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Amazon's Alexa+ vs Siri, iPhone 16e Reviews, ChatGPT Deep Research is Actually Great

/ 01:15:33/E64 Download MP3
Stephen Robles:

People break down into two groups when they experience something lucky. One group sees it as a sign, while the other sees it as love. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. This week, Amazon had a big event to release Alexa Plus, their AI voice assistant. We're gonna talk about that.

Stephen Robles:

But the iPhone 16 e reviews dropped at the weirdest embargo time ever, iOS 18 dot four, the beta released news plus food plus big changes to Vision OS 2.4. ChatGPT deep research is coming to more plans and more. This episode is exclusively brought to you by you, the members who support us directly, so thank you for that. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, on a new mic, so let me know how it sounds, joined by my friend Jason Ayten. How's it going, Jason?

Jason Aten:

Well, I'm very confused because I'm looking through our rundown because I swear I heard you say news plus food, and I'm not sure I'm just like, wait. What are we what are we gonna talk about?

Stephen Robles:

News plus food. That's what app

Jason Aten:

I can't wait.

Stephen Robles:

Apple's, yeah. Yeah. Apple's news remark

Jason Aten:

are put.

Stephen Robles:

Literally news plus food. So there you go. I'm using a new mic today. This is, they sent this to me. I like it's very cool looking microphone.

Stephen Robles:

And so listeners as you, ingest this episode, which is a weird way to say it. I don't know why I did that. But let me know how this sounds because I'm curious if I wanna,

Jason Aten:

listen, consume, watch I mean, the people who are listening can just tell you what it sounds like. Those of us who are watching can give you other types of feedback about That's exactly right. Vibe you have going on there.

Stephen Robles:

The yes. Let me know on the vibes. Jason, I I again missed the movie quote last week asking you if you knew what movie it was from. So let's do last week first where I said all those moments will be lost in time like tears and rain, time to die. That was last week's movie quote.

Jason Aten:

Was Was Wasn't it

Stephen Robles:

Wasn't it Blade Runner? That's exactly right. That's Blade Runner. And, I did the time to die because we talked about the humane AI pin last week. I felt like right.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Felt like that was apropos. Yep. I don't have as good of a connection this week, but this week's quote, one group sees it as a sign while others see it as luck. Do you know what that's for?

Jason Aten:

Only because you repeated it. Because I knew it was an M. Night Shyamalan movie, but I'm pretty sure it's signs.

Stephen Robles:

That's exactly right.

Jason Aten:

Which, by the way, is the worst M. Night Shyamalan.

Stephen Robles:

I'm going to take a hard disagree because Well, yeah. Well, I watched it.

Jason Aten:

It may not be the worst one. It is the worst of the original set of them.

Stephen Robles:

Are you counting Lady in the Water in that original set?

Jason Aten:

No. I'm counting, like, Unbreakable.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

What's the the

Stephen Robles:

It was the village. Do you count the village

Jason Aten:

that I've seen? Better than Signs, I think.

Stephen Robles:

I'll listen. I'm just gonna say this. I have not seen Signs in a long time. I rewatched it with my two older kids. One of them is now traumatized because of the shadowy figure on the roof, but I really enjoyed rewatching that, and I find that to be a great It would have

Jason Aten:

been 47000% better had they never shown you the aliens.

Stephen Robles:

%.

Jason Aten:

That's the thing. That's the thing. The rest of the movie, phenomenal. There but then it's like

Stephen Robles:

Yes. Yes.

Jason Aten:

Oh, this was the reveal we did not need.

Stephen Robles:

If they had not shown the spoiler for this twenty four year old movie, but if they had not shown the alien at the end, would have been way better.

Jason Aten:

Yep.

Stephen Robles:

% agree. But it's a very good movie. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

It's very good. By the way, the same thing is true of the new Apple TV plus movie, The Gorge. If there's which is actually three movies, two of which are pretty entertaining. One of which is, like, why? Anyway

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. I'm surprised how many people I think this is gonna have to be our bonus episode. Okay. Let's talk about Apple TV plus Let's do that. Because Lewis Toole in the community gave us an Apple TV show ranking of Apple TV plus original shows, and I have to take some issues with it.

Stephen Robles:

So I think that's gonna be our bonus episode.

Jason Aten:

I think he made up three of them. But, yeah, anyway

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. It does sound like that. Listen. So many of you showed out because last week, we talked about how we dropped from a five to a 4.9 star podcast, and so many of you rushed in to leave wonderful reviews. So we're gonna do a lightning round.

Stephen Robles:

I'm gonna run through everyone who left us five star, but still, I have a suspicion. I can't confirm this. I think William Gallagher is creating burner Apple IDs just to leave us one star reviews. I'm not sure. I cannot confirm, but we're still a 4.9 show.

Stephen Robles:

So if you haven't yet, if you could go, leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast. But everyone who did that this week, pineapple six six seven from The USA, battery percentage on, he and he thinks the iPhone 16 e, it stands for economic. Mhmm. Okay.

Jason Aten:

Is that do you think his, do you think his Apple ID is a severance reference?

Stephen Robles:

Pineapple667? No. Wait. I thought it was a watermelon.

Jason Aten:

No.

Stephen Robles:

Steven. The waffle party? No. Have you been are you actually caught up No.

Jason Aten:

They bob for pineapples.

Stephen Robles:

Oh oh, yeah. That's right. Okay. Anyway, TimTom seventy six from The USA, so we're one of his favorite podcasts. Drummer Mama from USA, where their favorite battery percentage on phone and dominant pocket.

Stephen Robles:

JC from Germany said the other guy is alright too. That's a that's a reference. He we know he's been listening for a while because he said the other guy. That's not been around

Jason Aten:

for me. Like that.

Stephen Robles:

That's it. He Emma o seven c q c from Buenos Aires. The primary tech is in their top three shows. Eugene Fraley from The USA. My oldest piece of technology is an iPhone two g, which still turns on.

Stephen Robles:

Well, that would be an original iPhone, wouldn't it?

Jason Aten:

Right.

Stephen Robles:

Unless you meant three g. But, yeah, still turns on, has the old logos for Facebook, YouTube, and the App Store. Yep. And Toby s 98 from The USA, battery percentage off. I wanted to end with that one.

Jason Aten:

I have two I have two bones to pick about this this list of five star reviews. We're in the it's saying someone is definitely in the top three. Like, why why aren't we first? Number one, why aren't we definitely first?

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No. I will I will set over top three. Top three is wonderful.

Jason Aten:

So then the other thing is I I started to feel like I always thought that there was like two schools of theology when it comes to all of these things. There's this there's there's Stevenism.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, no.

Jason Aten:

And then there's me. Whatever.

Stephen Robles:

I don't like the the other guy ism.

Jason Aten:

Sure. Right. Did you have Calvinism and Wesleyism and whatever?

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Sure. Sure. The other guy.

Jason Aten:

So, like, I felt like all of the thing what I'm learning though is nobody subscribes to either of our schools of theology when it comes to all of these things because they just mix and match whichever one they feel like, you know, it's like, I'm battery percentage on good. Apple volume in the correct direction, good. Phone in the dominant hand pocket, oh, forget it. You just lost your salvation.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No. They we have a very diverse audience. You could do do whatever you want even if it's wrong.

Stephen Robles:

That's what I say. No. Just kidding.

Jason Aten:

Right. That's relativism, I think.

Stephen Robles:

Or Yeah. That's right. That's good. Pluralism. Alright.

Stephen Robles:

Listen. We're iPhone, battery percentage pluralist

Jason Aten:

here.

Stephen Robles:

You could do whichever you like, although a better percentage off is better. Alright. We have to talk about the news, Jason, because Amazon I just see how it just roll right past?

Jason Aten:

You should.

Stephen Robles:

Amazon had a big event. They did not stream it, which I felt was very strange. The event was yesterday, Wednesday, and I kept searching for, like, Amazon livestream, Amazon event livestream. There was no livestream.

Jason Aten:

There was not.

Stephen Robles:

They did not livestream this event, and then I tried to find some live blogs, which I should've did you ever follow, like, the live blogs back in the day? Well, The

Jason Aten:

Verge still does one.

Stephen Robles:

So they do one, and I went to The Verge, and I clicked live blog, and I could not find what I was used to. I had not looked at a live blog in years because I watched the live streams of whatever these events are. And I was looking for just, like, the chat window with, like, the ongoing chat, and I couldn't find it.

Jason Aten:

They, I mean, it it looks a little different now, but they do basically do that. But it kinda looks more like it looks very similar to, like, their quick posts format. And some of them actually then just, like, link out to an article that they've written about whatever's happening. Yes. The older formats felt more, like, in the moment live reaction.

Jason Aten:

So, like, the the New York Times still does that for things like confirmation hearings where you just see, like, a stream of people. You know what I mean?

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Less less exciting.

Jason Aten:

But I know. I was trying to think of the example for it, but, like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

Jason Aten:

But, like, the verge still does it. There's some other places that still kind of do it. But, honestly, like, now you if you really wanna follow the live blog of something, you have to follow six people on Twitter, three people on threads

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And then a Mastodon server.

Stephen Robles:

What and that that's basically what I ended up doing because I was, like, I was frustrated with the Livelock situation. I was, like, well, I guess I'll just see what people post on social media. And people did. Yeah. People posted.

Stephen Robles:

And, basically, the news is Amazon has announced Alexa Plus, which is their LLM powered voice assistant. It is $20 a month if you want to actually just pay for it and you're not subscribed to Amazon Prime. But if you pay for Amazon Prime, it's just included. So if you already pay for it, this is just something that you can access. It is on basically the web, Fire TVs, and a lot of recent Echo shows and even just Echoes without screens if you wanted to use that, And it showed off they basically showed off a bunch of things that it could do and frankly it was pretty impressive.

