thing because I thought the m 2 and m 3.
Jason Aten:Nope. It's a 100% an Apple intelligence thing. Here's the reason why.
Stephen Robles:Okay.
Jason Aten:So Apple Devices require 8 gigs of of memory to run Apple Intelligence.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:So if you're running Apple Intelligence, we don't we say they require 8 gigs. We don't know how big that model is, but it has to load that whole model into memory in order to run it. Which means if your device only has 8 gigs, it's all being used for Apple Intelligence, which means the performance of that device overall is going to seem like it's gone down Right. If you only have 8 gigs of memory. So they've upped it to 16 because you're gonna be basically shelving off part of it when you're using Apple Intelligence for that purpose.
Jason Aten:So you still are gonna wanna have other, like, if you're using writing, I mean, I don't think writing tools is that intensive of a thing, but you don't want your computer to feel like it's slowing down just because you're using apple intelligence. So I think this is a 100% because of that. And the reason that I'm really confident in saying that is they updated a 2 year old laptop that they're still selling as the entry level 999 device that you can just buy. If you don't want to spend $1200 on the new version, the current version, and they didn't change the price. They just doubled the memory.
Jason Aten:Honestly, that M2 MacBook air 13 inch with 16 gigs of memory and a 256 gigs storage is the best Mac deal you can buy right now. It's actually the best Mac deal I think you've ever been able to buy.
Stephen Robles:It is a crazy good deal. The 256, you know, if you're now I will say, previously, if if you were gonna get a base model computer and you were like I can upgrade one thing, it was always difficult to say do you upgrade the memory, do you upgrade the SSD? Now you actually don't have to make that choice, so you're getting the base model and you have just a little more to upgrade something, now you can jump up to that 5 12 gigabyte SSD, which I think makes it more a long term computer. Like, I feel like you can use that for years and be good, and you get the 16 gigs standard of memory, which is that's wild. It's a great deal.
Jason Aten:But even if you don't update the storage, you know, Icloud storage is a real thing. Dropbox is a real thing. You can store a lot of things, and And if you're thinking of, as a parent, if I'm looking at buying something for a kid, well, actually I'm gonna go to Walmart and buy the 649 and one MacBook air at this point. I'm not kidding. Like that's what I would buy.
Jason Aten:That's still an amazing deal. If they would have updated that to 16, like they would have sold them out. They wouldn't be able to make them fast enough. That would have been such a killer deal, but seriously for 649. Anyway, I think though, by doubling the memory in that M2 MacBook Air, like it's the best value, even with only 256 gigs of storage.
Jason Aten:I think that that's adequate for that device. Right? Like, I just I think it is.
Stephen Robles:So if you get the base model 9.99, which is 8.99 with an education discount, so that's wild. 16 gigs memory, 256. If you wanted to upgrade to 5.12, it is a $200, not a $100 upgrade. So it does bring it up to 1200, which is a significant difference, you know, especially if you're looking at education discount and other things. But my goodness, 16 gigs of memory.
Stephen Robles:It's
Jason Aten:Yeah. That's
Stephen Robles:sweet. That's sweet. Can you get a Mac now with only 8 k? I don't think so.
Jason Aten:Just the M1 MacBook Air, which you can still buy from Walmart.
Stephen Robles:Right. But it but they're buying directly from Apple, every Mac is 16 now.
Jason Aten:All the new Macs are 16.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Everything.
Jason Aten:Everything. Or all the current. Yep. Exactly.
Stephen Robles:Right. Yeah. Because the Mac Studio and Mac Pro already started with, I think, 32 or 16, something like that. Oh, my goodness. That Mac Studio just zoomed into my face.
Stephen Robles:I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what was happening. So speaking of, what are you going to use that RAM for? We're going to have to talk about image playgrounds, because, listen, I have access. It is horrifying, what I have discovered Image Playgrounds could do.
Stephen Robles:I wanna show some of the results, but
Jason Aten:What what you think is horrifying is what it thinks of you, just to be clear. That
Stephen Robles:is correct. Oh, and also, like, I I've sent pictures of my wife, my kids, my parents. I send them all through there, and let me tell you.
Jason Aten:Nate. Nate is good, actually.
Stephen Robles:Nate. Nate's got the best picture. I'm gonna show Nate in a second. Nate is our friend from and and my good friend from Movies on the Side as well. But, anyway, well, we thank 2 more sponsors this week, which is amazing.
Stephen Robles:This is our first 3 sponsor episode. Thank you, by the way, for everyone listening and watching because it means people actually wanna advertise on our show, which is awesome. But our next sponsor is Notion AI, another thing we use every week. I'm literally looking at a Notion document as we record because that's what Jason and I use to collaborate, to do all the show notes, and Notion is perfect for that. We put our notes in there, we put the links, you can do attach all the kinds of things.
