TikTok: There and Back Again, iOS 18.3 Apple Intelligence by Default, Galaxy S25 Edge
Download MP3Every time I see y'all, I got the silk shirts on, jewelry, you know, looking real Miami. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Big week. TikTok was banned for 16 hours, and then it came back. Lots of news between them and what Trump is doing with executive orders, plus iOS 18 dot 3 will be coming out soon.
Stephen Robles:I put the release candidate on my phone because Visual Intelligence got a big upgrade, but Apple Intelligence is going to be hoisted on a bunch of people. Samsung unpacked with their Galaxy s 25, Netflix is raising prices again, and more. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh, and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles. And joining me though is my friend Jason Aitin, who is literally freezing right now.
Stephen Robles:Jason, what was the temperature yesterday as we're recording?
Jason Aten:Well, I mean, I'm well, I sound really bad, but I'm not freezing right now. It was it was super freezing. I mean, it's 20 it's, like, 19 to 20 degrees today, but it that is 35 degrees warmer than it was yesterday. And people don't think about, like so it was, like, negative 15 or so yesterday. And people think the difference between, you know, 20 degrees Fahrenheit versus negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jason Aten:They're both cold. Right? But that is the difference between 45 degrees and 80 degrees. Think about that for a minute. Like, that that temperature difference is, like, pretty substantial and that's the difference between yesterday.
Jason Aten:It was so cold in here. I couldn't work in my office yesterday because the floor is not insulated well enough that it was like I was sitting on a ice rink.
Stephen Robles:Oh my. That is crazy. I have not experienced those temperatures in a while. I'm down in Miami, which is why I'm in a different recording environment. It was it was cold here too, but, like, 50.
Stephen Robles:Not not in the negatives. Now I think there's a 0% chance you're going to get the quote, but I had to pull a quote about Miami because that's where I am right now. And, do you have any idea where that came from?
Jason Aten:I have no idea where it came from because I'm almost a 100% sure that it did not come from a movie I've ever seen.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right. But I
Jason Aten:if I had to, like, guess, it feels like it's gotta be something like Fast and the Furious ish or something like that. Like, I don't know. I have no idea.
Stephen Robles:Jason, I don't know how you did that. That quote is from 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Jason Aten:Definitely a movie I've never seen, just to be honest. That
Stephen Robles:that is amazing. I was also hoping you were gonna say Fast and Furious. That wow. There there you go. You did it.
Stephen Robles:I'm in Miami, by the way, because I got a special invite to tour their new Apple Store here in Miami World Center. And so I have a video up on my channel. And I'm going to talk about it in the bonus episode because there's like behind the scenes that I want to talk about. And you know, I don't know how many behind the scenes is like okay to talk about. So anyway, there's a video up on my channel.
Stephen Robles:I got to tour it. It's a beautiful new store. There's literally a garden on the roof, which is wild. And I learned a new word. Jason, tell me if you ever heard the word biophilic.
Stephen Robles:Have you ever heard that word?
Jason Aten:No. No. I mean, I heard you say it on the video, and that's it. I've never heard it before.
Stephen Robles:I've never heard that word before. Biophilic with p h I l I c, apparently. But it means like architecture that's designed with the, like, harmony with environment and buildings and stuff. So, yeah, biophilic. It's a biophilic building.
Stephen Robles:So there you go. That's gonna be our new tagline, a biophilic podcast.
Jason Aten:That is not that is not a homophone. Is that what the is that when you say, like, a word that sounds like what it means? That I don't even know what that word sounds like.
Stephen Robles:You know, you got
Jason Aten:it sounds like it's like probiotic. It's like Forever. The thing you would eat to to try to ward off cancer or something.
Stephen Robles:This sounds like probiotic. You got the homonyms, the hit, the hot never mind. Alright. Anyway, we got 1 5 star review shout out, Bluey h k from the UK. Battery percentage on points to Jason.
Stephen Robles:Blue dots on, though, point to me. Pencil facing down, which I don't know if if BlueHK
Jason Aten:only one that matters.
Stephen Robles:I I think that means your your orientation. But you can hold an iPad in various orientations. I'm just saying. So anyway, we have to talk about TikTok. It's been a wild roller coaster of a week for a variety of reasons, but last Saturday, it was Saturday night, the TikTok ban was supposed to go into effect Sunday, January 19th, And come Saturday night, it was like 10:30.
Stephen Robles:I was literally watching, TikToks with my family because I save funny ones to, to show the family. And pretty soon one time I went to open it and Saturday night, boom, says, sorry. TikTok isn't available right now. And this message popped up on everyone's devices here in the US if they tried to open TikTok Saturday evening. Now it was interesting.
Stephen Robles:Part of this message was, we are fortunate that president Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned. Now an important point, I think, with this message. The ban was supposed to go in the 19th. Apple and Google removed it from their app stores, which it is still not there.
Stephen Robles:It the you can't download TikTok if you've never downloaded it before. Or if you upgrade your iPhone, you can't download TikTok right now. It's not in the Apple Store, App Store or Google Play Store. But this part was clearly done by TikTok themselves. I mean, is that fair to say like this, like shutting down the app for those in the US Saturday night.
Stephen Robles:That was not some US government imposition. That was TikTok basically shutting it down.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And they were doing it just to make people mad. Literally, the only reason for them to do it at that point because the law had not gone into effect, and nobody had shut off any of their services at that point.
Stephen Robles:Right. And we and we had talked about the possibility of, well, once it goes into effect, it might still be that the app functions. It just might be like an unupdated app like on an old iPad or iPhone. You know, it just would slowly stop working over time. That wasn't the case.
Stephen Robles:TikTok preemptively, which they said we talked about last week, they were going to take it down if the ban wasn't, delayed by the Supreme Court. So then Sunday, like 16 hours later, I believe, Sunday afternoon, everyone says TikTok is back. And there's a message here. Thanks for your patience. As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the US.
Stephen Robles:You continue to create, share and discover all the things you love on TikTok. But 2 things are interesting here. Number 1, this happened on Sunday, January 19th. Trump was not president yet. He got inaugurated January 20th.
Stephen Robles:So TikTok saying President Trump did something, even though he's not president yet. That is a very curious message to see on TikTok. And come Monday, once Trump was inaugurated, he did sign, I think the total was 18,000 executive orders. That's not the actual number, but he signed a lot of executive
Jason Aten:to that.
Stephen Robles:It's close to that. But one of the things that he signed was Trump, one of his executive orders was delaying the enforcement of the ban, which this the language gets really dicey when you see some of these headlines or even hearing how Trump might talk about this. He did not reverse the ban or change the law. The executive order delayed enforcement of the ban for 75 days, and so there's 75 days where this issue will be revisited or it could be revisited earlier, and we'll have to see what may or may not change then. But right now, TikTok, if you had it on your phone, you can use it like normal.
Stephen Robles:CapCut, which took longer to come back, you can use CapCut again. But and that was that was interesting. I had a lot of people reach out not realizing cap cut was TikTok like that cap cut was made by TikTok is owned by the same company. And people were like, I had projects I was editing. I had like, how do I get these back?
