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Mac mini M4 Review, iOS 18.2 Updates, Apple Intelligence Fails, ChatGPT vs Google Search

/ 01:23:03/E48 Download MP3
Stephen Robles:

Who is but the form following the function of what? And what I am is a man in a mask. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Another huge show today. We have an M4 Mac Mini review.

Stephen Robles:

Jason has it in hand, so we're gonna talk about that. Plus, Apple Vision Pro accessories, and the VisionOS beta now has ultra wide Mac screens. IOS 18.2 public beta with all the image tools. I played around with Image Wand. ChatGPT's search is now out, and it's actually pretty good.

Stephen Robles:

Apple acquired Pixelmator and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by the Data Citizens Dialogues Podcast and Audio Hijack and members like you who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me is always my good friend in the Apple Vision Pro. Just kidding. He wears it more than everybody.

Stephen Robles:

Jason A10. How's it going, Jason?

Jason Aten:

Good. You know, I bet you most of our listeners don't believe I actually even have one.

Stephen Robles:

No. I think you don't.

Jason Aten:

Because they've never actually seen me wear one. I just talk about using it all the time. Would you no. We don't wear it on

Stephen Robles:

the episodes.

Jason Aten:

No. I never wore them. I never wore it on there. You because I didn't get

Stephen Robles:

it sitting up

Jason Aten:

though. Oh, you might be right. Okay. Well, it's sitting right there. Yes.

Jason Aten:

In case you can't see it.

Stephen Robles:

We can't see it, but that we believe you. We we were sure we believe you. Someone said I needed to move the movie quote that we do every week back to the cold open, and so I think it feels right there.

Jason Aten:

I think so.

Stephen Robles:

But I'm curious. Do you know what movie that quote was from?

Jason Aten:

You're gonna have to say it one more time because you said a lot of words.

Stephen Robles:

I said a lot of words. I I just kinda rattled them off, and now I closed the tab.

Jason Aten:

Okay. So let

Stephen Robles:

me look at the beginning. No. No. No. Hold on.

Jason Aten:

Okay.

Stephen Robles:

I got it. I got it. I got it. I said, who who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask.

Jason Aten:

Oh, the man okay. It's that Guy Fawkes movie, with Natalie Portman and Hugo Weavey.

Stephen Robles:

Yes. Yes. Yes. You're on the right track.

Jason Aten:

V for Vendetta.

Stephen Robles:

Hey. You got it.

Jason Aten:

Okay. The mask was If the mask was not in there, there's no chance. Zero chance I would know what those words were.

Stephen Robles:

That is the the most we're gonna talk about the election on this podcast. I might even cut that out. Anyway, we have some 5 star review shout outs to give, and then we're gonna talk about the M4 Mac Mini. Jason, he's gonna he would show it on camera, but he's using it right now to record. It's plugged in.

Jason Aten:

That's true.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Don't don't hold it up while we record, because

Jason Aten:

I might hit the power button on the bottom.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, yeah. Don't do that. Do that. We have 5 star reviews in Apple Podcasts from lpt0901 from the UK, Brandon Samples from the USA, the the do I don't know how I don't know what this is, but it's the doo doo Latalla from Canada. Forgive me if that's actually a name that I mispronounced.

Stephen Robles:

I'm so sorry. Dubzxn from Florida, Philip, Floridian. What's up? And dominant hand, pocket or dominant pocket for the iPhone. No one none of these other reviews specified, so it's not like I'm, you know, washing away the the other answers.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Right. I'm just

Stephen Robles:

saying it was. You can look at that podcast. And then Graph from the UK. Thank you for those 5 star reviews. Leave us a review.

Stephen Robles:

They were a 4.9 star podcast, because someone said Jason wasn't affable enough.

Jason Aten:

I don't know if that's exactly the reason why, but I'm trying to be nice

Stephen Robles:

to know. That wasn't the reason. That wasn't the reason. Someone leave it someone gave us a one star review for something else. So, anyway, we wanna get up to a 5 star podcast once again, which is, I mean, that's where we were for a while.

Stephen Robles:

So, anyway, leave us a 5 star rating on review on Apple Podcasts. We'd appreciate it, and you get a shout out at the top of the show. Also, our last episode did numbers on YouTube. It has about 5,000 views right now, and so funny comments. In last episode, you said I forget if it was it must have been in the main episode.

Stephen Robles:

You said, we have a gymnast, Like, you were talking you were talking about one of your kids.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say, but apparently the way I said it sounded like, we have a gymnast. Like, we've taken a gymnast.

Stephen Robles:

Exactly. So blue blue kibo on YouTube was, like, so what are your demands? Yeah. I thought of the line from the avengers when, Tony Stark says, we have a Hulk. You know, he's talking to Loki and the sour.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. We have a gymnast. We have a Hulk. Alright. Let's get to it.

Stephen Robles:

Mac mini m 4. You have it in hand. You have a whole article reviewing it, and I'm gonna link that in the show notes, of course. You're probably gonna publish it while we're speaking because we're recording

Jason Aten:

before

Stephen Robles:

it's actually live. But, but tell me about it. What what are the specs that you got? How's it been?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. The one that they sent me has the M4 Pro with 48 gigs of storage and then a 1 terabyte SSD. And

Stephen Robles:

Wait. 48 gigabytes of memory. Yep. Because that would not be a lot of storage.

Jason Aten:

And, I don't know what they said. It's the 48 gig, 1 terabyte. Do I have to specify which is what

Stephen Robles:

you're gonna do?

Jason Aten:

If the audience is smart, they'll figure

Stephen Robles:

it out.

Jason Aten:

But, yeah, I said it wrong.

Stephen Robles:

They got it. They got it.

Jason Aten:

And the reason I think I said it wrong is I literally was clicking the little Mac on it to check just to make sure I was saying the right amount of memory because I I was pretty sure it's 48 because the pro starts at, like, 24 or 40. It's weird because it's they're not the same. Like, no. 34 starts at 16 and then you can do 24 and then 36. And then this one is 32.

Jason Aten:

Anyway, it's weird. So Yeah. And it's amazing. It's I wrote my my my takeaway is it's the most delightful new Mac I've reviewed in a long time. It's it's super powerful for it's not just for its size, but period.

Jason Aten:

It was faster than the m three max MacBook Pro, and it's faster than the m two ultra processor that's in the Mac

Stephen Robles:

Studio right now.

Jason Aten:

It is absolutely ridiculous. I tried to put into this article, Geekbench, like, the results, but

Stephen Robles:

Yes.

Jason Aten:

It was like, nope. You can't do that. It didn't say no. You can't do that, but it the image just disappeared. But I have them right here.

Jason Aten:

And it I mean, I don't have okay. So I did get a MacBook Pro to review, but it's not an m four max MacBook Pro. So I can't speculate on the performance of that except for that it's obviously going to be better. But other than the m four max processor right now, this Mac mini with the M4 Pro is, like, the fastest thing Apple's ever made, right, in CPU performance. GPU performance, the the the m two ultra and the m three max still smoke it pretty good because it's got they just have more GPU cores.

Jason Aten:

Right? Like, a ton.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Just more cores.

Jason Aten:

And so, like, in most GPU performances, it just scales parallel. Like, it just continues to, like, scale it. If you add more, you can do twice as much. Right? So, but it's kind of insane how fast this thing is and how like, I

Stephen Robles:

used it. I wrote it like, I

Jason Aten:

used it for all the things you do on a computer, and then I listed a bunch of things that almost no one does on a computer, like match loudness and match loudness and audition, record audio and audio hijack, you know, color Yeah. Black magic raw and DaVinci Resolve, all of these things. And, you know, it was it's pretty much amazing. I I love using it. Really, the only knocks that most people would say are the power button, which is dumb.

Jason Aten:

It's not a problem. Like, I'm never gonna

Stephen Robles:

turn it off. Wait. Wait. Wait. With the power button, because there was some speculation on this, can you hit the power button without lifting it?

Stephen Robles:

Like, can you reach around? Or do you actually have to physically lift it to hit the power button? Don't actually turn it off right now while you record, please.

Jason Aten:

No. You can't. You you would have to lift it

Stephen Robles:

a little bit. You'd have to

Jason Aten:

have some super small fingers to get it underneath that lip. There's just no way. It's I mean, that's I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

Already 3 d printing, like, these little levers that would, like, attach to it, and then you could,

Jason Aten:

like There's not a whole lot of space there. Like, I'm looking at it, and I'm it's Yeah. Less than a half of an inch of clearance. So

Stephen Robles:

Right. It's it's not a lot. I mean, again, I don't think the only time I've had to use the power button on my Mac Studio was, like, in the hurricane because the power was out and my APC battery died. Like, that was then to turn it back on, that was it. Because you can program your Mac to shut down and turn on on a schedule.

Stephen Robles:

You can have it to turn on automatically after a power outage, given, you know, you know, all the factors or whatever. But, like, I'm I rarely ever touch it. Automatically.

Jason Aten:

Well and I think you can also turn your Mac off from the the Apple menu. Right? You can just go to shutdown. Now you can't turn it on that way, obviously, because if it's off, there's no menu. So you'd have to, like, do that.

Jason Aten:

But, like, I just it's I don't even my my laptops, I almost never I can't think of the last time I turned one of them off. The last time they even powered off was if they were restarting because of a software update. Right? Like, that's I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I'm curious. With with MacBooks, I believe you can turn them on just by pressing any key. Like, you don't necessarily

Jason Aten:

Unfortunately, that's true.

Stephen Robles:

Right. That's gonna be

Jason Aten:

The most effective way to turn your MacBook on is to try to clean the keyboard.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Exactly. Can you turn on a I don't know this. And you you don't have to know this. I'm just curious.

Stephen Robles:

If you could turn on a desktop Mac by hitting the keyboard of something, I imagine it would have to be physically attached by a USB, but I wonder if that

Jason Aten:

I'm I'm almost positive the answer is no. I didn't test that but I because I don't care, but I did not But I don't think it's true. I don't think you could do that. Sorry. I have to be more affable.

Jason Aten:

I don't think that that's true, but it's a great idea, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna change your title. The affable and gregarious.

Jason Aten:

The other affable guy.

Stephen Robles:

Jason Aitken.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. No.

Stephen Robles:

I wanna hear more about it. One question, though, because I'm looking at all the pictures in your review. Did you take these with your iPhone or, like, your big camera?

Jason Aten:

No. These are with the Nikon, with the z 6.

Stephen Robles:

These are the nice camera. Yeah. These are very nice photos. They're very moody.

Jason Aten:

I just Like, it looks pretty nice. So, yeah, the problem is I had to do it this morning before the sun came up because I needed photos and

Stephen Robles:

As soon as the sun

Jason Aten:

whatever, whatever, whatever. And I just all of that, it looks like it's natural light is these bloom cube panel LED things. So

Stephen Robles:

Well, it looks good.