Stephen Robles:

There's a little demo video. I'll link to this page on Amazon so you can check it out. But, you know, it can do things like keep track of your events and tasks and all that. But because it also keeps track of your conversations, if you were at home and you were asking it about some hardware part because you were trying to fix the sync and then you go to the hardware store, you can basically open the Alexa app on your iPhone and ask it, what was it that I was trying to remember? And it will, like, have that contextual awareness, which is pretty impressive.

Stephen Robles:

So it's across all those devices. The demo video, one of the more impressive things I saw, it was like, the guy asked, did someone let the dog out? And I imagine if you have your Nest cameras around or Ring cameras, the assistant was able to say, yes. It looks like the dog name went out. And I was like, that blew my mind because I'm like, of core like, you have all that information.

Stephen Robles:

Even Apple Home has that information. Like, you can recognize people through the cameras. There's facial recognition. It knows when there's motion, supposedly recognizes animals. But to be able to ask your voice assistant, did someone let the dog out and it just know, it looked very impressive.

Stephen Robles:

It also went through this, like, planning a vacation thing, which is like what the rabbit r one promised and it could never do, and it prob this Alexa plus could probably do that and it was it looked impressive, just seeing it from the outside. What what did you think when you saw this?

Jason Aten:

Well, I also tried to find a live stream and I didn't even try to get an invitation to the event because I assumed there would be a live stream. And then I was like, oh, well, that was dumb. I did not plan that very well. So I, so I spent a lot of time trying to get caught up on what the heck actually happened because

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

It did seem like really they only introduced basically one thing. I think there might have been a new product other than Alexa Plus. Is that true? Well, they introduced a website and a new app. And the The

Stephen Robles:

website, the app. Yeah. But all the shows and stuff, it's the same.

Jason Aten:

Okay. You're probably right. It was very confusing. And so I do think the demos were really convincing. I was a little bit I'm a little apprehensive because what I have read of reviews, all of the people who went to the demo area were not actually allowed to do demos.

Jason Aten:

Only the Amazon people, PR people were able to, like, walk them through a demo. So the thing seems like it was still pretty much on the rails. That's not super surprising because I've never been to a tech, like, product launch like this where you could you can watch it, walk up and pick up an iPhone, but, like, you're still gonna be limited in terms of the things that you can do on these products because it's just not it hasn't been launched publicly yet. And so that's great. Great.

Jason Aten:

And they know that in that environment you have people that are just literally gonna try to get it to flirt with them. Like, you know what I mean? Like that's the only thing you're gonna have someone from the New York times trying to do. So I I thought it was interesting. I think that it is, you know, amazon, I think you could make the argument for a while was way behind way behind.

Jason Aten:

I mean, Alexa was like of all of the voice assistants. I think most people generally think that Amazon's is maybe the smartest, but you had to, like, say the right combination of incantations in order to get it to do the thing you wanted. But if you did that, boom, it would do that and then it would try to sell you toilet paper and whatever. You just described a scenario where it would remember the part that you needed and I'm like, yeah. And four of them just showed up at your house while you were at the at the hardware store.

Jason Aten:

Right?

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

But that is, like, the killer feature of this. Amazon has all of these things already built together, and they've built partnerships with I mean, they're gonna be available on Sonos speakers, right? You'll be able to communicate with Alexa plus and Sonos devices.

Stephen Robles:

Yep. I thought I was okay.

Jason Aten:

Yep. Well maybe not all of them but but and then you're but it also has integrations with Ticketmaster. Okay that's good. But you know Uber TripAdvisor, OpenTable, all the Priceline, all these different things. And so far, we haven't really seen that happen with your beloved humane pin, Rabbit

Stephen Robles:

The

Jason Aten:

or for that matter, Apple Intelligence.

Stephen Robles:

Right. And so I think that's the biggest difference. You know, the Rabbit r one didn't have partnerships except, you know, they were basically using Spotify and a browser on some server somewhere because there wasn't that direct integration. So the Alexa Plus service, which I'm sorry if I'm setting off your, voice assistant devices. I'll try to stop saying it.

Stephen Robles:

You know, these are actual partnerships, so they actually integrate. So this should, unlike the Rabbit R1, if you wanna order some food through your Echo Show, it will actually work supposedly. But this is powered by, Amazon has said, multiple LLMs. They claim to be LLM agnostic, although a lot of people thought it was more Claude sounding, apparently. You know, people who use that one is seems like that's the predominant LLM, but I think the main thing is if this is as smart as the demos say, I mean, this totally wipes the floor with Apple's voice assistant because we'll get to some examples in a moment of that.

Stephen Robles:

My biggest thing is for someone like me, like, this is interesting. Like, I'm almost thinking maybe I get a Echo Show to, like, try this out and see, like, how smart is this. Like, you can buy the Show eight for a hundred $50, and that will work with the new Alexa Plus. But in my mind, I'm like, the only way this is really useful is if it knows all my stuff. So I I can imagine I can log in to my calendar so it has my events, probably some emails because I think it can do some stuff with that.

Stephen Robles:

But then, like, my smart home, do I can I even connect all the stuff I have to the Amazon smart home stuff? Will it be able to I don't know. Like, I'm not sure how much integration there can be because Amazon doesn't have, like, a phone hardware that you're signing into all this stuff and and has access to it. So I'm curious how that would work. I probably need to get one to just see how easy or difficult it is, but it's curious.

Stephen Robles:

And I would love to see, like, how good is this thing? Even a general knowledge.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. So I think okay. I think there's a couple of interesting things happening here. The first one is Amazon has even though they were probably behind, they have an enormous advantage. They've sold over 500,000,000 Alexa enabled devices.

Jason Aten:

Right? And you can and people are the thing is like chat GPT great. You can load it on your mac, you can use it in a browser, you can get the app on your phone and that's fine and people are used to typing to it and people are used to like talking and like to transcribe things and that's great. But you know what people are super used to doing Shouting at their echo from across the room. Right?

Jason Aten:

Like Right. It is a thing people are I hear my kids every single morning. Alexa, stop. Because their alarm goes off. Right?

Jason Aten:

Alexa, set an alarm. Alexa, what's the temperature? People are so used to doing that that this is the ultimate, like, scenario where this becomes, like, a mainstream feature is when the thing you're shouting at is actually capable of doing something other than just telling you a sports score, especially because you don't care about any of the sports scores. Right? So that's the first Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

I went to an NBA game last week. That's gonna come up in the, bonus.

Jason Aten:

I can't believe it. Anyway but I that's that's the first thing. The second thing is and I cannot figure this out, Steven. They're charging $20 a month for this.

Stephen Robles:

If you're not a Prime subscriber. Do you

Jason Aten:

know how much Prime costs?

Stephen Robles:

Is it, like, $1.50 a year?

Jason Aten:

It's $14.99 a month, and it includes Alexa Plus. Or you can just buy Alexa Plus for $19.09. Steven I mean Listen. We're not mathematicians. No.

Jason Aten:

But I promise you Amazon does not want anyone to pay for this. Right? Like No.

Stephen Robles:

A %. I don't understand.

Jason Aten:

It's like No. No. You could pay $20 for this thing, or you could just keep paying us the $14 and $15 a month you've been paying for the last sixteen years, and we'll just give it to you for free. What is what is going on, Steven?

Stephen Robles:

That is an amazing pricing strategy.

Jason Aten:

I don't get it.

Stephen Robles:

I don't, yeah, I don't know how they did that would well, I was gonna make a comparison to Apple.

Jason Aten:

It doesn't even it's not even like they're trying to convince people to pay for Prime because everyone already pays for Prime.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. It would it's like Prime Video, which I think we had one person reach out and said, yeah. I pay for Prime Video, but it's only because they're, like, in another country and Prime shipping isn't available, so it's not worth it. So maybe it's that. Maybe it's internationally, like but I don't know.

Jason Aten:

I know. Will this work internationally? I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

That's a good question. So I don't know. It I will say the voice sounds very natural.

Jason Aten:

Yep. It

Stephen Robles:

sounds, I think, way better than a lot. It sounds kinda like the the ChatGPT voice conversation. Like, it sounds that natural. It also did things like in the video, it said, Billie Eilish is doing a concert nearby. Do you want me to get tickets for you or something?

Stephen Robles:

And it's like, wow. That's pretty crazy. Like, if it could just preemptively know, probably because you're playing music through the speaker, it knows the artist you're interested in, like, that's very curious. So I wanna know how smart this is. That's cool.

Stephen Robles:

And I it is amazing seeing if if this is capable of all the things Amazon says, how behind Apple's assistant really is. And I don't know about you, Jason. I I use Apple's voice assistant for basically one thing now, which is smart home control. Because anytime I ask it something else, it's getting real rough. It's getting rough.

Stephen Robles:

And Gruber actually he had Paul Kefasas, who is the founder of Audio Hijack, which we're using to record the audio version of the show right now. But he had Paul Kefasas, and they were talking about asking the voice assistant questions about Super Bowl and past Super Bowls and who won certain games. And Apple's assistant was just wildly off most of the time. Like, it was just spewing wrong information. And Paul Kofasas pointed out that there was actually a newsroom article years ago from 2018 where Apple specifically stated, now you can ask our voice assistant, sports scores and Super Bowl history information.

Stephen Robles:

So it's like Apple said to do this, and now it's just giving wrong information. And I will even say from my perspective, there's a weird reason why we do this, but I have to find out how many days it has been since a certain date pretty much daily. It's a thing we do with the kids. It's complicated. So I would ask the voice assistant how many days has it been since July 14.

