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OpenAI Social Network, iPadOS 19 to FINALLY Transform iPad, Apple Ads Are Getting Weird

/ 01:21:38/E71 Download MP3
Stephen Robles:

And remember, an elephant never forgets. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. This week, is iPadOS 19 finally gonna make the iPad more Mac like? Plus, OpenAI is considering building a social network. ChatGPT 4.1 was announced.

Stephen Robles:

New video generations in Google's AI tools. Apple Ads is now a thing. Where is that gonna go? And FTC versus Meta, some things that have come out in the court case. Meta doesn't know how to redact their own documents.

Stephen Robles:

This episode is brought to you by 1Password, and you, the members who support us directly, I'm one of your host, Steven Robles. And joining me, as always, is my good friend, Jason Ayton. How's it going, Jason?

Jason Aten:

It's good. I'm dealing with a rogue hard drive that's making loud noises right now, so I'm I'm trying to unmount it and unplug it because all of a

Stephen Robles:

sudden I'm like, what? Why is

Jason Aten:

a leaf blower in my office? What is happening right now?

Stephen Robles:

I will say I finally have run into the issue where if I right click a drive that's on my desktop, the eject and erase is right next to each We

Jason Aten:

had this conversation. I think it's really We did.

Stephen Robles:

And I I hide my drives on my Mac Studio, so I didn't have that issue. But on my MacBook Air, I have not hidden them. And every time I go to eject them, I'm like, oh, I might erase it by accident, which is not a good feature.

Jason Aten:

And, yes, before you all respond, I know there's, like, multiple steps to that, but I still think it's a real bad thing to put those things next to each other.

Stephen Robles:

It's just scary.

Jason Aten:

Because they also both start with the same letter.

Stephen Robles:

Exact yeah. E race, e anyway. Do you know where the, the quote was from? It was a little vague, but it says, and remember an elephant never forgets. You know what movie that might be from?

Jason Aten:

I don't know. I mean, elephant. What how many movies do I know that have elephants in them? There's Dumbo, but I don't think the dumb I don't think it's Dumbo. No?

Jason Aten:

Is it a Disney movie?

Stephen Robles:

Yes. Yes, it is.

Jason Aten:

Jungle Book?

Stephen Robles:

Show's over. Yes. It's the Jungle Book.

Jason Aten:

I was

Stephen Robles:

using that. If you

Jason Aten:

had not said that it was a Disney movie, was gonna guess Jumanji, but I don't know why. No.

Stephen Robles:

No. You get this is ridiculous. Jason's your your percentage win on this is ridiculous.

Jason Aten:

I have four children. I have seen all the Disney movies all the time.

Stephen Robles:

I mean, so have I. But I mean, that's that's pretty impressive. Yes. It was from the Jungle Book. Alright.

Stephen Robles:

We have some five star review shout outs. Mikhail Klimovich from Czech Republic. Thank you for that. Tristan James from The USA and Dylan Wade all gave us five star reviews in Apple Podcast. We are a solid 4.9 star podcast here in The US, so thank you all.

Stephen Robles:

Maybe one day, maybe one day, we'll get to one star. Maybe when we have a thousand reviews in Apple Podcasts, which is which is doable if everyone were to review us in Apple Podcasts. We're just throwing it out there. We have some exciting news this week. We're gonna talk about all the AI stuff, Gonna talk about Apple and iPadOS 19.

Stephen Robles:

Two housekeeping things. One, if you wanna get an ad free version of this show and our bonus episodes, which come out every week, we have a new link, which gets you there even faster. You can go to join.primarytech.fm. I set up that subdomain yesterday. You're welcome.

Stephen Robles:

Just Awesome. Run run to that and support this. We were looking at the numbers earlier, and there's there's a bunch of you that support us, we really appreciate it. And would encourage you, I'm gonna put a link in the show notes directly to a poll that's gonna be in our circle community. And this poll is gonna be asking what additional benefits might you enjoy from a primary technology paid membership.

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna throw out some ideas in that poll. And Jason and I were just talking before the show, and there's gonna be some great benefits. And, you know, just let us know. Let us know what you would like to see, read, hear, and that's gonna help, I don't know, point us in the direction to go because we want build this thing. We wanna offer more content, capital c.

Stephen Robles:

I'm not I'm still not crazy about using that word, but that's what it is, right? We make content.

Jason Aten:

I mean, does have a bad rap, but literally that's what it is.

Stephen Robles:

That's literally zero it is. Okay. I wanna talk about OpenAI and all the social network stuff, but one quick question. I'm curious. What phone case are you using right now?

Jason Aten:

At this very moment?

Stephen Robles:

At this very well, you know, the one that you're using every day during the

Jason Aten:

I have gone back to I go back and forth between the suitie back and the nomad leather

Stephen Robles:

Nomad leather back? Case. Oh, the nomad leather case.

Jason Aten:

No. I the nomad leather back, I will never use again because it started breaking in weird play ways.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. I don't I don't like that one. I I was curious because I'd been using the Ryan London leather case has a wonderful patina on it right now.

Jason Aten:

It's the grossest thing I've

Stephen Robles:

ever seen. Just I wanted to show that on camera. But anyway, I I was curious because I also have gone back to

Jason Aten:

the

Stephen Robles:

You

Jason Aten:

you copied mine.

Stephen Robles:

I had this first. I had these backs first. This is the Souti I made a whole video about it.

Jason Aten:

Anyway, I

Stephen Robles:

went back to the Souti back as well, and I enjoy it. I think it's a nice compromise between the two. Although I was at a concert the other day, one of my wife's orchestra concerts. I had this instead of my Ryan Linden case, and the phone slid out of my hand. And the floor was concrete, and there was a slope.

Stephen Robles:

And so my phone just slid two rows forward and hit some lady's foot, which she graciously picked it up and gave it to me. But I did yeah. Don't think you could see it on camera, but there is a slight crack now all the way up here in the top corner. I don't know if you can you can't even see it on camera.

Jason Aten:

We can just see your fingernails. That's it, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

Sorry. I I tried to manicure them earlier, but anyway, there's there's a slight crack. Definitely not enough for apple care, which that was my other maybe we should say this for a bonus episode, but, like, what level of cracking do you then just?

Jason Aten:

I don't know. But mine, because of that, like, you can see that nice scratching is happening. And I think it's because I think it's just because of slide like, not having a a lip Bottom lip. Yeah. With a case at the top or bottom that is because I have the same thing at the very top exact like, you can't

Stephen Robles:

tell What is it rubbing on? On.

Jason Aten:

I don't just my jeans, I guess. I don't know. Like, right there at the top. See all that scratchiness? Yeah.

Jason Aten:

So I've been tempted to just throw it out of the car window a couple times and see why.

Stephen Robles:

Which when I'm not actually Apple, not actually.

Jason Aten:

I don't know how this screen shattered.

Stephen Robles:

Listen.

Jason Aten:

I have no information.

Stephen Robles:

It was dropped. You just have to say it dropped. You don't know whether or not it on purpose

Jason Aten:

or It's true. If you have AppleCare Plus, they will take your $29 and replace that screen as many times.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I don't yeah.

Jason Aten:

But Except for when it's scratched.

Stephen Robles:

Exactly. Yeah. If it's just a minor scratch, they won't do it anymore. But, anyway

Jason Aten:

This is more than minor. Actually, I'm kinda hoping it scratches a little bit more because then it won't have to drop it. Because if it were to interfere with face ID, I think they would replace it.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, yeah. A %.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. So I'll be yeah.

Stephen Robles:

What's

Jason Aten:

the Hang on. Let me get a key real quick and see

Stephen Robles:

what I can do. Just hammer and nail it. Just right in the middle. Alright. There was a bunch of AI news that we have talk about.

Stephen Robles:

I think the biggest news

Jason Aten:

Do you mean the news was generated by AI?

Stephen Robles:

Or No. No. No.

Jason Aten:

Just just checking.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. OpenAI. This was a big scoop. Kylie Robinson, who she scooped a bunch of AI stuff this past year for The Verge.

Stephen Robles:

I think she just joined The Verge last year, and then she announced she's leaving. Kylie Robinson, she didn't say where she's going, but she's leaving The Verge already. So this is, like, her last scoop, I guess, on staff. But OpenAI is building a social network. Apparently, Sam Altman, the CEO, has been giving, like I don't know if it's test builds or just giving previews to people asking for their feedback around Silicon Valley.

Stephen Robles:

And this was actually something that he teased on X saying, oh, we should just build a social network after Elon Musk, you know, merged XAI and and X. So I think this is fascinating. I'm curious what you think a social network by OpenAI would actually look like. I do think there could be some benefits, But this is also gonna put OpenAI in direct competition with X, where you have X and XAI, now actually one company. You could have ChatGPT and then whatever the social network is called.

Stephen Robles:

Do we need another social network? I don't know. But I think it's could be interesting. So I don't know. What do you what do you think this could look like, or what what would be the benefit of it?

Jason Aten:

There are literally no benefits.

Stephen Robles:

There this I I don't know about that. Now they said it

Jason Aten:

could be Yes. Because what we really need in the world right now is another social network. Come on.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No. I okay.

Jason Aten:

What space would this fill other than a place for people to more quickly dump their AI generated garbage? I mean, right now, it's a little complicated because you have to copy and paste the garbage from ChatGPT into X or threads or Blue Sky. This would be more convenient because they could just integrate, you know, a button that says post slop to OpenAI.x or whatever. Like, I mean, what I don't understand what we are not we are no longer in the phase of I understand why they would wanna do it because it's a whole bunch more content they can use to train stuff. Like, great.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Totally makes sense. I don't under like, we are no longer in the phase of humanity when we need new social networks. Am I wrong?

Stephen Robles:

I'm gonna play reverse devil's advocate, I guess.

Jason Aten:

So you agree with me?