Stephen Robles:And I'm like, I'm sorry. You can't. You just have to wait, I guess, to see what happens. But there's that. And I don't wanna hear I wanna hear your your thoughts in a second because this is just wild.
Stephen Robles:Apple has an article on their website, a support article talking about the availability of TikTok and apps by ByteDance, which also included Marvel Snap. Apparently, I had no idea. So that was all that's Yeah.
Jason Aten:They were the publisher. Yeah. One of their companies was the publisher of Marvel.
Stephen Robles:Right. Exactly. So but notably, again, even now we're almost a week later, Apple is not going to reinstate these apps into the App Store. So you're not gonna be able to download them. And again, they make it clear, like in this article, and I'll put all the links to these in the show notes.
Stephen Robles:It's that it is unknown what will happen law wise, what will change or go backwards or whatever. So Apple's just like we're not putting them in the App Store until like we find out what's going on. So that's all that happened. I find this to be such a bizarre timeline. Those messages that the TikTok app showed users.
Stephen Robles:I mean, just so strange. Obviously, Trump must have spoken to ByteDance, or the CEO or something. I don't know, Jason. Tell tell me, what are you thinking?
Jason Aten:Well, I mean, the CEO of TikTok was at the inauguration the next day, I guess. So maybe they were making plans, and they just sort of had this come this is this is weird. I I just wanna say we were right that it was going to the ban was gonna stay into effect. That was that was we were right about that. Listen.
Jason Aten:This whole thing is just a circus, but the anyone who's surprised that the Supreme Court upheld the law that congress passed is just not paying close enough attention because, I mean, you can disagree and and at least half of the people in this country disagree with most of the things that the Supreme Court does one way or the other. Right? That's fair. You can disagree with them. They do actually take their job pretty seriously and they do not care about who's coming to the inauguration.
Jason Aten:Like, so this kind of thing, like, it's that was that was the least surprising part of the whole thing is that the Supreme Court upheld the the law. Trump's executive order, weird. It's it's you know, in the law, there is a provision that if a sale is in progress, that the president can delay this for 90 days, but that is not what president Trump triggered. President Trump just signed an executive order telling the justice department, don't enforce the law against any of the entities. By the way, those entities are Apple, Google, Oracle, Acme, I think is the CDN.
Jason Aten:Like, that's who we're talking about here. We're not it's not TikTok or ByteDance. Like, that's not they're not they're not subject to any penalties because they just exist, and it's the other organization you know, other companies that could be penalized under this. But you notice, importantly, Oracle clearly is serving up TikTok again. Right?
Jason Aten:So they're they're like, cool. We'll just take Trump's word for it. Who's not? Apple and Google, they're not playing games. They're not like your magic words with a pen make me feel better about this whole situation?
Jason Aten:They're like, no. There's a law, and the fines are huge for them if they were to to not comply with it. And the only way to get around this at some point is to change this law. And I don't think even as favorable as the house of representatives is going to be to Trump that they're gonna overturn this law because they, for real, meant it when they said this should this is a national security threat. And I don't even think so what's gonna be the most interesting, not that this this is not a politics podcast, but for one second, just entertain to yourself.
Jason Aten:It's gonna be really interesting to watch. Does Trump really wanna push this if the republicans in the house of representatives and in the senate are not going to be behind him? Like, that could be a really interesting dynamic that we've really never seen in a in a Trump presidency before.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And because the speaker of the house was like, this is a law. You can't just wave away a wall old law just by, like, magic words or whatever.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:So the the flip side of that is if Trump just decides they're not going to enforce this law, can anyone do anything about that? Right? Because theoretically, congress would be the only people who could say, we passed a law. You have to enforce it. And just as I said that congress doesn't seem inclined that they would wanna change their mind about it, I that I don't know that that extends to the point where they would sue the executive branch to enforce it.
Jason Aten:So my point is, it's still banned, and we have no idea what's gonna happen, Steven. I downloaded TikTok to my phone on Saturday just so that I could see all the messages because people were posting about them and it was so ridiculous. And and I was actually so somewhat glad that I did only because I my high school age daughter was telling me about all day on on Friday was, like, people are just freaking out. Like, this is gonna get banned. What's what's gonna happen?
Jason Aten:After the Supreme Court declined to overturn the thing, and she's like, people are going crazy about this. And my kids don't even have TikTok, at least that I know of. But, several of her friends deleted TikTok when when on Saturday when it went dark, and then they couldn't get it back and they're even more angry.
Stephen Robles:Well and yeah. I mean, when someone if someone and upgrade your phone, upgrade your iPad if you have it installed there, like, you can't get it either. This is so bizarre. I've heard and seen reports of, like, maybe TikTok will sell a percentage ownership to a US company or person. I've seen the name Elon Musk turn around.
Stephen Robles:I don't know the viability or possibility of that. Is that even a thing that could happen? I feel like correct me if I'm wrong, but when it comes to, like, anti competitive behavior, the DOJ here in the States already has an eye on Meta and Google wanting to break up Google. They've already sued Apple. That case is pending.
Stephen Robles:And so, I mean, I can't imagine they would allow TikTok, this massive social media network to be sold even in part to another social media network owner. Does that is that even possible? Am I gonna say anything possible?
Jason Aten:I don't is anything possible? I the law does not say that the US gover if the US government owns 50%, then it's cool. That's not what the law says. The law says that it has to be divested of it cannot be owned by a Chinese company. So, like, what does that really mean?
Jason Aten:I don't know. Like, if the US owns 50%, like, again, the question is who can enforce this? The people who can enforce right now, the person in charge of the people who will enforce this is the guy who's like, let's make a deal. And that is an important thing to understand is that we talked about this before. This is just gonna be very transactional.
Jason Aten:Like, what kind of a deal can we make? And I think more than the principle again, I don't say this in a good way or a bad way about president Trump. More than the principle of the thing because, remember, all of this started because he wanted to ban it, whatever, 7 years 6 years ago.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:Whatever. I think more than the principle, what he really wants is he is the deal. He enjoys the being in the position where he holds other people's fate in his hands and he gets to use that in order to make a deal. So do I think listen. I think that the most likely outcome to this the most likely outcome is that eventually TikTok just has to go away.
Jason Aten:It's not because I don't think That's the I don't think China wants to give up control. I think that's the most likely outcome. I think a second close one is that is that an American tech company will buy TikTok or that a group of investors will buy it because they seem to be coming out of the woodwork to buy TikTok. Right. Like, they seem to be everywhere.
Jason Aten:They're just random guys walking on Washington DC streets right now, like waving dollar bills at the White House. Like, I wanna buy TikTok. I wanna buy TikTok.
Stephen Robles:Ready to write a check. Yep. It is so bizarre. The last thing I'll say, last episode, you, I think, eloquently talked about the transactional nature of this administration. I can I can knock it out of my head?
Stephen Robles:And as I saw those messages on TikTok Saturday, when it was went dark, and talking about we're working with Trump, and then Sunday when it came back saying thanks, Trump, exclamation point. It just yeah. The the idea of transactional was it was strong. It was strong with this one. Yep.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, the last hilarious thing out of this was capcut. Everybody freaking out because they couldn't access capcut meta over here.