Stephen Robles:

I just would ask it that. And up until recently, the voice assistant would just tell me. Like, my I would ask my iPhone, and it would just say it's been a hundred something days. And for some reason, in the last couple months, it refuses to do that anymore, and it literally falls back to ChatGPT. So I will ask my phone that, and then I see the little banner come down, and it says asking ChatGPT.

Stephen Robles:

And ChatGPT answers me, gets it right every time. And as Gruber and Paul Kofasas was saying, Chad GpT got all the sports stuff right, even asking it obscure, like, what high school football team won their state championship in '19 whatever, and Chad GpT gets it right. And so it's it's not looking good, Jason. I don't know what

Jason Aten:

to do. I know. It is an interesting thing that, Amazon first said they were gonna do this, like, what, eighteen months ago, two years ago, something like that, and they were able to pull this thing off. Grok, x a I, like, it took them eighteen months to build a flagship l o m for Grok. And listen, like, say what you want about x a I, but most of the people who have used it say that it's as good, if not better than any of the other flagship models.

Jason Aten:

They did that in eighteen months. Apple is the most valuable company on the face of the Earth, and they made a whole bunch of promises about what they're gonna do. And they and they can't like, we got Genemoji. That's it.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, well. And and it was a point. A lot of the rumors were that eighteen dot four would bring the voice assistant integration improvements, the semantic index, all the things that Apple showed off almost a year ago now at Dub Dub, and we still have not seen any of those. So we're gonna talk about 18 dot four in a minute, but, yeah, it's pretty wild. So you you have Alexas, right, around your house?

Jason Aten:

Well, we have Echos. We have three Echos, EchoDots, the ones that have the, like actually, with four of them. The ones that have, like, a clock on them because they're, like, a perfect little alarm clock. They play a little bit of music. The kids can ask it some questions.

Jason Aten:

Right. But, you know, we're a we're a, we're what did you call it? A, polytheistic family. We have echoes. We have Google stuff.

Stephen Robles:

Poly assistant family.

Jason Aten:

Yes. We are the word I've heard of the word that first came to mind was polygamy, but that's not that's totally

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No. No.

Jason Aten:

Totally different. Multiple something else. But we have

Stephen Robles:

Google is gonna give us an explicit rating.

Jason Aten:

We have Google we have Google Nest things. We have the Yeah. Yeah. Echo things, and we have HomePods.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Well, anyway, I'm gonna I think I'm gonna get an Echo Show. I'm gonna try this out. I might break my entire smart home trying to get my devices to work with multiple systems, but I'm gonna do it.

Jason Aten:

I I don't see that's an interesting point. I don't think Alexa or Amazon is interested at all in anyone switching over. Like, they No. Because I don't know. I mean, you probably are one of the very few households in America that doesn't have at least I mean, they will send you an echo for free if you buy Wheaties.

Jason Aten:

They'll just put it in the box, and it's just like I

Stephen Robles:

have I literally have an I have an echo, but it's, like, one of the older just the cylindrical speakers. It's like seven years old now. I did enjoy playing Jeopardy on it. I will tell you that, but I just haven't had it set up recently. So, anyway, Alexa Plus.

Stephen Robles:

We'll see how it is, when it comes out. IPhone 16 e, we have have found out how it is because the weirdest embargo ever for an Apple product, I feel like. I don't know if there's ever been one like this. 9PM eastern last night, the embargo dropped, and, the iPhone 16 e reviews are now out. MKBHD, Brian Tong, The Verge, all the reviews came out, which I mean, if you have MKBHD wearing a fake mustache, you know you really challenged him to make an interesting video about your products.

Jason Aten:

A fake mustache on top of a real mustache. You know

Stephen Robles:

That's true. Because he has a

Jason Aten:

Right. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

He has a mustache. Anyway, and, I actually think his intro to his video is very good because he basically pretends to be a customer asking for a phone that's exactly $600 and has these exact features, but not MagSafe and not the other things because as he goes on to say, I'll just I'll link the video in this in the show notes. You should watch it. But he's pretending to be the customer and be like, I want an iPhone that has a 48 megapixel camera, this and that. And he's like, well, great.

Stephen Robles:

That's the iPhone, 15 whatever or even like the 14 pro. Like, you can find all the different phones that have more features or the same price, and so why would you get the 16 e? The only thing. Well, even Apple intelligence. You can still get a 15 pro likely for $600 renewed, so you just really have to want a very particular set of features that also lack MagSafe and ultra wide, and that's why you would get the 16 e, I guess.

Stephen Robles:

But

Jason Aten:

I mean, there are probably some Dynamic Island haters out there who would just prefer not.

Stephen Robles:

That would be something. I would love to hear if

Jason Aten:

there's a Three of them are thrilled now that there's finally a phone for them. Right? Nah. That's probably not the case at all. The only other time I can think of, like, no one probably no one listening to this cares cares about review embargoes, but it is weird that mo normally, this sort of thing happens, like, where Apple will say we will we're happy to send you something to look at.

Jason Aten:

We would just prefer you not post anything about it until after this time. And that time is usually, like, in the morning on a given day. 9AM. Something like that.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

And so this one was clearly very different, and I don't the only other time I can think of when anything similar to that happened was, like, when they did the I think it was the MacBook Pros, and they showed that event in the evening. If you remember that, they showed that video at, like, 03:00. Yeah. But they had given briefings to everybody earlier in the day, and they're like, all this stuff we're talking about, please don't write about it or publish it until the event goes live or that kind of thing.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

But even then, once the people had the product reviews, that embargo was, like, back to normal. And so it's Yeah. It's very kind of an interesting thing, and I honestly think they're, like, they're just, like, let's just let's just try something different. Like, let's just do something different.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. We'll see. I mean, the phone is available to everyone tomorrow, Friday, February 28. I think I'll actually be getting one and I'm going to run an experiment to see, well, I don't wanna give it away. I won't give it away.

Stephen Robles:

Just anyway, watch my channel because I'm gonna I'm gonna try something interesting with it. Here's to try it out. It does look real clean. I like the look of that back, like, with the one camera. Looks clean.

Stephen Robles:

Not that I would ever wanna use it personally, but it looks cool. I'm just saying I'm just just throwing it out there. One of the quick news. Photoshop is officially on iPhone. This is like Photoshop, iPhone app.

Stephen Robles:

I saw a couple people on social media, like, the developers saying they've been working on it for multiple years, and it is an $8 monthly subscription plan, if you want the premium features, in the app. But, you know, previously, Adobe has a bunch of apps on the iPhone. They have, like, Adobe Rush, Adobe Spark, I think it is, for different things, but I believe this, you know, this is it. This is the official Photoshop app on iPhone. Pretty that's great.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, Adobe is, like, known for you stick a word after the word Adobe, and there's probably an app on the iPhone that includes that combination, spark, whatever you just said. I'm gonna, like, I've heard that I have not had a chance to play with it. From what I've heard from people who have, it's really good. That does not surprise me because the Lightroom app on the iPhone is phenomenal.

Jason Aten:

It is, like, so much better than the photos app. Like, in almost everything. And so it it's the only downside is it doesn't it doesn't allow you to store your things locally if you wanted to. That automatically stores in the clouds. You have to pay for cloud storage.

Jason Aten:

But, anyway, I I think it'll be I think this is really interesting. I'm looking forward to playing with it.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah.

Jason Aten:

I don't like that $8 monthly subscription if you're already paying for Creative Cloud. Doesn't it is it included if you pay for Creative Cloud at least?

Stephen Robles:

I imagine so.

Jason Aten:

The only thing Oh, yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. No. All current Photoshop paid plans already include

Jason Aten:

Okay. Thank goodness.

Stephen Robles:

Macs or Zoomos. Yeah. So if you already have a subscription, you're you're good. Phew. They're not gonna gouge you that much.

Jason Aten:

If you're already subscribed to Prime, you don't also have no. I'm kidding. It's not Exactly. Twitch. Twitch.

Jason Aten:

Sorry.

Stephen Robles:

Refresh. Yeah. Another weird Apple release, the betas for 18 dot four beta one came out last Friday, the day after we recorded our episode. Typically, betas come out, like, kinda Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, not a Friday, not a Friday afternoon, but we got 18 dot four, which there's not a ton of big features. I did a whole video talking about, you know, the big features you'll you might see.

Stephen Robles:

There's, like, ambient music, control center things, and all that, but the biggest, and this was this I said it in the intro, news plus food. Apple introduces news plus food, and this I think is is telling in regards to what it might mean for Apple's future products. And so in 18 dot four, if you're an Apple News plus subscriber, there's going to be a new food section in the app. It It basically contains, like, recipes and stuff. Mhmm.

Stephen Robles:

And it's actually very nicely designed. You have, like, the ingredient list, you have the steps, you can save recipes to your recipe catalog. I'll put a link to my video because I show you kinda, like, the whole deal, but then you can share recipes of course, but one of the cool things is you can actually go into like this reader mode when you're looking at a recipe, and it'll actually give you like the option to set timers right there in the app, and so you could be following along, and this would be perfect on a screen that's, like, sitting on your counter or whatever, and so it will create those timers. It actually labels the timers as, like, step one, step two, or whatever, And so you could follow along in this reader mode, set the timers with a tap just right there, jump over to the ingredients and directions. This is like a really nice recipe app, that you can curate them, save them, categorize them, and there's even, like, you can browse by recipes that take under thirty minutes or recipes that are vegan, and so you have all those categories as well in on the recipe catalog.