Stephen Robles:Notion is super powerful too. I mean, you can do images, PDFs, I'll save PDFs for like this sponsor break. Put that PDF right in the Notion document, and then I can just click it and access it there. Notion is incredibly powerful. And now with Notion AI, it is even more powerful.
Stephen Robles:The new Notion AI, it's the single AI tool that does it all. You can search across Notion and other apps, generate docs in your own style, analyze PDFs and images, and it'll chat with you about everything. You can organize all your tasks, all your projects, and use Notion AI, which has knowledge from GPT 4 and Claude, and it can chat with you about any of those topics. You can also just select text in a Notion document and ask it to summarize, ask it to rewrite, and even prompt Notion to generate things. Like if you want, you know, give me 5 bullet points based on this topic or this text, all that kind of stuff, Notion AI can do it.
Stephen Robles:Jason, you actually had some things you wanted to try, right, with Notion AI and transcripts and stuff? What because it was capable.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I mean, I just typed in something that we didn't talk about, so it's not gonna be very impressive. But I do this occasionally because I use Notion for also all of my articles that I write. I keep a database of that. But, also, we because we have everything in there, I can just ask it, like, when is the first time we talked about Tim Cook?
Jason Aten:And it'll look through all of our show notes, and it'll be like, in episode 17, whatever, whatever you talked about this. And here's the what you guys talked about. Like, I find that really useful. I do that for articles all the time. I'll be like, when did I write about this?
Jason Aten:And what did I say? And because if you put all your transcripts in here, it'll just LLMs are very good at this. You give them a source of information and ask them questions, and they don't hallucinate. It's really nice.
Stephen Robles:It is really So,
Jason Aten:yeah, it's great.
Stephen Robles:It is great. And so you should definitely try Notion. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/ primary technology, all lowercase, notion.com/primarytechnology. The link is also in the show notes, you can click it there to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today, and when you use our link, you're supporting the show. That's notion.com/primarytechnology.
Stephen Robles:Thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode and also, this is really cool, another podcast sponsoring our podcast, which is awesome, The Data Citizens Dialogue Podcast. So listen, as a listener of primary technology, you're probably interested in like data and how data works, in data companies, data security and privacy. Well, that's a great reason to check out the Data Citizens Dialogues show. It's forward thinking brought to you by the folks over at Calibra, the leader in data intelligence. You'll hear firsthand from industry titans, innovators and executives from some of the world's largest companies as they dive into the hottest topics in data.
Stephen Robles:They'll get insights to everything from popular staples such as AI governance and data sharing, down to more nuanced questions like how do we ensure data readability at a global scale. I actually listened to the episode right here, The Power of Common Data Language. It was super interesting. It was with special guest Nicola Askham and they talked about data science and how it works like in a company, the things about security and privacy risks and how handling data within large scale companies, how that works. It was fascinating.
Stephen Robles:She also has a British accent, so that was just kind of fun to listen to. I mean, I'll be honest. And so you should totally check out this show, and while data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens dialogue is shaping the conversation. You can follow the Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast, and I'll put a link to that show in our show notes, so you can just click over and watch or listen to it there. So our thanks to Data Citizens Dialogue also for sponsoring this episode.
Stephen Robles:Very exciting. It's exciting.
Jason Aten:Good stuff.
Stephen Robles:Alright. Image Playgrounds, Jason, it finally hit yesterday. You got it a day before me and you were sending me Genmoji, and I I just didn't I didn't wanna see any of it. This is making me mad, because I didn't have access to it. And so I got the notification.
Stephen Robles:I kept going to Image Playgrounds throughout the last week just to see, like, you know, maybe it's there, and they didn't notify me, but it it wasn't there. But yesterday, got the notification, I went to it, and I immediately tried to start generating things, images of me, and I just have to say that this is what Genmoji and Image Playgrounds thinks I look like, and it is horrifying. And I, like I get it. I get it, But also why? So you could do this like animated kind of 3 d render, like Pixar style, then you could do like drawn style.
Stephen Robles:And I've I found out it really doesn't want to generate like, full body images of people, because I tried really hard, because you can prompt it, they have like suggestions where image playgrounds you could say like, here's a picture of a person, and it'll have suggestions of like, here's a theme, like beach, sunset, fantasy, then you can also add things like fireworks or whatever. But you can type in prompts as well. And Jason, I tried so many prompts, because I I wanted a generated image of me riding a polar bear. I wanted I wanted me on a polar bear, and it refuses to do it. It really just wants to do, like, the headshot or, like, the shoulders up.
Stephen Robles:It will not show a full body image no matter what. So it put the polar bear on my shoulder. It's a very small polar bear. Pretty cute, but
Jason Aten:It's polar bear riding you instead of you riding your polar bear.