Stephen Robles:

No. Oh, right. No. So just devil's advocate.

Jason Aten:

Okay.

Stephen Robles:

So I do not think we need another, like, feed based short form text or image social network for sure. But and this is gonna come up in our personal tech segment. We're gonna have, like, a lightning round personal tech. I have talked to several people just this week who I would not have thought used ChatGPT to the extent that they do, and they just, like, just power users, just using it all the time. And I don't know if you remember when the custom GPTs launched two years ago.

Stephen Robles:

I'm not sure when that was. There was a moment where everybody was, like, building custom GPTs and then wanting to share them. They'll share their links. There's a custom GPT store. And now, even recently, last couple nights ago, I was telling somebody about Deep Research.

Stephen Robles:

You now converted me to believing Deep Research is amazing. And so now I'm trying to tell other people. So it's passing it on. And this person had never used deep research, but they use ChatGPT all the time. And so I did a prompt, and I was going to send it to them to show here's what it can do.

Stephen Robles:

I didn't realize you can actually there's a share button on the prompt. Like, when when you do something and you have all the ChatGPT gives you all the stuff, you can literally hit a share button and share a link to that conversation. And so in that moment, I was like, you know, it might be interesting if people wanted to share their prompts or different results they got from ChatGPT that were actually good or, like, the action figure meme that has happened in the last week where everyone's generating generating an image of themselves, packages, action figure. Full disclosure, I did it, and I didn't like what it looked like, so I stopped. I didn't do it.

Stephen Robles:

I didn't post it. But something like that, you see it, and you're like, well, I could go try to find the prompt to make myself into an action figure. Or if there was a social type feed or some place where you can go like, oh, here's the prompts that everybody's using to make these. Let me start a conversation in my own ChatJPT using this thing. Maybe there could be some kind of communal sharing whatever that's not necessarily a social network, but almost more like a Reddit ish, you know, people posting prompts and results.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know. That's the only thing I thought of.

Jason Aten:

If only there was, like, a site like Reddit Listen. Where people could share that sort of things.

Stephen Robles:

Wait. Be the new Reddit of

Jason Aten:

I don't under yeah. I don't think that I just like, I know why this is attractive to OpenAI.

Stephen Robles:

Sure.

Jason Aten:

I just don't understand why they I mean, other than a hedge like, so what probably happens is companies look at and in in JEDGPT's case, this is almost certainly true. If your growth engine is powered by something like, say, x or Twitter at the time, right, then you and that's where you find many of your users. They come to you through these distribution channels, and suddenly that distribution channel has its own competitor, which means that you are less likely to be able to get the same kind of future growth from that, you think, well then I need to create that. And I feel like that ignores the fact that you're talking about a social platform that has hundreds of millions of users,

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

Where people are already doing this, you cannot recreate that from scratch. Like, ChatGPT was the fastest growing consumer product tech product ever. Right? Zero to 100,000,000.

Stephen Robles:

But they do have the user base. That's the thing. Like, the install base for ChatGPT, it's been, like, the number one app in the app stores for weeks or months or whatever. And so when it comes to hundreds of millions of users, like, they actually already have that. And if, like, just having the ChatGPT account now means, like, there's now a social tab in your ChatGPT app, Like, they have the users.

Jason Aten:

Sure. And they have users for a thing that is not like the other thing. Right? True. True.

Jason Aten:

There are, like, other apps that might be really highly downloaded that are also not going to translate very well to becoming a social app.

Stephen Robles:

But think about think about Instagram and threads. One of the reasons why the threads growth was exponential at the beginning was that direct Instagram integration where, like, one tap and you're on threads with your account.

Jason Aten:

Right. Well, there's a billion people using Instagram.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And they got something like a hundred million people to use threads. Right. So that's a 10% conversion rate with all of the dials turned to 11 of show threads everywhere, show thread like, do this, you know, all of these sort of dark patterns. And if if ChadGPT has 200,000,000, then that's 20,000,000 at the same conversion rate. That is not an effective 400,000,000.

Jason Aten:

Fine. That's 40,000,000. That's not an effective competitor.

Stephen Robles:

Right? That that's

Jason Aten:

Nowadays, 40,000,000 is nothing on a social platform. Also, I guess my point is simply, okay. So what are the most popular Macs? Macs right now says it's the second most I'm I'm this can't possibly be true, but I guess this is not a right thing.

Stephen Robles:

Streaming service, Macs?

Jason Aten:

No. Yeah. But I'm just saying it's just popular iPhone apps. Oh. Macs is not going to launch effective social platform.

Stephen Robles:

No. I I get it.

Jason Aten:

Neither is Zoom, by the way. Like, Zoom is on this list too. Zoom had a bad day anyway. But, like, my point is, like, just because you are

Stephen Robles:

network, though?

Jason Aten:

Just because you I guess by the literal definition, it's not a network. Well, its network didn't work at all this week. Anyway, my point is just because you have a large user base does not mean that you have a large like Duolingo. Duolingo has a massive user base base. If they launched a social network I mean, they do sort of have social

Stephen Robles:

What does

Jason Aten:

that mean? I just don't think it's one of these things is not like the other, and I just don't think that people are gonna what you're describing is more like, yeah, a forum board to post Right. Stuff.

Stephen Robles:

And that's what I'm saying. I don't think it's gonna be a feed based thing, but I but some kind of social aspect where maybe you even have like friends that, you know, you can quickly share your latest prompt or whatever, or like, hey, here's a meme for Studio Ghibli, and you're probably breaking copyright, but nobody cares. You know, something something like that. But

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Google is by the way, the number three most downloaded free app. How has the social network thing worked for them?

Stephen Robles:

Google plus buddy.

Jason Aten:

I'm just, I'm just saying. And I think also the reason I'm convinced this won't work. And the reason is the incentives are completely misaligned. The only reason OpenAI wants this is for distribution and for and for training data. And there's no one like, yes, we're happy to give ChatGPT our training data because we're just talking to it.

Jason Aten:

Right?

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

But we don't need another reason to give them training data. And if what you're trying to do is get people to post content like, I just I don't see the incentives incentives being aligned to make that real.

Stephen Robles:

Well, will I think even if it's just a place where Sam Altman can now announce things that's not x, I think he's gonna do it just so he can have another platform. Because he doesn't do it on Threads or Blue Sky or anything.

Jason Aten:

And he does it on X because there's 400,000,000 people on there. And that's how they it's like the best free megaphone for doing that kind of stuff. Right. If he only if he just wants to announce it to the ChatGPT users, he could literally just put the prompt in ChatGPT. There's nothing stopping them from doing that.

Stephen Robles:

You can do a little flag at the top of the app.

Jason Aten:

I mean, Apple does a really good job of that. Open the settings app. See what they wanna tell you about today.

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna talk about Apple ads in a second. So alright, well, let's jam through the other ChatGPT news. GPT 4.1 has been debuted. I haven't seen it in my ChatGPT apps just yet, but it's the successor of ChatGPT four point zero. Multimodal supposedly has even larger context window, higher token, a ceiling, and all that kind of stuff.

Stephen Robles:

So you should if you're at least on the plus or pro plan, you should see 4.1 pretty soon. And another feature, this is available to, I believe, again, plus and pro users. But ChatGPT, you can now toggle on the remember or at least refer to all my past chats as context for my future prompts. So before, there was, like, a a memory feature where you can tell ChatJPY, like, hey. Remember that I live in Florida or whatever, and it will remember those key aspects that you specifically tell it.

Stephen Robles:

But now you can actually toggle on, remember everything, and it can look across all your past chat history as context. And so, like, I see people, like, on social media be like, tell me my three blind spots as a person. And it refers to all their past chats. And I guess sometimes ChatGPT says valuable things. But it can now remember everything.

Stephen Robles:

So

Jason Aten:

I mean, if you're asking ChatGPT for your three blind spots, number one is that you're asking a large language model and giving it all of your information. Could be a could be a blind spot

Stephen Robles:

possible. Also,

Jason Aten:

just because it's able to refer to all your past chats, is that really the same thing as memory?

Stephen Robles:

It's the same well, it's just that

Jason Aten:

All it means is that they enlarge the token window so they can just shove all of that information in every time you ask it something.

Stephen Robles:

Right. That's is that memory.

Jason Aten:

I I mean, I I understand. I just think it's funny how they're trying to give these humanoid characteristics

Stephen Robles:

Is it

Jason Aten:

thinking really, like, all it's doing is yeah. Is it really thinking? It's just processing tokens, man. If you wanna think that that's what it means in your brain, but I yeah. You did miss the most important OpenAI news of the entire week.

Stephen Robles:

What was that? What?

Jason Aten:

Which is that Sam Altman went on Twitter and said, how about we fix our model naming by this summer and everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us, which we very much deserve until then.

Stephen Robles:

That was pretty good. That was pretty that's self aware self awareness. That's pretty good. Also, other quick AI news before we get to Apple, Anthropic is working on a voice AI that you can speak to. So it's gonna be launching that.

Stephen Robles:

So Claude will be able you'll be able to talk to Claude. The mode options are mellow, airy, and buttery.

Jason Aten:

Everyone needs everyone needs a buttery voice assistant to talk to.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know if I want the buttery voice, but

Jason Aten:

anyway Buttery, is that like Morgan Freeman voice? I don't I don't know

Stephen Robles:

which one. He's not buttery. He's gravitas. That's the gravitas voice.

Jason Aten:

So what's buttery?

Stephen Robles:

Buttery is Matthew McConaughey? Maybe Matthew McConaughey is buttery?

Jason Aten:

I would say he's gravelly.

Stephen Robles:

Sure gravelly. Okay.

Jason Aten:

Sorry. This is a weird thing. This is a

Stephen Robles:

weird is be the bonus content that we're be offering.

Jason Aten:

Steven Robles is buttery.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, thank you

Jason Aten:

very Your voice.