Stephen Robles:

This I mean, Jason, the long rumored HomePod with a screen type device, this is this is the thing. This is the use case. This is perfect

Jason Aten:

for that. That's true because, you know, you know, we don't all have iPhones already or iPads.

Stephen Robles:

Listen. Listen.

Jason Aten:

Hold on. First, hold on. Hold on. Explain to me this.

Stephen Robles:

Uh-huh.

Jason Aten:

Apple launches a separate invites app that could have just been part of the calendar app, but this is a part of news plus. Yeah. What in the world is this, Steven?

Stephen Robles:

Steven If you're gonna launch a standalone app If

Jason Aten:

you had not explained this to me, I would have never come across this ever. No chance that I would ever look at it. Also, you know what this would be a fantastic app for? The vision pro. Like, my and the I'm sorry.

Jason Aten:

But the use the UI on that timer thing is, like, the most janky looking thing. It looks like

Stephen Robles:

It's a little It

Jason Aten:

looks like something my 13 year old made in scratch. Like, that's what it looks like.

Stephen Robles:

It's a little it's a little rough. I mean, the the highlight but it's beta. It's beta. Well, you know, it could change by the public news.

Jason Aten:

I just don't understand why is this a part of News Plus, Steven. If you can't explain that to me, then Oh,

Stephen Robles:

I can explain it with one word, Jason. Subscriptions.

Jason Aten:

Is this a subscription feature?

Stephen Robles:

I guess it is a plus. You're subscribed to news plus. So which I mean, I guess they could have released an app, but then to release an app, how would you put that behind a subscription? Apple doesn't like doing that. They want their apps to be free to download at least.

Stephen Robles:

So I think they made it so News plus would be a more enticing service, but that services revenue. You know what I'm saying?

Jason Aten:

I I I feel

Stephen Robles:

like that makes total sense.

Jason Aten:

Believe that you believe that, and I'm sure Tim Cook does too. But, also, just the last thing I'm gonna say about this is Sure. Is anyone paying for news plus that's not getting it as part of an Apple one bundle?

Stephen Robles:

I I think very, very few. Listeners, viewers, if you pay for Apple News plus and nothing else, no iCloud, no nothing, well, I guess if you pay for it but you just silo it, which I think Quinn Nelson from Snazzy Labs, he did an experiment which, like, the services he only uses, which was, like, Apple TV plus, News plus, and iCloud. If you only pay for those, it's still cheaper than a bundle. If you have to get, like, higher anyway, if you pay for News plus outside of an Apple one subscription bundle, let us know.

Jason Aten:

And if you pay for app or news, yeah, news plus outside of a subscription bundle and you don't have Amazon Prime, I wanna meet you personally.

Stephen Robles:

If you're left handed and you were born on the West Coast no. I don't know. Yeah. Which is random. I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

It's the it looks cool, and it all but it makes it makes sense for that Apple home device. And again, Amazon just had their event where they announced Alexa Plus and their Echo devices. Seems like prime time for Apple to say, like, here's our device, the recipe stuff. Maybe they even throw in a year of news plus recipes for free if you buy it or something. I could see those deals kinda happen, but have their device, the smart home device, like, let's do it.

Stephen Robles:

Let's do it, Apple. Let's finally release this thing. It's time. But, anyway,

Jason Aten:

that's part

Stephen Robles:

of me.

Jason Aten:

Last Apple one thing. I mean, the news plus food thing is really nice. I would just tell you, you wanna know the only reason the main reason I subscribe to the top tier of the Apple one bundle.

Stephen Robles:

So you can get more iCloud story?

Jason Aten:

No. Because it includes the Wall Street Journal in the news plus in the news app.

Stephen Robles:

Do other news plus subscriptions don't include?

Jason Aten:

No. But what I'm saying is the Wall Street Journal will cost you 30 something dollars a month if you just subscribe to it.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. For sure. For sure. That's all I mean.

Jason Aten:

It's like this is actually the best deal that you can get in a subscription because you if you care about the Wall Street Journal, because you also get two terabytes of iCloud storage with your Wall Street Journal subscription.

Stephen Robles:

Do do you up did you upgrade to, like, the four terabyte iCloud?

Jason Aten:

The we have four terabytes.

Stephen Robles:

That's yes. Well, I think you can get up to eight Twelve. If you really, really want.

Jason Aten:

You can get

Stephen Robles:

Oh, you can get up to 12. 12. I'll be I'll be right back. Give me no. I'm just kidding.

Stephen Robles:

I I have the I have the four terabytes right now. How much of you are you using of that? Do you know?

Jason Aten:

I think we're at, like, one point something. Because I mean, everybody's backed up to it and

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Exactly.

Jason Aten:

So

Stephen Robles:

So with 18 dot four also came VisionOS 2.4, which has, I think, arguably more upgrades or updates or features than the iOS version. Two dot four is gonna bring Apple Intelligence this is a terrifying picture. I don't even know how that works.

Jason Aten:

Absolutely not what you want in your marketing collateral. Seriously. Come on.

Stephen Robles:

Then it froze on the anyway, Apple Intelligence will be on Apple Vision Pro, come VisionOS 2.4. So you get the writing tools, you get your emoji, image playground, so you get all that if you wanna try and use that. I'm cure cool. But you also get a couple in like individual apps, which I'm actually excited to try. One, they're calling the Spatial Gallery.

Stephen Robles:

This is gonna be a new app on Vision Pro with VisionOS 2.4, and it's gonna be curated content of, like, immersive video clips, panoramas, spatial photos, and basically, it'll be one app where you can go and experience a bunch of stuff. There's, like, behind the scenes here of, like, a shrinking deal. I think there was, like, a Red Bull skydiving or whatever. So, basically, an app where you can see more immersive content in one place. And of all the things that I think make Vision Pro compelling, it's immersive content.

Stephen Robles:

So I think it's great. Have a stand alone app where people go and experience all of that for themselves. And in addition to that app, there's actually going to be a stand alone Vision Pro app on the iPhone, much like you have an Apple Watch app on your iPhone for managing your watch. This will be an app on your phone where you can, like, save immersive content or apps and basically send them to your Vision Pro. And I love this because sometimes I'll see an app or that there's some immersive content coming up, and I'm like, I'm not gonna charge my Vision Pro and put it on just to download the app right now.

Stephen Robles:

But if I could have my phone and just kinda send stuff to it so then next time I put it on, which is, like, once every other week or month

Jason Aten:

Every day, Steven. Come on. Let's go.

Stephen Robles:

Still every day? Still every day for you.

Jason Aten:

Pretty much.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Pretty much. I bought a stand, for the Apple Vision Pro. I'll talk about it when I get it. And I'm gonna just I'm gonna put the Apple Vision Pro just on my desk, just sitting there all the time, just ready at a moment's notice.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. And I'm gonna see if that, like, encourages me to use it more.

Jason Aten:

You never know when you may need Envision Pro in a hurry. And hopefully, that's never because putting that thing on and getting it to boot up is like

Stephen Robles:

I know. Well, that's the and that's the thing, the boot up process. But anyway, have you did you get the Belkin top strap

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

For the vision? It's fantastic. That's fantastic. It does

Jason Aten:

make a difference. Changing.

Stephen Robles:

It is very well, I don't know about that, but it is it is very nice.

Jason Aten:

I spend a lot of time in the Vision Pro. It's a big deal. Hold on. I want you to go back up though because I just wanted to clarify one thing. I don't think that you said that the spatial gallery includes a bunch of more immersive content.

Jason Aten:

I think that part may not be necessarily true because apple distinguishes between immersive and spatial stuff. I'm not trying to be nitpicking, but I did want to do it because it's like spatial videos, which are the ones where you're like looking at it and there's like depth. It's kinda like a three d video as opposed to the immersive, which is, like, you're in an experience. I just wanted to clarify that part of it because I did you did you hear anything about more? Because the immersive stuff is what we really want.

Jason Aten:

Please give us more of that.

Stephen Robles:

It's what we really want. I don't like, new Apple immersive titles include, you know, they talk about ice dive, the sharks, the man like, I've seen all of these.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. None of that's new.

Stephen Robles:

None of that's new. They're releasing immersive content. It feels a little more closer to a weekly cycle, maybe every other week, but it's still not enough because they're also only seven minutes. Although, they did did you see that Apple's first feature length immersive film is coming out?

Jason Aten:

Oh wait, you mean the submarine wasn't what they considered feature length like the twelve minutes or seventeen minutes or whatever?

Stephen Robles:

You didn't see you didn't see this, JC? I want you to don't don't look. I want you to take a wild guess. It has to do with music. What do you think Apple's first full length feature film is going to be in immersive video on Applevision?

Jason Aten:

It is going to be someone tuning Alicia Keys' piano And he has to overcome obstacles.

Stephen Robles:

Hours.

Jason Aten:

He has to overcome a lot of life obstacles and, Yeah. Oh, Bono. Yeah. I was in the right genre at least.

Stephen Robles:

Bono. So many people were like, why can Apple not let this thing rest? This one And

Jason Aten:

they're gonna preload it on everyone's Vision Pro.

Stephen Robles:

That's right. You're not gonna be able to

Jason Aten:

delete it. Whether you want it or not.

Stephen Robles:

You're gonna be able to delete it. This is going to be, it premieres it's set to premiere May 30, Mano Stories of Surrender. It's gonna be an immersive first feature length film available in Apple immersive video. So

Jason Aten:

You know, I wrote a story this morning about Jony Ive and how Jony Ive, steve jobs told him, you know, don't try to always don't ask when you ask yourself the question, what would Steve do? Don't do that. Like do you tim cook tells the same story that the day before steve jobs died, he said, just do what's right. You know, don't worry about what I would do. Right.