Stephen Robles:It took the writing prompt, but I also then went on to generate lots of images. Nate, I hope it's okay that I show your image on here. Nate's actually, looks some of the one, like, one of the best.
Jason Aten:I mean, that is exactly what he looks like. Right?
Stephen Robles:It is basically yeah. It is very close to what he looks like. Whereas, I generated my entire family. It's oh, I did ask it because I was trying to see if it would do political images. And so I asked it, Donald Trump holding a corn dog, but it only pulls the picture that you have.
Stephen Robles:So I guess this is what I would look like in a suit holding a
Jason Aten:This is what you would look like as Donald Trump holding a corn dog.
Stephen Robles:I guess. Now you can, like, save an image, like, of a person to your photo library and then give that to Image Playgrounds and it will generate an image, So you can do that, but I didn't wanna use it very much because your phone gets scorching hot using Image Play.
Jason Aten:Like, the hottest you've ever I mean, this is hotter than if you leave it sitting on the towel at the beach with the screen on.
Stephen Robles:It's so hot. Like, if you ever like, when you first update to, like, what something that indexes your entire phone, like, when you first get an iPhone and you, like, transfer all your stuff and it's indexing all your stuff, hotter than that. Like, think even hotter. It is
Jason Aten:It's blazing.
Stephen Robles:It's blazing hot. And I was like I generated, like, 2 things and I was like, you know what? I'm done with image playgrounds for a while. But Yeah.
Jason Aten:It was I did, like, 7 or 8 of them in a row and it was insane.
Stephen Robles:I mean, it's it's interesting. I think it will on one hand, it feels a bit late because there was, like, thousands of AI profile image generators for years. Like, I did that, like, 2 years ago, where you can, like, upload 40 pictures of yourself, and those pictures look better, I think, honestly. Like, it actually can look more like you than these Image Playgrounds versions. So it's like, you know, you play around with it a couple times, like, that's fine.
Stephen Robles:The Genmoji side, you sent what did you send me? You sent me a a chip on fire, and then you also sent me
Jason Aten:You were asking me if you should buy AMD stock, and so I sent you a computer processor on fire.
Stephen Robles:You sent me this giraffe with a thumbs down. I don't even understand. And then you sent me an avocado? That's my A
Jason Aten:smiling avocado. Yeah. Listen. You see, you're faced with this prompt and it's like, what weird thing could I create that's not already an emoji? Because there's a lot of emoji.
Stephen Robles:Wait. How did you do it? How did you generate this polar bear? This guy riding a polar bear.
Jason Aten:I mean, that's that's what Chat
Stephen Robles:gpt.
Jason Aten:That's what Chat gpt thinks you look like riding a polar bear.
Stephen Robles:You know, I was thinking, can because the ChatGPT integration now with Apple Intelligence, can you ask the voice assistant to generate an image?
Jason Aten:Oh, I haven't tried that. My guess is no.
Stephen Robles:An image of a middle aged man riding a polar bear. I just asked I don't know. It just shows me pictures of polar bears.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I don't Apple is playing this super conservative. Yeah. They do not want this thing to go off the rails at all.
Stephen Robles:Right. Exactly.
Jason Aten:And so yeah.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I then sent you so Genmoji is kinda weird. To get to it in the messages app, it's like there's Image Playground as one of the apps, like, where you would send later or whatever. You can open Image Playground, generate one of those images, and come back. But if you wanna send Genmoji, it's like in the emoji
Jason Aten:In the emoji? Yeah. Yeah. Picker. You just start typing what you want.
Jason Aten:And if it doesn't exist, it'll just give you the option to make it.
Stephen Robles:So I'm gonna I'm gonna try I really want something riding a polar bear. So I'm gonna try and say a snake riding a polar bear. And oh, okay. This is actually horrifying. This, it generated a snake riding a polar bear, but it's also like
Jason Aten:A mouse headed snake riding
Stephen Robles:a polar bear? Mouse headed snake. Right? I don't even know what to think about this. This will all be the chapter I work oh, here's here's a normal snake riding a polar bear.
Stephen Robles:So you can have things riding things in Genmoji, just not just not image playgrounds.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And if you wanna know why the iPhone is not carbon neutral, this right here is why. Because Steven has used 82% of his battery, which you would know if battery percentage was on.
Stephen Robles:That's true. My phone's already getting hot. Just generating a couple of
Jason Aten:That's what I'm saying.
Stephen Robles:It's starting to get warm. I could feel it. So, anyway, that was Genmoji. I you know, I was gonna do a video about it once I got access to it, and I'm like, you know what? I think just posting those images was was good.
Jason Aten:I think that polar bear has leprosy that you just sent me too.
Stephen Robles:Oh, does it does it? Does it really?