Stephen Robles:

Well, this is getting weird. Okay. Also, last AI news. Google Google rolls out, an AI video generator. So if you're on Gemini Advanced, you can generate some videos.

Stephen Robles:

It seems like they, did not generate enough frames in all these videos. They're all pretty, jittery. But, yeah, you can now generate video there as well. And I don't know. I'm less optimistic about our future with AI generated video and ads and social media.

Stephen Robles:

Speaking about social networks and AI, less than that, I think people are losing discernment. I think there is a demographic difference between who can discern this stuff and who cannot. Sometimes it's age. Sometimes it's just what world people live in. Are they tech minded or whatever?

Stephen Robles:

But I'm just concerned that I'm gonna get way more links to Facebook posts from family and friends being like, did you see this? And I'm gonna have to be like, that's AI. And then I have to somehow convince them that it's

Jason Aten:

You have to convince them that you're not the conspiracy theorist. Right?

Stephen Robles:

I am not AI butter. Okay? I'm not it's not I

Jason Aten:

think that we we do live in a weird time, though. I mean, what you just mentioned is true. That's that's unfortunate that we have to spend all that energy. But as an as someone who covers AI, we live in a weird time because every time you write a story about a new feature being released, you have to save that story. And about a week later, you have to do a find and replace and change everywhere you put OpenAI and then put Google's name and then do the same thing back and forth.

Jason Aten:

And then sometimes you insert Anthropic instead because it's all the same stuff. They're all just doing the same things.

Stephen Robles:

But you know what you never find and replace with?

Jason Aten:

Buttery.

Stephen Robles:

Apple intelligence. Apple intelligence. Sorry. I thought I thought you were gonna get there. I mean,

Jason Aten:

it's true. That's true.

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna cover that too in a second. Alright. So speaking of Apple, let's talk about some Apple news real quick. I just wanna share. I have the USB C AirPods Max and the iOS 18 dot four update, came out a couple weeks ago, brought lossless audio.

Stephen Robles:

And so I did this video, I don't know if you saw it, where I did a blind test about whether or not I can hear the difference between lossless and not. And it was very complicated tests to try and get to lossless and not. But my wife would basically play a track, whether it's plugged in with USB C or not, and I would try to guess whether it was lossless. You can watch the whole video. I'll link it in the show notes.

Stephen Robles:

But bottom line is I could not tell the difference, and I was sad. I was disappointed in myself. And then there were some comments from people who were like, well, you know, it depends on the track and all this. Like, listen. Bottom line, I don't think lossless as a feature is a reason to upgrade to the new ones.

Stephen Robles:

But I did also test latency. So, like, if you wanna use these wirelessly and edit in, like, final cutter logic, that has noticeably improved over the lightning versions. But, anyway, that's Max.

Jason Aten:

First of all Yes. I can't believe you bought those. But, I mean, it can.

Stephen Robles:

Apple sent me these to review. Full disclosure.

Jason Aten:

I don't know much.

Stephen Robles:

So I gotta send them back.

Jason Aten:

I do feel better. Thank goodness. But I do I feel like I don't understand the not yours, but the obsession with this because I mean, lossless just means uncompressed. Right? Like, that's literally what it means is there's no data loss to compression.

Jason Aten:

Right. Compression is a graduated scale. Right? So even the so the best com the difference between lossless, no compression, and the best compression that we're talking about the difference between shooting 12 bit and 14 bit raw at this point. No human can tell the difference looking at those.

Jason Aten:

Like

Stephen Robles:

Right. And also, like, you really get into the audio file stuff, and people will be like, well, if it's not a FLAC file, it's not whatever. And even the lossless, like, I forget the exact numbers, but Apple said, you know, this is capable of lossless up to whatever data rate. And the lossless tracks you get in Apple Music are not at that level. Like, they're they're less.

Stephen Robles:

You know what I mean? Like, it's just it's not that high. So, you know, it's I don't know. Cannot tell a You

Jason Aten:

said you're sad. I guess what I was gonna say is actually what's good about that is the fact that the stream the streaming music that you're listening to must be pretty good quality.

Stephen Robles:

Can't It is it is really good. The streaming quality is is that good. So anyway, that was the AirPods Max. Trigger warning, if you're watching on YouTube, you're about to see some feet. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

I'm just letting you know. Jason, YouTube. I don't know if if you saw this ad or not.

Jason Aten:

I have no idea what's about to happen.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Well, this this was Apple literally released a whole commercial about nano texture. Did you see this commercial? The guy with the laptop?

Jason Aten:

I did not, but now I'm gonna have to write about this because

Stephen Robles:

Just wait. This entire commercial is a guy shirtless, sitting on a beach chair on some roof in a city. Half the ad is just sun glares off buildings and him working on his MacBook Pro, and it's a nano texture ad.

Jason Aten:

I don't know, but I think this is the worst thing they've ever made. Maybe the mother nature video was close. That was pretty bad.

Stephen Robles:

I still stand by. I didn't like the crush ad. I know people have mixed opinions on it.

Jason Aten:

I think the crush ad was tone deaf, but it didn't make me wanna throw up.

Stephen Robles:

I'm listen. A trigger warning for those listening as well. I'm gonna put, I'm gonna make the chapter artwork the dude's feet in the opening shot, but I I don't I I was very curious to see Apple make an ad like this. It didn't it didn't seem, I don't know, Apple like.

Jason Aten:

But didn't seem necessary. The word is necessary. Like, there's here's here's why I say that. Nanotexture on a MacBook Pro is such an insanely good feature. You didn't have to do that.

Jason Aten:

Could've just, like, there are so many ways you could have shown it off. And, honestly, I wonder, like, that ad, there are probably some people who think it's brilliant, but I think it was gonna turn more people off to nanotexture.

Stephen Robles:

It's a pretty niche feature too. Like, most people buy a MacBook Air, which there's no nanotexture option.

Jason Aten:

Sure.

Stephen Robles:

And if you're getting a MacBook Pro, you probably already know that nanotexture is an option, and whether you want it or not, it seems like a a weird feature to advertise.

Jason Aten:

Everyone who buys a MacBook Pro should buy it with NanoDry.

Stephen Robles:

I don't I don't know if I agree with Everyone.

Jason Aten:

If you're buying, you should buy it. I promise.

Stephen Robles:

I don't well, first of all, I wanted to check the comments on this, and Apple turned off the comments, which might be telling. Just throwing that out there. I would say I have a Nanotexture iMac, which is an Apple review. I need to

Jason Aten:

say Not the same thing.

Stephen Robles:

I brought it outside, though. I brought it outside. Even but even inside, the contrast, the color richness, I'm a glossy screen guy. I want the glossy for the best colors, the darkest blacks. I I want it.

Jason Aten:

It's not OLED. The iMac screen is 52 years old.

Stephen Robles:

Even between my two years old. My studio display and that iMac next to each other, I could see the difference with my eyeballs.

Jason Aten:

Right. But you know that the MacBook Pro is about a trillion times better display than that iMac. That iMac is literally the worst quality display that Apple makes on a Mac. Worst quality.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. That's fair.

Jason Aten:

So I'm just saying, like, that is you there's no there's zero comparison that you can make. The MacBook Pro nano texture, amazing. It's better than the iPad. The iPad has OLED, and you can get it with the nano texture. The problem there is, like, the bezel is not nano textured, which I understand why it's not because you don't need the nano texture of the bezel.

Jason Aten:

Like, you're not looking at any content there. But I'm serious. The nanotexture display on the MacBook Pro is the yes. Everyone should get it.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I guess I I can't really speak to it because I don't I have not had one. I've looked at it in the store, but that's not the same. I have not used it. So we'll see. But I've been I've been loving my MacBook Air so much.

Stephen Robles:

I I don't know if I'll ever go back to a MacBook Pro.

Jason Aten:

And that's fair. I'm not I would buy one on a MacBook Air in a heartbeat, and if they put it on there, I would say the same thing. Everyone should buy it.

Stephen Robles:

Interesting. Well, I also think the ad is interesting also because people like Parker Ordalani, he's been sharing pictures of all the billboards around New York. And all the Apple intelligence billboards have now been taken down, and Apple is advertising other features, even just iPhone 16 Pro camera and stuff, which is not old, but obviously it's like there's been other products since then. And so, you know, we got this shirtless guy in a lawn chair, nano texture instead of Apple Intelligence. So there you go.

Jason Aten:

That's what Apple did. They're like, you're gonna you're gonna give us a hard time about this? We'll show you. We're gonna send you this and say, you don't want Snoop Dogg hacking Apple Intelligence on T Mobile. We're gonna give you this instead.

Stephen Robles:

Listen. That Snoop Dogg Apple Intelligence thing was pushed hard. I I heard it on like a ton of podcasts, on TV. I think it was during the Super Bowl too, it might have been, with the Olympics. Was it the Olympics?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Yes.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Because it was Everywhere. Yeah. Was it was everywhere. So speaking of ads, though, I find this interesting.

Stephen Robles:

Ads Apple Sales Ads, if you didn't know, and it basically was Apple search ads. So if you were a developer with an app and you wanted to pay to have your app higher in search results in the App Store, that was something you could pay Apple to run a promoted search result for your app. And that's why when you search sometimes for apps, there's, like, the blue banner at the top that's showing an app that's paid for the ad. Well, they Apple rebranded its search ads business to just Apple Ads, which is curious because that rebranding seems to imply that maybe there will be ads outside of search that people will be able to pay for. Maybe that's Apple News.

Stephen Robles:

Maybe that's something else. So curious. Again, no actual announcement or change in what Apple is offering, But just curious that now it's just Apple ads. And who knows? Apple TV plus could be a place where that's available.

