M4 iMac Hands-On, Plan to Break Up Google, Top 5 Holiday Tech Gift Guide!
Download MP3If you were a casino game, you would have the best odds. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Huge show today. It's our 50th episode. Exciting news again about the merch.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna talk about that Mike Tyson fight. I have an Imac M4 in green sitting right here. Wanna discuss that. The DOJ wants Google to separate the maybe even sell off Chrome the web browser. That's huge news.
Stephen Robles:Nvidia is making a ton of money and we have a special top five holiday gift guide. Jason's got 5 things. I've got 5 things we're gonna recommend for you, your friends, and your family. This episode is brought to you by Notion Data Citizens Dialogues podcast and Audio Hijack. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me as always is my good friend, Jason Aiten.
Stephen Robles:How's it going, Jason?
Jason Aten:It is good. It is snowing here, Steven. Are you
Stephen Robles:for real? It's snowing up there?
Jason Aten:Super for real. It is snowing. That is crazy. I'm not even joking.
Stephen Robles:Crazy. But it's our birthday, Jason. It's the 50th episode. I don't know what you call that.
Jason Aten:Aren't they all technically birthdays? Wait. 49 was a birthday too. It's just this is one we care about. We're over the hill now, Steven.
Stephen Robles:We're over the hill episode 50. Halfway to 100. That's that's a big news. And I'm I'm so excited to celebrate about how wrong you were about dots in the Mac on the Mac dock. I'm so excited.
Stephen Robles:It's the best part of this birthday. Just kidding. Just kidding. We'll get to that. I'm wearing, our merch right now.
Stephen Robles:It's bad.
Jason Aten:Oh, okay.
Stephen Robles:I have more energy than this, but this is I'm gonna wear this to a lot of parties maybe especially around the holiday season. You know, they put a nice jacket over it and just, you know, open one side of the jacket and you show your battery at 1%. So,
Jason Aten:but Talk to me right now.
Stephen Robles:Exactly. This point
Jason Aten:at your chest.
Stephen Robles:The point right here. So so exciting news. Again, we have merch, if you didn't know, just in time for the holiday season. You can get the shirts, battery percentage on and off. You can get a PTS primary tech show shirt.
Stephen Robles:You get hoodies. You may have hats, and a couple exciting news. Cotton Bureau, who makes it, basic Apple guy designed it. Cotton Bureau, that's where you get it. They actually tweeted our merch saying there's a right way to live and a wrong way to live.
Stephen Robles:Don't disappoint us. Battery percentage off and on. So Cotton Bureau's sharing it. We were apparently in the top 10 shirts on Cotton Bureau for a day, and, we already have listener John Holzer here with his battery percentage off. Wonderful.
Stephen Robles:Listen. Send us all your pictures. I don't care if it's a 100 pictures of listeners wearing our merch. We will share them all in rapid fire, in the episodes coming. So, yeah, exciting stuff.
Jason Aten:I also just wanna say that even if you're on the right side of history and you believe the battery percentage should be on like a normal person, it's fine to buy the battery percentage off merch because, honestly, it looks better. Just because it just I'm not like, it just it just does. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Sure. Sure. So I well, that's you know, I am better percentage. But the Alex PTS shirt, I'm getting a hat as well, so I'll just I'll be on low battery for all for all the things.
Stephen Robles:Also, more exciting news. Not only is it our 50th episode, and we have amazing merch, We are now a 5 star podcast once again.
Jason Aten:Love it.
Stephen Robles:We've achieved. I
Jason Aten:checked every day just so I can tell you when we make it back.
Stephen Robles:You you are the wary I know. I don't know. Like, you you notified me when this happens.
Jason Aten:Well, I think I texted you. You. It was, like, 7:30 in the morning or something, and I'm doing the math. I'm, like, I think I know when Steven gets up. And I'm, like, oh, who cares?
Jason Aten:I can send him this anytime. He'll be fine. Doesn't matter.
Stephen Robles:Well, you know, you can schedule a text now too. I've actually used that a couple times because I I'm a night owl and so, like, I'll be up at 1 in the morning, like, probably shouldn't text this person
Jason Aten:right now. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:But also, they should have a focus mode on. I mean, let's be real.
Jason Aten:That's true.
Stephen Robles:We should do another now I'm curious. How many people actually put focus modes on when they go to sleep at night? You know, if it's like, do you have the sleep thing automatically do its thing? Or do you anyway, we'll have to we'll we'll, workshop that that poll. But 5 star review shout outs.
Stephen Robles:Thank you all for helping us get to a 5 star rating again in Apple Podcasts. We have XOXO Wolfie, battery percentage on. K. Dominant pocket, thumbs up. Apple pencil pointing away from the buttons.
Stephen Robles:Nobody's perfect. G Apple Pro from the USA, battery percentage on dominant hand pocket. Apple pencil point facing the charging port. I guess that's the sound on all the app. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Okay. Melody of 1974 from the USA, they said we're the primary experience, which that's high praise. So and Demis g c y from Cyprus, international ratings as well, Is to listen to a primary tech while they're running. Bryce Winters from the USA.
Stephen Robles:Doc Dot's on. Can't wait to get to this. This is so good. One Republic is Nuts from Switzerland. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:I guess it's about the band. Dot's on. And the title of their review was Jason is wrong, which, listen, as long as it's 5 star review,
Jason Aten:you can write whatever
Stephen Robles:you want.
Jason Aten:You know? You really can.
Stephen Robles:And, I just wanna say Dots On 1, not only on social media, not only in our community, social.primarytech.fm, and in the reviews. Dots on. Everybody's look at the 100% dots on. This is in our community. Links in the show notes.
Stephen Robles:Everybody's dot everybody's dots on, Jason.
Jason Aten:I I saw that.
Stephen Robles:And even over here, you're trying to shame Nick over here about the the dots on. No. No. No.
Jason Aten:But I think listen. You are the person who tells people to never think about which apps are running on their phone.
Stephen Robles:That is true. I have a whole video on it.
Jason Aten:So what is even how are you how can you possibly live your life this inconsistently? I don't understand.
Stephen Robles:I listen. I think the mark well, I don't know who said it. The mark of an intellectual is to hold 2 opposing ideas in your head at the same time. Listen. You don't swipe your apps up on your phone, but on your Mac now on my Mac, I quit apps all the time because I'm running things like Final Cut and Compressor and, transcriptionist in the background doing stuff, just hogging my GPUs.
Stephen Robles:I quit stuff. I like to quit stuff.
Jason Aten:But if those things aren't running, they're not hogging your GPUs. Also, podcasting doesn't require any GPUs, just to be clear.
Stephen Robles:Well, oh, ours do well, mean, we No. It doesn't. Yours yours is processing. Yours is doing the, the studio lighting.
Jason Aten:It's all happening in the okay. Yeah. One of the GPUs. 1. Just 1.
Stephen Robles:One of
Jason Aten:them is being used.
Stephen Robles:Dude, anyway, I All
Jason Aten:I'm trying to say is Yeah. The reason those dots exist is like a legacy thing because there was a time mostly when you were running any Intel Mac where you did have to care about whether or not an app was running in the background, but you don't. And the reason that Apple allows you to turn those dots off is because it never wants you to think about which apps are running. Also, command tab works super well. If you wanna know what's running, you just command tab.
Stephen Robles:You can
Jason Aten:use it all the time.
Stephen Robles:I also you can also quit from command tab if you didn't know.
Jason Aten:Which is I I learned that from you. I do it all I it's a great I do it all the time.
Stephen Robles:It's a great shortcut. So on your Mac, command tab is quick switch between applications, and if you just go to highlight 1 while you're holding the command button, you can quickly press the letter q, and it will quit that app from that app switcher, like, you don't even have to bring it to the front. But here's the other thing. On the iPhone, the window has to like, in order for an app to be running, like, the window has to be open, like, active. On the Mac, you can close all the windows of an application, but the application is still open in the background.
Stephen Robles:You know what I mean? Like, Windows, you x out of a window, like, the app is closed. Well, as far as you know. But on Mac, you can have applications running with you know, and not quit fully. So you could have no windows on your display, but if you go to the tab switcher, you still see it there.
Stephen Robles:So that's why I like quit it. I quit stuff on the Mac.
Jason Aten:Yes. So just to close the loop on this because I know you hide your dock.
Stephen Robles:I do have my dock.
Jason Aten:So what is quicker for you to know if a app is running to reach over, grab your mouse, drag it to the bottom of your screen, and wait for the dock to appear to see if there's dots? Right. Or did you say command tab?
Stephen Robles:I have a lot of other apps open though sometimes. Like, right now
Jason Aten:It's still gonna be quicker. You this is like you would use the mouse to go down and see which ones are open and then right click on them all individually.
Stephen Robles:It's not even something I do, like, purposefully. It's just when I go down to the dock, maybe to open an application, I like I like seeing what's open. Listen. All I'm saying is
Jason Aten:Yeah. More people set dots on.
Stephen Robles:More people set dots on and just keep just keep them coming. Just keep them coming. You can
Jason Aten:keep them coming, but I promise you turn them off for a week and your life will be better. Try it.
Stephen Robles:Just I might I might try it. We'll see. Probably not. But anyway, thank you. Thank you all for at least justifying the one argument that I won in this podcast is dots on.
Stephen Robles:Did you watch the Mike Tyson, Logan Paul fight?
Jason Aten:No.
Stephen Robles:I know. You always say you have time to watch anything, so I I doubted that you watched this. Turns out, I watched some of it. Well, okay. Here's the thing.
Jason Aten:When you say you watch some of it is that because it just kept stopping? Exactly. Or okay.
Stephen Robles:Exactly. So for some, like, this was so hyped and I'm not like whatever the fight that whoever was involved, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in, like, the actual tech of what happened and what it means for Netflix because they have a bunch of live events coming up, but I did watch it. I think I inadvertently got my kids into boxing and, like, just didn't didn't expect it. Not during this fight because this one took forever to actually get on, and so I never actually like, we didn't see this one live.
Stephen Robles:But the fight before it was with Serrano, and I forget the other name, but it's actually a great fight, pretty violent, but my kids were, like, pretty invested by the end of those rounds. But when the actual Tyson and Logan Paul fight came up or excuse me, Jake Paul. Jake Paul? Yeah.