Jason Aten:Either that or it's a polar bear shaped pretzel and that's salt. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:You can't zoom in on these Genmoji, which is kind of annoying. But anyway I
Jason Aten:know, but so if you're looking at on your Mac though, the window is bigger and so I can just see them. Okay.
Stephen Robles:You see the you see the leprosy in detail?
Jason Aten:I'm just saying. Okay. Leprosy in detail, there is a title for you.
Stephen Robles:If we were doing those kinds of titles, yeah, that
Jason Aten:would Yes.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Anyway, that's I mean, yeah, your family seem to enjoy it. You were Yeah.
Jason Aten:I think it's it's one of those things that I think people will have a lot of fun with. And there will be times, like, I imagine that younger people who communicate mostly in emoji anyway will love this because they can just send whatever they want. And as a parent, like, I'm I guess I appreciate that it sticks pretty close to the rails and it won't be super offensive or whatever.
Stephen Robles:So I imagine there'll be like Christmas and other wish lists, this year for iPhone 16s because, you know, like my kids, they have the base model iPads from, like, a year or 2 ago, and my oldest son has an iPhone 13. Like, nobody has Apple Intelligence or Genmoji right now. Mhmm. And so I I'm expecting to maybe hear something on the list that is capable of Genmoji. We'll see.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. But so Apple's earnings are later today. A lot of all the other companies have their earnings. So I'm gonna I'm gonna throw to Jason, my affable cohost, to just read the front page of tech meme. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Tell us how much money do people make.
Jason Aten:Listen, they're all making a lot of money.
Stephen Robles:That's it.
Jason Aten:That's it. Everybody's having a good quarter in the re so the Microsoft, Google, actually, Alphabet, and Meta all reported earnings basically in the last week. All of them are making a ton of money, and the reason is the same. People are using their platforms because of AI. Right?
Jason Aten:Like, that's the bottom. I mean, it's a little bit more nuanced than that, but everybody's making a lot of money. Google search is making money. Like, all these companies just print money anyway. So this is not going to be a very nuanced, conversation about it because it we could spend a lot of time talking about it.
Jason Aten:I would be more interested in in what Apple's earnings look like today. We can talk about that next week. But the bottom line is
Stephen Robles:Everybody's making
Jason Aten:They're all making a lot of money, and they're making more money, like, significantly. Like, Microsoft was up 16% over the last quarter over the same quarter last year. Like my meta was up almost 20%. They're all doing fine.
Stephen Robles:They're all, they're all doing just fine.
Jason Aten:Well, and actually it isn't, it is worth mentioning that they're making a lot of money while they're also spending more money than ever because they're all buying NVIDIA GPUs. Right? Like, all that money is just going to GPUs.
Stephen Robles:So let so let me ask you this because I did I texted you about this story. I even removed it from our notes because I was like, maybe we don't talk about this. I saw that OpenAI signed a deal, or what happened with AMD that AMD might be making chips for OpenAI?
Jason Aten:So, basically, all of these companies cannot get enough, of GPUs. Right? And so OpenAI is gonna start using AMD chips. It's also trying to start making its own. It's working with Broadcom to do that.
Jason Aten:So, like, they would be manufactured, like, they're they've also TSMC, which is the company that makes all of Apple Silicon, they actually make the chips for basically everyone except for Intel. Actually, they make some of Intel's chips now too. Their OpenAI is essentially saying, we need more. People just gave us $6,500,000,000. Do you want some?
Jason Aten:And they're just walking around looking for people who will sell them more GPUs because that is the limiting factor. Electricity and GPUs are the limiting factor to AI taking over the world. Like, that's the end game here. That's how this basically works. And so, really, that's like Nvidia has owned that market, which is why they're, like, basically the 2nd most valuable company in the world at this point.
Jason Aten:Right? They are. It's just because of all I mean, I would not be surprised at some point if, Jensen Huang, who's the CEO, becomes, like, the richest person in the world, like, because of NVIDIA stock. Like, there are a $3,300,000,000,000 company, and it's entirely based just on people can't get enough GPUs. And so
Stephen Robles:That is wild. So yeah. Also, I saw that, OpenAI plans to release its next model before year's end. Did you see that?
Jason Aten:Well, they so they've been talking about about it, and they it's hard to know, like, exactly. I think that you're talking about Orion. Orion. Yeah. They've said that they well, I don't know if they've actually said it publicly, but it has been reported that they plan to do that by December.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:Right? And the the difference is that it won't unlike its previous models, it will not be necessarily released with chat GPT.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm.
Jason Aten:Right? And so they're this is a model that would be either I mean, again, I'm not an large language model expert, but it'll be available through, like, its API for, like, enterprise customers.
Stephen Robles:Gotcha.