Jason Aten:

Real well. It worked real well. Yeah. Exactly.

Stephen Robles:

Natural soft light. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

But I could

Stephen Robles:

Well, another time I don't know if we're gonna get to it today, but we do have to talk about this stack of things next to the Mac mini. That's not even in, like, size order. You have your Scarlett 2i2 on top of a cal digit dock, which is smaller. I don't know why those aren't flipped, And then I don't know. We have

Jason Aten:

Well, the reason why is because of the cord pressure behind that cal digit that if it's done top, it just, like, tips backwards. So having it on the bottom keeps everything flush. That's literally the only reason I see. I'm I like esthetics. That stuff matters to me.

Jason Aten:

But you what you know about me is I just do whatever is the most functional thing. I don't care. It's like this works. So but I but I could have taken them out. But I I didn't because I needed to show, like, it I put that photo right below, you know, the part about the black magic raw and the isotope and Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Yeah. I get it.

Jason Aten:

I get it. But there is a problem with the Mac. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

I know your article says there's one problem. What's the problem?

Jason Aten:

K. So did you know if you start with the base model Mac mini, it's $599, and it has 16 gigs of memory and a 256 gig SSD. And if you wanna increase that 16 gigs to 32 gigs and you wanna increase that SSD to 512, you can double both of those things. And the cost of it is $1199. You could buy 2 base Mac minis for $1198.

Jason Aten:

You would have the exact same amount of storage, the exact same amount of memory, and you'd save a dollar. And to me, that is preposterous, Steven. That is completely bonkers.

Stephen Robles:

That might be the first, like, solid argument against Apple's tier pricing

Jason Aten:

It is that

Stephen Robles:

I've heard because that is ridiculous.

Jason Aten:

Ridiculous that you could buy 2 whole Mac minis for the same in hand, you'd keep a dollar for the price of upgrading.

Stephen Robles:

So I'm gonna do this right now live. So it's 5.99 base. Yep. If you go to 32 gigs memory, so doubling that and double the storage

Jason Aten:

It's $1199, which is $1 more than 2 Mac Minis would be.

Stephen Robles:

That does feel like one of the more egregious I mean, that's where Apple listen. Apple makes its margins on memory and storage upgrades. Like, let's just be real.

Jason Aten:

But I feel like it's a little bit on a device. So on a on a Mac Studio where you're starting at $25100, the pricing is the same. And I I understand why the pricing is the same because, whatever, the SSD

Stephen Robles:

Same chips. I mean, honestly

Jason Aten:

not gonna yeah. They're not gonna, like, discount it. But when you are starting at $599 and the the thing is, if you bought a second Mac like, I get it. People are gonna tell us, like, storage and memory, they don't work that way. You can't buy 2 of them and have 30 you know, it's not

Stephen Robles:

Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Let's do that. Thing. But you'd also get a whole new processor, all that aluminum, another fan, more ports.

Stephen Robles:

A second power button. Yeah. You got another power button. Upside down. Put it right up the back of sandwich.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, yeah.

Jason Aten:

You could stack them. Don't do that.

Stephen Robles:

Power button right at

Jason Aten:

Don't do that. But anyway, I just feel like it is a little bit insulting when you start with this because I did write that this is the perfect computer of what you wanna do is have some kind of weird server set up and throw this thing in your closet, Steven. And it's it's great. But it does feel like especially egregious that it doubles the price if you're going to do that. And I I just I think I think Apple, like, my takeaway on that was Apple has some really smart people.

Jason Aten:

I think they could figure out the math to sort of rationalize this a little bit without losing that much money because you can buy a 1 terabyte SSD external. No. One terabyte of NVMe SSD. So internal from crucial for $85 it would cost you $400 to upgrade that through apple. To me, I feel like that's a lot of margin.

Jason Aten:

And at some point, it just feels like you're, like, extracting rent from people kind of. But all of that said, Mac Mini is amazing. My final conclusion was even the base model for this computer with 16 gigs of memory and a 256, SSD is fantastic. And just spend the $85 on an external dot you know, 1 terabyte drive and put all your stuff on that, and you'll be so happy and this will last you forever.

Stephen Robles:

Or just buy an Apple Vision Pro, and you can use that as the monitor. Just kidding. Totally undo any money.

Jason Aten:

Of course, you don't get any extra rammer or storage Yeah. If you do that.

Stephen Robles:

No. Don't do that. Don't do that. Well, this is this is very exciting. I'm excited.

Stephen Robles:

Mine comes in tomorrow as we record. I got the base model and the only thing I upgraded was the storage to 512 because like you say in your article, I'm gonna throw this in the closet. Actually, I'm gonna throw it in my entertainment center. Mhmm. And I am going to connect it to my home theater receiver if I ever wanted to just pull up the Mac on the TV for whatever reason.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know. Some people I've seen were talking about this might be a good, like, gaming option if there were actually games and Apple Arcade people wanna play. We'll see, you know, connect to a Bluetooth controller, you could do that, But I'm really excited because I'm gonna do a video on it, but I have an Intel I7 Mac Mini in there, and this is gonna be a massive upgrade. And honestly, it's I'm probably not gonna notice any kind of speed difference, but just knowing it's Apple Silicon and I do log in to my Icloud account on that and I don't know. I feel a little weird having the Intel Mac syncing some things.

Stephen Robles:

I usually turn all the syncing off. So I don't know. Maybe that's just I

Jason Aten:

think you'll notice a speed difference, even the m 4. But so I also was sent, I haven't finished the reviews yet, but we can briefly talk talk about them if you want to. I have the, m 4 imac with the nano texture display, and then I also have an m 4 MacBook Pro with a nano texture display, which, by the way, nano texture everything. Like, it's

Stephen Robles:

Isn't that good?

Jason Aten:

It is so good, especially on a laptop.

Stephen Robles:

I

Jason Aten:

Oh, tell me that. I'm telling you right now. I and I'll just give away my takeaway is that if they upgrade the MacBook Air with the option for an OLED or mini LED display with nano texture, they could they could double the price of the MacBook Air, and people will pay it. It'll be that worth it. It'll be so good.

Jason Aten:

It'll be so good.

Stephen Robles:

Why? I don't I'd I'm hearing from you. I hear Gruber talk about this on the talk show. It's a $200 upgrade on the Imac.

Jason Aten:

It's a $150 on the MacBook Pro.

Stephen Robles:

Well, it's a bigger bigger display.

Jason Aten:

I'm just saying. It's but it is it is so in fact, what was funny is I I had it sitting on a desk, not here in my office, but I had it sitting on a desk that had, some overhead lights and then a window behind it. And I just was using it. No big deal. And then I opened up my laptop, my MacBook Air, and I'm like, what is wrong with this screen?

Jason Aten:

And I realized there was so many points of light hitting it that you didn't even see at all on the on the Imac. It was fantastic.

Stephen Robles:

But you have a keen eye. You're a photographer. You're looking at Apple Vision Pro OLEDs every day. Is is is it a noticeable difference when you look at like, talking about color, saturation, contrast? Is it a noticeable loss?

Jason Aten:

I mean, no. No. Like, could a colorist tell? Maybe. The I would say overall, the screen the the how do I differentiate this?

Jason Aten:

Things like text and stuff to me, they didn't they don't feel softer. Actually, I'm gonna open it up right now.

Stephen Robles:

The Mac I got the Mac Pro Center. Because that's the the the what I have heard is that the nano texture and, like, I've seen some videos. I've seen people when they you know, Apple actually had a little event in Los Angeles where they were showing off these Macs, and a bunch of influencers were there, And I see people doing the MacBook Pro side by side with the regular glossy and then the nano texture, and, obviously, the the most obvious difference is the lack of glare, or basically it kind of diffuses the glare across the screen. So if you have a light, the glare, anodextxture really lessens that. But at least in even in those videos, it does look like everything is slightly less saturated and contrasty, but I'm not sitting in front of it.

Jason Aten:

No. So I think that the display the what it appears is I mean, I'm looking at a random junk email that someone said all the text is perfectly sharp. Like, it's perfectly sharp. It's just it does the whole thing have a slightly softer feel to it. Yes.

Jason Aten:

But I don't want that to be don't mistake that for less sharpness. There's a there's a different it's a different variable. It's a different quality of the display that seems different compared to looking at a glossy display. Like, if I look up at the studio display right now, that's Right. It doesn't feel sharper.

Jason Aten:

It just feels like glassier. I don't know. It's a hard thing to explain. I would buy it on everything. I I I didn't buy it on the studio display, but I would I'd put it on everything.

Jason Aten:

It's it's fantastic. And and I'm like, I edit photos. Like, I edited photos this morning for my review. I didn't I did it on the studio display, but I would have had no problem doing it on a different display.

Stephen Robles:

Did did you get one of the nano texture iPad Pros when those came out earlier this year?

Jason Aten:

No. The but the joke is I when I got an m 4, I just put a paper like screen protector.

Stephen Robles:

That's right. That's right. That's right. Oh, man.

Jason Aten:

But the difference is this nano texture goes all the way to the edge. Unlike those those iPads where there was actually a shiny glossy bezel and then there's a nano texture display. Both the Imac and the MacBook Pro, it basically goes to the to the edge.

Stephen Robles:

Wait. Do you have so the MacBook Pro, is it connected to anything right now?

Jason Aten:

No. It's right here.

Stephen Robles:

Can you, like, just go to the desktop and show it on screen? Yeah. So our our YouTube viewers can see. So if you're not watching I'm

Jason Aten:

just making sure there's nothing on my, to do list here. Hang on. Let me just nuke this, widget. There's a widget. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. It's, yeah. Hold on.

Stephen Robles:

Leave one star review as anonymously on Apple Podcast. So if you're not on youtube.com/atprimarytechshow, the link is in the show notes too if you wanna see.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. So

Stephen Robles:

show them now. Yeah. Go ahead.

Jason Aten:

There you go. And then you can text

Stephen Robles:

on it

Jason Aten:

as you can see text.

Stephen Robles:

So the very edge, something's happening with the vault.

Jason Aten:

I don't know why. It's because I nuked something and Outlook thought it needed to be involved.

Stephen Robles:

So the so the black bezel around the screen is also nano texture Yeah. Glossy?

Jason Aten:

Correct.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, interesting.

Jason Aten:

I'm not I'm trying to hold this up. Can

Stephen Robles:

you No. No. No. I see it. I seize it.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. I seize it. I have to go I'll have to go back to the App Store and check this out. You're gonna make me I just I've I've always been leery of it. And maybe it's because I have the old matte screens in my head, which people who have been in the Apple world for more than 10 years will remember, you could get a MacBook Pro with a matte or glossy screen, like you just had that option, and then it went away for a long time.