Jason Aten:Oh, my gosh.
Stephen Robles:Instagram announced did release. This is not an app you could download, but they announced edits. An Instagram app. Hilarious. They're saying it's expected March 13th, which is my birthday, by the way.
Stephen Robles:You can give me the edits after my birthday. I thank you. I got you. So so funny. After last week's conversation, literally the 2 of us last week talking about Mark Zuckerberg calling out Apple for not being innovative and not inventing anything.
Stephen Robles:Meta is over here literally command c command ving an edits app to capitalize on cap cuts being, going dark. This is just hilarious.
Jason Aten:Yeah. When you just think of Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy of resource allocation, it's literally look around at the biggest dumpster fire and figure out how quickly can we make a dumpster that's not on fire. Like, that's literally, like, his entire strategy. And but I will tell you, like, CapCut, it's killer feature. You can disagree with me if you want, but in my mind, it's killer feature is it is better than any other app, including Final Cut, Premiere, whatever, at taking a horizontal video and making it a vertical video while following the subject.
Jason Aten:It is it does that better than just about anything. And so if edits whatever Instagram's edits, the app will do that, then fine. I don't even I'm I'm I am platform agnostic. I don't really care. I just want one thing that will do that for me because Final Cut will like, there's a convoluted way you can do it, but the tracking is just not nearly as good.
Jason Aten:That is like the and it it makes sense that that TikTok would have an app that does that better than anyone because there's a lot of horizontal video out in the world, and none of it works on TikTok. Right? Like and so anyway They're
Stephen Robles:motivated to make it. And I also thought I saw Wesley Hilliard writing an Apple Insider and John Gruber linked to his article being like Apple Clips. That is a thing and used to be a thing. And it's like, Yeah, Apple Apple released that at the perfect time, but made like, like the worst app for that. Like, they they if they would have, like, made that actually a great app.
Stephen Robles:But again, like what it's not tied to an ecosystem or social media platform that they own. So maybe it's not like direct benefit, but they made a thing. I think you still download the Clips app. Did you ever play around with it?
Jason Aten:Also, did they ever talk about it once? I have never heard a person with an apple.com email address talk about the Clips app. Not one time.
Stephen Robles:I would I'm actually wondering right now. I'm going to the App Store. I'm searching for clips. I feel like one of the weirdest thing was like it was square, by default, like wanted things to be square.
Jason Aten:I have it.
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah. Here
Jason Aten:we go.
Stephen Robles:I have it here. Let's see. When was the last time it was updated? It was updated 8 months ago for stability and performance improvements. And then a a year ago, it was right there.
Stephen Robles:Apple had it that you could you could have made stuff. But anyway Wait.
Jason Aten:Can I say one more TikTok thing? We talked about opportunism and how opportunistic Mark Zuckerberg is. I should have put this in there. Did you see what I posted? I from Carrot Weather.
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah.
Jason Aten:So on on Saturday, Carrot Weather updated their app so that the little snarky message says, you're just checking the weather because TikTok is gone. And I thought that was so perfect. It was so good.
Stephen Robles:It just
Jason Aten:made me happy.
Stephen Robles:I forget his name. But yes, that developer is on point. He is Mister Carrot.
Jason Aten:He's doing a good job.
Stephen Robles:Mister Carrot. That's not his name. Mister Carrot. And so I I was not on the beta train, Jason. I was not doing the betas.
Stephen Robles:And then I saw Ios 18 dot 3 was in release candidate phase, and I'm like, that's not really a beta. I mean, that's basically the this version that comes out to everybody. So I upgraded as you do. And I While you're traveling. Literally, while I was traveling, I started the update on the train that I took from Orlando to Miami.
Stephen Robles:18 dot 3, Visual Intelligence is actually going to be what Apple advertised it to be in at Dub Dub. Basically, that you can point your visual intelligence phone at a dog, and it will tell you the breed of the dog. And you can point it at a concert poster with a date on it, and it will, like, suggest adding that date to your calendar. And I tried it. It does work.
Stephen Robles:You can, identify dogs and you can do the dates. I haven't done plants yet. I'm actually I thought about going outside to try and identify plants, but I'm in the middle of downtown Miami.
Jason Aten:If only if only you were somewhere close to a biophilic building with lots of plants that you could
Stephen Robles:Jason, genius. I'm literally gonna step outside and go go biophilic identify whatever's around the Apple Store. A bunch of trees. There's a lot of foliage. So anyway, but yeah, so Visual Intelligence is going to be better.
Stephen Robles:But some other things changed about Apple Intelligence and 18.3. One, summarize notifications, it's going to be off for news and entertainment apps because it keeps messing up the headlines. And also those summaries are gonna be in italicized text, which when I updated to 18.3, I started getting those italicized text notifications. It looks so weird on the lock screen. I did not I did not like it.
Stephen Robles:I didn't appreciate it. But it's because those summaries has been in the news and how you have stated you keep tweeting you have images literally in our Notion document of like, terrible New York Times articles. It's not not doing well. It's not summarizing it. But also, finally, in 18.3, you're not gonna be able to you'll have to opt out of Apple Intelligence if you want.
Stephen Robles:It's gonna be on by default, which is the first time because ever since Apple Intelligence was there, you would have to go into the settings and actually enable it. I actually had a friend call me the other day. He literally literally called me and said, what is Apple Intelligence? I don't know what it is. And I'm afraid to turn it on.
Stephen Robles:I, Jason, I literally went all the way back to like, listen, here's an here's what an LLM is. Here's here's Chet do this. I explained the whole thing. And I mean, I told him, you know, listen, turn it on even just for the summaries, not notification summaries, like article summaries in Safari. But, anyway, you're not gonna have to turn it on because it's gonna be on by default.
Stephen Robles:You have some strong feelings about this, Chase. Would you
Jason Aten:Yeah. I just well, as a general rule, don't think you that companies should put this sort of thing as a on by default sort of and and I heard, John Siracusa talking about, like, eventually, these are just going to be features, and I agree. And at that point, they will be just part of the operating system. There won't be, like, an extra tab for, do you wanna turn this on? Do you wanna not turn it on?
Jason Aten:But It's
Stephen Robles:still in beta too.
Jason Aten:There's, like, a beta tag
Stephen Robles:on it still.
Jason Aten:Yeah. That's the thing. They're still calling it a beta, and it's bad. Like, these features are bad. They're just not good features right now.
Jason Aten:I can't I'm trying to think of, like, in the visual intelligence thing, I think it was I heard Steven Hackett yesterday say, you know what else you could do besides pointing your phone at the dog to find out what breed it is? Just ask the guy at the other end of the leash. Listen. What kind of dog is that?
Stephen Robles:When you walk up to the tree, just ask the tree. What kind of tree are you? That's all you have to do.
Jason Aten:I think that's a slightly different use case.