Jason Aten:

Someone wasn't paying attention because we're repeating the same mistakes from years ago. Come on. Like, it's anyway, I like Bono. He's cool. But that that would not have been my first choice for for this.

Stephen Robles:

That's what I'm saying. But anyway, I did see did you see the, the surfers, the ice surfers or whatever?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I know what you're talking about.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Yeah. That was I mean, the immersive videos look great. Like, it's wonderful to to watch them. They're just six minutes long.

Stephen Robles:

But anyway, there's one other part that will come in VisionOS 2.4, which is the guest user experience is gonna be vastly improved. You know, right now, you you as the owner of the VisionPro have to put it on, unlock it, put it in a guest mode, hand it to someone, and then they do their training thing. Well, come VisionOS 2.4, the guest you can go straight to the guest putting on VisionPro, and then you'll be able to manage it from your iPhone to say put it into guest mode, allow access to these apps. I believe it's even gonna save some guest profiles. So if you have someone using it multiple times, it'll be easier to, you know, resume that session.

Stephen Robles:

So it'll make it easier to share Vision Pro. I will say having one that is kind of one of the more fun experiences is like giving it to someone and say

Jason Aten:

like Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Check this out and, watching their mind be blown in some immersive video. But, anyway, as VisionPro Yeah.

Jason Aten:

We still have people people we have people living in my house right now. They're in my family. We don't just have people living in my house. But we have people who live in my house who have still not used the VisionPRO because it's just such a pain in the butt to do this.

Stephen Robles:

Because guess that. Do they want to? Are they like, dad, why haven't we finally used VisionPRO? I don't

Jason Aten:

think no one has ever asked me that, but they also don't know exactly what they're missing.

Stephen Robles:

They could've Did you use it on the plane last weekend?

Jason Aten:

No. The

Stephen Robles:

show's over. That's it. That's it. And not even to embarrass your daughter,

Jason Aten:

I figured it was funny thing is. I actually sort of planned to take it. But Uh-huh. When my wife and I left the house, we also had to take the dog, suitcases for the kids when they got home from school, and all of our stuff, and I just

Stephen Robles:

Wow. Anyway, moving on. ChatGPT. Apparently, you can now use ChatGPT as your default search engine in Safari through a weird extension, that the ChatGPT app now enables. So I actually tried this.

Stephen Robles:

You have to update to the latest version of the ChatGPT app on your iPhone or iPad. You have to go to the settings, apps, Safari, extensions, and then on your iPhone or iPad. You can enable this extension, and basically what it does is, like, hijack the address bar, which you can it's not like you're choosing ChatGPT as your default search engine in the search engine picker, which, you know, you have, like, Google, DuckDuckGo, and all that. This is actually, like, when you type into that address bar, it redirects from the Google search to ChatGPT search and then opens ChatGPT in a browser with your search query, and it just goes that way. It is super janky.

Stephen Robles:

I immediately stopped I turned it off because I couldn't even, like, get to, like, normal websites where I would muscle memory, like, type the first few letters of domain and hit go because I knew the Safari autofill would get it, because I just go to those websites all the time. And this was, like, hijacking that process. It was trying to do, like, ChatGPT searches with my three letters or whatever, so I turned it off. But interesting that this is, like, a little closer to if you wanna ChatGPT as your default search engine, which we're gonna talk about the deep research part in our personal tech too because you have that, you've been using that more. It's it's close.

Stephen Robles:

It's close to be able to using it, as your search engine.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, this is kind of what it does in Chrome. Right? It just they

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Release it. But this is on your iPhone, and I don't know that extensions for Safari are meant to just to be honest.

Stephen Robles:

Some of them work okay. That'll be my that's that's my, glowing review. One I let's see.

Jason Aten:

Some of them don't brick your iPhone.

Stephen Robles:

Let's play this game, Jason. Good. Let's go to settings together on your iPhone. We're gonna go to app because Safari is no longer that main settings pane. You have to go to the apps down at the bottom.

Jason Aten:

Pane is right. Yep. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

We go we go to Safari and then we go to extensions and let's see what extensions do we have installed and on for Safari. I will say I have so Noir, I have that extension, although I don't use as much on my iPhone. I use Noir on the Vision Pro if I ever go into Safari, because if you ever have a stark white web page load in Vision Pro and you weren't expecting it, you will be blinded. But Noir is good for forcing dark mode. I have atchoo HTML, which is an extension that allows you to basically see the source code of a website from just by tapping the extension, which is pretty useful.

Stephen Robles:

I have Magic Lasso, which is an ad blocker content blocker. I have over picture, which lets you put picture in picture, mode on videos like on other websites just, you know, kind of forces that. And mapper. Mapper is an extension where if you search and there's a business or direction link that by default goes to Google Maps, the Mapper extension forces it to Apple Maps. And so you can tap any directions like that.

Stephen Robles:

Like if you do a Google search for a business and normally you would tap directions and it defaults to Google Maps, Mapper will force it to go to Apple Maps. And so I find that to be useful sometimes. How about you?

Jason Aten:

I have good links and saf and, one password that's. Alright. I don't use Safari extensions. There are that's not but I wanna you did me you you because you made me open up the settings app. I do wanna just this is the next thing I want people to tell us.

Jason Aten:

Uh-huh. Do you have apps on your iPhone just automatically update whenever they feel like they should? Or do you go into the app store, see what apps want to update and then update them manually essentially,

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

Because I subscribe to the Gruber method of let them accumulate. And then every week you kinda go in and you look to see what wants to be updated. And if you haven't used that app in, like, six months, not only do you not update it, you just delete the app. I just I I probably delete three apps a week.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. I do not do that. Maybe I should. I have mine auto update, which it up it auto updates a lot of the time. Sometimes Yeah.

Jason Aten:

I don't I don't ever want it to do that. I never wanna be surprised when I turn on my phone and I try to tap on something and say, hang on. I'm trying to download.

Stephen Robles:

I mean, usually it happens at night while your phone is charging. It's not usually I will say though, sometimes there's an update and it won't do it or you kinda have to, like, go to the App Store, go to the app, expand it, and then update, but anyway no. I have an auto update. Auto update the app. Let us know.

Stephen Robles:

Leave us your five star rating and review in Apple Podcast. Tell us, auto update apps or nah?

Jason Aten:

Or manual.

Stephen Robles:

That's what we will.

Jason Aten:

Or nah. Please.

Stephen Robles:

Or nah.

Jason Aten:

Just put nah.

Stephen Robles:

That's it. Alright. Apple and The UK. We have to talk about this. We covered it last week where The UK was trying to, secretly force Apple, and I say secretly because it was leaked through various backdoor means, but, ironically, I said backdoor.

Stephen Robles:

The UK wanted Apple to create a backdoor to iCloud data that is encrypted. That's so advanced data protection on your phone, they basically want a backdoor to get around that. And not only for The UK, but The UK was saying they want it for worldwide because, not not just UK users, but everywhere. So we talked last week and then a bunch of news came out after it. I think you predicted this.

Stephen Robles:

I think you said this, that Apple would just pull advanced data protection from The UK, and that's exactly what they did. So advanced data protection, you cannot toggle it on in if you're in The UK anymore. Didn't you didn't you

Jason Aten:

say that? Basically. Although, I I'm we and we'll talk about this. I'm not sure that that's going to be the final outcome of this. So

Stephen Robles:

Right. Probably likely not the final outcome. There's also an Apple Newsroom article where Apple goes on to say Apple can no longer offer advanced data protection in The United Kingdom to new users, and I think it means that if you already had it enabled, it's not like Apple can turn it off for you.

Jason Aten:

Well, that would literally be the backdoor. Think about that.

Stephen Robles:

That literally They

Jason Aten:

literally can't turn it off for you because, like, that's literally what they were asking them to be able to do is for apple to go in and decrypt all this stuff. But apple, if apple doesn't have a key, they can't disable it. However, they I'm sure that what they are going to do is to say none of your information will sync to iCloud anymore. If you don't turn the feature off, like you're gonna lose access to all of those services if you don't turn it off. And in fact, I think it says right there, UK users will begin in a period of time to disable the features to keep using their iCloud account.

Jason Aten:

So we're just, we're we're just gonna make, we're gonna, they're gonna force you, but Apple literally can't turn it off because that would be what The UK is asking. Like that's actually what they're asking for.

Stephen Robles:

Right? Because it would be thinking

Jason Aten:

about imagine like if they're like, so we're not going to build the backdoor, but what we will do is turn this feature off for all of you. And The UK would be like, literally, that's what we wanted you to do. Come on.

Stephen Robles:

They'd be like, cool.

Jason Aten:

Come on. Yeah. Sure. Come on.

Stephen Robles:

Sure. Go ahead and do that. So that's yeah. That was Apple's official statement. I'll put a link to that newsroom article.

Stephen Robles:

So stuff's happening behind the scenes so much so that nine to five Mac actually saw a letter, from the Trump director of Nash Trump's director of national intelligence, which is Tulsi Gabbard. She wrote a letter responding to senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and representative Andy Biggs of Arizona talking about this situation. And in this letter, Tulsi Gabbard is, again, saying, I'm aware of the press I'm reading from quoted nine to five Mac quoting the letter. I'm aware of the press reporting that The UK Home Secretary served Apple with a secret order directing the company to create a backdoor capability in its iCloud encryption to facilitate UK government access to any Apple iCloud users uploaded data. Later in the letter and in quoting the nine to five Mac article, which I'll link in our show notes, basically says, Tulsi Gabbard, my lawyers are working to provide a legal opinion on the implications of the reported UK demands.