Stephen Robles:

And now, nano texture is here, so I have to look at it again. Now I have one I

Jason Aten:

have one more controversy about the MacBook Pro. I'm gonna give away my review. I haven't said it yet.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, okay.

Jason Aten:

Well, there was not a lot for me to write about because it's just an m 4. And they sent me the base of base models. I think it has a 1 terabyte SSD, so it's they upgraded that. But Wait.

Stephen Robles:

Did they send you the m 4 m 4 pro?

Jason Aten:

M 4 MacBook Pro.

Stephen Robles:

So they sent you a more powerful Mac Mini.

Jason Aten:

So here's the thing. I'll explain that in a second. But it's an m 4 MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of memory

Stephen Robles:

Yeah.

Jason Aten:

And, a 1 terabyte, SSD, which I think the only reason they give you the 1 terabyte SSD is no one could even port. They couldn't they know that we couldn't I couldn't even, like, put my stuff on it if you didn't give me that. Right. In fact, on this one, I don't even have my entire Dropbox downloading. I just have, like, a couple of folders.

Jason Aten:

But this m 4 MacBook Pro that I and I is 1 third of a pound lighter than the M3 Max MacBook Pro. And there's only one way that's possible. There's less battery in this.

Stephen Robles:

Battery.

Jason Aten:

But here's the thing. That means that they could have made the battery in the base level better. Like, they could have given it more battery life, but they wanted all of them to be the same. And, obviously, the m four pro and m four max require more battery, right, to get the same amount of performance. And I I I tried to figure it out.

Jason Aten:

I'm like, well, the difference in the chip is, like like, fractions of an ounce. Right? Like, nothing. And even the SSD

Stephen Robles:

The m four max isn't a pound heavier.

Jason Aten:

Well, the m three max. But, yes, it's not like a third of a pound heavier.

Stephen Robles:

No. The m four max. Excuse the m four max. Well, I'm just saying I was weighing it comparing to

Jason Aten:

an m three max. Right? Because I have one of those sitting here. And so I put it on a on a post, like on a scale, like a, you know, postal scale or whatever. And it was like a third of a pound heavier.

Jason Aten:

And I think the only way to to explain that is battery. Battery is the only dense enough thing in there to make that much of a difference. And I feel like, why didn't you just fill this thing with battery? Make it the same way. Nobody buying a MacBook Pros complain about a third of a pound.

Jason Aten:

Right? Like Is

Stephen Robles:

Thunderbolt 5 heavier?

Jason Aten:

Definitely. All that data is so heavy.

Stephen Robles:

It is. Because I got a lot of photos on my phone. It gets pretty heavy.

Jason Aten:

But they could have given it so much battery life.

Stephen Robles:

So what's the what's the weight difference?

Jason Aten:

It's like a third of a pound.

Stephen Robles:

That's that's kinda significant actually.

Jason Aten:

It's noticeable. Like, I kept picking them up and I'm like, I I can't pick up the M3 Mac right now because it's literally just serving as a standard for my iPhone. That's all it's doing. It's not even on. It's actually been wiped but anyway.

Jason Aten:

Wow.

Stephen Robles:

That is that is kind of a shame then. Yeah. They could have made that kind of like a battery monster. Exactly. If they would shove more battery running an m 4.

Stephen Robles:

That's great.

Jason Aten:

But I I don't think they wanted to have to explain why the m 4 gets more battery than the other ones because like, wait. I'm paying more money for the M4 Max and I get less battery life until they Yeah. But I'm like, why are you artificially reducing this thing that could just last for days?

Stephen Robles:

That is true. I will tell you, I'm going to be tempted if and when the M4 MacBook Air comes out, because I've been taking stock in my thing. You know, I have my M3 Pro MacBook Pro, and I had no reason to upgrade to an M4 anything MacBook Pro, so I'm like, I'm just not gonna do that. But I one of the reasons why I kept it, and maybe you can answer this too, the SD card slot, which correction from last week, I said the previous Mac mini had an SD card slot. That was false.

Stephen Robles:

There's not been an SD card slot in the Mac mini, so just kidding. Nope. You didn't lose anything with the new one. But I kept the MacBook Pro over the air because the SD card slot, and as I continue to think about it, I haven't used that SD card slot, I don't know, like the whole time I've had it. Like, I I wanted it because, like, well, if I bring my camera and I record a thing, I wanna put it in there, but I don't do that.

Stephen Robles:

I actually anytime I'm away from the studio, I film with my iPhone now, so it doesn't matter. So the SD card slot doesn't matter to me personally, but the display, the display on the MacBook Pros, which is the ProMotion display and all that, compared to the MacBook Air, I know you used a MacBook Air kind of interchangeably, like, is it noticeable to you? Like, do you feel like me?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. The MacBook Pro is the best display Apple's ever made. Like, it just is so Well so, so good. It's it's better than the Studio Display. I would argue in some ways, it's better than the XDR just because it's on a laptop and you could take it with you and stuff.

Jason Aten:

And it's not wanna have higher refresh rates. Not $6,000.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Well, the MacBook Pro

Jason Aten:

is promotion. Right? Yep. You're right.

Stephen Robles:

And so the XDR doesn't even have that. Right. And, I

Jason Aten:

mean, I don't ever notice that on my studio display, so I guess I don't care about that as much. But all that's to say, the display is noticeably better, especially, like, I watched Interstellar the other day. Don't ask why. Just reasons. I had to explain.

Stephen Robles:

You don't need a reason. You can watch that any time of day.

Jason Aten:

I had explained black holes to my son, and so I watched Interstellar because, of course, that's how you would do that.

Stephen Robles:

You you've been a good father.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Anyway, so but I was watching part of it on my MacBook Pro, and it's just, I mean, having basically it's not an OLED, but it's as close as you're gonna get until you put an OLED on there to have that deep black, whatever. Yeah. It's so good. Now that said, if you're comparing them side by side, the MacBook Pro display is significantly better, but the MacBook Air display is not bad.

Jason Aten:

It's fine. It's totally fine for all of the things. Even if you're gonna do video editing and stuff, it's it's all fine. Like, it's it's Yeah. It there's nothing wrong with it.

Jason Aten:

It's not ProMotion, fine.

Stephen Robles:

That's fine. I I'm looking at the the pro display XDR tech spec page. Yeah. And it's it's 60 hertz too. It's not even, like, 90 hertz or whatever.

Stephen Robles:

I I was wondering

Jason Aten:

if you could That is the worst. That is even worse than what I just said about pricing. That that thing is $5,000

Stephen Robles:

without a

Jason Aten:

stand without a stand.

Stephen Robles:

And if you want nano texture on that, it's another $1,000.

Jason Aten:

Steven.

Stephen Robles:

I mean,

Jason Aten:

what is even happening? I actually it makes me think differently about the people I knew that bought one of these. And now at the time, there was no studio display, but still.

Stephen Robles:

Right. But also the fact that this came out in 2019 with the updated Mac Pro. So this display is over 5 years old. Price is unchanged. I mean, this is classic Apple.

Stephen Robles:

Like, price is unchanged. Features, unchanged. That's it. That's it. I mean, I've I've I'm not tempted by this anymore.

Stephen Robles:

I was when it first came out, but I couldn't afford it back in 2019 anyways. But now the studio display is so good. But now now I'm like maybe I should get a Nanotech and sell this one.

Jason Aten:

I I will say hold on. I will just say Yeah. The the studio display overall is a little bit overpriced. And so I don't know that it's worth buying another one with nano texture. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

I don't know. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

No. I probably wouldn't do that. I don't I mean, yes. But it's also a great display.

Jason Aten:

Like Sure.

Stephen Robles:

In in my tech world, when I have the ability to buy something where once I have it, I'd never have to think about it again. When I have the option to do that, I do that. And, like, for instance, microphone wise. This is my podcast mic, the Earthworks Ethnos. I have a with the mic I record videos with, it's the Sennheiser MKH 416.

Stephen Robles:

It's a $1,000 microphone, and I'd never wanted to spend that much on a microphone. I had plenty of other mics, and I just kept seeing other people talk about, like, if you buy this mic, you never have to think about mics again. And I didn't realize, like, what that felt like.

Jason Aten:

Sure.

Stephen Robles:

And when I I got this maybe 2 years ago, and it is a nice feeling to think, I never have to even look up or think about microphones again because, like, it is just the perfect mic and I never have to do anything about it. And so the studio display is also that for me, like, when I got this I had the LG Ultrafine, which, whatever, fine display, but when I got the studio display it was like, I'm good. Like, I'm totally good. Like, this is exactly what I need, and I don't have to think about it. It's the great size.

Stephen Robles:

So anyway, there's there's something to be said, I think. I mean, the only downside is there's, like, a

Jason Aten:

little baby iPhone in there, which is gonna someday die, and it's gonna prematurely but think about it. Like, hold on. The argument against the Imac has always been, yeah, but what about when the computer dies and you wanted to just use it as a display? But what happens when you buy a display in the little tiny computer and it dies and you can't just keep using it as a display?

Stephen Robles:

I mean, listen. The iPad

Jason Aten:

I'm not wrong.

Stephen Robles:

I have an iPad second generation in the closet that if I plug it in, I could still use it just fine. And that thing is was iPad came up 2011?

Jason Aten:

You say you could use it just fine, but

Stephen Robles:

you can't update any of the software on it, and you probably can't use half of the app anymore. What software is my display? I understand there's software that updates, but I mean, if this software just

Jason Aten:

stays on your ear

Stephen Robles:

I was

Jason Aten:

talking about the iPad. I'm just saying. I'm just saying, like, iPad.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

It's a fantastic display. I agree with you. I'm just saying it's weird to me that they put a thing in there that could prematurely like, because this is this is the same display they've been using literally for what? Since the 2015 Imax, maybe? The 27 inch Imax.

Jason Aten:

Like, it's the same exact panel. 27 inch. It works amazing. It's it's fantastic.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Great. And the webcam's fine. Don't me. I saw somebody asking about the the studio display on Mastodon, and they were like, oh, but the web the web the webcam is fine.

Stephen Robles:

Totally

Jason Aten:

fine. Yeah. The webcam on the Mac mini is really good actually.

Stephen Robles:

On that note

Jason Aten:

It's much much better than the power button. Let me say that.

Stephen Robles:

One of the few sarcastic moments, from Jason Aten. I wanna talk about we have Apple Apple Vision Pro accessories that came out. Jason actually has some in hand, so we're gonna show them on screen. But before we do, I wanna thank one of our sponsors for today, which is the Data Citizens Dialogues podcast. I mentioned this on last week's episode.