Jason Aten:Jake Paul. Yeah. Correct.
Stephen Robles:Just buffered like crazy. And I saw just all over on social media on TikTok, like Netflix is really messing up here. There's other phrases I would have used if this was a PG 13 rated podcast, but they they totally failed on the buffering thing, which is fascinating. Netflix is a huge company, but they don't do live events. Like, that's not typically their thing, but they're trying to get into more of it.
Stephen Robles:And if you weren't aware, I'm gonna I'll pull a link to this in the show notes. They actually have 2 NFL games on Christmas day, which is typically a big day for, like, NFL games and such. And so they're gonna be streaming those events live. A lot of people are gonna be watching that. I also think don't aren't aren't they broadcasting a Beyonce concert next year in the announcement?
Jason Aten:Well, they're I think it's halftime at one of the games. It's gonna be Beyonce. Oh, okay. So a couple of things of note. First of all, I didn't watch this because I had just gone off a plane after traveling for 19 and a half hours.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:Friday. Just to be clear, it wasn't like I was not trying to miss out on this social cultural. I just was giving up on all social anything. Okay. Secondly, there was 60,000,000 people watching this.
Jason Aten:Those you know, the thing people are are, saying is, like, this is bad for the NFL. Netflix is hosting these 2, Christmas Day games, which, by the way, Christmas Day football games is actually a relatively new thing. The Christmas Day always belong to the NBA for a very long time. And the NFL is like, we're just gonna kill you. Like, we don't care.
Jason Aten:We just want all of the money that we can get by selling these games to whoever wants them. And so Netflix was like, we'll take them. But the average football game, like, for this something like this is probably gonna be, like, 20 some million people.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm.
Jason Aten:So, like, half. I think Netflix will be fine for Christmas. But the reason like, Netflix has one of the most efficient tech stacks of all of the streaming services because they literally take the content and and send it to hard drives stored at ISPs. Not even, like, CDNs. They actually have their own networking gear at at your Xfinity and Spectrum or who you know, MetroNet or whoever your company is.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:And but you can't do that with a live event. Right? You can the other thing, Ben Thompson talked about this both on dithering and I think, in one of his articles. And he also does another one called Sharp Tech, where he was talking about it with, Andrew Sharp. The problem is when you're, like, ever you can hit Netflix can certainly handle 100,000,000 people watching Netflix.
Jason Aten:It's just they're all watching something different and starting it at different times.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:So it's not drawing all that same thing. But when in a with a live event, that's completely different. And and so but, again, the idea that they're not going to be able to handle those Christmas day games, which will probably have roughly half of the viewership, I think that they'll probably be fine. Because all of the all of the undercard fights, I guess, went fine. Right?
Stephen Robles:Like Yeah. It was fine. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Yeah. There were there were
Stephen Robles:a couple moments, but nothing like when that the main event happened, and it was just unwatchable or it was, like, 20 minutes delayed for some people. So, 1, I used to work in live production situations, and I I hope there's some documentary or some interviews one day just talking to the tech people who are, like, the IT people that were responsible for Netflix's stream just to talk about the chaos that was probably ensuing during that event. Although, once you're there, like, there's not much you can do. It's not like you could spin up a bunch of new servers or whatever, and, make the stream better immediately. But I would love to have seen the behind the scenes of that moment, to see what happened.
Stephen Robles:So that's Well,
Jason Aten:I actually think they can. I'm sorry. I if you think about Netflix's infrastructure, they have local infrastructure at ISPs. And again, I don't know exactly how it all works, but also they host a lot I mean, like, they're one of AWS's biggest clients.
Stephen Robles:Sure.
Jason Aten:And if there is a single cloud service that can scale instantly, it's gonna be AWS. And also, if you think about the way those those cloud infrastructures work, if 60,000,000 people are all watching the this fight on Netflix, that means they're not doing anything for, like, for work. So there's no, like, draw for any of that other stuff. All that compute excess computing capacity could be just funneled towards Netflix.
Stephen Robles:That's true. The second thing and last thing I'll say about this, there was a decoder episode with Nilay Patel and the Netflix one of their I think they have co CEOs. Right? Isn't there, like, 2?
Jason Aten:Netflix does. Yep.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Netflix does. But they were talking about the algorithmic delivery of the movies and shows when you first open Netflix. And if you weren't aware, like, this happens with YouTube, this happens with Netflix, like, the moment you open the app, it's not like there's preloaded videos and shows. That's why it takes a second to load because it's doing a bunch of computational stuff behind the scenes to figure out what is best to show you right now, and when you if you listen to that episode, and I'll find the link for the show notes, the Netflix co CEO was basically saying, like, we go through, like, your watch history, what's popular now, what we the algorithms think you'd be interested in, and it's serving you that, like, in real time.
Stephen Robles:And it happened so fast that it doesn't feel like that. It feels like, oh, this has just been sitting here for hours waiting for me to open the app, but it's the same thing with YouTube. That's why every time you refresh the home tab, you're gonna see different stuff, because it's always trying to recalculate what to show you that's gonna get you to click on something, watch it, and watch it for a long time. You know, that's what all these platforms want. It's just amazing to me, like, the incredible technology and algorithms they have on that side of it, but listen, live events are hard, and so this is not great.
Jason Aten:Yep.
Stephen Robles:We're also gonna talk about, like, how these events play out on social media, but we're gonna say that for the bonus episode because we're gonna talk about Fred's and x and the Jaguar rebranding because that's hilarious.
Jason Aten:Oh, yeah. That was so bad.
Stephen Robles:Now I'm excited because I have a I have a new Mac, Jason. Actually, this is not full disclosure, Apple sent me this Imac. I didn't buy it.
Jason Aten:You know, technically, Apple will send anyone an Imac. All you have to do is send them $1500
Stephen Robles:Wait. Number. Okay.
Jason Aten:I just wanna be clear.
Stephen Robles:I got the green one. They sent me the green one. You know?
Jason Aten:It's a review unit. That's what it's saying.
Stephen Robles:Review unit. I'm very excited. Green is my favorite color. The green looks amazing. They also sent me the nano texture version.
Stephen Robles:So I have a green nano texture Imac. I I literally have it right here. I was gonna try and show it on camera. Here we go. I'm carefully covering my entire frame, and there it is.
Jason Aten:It looks very shamrock green in that shot.
Stephen Robles:Listen, these greens, they change drastically depending on lighting. Like Well, I
Jason Aten:mean, you have a green light behind you so that might be affecting
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It all it all. Yeah. But it looks beautiful in person. I'm gonna be reviewing it, testing it out.
Stephen Robles:I tried to do a canopy photo. I don't know if you ever see the picture of him on a beach where he put the Imac like on a big rock as if it were a desk. I think I'm gonna try and mimic that down here at the beach, but anyway, I want to review it. But the one thing I want to say, nano texture, this is a nano texture Imac. This is the first nano texture device from Apple that I have in my possession and I can just stare at, for hours.
Stephen Robles:I see the difference, and I'm I'm glad I don't have nanotextra on my devices.
Jason Aten:Wait. Really? Hold on. Hold on. Couple of things we have to we gotta start with.
Jason Aten:You said you're gonna take the Imac to the beach because you're hoping this is the last Mac that Apple ever sends to Apple.
Stephen Robles:Don't listen don't listen to that. Okay. And just just forget that. Forget averages.
Jason Aten:Forget you ever said that. Okay. Fine.
Stephen Robles:I'm not gonna put it in the sand.
Jason Aten:I just
Stephen Robles:I'm gonna find a big rock.
Jason Aten:Wanted to clarify. I put it on the rock. Secondly, I'm pretty sure that Apple, everything that they sent out this review cycle was nanotexture because I they sent me an Imac with nano texture. They sent me a MacBook Pro with nano texture. If they could have, I'm pretty sure they would have sent a Mac mini with nano texture.
Jason Aten:It's just it doesn't have a display on it. Right? Maybe the little light is the the front light is nano texture. I don't know. They were very high on nano texture.
Jason Aten:And every review I've seen was, especially with the MacBook Pros, was all nano texture.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:And I think it's the highlight feature of the MacBook Pro, but you don't like it on the Imac.
Stephen Robles:So I need to this is why I'm gonna be silly and bring it outside to the beach because supposedly nano texture diffusing light is the biggest deal, and that's the most useful thing. That's why maybe on a MacBook Pro and then on an iPad, if you're gonna be outside, it makes a difference. I just had it sitting here in the studio yesterday on my desk, and the way my window is, there's never direct sunlight in the window. And so I had this Imac sitting right next to my studio display, and I would just I looked back and forth, back and forth, and when you're comparing it side by side like that, I noticed the contrast difference, and I noticed how everything just looked a little soft because of the nano texture and just the saturation of colors and the blacks and, like, it still looks great and, like, if I just turn off my Studio Display and I just look at the Imac, after a few seconds, it's like, oh, whatever, like, this looks great. But when I'm comparing it side by side and I imagine if I was editing a bunch of videos, I and this was a computer that was gonna sit on my desk where there's no direct sunlight ever, I would probably go with a glossy still, but that's my, like, one day impression.
Stephen Robles:So we'll see.
Jason Aten:We'll see. And maybe in the MacBook Pro, it's a little bit different because it has a much better display.
Stephen Robles:That too.
Jason Aten:The Imac or the Studio display, and it's brighter now. Right? And so
Stephen Robles:That's true.
Jason Aten:It's possible that that could be part of it, but I don't if I could, I'm working at on a review of the m 4 MacBook Pro. And if I could, I would pay an unreasonable bottom amount of money the next time that they release a MacBook Air. If they would sell it with this display, nanotexture, mini LED, or OLED or something
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:You could sell that thing for $25100 as a MacBook Air. That display is just so good.
Stephen Robles:What you're saying is I need to hit up Apple again and say, listen. The only way I can review this Imac is if I also get an M4 Max MacBook Pro spec'd out with nanotexture so I can compare the display because that's really what I need.
Jason Aten:Just do that before you take the other one to the beach. That's all I'm that's all I'm gonna
Stephen Robles:say. No. No. I can't take it to the listen, if I if Hanupi's photo, it, like, lives on forever. People steal it all the time, so I'm gonna try and recreate it.