Stephen Robles:

Because I think right now, if you were a company, let's say, I don't know, OWC, and you wanted to advertise your external drives, don't think that there's any kind of self serve program where you can, like, put in a commercial on Apple TV plus Like, you probably have to work with Apple directly and maybe have some kind of connection there. And there's only ads, I think, on, like, MLB Friday night. Right? That's the only place where there might be ads?

Jason Aten:

I mean, there's a lot of ads for other Apple shows, but

Stephen Robles:

Well, yeah. But That's

Jason Aten:

what was just talking about.

Stephen Robles:

But ads for other things. And so this could be the foray into more advertising on Apple services like TV plus and more services revenue for Apple. So you think we'll see more ads? You think we'll see more ads around

Jason Aten:

Apple's ad product is so bad.

Stephen Robles:

The Apple News ones seem a little weird.

Jason Aten:

Understand why they spend all that effort to hide distracting items in Safari. So Apple will let you hide other people's ads

Stephen Robles:

Oh, %.

Jason Aten:

Even though they're sometimes good. But then you open the Apple News app, and it's toe fungus everywhere. It's worse than that ad that they that's, like, terrible stuff.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know if I've had toe fungus. Hold on. Let me let's see.

Jason Aten:

I'm it's just the it is the literal worst quality ad product that has ever been made.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know about that. I mean, the ad the punch the monkey ads in the early days of the Internet, those are pretty bad. I'm going to Apple News plus because I'm just curious what kind of ad what's the first ad that I see? Well, that that article didn't have any ads. Do you really see toe fungus ads in there?

Jason Aten:

I I did for a long time.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Here's one.

Jason Aten:

I even I even checked my toes to make sure there was I'm not even talking about the video one, but, like, look at the this quality of this ad is, like, garbage in the middle of this, like.

Stephen Robles:

I mean

Jason Aten:

And then you see the same ad 16 times in the same article.

Stephen Robles:

It's like,

Jason Aten:

we didn't we ran out of inventory. Like, what what is this, Steven? Like, it's No. No. No.

Jason Aten:

This to look like

Stephen Robles:

No.

Jason Aten:

Supposed to look like a New Yorker comic, but it's not. It's just some random

Stephen Robles:

No. This listen. This is the kind of quality ads I see in Apple News. Okay. You ready?

Jason Aten:

And this

Stephen Robles:

What's the link between aging and your pillowcase?

Jason Aten:

It's exactly. Thank you. Or or seniors are eligible for a bathroom remodel. What what is this?

Stephen Robles:

I don't know what's more triggering, that shot of the bathroom or the dude in the lawn chair.

Jason Aten:

Who charges the most for car insurance? And it's like people going like, what are they where are those people going? I almost said something very political, but

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No. No. Not to get

Jason Aten:

I'm not going to.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. Not to get political, but, maybe that's why Apple ads is now a thing because now they can get better

Jason Aten:

Who's living in this slum that they need his bathroom remodel? I think you just burn it down and move.

Stephen Robles:

Like, man,

Jason Aten:

this is the worst.

Stephen Robles:

Apple ads is gonna fix it all. It'll just fix it all.

Jason Aten:

Those are Apple ads.

Stephen Robles:

I know. I know. But but anyway, okay. I wanna talk about iPad and the possible iPadOS 19 that's going to solve all the iPad woes. That's a little sarcastic there.

Jason Aten:

Hold on, though. I have to ask one last question. Oh, yes. I'm sorry. This ad that I'm never gonna be able to sleep again.

Jason Aten:

Do you think it's here's what I think. Do you think it's possible that Tim Cook doesn't actually know that these ads exist and that when the revenue shows up, someone's just like, oh, yeah. Don't worry about that, Tim. It's just some money that we found somewhere, and they don't tell him how bad this is.

Stephen Robles:

Here's how it goes. Tim Cook, he opens Apple News. He says, what in the world? Where did this and then someone just slides a piece of paper with the profit of what all the ads from Apple News makes, and he's like, oh, yeah. Okay.

Jason Aten:

It's like 17¢. Is such a small niche thing for them. That's why the ads are so bad is because, like, no one is actually anyway, I'm sorry. I know you were trying to move on, but

Stephen Robles:

I just No. No.

Jason Aten:

That's fine. Understand how a company like Apple anyway. I

Stephen Robles:

think we're gonna touch on this because for some reason, you know, I think all the companies know that we release an episode on Thursday because then everybody drops news on Friday. I don't

Jason Aten:

know if that. Thanks, guys.

Stephen Robles:

You know what I mean? I think that's what everybody they're looking at primary technologies and say, listen, they go on Thursdays. Let's do the bad news on Friday. So we know how we see the game everyone's playing. But one of the things is that information article, which had a bunch of behind the scenes and supposedly people who worked at Apple previously in the AI and the Dingus team, the Hey Dingus.

Stephen Robles:

And that came out last Friday. And there were some interesting tidbits about leadership and how that works within Apple. So we're gonna get to that too. Okay. And I think that kinda maybe plays into this ad thing as well.

Stephen Robles:

But iPadOS 19 coming up next. But before we do, I wanna thank today's sponsor, which is 1Password and 1Password Extended Access Management. Because I don't wanna speak from personal experience here. I have worked in places managing many devices across entire teams. Okay?

Stephen Robles:

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Stephen Robles:

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Stephen Robles:

But if you know that there's some shady stuff going on around behind the scenes, hey. Listen. Here's a solution that'll get people they can do their work. They can have access to their devices and still keeps our company secure, private, and safe. So secure every app, device, and identity, even the unmanaged ones at 1password.com/primarytech.

Stephen Robles:

That's all lowercase. That's 1Password.com/PrimaryTech. The link is in the show notes as well. And thanks to One Password for sponsoring this episode. Alright.

Stephen Robles:

Let's talk about iPadOS 19. This was a report again from Gurman, where his power on newsletter comes out on Sundays. This was news from last Sunday, but Mark Gurman saying that iPadOS 19 this year at dub dub is going to be a big upgrade. Quoting from Gurman's article here in the '9 zero '5 Mac article, Gurman says, I'm told that this year's upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking, and app window management with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac. It's been a long time coming with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful.

Stephen Robles:

Now I just wanna say productivity, multitasking, and app window management, I feel like that's been every iPadOS update for the last six years. Right?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I feel like he might be getting some hopes up because if you just read that, I'm told this year's upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking, and app window management. And you hear those things and people are like, yes. It's about time. And then it's like, the last time they focused on productivity, multitasking, and app window management, we got stage manager.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Exact. That's all that's all.

Jason Aten:

Which everyone hates and wants them to change. And then, so I don't What do you Are you optimistic?

Stephen Robles:

Here's the thing. I love my iPad. I edit the audio version of this show in Fairlight on my iPad. I recently did a video about the 20 best iPad apps of all time. There's great apps on the iPad.

Stephen Robles:

The iPad has been held back for years on a few key things. One is that window management is not one of them. Let me just say that. Like, I don't think having better window management or having a more macOS like UI is the answer. Like, the way the iPad functions, even if you're just full screening and split screening apps, honestly, I think is fine.

Stephen Robles:

The issue is when a power user as like I do here, an m four iPad Pro, which is the same processor that's in my MacBook Air and the iMac out there, is if I want to connect a USB microphone or audio interface and actually select my audio input versus audio output, you can't do that because the iPad doesn't give you just that granular control of audio input output. Or I I feel like Apple has said that the iPad has a desktop class browser for, like, five years. And it's just not because whenever I try to go edit a Squarespace site on my iPad, it's broken. And so Safari on the iPad is not Safari on a desktop, meaning the Mac. So and if they hadn't said it, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.

Stephen Robles:

But because Apple said desktop class apps, desktop class Safari, then it's like, well, where where are the desktop class features? Because I don't see them there. And even things like an app like Audio Hijack, which we're using right now to record our audio, can't run on the iPad because it does not have access outside of the sandbox to those kinds of things. And so I don't think the sandboxing is ever gonna go away. I think apps are still gonna function.

Stephen Robles:

But giving users more controls, whether it's audio input output, whether it's like a clipboard manager. Like, you can't have clipboard manager apps on iPad. So is is that more macOS like? Probably not because that's another sandboxed limitation. Like, the only reason you can have a Clipboard Manager on a Mac is because those apps can run-in the background, and it's not sandboxed like it is on iPadOS.

Stephen Robles:

So I think we probably will get some new window management features, and it's not going to actually drastically change the actual function of the iPad. And so I'm I'm not optimistic, but I'm I'm always hopeful. Always hopeful. Is that a thing? Not optimistic, but hopeful.

Jason Aten:

What if they I think the definition of optimism is, like, positively hopeful. But

Stephen Robles:

No. I'm sticking with it. I'm sticking with

Jason Aten:

it. But I so let's assume for a minute that they were going to do all the things that people think that they would want. Would that actually be a better outcome?

Stephen Robles:

I don't know because there is, like, the sliding scale of if you add 10% of the Mac features, let's say you get audio input output, maybe you even get video, which you can do video and just kind of. But let's say you get 10% of those features, there's immediately going to be another level of users that's like, oh, yeah. That's great. But I can't do x, y, and z that I can do on my Mac. And so I don't know if Apple can really win here as far as, like, adding enough features that some power users are placated, but not all power users.

Stephen Robles:

So I feel like I'd I'm not sure what they can do there. But I would love to see iPadOS in general actually be a different operating system than iOS. You know, for a long time, iPhone and iPad both ran what was named iOS. They ran the exact same operating system. And then Apple changed iPad, I think it was when Stage Manager wasn't released, to be a different operating system again, which is iPadOS.

Stephen Robles:

And so I'm like, if you're gonna make it different, then make it different. You know, call it something different. Somehow make it function different. But I know they're not gonna do, like, third party app, you know, outside of the App Store installs. So I'm not sure, like, what technically is possible.