Stephen Robles:

So fun to have a podcast sponsor another podcast. I feel like that's kind of like an ideal thing, but the Data Citizens Dialogues podcast. If you listen to this show, you're probably interested in data, whether it's data management, data security, data privacy. If you're interested in data, then you need to check out the Data Citizens Dialogues podcast. The link will be in the show notes.

Stephen Robles:

A forward thinking show 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. You get insight 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? And So I actually been listening. I listened to their latest episode, which just came out yesterday as we were recording this podcast, and it was with Jordan Galvin, talking about data governance, laws having to do with data, how that affects companies, and how they manage data, privacy and security.

Stephen Robles:

Super interesting and I think if you listen to this show, you'll love that show as well. And so while data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversation. So follow follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast, and I'll put this link in the show notes where you can just click Apple Podcast, Spotify, RSS, YouTube, wherever you'd like to listen. Data Citizens Dialogues podcast. Thank you for sponsoring this episode.

Stephen Robles:

Alright. Apple Vision Pro, you still use it every day?

Jason Aten:

Every day. I have not used it yet today, but I was busy this morning.

Stephen Robles:

You were busy. Did you publish your Mac import Mac mini review?

Jason Aten:

You just reminded me. I probably should.

Stephen Robles:

I just got a notification that MKBHD's, video went live.

Jason Aten:

Okay. Well then I'm safe.

Stephen Robles:

We were before we started recording we were talking about embargos lifting and, I've I don't know. I'm trying to think what I've I've had an embargo, but not for an Apple product before, But it is one of those things where like you you look at the time, you look at the date, you want to be very sure, but to be really, really sure, it's nice to know someone else published too. And, yeah. So the MKBHD review just went live because I got a notification. And,

Jason Aten:

yeah. Amazing.

Stephen Robles:

I'm sure there's going to be plenty of others that go live here. Let's go let's go look at my YouTube homepage and see what is live. Here is we got the okay, yep. MKBHD made himself a miniature version of himself next to the Mac Mini, so there you go.

Jason Aten:

Because you do that.

Stephen Robles:

And, yeah. How does it get 13,000 views already in the first 6 minutes? Ridiculous.

Jason Aten:

How many how how far how long do you have to watch to count as a view? 8 seconds. Is that what they count as a view nowadays?

Stephen Robles:

8 or 10 seconds or whatever. I know. I just got another one for me right now. Yeah. Anyway, he's unboxing, the M4 Mac mini.

Stephen Robles:

There you go. I'll put a link to his video, but you should go read our Jason's article first. Please. About the

Jason Aten:

M4. Please do it.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Please read them. Definitely do that first.

Jason Aten:

Send it to our customers.

Stephen Robles:

Alright. You have some embargoed Apple Vision Pro accessories and we're gonna we're gonna fight to the death about which which of these cases are better.

Jason Aten:

We don't have to fight. We I mean, you

Stephen Robles:

can win

Jason Aten:

if it makes you feel better. I don't really care.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. It's fine. It's fine. The first one I which I think is interesting, and this was already shown.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know. It's already on Apple's website. You can buy it. Yeah. So there's no embargo, and I saw this around social media, but Belkin, who made one of the first or the first third party accessory for Apple Vision Pro, which was the battery belt clip, which I bought, and it's sitting here in a drawer, the Belkin battery belt clip, which I have not used since I bought it, and I think it cost, like, $40.

Stephen Robles:

But anyway, there's now a Belkin head strap for Apple Vision Pro, and curiously, this is, like, to be used with the solo knit strap to go over the head as though Apple were admitting to have this be comfortable for long periods of time, you should really have that head strap on top. And while they include the dual strap in with the Apple Vision Pro when you buy it, if you like the solo knit, which I personally do prefer the solo knit strap, now you can actually get another strap, the Belkin now to go on top of it. Yeah. You have this in hand?

Jason Aten:

I have it right here, and I haven't actually used it, but it's right here.

Stephen Robles:

Wow.

Jason Aten:

It's in a box.

Stephen Robles:

I I was about to ask you how it was, but

Jason Aten:

It's, well, here's the thing. I use the dual strap already.

Stephen Robles:

You use

Jason Aten:

the dual? So this is really designed for people who wanna use the solo thing. Right? And which I guess is more comfortable behind your head. Right?

Jason Aten:

But the problem with it is, like, you had to tighten it so much that you feel like your head is, like, in a crucible or whatever to yeah. It's real uncomfortable.

Stephen Robles:

Is it crucible? Is it stocks? How about a crucible?

Jason Aten:

Situation, whatever it is. Can we just agree? Like, it's Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Sure.

Jason Aten:

It's an unfortunate way to wear a headset that you're going to wear.

Stephen Robles:

A novel. It's a novel.

Jason Aten:

The crucible is the thing that you put something in and you grind it, actually. So Oh, yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Okay. This is getting

Jason Aten:

this is

Stephen Robles:

getting this is getting a higher than PG rated. So that's that's the head strap. Jason has to try it. I might actually get it. I did try there was another third party head strap, but it was, like, a hard plastic one.

Stephen Robles:

I talked about it on a previous episode. I returned that because it wasn't very comfortable. So I'm curious to try this Belkin one. But you also have a case for the Apple Vision Pro. This is going to be Apple selling it, the Belkin case.

Stephen Robles:

Oh my goodness.

Jason Aten:

I have an I have an Apple Vision Pro lunchbox right here. It's It does look like It does do 2 things that I like.

Stephen Robles:

Okay.

Jason Aten:

Besides being half the size of the Apple one, But it's got a little connector up a little pouch up here for the battery. So the battery is not just, like, free riding in there. And then it has a little you can see there's a little protector for the lenses. So there's a little that little piece folds up, and it kinda, like, fits perfectly in where the lenses are to keep that protected as well. It's got a couple other packets.

Jason Aten:

I don't really know what you would do with them. Maybe put your mac

Stephen Robles:

mini in there.

Jason Aten:

Maybe put your mac mini in there so that if you wanna use it on a plane. Should I do that? Should I take a mac mini in the plane next week?

Stephen Robles:

Please. Please do that. Just set up your little mac mini on the tray table. Plug it into power. Apple vision pro.

Jason Aten:

What if I just don't plug it into power, but set it there because no one else will know. Right? No one else would have any idea.

Stephen Robles:

Well, here's my have you used it on a plane? No.

Jason Aten:

I've never used it on a plane.

Stephen Robles:

Jason, what do you do? That's, like, one of the best use cases. That's, like, the one universally accepted use case to say Apple Vision Pro is great on a plane. Man,

Jason Aten:

people really do it. People really do that?

Stephen Robles:

You're up there in 1st class anyway. No one's looking at you.

Jason Aten:

I mean, not flying to Portugal. I'm not gonna be in 1st class. Just to be clear.

Stephen Robles:

You have a long flight. Take it in the Belkin case and use it on the plane.

Jason Aten:

I'm flying directly from Boston to Portugal. So

Stephen Robles:

yeah. You should do it. Do it. Anyway, it's a cool case. I still I have the Waterfield Apple Vision Pro case.

Stephen Robles:

They sent me this early on, and, I really like the compact nature of this. And it actually fits in my backpack. So are you gonna take it with you to Portugal at all?

Jason Aten:

I wasn't going to, but actually now that

Stephen Robles:

I have this little tiny case, I might. I think you should. I think you should. And, for science. For science.

Jason Aten:

For science and for, you know, the podcast.

Stephen Robles:

Really? Yes. For the podcast.

Jason Aten:

For the podcast.

Stephen Robles:

I I said I was going to put in the VisionOS 2.2 beta on mine to try the ultra widescreen Mac thing, but I still hadn't got a chance. But if you do the vision OS 2.2 beta, you can it's upgraded the resolution when you connect it to a Mac, and there's now wide and ultra wide modes, And have you tried this yet? Not yet. I have not put that beta.

Jason Aten:

I I depend so much on my VisionPRO because I use it every day that I can't

Stephen Robles:

I can't tell if you're being joking. I'm totally joking. I was gonna say, I know you use it every day, but I think it's like it's that.

Jason Aten:

No. It depends on their Vision Pro that much, though, if they can't put the beta on it.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. And that's I'm gonna do it, but I'll have to charge it up. But, anyway, you can do the ultra wide Mac display, and I'm I'm curious. I've not tried this if you can. I know in the control center on Apple Vision Pro, you can basically do the Mac mirroring, like, you can trigger it from there.

Stephen Robles:

I'm curious if I can trigger it with a headless Mac Mini, which is how mine will be, which you're not familiar. That just means that there's no monitor actually attached to it. Curious if I'll be able to do that, with the Vision Pro. So Mhmm. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Typically, I've I've gotten these little, like, weird HDMI dongles that, like, tell the Mac it's connected to a 4 k display. So if you screen share, you get a 4 k, you know, display. Because otherwise, sometimes it'll just give you this, like, really small screen thing if there's no monitor plugged in, but it's neither here nor there. I'm gonna try it out. Also wanna talk about iOS 18 dot 2.

Stephen Robles:

The public beta is out. If you wanna try that, some people are still waiting for Image Playgrounds, which, you know, I I don't know how much you're missing, but I will say I finally did a video going through some of the features, and I'll put this in the show notes. But one of the features in the latest beta was magic wand Oh, excuse me. I said magic wand throughout the entire video, and then realized that that was wrong. It is called the image wand, where you can use the Apple Pencil, circle things, at least it works in Apple Notes right now, and it will just create, images of whatever the text is.

Stephen Robles:

So if you do this, like, in an Apple Note right now on the beta, it'll just pull, like, random text, and so this was a note where I was just testing things, and it, like, pulled Hanging Gardens of Babylon podcast microphone and something else. It made, like, a medieval looking microphone, which was not helpful. But you can also select text, and then in that contextual menu, which, can we just say, is getting very, very long now? Like, when you select text now on an on an iPad or iPhone, you could tap that right arrow, and it's you got, like, cut, copy, paste, look up. Now you got writing tools, you have translate, you have an undo, and now you have generate or create image.

Stephen Robles:

It's a very long contextual menu.

Jason Aten:

It's almost as bad as trying to find something to watch on Netflix. You just have to keep going down rabbit holes.

Stephen Robles:

I feel like they should change that to the like like a vertical contextual menu. Right? I mean isn't that what it looks like?

Jason Aten:

Or maybe if you could just tap on it and tell the the assistant what you wanna do.

Stephen Robles:

I mean look at look at this. This is the contextual menu right now. You got find selection, look up translate, search web, speak, share, like

Jason Aten:

And there's an arrow there.

Stephen Robles:

There's an arrow, but they're so small, it's so hard to tap. But anyway, so what you can do now in 18.2, if you have image playgrounds and access to the image generation, when you select text in Apple Notes, and this should be coming to the Iwork suite, like pages, numbers, and keynote later, you can tap create image, and it will just generate an image, from the text that you had selected, and so that's what I did here. The images are all like this kind of comic book y illustration. You cannot get a photorealistic image from Apple's image generation. Like it just will not do photorealistic anything, and it won't do people.