Stephen Robles:Lara b I'm trying to get a palm tree in the photo with the green Imac. I think it'll look great. I think it'll be a great photo. Anyway, I'm gonna review that. Oh, also USB C accessories.
Stephen Robles:Cool. Like that's fun. The because it came with the Imac. You know what I mean? So now I have a magic mouse with USB c.
Stephen Robles:The keyboard, correct me if I'm wrong, Jason, I feel like the Imac used to come with the half size keyboard, like the 75% without the number pad. Isn't that it didn't they used to just come with that and not the full thing?
Jason Aten:I think you're right, but I think it's an option. I think you could choose. I just think that they send you the bigger thing. I don't know why. Because they sent me the same thing and I quickly dispatched it to the bottom shelf.
Jason Aten:I don't even use it.
Stephen Robles:Dispatched it. I will I'm curious your preference. I don't care for the full keyboard with number pad, especially on a magic keyboard style keyboard because a, I don't use it.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And b I hate it.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Yeah. So we we we agree on this. I'm curious the listener and and viewers opinion, but also the touch ID button is, like, in the middle of the keyboard almost because it's so big. And so you I don't know.
Stephen Robles:I feel like I'm gonna touch so many buttons just doing touch ID whereas the small magic keyboard, which is what I actually use all the time, like, being right there on that edge, like, you can just quickly, like
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Reach in and do this is weird because I don't had it on camera. But anyway, like, it just feels more natural to just go to the top right corner, touch ID, no problem. The big one, it's like, where is it? I don't know. So I don't prefer the big keyboard.
Stephen Robles:But that's just Yeah.
Jason Aten:I don't either. And it to add insult to injury, they sent me 2 because they sent me one with the MacBook or I mean, with the M4 Mac mini and one with the Imac. Because I have 2 of them that I'm not using either of them for. I do have I started using the one with the, the Mac mini
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:For the touch ID. And I just decided I don't care about touch ID enough to suffer with this keyboard because I don't like the full size keyboard. I don't understand how anyone can possibly use these. And so it it literally has been on the bottom shelf, and I I'm literally this is a 15 year old keyboard, and I'm still using it.
Stephen Robles:I don't know how you're using that. I don't know.
Jason Aten:To change the bat like, I literally have to change the bat Steven.
Stephen Robles:Chart no. You gotta get a new one.
Jason Aten:Why?
Stephen Robles:The new ones the new one's better, I think. No. No.
Jason Aten:No. No. Listen. The touch no. The new ones are way too low profile, and they're not nearly squishy enough keys.
Jason Aten:This is the best.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, it
Jason Aten:doesn't matter. But it is an $80 option, the large one. So normally, if you just bought an Imac and you didn't upgrade the keyboard You
Stephen Robles:have the small.
Jason Aten:I doubt listen. Why would you pay $80 more for a worse experience?
Stephen Robles:If you're an accountant. Because I remember because I I worked at an insurance company for a little while, and I was doing a lot of spreadsheet work. And when you have to enter numbers, that numpad is nice. But I don't I don't do that a lot of editing video. Also, I just wanna say colors, Jason.
Stephen Robles:Colors are fun. And this green, like, every look at all the colors. The power cable, color, the computer, color, the accessories, the keyboard, the mount. Well, you know, it's very light mint on those accessories, but I like the colors. I would love for I would love to have colors.
Stephen Robles:I love the green. Speaking of the keyboards and stuff, I reviewed the the m 4 Mac mini and talked about how I use it as a home server, and I have my old Mac mini there and the new one. Look at here's a comparison, Apple TV, new Mac mini, old Mac mini, and I talked about how I use it as a home server. I will say trying to set it up without kind of a dedicated keyboard and mouse with it was a little bit cumbersome because, for some reason, I have, like, other Magic keyboards, but the Bluetooth wasn't syncing and the Mac mini setup, so I had to, like, pull out a mechanical keyboard, USB it, and then the Magic Mouse wouldn't connect, so I had to do, like, my Logitech MX Master 3 with a USB cable. Like, it was weird.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, so so not having the keyboard and mouse on setup was a little cumbersome, but it's now setup and the Mac mini is chugging away in buried in an entertainment center. Let me try to find the picture of it. Here is here's where I put it. This is me pushing the power button. My hand was shaking because it's so much work.
Jason Aten:I'm so nervous about turning it on.
Stephen Robles:So much work. So the M4 Mac mini, it's in the entertainment center. It's doing my things with trans Transloader and Downey and Hazel doing the Plex server stuff, and I wanted to use it for streaming, and I was like, base m 4, I mean, this is gonna be more than enough, I think, to stream, like, 1080p video. And so I put OBS on it, I have an Elgato capture device, where my son's Playstation is going into the capture device, back out to the receiver, and, it's working great. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:He's been, like, streaming live on YouTube with, doing Fortnite, and I actually have a little, like, Rode wireless go lapel thing, and so I connected that to the Mac, and he wears the lapel, and it's all it's all working. You can hear him. You could the video game's working, the M4 Mac mini, live streaming 1080p like a champ, not even thinking about it, and, it's it's a great little machine, and so even the base model, like we said, I mean, is it like with education discount, you can get it for, like, $500. Right?
Jason Aten:Yeah. And that's
Stephen Robles:That's pretty impressive. Yeah. Amazing. Did you
Jason Aten:see the or here I I don't know if it was I think it might have been Jason Snell saying that it's the lightest Mac Apple has ever made.
Stephen Robles:Oh, really? That's
Jason Aten:It is the it's it weighs less than the 12 inch MacBook did.
Stephen Robles:That's amazing. Well, I I love it. I mean, I'll put I'll put a link to my video. But, I mean, basically I mean, if you were just wanting a desktop computer and, you know, if you were wondering should I get Mac Studio or whatever, it all depends on what your power needs are. But my goodness, the M4 Pro in a Mac Mini, if you wanna upgrade to that, I mean, that's that's the stuff right there.
Jason Aten:It's what I'm using right now. Literally, we're I'm podcasting from it right now, and I may never send it back. I may just email them and be like, can I just send you money?
Stephen Robles:I was, you know, I was wondering about that. Like, if I set up this Imac and my family just starts using it, like, can I hit up Apple and be like, hey? Can you just sell this to me? Right. It's all set up, but I don't know how it's gonna work.
Stephen Robles:He also keeping boxes to send stuff back. I'm having to develop a whole system for that now because the item
Jason Aten:We have we do have a system for that. It's just called a basement and there's just a pile of boxes in the back of the basement. Every once in a while, my wife is like, you need to get rid of some of these boxes. And I'm, like, I guess that means I have to send some things back. I've been getting better at it.
Jason Aten:I have I
Stephen Robles:have just sent the
Jason Aten:max MacBook Pro boxed up and ready to go. I have, I did send back 3 laptops and iPad and about 4 phones recently
Stephen Robles:Wow.
Jason Aten:In one box. Yep.
Stephen Robles:I could see though how I mean, I I don't get as many devices as you to review, but, like, the AirPods 4, I got sent to review from Apple, and I haven't sent them back yet because I'm, like, I have till March, they said, or something, which I know, at least if your experience and what I hear from John Gruber is anything, I could probably keep these forever, and they never say anything. But it's you you can almost like, I almost forget, like, oh, shoot. I do have to send these back one day, and I need to remember to do that. So
Jason Aten:Yes. And I've decided that the better thing to do is send it back sooner rather than later because once you start, like, using it all the time and it's like, oh, no. I gotta go back. Now even so, like, my regular laptop is an m 3, and that's what I took to Portugal, my m 3 MacBook Air. You know, I we podcast it from it does everything.
Jason Aten:It's fine. It has Yeah. It's fine. 24 gigs of memory, and it has a 2 terabyte hard drive. It's actually perfect.
Jason Aten:I have no reason to stop using it. And so it's not like going back to it as, like, a chore or anything. Right. It's like you just get used to using something and then it's like, oh, this isn't actually mine. I need to send this back.
Stephen Robles:Well, and that's like, the AirPods 4, I actually been using a lot because I do prefer them in a lot of situations just to not feel the in ear thing whether it's just around the house and I don't wanna be so closed off. I'm, like, man, AirPods 4 are really nice.
Jason Aten:They're really nice.
Stephen Robles:They're very nice. The noise canceling cancels a little bit. It's not like, you know, AirPods Pro noise cancelling but but they're really nice, so I don't know. I'm gonna send those back right I'm a wait till right on the day I have to and then wait 6 more months like Jason and not
Jason Aten:send them back.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. No. That's alright. Alright. We need to talk about this huge antitrust case with the DOJ and Google, but before we do, we get to thank a few of our friends.
Stephen Robles:The first one being Notion, which literally literally powers this show because Jason and I are sharing a Notion document as we speak who we use every week to plan the show, and I mean Notion is great. We get to collaborate. I'm gonna give Notion some credit here too because I've had I use Bear Notes for a lot of things, and there's been some sync issues recently where, like, it'll show me a sync conflict or whatever, and I was in a place of low bandwidth yesterday, and I went to add something to our show notes that we're using right now. I was, like, oh, shoot. This low bandwidth, is it gonna make a sync conflict?
Stephen Robles:Is something not gonna, like, work properly? And then I gotta give Notion credit, Solid as a rock. I mean, the the syncing, it never loses anything, and, oh, they have shortcuts actions now. You can now add links. You can share things through shortcuts and make automations, and actually put it into a Notion page.
Stephen Robles:You can create new pages with shortcuts. None of this is even in the script. This is all to me, like, discovering Notion. I put it in my recent shortcuts videos, because now you have Notion actions. So Notion is amazing.
Stephen Robles:We use it every week. But also, Notion has AI built in, and the new Notion AI is the single AI tool. It does it all. You can search across Notion and other apps, generate docs in your own style, analyze PDFs and images, and you can chat with it like a chatbot. I've used Notion AI in the past.
Stephen Robles:It's great just for, like, selecting a bunch of text and summarizing it or rewriting it or brainstorming, just asking it for ideas. Notion AI is connected to multiple knowledge sources. It uses AI knowledge from GPT 4 and Claude, who combines those 2. You basically get the best of all the worlds, and he has other specialized tools, where again, it just works across all your documents. Jason will do a thing where putting our transcripts in Notion, and you can basically search the transcripts, get the summaries.