Jason Aten:And so we'll see. I you know, it'll be interesting. Like, this is a model that other people will use to build products on as opposed to, like, GPT 4 o, which is Chad GPT.
Stephen Robles:Gotcha. Okay. Interesting. Well, we'll always keep you updated on the end of the world right here on primary technology.
Jason Aten:Even when we don't know what it means, but we'll talk about
Stephen Robles:it. We know. Listen, I I use Chad GPT.
Jason Aten:We're we're basically, what is it? Notebook LLM, but we just have a lot more personality. We just say words about things.
Stephen Robles:We know things. That's the tagline. That should be the tagline
Jason Aten:for the show.
Stephen Robles:We know we know things. We know things. Yes. I wanted to ask you about this article you wrote about the the Netflix moments. I don't watch Netflix enough to know what this was or to even see the feature, but it looked cool.
Stephen Robles:So what is what is Netflix moments?
Jason Aten:Yeah. So basically, you can now, and I don't know if this is available on all Netflix content or if it's only certain content because I actually had a hard time finding it when I updated the app. I was not able to find, like, an example where let me do this. But there are 2 things that you can do. 1, you can if you're watching a movie and you're like, I love this scene.
Jason Aten:I wanna be able to rewatch it or show you can tap the moments, and this is basically like bookmarks for a, a spot in the video. This is like what you can do with podcasts in Pocket Casts, right, where you can, like, clip a video or clip of it. So you can save them and you can go back and rewatch them, but you can also share those clips now, those moments on social media. So there's a share feature that lets you, like, send them directly to, like, Instagram, for example. And then there'll be a link that someone will be able to open in their own Netflix app.
Jason Aten:And, and if you think about it, it's cool because it's like, this is how Netflix shows spread is they go viral because people love them and they're just making it easier for people to do the thing they want to do anyway. And I'm in my mind, like, yeah, that's the smartest idea in business. Just make it easy for people to do the thing that they want to do Yes. That's also beneficial to you.
Stephen Robles:100%. And, like, I wish more would do that. Like, I understand the licensing copyright or whatever, but it you know, if you can have the agreements and with Netflix's original content, it can decide on its own, I imagine, whether or not to just do this. But I also think about I mean, if Apple TV had this kind of feature, I would share that Ted Lasso dart scene from the first season so many times. And honestly, what I do now is typically find the clip on YouTube and share that link, because it's just easier and I know everybody can watch it.
Stephen Robles:But if you could have just easy sharing of a scene like that and share it to your social media with a link to then directly watch the full episode, that would be great. I think Apple should a 100% do this, at least with their content.
Jason Aten:Yeah. It must be only certain content because I'm just, like, tapping through things and and I can't, like, save moments of anything. Maybe it just may do I have to like watch it for a while? I don't know. We'll just leave we'll leave lost going for a while.
Jason Aten:We're watching the pilot of lost right now. It's a
Stephen Robles:good show. I'm so sorry.
Jason Aten:I didn't even know it was on Netflix. I might not cancel my subscription. I'm gonna rewatch lost first. That's a rash. We only signed up for Netflix because we wanted to watch the Simone Biles documentary because we have a gymnast.
Jason Aten:And so we re signed up for it, and, apparently, I haven't canceled it.
Stephen Robles:Like, are you saying we have a gymnast? It's like, we bought a gymnast. We have it. It's downstairs. You mean one of my children
Jason Aten:One of my
Stephen Robles:is is a gymnast.
Jason Aten:One of my and she's actually a retired gymnast, but my point is Simone Biles is her hero, so we wanted to watch the the documentary that they were doing.
Stephen Robles:There you go. If you start watching Lost episodes instead of Friends at night, and then you tell me that you don't have time to watch an episode of, whatever it is I told you to watch last week, it can be a problem.
Jason Aten:I might just binge watch Lost because I'm flying to Portugal in a couple weeks and just watch it on the plane.
Stephen Robles:See. Interesting. I binged, Ted Lasso season 3 on my last long flight from from, Tel Aviv back here. But anyway
Jason Aten:I actually need to sleep on that flight so I probably shouldn't watch anything but anyway. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:You're gonna watch it. You're gonna watch it. Nintendo released a music app and I just wanted to mention this because I thought it was this is I thought it was pretty cool actually. I downloaded it and started listening to it. If you have a Nintendo online account, a Nintendo Switch online member, you can listen to all this like Nintendo music.
Stephen Robles:It's just like in the background.
Jason Aten:Is this just the video game music basically? It's
Stephen Robles:the video game music. It's the video game music. But if you play Nintendo games like Legend of Zelda, like it's really good music and it's really great background music. And so it's a Nintendo music app. I thought that was fascinating.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:I I have nothing to add but yes, that's fine.