Stephen Robles:

I asked him multiple times to try and do different people, and it just it just refuses. Like it shows you this error. It says images involving people are not supported. Apple is being very careful not to do that, which means I couldn't oh, I also, I uploaded a picture of Chance Miller from 9 to 5 Mac. I tried I trolled him in the video.

Jason Aten:

As a as a 12 year old is basically

Stephen Robles:

I said it de aged him, and Zach was, like, that's a burn. I was, like, what? Obviously, that is a deaged thing. Like, one more anyway, but an interesting part of the chat GPT integration, if you start a command with using like use chatgpt, so if you tell the voice assistant on your phone, using chatgpt, generate an image blah blah blah, it will do a photorealistic image because it's actually an image generated by ChatChpT, and so this one, I can get it directly just by asking the voice assistant on my iPhone, or you can do this, you know, using a prompt, but that's ChatChpT doing it, not Apple Intelligence, and You can see a little ChatGPT thing at the bottom, and that's how I got this, I got a medieval knight riding a polar bear, which honestly is the the best thing that I've gotten so far from, any image generator. I thought that was great, but anyway.

Stephen Robles:

So the the best thing about Apple Intelligence is the chat GPT integration is what I'm saying.

Jason Aten:

Oh, that's unfortunate.

Stephen Robles:

I mean, would would you because you're do you you have it? Yeah. Are you sending genmoji?

Jason Aten:

No. Well, sometimes. I my son who only has an Apple Watch, like, he's a text aficionado. Like, actually, he's just an addict. Maybe that's a better way of saying it.

Jason Aten:

And he is he's actually pretty smart. Most of his responses don't sound anything like him. And we figured out that that's because he just taps whatever the, whatever the prompt is as a response. So you'll be like, Hey, could you make sure the garage door is shut? And his response will be like, of course, I'd be happy to.

Jason Aten:

I'm like, you're 10. 10 year olds don't respond like that. Like, never. Or we're like, hey. We're headed home.

Jason Aten:

We were at a banquet last night, and his response is like, please drive safe. And we're like

Stephen Robles:

Please drive safe.

Jason Aten:

Doesn't care.

Stephen Robles:

No kid says that.

Jason Aten:

Anyway, so it's funny. But, anyway, he'll send things in and whatever. So I I have made it a habit of to him sending him back Genmoji because he thinks it's very cool. So he'll be like, I love you so much. And so or I think he said I love you forever.

Jason Aten:

So I made a gen emoji of a heart with an infinity sign in the middle of it. And so he thought that was very cool.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

So that's good. And then the kids have really enjoyed having their photos made in image playgrounds.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Right? And none of

Jason Aten:

them look anything like them. Although they kinda do it. Like, it'll hit certain characteristics. And it's actually horrifying when you make them enough of, like, yourself. You're like, is this what the world thinks I look like?

Stephen Robles:

See, that's the thing. You know, I kept saying horrifying and people are like, they're not horrifying. Listen I've had several of these images like they're just I mean this is actually of, Whitney's grandfather.

Jason Aten:

I was like that's definitely not you Steven.

Stephen Robles:

No no that is not me But even my kids It's

Jason Aten:

Harry Winkler, isn't it?

Stephen Robles:

My son like, my son's image actually looks pretty good. It looks somewhat like him, but it's

Jason Aten:

He looks like Hans from Frozen.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, yeah. A little a little bit a little bit Hansy. Hansian. I still don't I just don't I mean I get it. I should give it a more recent picture.

Stephen Robles:

Anyway, because it thinks it has more I have more hair than I do. It's it's fine. Now, you wanna talk about notification summaries and I do think, I've had increasingly bad experiences with it. But tell me about your

Jason Aten:

I don't understand why everyone likes it so much. That's the thing. I don't I don't understand. I mean, I well because

Stephen Robles:

they're funny?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. But they're super not useful in a lot of scenarios. They are good at a couple of things. So for example, I have the New York times app and I get about 45 notifications, especially this week, a day per hour. Like it's just insane.

Jason Aten:

And it'll just know it'll summarize. It'll be like, you know, Donald Trump won Michigan, Kamala Harris to concede at 4 something else, the oil refinery fire in Louisiana. Those things are not related, but it's good because I know that if I tap on it, I'm gonna see those things. I knew we weren't gonna talk about the election, but those were, like, the most recent. Some of the notifications on here.

Jason Aten:

I'll let it slide. Appreciate it. So that's great. But it is it sort of assumes that all notification types from a given type of app are of the same type, which if you think about that from email is very much not the case. And what it does that I don't like is it shows you who the most recent email is from.

Jason Aten:

And then it summarizes like 4 emails. None of which came from that person necessarily. And I don't, it's like, this is not in any way useful. So I've actually turned it off for email completely because it's, it is completely not helpful for emails at all. It would be fine if it showed me a notification and summarized, like, what that like, what it does in the mail app.

Jason Aten:

That's fine. Those types of things are useful. So I've had to turn it off completely for that. I've also had to turn it off for other types of apps that, like, I don't know why I had notifications on them for anyway, like, it's just there are some things that are just very strange, because it doesn't understand the context of, like, what was this app? It's just looking at text and groups of text and trying to summarize it into one thing.

Jason Aten:

I feel like for messages, it's less terrible. Right? Because it'll be like your kid texted you about this, and someone else texted you about this other thing or something.

Stephen Robles:

Well, the issue that I ran into and you can turn off summaries per app in case you're wondering.

Jason Aten:

And I suggest you do that.

Stephen Robles:

I suggest you do. So last week, I was gonna record a podcast with a guy. He asked me to be on as a guest, and right before we were gonna record, he emailed me, and he said, I just spilled a bunch of stuff on my desk. I don't know what's happening. I need to postpone the recording.

Stephen Robles:

I said, no problem. And when I got that email last week, the summary said, you know, equipment issue reschedule. Like, that was the summary, and I was, like, not bad. I mean, that's Sure. What happened.

Stephen Robles:

This yesterday, I think it was, or earlier this week, we had was when we had rescheduled the recording for. I got an email from him. He was just reminding me, like, hey, just so you know, remember, like, we were recording, the mail summary, it looks at the entire thread rather than just the latest message. So the summary of the mail said, equipment issue, need to reschedule. And I was like, it happened again?

Stephen Robles:

Like 2 weeks in a row? And when I opened the email, I realized he was just saying confirming again, but the summary was pulling from the whole email chain, and that immediately is, like, I feel like Apple needs to change that to say only summarize maybe from, like, today's emails, but don't summarize the whole chain because I have email chains that'll, you know, maybe several weeks long.

Jason Aten:

Right.

Stephen Robles:

Like, I'll talk to, like, sponsors back and forth, maybe we're, like, doing a brand, whatever, and to summarize an entire email chain in one line, you're gonna get some bad information. Yes. It's just not gonna be summarized well. And so when I saw that yesterday, I was, like, okay, that this is not great. Like, this needs to be adjusted to just look at maybe the last message.

Stephen Robles:

Like, only summarize the last message, like, the new message, the unread Right. Not the entire change.

Jason Aten:

Or give context. It's like recording Yeah. You know, confirming recording, previous recording rescheduled due to equipment issues. That would be fine. Right?

Jason Aten:

Like, you would understand. Right. My favorite, though, is we the Google Home app, we have the front, well, we have our backyard camera and our front yard camera or not our front yard camera. We have a front camera that will notify us if it sees people. Right?

Jason Aten:

And so the, like, yesterday, I should have screenshotted this. It's one of my great regrets in life that I didn't. There was there was a notification that pops up and it says multiple people seen in backyard and foyer.

Stephen Robles:

It's yes.

Jason Aten:

Are we being invaded? What is actually happening? And it just meant that there was 3 notifications throughout the day that had said person seen in backyard. And it was me walking out to my office. Right.

Jason Aten:

But the notification summary is like multiple people in backyard in front foyer. And it's like the cavalry is here. It's over. We're done.

Stephen Robles:

One of my most proud I'm most proud of this joke that I made the other day because someone posted an Amazon notification summary, and it says package is 8 stops away delivered and will be delivered tomorrow, and I said Schrodinger's package.

Jason Aten:

Exactly.

Stephen Robles:

And I I was so happy that I made that joke and I didn't see anybody else make it first. And but that is that is like I will because I have all the smart home things, and I have lots of notifications. And one of the annoying parts of, like, the garage is I do wanna get notified when the garage door opens and closes. Sometimes that happens a lot. Like, if my kids are going in and out or loading the car, you know, my and so I'll get a notification summary and it says garage state has changed multiple times.

Stephen Robles:

And it's, like, yeah.

Jason Aten:

It's in Georgia now.

Stephen Robles:

It is both open and closed, Schrodinger's Garage. Mhmm. And and I'm and I feel like maybe Apple Intelligence could be tweaked to say, like, give me the last state, like, because that's really what's important, like, garage, multiple chase, you know, had open and closed multiple times is now closed. Right. Is now open.

Stephen Robles:

Like, that would be more helpful tweak.

Jason Aten:

I almost think maybe Apple could make some kind of an API for developers for notification types where a subsequent notification is essentially overriding a previous notification. Right? Because you don't need it to say I don't need it to tell me. And there are some maybe you do wanna know, but, like, I don't need to know that there was a a notification summary that 7 people rang the doorbell today, especially if it's gonna say there are 7 people at the front door.

Stephen Robles:

Like There's a group of people at the front door, back door, and on the

Jason Aten:

Stephen, be honest. In our day and time, I've there's never a time when there are 7 people at our front door. Literally, not even if we were having a Christmas party, they wouldn't all show up at the same time. So in this day, like, the world we live in today, if you got a notification and there were actually 7 people on your front, you would be tear you'd be in the basement. Well, you don't even have a basement.

Jason Aten:

You would be so it's like the purge. That's literally it's the purge. It's the plot of the purge. They should

Stephen Robles:

they should, Apple should just summarize it to just say you are surrounded. You're surrounded. The show's

Jason Aten:

Man, for, like, April fools or for Halloween, someone one of these one of these vendors should have been, like, the purges started.

Stephen Robles:

You're under siege. You're under siege. Anyway, yeah. It's it's just gotta be tweaked. I should probably turn it off because I have summaries turned on for every application.

Stephen Robles:

I turned it off for a

Jason Aten:

lot of things.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. I had an Instacart the other day, and and there were, like, those summaries weren't helpful. It was, like, tomatoes, we have and don't have tomatoes, and yes, tomatoes. Yeah. I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know about that.

Jason Aten:

Yep.