Stephen Robles:It's just incredibly powerful tool. They can write beautiful docs, collaborate, organize your tasks. Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, and teams that use Notion send less email, cancel more meetings, save time searching for their work, and reduce spending on tools. And I have to say, I mean, Jason and I basically just collaborate in the note. Like, we don't really text each other during the week.
Stephen Robles:We just put stuff in the note, and it just all works out.
Jason Aten:Steven, just this week, somebody was asking a question about the tech pouches or whatever thing we use in our community. And, and I wanted to answer the question. And I used the notion AI and I said, when did Steven and I talk about our tech gear bags? And it told me the episode.
Stephen Robles:See, Notion. Here's what you do. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com /primarytechnology. That's all lowercase letters and the links in the show notes below. Notion.com/primarytechnology to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today.
Stephen Robles:When you use our link, you are supporting the show. So notion.com/primarytechnology. Thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode and our friends at the Data Citizens Dialogues podcast. You've heard us talk about them before. And listen, if you listen to this show, you're probably into technology, interested in data.
Stephen Robles:Well, if you are, you need to check out the Data Citizens Dialogues podcast made by the folks over at Calibra, and 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. And you get insight into everything from popular staples, such as AI governance and data sharing, and down to more nuanced questions, like how do we ensure data readability? I was just listening to the latest episode, before we recorded this, and they were talking about decentralizing data and how in companies and organizations, it's important for everyone in the organization top down to have access to the data they need to get their job done. And it was a great discussion about data decentralization, how to do that privately and securely, but making that data available to everyone in a company. So super interesting.
Stephen Robles:So while data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversation. You can follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast, and the link to that show is in the show notes, in our show notes as well. Go take a listen. Our thanks to Data Citizens Dialogues podcast for sponsoring this episode. Alright.
Stephen Robles:Big antitrust news. The DOJ, the Department of Justice here in the US, has now filed an official what is it? Official document? Official request? What is the what do you call it?
Jason Aten:Basically, they have filed their proposed remedies in the antitrust case.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:They're basically it's basically their attempt to persuade the judge, this is what you should do.
Stephen Robles:Right. So this filing is basically saying that Google should have to sell off Chrome as the web browser, and there's an option open that they might need to sell off Android as well, which I think would be a bigger deal. We'll talk about that in a second. But that this, selling off of Google Google Chrome helping or lessening the monopoly that they believe Google has, in things like the web browser market, which is vast, like, far and away the number one web browser across the world. I think it's something like 65 to 70% of all browser usage is Chrome, so it is a bunch.
Stephen Robles:Now, this doesn't mean Google has to do it right now. What this filing means, this is what the Department of Justice believes should happen, and they have remedies that they've recommended. And then in April of next year, 2025, I believe, they're going to go before a judge, and the judge is going to rule, basically, who does Google have to sell off Chrome and or Android. And so there's a link from The Verge I'll put in the show notes, but Jason also has an article that we talk about more. This is a pretty big deal.
Stephen Robles:Now, if you look at Google's revenue, you know, the most revenue comes from ad revenue, which is not necessarily Chrome, right? But having the most used browser also means they can have the most used default search engine, which is Google, which equals the ad revenue. And so having to sell off Chrome obviously would affect that part of their business dramatically, But I think it also is another interesting question, who would buy it, and who could buy it where it's also not just a monopoly? And also, I think part of the ruling, and I again, I don't think this is decided yet, but that Google will not be able to pay someone like Apple for that preferential treatment of being the default browser, which would mean a huge effect on Apple's bottom line if Google can't give them, what, 20,000,000,000 a year? Mhmm.
Stephen Robles:Because $20,000,000,000 a year to be the default search engine. So it's a big deal. We're not gonna know like, nothing's gonna happen now. We don't know what the judge will rule come April. They might decide not to do this.
Stephen Robles:I think the Android part is also a big deal because that's the most used mobile operating system globally, and that means Google Chrome and Google Search are the defaults. So if someone were to buy Android, someone could change that all. Like, think worst not worst case scenario, and I don't think this could happen because of their already large influence, but, like, someone like Meta. You know, if Meta were to buy Android or an or Chrome or whatever, which I don't think they would be allowed to. Hopefully, the DOJ and the courts, like, wouldn't allow something like that, But that would mean a company like Meta could now have huge influence to say, you know what?
Stephen Robles:The default engine is gonna be Meta AI. You're gonna have to talk to the Meta bot every time you wanna search the web. Or that Android, the operating system, would then become MetaOS or whatever, and then a bunch of mobile operating systems would have meta search and meta apps just preprogrammed to default. So this would be a huge advantage for someone who could buy it, which, again, makes me think, I don't know who could buy it where it would not increase or not lessen competition, but, you know, silo another company more. But this is fascinating, and, tell tell me what your thoughts on this.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I think there's a couple of interesting things, the the yeah. There's a so there's a hearing in April where both sides will make their case, and the judge has said judge Mehta, which is not at all confusing.
Stephen Robles:The I like m e h t a.
Jason Aten:Yes. Has has said that, he plans to rule by next August. Okay. So this is and then, of course, there will be appeals. Right?
Jason Aten:Actually, Google is appealing the verdict that they are a monopoly. So even if this goes on, like, there are a lot of things that are still this we're a long way from any of this happening.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right.
Jason Aten:It does not make any sense to force Google to sell Chrome for several reasons. It doesn't make any money, so no one's going to buy it. Right? Because here's the thing. Bloomberg reported that they that the there's an estimate that Chrome would be worth on its own 15 to $20,000,000,000.
Jason Aten:To who? It doesn't make any money. Like, Chrome makes $0 of direct revenue. The reason it is so valuable to Google is it pro it provides it a way of distributing all of its other services and it prevents it. It prevents other players like apple and Microsoft, and maybe to some extent, meta from prioritizing other like, you can imagine that if, if apple, if there was no Chrome, apple could make it so that in Safari, you couldn't access Google search or something like if they wanted to start their own search engine.
Jason Aten:So it gives them that sort of hedge against that. So it's extremely valuable to Google. Their entire business is is, like, just entirely based on the idea that they have their own browser that gives them all of this. Also, they use data from the browser.
Stephen Robles:You click
Jason Aten:on the thing, they use that information, and it informs the search engine. All that's great. Like, it's super valuable to Google. The only companies that off the top of your head could just swing 15 to $20,000,000,000 to buy something like this would never be allowed to buy it. There's no way the government would be like, sweet Apple by Chrome or sweet Microsoft.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Microsoft, you should remember the whole thing where we try to force you to break up because you had a browser. You have one now. Why don't you buy Chrome? And now you just like, if it's never gonna happen, there's like and so to me, this feels like, and this is what I wrote in my article.
Jason Aten:This feels like an attempt to regulate the Internet by people who don't understand how the Internet works. Like, it doesn't make any sense to do that. And maybe you could look at this as sort of like a bargaining position. We're trying to ask for everything and we'll settle somewhere in between and we'll just kinda kind of go go from there. But this is like, it doesn't make sense.
Jason Aten:And I don't think it solves the actual problem, which is that Google search isn't. I don't think anybody would argue that Google search is not a monopoly. Right? Like, right. I don't know.
Jason Aten:94% of searches go through Google.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And the other, the alternatives are just not good, like being bad. Right? At Kosia, like, they, they're sort of, like, the eco friendly one. Every time you do a search, they plant a tree. That's not exactly how it works, but sort of, no.
Jason Aten:For real. Like,
Stephen Robles:that's their
Jason Aten:business model. That's their business model.
Stephen Robles:Not very many searches.
Jason Aten:That's how that's the business model.
Stephen Robles:And how do you how do you spell that? I'm gonna find this.
Jason Aten:E c o s I a. I think that's how you spell it. I've interviewed the CEO. Like, they're legit.
Stephen Robles:But but
Jason Aten:my thing is they, for now, have been using Bing's search results. Now they actually now have their own some of their own search capabilities. But my point was just going to be that they are like, it's still just Bing. Right? Like because Google doesn't license their data.
Jason Aten:So the the bottom line here is that it does not, I don't understand the government's remedy. This is like, it feels like when you're a lawyer, you look at, well, thing went wrong. We sued. We won. Now we have to find the structural remedies to prevent that thing from happening again.
Jason Aten:But there's, you can't just extract Chrome from Google, right? Like it's not a thing. Same thing with Android. Android may be a little bit more, but also Android doesn't on its own. It's make any money either.
Jason Aten:Like Google doesn't sell Android. It's an open source operating system. Now they do have deals, and this is one of the things that they're trying to prevent. You have to have the Google play store and you have to take Chrome.
Stephen Robles:Right. But if
Jason Aten:you're gonna buy us, if you're gonna use a smartphone operating system, you need a way to get apps on it, and you need a browser. Like, this it it's just perplexing.
Stephen Robles:Which which, I mean, you could say that's how the EU has tried to regulate Apple, whereas, yes, you need a browser. We're gonna make you choose every time you update your operating system to make sure that's the browser you want, which is not a great solution either.
Jason Aten:Okay. So here's what's gonna happen because that's the other thing is Google, you can no longer have these deals to be the preferential search option as a default. Okay. There's Google's gonna keep paying Apple all this money because that money is a revenue share. Right?
Jason Aten:Google is paying apple for traffic. And so they're paying them essentially a percentage of the search ad revenue based on the traffic that comes from Safari for being the default. What's gonna happen is Apple's gonna because also other search engines would pay that as well. They just aren't they're just the money is negligible because nobody's actually using them. Right.
Jason Aten:But Google also pays Mozilla, like all of Mozilla's revenue is from Google search deal. And so it's so what will end up happening is you can't have a contract that requires you to be the default. We're gonna put up a ballot. And then as soon as people choose Google, apple's still gonna get the traffic, like acquisition costs. Like it's gonna end up being the same.
Jason Aten:You're not going to actually solve anything.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Quick aside.
Jason Aten:Yeah. At Kosea, they really do. They plant trees. I I wasn't making this up.
Stephen Robles:They've planted 219,000,000 trees.
Jason Aten:Yes. It's
Stephen Robles:a lot of trees. I could I don't think it's, like, every time you make a search, but they plant a lot of trees.
Jason Aten:I said I was oversimplifying it a little bit.
Stephen Robles:I know. I know. I know.