Stephen Robles:But it identifies plants too. That's what I'm saying. It now identifies plants. There you go.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And there's a lot of apps that do that, and that's great. But I feel like I just think that for the most part, these things are it's they're just not quite ready for mass use. And the fact that Apple's having to turn some of them off, you know, tell for like, the example I put in the our notes is the New York Times that summarized an article that says, the morning of the inauguration, before president Trump was president Trump, it said Trump pardons 5 family members Uh-huh. Which here's the problem with that summary.
Jason Aten:That's actually not a bonkers possible headline summary. Sure. It's just that that's not what happened. President Biden had just, pardoned 5 family members. It's like Trump pardoned 5 family members, and then he was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States.
Jason Aten:It's like, I feel like there's something wrong with that summary. I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Although my favorite summary was when Sam Altman told me that he was proud of me or whatever. It says something like it's like, that's not what happened. No.
Stephen Robles:No. No. I have to I have to show this one on screen because these are x notifications. It says Ben Thompson reposted about Stargate. Sam Altman complimented you.
Stephen Robles:How did it even get that? How did it even
Jason Aten:Because Sam Altman okay. So this was Sam Altman's reply to Elon Musk about Stargate because Elon Musk was like, they don't actually have the money or something like that. And and we can talk about that later if we get to it. Sam Altman responded basically saying, you know, you are one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time to Elon Musk in the chain. But because the word says you, Apple's notification summary is like, well, clearly, they're talking
Stephen Robles:about
Jason Aten:it's like, is new a proper noun? It's like, complimented you, not me personally. Like, you is the name. That's my daughter, our oldest daughter, when she was a kid, like, she was 2 years old, she thought her name was you. If you asked her, what is your name?
Jason Aten:She'd say, you. And we could not figure out what is wrong with you. And then we realized it's because all we ever say to her is, I love you. You are so cute. Do you want this?
Jason Aten:And so she thought her name was you. And apparently, Apple Intelligence has the mind of a 2 year old.
Stephen Robles:And then you said, you, go to your room. Yeah. You. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:That's, those summaries are amazing. Anyway, I I guess it's good that they stopped the news and entertainment summaries. I well, anyway, I don't know. We'll see. Visual Tellus shouldn't have shipped the new they just shouldn't have shipped those the
Jason Aten:the notification summaries yet.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. They shouldn't have done that.
Jason Aten:And I'm actually the problem is it is not clear. Like, some of the replies that I got were from people saying, this will get better. It's fine. Whatever. I don't know that that's true, and I don't think that the people who know a lot more about LLMs are sure that it's actually gonna get better.
Jason Aten:Like, it's just a function of the way that they work. Right. It's not clear. Like, I wonder if someone at Apple right now is trying to find a way to hard code some parameters that'll say, like, never show a summary that says, you know, president something something. Like, you
Stephen Robles:know what
Jason Aten:I mean? Like, there's gotta be because you could just you can move markets and cause national security problems.
Stephen Robles:Well, I wonder too if one of the issues being that Apple grouping summaries and then summarizing a grouping of summaries like that's or it groups notifications, and then it's summarizing the groups. Like that's an issue. I imagine if it just summarized individual notifications, you will get less confusing wording. But then, also, what is the point? Because notifications can't be that long anyway.
Stephen Robles:They're they're only
Jason Aten:1 issue. A headline if it's not a summary of an article? Right? Like and you know what a fun game you can play? Seriously, listeners, this is actually genuinely a fun game to play.
Jason Aten:You pull up a news grouping of headlines that it has a notification summary and just tap on it so it shows you all of the things and swipe away, like, 2 of them and then go back and click show less, and it'll go back to a summary, and it'll be a different summary.
Stephen Robles:Oh. You
Jason Aten:can just read different new different notification summaries as you change the group. If you if you delete something, then that takes it out of it, and it's actually kind of a fun game you can play.
Stephen Robles:Jason says he doesn't have time to watch half the things I say to watch, but he's over here playing around dismissing individual notifications.
Jason Aten:It's for the work, man. I gotta do this for my job.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. You do. Yeah. It's for your job. Okay.
Stephen Robles:I actually have gotta try that, though. That's kind of interesting. So, anyway, I got 18.3 on here. Also, can I just say I've talked to a lot of people people's post reply on social media like so many bugs still in iOS? Do you ever get this, Jason?
Stephen Robles:And if any of our listeners and viewers get this, I'd love to know. Where autocorrect just like doesn't it's not on. Like it just it's just off. That ever happened to you?
Jason Aten:My problem is it's it's my problem is that it's too much on. It's autocorrecting things that I did not ask for.
Stephen Robles:I'll I'll be texting someone. I'm literally in the messages app, and all of a sudden autocorrect is just not working. And so I have to, like, hyperfocus on the letters I'm tapping because if I just type like I normally type, it's gibberish because autocorrect not doing it, which a, is super troublesome because I'm like, am I really not hitting any of these letters? Like, how is autocorrect
Jason Aten:right
Stephen Robles:when it's working that good? But b, why is it not on right now? And I will go into settings and I'll go to keyboard and autocorrect is on all the settings are fine, but for some reason, it's just not working. Screen Time has been even more buggy for me and my kids. I don't know about yours, but like, you know, website access will just like, yeah, just that get whatever you want.
Stephen Robles:You know, sometimes it just disables
Jason Aten:I have a theory that the screen time team is a bunch of 17 year olds.
Stephen Robles:That the
Jason Aten:entire development team are just teenagers.
Stephen Robles:It's like the swift boot camp or whatever. They're like, listen. Why don't you guys work on some, screen time settings?
Jason Aten:It's like asking the inmates to design the security system at the jail, basically.
Stephen Robles:Jason did not just compare our kids to inmates. Just wanna clear that up. Okay. I mean, kinda did. Anyway, let's let's thank our sponsors this week, which is to say about that.
Stephen Robles:This episode brought to you by HelloFresh. And I'm excited because I actually have a picture of the meals I made of HelloFresh. I am not a cook. I I don't know why. Anyway, I don't cook.
Stephen Robles:Disclaimer. I don't cook, but HelloFresh makes it possible. Listen. With HelloFresh, you get farm fresh, pre portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip the trip to the grocery store.
Stephen Robles:Jason it's so cold with Jason that he can't even go to the grocery store without literally freezing to death. He has a oh, you know, the temperature of a Tom Tom? This is a Star Wars joke. No. It's lukewarm.
Stephen Robles:No. Anyway, listen. You can count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun, and affordable. I think I messed up that joke. I'm just I'm bracing myself for the 1,000 comments.
Jason Aten:Also, that's my least favorite scene of any of the Star Wars movies, just to be clear.
Stephen Robles:It's not it's kinda gross. Anyway, but HelloFresh, not a TomTun is America's number one meal kit. Also, if you're tired of figuring out what's for dinner night after night, especially on busy weekdays, get dinner done easy thanks to HelloFresh. And it's easy to find and eat well because you have 50 wholesome, hassle free meals to choose from each week delivered to your door. I'm gonna I'm gonna get my picture of a meal here.
Stephen Robles:I cooked 2 meals so far. I have the this is a tortellini with chicken sausage, and they even gave you they gave me garlic bread, so they gave me a little bread thing. And then the garlic butter. And I followed all the directions. They have the nice little cards to let you know how to do everything.