Stephen Robles:

But yeah. I don't know. So I'm not sure.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, I think Apple brought this on themself because they ran that what's a computer ad to basically positioning the iPad as, like, the next coming of the Macintosh or whatever. I don't even know. Like but let me let me just do a double, you know, reverse double advocate on you and just like, I don't even know. I don't I don't quite understand the obsession people have with not just letting the iPad be the iPad.

Jason Aten:

Like, why does the iPad need to be the Mac? We have the Mac, and I got I can kind of understand the ideal of, like, well, what if I only wanna have one device that does everything? But one device that does everything never really works out as well as we think that it will because it, like, it doesn't do everything as well. Like, foldable devices. Oh, you got a big screen.

Jason Aten:

You got a little screen. Like, they're not good at either of fully understand. Like, the iPad actually there are things they should try to solve. For example, the 11 inch iPad is the perfect iPad, the Pro. I think

Stephen Robles:

I agree.

Jason Aten:

Is the perfect iPad.

Stephen Robles:

But it's terrible We agree on something.

Jason Aten:

But it's terrible if what you wanna do is, like, use it as a computer because the Sure. The Magic Keyboard is too small. I mean, it's it's usable. Don't get me wrong.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Right. Right.

Jason Aten:

Like, as someone who writes lots of words every day, it is not a big enough keyboard to do that on on a on a on a regular basis.

Stephen Robles:

It's also heavy and thick, and it's like

Jason Aten:

Well, that's what I was gonna get to. So then you have the the 13 inch iPad Pro, which is actually kind of crappy as an iPad because it's like you're holding, you know, I I don't know, an airplane wing in your hands to try to do stuff. But then you put it in the Magic Keyboard and it's amazing as a laptop replacement, but it weighs as much as a MacBook Pro. Right. It's like there's no scenario where you can make this good at that.

Jason Aten:

And so I, like, I believe wholeheartedly the Levin Jabez Pro, that's the best iPad. Yeah. It's not necessarily the best one for all people because you don't know a lot of people don't need it, but, like, that's why I don't get the 13 inch iPad Air. It's like, what are we doing? Why like, big screen.

Jason Aten:

Great. But it's anyway, so I don't know why people I know Apple brought it on themselves by positioning the iPad in that way, but I think Apple has made it pretty clear. They're like, oops. Just kidding. Actually, the Mac is amazing.

Jason Aten:

Here's more MacBook Airs that can literally do things that, you know, you never thought you'd be able to do on a computer under a thousand dollars.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

I I don't know, Steven. Why are we here?

Stephen Robles:

No. I think I I agree. I personally, I'm good with what the iPad does. And I guess I'm not necessarily looking for like, it would be nice to when I'm traveling to use the iPad to record. But, honestly, like, with the m with the MacBook Air now, I'm like, that's such a perfect device when I'm away from the studio and it does all the things.

Stephen Robles:

I I don't need the iPad to do that. Like, I have the Mac. Maybe it's people want a touch screen Mac or maybe because people wanna use the Apple Pencil in other ways. I don't know. I think the reason why I did that that video, the 20 best iPad apps of all time, is because there are like, when the iPad is good, it's amazing.

Stephen Robles:

Like, when I show people how I edit podcasts on iPad, they're, like, blown away. And they're like, that's amazing. And that is a key like, the Apple Pencil is a key part of that workflow and the AppFerrite, which is a third party app. So, like, you can make great third party apps. And then other great what are tablet specific use cases?

Stephen Robles:

Procreate for someone who's drawing. And maybe that's why they would want the 13 inch iPad Pro for that use case. And I do think for some people, like my mom, she has the 13 inch iPad Pro because the iPad Air didn't exist when she got it. And that is that is her computer. And so, like, for some people, you know, if if an iPad can be your computer because that's just your use cases, like, great.

Stephen Robles:

Get the big one, throw it in a keyboard case, and you're good to go. Digital sheet music. The tablet is uniquely positioned. It's better than a Mac and MacBook at that because you can put it on a music stand. You can get the bigger screen.

Stephen Robles:

It has FourScores, an amazing app where you can do things like blink to turn pages. Like, it's amazing at that. And so I think when the iPad is used as a tablet, I think it's great, and it actually doesn't need much more. Like Digital Sheet Music, My Podcast Editing, Procreate, it doesn't need better window management. All of those use cases, you want one thing on the screen at a time, and you just use the pencil or you do whatever.

Stephen Robles:

So I guess I'm convincing myself that maybe it doesn't need maybe it doesn't need more macOS like features. And I don't I don't know what those features would be anyway. So

Jason Aten:

And I think it's largely a a problem of possibility because we go like, well, it has an m four in it. It has 16 gigs of RAM and a two terabyte hard drive.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

So does my MacBook Air. Why can't they do the same things? And I'm like, because they're different products. Like, they they they they're there's a lot of things different about them, and the operating system is probably the main one. Could conceivably Apple just make an iPad that runs macOS?

Jason Aten:

Maybe, but, like, it wouldn't be as good at running macOS. There's just no scenario, and Apple's not gonna make two versions of macOS. And the version that would run on an iPad would not be as good on your Mac.

Stephen Robles:

And if you wanna know how macOS would be on an iPad, download the Screens app, VNC into a Mac that you already own, and try to control that. Yeah. It's it's not easy nor good. So Yeah. We'll see.

Stephen Robles:

I mean, Apple, they add stuff every year. I feel like last year, what they added was like math and the calculator app. So we'll see. Let's see what they do this year.

Jason Aten:

So adding stuff there is doing a lot of work in that sentence because they added you're right. They added math in the they added a calculator app, and you can do math

Stephen Robles:

That's right.

Jason Aten:

In the calculator app.

Stephen Robles:

Do you do you use your what do use your iPad for?

Jason Aten:

Well, I edit a podcast every week, so Fairlight, that's a big one. Uh-huh. I use it for a lot of reading and research when I get what I'll often be doing during the day is collecting a bunch of, like, research, clipping it, and that kind of stuff. But it's a lot easier for me to sit down and read that on the iPad because for a lot of reasons. One, I can sit in a comfy chair, just read.

Jason Aten:

Right. I I use it when I travel for, like, YouTube, whatever, Disney plus, Apple TV. That's where I binge watched most of severance and, shrinking. No. Not shrinking because the studio, sorry, is is on there.

Jason Aten:

And that weird show I watched hijacked that was really good.

Stephen Robles:

Idris Elba.

Jason Aten:

But I it was I I enjoyed it. Yeah. The only not to sidetrack too much. My only beef with that show is the whole premise is he's this insanely amazing corporate negotiator. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

And he does almost no negotiating in this entire show.

Stephen Robles:

He he does some talking. I only made it halfway through the season, so in my mind

Jason Aten:

It's good. I liked it. It was super entertaining. One of those shows that, like, it's just better not to think about that stuff. Just

Stephen Robles:

just enjoy it.

Jason Aten:

It's like one of the Ryan Reynolds movies on Netflix. It's just like, oh, this is fun.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Very true. Alright. Well, we'll see. We're only a couple months away from Dubbed.

Stephen Robles:

Less than two months away, so we will see what they revealed. I wanna touch on this. You've you've probably heard it talked about on other podcasts and written about, but the information report talking about the Apple Intelligence failing and the HeyDingus team and all of that. There's a bunch of, like, poll quotes that you can get. Things like Apple's AIML group was dubbed aimless internally by employees, which is not great.

Stephen Robles:

There was some, like, infighting about people on the AIML team being able to take vacations or leave early or weird things like that. Craig Federighi hired AIML employees to join his team maybe because John Gianandrea's team was not doing well. Overall, just reading this stuff, hearing people talk about it, it sounded like there was just a major dysfunction when it comes to the HeyDingus and Apple Intelligence teams. And dysfunction like just corporate structure leadership dysfunction. And if you've ever worked a corporate job or you work in a big company, you know probably exactly what this is like, where you have infighting between teams.

Stephen Robles:

You have people saying no from one manager, and so they'll go around to try and get a yes from a different manager. It sounds like a lot of that happened in in this team. And maybe that was some of leadership failings from John, Jean, Andrea. Maybe it was something else, but that's why they're restructuring the whole thing. And little I wouldn't say fascinating, but, you know, a peek behind the curtain about maybe why Apple Intelligence has not gone off.

Stephen Robles:

And one of the key pieces of information that was fascinating, during the dub dub announcement last year for Apple Intelligence, when they showed the example of Apple Intelligence in a message conversation, pulling the flight from the mother, finding out where they're going to lunch and getting directions and doing all of that with the semantic index stuff, there were people on the HeyDingus team that were shocked that they showed that in the event, either because it was not ready even close to being ready or it was something that they didn't even know was being worked on. And so that, again, is just kind of a failing of communication within the organization and leadership and all that kind of stuff. So that was telling. And you know, you know, it's gonna be a while now because I forget his name, but the Apple Vision Pro guy has come over. You remember his name?

Jason Aten:

Mike Rockwell. Mike Rockwell.

Stephen Robles:

Mike Rockwell. He's not gonna be in charge of Apple Intelligence. But, again, it's gonna take a while. Like, I don't even know if they can announce stuff at Dub Dub. I mean, maybe they'll announce stuff even if it's not even close to being ready or worked on.

Stephen Robles:

But, anyway, it's interesting. Look. I'll link the MacRumors article where they have some pull quotes. The information article is behind a paywall, but you can, yeah, read the whole thing there.

Jason Aten:

I think the real issue here see, I'm sure there was some, like, corporate dysfunction or drama or whatever. That's just the way it works. Like, you can't have a company the size of Apple without having some of that kinda whatever, especially at that level. And for but I think what happened here is that when John Gianandrea was hired away from Google, you know, he's a sort of a superstar Yeah. In his field.

Jason Aten:

Right. But there was no ChatGPT really at the time. Right? And he was initially brought in, I believe, to improve search in Siri. Right?