Jason Aten:Listen, I'm gonna send you a link. I interviewed him to the CEO 2 years ago.
Stephen Robles:That's pretty cool.
Jason Aten:At, at Web Summit, actually. And and hit the only reason I yeah. Anyway, I'll send you the link. You can put it in there if people wanna read more about Acoccia.
Stephen Robles:No. That's great. I do think, like you were saying, these are laws that seemingly made by people who don't understand because, you know, the bigger issue is Google search. You could say Google 0, which is, like, what The Verge and Eli talk about, where traffic to websites is screeching to a halt because Google is not sending people there. AI overviews, every time you use Google, like, now, it used to be where I would get an AI overview, like, 1 out of 5 times, and now it's a 100% of the time.
Stephen Robles:A 100% of the time. And I even find, like, my own habits are changing slightly, because sometimes the AI overview gives me the info that I want. And, like, 2 months ago, I was just resistant, and I didn't want I didn't wanna look at the AI overview. I just scrolled down to the links. And now because it's sometimes it takes up so much of the screen, like, I'm literally here on my studio display, I do a search in Google, and the AI overview is 3 quarters of the page, and it's basically, like, if I'm asking for steps on something or information on something, it's they're, like, giving me everything, I think, in that AI overview.
Stephen Robles:And so even my habits are changing, and, like, none of that has affected whether or not Google sells Chrome or not, because AI overviews and the search results and all of that, like, people are still just gonna go to google.com and type whatever. Because I mean, google.com is, well, like, the most visited website on the Internet still, I think. Yeah. Like, not even, like, just searches, just like Google.com. People just go there.
Stephen Robles:And so this again, whatever would affect Google's bottom line, it would not actually you know, ideally, if a government is gonna pass a law or make a change, the ideal scenario is that it actually makes a better experience for customers and the just the regular people who use this stuff, and this would not really make it better. Honestly, you know, some some weird company, a thing like HP, buys Chrome. Okay. What are they gonna are they gonna change the default search engine to what? They're not gonna make their own.
Stephen Robles:They don't have, you know, a search engine. Are they gonna use a third party one? Everyone's immediate reaction is gonna be like, this stinks because it's not Google, and it's not what they're used to. And some people are just gonna go to google.com anyway, and so I don't like, it that doesn't make I think the Android thing, like you're saying, it would affect them more, but still, like, people are just there is a a gravitational pull because it's been so long, so many years, like, this is not gonna change people's habits. This is not gonna change whether or not people use Google or not.
Stephen Robles:It's just gonna make the experience worse because now it's like, now I have to get struggle to where I find, like, find the things I wanna find. And so and I and I don't think the DOJ, and you know more about this than I do, that they don't have the wherewithal or the abilities to, like, actually pass laws that would functionally change how Google conducts search. Like, I feel like that's more like, if laws were being passed in the interest of the person who makes the website about fabrics, and the DOJ wants their website to still get traffic when people search for fabrics, this doesn't change anything. But also it's really hard to make laws about that. And I mean, I I don't know the answer, but I don't know.
Stephen Robles:I feel like isn't isn't that wouldn't that be the more valuable course of action, but it's also harder and maybe DOJ doesn't know what to do with it?
Jason Aten:Yeah. So let me just I'm just gonna say this. This is, like, the libertarian side of me. I don't want government making laws about any of this. And here's the reason why.
Jason Aten:1, again, they don't understand how the Internet works. Fine. Like, just whatever. But if you make a website and you sell fabrics, you're not actually entitled to traffic from anything. Now I'm not arguing that Google hasn't totally messed everything up.
Jason Aten:That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying, like, you can't make a law like, protectionism doesn't usually work out the way you think it's going to. It usually has a lot of unintended consequences. And I don't know that that's exactly the route that we wanna go down. I think that I heard on another podcast this week, the the cohost talking about how, like, the way that we could have prevented this was from better laws and regulation early on.
Jason Aten:Chrome was a thing that Google started internally. Like, it's not like Android where they essentially bought it very, very, very early on or, like, double click, which was like their ad tech stack that they bought or whatever. It's they built Chrome from the ground up. And the reason it happened is because of the Microsoft US antitrust case where, right? Like the, the micros, the US sued Microsoft, tried to break up Microsoft, won a settlement in the Supreme court that basically said you can't bundle Internet Explorer.
Jason Aten:You have to let people choose their browser, whatever. And now we have Chrome. Like, that's the unintended consequence. 20 years later is we still have a browser monopoly. It's just not Microsoft.
Jason Aten:It's Google. So what are we gonna do this every 20 years? Like, what I don't think that this is real like, the definition of insanity is continuing to sue big tech companies and getting the same outcome. Like, I don't I don't understand. And I don't think that there's a way to regulate this.
Jason Aten:I don't I'm not smart enough to figure out what the solution is, but I do because again, so what is the downside to Google being a monopoly? Okay? Theoretically, there's 2 possible outcomes. 1, Google search sucks, which, let's be honest, most of the time it does. It's the best option and it's terrible.
Jason Aten:Like, that's really the truth. Right?
Stephen Robles:It's gotten worse. It keeps getting worse. Right. It keeps getting worse.
Jason Aten:But that's because they have no meaningful competition. And then the other possible outcome is that advertisers might have to pay more money because they don't have other place. Now fortunately for advertisers, there is an alternative, which is meta, which is the another monopoly. Right? They you know, there is a
Stephen Robles:I was gonna say they have another alternative being YouTube, but then I was like, wait a minute.
Jason Aten:That would be owned by oh, shoot. Google. Okay.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:But what I'm trying to say is, like, the advertiser side, like, that would be the downside is that the pricing Yeah. Price to advertise goes up because you don't have as many choices. Right. You're locked into that. So I think that those are real problems, and I think that that's what the DOJ is trying to solve.
Jason Aten:I just don't think that saying sell off Chrome is gonna make any sense because even if you've got a group of private equity investors together and they pull together $20,000,000,000 the only way that they get a return on that is by getting traffic acquisition costs from Google search. Right? Like we're right back where we started. That's the, so maybe the outcome is that it costs Google more money every year, like, fine, but that doesn't actually fix anything.
Stephen Robles:Alright. Let's fix it right now, Jason.
Jason Aten:Okay. Let's do it. We're starting a browser right now.
Stephen Robles:The the question is what is
Jason Aten:the web? Primary browser.
Stephen Robles:What is the web? Here's the thing. Like, base the base problem that needs a solution. Someone makes incredible fabrics, and they have a website where people can buy them. And there on the other side, there are people who want incredible fabrics, and they they want like, they want to find that person, and that person wants people customers to find them.
Stephen Robles:Like, if those 2 people find each other, like, it will be a wonderful long term relationship, and they will buy lots of fabrics over the years. The person has a viable business. Everybody like, those two parties can be happy. The problem is, how do people find things on the Internet? Like, that's the problem.
Stephen Robles:And obviously, being the biggest moneymaker, like, there's just so many different motivations in that middleman part. And the web is great because anyone can have a website, and it can be open. And that's why I'm running 4 different social media windows all the time on my Mac because it's like no one knows where to go to look for stuff. And it's like, maybe the answer is blue sky. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:But, like, surely after all these decades, can't can't we not just get along? Like can't there just be a system where the person who wants the fabrics can go to a place and the web, I imagine, and find that person without that person paying like, that's the problem. Like, that fabric website could pay a $1,000,000 beyond Instagram and TikTok and have ads everywhere, but they don't have that money. And so it's, like, how can that person if they truly have the best stuff, how can they be found? And I get, like, is that that's the problem.
Stephen Robles:Right? Like
Jason Aten:Okay. Yes. But utopian answer is sure, everyone just finds everything on Google.
Stephen Robles:Immediately gonna be a downer. Okay. Go ahead.
Jason Aten:But the real answer though, is Instagram ads. Like, seriously, it's not a $1,000,000. You they don't need to spend $1,000,000 because you pay per conversion or you pay per for the traffic that comes from. And and there is I think it might have been Ben Thompson who says and I don't think he originated this, but I think this is where I heard it from, that there is no single greater source of new businesses that have started in the last 10 years than Facebook because there are so many businesses that literally would never exist except for Facebook ads. It is created businesses because you can just you wanna sell belts or widgets or, you know, think about think about all of the companies like Nomad.
Jason Aten:Right? Like, all these companies are entirely built on Instagram ads and Facebook ads. Like, seriously. And so that's where you're a fabric company because you can target exactly who you want. Right?
Jason Aten:You can target the right types of people. And and the incentive for the platform, in this case, Meta is we want them to find you because that's how we make money. Those incentives are aligned. And so and also Google Ads. Like, the alt the other option
Stephen Robles:to that
Jason Aten:is Google Ads. Somebody searches for best fabric store in, you know, Tampa or whatever, Michigan, you wanna show up there. You you pay for an ad. It's there is this weird sort of distort distortion that happened because for many, many, many years, like all of civilization, the way you found customers was advertising. Right?
Jason Aten:And then the Internet happened, and all of a sudden, it's like, wait. My cost of distributing my message went down to 0 because I can just put it on the Internet and people will find things. And Google did this really nice thing by indexing the entire Internet. And then Google realized, yes, but we like money too. So what if we make you pay?
Jason Aten:Like like, that's what that's just kind of the way that this happened. And yeah.
Stephen Robles:Well, and and thinking, like, even farther back before advertising, because I'm pretty sure there was a world before advertising. It was word-of-mouth. It was Yeah. It was word-of-mouth. And that's where I do think, you know, that you look at the creator economy, and maybe that's what that's becoming.
Stephen Robles:It's still advertising a lot of times, you know, it's influencers, whatever, being paid, but it is that kind of direct recommendation from a person, but I don't know. I yeah. I just want the people who want the fabrics to find the fabrics, you know what I mean? But you are, like, it is weird to think that maybe Meta is one of the good guys here, because I will say there there have been lots of individuals, business owners that would ask me, like, how do I get, like, exposure? How do how do people find me?
Stephen Robles:And the ad like, a lot of times the answer was Facebook and Instagram ads because you can pay whatever you can afford. Like, you can pay $50, and someone will look at your stuff. And then it's on you to have the good stuff that people wanna keep coming back to, but you can pay $50 and people will find you. And, like, I know I have friends that are actually their entire business model is helping other businesses get ads on Facebook and Instagram because it is that effective, and they have huge success stories. So
Jason Aten:Well, and if you spend $1,000 on Instagram ads, all you need is $1,001 of incremental, like, net income. Right. No. Seriously. That you would have never had any otherwise.