Stephen Robles:Put in the toaster oven. The garlic bread was wonderful. Tortellini was great. I don't think I've ever made pasta in my life. And I made pasta for the first time.
Stephen Robles:And it was wonderful. And it's all thanks to HelloFresh. Did you make any HelloFresh things?
Jason Aten:We did. We had some southwestern beef. It was like a pasta. I this is gonna sound, like, not as appetizing, but it's like it was like a goulashy type thing. I don't know if
Stephen Robles:that's a good way
Jason Aten:of calling it, but it like goulash, but it tasted like a wet burrito. And the thing is, I was very, very sick. And so I no. No. I wasn't gonna I do most of the cooking in our well, that's not a fair thing to say.
Jason Aten:My wife does a lot of cooking, and she's actually good at it. She doesn't think that she's good at it. But, generally, if if we wanna make something complicated, she'll ask me to do it. I I I spent time working in restaurants and so Alright. I just anyway, she'll be like, this is your responsibility to do now.
Jason Aten:But I couldn't do that because I was sick and she she loved the fact that it was so easy to just follow the card and the recipe. And I love the fact that I couldn't taste anything that day, and yet it even tasted good. Like, it was the first thing I could actually taste that day.
Stephen Robles:It was that amazing. HelloFresh also will bring your taste back. No. That's not a promise they make. But HelloFresh, I can cook.
Stephen Robles:Anyone can cook. Ratatouille. So get up to 10 free meals and a free high protein item for life at hellofresh.com/primary10fm. The link's in the show notes. You can just click it there.
Stephen Robles:One item per box with active descript subscription free meals applied as discount on first box new subscribers only varies by plan. That's up to 10 free meals. That's up to 10 free HelloFresh meals, just go to hellofresh dotcom/primary10fm. Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this episode America's number one meal kit. I was that was able to make something I proved to my family that I can cook.
Stephen Robles:I could follow directions. You know what I mean? If you could follow directions, you can you can do it. You can do it.
Jason Aten:That's great.
Stephen Robles:Samsung Unpacked. Neither of us are there. I'm in Miami. You're in freezing in Michigan. But they they announced some things.
Stephen Robles:This one I think is just funny. I just want to throw this out there first. This is like the budget vision pro. This is Samsung's VR headset. This is Project Muhan.
Stephen Robles:And this is a Samsung's headset. I mean, this looks like the very early renders and concepts of Apple Vision Pro, like 2 years ago. I think Ian Zalbo probably made those for I forgot what it was 9 to 5 Mac or MacRumors, but this looks hilarious. There's no like videos or like reviews of it because it's not, you know, something that reviewers could use right now. But come on.
Stephen Robles:I mean, come on. I don't know. Looks funny.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I wonder where they got the inspiration. It's hard to
Stephen Robles:command c command
Jason Aten:figure it out.
Stephen Robles:Copy paste the strong, here and at meta. But Samsung also announced their entire Galaxy S 25 lineup. The Galaxy S 25 Ultra, which is their flagship phone. I watched MKBHD's video on it. And this is the Verge's article I put in the show notes.
Stephen Robles:Really similar to last year's model. There's like an upgraded ultra wide camera and some slight design changes to make corners less sharp. But even MKBHD was like this this is almost indistinguishable, which is interesting that, pretty minimal upgrades year over year. But they did announce the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. And this is Samsung's, like, hyper thin phone.
Stephen Robles:Now there were no, like, reviews on this like MKBHD did on the S25 Ultra. I think this will probably be coming soon, but super thin phone. I think this is the year, Jason, of the thin phones. I don't know. Battery's got to be half a day.
Jason Aten:I don't know why. Is that is that is that a thing? I don't know. What? I'm curious.
Jason Aten:Why?
Stephen Robles:I mean, it looks cool. It looks cool that it's that thin. Like, sure. But the battery life, man, I don't I don't know. I do want but this also, I mean, if Samsung's doing this now, I feel like the rumors about an iPhone 17 Air may be a little more legitimate.
Stephen Robles:They might be happening, but I don't know. I I don't know if I would go for this. I mean, it can't be like the flagship phone for these companies because it just doesn't have the space for, like, the same camera systems and things like that. So I don't know. We'll see.
Stephen Robles:I don't
Jason Aten:know. I just don't know if it makes it's fine. Like, everyone gets all excited about the the iPhone 17 air, whatever. I just I think, like, battery, all of it. Just give me I don't want a thin device that I have to stick a MagSafe battery in the back of just to, like, go to pick up kids from soccer.
Jason Aten:It just seems like Yeah. I don't know. Is this the phone that's I got it. It's it's a phone that's meant to always be plugged in.
Stephen Robles:Oh, that's nice. They're
Jason Aten:bringing back the landline. You gotta have it plugged in all the time for the battery. It hasn't it actually doesn't have well, that's the thing. It doesn't have a battery. It's just got, like, you know, it's got a battery to keep the clock going.
Jason Aten:That's it.
Stephen Robles:It keeps it always on display with the clock. I don't know. We'll see we'll see when the reviews actually come out about it. I will say I I have my you know, I'm traveling, so I have my whole setup here. I have my Belkin 2 in 1 that I bring with me when I when I travel.
Stephen Robles:And I think the I must have, like, not had my phone on there or something was, like, preventing it from making, like, full contact with the charger. And when I woke up this morning, back of my phone was hot. I think it was hot because I think there was probably like a gap there. Tripped me out a little bit. I'm like, maybe I should plug this thing.
Stephen Robles:I don't know.
Jason Aten:Yeah. You know, I had this experience that's this is totally unrelated, but you made me think about this. I've been meaning to say this for a while now.
Stephen Robles:Are you about to make a confession?
Jason Aten:No. I got that, what what was the car mount MagSafe thing that you suggested?
Stephen Robles:Yes. I'm
Jason Aten:one of those for Christmas.
Stephen Robles:Yes.
Jason Aten:Sure. There you go. Sure. Okay. I got one of those for Christmas.
Jason Aten:And I have a I think it's either, like, a moment or something in a in a different vehicle that doesn't charge. It just clicks. Yeah. And it seems like in concept that all of these things make sense to just clip them onto the vents. Right.
Jason Aten:Right? It's in a convenient place that you can snap something to. The problem is, it occurs to me that none of those devices were designed in a place like Michigan, where in the winter, you have to blast your heat constantly in your car or else you can't drive and guess what the phone says after about 2 minutes of heating the car.
Stephen Robles:Overheat.
Jason Aten:Charging stopped until it returns to normal temperature. And I'm like, what what what what's wrong with the temperature? I'm like, oh, yeah. I'm blasting 80 degree air at the back of this thing. So, like, I'm starting to feel like maybe that wasn't the best design choice.
Jason Aten:And it must have been made by like, you know, the joke is that no one in Apple ever goes outside when it's raining or when it's cold or whatever. Right? So they don't actually design features that for anyone who doesn't live in 65 degree weather year round. I'm thinking that these car accessory people, it's the same thing.