Jason Aten:

Because the like, when he was hired, the thought was like, oh, is Apple gonna build a search engine to compete with Google?

Stephen Robles:

Oh, that is true.

Jason Aten:

Remember that. No. $20,000,000,000. We're good. You guys can be the search engine.

Jason Aten:

It's cool. We'll just we don't wanna compete. We'll just take him. Can we just have him Right. Just have Right.

Jason Aten:

Have him come over. And the stuff that he was working on was not generative AI chatbots. That was not the thing that he was hired to do. And so all of the people he hired, all of the stuff that went into that at the when he was brought into Apple was for one particular purpose. And then chat GPT happened and, like, OpenAI dropped a chat GPT nuclear bomb in the middle of, like, all of the tech industry.

Jason Aten:

Right? And so the the skills and leadership and whatever that he had was all of a sudden, it's like, now we have to make Siri compete with this. We have to have Apple intelligence. We have to do all this stuff. That's a very different thing because what you're essentially asking is fix a product and make a new product.

Jason Aten:

And instead of figure out, like, you've you've seen his team release all of these white papers. Right? All of this kind of stuff. They are the team, to my understanding, that kinda came up with the private cloud compute thing. It's like this idea of hierarchy where certain tasks can be handled on device, other tasks require going to the private cloud compute, and then beyond that stuff goes to ChatGPT or whatever.

Jason Aten:

Like, that whole stuff, like, as far as I understand, like, that's they came up with that model, and I think that that makes sense because a device like an iPhone is always gonna be limited by memory and in that kind of capacity stuff. So it's not like they were just morons wandering around Apple Park not knowing, like, where the exits were. It's just they they were that team was built to do a different thing. And this is what happens, I think, in companies. It's sort of the sunk cost fallacy.

Jason Aten:

They were moving in this direction. When ChatGPT came out, no one knew if this was, like, the new direction or just a flash in the pan. Like, was this just a cool thing that happened for a very short amount of time? Turns out, no. Turns out it's a bigger deal than anyone thought.

Jason Aten:

There's hundreds of billions of dollars just flying around everywhere to, like, try to build out you know, buy NVIDIA g GPUs and build out, you know, server farms and do all this kind of stuff. And the the team that was built to do one thing was not capable of doing the other thing. And and if there was any leadership dysfunction, it was waiting too long to recognize that, no, we need to make a change to do this. Because you just look at, like, you guys were tasked to do one thing. The the the Dingus team was doing a different like, they were built to do a different thing.

Jason Aten:

Right? That team and and and it was never very good at the thing it was built to do, but it was definitely not designed to do this. But you look at it and you're like, well, okay. We're gonna have to start from scratch. In the meantime, let's leave the thing alone and, like, let's just add a couple of features to it.

Jason Aten:

We'll make an interface with TedGBT. We'll add a cool new animation. We'll, like, make these quality of life improvements if you wanna call them that. And then eventually, we'll get to a point where we can, like, hot swap one for the other.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

But you but you can't break all of people's shortcuts and routines and all these. It's it is a very complicated problem. And I just think that if there was any dysfunction, it was not recognizing that the group of people that you handed it to was, were incredibly capable and incredibly talented at thing a, and we need them to do something completely different. It would be like asking John Turnis to, to be like redesign iOS for iOS 19, like incredible engineer, not his sweet spot.

Stephen Robles:

Or like Johnny Saruji to redesign iPadOS. Right. We want him making chips.

Jason Aten:

Sweet demo, but I just feel like, you know, you don't you don't have Luke Amaistri, who I guess is not actually the CFO anymore, but you don't have him coming in and, like, wiring up chips either. Like

Stephen Robles:

What? That was the other thing in in the information article. Mhmm. It talked about how Tim Cook seems to be conflict averse. Like, don't bring him conflicts.

Stephen Robles:

And I think, you know, back to we were talking about Apple ads and maybe this team, like, as a like, yeah. You want your high level leaders, your senior vice presidents, to be able to handle conflicts and, you know, diffuse them themselves. But when something is going so poorly, there likely does need to be a moment where the leader, the CEO, steps in and actually changes things. And maybe that just needed to happen earlier rather than later. And Tim Cook, I still think, I mean, he is the COO.

Stephen Robles:

He's the CEO, but he's a COO. You know what I mean? Like, his bread and butter, like, his competent, his expertise is that operating revenue profit, like, all of that. And so how could it maybe be handled different by a different leader that was more like in the people kind of thing rather than in the numbers kind of thing? But who knows?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, in Tim Cook, he's like pretty you say he's conflict averse. If you just remember the last major conflict, it was when he fired Scott Forstall. Like, so he probably has some PTSD from he he would prefer to not be fostering those types of competitive rivalries and and just, like, you guys you guys are like, we're paying you millions of dollars a year. You should be able to work this stuff out.

Stephen Robles:

I'm sure he's savage in, like, a negotiation, though. I'm sure he's had lots of negotiations with, like, factories and fabs and all that stuff. Like, he's probably a monster there.

Jason Aten:

Sure.

Stephen Robles:

That's conflict of a sort. So

Jason Aten:

But he doesn't want he doesn't want personality conflicts where where two of his leaders are coming to him, and they're like, we don't agree. We can't get along. We think each other is at at at fault, and you figure it out. He's like, I I got too much

Stephen Robles:

to do. He's in his office wearing his Apple Vision Pro for that vanity fair. I'm get

Jason Aten:

out of here. Listen. I'm too busy approving Apple News plus ads in my Vision Pro. Like, I have real things to do. I got listen.

Jason Aten:

I don't have time for this. I have to use every single one of our products every day.

Stephen Robles:

Every day. The Apple Watch SE, the Apple Watch Series 10, the Ultra two,

Jason Aten:

the

Stephen Robles:

The

Jason Aten:

MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, the

Stephen Robles:

The iMac, the Mac Mini, every single one. Just imagine it's just all lined up along a wall. If you're not sure if you don't know the context is in some interview, Tim Cook was like, use every Apple product every day. And so it's like, just along the wall, he's got the base model iPad. He's got the iPad Mini, the iPad Air, the iPad Pro.

Jason Aten:

What do you think he uses the Mac Pro for, honestly?

Stephen Robles:

Oh, it's good. He just like has a He has one Final Cut project just sitting there, and every day he just says render. Just figured maybe

Jason Aten:

it was, like, how they air condition his room because it's the only basically, only one with a real fan in it anymore.

Stephen Robles:

Or maybe Heats. Maybe Heats. Maybe they had that thing just chomping away at

Jason Aten:

Cranking away at AI. That they're doing Apple Intelligence on that thing.

Stephen Robles:

That's here's this is the rumor. Apple Intelligence is running on a single Mac Pro in Tim Cook's office. That's why.

Jason Aten:

That's definitely what it is.

Stephen Robles:

That's definitely what it is. Okay. Let's jam through a couple things and get to a personal tech. There was a bunch of a tariff back and forth last week, and how it has now ended up is that smartphones and computers are now exempt from the latest tariffs. And so iPhone prices looks like they won't go up or Mac prices for now.

Jason Aten:

Except for that Trump says that they're coming.

Stephen Robles:

They might they might still

Jason Aten:

be coming. Going into a different bucket. Yeah. He's like, they're definitely coming. Nobody's getting away from this.

Jason Aten:

Yes. The court customs and border protection issued a list of products that are exempt from the, retaliatory reciprocal tariffs, but the word they're coming. We've they've actually opened an investigation now into semiconductors. And not only do they plan to tariff semiconductors, but all of the downstream products. So the bottom line is we still have no frigging idea what's gonna happen.

Stephen Robles:

That's the news. And I just need to, for a second, talk about the CNN page because now that I'm taking a closer look at it, yeah, I'll link this page, but I don't know if this is gonna change. So you can go over to youtube.com/atprimarytechshow, go to this chapter and see. I just need to read some of the words on this page because in the top middle, there's a fear and greed index. I don't ever spend time on CNN business, but apparently

Jason Aten:

It's a contrast between what is driving the market right now.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

Greed, which is we see an opportunity and a bunch of people are trying to pounce on the opportunity. Ah. And fear, which is we're selling everything because we don't know what's gonna happen.

Stephen Robles:

So is greed the positive side of this speedometer?

Jason Aten:

Greed means the numbers go up.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, okay. Okay.

Jason Aten:

Fear usually means the numbers are going down.

Stephen Robles:

Well, right now, we're at a 19 apparently, and we're

Jason Aten:

Which is extreme fear.

Stephen Robles:

Extreme fear is driving The US market. So that's right there at the top of CNN business.

Jason Aten:

By the way, extreme fear, probably not good for the market.

Stephen Robles:

Probably not good for the market, which right to the left of that, it's all red. Dow Jones, S and P, and Nasdaq is all down. But then there's start the day here. This is a banner at the top of the CNN page, and it says Trump administration ramps up attacks on Harvard. Island wide blackout hits Puerto Rico.

Stephen Robles:

Colossal squid captured on video. Like, just look

Jason Aten:

just Are those things related? Like, did the squid take out all of the power in Puerto Rico?

Stephen Robles:

That's exactly what I

Jason Aten:

I was And Trump blamed Harvard for it?

Stephen Robles:

I was just glancing around this page. I was like, black eyed in Puerto Rico colossal squid? What? And then

Jason Aten:

Right below that, Taco Bell is bringing back a wildly popular they're gonna have squid tacos.

Stephen Robles:

I was just that's the next thing I was gonna say is, like, and then under that, Taco Bell bringing back a menu. What is happening on the CNN page? This is messing my I can't even look at this anymore.

Jason Aten:

Here's the thing. The feeling you have right now is the way that everyone who has stuff on a boat from China feels right now. They have no idea what's gonna happen. I was listening to the, I think it was the pivot podcast where, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway were talking about how, like, there are literally people who, like, sell furniture, have boats full of stuff. This you know, let's say you have a hundred million dollars worth of stuff sitting on a boat somewhere.