Jason Aten:And all of a sudden, you just turn that you just keep turning that dial up.
Stephen Robles:And that that's how, like, all the Amazon, like, knock off products work. Like, you basically Yeah. Put a product on Amazon. It could be, like, just a slight rebrand of something. Like, people do this as a business.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Like, just sell on Amazon. They buy Facebook ads. They sell the thing at a very small profit, and then they just keep doing it over and over again. But, anyway Yep.
Stephen Robles:I don't know why this can be this conversation may be sad. I don't know what the future holds, Jason, but
Jason Aten:I don't think it involves Google selling off Chrome.
Stephen Robles:Oh, okay. You don't think it's gonna work? I just
Jason Aten:well, I don't know that the judge will even order that, to be honest. I just don't think that that's I don't think that that's the right alternative. There may be some structural alternatives that are necessary. I just don't think that that's the one that I I think that's the one that makes people who want tech regulated feel good because it's like, yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Stick it to big bad Google. But I just don't think it actually makes sense when you think about it.
Stephen Robles:Here's how here's how we're gonna solve it. We just need every judge who has to rule on a big tech case to listen to this podcast. They have they have to at least listen to maybe the maybe this episode, maybe, you know, a string of 5 to 10 episodes. There there's just required listening so they get the full picture of what the ramifications might be, and then they can rule. I think that should be the the requirement.
Jason Aten:I'm yep. Found it.
Stephen Robles:We did it. We just passed the law. We just solved it. We just solved it.
Jason Aten:This is so easy.
Stephen Robles:We got a couple other things about Microsoft and Apple News, but we have one more sponsor to thank, a very special sponsor, because this is our friend Rogue Amoeba, who makes Audio Hijack, and I mean, Jason and I are using it right now. We record the audio the WAV files directly with Audio Hijack. Listen, Audio Hijack is just incredible. If you do anything with audio on your Mac, you want to record any kind of audio, you have to try Audio Hijack. It's incredibly easy to use UI.
Stephen Robles:Let's say you want to record your USB mic input and maybe audio coming from a web browser, you can do that with Audio Hijack. You build the little blocks, you tell it what to record, where you want the audio to go, your output, you're good to go. It can be hardware devices, system audio, and there's even crazy tools like transcription. You can literally transcribe the audio while you record it with audio hijack. I use it all the time.
Stephen Robles:I use it for every video that I make. I use audio hijack right there in the menu bar. I have a bunch of sessions set up, so you can have different kind of templates. This is my video recording template. This is my primary tech recording, and I just click run, and it's just recording in the background.
Stephen Robles:And one of my favorite little features is that I can see the levels in the menu bar of my Mac. So as I'm talking I'm literally staring at it right now as I'm talking, I see little levels going up and down. When Jason talks, I see his levels and it just gives me peace of mind knowing that Audio Hijack has got me covered. And I've never again, I've I've said it before, I've knocked on wood, I think this desk is real wood. Never ever lost a recording with Audio Hijack.
Stephen Robles:Every audio recording I've done for years years, I mean, I'm talking however long it's been around, because I've been using it forever. Audio Hijack, rock solid. So here's what you do. Go to macaudio.com/primarytech, and you can use the coupon code techxx to save 20% off Audio Hijack. You can be audio hijack.
Stephen Robles:You can buy one of the bundles, which Loopback I've used is an incredible tool, Piezo for even simpler audio recording. Get 20% off one of their bundles or off audio hijack itself when you use the coupon code techxx. Click that link in the episode description, you will not regret it. It's probably the first app I install on any new Mac, which even that Mac Mini that's sitting in my closet, I put Audio Hijack on there just because. You never know.
Stephen Robles:You never know when you're gonna wanna use Audio Hijack, so go to macaudio.com /primarytech, the link's in the show notes, and use the coupon code techxx for 20% off. So thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this episode. Alright. Couple of quick news bits, then we have our holiday gift guide. Real quick, we'll call this the lightning round.
Stephen Robles:Windows is making, bootleg Mac Mini. No. That's not really what it is.
Jason Aten:That is what I thought of the first time I I saw that.
Stephen Robles:The Windows 3 yeah.
Jason Aten:Very different.
Stephen Robles:Very different. The Windows 365 link, it's $350, cheaper than well, cheaper than Mac Mini, but basically, it will stream Windows over the internets, to your display, whatever you connect to this little box. Interesting idea. It's basically like a VM, like you're buying a virtual machine.
Jason Aten:I remember the first computer that I used on a regular basis was, like, a terminal thing when I was in college, and it was basically just like a shelf that you logged in, and it was, like, connected to a computer somewhere else or whatever. That was a long time ago. It was terrible. I remember that was when, like, 3 days later, somebody down the hall got the first Imac, and I'm like, oh, that's what a computer should be. Right?
Jason Aten:Anyway, this is a little bit more sophisticated than that, but not bear not much because it's it's literally just processing a video signal and sending it to a monitor.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:But it is kind of an interesting thing. I the only reason I put this link in here is because it was like a I don't know if it was last year that windows announced this windows 365 thing where you can basically run windows in the cloud, all of your applications and everything is in the cloud, but you can run it, like, locally. Actually, as a Mac user, I'm curious. Is that a thing that you ever would want to do? Run Windows in the cloud?
Stephen Robles:Run will I run Windows in the cloud or Mac in the cloud?
Jason Aten:No. Run Windows in the cloud. Like, do you actually have a use in your life for running Windows? Probably not. So you can't compare.
Stephen Robles:Probably not. I mean Okay. I'm sure my kids would like to run whatever epic games mods you can do only on Windows, which I did install a VM one time on a Mac to do that, but maybe that, but not me. It's a cool idea though. I mean, 350, and you got you have a computer in the cloud.
Stephen Robles:Yep. Cool. Alright. NVIDIA, who makes the GPUs for the entire, AI industry, they're making a ton of money, And, yeah. There you go.
Stephen Robles:That's that.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Basically, they make GPUs that print money. Like, literally, that's
Stephen Robles:what they do. GPUs that print money.
Jason Aten:Have figured out how to make GPUs that just spit spit out money. They suck up electricity, and they spit up they spit out money. I think this is actually funny because if you read the news reporting about it, Nvidia's stock price was down 3% after this report even though their revenue doubled year over year. What? And the reason is because the previous year it had like tripled.
Jason Aten:And so it's like the sale, the growth has slowed and it's like, well, yes, of course. First of all, all of these things are supply constrained, meaning the Nvidia is selling every single one that it can make. Right. Secondly, there, it's very expensive, like $35,000,000,000 for the quarter. Like that's a whole lot.
Jason Aten:And even these big giant tech companies, like there's, they do still have budgets. Right. And if the other thing that stuck to my mind is it's like, if you sell a $100 worth of a thing, and then the next year you sell $200 worth of thing, you went up a 100%. Right?
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:But what if you went from a 100 to $300 Okay. So you you you tripled it or whatever. Then the next year you only doubled, you went to $600. That increase is still more than the previous 2 years worth of increases.
Stephen Robles:Like, right.
Jason Aten:It's like, yes. By a percent. That's what happens with large numbers. It gets harder to continue to have the exact same, like huge amount, but a doubling in the 3rd year is more than the previous gains of those. Like, I don't know.
Jason Aten:I feel like anyone who's worried about this, you're just, first of all, it's clearly, it's definitely a bubble. It's going to, this is not investment advice. I don't know. I'm just saying there's no way it's sustainable forever. Either someone else is going to make figure this out how to make these things AMD or whatever.
Jason Aten:We're gonna be running private cloud compute on m 2 ultras or whatever for forever in Apple's data centers. They're gonna figure this out. It's not gonna continue forever. But, man, like, Nvidia is fine. They're the largest company in the world right now.
Stephen Robles:Everyone was after trees trying to grow money. They just needed to make GPUs. You know what I mean? But
Jason Aten:Every GPU you plant in the ground, a tree is searched for on the Internet. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:That'd be a hilarious sketch. I think it was Kylie Robinson from The Verge. She was on an episode of The Vergecast talking about all these AI companies are now scrambling a bit because the idea was that every new model that, like, OpenAI were to release was gonna be a leap above the previous model, which you could say chat gpt, like, 3.5 was that leap back when it really hit the stage, and then GPT 4 o, a bit of a leap there. Well, it appears that these AI companies are not achieving those great leaps and that it might be slowing down. That's when Jason talks about the bubble.
Stephen Robles:If you know, because OpenAI, we talked about this, I think, last week, but supposedly might release a new model before the end of the year or at least announce it, and then maybe early next year. And if it is not a leap above 4 0, it does feel like this quickly, it will be like, oh, never mind. Look, you guys aren't going to build some kind of sentient thing. You're just making a slightly better chatbot every 6 months.
Jason Aten:Right.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Well, maybe not. So they'd be curious to see. Also Apple, Apple News, which I've been using Apple News. I I enjoy the Apple News app.
Stephen Robles:Apple's gonna be selling Apple News ads directly, for the first time. This is a scoop from Axios, which I think is interesting just Apple being more involved in the ad delivery on its apps. And, honestly, that is the one kinda negative part about Apple News is sometimes the ads are a little, like, woah, that's a lot of ads, or it's kind of, breaks I don't know. It just doesn't feel as integrated, and so Apple actually directly, distributing ads or buying ads for Apple News. It's interesting.
Stephen Robles:I'm curious how it's gonna affect the experience, but also, yeah, they gotta get more in the ad business.
Jason Aten:I mean, to be clear, the problem with the ads in Apple News is that you're reading an article, and all of a sudden, there's a giant ad for toe fungus cream. Like, that is the problem with the ads. Well, I'm saying it isn't a problem with the number of ads. It's a problem with the quality of the ads. They're so bad.
Jason Aten:They are the worst garbage ads anywhere. Like, they just really are. It's like, it's actually embarrassing when I think about how do the people who run apple news walk out in public in, in like their, if their friends know what they do, like I'm listen, it's apple. They do everything so well. They over engineer everything.