Stephen Robles:See, in Florida, it's a feature because I have the air conditioning blowing 90% of the time, so it cools the phone down no matter what. And I will I will say, just just a side note, my car you know, I recently got a different car a few months ago, but with the heated seats, I've never had heated seats before in anything. It's pretty nice. I do like the heated seats. I imagine you wear the valve.
Jason Aten:Thing is?
Stephen Robles:No.
Jason Aten:Listen. You know what the best thing? Well, first of all, the nice thing about heated seats in an electric car is they're on instantly. Right? Like, you just you get in the car and it's but and my wife makes fun of me.
Jason Aten:And the kids actually think this is kinda crazy too. The best combination and I know this is gonna sound absurd. I wanna get people
Stephen Robles:to get started. Know what's coming in.
Jason Aten:Heated seats on with the air conditioning blasting.
Stephen Robles:I could totally get it. I totally get it. No. I I totally get it. I mean, I will it's like, you know, when you wanna have a blanket at home, sometimes you you lower the temperature a little bit so you could use a blanket.
Stephen Robles:Like, it it makes sense. It totally makes sense to me.
Jason Aten:It's amazing. It's amazing.
Stephen Robles:I mean, I think yeah. It would no. It's it's totally fine. I haven't tried that yet. I don't even know how to do that on my oh, no.
Stephen Robles:I guess you just turn the heat to the seat on and crank down the temperature. Turn the
Jason Aten:air conditioning. I didn't do that.
Stephen Robles:I'm new to that. I had a 2011 Kia Soul for, like, 10 years. Okay. I'm still I'm still getting used to it. But anyway, if you're a Netflix subscriber, which I still, I pay for it.
Stephen Robles:I'm not sure why, but they just hiked their prices up again for all the plans now cost 89 no. The top plan, I think it was like 23, and now it's 25 or $26. And then all the tiers went up. And it's like, I don't even know if there's outrage anymore. I think people are just like, yeah, whatever.
Stephen Robles:There's a we're just doing it. Yeah. And I guess it's fun. Whatever. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:But you wrote this article about it. Tell me about it.
Jason Aten:Well, the thing is they reported, you know, that they added 19,000,000 subscribers. They're over 300,000,000 subscribers for the first time.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:They had a record quarter. And they're like, so you know what we're gonna do? Because we're not reporting subscriber numbers anymore after this. This is it. Last time, we're going out with a bang, and then we're raising prices.
Jason Aten:Because for a long time, Netflix's primary measure of success and of growth and performance was adding subscribers. And then they had a great huge, like, quarter when COVID started. I don't mean that in a, like, morbid way, but, like, people couldn't go to the movies so they all signed up for Netflix. Right. And then that kind of growth is hard to sustain.
Jason Aten:So eventually, they're like, we're not gonna report subscribers anymore, so we have to report something different. And they're gonna report primarily revenue and and profitability. And so they're just gonna keep raising prices. And I think that at some point, they're gonna be, like, people they they have not reached that point where people are like, this is just not worth it. We're gonna I'm gonna we've canceled Netflix, and then we resubscribed for, like, a month and then we canceled it again because we just weren't it wasn't worth paying for.
Jason Aten:But I think for the most part, Netflix is just gonna keep turning that dial little by little, and they may lose some people, but it's fine because they're not reporting subscriber numbers anymore. So if you lose a 1000000 or 2,000,000 people, but everyone who stays is paying $2 more, you just you just made up for it all.
Stephen Robles:I guess I was wondering, you know, as a company like publicly traded like that, how can you not report that number? But I guess they'll still report revenue and profits. So
Jason Aten:Yeah. So I mean, Apple doesn't report how many iPhone units they sell. Right. Like, companies can decide what they want to. But, yes, they have to publish their revenue.
Jason Aten:They have to publish their, income statement and their balance sheet. And there's certain things that are required by law. But other than that, they can just be, like you know, because Apple breaks down its revenue by these broad categories.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:But companies, it that's not, like, by law that you have to. It's like there's there is a threshold at which a business unit has to be reported separately because of its significance to the bottom line or whatever. That's that's not a quote. I just made that all up. But, anyway, they don't have to report subscribers.
Jason Aten:It's just the only reason that well, here's the reason why people were reporting subscriber growth, and this is why most of the other streaming services report it. Because it's a number that's going up.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And the reality is none of them were making money. So those numbers look bad. So you're not gonna be, like, we lost $3,200,000,000 this quarter. Instead, you're gonna be, like, we are not yet profitable, but we continue adding subscribers at a, you know, a 17% rate or whatever. That sounds good.
Jason Aten:And people are like, great. Eventually, you'll figure out how to make money. And it turns out that so far, Netflix is basically the only one that figured out how to make money off of subscribers.
Stephen Robles:And I did see, apparently, the Tyson Paul fight did actually garner a number of new subscribers to the platform, which I think makes sense. I'm curious if they do more sports, live sports, if that will garner it. I was listening to the Verge cast where David Pearce was talking about sports streaming packages, and I forget who was on the show with him. But basically, like, if you had wanted to watch every NFL game this season, you had to have paid $800 in streaming costs for all the different services because the games are so fractured. So like CBS and some on Fox, you know, Netflix had 2 of them on Christmas Day.
Stephen Robles:And it's just, like, we are worse now than we were with cable. Like, we people always A 100%. People say, like, oh, we're getting back to the cable days. Like, no. We're way past that.
Stephen Robles:Like, this is way worse.
Jason Aten:We're way worse than the cable days. Like, it's cheaper to just go in person to every NFL game. Like, it would just make it'd be easier.
Stephen Robles:It's cheaper to go to the Super Bowl than pay for all the football streaming games. That's probably not true. Yep. But I it's so weird. And I do I'm looking at all my streaming services because I now I have everything on my Apple Card.
Stephen Robles:I don't know how you do this, but the Apple Card will actually do a good job of telling you, like, what are recurring charges. And so you can see, like, all the subscription services in one place. The Apple Card just, like, gives that to you as, like, a filtered search. I'm like, I don't I don't wanna pay for Netflix anymore. I really don't watch anything on there.
Stephen Robles:I just haven't finished The Crown yet. And I've been saying that for over a year. And I'm like, if I could just buy it on Blu Ray, I will rip them and watch it on Plex. I would rather do that, but I don't think I get the last season. So,
Jason Aten:Adam. You know what you could do? You know what you could do?
Stephen Robles:What's that?
Jason Aten:You could go into your Netflix account. Yes. And there's a button, and it just says cancel membership. And you could click it. It takes 2 clicks.
Jason Aten:I wrote an article about this, by the way, Steven. And then just guess what? They won't bill your card anymore. And then at some point, you'll sit down in the future and you'll be like, I really wanna watch The Crown. You just open your account again.
Jason Aten:You go back to that button and you click resubscribe and you watch The Crown. And then when you're done, you click cancel again. Like, you are not obligated to keep paying for Netflix until you decide to finish The Crown. Like, this is the worst sunk cost fallacy I've ever seen someone go through.
Stephen Robles:That's pretty deep. That's pretty deep. Well, I also I will, sometimes on a Friday, we'll open the app to see, is there anything here that I wanna watch? And then after 20 minutes of scrolling, I think, no. There's not anything I wanna watch.