Stephen Robles:

But anyway, so that's Apple Intelligence. We have talked about chat gpt search, because that it was a huge thing that they announced months ago, and now it is actually live and you can use it. But before we do, I wanna thank our second and final sponsor, which is they're just one of my favorites. It's Audio Hijack by Rogue Amoeba. We're using it right now.

Stephen Robles:

You listening to our voices right now is thanks to Audio Hijack. Now we record this podcast. It's how I record the audio for all of my videos. It is it's just incredibly powerful tool. If you do anything with audio on your Mac, recording it, routing it, Audio Hijack is the way to go.

Stephen Robles:

Now they've been sponsoring for a number of weeks, and so I'm gonna share something different this time, which is their brand new blocks, which if you aren't familiar with Audio Hijack, it's so user friendly, you can basically just drag blocks, like building blocks, and you make a signal chain, and you can say here's my input device, a USB mic. I want you to run that through a compressor, there's blocks for that or EQ. Give me the little levels meters, and then record it to whatever format you would like, even record it to multiple formats. So Now they have new blocks including you have magic boost, which will boost the audio on an input or a signal. There's the mixer block, parametric EQ, but also they even have I don't even know if you knew this, Jason.

Jason Aten:

I did not.

Stephen Robles:

They have a transcribe block. Did you know

Jason Aten:

this? I did not know that.

Stephen Robles:

They have a transcribe block.

Jason Aten:

Hang on. Let me let me add it real quick to my little numbers too.

Stephen Robles:

No. Don't change it. Don't touch it right now. Wait. We're done.

Stephen Robles:

Wait. We're done. You but you can add a transcribe block, and with the magic of audio hijack, you could have that include multiple channels. So, like, you can have, you know, your audio input. I can put an app, so like the web browser that me and Jason are talking through and have those combine into a transcribe block and get a full transcription of this podcast, like, I'm actually gonna do this after we're done recording because that would actually be really helpful Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Where I can run that through, like, ChatChpT and stuff. Amazing. This is the power of Audio Hijack. Plus, look, they're always updating their blocks. It's just amazing.

Stephen Robles:

So here is what you do. You go to macaudio.com/primarytech, and you can get 20% off Audio Hijack or any of their bundles with the promo code techxx, all one word, techxx x. Go to macaudio.com/primarytech. That link is just in the show notes. Just go there and click it.

Stephen Robles:

If you've never tried it, you have to try audio hijack. We just love it. Can't say enough good things about it.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. It's so easy that I had to set it up on this Mac mini, this as we're getting ready to record. And if you just heard me say that, then it worked because that's how we're recording this. If you didn't hear any of this, then it didn't work. But it was super easy.

Jason Aten:

I just dropped them in there, and we're good to go.

Stephen Robles:

It's amazing. So try it. Macaudio.com/primarytech. Link is in the show notes. Our very gracious thanks to Audio Hijack and Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this episode.

Stephen Robles:

Now chat t chat chat chat chat gpt search is a thing, which they also just bought the domain chat.com for, like, 1,000,000 of dollars.

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Maybe that's worth it. I don't know. You can now just go to chat.com and get, chat g p t, but so chat g p t search is out. Now I feel like when this was announced months ago, it was a lot of fanfare, like GPT search or search GPT is gonna be a big thing, and it almost felt like it was gonna be a different application or like a different place to go, and now that it's out, it was kind of just, I don't know, it feels like minimal fanfare. It's kinda just snuck out there, but it's live, and if you use the ChatGPT app or if you go to the website, there's just a little search icon now.

Stephen Robles:

I'm gonna share my ChatGPT window here, and you'll see there's this little search icon, and you can click that, and whatever your prompt is afterwards, it's going to search the Internet, and it's going to give you an answer. And honestly, it's been pretty good, like I just asked it, what is the primary technology podcast? And with the little search thing enabled, immediately gave me primary tech dotfm, which is our website, and then gave me a little summary, which is based on the podcast description, which is great, and they even included links to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music for the show and they all work. I can click Apple Podcasts and it brings me to our show page in Apple Podcasts and the same with Spotify and then it has a little sources, thing at the bottom. And so for web searches, honestly it has been very good.

Stephen Robles:

But what has been your experience with it?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I think it's, very good. I was I was I

Stephen Robles:

was formulating an idea, and

Jason Aten:

I realized I should finish that thought because people expect me to be contrarian. But, no, it's very

Stephen Robles:

good. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

I'm I'm gonna write more about this, so I don't wanna give away too much of it at this point. But I do think there's a reason that Google is very nervous about this, and I think that they should be. Because just think about all of the bad things that exist with Google's search and basically none of them exist with this. And it's, and in fact, I feel like you can be in the chat GPT app doing a web search, and it does a better job of getting you to links than Google does because Google just wants to send you those AI summaries, and it starts to push links down. I did I did quite a few of these, just to play around with it because I I sincerely like, my thought is that it's could replace Google search for me personally.

Jason Aten:

The only downside to it, Google search is actually much more. I don't know if open is the right word than we think, but like, you can basically search for anything. Maybe not exactly anything, but the boundaries are pretty like far out there in terms of what you can search for in Google search. But with g I g p t, you couldn't even search for the election results. Like, if you tried to search, I typed in I don't even know.

Jason Aten:

I just typed in the word election results, and it just says, I may not have the latest updates, visit the AP, blah blah blah blah blah. Then I just typed in, like, who won the presidential election, and and it started to try to answer that. And then it stopped, and it replaced that text with, I may not have the latest updates for more. So they're they're definitely putting some boundaries on some things. And maybe that's just because it's so new that they weren't sure how it would respond and they didn't wanna overload it or whatever.

Jason Aten:

But then I I just typed in the word lions. Right? Our hometown football team. And it's like they're currently leading the NFC North with the 7 to 1 record. They just defeated the Green Bay Packers 24 to 14, making it their 3rd consecutive win at that venue.

Jason Aten:

Even after Ian Hutchinson sees season ending injury, the lions, like, blah blah blah. Like, it like, it was good. It knew all it knew way more about the lions than you do. Like, it was which is I know a low bar because you don't watch sports or anything like that. But it had their upcoming schedule, and then it shows you all the sources.

Jason Aten:

I think it's I mean, this and, honestly, this is more useful than just typing random stuff to check GPT. Like, the ability to actually do the searches Yeah. And have

Stephen Robles:

it and I like the way

Jason Aten:

that it presents it a lot better. So I think Google this is, I think, one of the I'm waiting for some smarter people to chime in on this, but I think that this is a could represent an existential threat to what to goo I mean, because Google is a like, just think about how much money they print based on Google search.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

It is absurd. It is like the most brilliant business idea in the history of the world. And,

Stephen Robles:

I think it's their business. Isn't it like 90? Percent?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And I'm just saying it's the best business idea anyone ever came up with, like organize the web, spend a $1,000,000,000,000, not really, but spend a bunch of money organizing the web, crawling it, making an index, serving that up to people. Don't charge them, just sell ads. It's the best ad business. It's it is the biggest bad bad business in the world.

Jason Aten:

So this this could be yeah.

Stephen Robles:

And I'm looking, I searched Google for how much what is the percentage of the revenue? I got an AI overview. I don't know how much to trust that. But it says Google's advertising revenue was 70 about 78% of its total revenue. Search ads are the primary source from Google search which accounted for about 57% of Google's total revenue.

Stephen Robles:

So not 90%, but still very high percent of the revenue. And I just so I was, trying to help my mom with her 2 2018 RAV 4. Her infotainment system, like, froze and is now on a boot loop, and so I was searching feverishly last week to try and figure it out. But just ask ChatGPT, and first of all, it started by saying I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing issues with your 2018 Toyota RAV 4's infotainment system. So, listen, Google doesn't tell me they're sorry.

Stephen Robles:

I appreciate JWPT trying to identify to empathize with my issue. And it gives me some solutions here, which I've ran across all these and none of them worked, but it did give me a source to go to, like, Toyota's page or whatever, which even that I have struggled to get to with Google last week. I had to, you know, really go down to search for it. But Yeah. I wanna try for more things and see what happens.

Jason Aten:

Well, and just you you you commented that, like, oh, well, you know, 80% or whatever the number is is not that much. But it's I mean, 80% of whatever, like $305,000,000,000 is a whole lot of money. Really the only things that are left after Google's ad business is Google cloud and people who subscribe to like Google workspace, Right?

Stephen Robles:

Like, to for business. And I promise you neither

Jason Aten:

of those things would exist if it wasn't for Google search because that's where all the money came from to build Gmail and to build Google Cloud.

Stephen Robles:

Although, I will say I mean, I'm curious. They break down maybe I could search for this real quick between YouTube ad revenue and Google search ad revenue. I can see Google search ad revenue versus YouTube ad revenue because they just said ad revenue total. It seems like Google search and other revenue increased and I don't have to represent okay. It's not really telling me.

Stephen Robles:

Again, Google search

Jason Aten:

Well, I think YouTube's ad revenue is roughly 10 to 15% of Google search. So I think it's I think the way it breaks down is, like, roughly $30 ish billion for YouTube advertising versus, like, a 170 or something like that for Google search. I could be wrong.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I'll tell you what, I just I just I just used the chat gpt search option. Here's what I got. It says in last year Google's total advertising revenue was approximately 237,000,000,000 gives a reference to Statista. Statista? How do you say that?

Jason Aten:

I would say Statista.

Stephen Robles:

Statista, yeah. Of this Google search ads generated about a 175,000,000,000 accounting for roughly 73% of the revenue, Yahoo Finance. YouTube ads contributed 31,000,000,000 representing 13% of total ad revenues. Yeah. So I

Jason Aten:

was roughly right on the numbers, just not the percentages because I can't do math in my head on a podcast.

Stephen Robles:

Right. But on a so I just did this exact I literally copy and pasted what I put into Google and what I and then put it into chatgpt and chatgpt gave me a better answer. Anyway, yeah. So, I wanna be using it more often, and I think it's pretty good. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

It's pretty good. Agree. Pretty good. Alright. One couple quick things, then we're gonna get to a personal tech, which is you actually bought a a 3 in one charger.

Stephen Robles:

Well, before

Jason Aten:

you can I say one thing about the chat.com thing?

Stephen Robles:

Oh, Oh, yeah.

Jason Aten:

There's something interesting because a couple years ago, HubSpot's cofounder published a post on LinkedIn about how he had spent $10,000,000 on that domain name. $10,000,000 he paid. And then 2 months later, I think it was, he sold it for more than he paid. No. And he didn't say at the time who he paid, who bought it or anything like that.

Jason Aten:

But it seems as though the person who bought it was Sam Altman, open AI, whatever. So like someone paid a lot of money so that they can redirect chat.com to chat g p t, which honestly, like, makes a lot of sense. Sure. But now you know why they had to go raise 6 and a half $1,000,000,000 because domain names are getting very expensive, it seems.