Jason Aten:And then the, I mean, I'm not even, I'm not even it's, like, not even hyperbole to say that the ads are for toe fungus. Like, it's just so incredibly bad. All of the ads, I it's, like, it's stupid. I don't even understand.
Stephen Robles:You know, speaking about ads, though, the Apple Intelligence ads, you have said before and we talked about this podcast, like, they're not good ads. The ads that Apple is making for Apple Intelligence specifically, and I think I'm gonna include this video in the show notes. This is a CNET video, but she oh, Bridget Carey. She's talking about Apple Intel did you see this video? No.
Stephen Robles:You should watch it.
Jason Aten:She Oh, I did hear that headline though.
Stephen Robles:She eviscerates the Apple Intelligence ads, basically saying, like, Apple Intelligence thinks you're like, Apple thinks you're an idiot, and that's why it's like, that's what these ads are saying and why you need Apple Intelligence. And she, like, goes hard in the paint. That's a sports reference. I just know the saying. I I think it's related to basketball.
Stephen Robles:She Yes. She she goes hard in the paint. I just just watch the first, like, minute of this video. I mean, she's not wrong either. Like, she's not wrong.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm. Basically saying, like, you know, she goes through and she talks about the different ads which are, like, oh, this dude, like, who didn't do the work, and he, like, summarizes this report or whatever or, like, this know nothing, like like, she's she hammers them, and it's
Jason Aten:Well, we talked about the one with the moron dad
Stephen Robles:for
Jason Aten:the fish Right. Funeral.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Yeah. In that sense, I have to agree.
Stephen Robles:Well, I'll include that link as well. Alright. We need to do our top five gift guide. Yep. Now I do wanna say you threw this in here, and I and I do wanna hear, how your experience has been.
Stephen Robles:Apple Vision Pro, the ultra widescreen mode. I was gonna put the beta on my Vision Pro to try this out, which is in in 2.2. You'll be able to do the ultra widescreen Mac and high definition Macs, But then I found out you have to have your Mac on macOS Sequoia dev beta as well. And then I was, like, nah. With my experience with downgrading, I was, like, no.
Stephen Robles:Thank you. But you did it because you have used computers everywhere.
Jason Aten:I will also say well, so I did it on this MacBook Pro M4, which is a review unit.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:By the way, like, the dev betas are fine. Like, on the Mac, I have not had a single problem. This in fact, Casa in fact, I keep forgetting that I'm running the dev betas because, like, I just it's fine. I mean Okay. I don't worry about battery.
Jason Aten:It's not it's not like your phone where it's like, My battery should last me 12 hours hours and last me 2 and a half. I don't what's could possibly be wrong? But I'm just wanted to say, Mark Gurman a week or so ago said that this is, like, the killer feature for a vision pro. By the way, I don't think anyone should buy a vision pro just for this. Like, that's stupid because you could buy the 2 studio displays and effectively have the same real estate, like whatever.
Stephen Robles:And it's cheaper. It'd be cheaper
Jason Aten:by a little bit. Yes. $300 cheaper. But I do think one, it makes a case that you should just be able to virtualize Mac OS inside the vision pro period. Like it's got an M2 in it.
Jason Aten:It can handle it just fine. There's absolutely no reason for that to not be a thing. And that would be like the killer reason to buy if you could wear that on your face and actually run Mac OS natively. But I discovered yesterday that this really is the killer use case for taking the vision pro because I spend a lot of time driving people to soccer practice. And and one of our daughters, her soccer practice is about an hour and a half away.
Jason Aten:And so I like to try to get work done because I'm obviously not gonna, like, leave, and it's an hour and a half practice. Right. And when I got there yesterday, I put the vision pro on, and I turned it on an environment and I worked on my laptop with the ultra wide display, and it was glorious, Steven. Now You actually should do this. It is it is one of those things that is so much better than you think it's going to be.
Jason Aten:Really? Yeah. It's
Stephen Robles:yeah. Now this from the guy who would refuse to wear it on a plane.
Jason Aten:I know.
Stephen Robles:You're here at a soccer practice.
Jason Aten:I knew well, I was in my car in the back in, like, the corner of the parking lot.
Stephen Robles:Like, I wasn't just sitting out. To cover all the windows?
Jason Aten:No. I won't see it. Like, it gets dark at 5 o'clock. Like no one can see me, but it's like, and the screen is off on your computer. So no one even can like walk by and see that light or whatever.
Jason Aten:It's great.
Stephen Robles:Come by and knocked on the, on the window.
Jason Aten:Nobody knocked on the window. It's it's fine. But I mean, yeah, I guess if you walked by the car, it would seem kind of weird. Why is that guy sitting in the Tesla over there in the corner with that?
Stephen Robles:You look futuristic. You're just kinda jacked in and you see the little glowy things on the front.
Jason Aten:You don't care. Yeah. And I did know I was gonna take some heat over the not wearing it on a plane thing, but this was even better because, like, the problem is, like, when you're just sitting in your car
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:It's hard to, like, focus and there's a lot going on or whatever, but putting that VisionPRO on and having a real screen, like
Stephen Robles:Well, it's also, like, if you wanna open a laptop on your lap in the car and you're in the driver's seat,
Jason Aten:you know Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard.
Jason Aten:There's a lot of space. And you're gonna be,
Stephen Robles:like, tilt it off to the side. Sometimes I'll just move to the passenger seat so I could do it, but, alright. I'll have to try.
Jason Aten:That was pretty good.
Stephen Robles:I'll have to try. Alright. We're gonna do a holiday gift guide. We're gonna do 5 items. We're gonna go back and forth, Share these are recommendations, that you should get either yourself or your family and friends.
Stephen Robles:So this is our personal tech segment. Jason, you wanna start us off?
Jason Aten:Yeah. So I was pitching this idea as we should just do, like, a tech gift guide since, you know, by the time I mean, we should figure out when we're recording next week since it's Thanksgiving. But by the time people listen to our next episode, it will be, you know, time for buying holiday things. Alright. So my first item is going to be not that exciting.
Jason Aten:No. My first item is AirPods 4, hands down. I think absolutely the best AirPods that Apple has ever made for most people. Right? I still the the AirPods Pro version 2 USB dot 2, whatever version it does.
Jason Aten:That's great. But I absolutely AirPods 4, I prefer the ones with the noise cancellation, but even the ones without are excellent. Excellent. Excellent. So that's my first recommendation.
Jason Aten:If you have and the at this price, like, they're just kind of a no brainer. I guarantee they're gonna be on sale. You'll probably be able to get the noise canceling ones for, like, 129 or something on Black Friday. I'm just being here, like, time show, Target, and a bunch of places are gonna have them on sale.
Stephen Robles:This is gonna be if if this might be the only thing we we double up on, but this is
Jason Aten:Oh, see, I was thinking we should have shared our list to make sure that they are, like, different.
Stephen Robles:We probably should have done. This is the first time we're ever doing it. It's okay. Yeah. Anyway, it's good.
Jason Aten:These things.
Stephen Robles:This is literally gonna be my number one pick, but, anyway
Jason Aten:Is that right?
Stephen Robles:So I'm gonna do one different. So that was Jason. This this one's mine. I don't think you're gonna have this one. This is I went from, like, cheapest to most expensive.
Stephen Robles:This is a little cable management thing from Anker, and it's $10 right now. It's on sale. It's usually $13, but it's $10 right now. But I love this thing. I have this on my nightstand, and what it is is a little it has a it's a little pad, and it's got 5 spots, and it comes with these little rectangular bricks where you can slide a cable in the brick, and then these little bricks magnetically attach to the anchor pad.
Stephen Robles:And so, basically, it's cable management. So you can put this little brick on the end of a cable, so this way it doesn't fall behind your nightstand or fall behind your desk anymore, and then the little, magnet thing, you just right there. And it the cables are right there and they're easy to come off because it's a magnet, you charge your device, put it right back on with the magnet thing. It's $10. It's a great gift.
Stephen Robles:Everybody's got cables they have to deal with. I recommend this. What's
Jason Aten:your Alright. My next one is the Crucial X10 Pro s s external SSD.
Stephen Robles:Alright.
Jason Aten:These things are compared to, like, the Samsung or SanDisk or whatever, these are ridiculously inexpensive, extremely small.
Stephen Robles:Like That is small.
Jason Aten:Really, really, really small, very fast. Like, I think they're, like, 25 100 megabits per second or whatever. Like, very, very, very, very, very fast. You can get a 2 terabyte one right now for, like, $150 at at Best Buy or crucial.com.
Stephen Robles:That's crazy.
Jason Aten:Personally, I think that they're that they're the best, external SSD. I know a lot of people using, like, either, digital s you know, DSLRs or mirrorless cameras or Blackmagics are using all the, like, the t five and the t seven. Whoops. And those are great. These are, like, 40% cheaper and faster.
Stephen Robles:That's wild. And the transfer speed is still fast?
Jason Aten:Oh, yeah. They're they're wick yep. Exactly.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna put links to all this in the show notes, by the way. And do you have affiliate links? Do you have an affiliate account?
Jason Aten:No. I don't.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Well, I'm gonna put I'm
Jason Aten:not allowed to have affiliate links because me personally, because otherwise, I would just be, like, populating my articles with all kinds of affiliate stuff.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Okay. Well, I'll put links in there. They'll likely be affiliates whether they're
Jason Aten:You that's totally fine.
Stephen Robles:So I'll put links to everything. Alright. My number 4 pick is a car charger. Listen, everybody's got a charger phone. I got a lot of charging related things here because I'm all about it.
Stephen Robles:But this is a MagSafe car charger from ESR. It's G2, so it'll charge at 15 watts. It's $20 for $22 right now on sale. There's a lot of Black Friday sales right now. And, I use this is the one I use.
Stephen Robles:It, you know, goes on your air conditioning vent. It's got a little stabilizer, which I really like. A lot of these car chargers don't have, like, the bottom stabilizer to actually hold it firmly on the thing and not put all the weight on the air conditioner vent. So this is the one from ESR. It's great.
Stephen Robles:I recommend 20 something buck.
Jason Aten:Nice. My next one is the, amber travel mug.