Stephen Robles:That's not worth it.
Jason Aten:I wanna watch that back to work. Is that what it's called? Is that the Cameron Diaz, Jamie Uh-huh. Fox movie?
Stephen Robles:Maybe. Oh, you know what? We did use it the other day for Nate Parkazzi. Back
Jason Aten:in Action. Sorry.
Stephen Robles:Oh, Back in Action. Nate Parkazzi's on Netflix. Those are I like his specials. Anyway, alright. We have one of our
Jason Aten:chalk artist guy who paints on the sidewalk? Nate.
Stephen Robles:Oh, no. That's it.
Jason Aten:Fair enough. K. Never mind.
Stephen Robles:I'm just kidding. That's Nathan's hot dogs. Hey, Nate. He was he's at Disney. He was eating a 3 d Hulk the other day.
Stephen Robles:He was pretty amazing.
Jason Aten:He just sent us a text message, actually. But, anyway
Stephen Robles:Why is he he knows we record now. So he's sending
Jason Aten:text messages. To answer live on air. He'll have to stay tuned for the bonus episode.
Stephen Robles:He's asking about AirPod Pro sizes. Should we? No. Okay. Never mind.
Stephen Robles:We'll answer that later. One last thing before we get to our personal tech segment, which is this iPad mini that's powering the hotel room I'm in. You put this article in here, so I'll let you get in trouble instead of me. But what is this? This is, what, the kiss the ring segment?
Stephen Robles:Is that the kissing is that what this is?
Jason Aten:Okay. So the short background on this is Elon Musk, Sam Altman Sam Altman used to be buds. They sort of cofounded, OpenAI way back in the day. Elon Musk left. He now has his own, XAI, I think is what it's called.
Jason Aten:Yep. And he's trying to turn Twitter slash x into this whatever. It doesn't that that part's not as interesting. But the guys used to get along. They don't get along.
Jason Aten:Elon Musk is actively suing Sam Altman right now. And, Elon Musk also, of note, gave, what, $250,000,000 to get president Trump reelected and used his platform at every opportunity to get president Trump reelected. And it turns out that on his first day as president president Trump announces a massive initiative called Stargate, which is an investment over, I don't know what the time period is, but a $500,000,000,000 to build AI infrastructure here in the United States. This is sort of related to OpenAI and Microsoft sort of drifting apart. OpenAI is trying to build up their own AI infrastructure, and Trump's seeing, you know, a good opportunity to take credit for something that he didn't have a lot to do with.
Jason Aten:Again, I'm not bashing him. I'm just simply saying this has been in work for a little while and had nothing to do with him. They announced it and, Elon Musk is not happy. Elon Musk, who notably has a West Wing office and email address, is really not happy that his, not good friend Sam Altman is right in the mix of this. And so they've been going back and forth online about, a little bit of, fighting over who gets to be BFFs with the new administration the most.
Jason Aten:And I can understand if you're Elon Musk. Like, Elon Musk has put a lot of effort into becoming Trump's good friend. Right? And I imagine that he is expecting something because he's also very transactional. And I don't think that what he was expecting would be that his biggest competitor would be getting the 1st big governmental tech announcement.
Jason Aten:And and so he's not very happy about it, you know, because if you think about it, like, most of his most of Musk's businesses depend either on a lack of government regulation or directly on government contracts. Right? So Right. So,
Stephen Robles:you know, SpaceX.
Jason Aten:SpaceX entirely dependent on government contracts. Also, one of the most successful stories of the last couple generations in terms of what they've been able to do. Great. So, like, that's not knocking the company. But Tesla became a thing mostly because of, like, EV tax credits and that kind of
Stephen Robles:thing. Right.
Jason Aten:And so he he's feeling a little bit sour.
Stephen Robles:Interesting. Yeah. This is the the interesting one. I will put this TechCrunch article in the show notes, and there's a back and forth between Elon and Sam. This is, I have one question, though.
Stephen Robles:Whenever Sam Altman tweets, it's all lowercase. He doesn't even capitalize the beginning of his sentences. Do you think he has disabled autocorrect? So he's or auto capitalization so he can do this? Or does he literally delete the first capital letter every time he types so he can have a lowercase?
Stephen Robles:What do you think?
Jason Aten:Well, I think he definitely has it because, like, my teenagers have it turned off. Like, they
Stephen Robles:Auto capitalization?
Jason Aten:Teenagers don't use yeah. Teenagers don't use capitalization at all. What? Like, do your teenagers yeah. Like, my Yeah.
Jason Aten:My kids literally have it turned off because they do not wanna use capitalization.
Stephen Robles:They don't want to use
Jason Aten:capitalization. Times no. They don't want to. It's they Why? It's not cool to use capital letters.
Jason Aten:Not cool. Listen. I don't I don't make these rules. I'm just explaining to you what Is
Stephen Robles:it Skibbty, Ohio Riz to use capital letters? I'm so sorry. I don't even know what you said. I'm so sorry I even said that on
Jason Aten:air. What? I thought for a second that you had a stroke. I
Stephen Robles:don't know. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why is it uncool to use capital letters?
Jason Aten:I am a writer. I'm not saying it's uncool to use capital letters. I'm a 50 gram or punctuation in all of its forms. You're literally right. Just saying.
Jason Aten:What?
Stephen Robles:I don't understand it, Jason.
Jason Aten:I know.
Stephen Robles:But also I
Jason Aten:there have been times when my daughter will hand me her phone because, say, she wanted to, like, reach out to a college coach or something like that. And she's like, hey. Would you just help me? And I'll, I'll, like, try to type something.
Stephen Robles:And I'm
Jason Aten:like, what is wrong with your phone? Why won't it why does it not understand that if there's a period, the next letter should be capitalized? She's like, yeah. I turned that off. I'm like, well, turn it on or you're never going to college.
Stephen Robles:You You, turn it on.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Hey, you. It's the same one. A 100%.
Stephen Robles:Well, but what but Sam Altman is not a teenager. I don't understand. I don't understand why.
Jason Aten:Okay. That's a fair point. I just I don't know. I think he's explained it at some point. I just don't have the energy to
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I don't know.
Jason Aten:To find out.
Stephen Robles:That's weird. Anyway yeah. Watching these billionaires go, tit for tat on social media, it's that's we're in 2025. Well,
Jason Aten:I think they think it feels casual and hip.
Stephen Robles:Casual and hip. Okay. Anyway, personal tech oh, you know what? Well, no. Never mind.
Stephen Robles:I was gonna I was gonna say what you thought of the new, redesigned Tesla Model Y, but I feel like that's gonna get a wave of comments no matter what you say.
Jason Aten:We can say that. We can talk about that another time. I'm happy to.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Have you seen it? Did you see the new design?
Jason Aten:Yeah. And I don't mind comments. It's just you just Oh, no.
Stephen Robles:I I know that. Probably. Yeah. No. I know that.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, I'm gonna talk about my hotel room. So I'm I'm staying at this, I'm staying at this, I think it's called a citizen. I've never heard. Wait. Is this our personal tech section?