Stephen Robles:

Name pollution. It's out there. Here's the I'll link this. This is the LinkedIn post from, Damesh Shah. He says, 2 months ago, I bought chat.com for 10,000,000 plus dollars.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, it's it's not entirely clear if it's possible that he sold it and then someone else flipped it to Sam Altman or

Stephen Robles:

to open AI. I don't know. Like, if because if they bought it a year ago, why did

Jason Aten:

they wait this long? So I don't know. We don't know all the details. There's a whole lot of stuff going on, but all I'm saying is we know that OpenAI paid more than $10,000,000 for that domain.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Which is wild. Bananas. I I thought about buying, steven.com for a lot of money, but there's no there's no reason No reason for that. So, alright.

Stephen Robles:

One other quick news. Last week, this is right after, I think we recorded last week's episode, but Apple acquired Pixelmater. Pixelmater I use Pixelmater for all my image editing needs on the Mac. I use Pixelmator on my iPad. And it's an incredible app.

Stephen Robles:

It's won several Apple Design Awards. And now Apple has acquired it. And just a short little blog post from Pixelmator saying, you know, Apple's done it. Unclear what will happen to it. And so, you know, I've I'm of 2 minds on this because you can look back at different acquisitions.

Stephen Robles:

If you remember, years ago, Apple actually acquired Logic, and that became Logic Pro, Apple's app. Workflow, the app, became shortcuts. Thumbs up on that acquisition because shortcuts has come a long way and has more access to Apple's, like, hardware and features because it's a first party app, so that's cool. Apple also acquired Dark Sky and incorporated it into the weather app, so that did not stay as a standalone app. It's just part of weather.

Stephen Robles:

I think weather got better. I still miss dark sky a little bit, so, you know, we'll have to say about that. And in light of this acquisition, if you remember Aperture, which I still have nostalgia for, was Apple's pro photo editing app, which disappeared. So I'm cur oh, and was Final Cut Pro acquired too? Yep.

Stephen Robles:

So Final Cut was originally made by I think

Jason Aten:

it was

Stephen Robles:

Macromedia, and there was no market for it. Like, everyone who was using nonlinear editing at the time was using Avid. Right?

Jason Aten:

And and so, like, they couldn't they couldn't figure out, like, a way to, like, sell it and stuff. And so, Apple bought it from they actually it wasn't it wasn't the entire app at the time. It was like their I can't remember what it's called. Key something something something. But anyway,

Stephen Robles:

Keystone key grip thing. Key grip. That's what it was. They bought key grip from Macromedia, and they renamed it

Jason Aten:

to final cut, and they turned it into an actual thing. I actually was at, the NAB show back in I can't even remember what year it was. Like, it was, like, right after high school I was in college. So, like, 98 or something. Anyway and there's a demo.

Jason Aten:

I saw a demo of it very, very, very, very, very early on. What? And I didn't end up using it for a while after that. But it's but, like, Final Cut was, like, a revolutionary app at the time because you used to have to have, like, these massive avid systems, which required you to, like, have, you know, like, they used to have, like, the u the the dongles. Like, you had to plug in, like, a hardware dongle that, like, synced was actually, avid still does that.

Jason Aten:

If you buy an avid, like, pro audio workstation, you have to have a license key that matches a physical it's ridiculous. And on in Final Cut, you could run it on a PowerBook. It was it was mind blowing.

Stephen Robles:

That was my foray into video editing. I used Imovie when I got my first g 4 PowerBook, and then I got Final Cut Express because they actually there was like Final Cut Pro, which was like came in this massive cardboard box and I couldn't afford it, but I could afford Final Cut Express. I bought I think for like a $150 and that, sent me on the road that I'm in today. But anyway, so Apple's acquisitions, they've gone different ways. Sometimes they become stand alone first party Apple apps like shortcuts, sometimes features get merged into Apple's apps like weather, and what will happen to Pixelmator?

Stephen Robles:

I'm curious with your pontification of what might happen. A lot of people feel like Apple will just keep it, it'll just become an Apple app, maybe rebranded, maybe not, but it will be Apple's, like, pro editing pro photo photography editing app or pro image editing app, and we'll finally, like, be competing with Adobe on this front. I think, another possibility, I think this is less likely, is that Apple just kind of tries to merge some of those features into the Photos app and tries to make the photos app more popular. I think that's less likely. I think it'll be separate at least for a while, but I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

What do you think? What do you is gonna happen?

Jason Aten:

Alright. I have thoughts. I'm just gonna keep them brief. I live through the Lightroom versus aperture wars. I was a professional tiger photographer the time, and I was an aperture person.

Jason Aten:

And I was in the in the extraordinarily small minority. Let's just say that, like, there's a reason that they got rid of aperture. I would go to, like, WPPI, which is a huge, like, wedding and portrait photographers convention in Vegas. And Apple wouldn't need there wasn't like there would be a couple of their people there, but there was no boot like, there's no booth. Like, you couldn't just go talk to the aperture people because Lightroom was just everywhere.

Jason Aten:

Right? Everyone was using Lightroom. I even was in I even participated in a shoot like a edit out a shootout type thing with a Lightroom. Now one of the reasons why Lightroom sort of won that battle is it was more portable. You could make so you could actually outsource your photo editing to someone, and they could just send you back some like, a catalog of, like, XF files or whatever.

Jason Aten:

Like and you could just merge the 2 things where you couldn't do that with Aperture. That was one of the reasons. I think that the this acquisition goes one of 3 ways you kind of described. It could go dark weather, which is would be terrible. That would be unfortunate.

Jason Aten:

Like, it would be bad. Right? Like, the weather app is somewhat

Stephen Robles:

miss dark weather? You miss dark weather?

Jason Aten:

I thought it was a great app. I mean, I love Carrot, so I'm fine with the fact that dark weather doesn't exist. But dark weather at the time was

Stephen Robles:

like Dark sky.

Jason Aten:

Dark sky. Dark sky.

Stephen Robles:

Why don't you go on the comments. Dark weather.

Jason Aten:

Well, that's how I feel about the weather app now.

Stephen Robles:

It's dark weather. Exactly.

Jason Aten:

Dark sky. I'm sorry. Or it could go, like, the way of, like, what final cut in, like, logic where they bought something and they turned they kept it as a full featured developed app. I think the more most likely, acquisition because if you like, just think about some of their big acquisitions that they've had in the past. Right?

Jason Aten:

Like Beats. Beats just kinda lives on as its own thing. No. Like, really. Like That's true.

Jason Aten:

In the the real reason they bought Beats, though, was they turned Beats's app into the music app. But other than that, there's no Beats streaming app anymore. So Apple doesn't really buy things for the sake of just I think the reason that Beats continues to live on as a brand is it was a huge, like, hardware business at the time. Like, that's really the only reason.

Stephen Robles:

It has cache too.

Jason Aten:

Like, it beats And it has an audience, and it's like, well, we don't have to build this audience. We just have to keep giving them things to give us money for and so that they did that. I don't think that there's any question that what's gonna end up happening is the features and technology from Pixelmator are just gonna end up in the Photos app. Like, that's

Stephen Robles:

Oh, no.

Jason Aten:

Steven. Say that. Be honest, though. Like, think about it. They're not re they're not rereleasing aperture.

Jason Aten:

There's zero chance that they're ever gonna release a pro app because that market is there's no room in that market. There is zero room for a pro photo app that pro photographers would use. There are a lot of prosumer photographers that would be like something more than than photos, but guess what? The the new Lightroom is that app. That is that app as opposed to Lightroom classic.

Jason Aten:

Right? Like, I actually, most of the time, just use the new Lightroom. I don't even know what they call it. Like, they just call it Lightroom and then there's Lightroom classic, I guess. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. But, Steven, like, I don't

Stephen Robles:

Listen.

Jason Aten:

I don't think that

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna say You

Jason Aten:

gotta use your head, not just your heart, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

We we're gonna make this wager right now. I don't know how long it's gonna take and we'll see. I don't know how many years down the road this will be. We'll we'll have to come back to this episode, mark it down and see who was right.

Jason Aten:

Episode 48. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

I am saying they are not going to merge it into the Photos app. I think they're going to keep it separate and I think that Apple is going to make the play to have a professional photo app again. I don't think they'll bring back the Aperture name, but I think it will be a separate app and if you look at their strategy, like look at the iPad. Everyone asked for Pro apps on the iPad, and we don't talk about as much anymore, but Apple did give it to us. We got Logic Pro on the iPad, we have Final Cut on the iPad, even Final Cut Camera, whether or not how many people are using it or whatever, I think Apple wants to have that because that is the missing piece, like, in the puzzle, like, when it comes to you have video editing, Final Cut, you have audio, you have Logic, You don't have the photo editing app on there, and I don't think they want to complicate the stock photos app that much because it's still mass appeal.

Stephen Robles:

I mean look at the redesign of photos on the iPhone now, like you cannot shove professional tools into how that app currently functions, which is still not crazy about it. I would I say it's gonna be a separate app. It's gonna be Apple's professional photo app, and we'll see if it's 6 the Pixelmator name or not, but it's gonna be separate.

Jason Aten:

Okay. I didn't think this would be the most controversial part of our conversation today or longest, so I'll try to but can you think of an example that where this where they've done this, where they have had a app and a space, they acquired some technology, and they just kept that and left it alone? Because logic and final cut don't count because there was I mean, they did have Imovie, but the difference with Logic and they had GarageBand. But the difference with Logic and Final Cut is they were filling a pro market that was inaccessible to most people. Because, again, an Avid system, I don't know what you had to have, 15, $25,000 to have an Avid system.

Jason Aten:

Right? Like, I mean, for real. With Final Cut, all you had to do is have a PowerBook and a super drive, and you could use iDVD, and you can make your thing. Like, I cannot

Stephen Robles:

iDVD so much.

Jason Aten:

But I can't think of another market because there that does not exist in photos. The above consumer but accessible to anyone market exists, and it's Lightroom. Or or Pixelmator, that's fine, or PhotoMator. Excuse me.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Right.

Jason Aten:

Right. But I don't I cannot think of an example where they bought a parallel technology, and then they kept it as a standalone. Like, they didn't keep the Beats app as a standalone next to I iTunes. I think

Stephen Robles:

well, it might not be a pair like, they didn't have a parallel, but I do think the workflow app into shortcuts

Jason Aten:

They didn't have anything. They had Automator. Like, well, that's not the

Stephen Robles:

same thing. But but they saw value in it even though it was pretty niche, like shortcuts is not widespread, like it's not like most people use it. But they did choose to keep it a separate thing and continue to develop it even though it's really buggy and they don't add a lot of actions a lot of times. Like it is still there, and you look at Apple Intelligence and the push there, I think Apple would love to say we have Apple Intelligence features for video. And you know they talked a little bit about this like in the final cut for iPad where you can like write on it and it will animate for you.