Stephen Robles:

Upon initial review of The US and UK bilateral cloud act agreement, United Kingdom may not issue demands or data of US citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents, nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside The United States. The same is true for The US. Any information sharing between a government, any government, and private companies must be done in a manner that respects and protects The US law. So Pelosi Gabbard and the Trump administration going after The UK saying like, no, you can't do this. And maybe apropos, timely, whatever you wanna say, the prime minister of The UK, his name is Keir Starmer.

Jason Aten:

Starmer.

Stephen Robles:

Keir Starmer, will actually be, is set to visit the White House today as we record. That's The UK Prime Minister. Likely, this will be on the agenda. So it's actually, as Gruber says in his article which I'll include in the show notes as well, it's kind of nice to see The US stepping in to one of these matters unlike kind of what they do with the EU and the Digital Markets Act. The US is stepping in and saying like, maybe let's not let's not you can't do that.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because if the if the not specifically speaking about the current director of national intelligence, but I think that there was reporting that the Biden administration was aware that this was happening and did zero about it. It was in, so it was not until it actually became public that anybody did anything. And one of the things to think about is there's this coalition of major powers called the five eyes and they all share data. So The UK, The US, Australia is a part of it, maybe Canada.

Jason Aten:

I'm not sure who the other players are, but the point is if The UK can do this, essentially, The US can also access that information. And so there's a little bit of a, well, we would never do this, but we would benefit if somebody else did it kind of a thing. And so it's that it is not entirely surprising to me that the previous administration, regardless of politics, didn't make a huge stink about this when it wasn't made public because they would be a benefit to US Lawmakers if this would if if Apple had been forced to actually do this. And so it's only really become a thing now that it's public. Now I'm just gonna, we'll give people the benefit of the doubt that in the current administration, let's just pretend for a minute.

Jason Aten:

Like they really do think this is terrible and they think that apple should definitely not back down and they're gonna have their back in that case. I think you're right. Like, that's good. We need, that's one of the things we need the US government to do is to have the back of US companies when those US companies are standing up for principles. Right?

Stephen Robles:

Like And privacy and

Jason Aten:

data. Exactly. And so I and I especially think we should stand up for US companies when they're like, nah, y'all y'all can't get US citizens information just because you ask. Like, it doesn't matter how nice. We're just not gonna do that.

Jason Aten:

You're not you're not the US government. Like, Apple will follow the laws of the company of the countries that it operates in. It has to, like, it has to follow laws. It gets very complicated when those laws are contradictory, which is what happened in this case. Right?

Jason Aten:

The US says you can't do this. And The UK is like, no, you have to do it. I'm not sure that we've reached the end. You know, one of the one of the surprising things is how little outcry there was from people in The UK when they found out that their government wanted to do this. And I think Apple was counting on a lot more.

Jason Aten:

Okay. And the fact that there wasn't kinda makes me feel like that would encourage the UK gov because technically, what Apple did is not what The UK requires. They just turned off advanced data production, but that is not what The UK is asking for. The UK is asking for the ability to access information of anyone in the world just because they ask for it. And that is not that is super not what Apple did.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. That's not what it is. So I I would not be surprised if there's more to this where The UK is like, no. Like, we this is essential. We're gonna ask for it.

Jason Aten:

And if that happens, I think things get really interesting. Like, people stop working in The UK for Apple.

Stephen Robles:

That'd be wild. We're gonna see what happens. You said the five eyes. I have never heard of this before. Apparently, it is the thing.

Stephen Robles:

The five eyes, like eyeballs. Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council. It is Australia, Canada, New Zealand, The United Kingdom, and The United States.

Jason Aten:

I got four of the five. That's pretty pretty good. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Four to five of the five.

Jason Aten:

Sorry, New Zealand.

Stephen Robles:

I did not I had never heard of that. Five eyes. Okay. Well, we're gonna keep on I

Jason Aten:

did not watch slow horses?

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna get into this in the next episode, Jason. I'm just I'm

Jason Aten:

just trying to pull the thread all the way through.

Stephen Robles:

You get the threads annotated throughout the episode. That was very good. I I have I have not, basically. Anyway It's

Jason Aten:

better than that.

Stephen Robles:

A couple of the quick stories. Sorry. But, yeah, before we get before we get to, personal tech of the bonus episode, Apple's gonna spend $500,000,000,000 in The US over the next four years building teams and facilities to expand their operations in Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington. It includes a new factory in Texas doubling The US Advanced Manufacturing Fund. So basically, Apple's gonna spend a bunch of money here in The US building facilities and hiring teams to do more hardware stuff in The United States.

Stephen Robles:

I think this picture is amazing because it's a guy wearing AirPods Max, working on the line in this Apple factory. I wanna know if that's the lightning or USB c version. That's what I wanna know. That's what I wanna know. I can't tell by the color of this picture.

Jason Aten:

I can't even tell if that's supposed to be white and it's just dingy or if those are

Stephen Robles:

the mint green ones. I think it's the mint green ones. I will say what was kind of interesting about this is Trump in some video from the Oval Office or something basically like said this before Apple announced it and he was like, yeah Tim Cook they're gonna spend billions billions of dollars on whatever And then Apple basically had to, like, put this news article out. I probably think quickly because it was like, okay. Well, Trump just announced this for us.

Stephen Robles:

So let's yeah. Anyway.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Well, and just to also be clear, Apple had already committed something like $430,000,000,000 over the next period of time. So I just wanna be clear. This is not 500 new new billion dollars, 5 5 hundred billion new dollars. This is just they're, like, expanding some of what they had already committed to do.

Jason Aten:

And I think the point, like the real thing that they did is they said, we're gonna hire 20,000 employees over the next few years.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

I don't know if there's any specific significance to the whole four years thing. I mean, like, it seems like that's a, that's a period of time to which the government of the United States might care a lot about. And so do all these things you can now. I'm especially interested about what they're they're gonna do some stuff in Detroit. So I'm looking forward to hopefully trying to go see what they're doing in Detroit.

Jason Aten:

They're gonna build sort of like an innovation campus type thing. So

Stephen Robles:

Apple build build one of your battery station type things in Miami. Do do something in Florida. So I can, you know, go somewhere.

Jason Aten:

You have a reason to go to places other than just the biophilic zone on top of the Apple Store. Did I even get the word right?

Stephen Robles:

I think that's Oh, yeah. Biophilic. Bi biolithic. It's either biolithic or biophilic. I think it's biophilic.

Stephen Robles:

Anyway, I wanted to shout out MacRumors. Show user articles a lot mentioned a lot. They turned 25 years old. They were coincidentally founded on February 24, which is also Steve Jobs' birthday, but, in February, the year February. So they are 25 years old.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And that's the same time they last updated the design of the homepage. I'm just kidding. I like MacRumors a lot.

Stephen Robles:

That is that is underhanded.

Jason Aten:

I love MacRumors, but it is too easy of a joke because, like, it does their website does still look 24 years old 25 years old, just to be honest.

Stephen Robles:

Fair enough. Not her I'm sure there are plenty of people visiting it. I will say one of the coolest features of the MacRumors website, design or not, their buyer's guide, which tells you how many days it's been since I do

Jason Aten:

like that.

Stephen Robles:

The first.

Jason Aten:

That is pretty

Stephen Robles:

neat. Although, they're saying the iPhone 16 they must do it since the announcement, not the release, because they're saying days since last release, the iPhone 16 e is six days, although it's only publicly available on the tomorrow. There should be negative one days, but I'll let it slide. I'll let it slide. Let's let's let's find the oldest so what they do is on this page, which I'll link to it in the show notes, you can basically go to any device in Apple's lineup, and they'll tell you, like, should you buy it?

Stephen Robles:

So, like, the base model iPad. They have a caution warning because it might be approaching the end of cycle because the last time it was updated was eight hundred sixty three days ago, which I think is

Jason Aten:

Check out the Pro Display XDR.

Stephen Robles:

Alright. So let's go on.

Jason Aten:

Which is clearly the oldest thing in the lineup. Right?

Stephen Robles:

This is

Jason Aten:

There can't there can't be anything older. It'd be

Stephen Robles:

under 15.

Jason Aten:

Would it be under watch other?

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. I was just trying to see. Hold on. The AirPods, the HomePod mini, almost 1,600 days old.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. But, I mean That's

Stephen Robles:

the last time that was the I don't know if they have that.

Jason Aten:

They don't even have it on there.

Stephen Robles:

They don't even have it. They have the Macs. They don't have the displays on here. Mac rumors if anybody from Mac rumors is listening where's where's the displays? You got to put the displays on here that's that's the oldest stuff.

Stephen Robles:

Anyway, it says Apple TV don't buy. I bet Chad GPT can talk. Okay. Yeah. You asked Chad GPT let's find out.

Stephen Robles:

The Apple TV says don't buy because that's eight hundred sixty three days old. Anyway, this is a fun page to play around with. You can see how long Apple's been Apple Vision Pro why does it say just updated? It says days since last release four hundred five days ago. I don't know, I take issue with that Vision Pro, rating as well.

Jason Aten:

Alright. One thousand nine hundred and six days since the Pro Display XDR came out.

Stephen Robles:

Is that that was more than the HomePod Mini round. HomePod Mini was 67.

Jason Aten:

It was more.

Stephen Robles:

It was more. Anyway, it's

Jason Aten:

a fun it's a fun

Stephen Robles:

little game here, but anyway, congrats, MacRumors. Twenty five years. Let's talk about personal tech. Maybe tell me about this Tesla charging station real quick, and then we can talk about Chat GPT deep research.

Jason Aten:

Oh, yeah. So so we were in Texas, for soccer in the cold. It was very cold, and we were in Texas. Those two things are seemingly unrelated. But, anyway, we, we drove up to Waco.