Stephen Robles:IPhone only. Yeah. IPhone only. Alright. I was debating what to do for our personal tech and I don't know whether to talk about how I bricked my iPad Pro.
Stephen Robles:Oh.
Jason Aten:I think you should. Okay.
Stephen Robles:You should
Jason Aten:talk about that and we can talk about the other thing in the bonus con we need a bonus episode.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We'll do we'll do that.
Stephen Robles:Alright. So here's the personal tick segment of the show. Listen, I don't like messing with betas. As much as I'm on betas now, it's only because I have to make video content of this stuff and I don't have a backup 15 pro max. I didn't keep my pro my 15 pro max.
Stephen Robles:I traded it back in. So I was trying very hard to get Image Playgrounds the day it released, because I wanted to put that in my video. And so I, you know, downloaded the 18.2 beta on my main iPhone, which is risky enough, that I got the waiting list. And then I saw some people on social media being like, I got right in on my Mac. If you update to macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta, and people were like, I got it on my iPad but not my iPhone.
Stephen Robles:And I was like, alright. I'm gonna upgrade everything. And so I upgraded all the things except my Mac. I'm not willing because it's such a mission critical device, I don't like putting the beta on my Mac, so I didn't. But I put 18.2 on my phone, and I put 18.2 on my iPad Mini and my M4 iPad Pro.
Stephen Robles:I put it on everywhere, and I still didn't get access. And I was like, alright. And then I was getting this error, which is this is what happens when you do betas, it's my own doing. But I was getting every time I would turn on my iPad, I would get this error that said, display is not from manufacturer. Like, this display is not I was like, listen.
Jason Aten:Where did you buy this? Like, this is You were in a really rough part of Tampa when you bought that iPad. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:You're saying, oh, the back of a truck, and I'm like, no. This is the this is the built in iPad. Anyway, so I was tired of seeing that error. I was like, I'm not getting into Image Playgrounds. I backed up my iPad right before I put the beta on it, I'm like, I'm gonna downgrade.
Stephen Robles:And now listen, I've downgraded before, everyone on social media was like, downgrading is risky. Listen, I've downgraded my Macs, I've downgraded my iPhone, I've downgraded listen, it's not my it's not my first day, Okay? I've down I've downgraded things. So I did
Jason Aten:Not the first thing he's ever bricked is what he's trying to say.
Stephen Robles:I think this is the first thing I've ever bricked.
Jason Aten:Oh, okay.
Stephen Robles:I think that's that's why it took me by surprise. So I went I downloaded the 18.0.1 file directly from Apple's developer portal. So I got like the the I'm gonna flash the the thing. I attached my iPad to my Mac. I see it come up in the finder.
Stephen Robles:I hold the option key. I I click restore, so then you can choose the file which to restore to. I choose the 18.0.1, and after a few seconds it says installing OS on iPad, I say great, and then the iPad goes boom, recovery mode. I said okay, maybe it's just doing its thing, and now it's stuck in recovery mode. I could not do anything to get this thing out of recovery mode.
Stephen Robles:I tried flashing the 17 dot whatever, I tried putting the 18.2 beta file through the re the finder thing. Tried all of that, tried DFU mode which is the most the craziest, like, hocus pocus button combination.
Jason Aten:Device FU is what that mode stands for.
Stephen Robles:It's like DFU mode is like, not only do you have to have the right button, like, combination, but the timing has to be perfect. It has to be it's like volume up, volume down, sleep button, and then maybe hold the sleep button and volume down or maybe let it go and then press sleep and volume down at the same time. Hold that for a while. Turn around
Jason Aten:3 times and spit.
Stephen Robles:Yeah, then you got eye of newt to the dragon's toenail. You gotta let go of the sleep button, hold the volume down for 10 seconds, and then you'll be in DFU mode, but DFU mode the screen is blank, so you won't really know. And I was like, Well, okay. I tried that a bunch of times, never got it to go into DFU mode, just stuck on the recovery screen. I was like, Well, listen.
Stephen Robles:This is my own doing. I'll just deal with it. I'm gonna go iPad mini all the way one more time. And I got a bunch of threads people, because I posted on threads, and a bunch of people calling me, like, Mergent, I downgraded. I was like, thanks.
Stephen Robles:And 1 I had a couple people say, try try the I My Phone app. Mhmm. It's letter I, myf0neapp. I'm not linking it. I'm not gonna show it on screen because I wouldn't actually recommend using it.
Jason Aten:Because it's voodoo is what you're saying.
Stephen Robles:It is the shadiest looking app. Like, if you remember the spammy ads you used to see on websites all the time, this is that but an app.
Jason Aten:Yeah. This is the your Mac is infested with the virus, click here, but on an app that you actually willingly downloaded.