Stephen Robles:Oh. I sent
Jason Aten:you a link. It's, like, $50 off right now. Yeah. Yeah. It is the and it you I think you could get it with find my
Stephen Robles:and I
Jason Aten:think it has find my in it. This is the travel version. So it's the one that you meant to, like, take with you. It has a lid and everything like that. And I personally, I have the desk, you know, the little, like the little one that you have on your desk and stuff.
Jason Aten:I thought this was the stupidest thing ever until I started using 1, and it's just amazing. They are so it's so useful.
Stephen Robles:It's great. My wife has one of those. I got this for my wife for Christmas, I think, 2 years ago, and she loves it. She uses it all the time every time she goes out of the house. So, yeah, highly recommend.
Stephen Robles:My talking about find my my segue, get somebody an AirTag. These are also on sale. You can get one for $20.20 for an AirTag on Amazon right now, which is amazing, but also don't just get someone an AirTag. Listen. Get them an AirTag and get them a keychain.
Stephen Robles:You don't have to buy Apple's keychain, because it's too expensive. Get I've done the cheap ones from Amazon all the time. I don't know where the other, like, recommended products are, but you can get, like, 4 keychains for $10 that fit an AirTag, little silicone things with a little key ring. Get them the whole deal, and then people don't have to lose their keys. Get somebody an AirTag.
Jason Aten:AirTags? That's a good that's a good option. You're right. I agree. Okay.
Jason Aten:My next one is my 3 in 1, which is not really a 3 in 1, but I am definitely gonna recommend this nomad. Good 65 watt power adapter with the Apple watch charger on the top of it because of the size. It is so small. It's super easy to throw in a bag and you can just use this as your main portable charger, right? It's 65 Watts.
Jason Aten:If you have a Mac book air or even if you have a Mac book pro like it, you can be fine using this most of the time and you can, plug, plug 2 USB CS into it, plus charge your apple watch, especially if you're going somewhere over the holidays. This is perfect. Like, yeah, we're gonna go stay somewhere, but we just wanna make sure we can charge everything. I actually think it, I thought it was a gimmick when I first got it, but it's actually, it's actually pretty great. They do make a 65 watt version that doesn't have the apple watch charging and it's only $50.
Jason Aten:And I think that that's actually a steal too, because it's, it's super small. And the thing that's nice about having a 65 watt charger like this that's really small is, like, it's super easy to take places and you still you still get 2 USB c ports. So
Stephen Robles:That's fine. So I actually had a bonus pick that I was gonna do at the end, but I'll put it now. Their slim charger, which is also Yeah.
Jason Aten:I know you love those. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Love this thing. It is just so tiny and it's still 65 watts, GaN charger, 2 USB C ports on the bottom. Highly recommend that as well. So I
Jason Aten:would recommend anything from Nomad, to be honest. I love their stuff, so Fair.
Stephen Robles:That's fair. Alright. My next one, this is a lot a lot of charging related things, I'm sorry, but also, if you're gonna get somebody a battery pack, this one's on a pretty good sale. This is the Anker Maggo 10000 milliamp hour G2 15 watt battery pack, so it charges at 15 watts wirelessly. I've done so many videos on batteries, if you watch my YouTube channel, and many that say their G2 don't charge at 15 watts.
Stephen Robles:They charge at 7 and a half because power, whatever. This one actually charges at 15 watts. It's great capacity. It's on sale now for $50 instead of the normal 75, and it is ultra slim. Like, this is the thinnest 10000 milliamp hour battery.
Stephen Robles:Listen, everybody has to charge their phone, and even if you just have one of these laying around, like, when people come visit for the holidays, and they're like, oh, do you have a charger? If they have an iPhone 12 or newer, and you can just hand this to them, and you're like, here, just take this on the back of your phone and it'll charge. Blows people's minds, and also just nice a nice experience. Be like, you don't have to be tethered to the wall like an animal. Here, take this battery, charge your stuff.
Stephen Robles:So I recommend batteries. Alright. What's your your last one?
Jason Aten:My last one, this might be a little bit unconventional, but I'm going to recommend the Walmart special MacBook air 13 inch M1. It's always $649, but for real, if you have someone in your family who needs just a reliable laptop that they can use for a while, that's going to just, you know, work without a problem. It'll run apple intelligence. They don't let you upgrade basically anything. You get to pick the color and that's it.
Jason Aten:So it's only got 8 gigs of memory and 256. But like, if you have a kid who has is being forced to use a Chromebook at school and you're just tired of it, or you have somebody who's like, you know, maybe you have a college student in the family that just needs something better like
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:This for $650. I mean, these things were of good value at $1,000 and at $650, I I could still recommend the m one MacBook Air, honestly to my wife uses one of these. I think she has a I don't really know. I think she has 16 gigs of memory and, like, a 1 terabyte hard drive. So she's gonna be using it forever, basically.
Jason Aten:But that says a lot. She's been using it since 2020 and it's 2024, almost 2020 5, and she has never once said, I think it'd be nice to upgrade my laptop. It'll just keep working forever.
Stephen Robles:So That's wild. Hey. Listen. That was a good deal. I mean, and you the fact that you can get it in colors, including a gold
Jason Aten:Yeah. More than you
Stephen Robles:could say for, like yeah. No. Anyway, no. No. It's a great that's a great pick.
Stephen Robles:Alright. And, my last pick, Apple Vision Pro. No. Just kidding.
Jason Aten:Oh my gosh. No. But but the Belkin heads chap, if you know someone who has a Vision Pro, is absolutely an essential.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. No. I my number one pick, you literally stole it on the first one. I was gonna say AirPods 4, because I was trying to go up in price, and it was the most expensive thing I was recommending. I know.
Stephen Robles:But AirPods 4, I mean, I love them. And even I have AirPods Pro 2 and still use these a lot. So this would be obviously a great Christmas gift. Get it engraved. You know, it's fun to get.
Stephen Robles:It's hard enough for getting it for a gift like what someone would want engraved. Usually initials Mhmm. Would be fun. You know, if you know their initials, like, three initials look cool on an AirPods case, but anyway. That's our gift guide.
Stephen Robles:Look at that. Gift guide 2024.
Jason Aten:That is the most organized list thing we've ever done so far.
Stephen Robles:That was good. That was good. Alright. So we're gonna go record an episode. I wanna talk about the Jaguar rebrand and social media and the death of it all.
Stephen Robles:But we're gonna go do that in a bunch of episodes. So how you listen to it is if you could support the show in Apple Podcast or directly with Memberful. And here's the deal, because I've had multiple people now reach out. If you support the show directly in Apple Podcasts, we love you, thank you so much for doing it. Apple, not me, Apple takes the chapters out of the subscriber audio, so if you support the show, which you would think you get a better experience that way, you don't get the chapters or chapter artwork.
Stephen Robles:There's nothing I can do about it. I've literally sent direct emails to Apple. I'm so sorry. So if you have signed up that way but you want the chapters, direct message me in the community or shoot me a DM on social media, and, I've been basically just giving them, like, a year of the member full membership after since I already did the Apple Podcast. So just reach out.
Stephen Robles:But if you want all the chapters, the best experience, have one feed where you get ad free and our bonus episodes, plus you can listen to the whole back catalog of bonus episodes. Support us at primarytech.fm, click bonus episodes, and you can support us there or directly on Apple Podcasts. We're gonna go record that bonus episode, so we hope to see you there. Keep leaving us 5 star reviews in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You could do that.
Stephen Robles:We're a 5 star show in both places now.
Jason Aten:The Apple Podcast has a fatal flaw in their member thing.
Stephen Robles:It's so bad.
Jason Aten:Know why. I I wanna know why the company that has served as the most benevolent of syndicated dictators has decided that this is the time to bring down the hammer and not make it. Like, you offer these yeah. I'm gonna write about it. I got a form from Thoughts here.
Stephen Robles:Please stop stripping my chapters out of the subscriber audio. Like, it's a worse experience. Some like, you make the sign up process super easy. There's a higher conversion rate in Apple Podcasts because it's right there.
Jason Aten:It's right there.
Stephen Robles:But if people do it and they had chapters before, and now they're paying for it and they don't have chapters, That really sucks.
Jason Aten:It also seems like a weird thing to add code to something to make the like, you could've just left it alone.
Stephen Robles:Well, and here's the thing. Like, the Apple Pod like, the thing that takes me the longest of putting the show together is I have to upload that ad free m p 3 to Apple Podcasts directly first before I publish the RSS. Otherwise, someone might get might be paying for the subscriber version and get the ads first before that other. And that subscriber m p 3, they take forever to process. It can take up to an hour for me to upload that m p 3 and for it to finally be ready to actually publish.
Stephen Robles:And it's like, whatever you're doing during that hour
Jason Aten:If it's what are you doing different?
Stephen Robles:Stop. All you're doing is stripping out my chapters and chapter art. Stop processing it. When they first launched, it used to just be WAV. You can only upload an uncompressed WAV or FLAC file.
Stephen Robles:So they finally added m p threes, and I was, like, okay, great. M p threes are what supports the chapters, because you can't do chapters in WAV and FLAC. I was like, great, m p 3. I literally give them the m p 3 file, formatted just fine, and they literally strip my chapters out for no reason, and then deliver it to subscribers. And it's like
Jason Aten:It's like they built it entirely well, they did. They built an entirely different system that doesn't know that there's a different way of doing it that it even exists, and they make the whole incredible experience so much. I don't it's like Yeah. Here's every time I think about, like, this is not our bonus content, but we're whatever we went there. So, but every time I think about something like this, where it's like, it takes an hour to process and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jason Aten:I just think about YouTube. When you upload, you can upload a big old giant 4 ks YouTube thing and it can be hours long. And it was, as soon as it gets there behind the scenes, YouTube starts doing all of this processing so that it will work on your phone and it'll work on your TV and it'll work on your whatever. And it does all that in the background. And I know that it can sometimes take a little bit of time for YouTube to publish something,
Stephen Robles:but
Jason Aten:it's like, it's way faster. And And YouTube has figured out something that none of these other services have. I just it's bananas.
Stephen Robles:I just I'm gonna if you're alright, I'm gonna put this at the, like, like, a motts post credit. Yeah. I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna put it, like, like, 20 seconds after the episode ends just so everyone can know who's to if you're still listening, you're the real ones, first of all.
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:And also, Apple. Just don't do that. Stop taking my chapters out.
Creators and Guests