Jason Aten:

We are we are in Austin. We drove up to Waco because my wife really wanted to see the silos. Are you familiar with the silos? Uh-huh. You know the

Stephen Robles:

Like the Apple TV plus show?

Jason Aten:

Nope. The fixer upper show from HGTV, Chip and Joining Gaines have this whole thing in Waco. Yeah. We she wanted to see it. So we drove up there.

Jason Aten:

On the way home, we had to stop. Well, actually, we so we were really excited to see the silos, and then we were just as excited to go to a Buc ee's because we'd never been to one before. So we stopped, got gas. Anyway, you go in. It's bizarre.

Jason Aten:

But this the real

Stephen Robles:

Nice bathrooms, though. That that's the selling.

Jason Aten:

Do yes. Bath bathrooms that mom would love is, I think, their tagline.

Stephen Robles:

They're the tagline. Did you wait. Did you get any, like, food items?

Jason Aten:

Because it now buy anything.

Stephen Robles:

The first time you walk in I've been to, like, two Buc ee's now in the recent years. It was my first time a couple years ago. Walking into a Buc ee's is the most one of the most overwhelming experiences.

Jason Aten:

It was

Stephen Robles:

Always a thousand people.

Jason Aten:

It was Always bigger than a Walmart, and it had more stuff in it than a Hobby Lobby. It was just completely insane. It was Insane. And it had probably a I don't know. This is probably not true, but it seemed to have at least 200 gas stalls.

Jason Aten:

It was, like, two towers, like,

Stephen Robles:

deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

It was, like, insane. But we noticed that wrapped all the way around the edge of this parking lot were supercharger stalls. There are 68 of them. It's the by far largest supercharger I've ever seen. Most of them, I believe, are version three supercharger stalls, which are like the max of two fifty kilowatts.

Jason Aten:

I think that's the case. Or 150. I don't know. It doesn't matter. But then you get to the end and they have a bunch of version fours, which I've never charged on it for those are still version three.

Jason Aten:

Like, it's still going. We're like, this is we weren't even driving a Tesla. I mean, we have a Tesla, but we were driving a rental car.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And, you it keeps going. It's still going. And if you're listening, this is not all that interesting, but there is just a ton of them. And then there's a version fours, which are the ones that charge like three twenty five kilowatts or something like that, which I would never use because my car doesn't charge that fast. And then there were still even after that which is not on this video a bunch of like Mercedes charge point chargers or whatever that are like CCS or something like that.

Jason Aten:

It was it was amazing. Like I was like wow like this place is like and now they do have to they have to keep all of the supercharger stalls far away from the gasoline. Right? Because, like

Stephen Robles:

That is true.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Right. Right. Anyway.

Stephen Robles:

Because, yeah, it says this is like the website for that. The 68 superchargers up to 325 kilowatts.

Jason Aten:

So those are those version fours. It was pretty amazing. So that was exciting. I don't know. Most of our listeners probably don't care, but it it was pretty cool.

Jason Aten:

Like, if you're a person I've been to a lot of superchargers. Right? Because we drive a Tesla and it is kind of fun to see. And a lot of times superchargers are tucked away and like actually Tesla does a pretty good job, but they're like, they're just, you know, you might find one at a grocery store, you might find one at whatever, but like this, like it was buckies. You could spend all day there if you had to.

Stephen Robles:

You could. You could. Your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Most I think all the superchargers I've ever done here in Florida, there've been a Wawa gas station.

Jason Aten:

Okay.

Stephen Robles:

That's where all the superchargers are. Okay. They're at all the Wawa's.

Jason Aten:

And up here, they're at Meijer, which is a grocery store chain up here. So, like, they have a lot of them. So which is nice because you even if there aren't restaurants around, you can just walk into the Meijer. So

Stephen Robles:

Right. There you go. Oh, and there's one also by Mellow Mushroom. It's a restaurant. I don't know

Jason Aten:

if you've ever heard

Stephen Robles:

of that.

Jason Aten:

That sounds like a legalized drug facility. No.

Stephen Robles:

No. It's a pizza

Jason Aten:

place. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

It's a pizza pizza place, Mellow Mushroom. But, anyway, the the last news and then slash personal tech is that so Deep Research, which was previously exclusive to the Pro ChatGPT plan, which was $200 a month, OpenAI announced it's going to be available on the plus plans as well. You get 10 Deep Research queries per month on the plus plan. If you were on the pro, $200 a month, then you are raising the monthly limit to 120 deep research queries per month. But you've been using the deep research?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. So the day before they announced this, I upgraded to the $200 subscription. Really?

Stephen Robles:

I was gonna just

Jason Aten:

do it for a month to try this out. Like, I'm I'm not gonna keep paying $200 a month. And then the next day, they made it available on the on the plus. I'm like, are you kidding me? And since I subscribed up through the, through the app and the, there's no way to get a refund.

Jason Aten:

There's just, I'm out of luck.

Stephen Robles:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Yeah. But I will tell you if you have the chat GBT plus, which is the $20 a month plan, I highly recommend you not use this because you will instantly start paying $200 a month. Like it is that good.

Stephen Robles:

It's that

Jason Aten:

you will want to use it, a % of the time. I, this week has been kind of chaotic because of the Alexa stuff. Also Nvidia head earnings this week. There were several other things that happened. And so I mentioned earlier that, that these Alexa event was not streamed.

Jason Aten:

Okay. So catching up on all of the different things is kind of crazy. So I just asked Chad GPTs deep research and I said, research what Amazon announced at its Alexa event today. And this was probably forty five minutes after like the news coverage stopped, right? Like it was pretty, pretty recent explain the product services and features of each that were announced, then find analysis from respective news sites, summarize the reporting, create a comprehensive briefing so that I can do the research.

Jason Aten:

And it gave me, like, 3,500 words of everything that was announced. All of the information in each paragraph of information has links to all of those sites, like just constant sources of stuff. So I knew exactly where to go to find all of the best information. I will say Chad GPT sources that it prefers are tiny bit questionable compared to Gemini's deep research, which is like you get the results from all the sites that you expect to get. I got some results from places like netdigs.com.

Jason Aten:

I don't know what that is.

Stephen Robles:

What in the world?

Jason Aten:

But then there's, like but usually what those what I found those sources were are, like Yeah. They are kind of like the equivalent of how in the Apple ecosystem, there's, like, five websites that are entirely just based on reporting what Mark Gurman reports in Bloomberg. So all of these articles just linked to, like, Engadget or The Verge or whatever. So I was able to easily find the information. That's kinda weird.

Jason Aten:

It should just link to those, but the information, super solid. I did the same thing last night because Nvidia announced its earnings, and I was wanted to think about writing something, but I was headed to soccer practice. Didn't have time to read a bunch of stuff. And I just said, give me a comprehensive report on Nvidia's earnings. And I said it asked me, like, what are some sources that you wanna refer to, which I wish the other one had done that.

Jason Aten:

But I'm like CNBC, Bloomberg, New York times, Wall Street journal. And it did. It gave me a full summary. And in this case, I didn't end up writing the article. But what I did do is go through this and compare it to like, I just went to CNBC's website and I'm like, does it all match?

Jason Aten:

And it did, and it was great. And it's to me, for someone like me who my livelihood is I have to read things and learn things fast, and then I have to write about them. This is like having a research assistant.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. That's wild. So have you tried telling it what sources to prefer in your prompt? And will it

Jason Aten:

Yes. You don't

Stephen Robles:

have to do it now because

Jason Aten:

I Yeah. So in the Alexa one, I did tell it, like, look for these places. And so it kind of did a roundabout way. I think what it was doing is it's like, I see that this article linked to the actually, like, Techmeme came up a bunch of times, but that's because Techmeme had the articles.

Stephen Robles:

Aggregate.

Jason Aten:

I'm fine with Techmeme being one of the sources that it responds to. Some of these other ones, I'm like, you should have just given me the thing it's linking to. That was kinda weird, especially because Vox Media has a deal with chat g p t. Like, just send me to the sites. Like

Stephen Robles:

I wonder I wonder I might try it out. I wonder if you could say, like, only use these websites as sources, and then you can list, like, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post or whatever. Curious

Jason Aten:

Yeah. If, if

Stephen Robles:

you could do that. But that's interesting. I'm gonna have to try it. I will say, man, I'm looking at the ChatJeev Team Mac app now. It is becoming an impressive array of options you have when you start talking to ChatJPT because you have you know, upload a file, image, search the web.

Stephen Robles:

You also have ChatJPT search. You have the deep research. There's something here that I was not aware of that there's like a works with section and there's like Notion is there and apparently, like, it'll work with Mac apps. I'm not sure what I guess you can, like, pop up ChatGPT within apps like Xcode. That's part of that.

Stephen Robles:

This is pretty wild.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. It is pretty cool. And it's also I I think I I mean it sincerely that if you, like, if you use this a bunch, you're gonna seriously be thinking, it might actually be be worse because you would go if you use it like 10 is just not enough. It's enough to play with it. No.

Jason Aten:

Yeah you're gonna I'm gonna do this every day.

Stephen Robles:

Like how how how long because it says it might take like up to thirty minutes to generate it. How long has been your experience?

Jason Aten:

I would say that the Nvidia one, it probably took eight to ten minutes. The Alexa one came back and asked me a couple different questions, and I think that was because it was so recent. And I wanted to know, like, which event are we talking about. So I had to give us a couple follow-up, which I appreciate that it asked me follow-up questions. Right?

Jason Aten:

And I could tell it. Actually, Nvidia did the same thing. It's like, which which earnings results do you want? And it gave me, like, three suggestions. And I'm like, actually, what I want is the q four two thousand and five fiscal year.