Stephen Robles:I willingly downloaded it. IMyPhone. Even the name is, like, it's a spammiest name you could I don't even know. Anyway, I downloaded this app. A bunch of upsells trying to get me to upgrade or whatever, but it said on the website, get out of recovery mode with one click for free.
Stephen Robles:I said okay. You said I can do it. I plugged in my iPad to the Mac with the Imiphone app running. There's a little button that says exit recovery mode. I clicked it and it just worked.
Stephen Robles:It just got out of recovery mode instantly and I don't know, I immediately unplugged my iPad, I immediately deleted the Imiphone app. I used Hazel to sweep my entire Mac and download any file might be associated with it, and I got my iPad out of recovery mode.
Jason Aten:I do love that if you Google Imiphone, the people also ask questions are, is it safe to install Imiphone? Is Imiphone a Chinese company? Does Imiphone really work? How do I get rid of Imiphone? These are the things that people want to know when they Google this app.
Jason Aten:It's the That's
Stephen Robles:That's the first app or a piece of software that I would say unequivocally worked and fixed my problem and would 100% not recommend. I don't I don't know of anything else I could say that about.
Jason Aten:It unlocked your iPad, and also, all of your information is for sale on the dark web at the moment.
Stephen Robles:I I was really trusting in Hazel at that point to just delete it off my computer as fast as possible. I I don't I have not seen any remnants of it. I've not got Did
Jason Aten:you air gap your computer while you were doing this?
Stephen Robles:What does that mean?
Jason Aten:See, I would have
Stephen Robles:What is that?
Jason Aten:Disconnected from the Internet.
Stephen Robles:Shoot. I should have done that. Air gap. Is that what that mean? I never heard of that.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Yeah. It means, like, a computer that's not connected any network so that you can't remote into it or hack it or anything like that. But if you're gonna do something like this, I would a 100% I should have. Unplug that Ethernet cable, disable Wi Fi, Bluetooth, everything.
Jason Aten:Well, anyway,
Stephen Robles:if if
Jason Aten:I suddenly disappear, midweek
Stephen Robles:and there's no more episodes of this show, you know why. I, my phone. Oh, I should have done that. But anyway, I mean I deleted it as fast as I could. I'm hoping nothing got sent to wherever.
Stephen Robles:But you know I figured Mac, the Mac now is so anal about security and permissions. Like if you just wanna change the brightness on your display, it's like, are you sure you wanna do that? Do you wanna allow that security?
Jason Aten:Enter your password.
Stephen Robles:Change the volume, enter your password. And it's like Right. You have to authenticate for so much I'm like I guess I'll just trust macOS. The analinity? What is the word?
Jason Aten:The anality? I don't know. That's definitely not the word.
Stephen Robles:That's not the word, but anyway the analness of this.
Jason Aten:The overprotectiveness.
Stephen Robles:The overprotectiveness of Mac was I figured I'd just trust it and we'll see what happens and and there were no permissions like this app would like to access your local network and this app would like to access your full disk access. It didn't say any of that, So I think I'm good. But anyway, I own Brick Miles.
Jason Aten:Speaking speaking of brick devices, I saw I it's not quite as I didn't put any betas on it. I don't even know what I've done with it now, but I'm trying to figure out if anybody out there knows how to get a 2012 MacBook air. I'm having the same problem. Only my problem is there's no free app. You can just download to get it out of recovery mode because you can't make, you can't make a restore version of the, the OS to install on it without a device that can run that OS.
Jason Aten:And it's like, right. There's this weird cutoff between lion and I think mountain lion where you can download just the DMG file of the old, right. Like lion, because, but the problem is if you do that on like a apple Silicon Mac and you open, what you have to do is like unpackage the installer and then take that installer and use that to create a disk image. But it will not let you unpackage the installer because it can't run on that Mac and anything newer than that has to be downloaded from the Mac app store.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And it will not download that onto your computer if you can't run that operating system and all of the operating systems that would run on my MacBook air or my MacBook pro will definitely not run on this old MacBook air. Now my daughter has an Intel MacBook air, and and I had sort of forgotten about this. So I think what I have to do is download like mountain lion Yeah. Onto hers before the Mac realizes why are you going back to a 6 year old operating system and get it to do it?
Stephen Robles:If you go to the app store and then purchases, usually that is where it would let you download the operating system, if you did actually download it from the Mac App Store back then. But I actually just
Jason Aten:But it will tell you this operating system will not run on this.
Stephen Robles:Well, I'll tell you what.
Jason Aten:I tried this.
Stephen Robles:I re I just remembered. I have a I have a box in my garage with some computer cables, and there might be a USB flash drive with Lion on it. And so I'm
Jason Aten:With iPhone Mac I found my phone Mac
Stephen Robles:or something?