Stephen Robles:

We saw in the Mac Mini announcement video that the transcription for captions is coming. They might be talking about AI features in Final Cut. I think they would love to say, we also have Apple Intelligence for your photos and for image editing, whether it's content aware, fill type stuff, or just generation, like, whatever generation while you're editing. So I'm I'm just gonna say, I think they're gonna keep it separate. I think they're gonna make it play for pro photos.

Jason Aten:

I think Pixelmator maybe. PhotoMator definitely not.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, and maybe it's just one thing. Like, it could just be one thing.

Jason Aten:

But I mean, those 2 I mean, Pixelmator is a competitor to Photoshop. PhotoMator is Lightroom Aperture Photos. Like, I don't think there's any way Photomator continues to exist. Pixelmator maybe because Pixelmator is just a Photoshop, and Apple doesn't have a Photoshop, but they're not gonna take the Pixelmator Photoshop features and put them into photos because Right.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Right.

Jason Aten:

That would be absurd. And so

Stephen Robles:

I'm not think I I wasn't thinking about PhotoMater, I guess. I'm thinking more just pix just PixelMaters in my head because that's the app I use to, like, make thumbnails and stuff. And that I could see them keeping it like a first party, but then also But that's not a photo.

Jason Aten:

I just wanna be clear. That's not a pro photo app. That's a that's a graphic design app.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And they're not I don't think they wanna compete with I don't know. I think it's

Stephen Robles:

Don't people bring photos into Photoshop though? I mean, the photo is literally in the name. Like

Jason Aten:

Do people bring photo? That's a that's a question.

Stephen Robles:

You know what I'm saying? I mean, if you I know Lightroom is a thing, but

Jason Aten:

If you're a pro photographer, I feel pretty confident saying this, that you are only using Photoshop for the client that you hate who says, could you please take out the braces or could you please do this thing unless you're doing actual design work where you need layers. Like, otherwise, there's really no reason to go into Photoshop because, yeah, Lightroom has has, like, AI generative remove tool. Like, I almost did it this morning on a, on a cable hanging down, and then I realized it'll actually take me less time to just move the cable and retake the photo, which is what I did.

Stephen Robles:

Alright. Well, Jason, I would like you if if you think this is worthwhile, an ink.com article arguing about what Apple is gonna do for with Pixelmator. Because I I piece. I could I on

Jason Aten:

on Apple and Pixelmator. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

I love I love Pixelmator Pro on my Mac, and I just don't want anything to happen to it. I don't want it to go away. That's that's I think that's what I'm really speaking from.

Jason Aten:

Okay.

Stephen Robles:

Anyway, okay. That was fun. Alright. Wanna hear about your 3 in 1 charger. Very quickly, I just wanna mention that we had a listener send me this article.

Stephen Robles:

This is from Stuart Whittingham and he said, a radio station attempted to replace their host with AI and it ended in disaster. And so I just wanna say, Jason, we have several good

Jason Aten:

How did they not see that coming?

Stephen Robles:

We have several good years of hosting this podcast left before AI replaces us, so thank you Stuart for sending that. I feel safe. Now personal tech, we have talked about 3 in 1 chargers in the past. Jason was not a fit he he felt no reason to buy a 3 in 1. You don't need 3 in 1 chargers.

Stephen Robles:

Then I sent him a 3 in 1 charger, and it's I don't know for sure, but it sounds like he's now been converted because he seems to have bought one on his own.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean

Stephen Robles:

What happened?

Jason Aten:

I I actually what I did this week had nothing to do. I mean, you sent me something to the nightstand.

Stephen Robles:

Which to do the nightstand.

Jason Aten:

Thank you. I do use it because You

Stephen Robles:

do use it. Okay. Great.

Jason Aten:

Well, mostly I use it because once I set it up, it was easier to just not take it down. Right? Like, let's just

Stephen Robles:

mess friction. Just leave it.

Jason Aten:

Just keep using it.

Stephen Robles:

I get it.

Jason Aten:

I do notice that some days I wake up and it has not charged the AirPods because it's a little finicky. If you don't line it up quite right on that particular one, the the light glows, like, real bright. Like, it's starting to wake you up to let you know your AirPods are not charging, which is not a thing I actually care that much about. Like, I'd rather sleep. I can plug them into a cord in the morning for 5 minutes, and then I'm good for

Stephen Robles:

the day. I would just aside from I I review a lot of 3 in 1 and now even 4 in 1. I don't know if you saw that video, Jason, but I have a 4 in 1 charger which can charge your iPhone, your Apple Watch, your AirPods, and another phone because there's a 4th g charger. But I will say the AirPods, there's some 3 in one chargers that has a little tiny magnet that will actually align the AirPods on the charger. Those are really the best.

Stephen Robles:

Like Yeah. Anker's 3 in one has one. I think it's Amigot. Theirs has, like, a little magnet that aligns the AirPods. For some reason, most of them don't, even from, like, the bigger brands, like Belkin or whatever.

Stephen Robles:

Everybody used to have a little magnet that aligns the AirPods. That's all I'm gonna say.

Jason Aten:

I hard hard agree. Okay. Have a problem though, which is, you can't see my desk right now, but I have an addiction to adapters or charging adapters things. I don't know why. I just buy them.

Jason Aten:

And so I did. I bought a 3 in one charger. But before our listeners get super excited, I found this I was okay. I'm going on a trip next week. I was getting my chargers together.

Jason Aten:

Right. I have to get my universal, you know, ones with the weird things, and I even have an Anker one. This is obviously not this is just Apple adapter with the prongs on it. But I have one of the Anker ones that has a multiple thing, and it's great. And that and I love it because I take it when I go overseas.

Jason Aten:

But then, I mean, I carry around with me various versions of these, like, Anker charging things. And I I was you're gonna get real distracted by this, but I went ahead to Nomad, and I bought one of these backs. Right?

Stephen Robles:

Oh, the back. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I love it. It's fantastic. While I was there, I was like, oh, you have a 65 watt charger that has 2 USB c's. And I've been using this anchor charger with 2 USB c's and 1 USB a.

Jason Aten:

And I'm like, that's pointless. Why do I I don't even carry a USB a cable anymore, so that's dumb. I should just get rid of this thing. But while I was there, Steven, I found this, which is a USB c 65 watt charger, dual. And on the top, it has an Apple Watch charger.

Jason Aten:

So this is my 3 in one charger that I can take with me and I can put, I can't actually take it on this trip because it's us only, but I could plug it in. I can plug in my, my watch and my phone with cables.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And then I can turn my Apple Watch on the top of it. Although it's not gonna work in most hotels because most hotels, you have to plug them in, like, down or whatever. So I don't know. I just really thought that this was fun to have it.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. It's cool.

Jason Aten:

And, Steven, like I mean, I have so many of these things just like, why do I have that's not even I can't even pick them all up. So I bought a 3 in one charger. It's not what you think.

Stephen Robles:

No. I know. I love it. I think, you know, I actually have a couple 3 in one. I'm gonna send you another one.

Jason Aten:

Oh my gosh.

Stephen Robles:

I'm gonna send but this one will be for travel. This is, like, one of the fold out 3 in ones. Oh. So it's compact, but you can do Apple Watch AirPods and your iPhone, and it folds nicely. And you can let me know what you think about it.

Jason Aten:

Is it the 12 South that has the butterfly one?

Stephen Robles:

You know, I reviewed the butterfly and the Native Union has 1 and Anker has 1. I reviewed all those. I honestly like them all less than the MagSafe Duo.

Jason Aten:

Oh wow.

Stephen Robles:

Because they're very floppy. Like the little connector between them is real floppy, and I just don't prefer it. So I like just kind of the more They're slightly larger, but they're more sturdy 3 in ones or 2 in ones. And, like, I'll show you the, let's see if I can reach it without unplugging my headphones. I'm reaching for my backpack here.

Stephen Robles:

I'm gonna go to my pocket. You have a ASMR of me unzipping my backpack. Amazing. This is this is what I use when I travel now. It's the Belkin 2 in 1, and, you know, you actually showed me the picture of how

Jason Aten:

this is

Stephen Robles:

supposed to go.

Jason Aten:

How you're supposed to use it. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

You do a little triangle, and then you can charge your iPhone here, even in standby mode, and then the Apple Watch there. Yeah. And, you know, you could charge your AirPods Pro on either of those too. So this is what I use when I travel. But Belkin has a 3 in one version of this, where it stacks like this, but it has one more little pad that comes out for a dedicated AirPods thing.

Stephen Robles:

So, yeah, I'll send you that one because I'm not using it, and you can see what you're doing. -Okay.

Jason Aten:

Great. Can't wait.

Stephen Robles:

-So Jason bought a 3 in 1. That's the bottom line. Alright. We're gonna go record a bonus episode, and I I wanna get Jason's take on new media versus old media during the election.

Jason Aten:

Oh, boy.

Stephen Robles:

We're doing

Jason Aten:

we're doing this.

Stephen Robles:

And that's why that's why we're doing it in the bonus episode. Listen, our bonus episodes are getting fun and you should really go take a listen. So if you wanna listen to the bonus episode and get an ad free version of the full episode, you can go to primary tech dot f m, click bonus episodes and support us there. That's why I'm Memberful and you get the chapters and you get the chapter artwork and all that, or if you just like the ease of supporting the show directly in Apple Podcasts, you can do that as well. You still get all the bonus episodes, you get ad free, but you don't get the chapters in the Apple Podcasts ad free version.

Stephen Robles:

It's not my fault. They stripped my chapters out for some reason. So if you want all the good stuff, you can go to primary tech dot fm, click bonus episodes. And I'm just looking back at our, bonus episodes. I mean, this is good stuff.

Stephen Robles:

You you should go over there and listen. But also You do. You can give us a 5 star rating in Apple Podcasts, and we would appreciate that. You get a shout out at the top of the show. And, of course, we just appreciate you listening.

Stephen Robles:

Thanks for watching. You can go subscribe to the YouTube channel. That link is in the show notes as well. And our thanks to the Data Dialogues podcast and Audio Hijack for sponsoring this episode. Thank you for listening.

Stephen Robles:

Thank you for watching. We'll catch you next time.

Creators and Guests

Jason Aten
Host
Jason Aten
Contributing Editor/Tech Columnist @Inc | Get my newsletter: https://t.co/BZ5YbeSGcS | Email me: me@jasonaten.net
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Stephen Robles
Host
Stephen Robles
Making technology more useful for everyone 📺 video and podcast creator 🎼 musical theater kid at heart
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