Jason Aten:

It's like, great. And I'll do that. So, like, it it does a good job of that, but and they're probably anywhere between five and ten minutes. I don't think any of them took longer, which is about the same as Gemini. It does give you the ability to see, like, it'll it'll show you a progress bar that's working and you can click details and it starts to show you, like, here's the sites I'm looking at.

Jason Aten:

Here's what I'm doing. You can see all that work. I do like the interface of the Gemini better because it actually then gives you the result, whatever the result is. And then it actually just shows you all the links completely, like, as a, like, an appendix or what do they call it? Like, a bibliography kind of thing.

Jason Aten:

Like, it just lists them all, and you can just start clicking on them. But the results from CHaGPT, I think, are far superior right now.

Stephen Robles:

Interesting. So Interesting. Now if you do follow-up questions within a deep research prompt, those don't count against your, like, limit per month.

Jason Aten:

Oh, that's a great question and I have no idea. I think the research is no. Because I think then you're just it's just Chachapiti. Right? You're just

Stephen Robles:

Chachapiti referring to itself.

Jason Aten:

Four o ing whatever you came up with. Right.

Stephen Robles:

Four o ing.

Jason Aten:

Is that a verb? Can you say

Stephen Robles:

that in my life? Yeah. That's a four o ing. That's funny. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

That well, that's fascinating. I've yet to try deep research. Now I'm gonna try it on something and see, I've actually been try I've been building this one shortcut for the last three days trying to get it to work and I've been like down a rabbit hole of like Python and so I've been asking you Python things and it's been I've been sending it the errors, but I'll also have ChatGPT, like, I'll ask it, like, help me build this shortcut. And I would say, like, 80% of the time, it's really good at doing that. It tells me what actions to use.

Stephen Robles:

A lot of times I'm using API things and so I use the get contents of URL shortcuts action and it tells me what to put in, like, the header categories. Like, it does a good job with that and then some there was one time it was like we'll use the something something mail action and so I'm like I don't think that's an action and so I'll search and I'm like that's not an action. I'll go back to chat g p t and I'll say that's not an action in shortcuts, what else can I use? And chat g p t will be like you're right. That's not a shortcuts action.

Jason Aten:

Right.

Stephen Robles:

Instead, you should and I'm like, ChatChippy Tea. Come on. Like But I

Jason Aten:

mean, it is amazing. I asked it, make me an Apple script that I can use. And what it does is it opens an audio file, puts it into whisper transcription, transcribes the audio file, copies the transcript, opens ChatGPT in a browser, pastes it with a prompt, and then closes the browser because I don't wanna be interacting with ChatGPT in the browser and opens the ChatGPT Mac app and get and then I have the result right in front of me. And and I just I literally said do this thing for me. Actually, the part with the browser I had to, like, finesse because it what was happening is I wanted it to just open the chat g p t app on the mac.

Jason Aten:

And for some reason, I don't maybe it's a sandbox app, and it just wouldn't do it. Like, I I just couldn't figure it out. So I was like, fine. Do it in the browser, then close the browser, and then open the Mac app. I'm not doing any steps.

Jason Aten:

It just does and all these screen flash in front of me. I and it literally said, here you go. Copy this in open script editor, paste it Yeah. And then you're good to go. And I'm like

Stephen Robles:

It's it is it is wild. I even think, Parker Ortolani, he was saying, like, he's he's, I think, releasing an app, and he's like, chat to be or, like, these large language models basically makes it made him a developer. Yeah. And it's like it is pretty it is pretty amazing. Before we get to our bonus episode where I want to talk about Apple TV plus content, I will I will have my sportsball story here, I'll put it here.

Jason Aten:

Okay.

Stephen Robles:

I went to a sportsball game real quick.

Jason Aten:

Do you know which type of sports ball you went to?

Stephen Robles:

Listen, I'm not I'm not a total, troglodyte or whatever. Like, it was my my two boys were actually dancing in a halftime show for an NBA Orlando Magic game. So it was pretty it was really fun. We got to see the game. They danced the halftime show.

Stephen Robles:

So I I went to the game. I went to the Kia Center in Orlando, which is, you know, it was a newer stadium, and I think it was built in the last decade or whatever. But, Jason, I I talked to Nate about this in Movies on the Side, so I won't belabor it here. You can listen to that episode, but I don't I haven't it hasn't come out yet. So if you're wondering why you haven't seen it yet, it's because I have to edit that episode.

Stephen Robles:

But I do not understand how anyone can withstand going to those live sports games more than, like, once a year. The amount of people that has to, like, funnel through the tiniest aperture of a small security thing and then leaving a game, like, the amount that everyone has to squeeze through the like, there's one escalator in the arena that goes from the Second Floor down. And so it's just this mass of people, like, Times Square on New Year's Eve trying to get down one escalator and I'm like, what's the weight capacity of this escalator because there's 1,000 people on it right now and it seems a little, you know. So that I mean, sitting there watching the game, I can enjoy that as much as I make fun of sports ball. Like, it's fun watching a a live basketball game and seeing making the plays or whatever.

Stephen Robles:

Apparently, the Washington Wizards are not a good basketball team right now as Nate informed me, and so maybe it wasn't that good of a game anyway. But anyway, it was fine. All I will say is after experiencing that, if somehow Apple can make Apple Vision Pro a real, like, immersive watch an NBA game courtside from the comfort of your own home, and you don't have to deal with all that craziness trying to get into and out of an arena to watch a game, I totally get how that would be a huge selling feature. And maybe people love it. Maybe people love just being sardined with a thousand other people on an escalator.

Stephen Robles:

But I do imagine there's another segment of people that's like, if I could watch and it feel like I'm sitting courtside but I am at home and I can literally get up and go to the bathroom whenever I want and it's 10 feet away instead of three floors away, Like, that would be compelling. So anyway, I think I think I see that. Like, that would be that would be cool.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I think it would be cool. I don't know if it'd be the best way to experience it because there are three types of people who go to sporting events like this, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

Okay.

Jason Aten:

There are people who just who go to the sporting events with a group of people all the time. Like, we have friends who have season tickets to Michigan State basketball, and it's the same six people that go all the time. Right? The game is amazing, but it's like the social thing they do with that group of people. Right?

Jason Aten:

Then there are people who are, like, diehard fans, and they just love the sport so much that they wanna be there in person. Fair. Right? And then the third group are, like, kind of you fit into that category when you went to the game. It's like, no.

Jason Aten:

Like, I have a reason to come to this particular game. Like, we often for Christmas, we'll buy basketball tickets for, like, my father-in-law. That kind of thing is like in Right. And so it's you know? Or when I've take we've taken our our kids at different we don't take them all because there's four of them, so it's expensive.

Jason Aten:

But we've taken different numbers of them at different times to things because for them, it's an experience, and it's really, really, like, great. Which of those people, though, do you think would be better served by the game on division pro? I don't think any of them.

Stephen Robles:

So I'm gonna I'm gonna add a fourth group to your diorama there and say my father-in-law fits into a fourth group where he is an Uber sports fan that's literally every night just watches hours of sports.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. But that's not one of those groups. I'm talking about the people that were in that room.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. Those those groups as you stated no. None none of them would benefit from Applevision Pro.

Stephen Robles:

But from the Uber Sports fans who 99% of the time watch sports from home, but are also super into it, like, that is their thing, they would be able to maybe have a cool experience in a headset. And so probably the smallest of all those groups, like the social aspect, totally get, the once a year go for the experience. However, someone who just loves to watch sports, if you could make that watching sports feel a little bit more like being at the sports, I think that's that could be that could be compelling.

Jason Aten:

Maybe. But I think for most of those people, because we probably fit into that category, we love to watch, like, Michigan State basketball. We love to watch the lions play football. Whatever. We like, people who just love to watch sports would have watched on the humane AI pin with the laser projector.

Jason Aten:

They don't care. Like, they just wanna watch the game. And honestly, if you're used that's if we did headlines, there you go. Now if if we if you're used to watching a particular type of sport on your 65 or 75 inch television, it's actually disorienting to watch it in person because you're like, you don't get the replays in front of you. You can't pause it.

Jason Aten:

You can't do those things. So for you, you're just like, I actually just want my my 16 by nine format. So I don't know. Like, I I do think it would be cool. I'm just not sure who the real market for that is, and I don't know how you'd they'd be able to monetize it well enough to make it work.

Stephen Robles:

I mean, if yeah. I mean, part of NBA League Pass, if there was, like, a higher tier for immersive games or whatever maybe that but Alright. Listen sport if anybody can monetize anything, the sports ball people will be able to monetize.

Jason Aten:

They'll figure it out.

Stephen Robles:

They'll they'll figure it out. So alright. I wanna talk about Apple TV plus original shows and ranking them because Lewis Tool had a had a ranking we wanna talk about. So listen, before we go, leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You can tell us whether or not you have, what was it in the oh, do you have apps auto updating or not Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

On your iPhone?

Jason Aten:

That's probably not interesting to anybody else, but I'm just curious.

Stephen Robles:

The other guy's curious. You can also leave all the other things, battery percentage, dots on on your Mac, all of that kind of stuff, and that helps get to back to five stars. And if you wanna support the show, we have a sponsor next week, but then we have some openings later. If you're a developer, you know, we had someone sponsor the show last week who was developer, the Virtual Boy. That Virtual Boy, made the, BentoCraft app.

Stephen Robles:

So we'd love to hear from you, but also you can support the show and then you get access to the bonus episodes and ad free versions of shows in the future. So thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. We'll catch you next time.

Creators and Guests

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