Stephen Robles:Personal tech. Yeah. Yeah. Personal tech. Are we
Jason Aten:in okay. We're in personal tech.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah. But you got something for personal tech?
Jason Aten:No. No. No. I just I didn't I'd wanna make sure that that was the section that we're in.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. A chapter marker. Yeah. A chapter marker. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Okay. So I'm in this hotel, and, like, it's it's a very bizarre room. It's, like, it's very narrow. I almost feel like I'm in, like, a ship hull. But it's nice.
Stephen Robles:It's a nice room. But
Jason Aten:Wait a second. What word did you just say?
Stephen Robles:A ship hull, like h u l l.
Jason Aten:Okay. Super not what it sounded like you said.
Stephen Robles:Oh, super well, I I got all those stuffy nose. I don't know what it sounded like on your end. Except for Steven doesn't usually say bad words.
Jason Aten:It's the only reason I didn't think he said he's an asshole. But Hole.
Stephen Robles:Hole. Anyway, so I walked in this room and there's a there's an iPad mini. This is an iPad mini, what, 5
Jason Aten:Like an actual iPad mini. Oh, you can't even update that anymore. And I know this because my wife has one and it won't update.
Stephen Robles:It's a home button iPad mini with lightning. It feels so much larger than the iPad mini I have at home because, you know, it has the chin and the forehead or whatever. But this is, how you control the entire room. Like, if you because I when I first walked in, it was a little warm, as you do. You turn down the air, and I was looking for the thermostat on the wall.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. No. You do it here on the iPad, but also it's kind of annoying because you can't see the temperature.
Stephen Robles:It just has a warm and cool slider, and even when you slide that, it doesn't show you a temperature. It's just like, yeah, it'll get cooler. It's cooling down right now. Like, yeah, it can get warmer, but like, it won't it doesn't give you a temperature, which I feel like maybe it's like a battery percentage thing. I don't know.
Jason Aten:Steven Steven, that is that is unacceptable.
Stephen Robles:But hey. I didn't like that. I didn't like that. You could turn the TV on and off from the iPad. That's like a little toggle at the top.
Stephen Robles:So you could And it
Jason Aten:tells you if it's on or off. So see that's this It does. They give you some indication. It probably has a battery percentage indicator too, but they will not tell you what temperature it is.
Stephen Robles:It doesn't tell you the temperature. It also has smart lights, so you can literally, like, change the colors of the lights in the bathroom. That's the only place where there's colored lighting. So if you want your bathroom to be purple or blue, you could do that. You could
Jason Aten:turn Definitely where you need the colored lighting is in the bathroom.
Stephen Robles:Right. You could turn the whole lights on or off. And even you can raise and lower curtains. They have blackout blinds that you can raise and lower. And they also have like a a day curtain.
Stephen Robles:You can do all of this, from the iPad. You even this is not an ad for the hotel. I wouldn't even suggest staying here. But you even you even like, you order your cleaning. You're like the Yeah, cleaning services from the iPad.
Stephen Robles:Anyway. I'm all about as anyone our listeners and viewers probably know I'm all about the smart home. I think I like dumb hotel rooms. Like I like dumb dumb rooms that just have light switches and a thermostat. And, also, it came with this, like, weird doll.
Stephen Robles:I'm not gonna go back and and grab it. But it came with, like, this, like, raggedy and Weird doll? Oh, I guess I have to grab it now. Hold on.
Jason Aten:Steven's staying in a hostel, actually.
Stephen Robles:I don't know. It's a
Jason Aten:it's an Airbnb. He's just camping out in somebody's spare bedroom.
Stephen Robles:I got I I chose to stay here because it's the closest to the Apple Store. It's, like, super close. Anyway, this thing was on the bed when I got here. I don't know what it is. Do you do
Jason Aten:you think the hotel owns that, or
Stephen Robles:do you think that that
Jason Aten:just got accidentally left behind by whoever rented that room before you?
Stephen Robles:No. No. There's there's one of these by the front desk, and it has, like, a little story behind it. I have not read it. But, it's a weird dog because it has no nose or mouth.
Stephen Robles:It's just 2 black dots for eyes. I guess a red hair type thing. Anyway, I forgot to take this off the bed last night when I got into bed, and so I just kicked it off. And it's been laying on the floor ever since. But, yeah, this was staring at me when I walked in this hotel room.
Stephen Robles:I don't know what I don't know what this is.
Jason Aten:But you couldn't see it because there's no light switches, so you
Stephen Robles:had no idea how to turn on the lights in the room. I don't I don't understand. Anyway, I'll, I'll try to make that the the chapter art for those listening in the podcast. Anyway, smart hotel room. I don't think I prefer it.
Stephen Robles:I like lowering the curtains. That's about it. But anyway, smartest hotel I've ever been in. It's also I don't know how to send you a picture. It's a weird it's a weird place.
Stephen Robles:But the reason I was here was because I was visiting an Apple Store. And I want to talk about that in the bonus episode because it was an interesting experience. I have my I have oh, I have 2 things. I'm going to tease it for the bonus episode. 1, for this store opening in Miami.
Stephen Robles:I guess I normally give totes for new store openings. Is it like a little bag or something? Have you ever gotten one of those? Have you ever gotten one
Jason Aten:of those? Not a new not a new store opening. No.
Stephen Robles:Well, this one. They're doing picnic blankets. This is a picnic blanket. And, so the giving badge I'm
Jason Aten:gonna tell you right now, that thing is useful. I I I have one that says WWDC on it, and we've actually used it lots of times.
Stephen Robles:Well, I'm excited. I'm I'm gonna open it at home with my family. This this was exciting for me. I know this is not a big deal maybe for other people, but first time I got an Apple media badge and, that's yeah. It's really fun.
Stephen Robles:It's a nice media badge too. Like, it's nice colorful. This is like, indented, embossed. I don't know what the right word is for it, but, like Sure. Textured.
Stephen Robles:You have a bunch of them. Right? You probably have, like, a collection of these.
Jason Aten:I got one right here from WWDC. Right.
Stephen Robles:That's your name on it, though. Right?
Jason Aten:Other ones over there. No. They don't have your names.
Stephen Robles:Oh, no.
Jason Aten:None of none of the Apple ones have your names.
Stephen Robles:Oh, okay. Okay. Then well, anyway, but I I will, treasure that. It's really fun. But anyway, I wanna talk about the behind the scenes experience because it was kinda funny.
Stephen Robles:And, so we're gonna do that in the bonus episode. So here's what you do. You go to primary tech dot fm, click bonus episodes, You can support the show. You get the whole back catalog of bonus episodes, plus you get an ad free version of the show. You can also support us in Apple Podcasts, but there you don't get chapters.
Stephen Robles:Not my fault. That's Apple. You can also watch the show at youtube.com/addprimarytechshow. That link's in the show notes as well. You can see the bizarre doll that, is in my hotel room, and you can also just watch all the past episodes there.
Stephen Robles:And if you want, you can leave us a 5 star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. We're a 5 star show still. Almost 300 ratings. And so we'd love to cross that 300 mark soon. So if you haven't yet, we'd appreciate that as well.
Stephen Robles:Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.
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