Jason Aten:

You've paid for the stuff, but now you gotta come up with a hundred and $45,000,000 to write a check to the US government just to get your stuff off of the boat. Like Right. It is just it's insane.

Stephen Robles:

And I know there's been, like, cars just sitting at ports so they don't have to import them yet, trying to

Jason Aten:

see Yeah. They're waiting to see if they can, like Waiting to see. Will this change? Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Maybe this giant squid that caused an island wide blackout will save us all.

Jason Aten:

See, didn't even do it. Is if what you mean is take out the power of the entire country and reset, maybe. I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

Have we tried turning it off and back on? That's what

Jason Aten:

we're doing. Unplug it and plug it back in and reboot it.

Stephen Robles:

That's that is CNN, I don't know what you're doing. We need to mention the FTC and Meta. There's an antitrust lawsuit happening this week. Mark Zuckerberg is testifying. There's a a bunch of news that came out of it.

Stephen Robles:

One is there was some

Jason Aten:

redact You need unlimited access to the Washington Post, one of them.

Stephen Robles:

I wanna talk about this in our bonus episode because I need to know. Think I need to finally start paying for some of these news websites, and I need to know which I need to pay for. So anyway, I'm gonna link a bunch of Paywald stuff, then there's a Verge article, which may or may not be Paywald. I don't know how depending on your Verge reading. But there's been there were slides or whatever that were supposed to be redacted.

Stephen Robles:

And if you didn't know, if you just open a PDF and preview on your Mac and just add some shapes on top of stuff, that's not actually redacting a document. And the content below those things is still available and can be seen. And so Meta, one of the biggest companies in the world, apparently doesn't know how to redact stuff.

Jason Aten:

Or do they?

Stephen Robles:

Well, that's the other thing. This could have been intentional. Hard to say. But this was one of the slides that actually is quoting one of Apple's director of product marketing, Ronak Shah, at least at the time of this data was taken. But this is talking about use case of messaging apps and iMessage.

Stephen Robles:

And the data that's supposed to be redacted, there's actually a little graph, and it shows, like, the most used messaging apps, I believe, on iPhone or at least, like, the percentage of devices. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was

Jason Aten:

I mean, it must be because messages is not on anything else.

Stephen Robles:

Right. So messages is, like, 88% of devices are being, like, used on devices. In the and I just found the next ones now to be interesting. So messages, 88%. Instagram, the second at 48%.

Stephen Robles:

Facebook Messenger under that, WhatsApp under that, and then Snapchat. So that's three meta messaging apps that are in the top five right under messages. So

Jason Aten:

By the way, pro tip, the way you should do this is you open the thing in preview, you add your shapes, and then you take a screenshot of that.

Stephen Robles:

That's how you do it, at least.

Jason Aten:

That's how you redact it.

Stephen Robles:

That's how you do it.

Jason Aten:

Thank you. You're welcome, Meta. Let me just help you out here.

Stephen Robles:

There you go. I will link to this is the article if you wanna read kinda more. Alex Heath put together kind of like the most interesting things that Mark Zuckerberg has said during this court case. He's been there all week listening to it. There's a very funny picture of Mark Zuckerberg with sunglasses in the back of a car.

Stephen Robles:

You can go to the article just for that. But when asked about, like, WhatsApp and Instagram and acquiring them, and, like, one of Zuckerberg's reasons for acquiring WhatsApp was because he was worried about Apple and Google, specifically the App Stores, quote, unquote, messing with us. And so they thought it would be like a hedge against that. And this thing about acquiring Instagram, during his testimony, Zuckerberg said he wasn't worried about Instagram competing with Facebook until it reached 1,000,000,000 users years later after he bought it, which it's like, you bought it because it was clearly a competitor. But anyway, he's he's trying to make it seem like, no.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. I just you know, it wasn't a competitor. I just wanted to buy it.

Jason Aten:

Well, let's okay. Here's what I wanna say about this. I'll try to keep it very brief. One, and I'm gonna say something political, Steven. I'm sorry.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. That's fine.

Jason Aten:

This case is stupid. Also meta equally stupid. Like, this is one of those things where no one looks good. I mean, clearly, like, the best part of the reporting is how it's just obvious that Mark Zuckerberg donated a million dollars to the inauguration and and settled the case with with the president for $25,000,000 because he was hoping that Trump would overrule the FTC or FTC and agree to settle this case for $450,000,000. And the FTC is asking for, like, 30,000,000,000.

Jason Aten:

Those numbers are very far apart. And he's and he's, like, bumfuzzled into, like, how this plan did not work for him. And it's like but I can understand why he's a little bit confused because it does sometimes seem as though, like, the way to get a deal for this kind of thing is to just, like, know the right people. And that honestly is true regardless of who's president. Like, that's not even just a a current administration thing.

Jason Aten:

But this case is like the FTC approved Facebook buying Instagram Right. And buying WhatsApp, and now they want to unwind it. So I feel like

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

The the whole thing is, like, nobody looks good. Nobody's gonna come out a winner. I did hear an interesting point, which is that typically speaking, breakups like this are very uncommon because that's what they're asking for. They're asking for them to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp or at least Instagram. They're very uncommon.

Jason Aten:

But when they do happen, the, like, the the Bells, the AT and T breakup, whatever Right. All of the companies involved are way better off now, and they increase the the estimated shareholder value of Instagram alone is, like, $200,000,000,000. You spin that off to its own company, and it's an instant competitor to TikTok, to to Facebook, to Snap, to all these things. And it would be just fine, and shareholders would now have shares in Meta and Instagram and be much richer, and consumers would have more choice. I don't think the government should be allowed to break up companies that they approve the mergers of.

Jason Aten:

But also if they did, I I like, everyone would be, fine. It's like so it's very complicated. The only people who the only people who wouldn't be fine are advertise advertisers. So that's a lot of small businesses. So I don't wanna, like, I don't wanna overlook that, who are able to leverage the advantage of the ad network going into the different places.

Jason Aten:

The counterargument to that is the ads might be less expensive because now you have a more competitive ad market. So it's, it's, it is very complicated. I think the case is dumb. I also think Mark Zuckerberg looks really bad.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Thank you for that.

Jason Aten:

Is that fair? Like, is that a fair assessment?

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good.

Jason Aten:

Is it political if you're like, everybody's dumb?

Stephen Robles:

I don't know. You tell us. Leave us a five star rating and review, and tell us if saying everybody's dumb, is that too political. I'm gonna link your article too, Jason, before we get to our primary or personal take, which is Zoom. Thanks.

Stephen Robles:

Zoom had an outage. Spotify also had an outage last week. But, yeah, I don't use Zoom. Use see, let me say this clearly. I use Riverside for all of my meeting needs.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah.

Jason Aten:

All of your meetings are on Riverside because you work for Riverside,

Stephen Robles:

Brad. That's exactly right. Full disclosure. Full disclosure. I personally pay for this account, though, to record primary technologies.

Jason Aten:

Just wanted to be clear

Stephen Robles:

about as well. Saying. Just saying. But, yeah, Zoom Zoom had an outage, which is, like, what half of remote work runs on.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And I think it was what what was kind of bananas about it is that apparently it was because of some, like, domain name misconfiguration. The Zoom.US domain name was like I don't know. There's something complicated it had to do with GoDaddy and some other company. They, like, had misconfiguration.

Stephen Robles:

That's the first mistake. Can I just say I bought a few domains this past week as you do? Don't buy don't don't buy domains from GoDaddy. Okay?

Jason Aten:

Hover's a good place.

Stephen Robles:

Hover.com. They've never sponsored me for anything, but I own 1,000 domains from hover.com.

Jason Aten:

Well, the irony is that it doesn't matter. They could sponsor every single episode, and they'd you'd still be in the red with them probably.

Stephen Robles:

Probably.

Jason Aten:

It doesn't even matter.

Stephen Robles:

Dot FM domains are expensive. Hundred dollars a year.

Jason Aten:

But But it was just this they, like it was the stupidest thing, and it but it took out, like, everyone's Zoom because you could if you can't resolve the domain Zoom.US, you can't you can't resolve any Zoom link.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Right.

Jason Aten:

That was the genius of Zoom was just you could click on these links and you could just open it and that kind of thing. And so but I I I wrote about it because I thought, like, you didn't even you you minimized that this was just a minor technical glitch. But if you were somebody who was hoping to have a job interview on a Zoom call or meeting with a potential new client as a salesperson, and you couldn't have that meeting

Stephen Robles:

stuff

Jason Aten:

and you missed out, the impact is not negligible. It's like, that is the worst case scenario for you.

Stephen Robles:

So yeah. Inter interview, especially that'd be terrible. Yeah. So Zoom. Listen.

Stephen Robles:

This is why everybody should use Riverside. But no. No. I was gonna say Webex, I was like, no. Need to say

Jason Aten:

it's a job. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

It's It's good It's Not really.

Jason Aten:

They don't actually sponsor this podcast, but I don't we would have preferred Steven not lose his job.

Stephen Robles:

Sure. That's good. Personal tech. A few things. One, Notion Mail is out there, and you can try it for free.

Stephen Robles:

I have not tried Notion Mail, but you did? You've been trying?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I tried it. It's fine. It's good. I mean, like, design is nice.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. It's very Notion y.

Stephen Robles:

Very Notion. It only works with Gmail accounts right now.

Jason Aten:

That's and that does that's not surprising because Notion calendar also only works

Stephen Robles:

with email.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. But, like, Notion is quietly building up a competitor to everything. Right?

Stephen Robles:

That's

Jason Aten:

true. They're competing with Google Workspace. They're competing with Microsoft three sixty five. They're competing with I don't know. Like, is a CRM next?