Jason Aten:Is that you got a flash drive with that? You're gonna send me
Stephen Robles:one of the boot drives I made, so I'll I'll see if I can find that. But, also, I realized my mom still has a 2,008 MacBook Pro. It was I was actually just using it at her house last week.
Jason Aten:A 2,008
Stephen Robles:Macbook Pro. 8. The battery is so swollen that the trackpad is now, like, elevated above the chassis Put the neck
Jason Aten:Put that thing in a bag of sand right now.
Stephen Robles:It works. It works because I was it's this is another personal tech story. I was trying to update the software on our Toyota RAV 4.
Jason Aten:And like, That's not where I thought this was going, let me just be honest.
Stephen Robles:I couldn't get it to do it. But anyway, I'm gonna bring my screwdriver over there because I wanna take the battery out before it explodes. But also
Jason Aten:Good good call.
Stephen Robles:I might be able to create a boot drive on that. So I will Oh. I'll try to let me let me ask Apple Intelligence. Remind me to make Jason a boot disk tonight at 6 PM.
Jason Aten:I thought about precise.
Stephen Robles:It says make Jason a boot disk. That's Apple Intelligence for you.
Jason Aten:Apple Intelligence is about to turn me into a boot desk.
Stephen Robles:Okay. So I'm gonna try that. But, yeah, the the battery is so swollen. Like, you can still use the trackpad because it has tap to click on, but you it doesn't depress because the battery is just, like
Jason Aten:You should not push hard onto that at all, or you're gonna have lithium just leaking everywhere.
Stephen Robles:I'm gonna take it out for I'm taking that tonight. And I guess you're not supposed to put it in the garbage, but, like, what do you do with it?
Jason Aten:You can put it in a bag of sand and take it to your fire department. That's how you dispose of those. No. No. No.
Jason Aten:You think I'm kidding?
Stephen Robles:What you're supposed to do?
Jason Aten:I guarantee you. If you if you look on your, like, fire department's website disposing lithium batteries, they probably have a
Stephen Robles:similar dig a hole in her backyard and throw it in there? Does that work?
Jason Aten:Sure. Same thing. But I told you the story of how my son dis disassembled a lithium battery up in his bedroom from, I don't remember, from one of his little robotic. I swear we talked about this, but from one of his little robotic toys or something like that, he disassembled the whole thing and it smelled like this weird solvent smell up there. And we I'm like, everyone out.
Jason Aten:I got a bag full of sand. I put the pieces in there, and it's been sitting on our back patio for 6 months. Actually, I think my wife finally took care of it, but, like, I'm like, you guys are. And then I'm, like, googling poison control. Is this going to kill the children?
Jason Aten:The the but, apparently, the what the smell we smelled was not the bad smell. It was just the solvents or whatever. There are other smells that would be bad, but because the battery was basically dead, you know, it was a pretty small battery, but
Stephen Robles:I will say the inside
Jason Aten:of a battery is not what you think it is. It's just it was a very weird.
Stephen Robles:So like, what is it? Is it
Jason Aten:it was like this long it looked like this long tape ish not tape, but like it was like the consistency of, like, one of those one of these things, like, an alcohol swab. Right? But it was like because that's, like, wrapped up on the inside of there. But I expected it to just be, like, full of, I don't know, lithium part. I don't know what I thought was going to be in the inside of there, but that's not what I thought it was.
Jason Aten:And I was like, listen, son, there are only 2 rules in this house. We don't hit girls and we don't disassemble lithium batteries. That's it.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Those are good good rules. Now I'm gonna have to Google lithium batteries when we stop recording. Anyway, alright. So here's what we're gonna record a bonus episode.
Stephen Robles:I think can we talk about the Jeff Bezos thing? Yeah. We should. I wanna hear I wanna hear your thoughts on it. So if you wanna listen to the bonus episode or get ad free versions of the show, you can support the show directly in Apple Podcasts.
Stephen Robles:You get the ad free versions and the bonus episodes, or you can go to primary tech dot f m and you click bonus episodes and you can support the show that way as well. You can also support the show by giving us that 5 star rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you'd like and we'll give you a shout out here on the show and, yeah, you can watch us on YouTube as well. Youtube.com/atprimarytechshow. I think we actually crossed 1500 subscribers. I didn't check.
Stephen Robles:I should I should have checked, but, yeah, I think we crossed it. Oh, no. 1467. So here's what we need. We need we need
Jason Aten:Let's go, people.
Stephen Robles:At least 33 people from this episode because there's way more that listen than are subscribed. So go ahead and subscribe so we can, get over 1500. But anyways, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Thanks to Notion AI Audio Hijack, and thank you to Data Citizens Dialogue Podcast for sponsoring the show.
Stephen Robles:Thanks to you for listening and watching, and we'll catch you next time. Watching, and we'll catch you next time.
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