Jason Aten:

We'll see what

Stephen Robles:

comes up. Management? I mean, is product management also?

Jason Aten:

Asana. Yeah. They're you can publish websites with it. So they are competing with all those things. So they are just quietly, you know, competing with basically everybody.

Jason Aten:

So it it is cool. I I can't say this for sure, but I do think that you can only add

Stephen Robles:

like, if

Jason Aten:

you have in whatever you use to create your Notion account, I think that's the only email address you can attach to it. I couldn't figure that out. But, I mean, the interface of it is nice. Like, I like it. It's it doesn't I I was able to add two inboxes.

Jason Aten:

I don't believe there's any unified inbox. I'm looking at it right now. Sorry. That's why I'm doing this. So you see them separately, but that is that's becoming more common.

Jason Aten:

Like, Superhuman does it that way. I think there are benefits of, you know, separate inboxes because if you have a personal one and a work one, you can sort of focus what you're doing, that kind of thing. But it's nice. If you like this the design language that Notion uses, you'll like this.

Stephen Robles:

So I do like their design language. You can get the Mac app now. The iOS app is coming soon. And I did see this one thing that made me like, which is that you can basically compose an email like you do in Notion, doing like forward slash and then different blocks and Yeah. That's kinda sweet, honestly.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. That's pretty cool. So anyway, I I don't have a Gmail account, to try with it because I use Fastmail. But

Jason Aten:

You don't even have a personal Gmail account?

Stephen Robles:

I do, but I don't use it for email. I don't ever check the email.

Jason Aten:

I mean, maybe you should.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No.

Jason Aten:

It's

Stephen Robles:

it's too far gone. It's too far gone. Like, it's it's gone away. Fastmail. I just renewed my Fastmail subscription.

Stephen Robles:

Not a sponsor, but I use Fastmail. I wanted to talk about two well, alright. Two quick things. I got my Instagram back. It finally let me change my birth date.

Stephen Robles:

I don't think anybody from Meta actually helped me. I think just the statute of limitations passed, and I was able to change my birthday again. So I have my Instagram account back. It's public. That's cool.

Stephen Robles:

But also ChatGPT. We talked about it earlier, but I've been talking to more and more people that just use ChatGPT. And one, I met a friend, I'm gonna say friend of the show, Fernando Silva. He's a YouTube creator at nine to five Mac. Actually, met him for the first time in real life.

Stephen Robles:

We went to First Watch, Jason, because I guess that's the only place I meet Internet friends. You cheater. It's I don't know where else to go. I was like, oh, First Watch. That's the only thing.

Stephen Robles:

But he would tell me how he uses ChatGPT, and it is wild. Like, he gave me one example. I hope it's okay that I share. But he was trying to figure out, like, a pool heater. Like, he was staying somewhere, and and there was, like, a pool heater equipment, and he didn't know how to use it.

Stephen Robles:

So he pulls up ChatGPT, starts the camera, and literally, like, asks ChatGPT how to turn on a pool heater. And it tell it walks him through it. It just tells him how to do it. Like, that's just wild to me. Amazing.

Stephen Robles:

And I there was another guy. I introduced him to ChatGPT months ago, and I figured, you know, he'll probably never use it. And I talked to him last night. He's like, I use ChatGPT all the time, multiple times a day. I pay for the plus version.

Stephen Robles:

I use it for this, this, and that. And it's just impressive to me how quickly people can find value in very different use cases, but it just provides value in so many different areas. And as soon as someone finds a use case or is shown something that is impressive, like, it catches on so quickly. And again, that's probably why it became the fastest growing product in history. So

Jason Aten:

Steven, I, the other day so in a Tesla, you can turn on sentry mode, which keeps the cameras on when you're not in the car. So it's like a security feature. You have all these cameras on the outside of the car and they keep track of it. When when you turn on sentry mode, on the screen, if someone approaches, it shows this giant pulsing red eye. It's actually terrifying.

Jason Aten:

I I was gonna I could have you seen this thing? Seen this eye?

Stephen Robles:

I know. I I don't know if I've seen the eye.

Jason Aten:

I was just looking really quickly to see. I can I can share this photo because there's I won't dox myself?

Stephen Robles:

Oh, you mean on the screen?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. On the screen. Have you ever seen what

Stephen Robles:

I'm not looking at images. I'll share these images now. There's a bunch of, like it's,

Jason Aten:

half. It's actually actually terrifying.

Stephen Robles:

It's the 2,001 Space Odyssey. It's terrifying.

Jason Aten:

So I got into the car the other day, and Sentry mode was very much not on, but my wife had turned it on previously. So I I walked in. I got in the car, and it wouldn't go away. Like, it it just was sitting there. And I'm like, what is happening to my car right now?

Jason Aten:

So I pointed my camera at it and I literally just asked Chad GPT, what is this? And it says, this symbol in question is a circle icon with a vivid orange ring. This is the glowing eye indication that Tesla's central mode is turned on. I was like, that's exactly what it is. And then it says it, test the, it was a direct homage to how September.

Jason Aten:

Right? Whatever. Whatever. Right. And I was like, okay.

Jason Aten:

How do I make it go away? And it's like the easiest way is just to do the reset, which you hold down the two buttons, the two scroll wheels. You just hold them both down at the same time on your steering wheel Uh-huh. For, like, ten seconds, and it just reboots the computer in the car, and it went away. But, yes, ChatGPT is so good at that sort of thing that you could just point it at stuff and be and I didn't even have to say, like, what is the symbol?

Jason Aten:

What is the red thing? Like, what I just literally pointed it at the screen, I said, what is this? And it it took care of it for me. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

And I need to I think you try it more often in more places because I have a bunch of use cases, like, for my video and stuff and this podcast. But, yeah, in real life situation, I'll try more.

Jason Aten:

Steven, I use ChadGPT more often than I use the VisionPro, which is That's saints. But but I use the Vision Pro every day. I use the Jai GPT, I don't know, 30 times a day.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. That's wild. It's crazy. Anyway, lastly, find my, you gotta find my story. I just wanna say real quick.

Stephen Robles:

I dropped my AirPods Pro two the other day in my bedroom, but they went flying as they do. You know, they just scatter in all directions, the actual pods. One, could see on the floor. I got that. The other one, could not find.

Stephen Robles:

But apparently, if you go into the Find My app, I think this is just AirPods Pro two, but you can actually just see individual buds

Jason Aten:

Yep.

Stephen Robles:

If they're out of the case. And it will say out of case, here's the bud, And you can have it make a sound, just the individual bud, which is cool. And you can do the proximity find my. It doesn't show you the arrow on screen, but it does show you just like the circle and how many feet away it is. And you can do that with just the individual buds or the AirPods Pro case, and I found the other bud.

Stephen Robles:

And I just wanna say, find mine. When it come you know, it's not something you use a lot or every day, but when you need it, it works. It's good.

Jason Aten:

I think it's fair to say that low key find my is one of Apple's best features that's ever released.

Stephen Robles:

I think that's not When

Jason Aten:

you judge it by the criteria of the, it just works philosophy of like, this thing just improves my life in such a simple way, and it does it in such an intuitive way that I don't have to think about it. Now there's one drawback to Fine Mine, which is my problem that I had this morning, which was my office, as our listeners probably know, is a shed in our backyard. I'm sitting in a shed. So the house is

Stephen Robles:

like It's a nice shed. Don't feel bad for Jason if you've

Jason Aten:

never seen mean, can see it. It's a very

Stephen Robles:

nice shed. Only

Jason Aten:

a nice shed because I spent a lot of time and effort and money

Stephen Robles:

You built it. Making it

Jason Aten:

a nice shed. Yes. But I it's not just like where the the lawnmower's sitting over here in the weed whacker. You can't see any of that stuff. It's just right here.

Stephen Robles:

It's five gallon buckets.

Jason Aten:

It's that's not it at all. But it I mean, it's heated. Anyway Yeah. But I couldn't find my keys. Right?

Jason Aten:

So I locked this shed because there's a lot of stuff in here I don't necessarily want people to come in and take. And I couldn't find my keys, and I was like, oh, yeah. There's an AirTag on my keychain. Of course. So I opened the FindMy app, and the only thing I don't love about FindMy app, I understand why this is the case, is the AirTags do not update in the in the background.

Jason Aten:

Right. Right? They're not just constantly updating their location. So I opened the Find My app, and it tells me that my keys are in the car that I drove last night but that my wife has already left the house with to go to work. And so there's about a thirty second period of time before they updated that I'm like, oh my gosh.

Jason Aten:

I'm gonna have to like, I have to record a podcast in, like, eleven minutes. I'm gonna have to drive to my wife's work. I'm gonna have to get in the second set of keys to her car. I'm gonna get it. And then all of sudden it updated, and it's like, they're here at home, and I was able to because it's an AirTag, I was able to do the directional thing and find them.

Jason Aten:

And I'm like, great. And then Steven reminded me I actually have a second set of keys to my house. Like

Stephen Robles:

Did it show you the arrow on screen, though, and it pointed you in

Jason Aten:

For AirTags. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. For the

Jason Aten:

AirTags. The downside of the AirPods thing, by the way, is if your AirPods fall out into a laundry basket, that little beeping is not gonna help.

Stephen Robles:

No. It's yeah. It becomes very difficult.

Jason Aten:

You're spend a lot of time wondering where where is

Stephen Robles:

it? I just wish the arrow thing worked on more things, like MacBook Airs and Pros, Vision Pro, even iPad. Like, put the arrow on screen for all of that. Not just like, it's about 20 feet away. Like, point to

Jason Aten:

How often do you lose your MacBook Pro?

Stephen Robles:

I mean, never. But Okay. The time but that's the thing. The time you do, you would like to to show you an arrow on screen.

Jason Aten:

But if you okay. So the reason for the arrow is you might have lost it under a couch or in a couch cushion or in your in your cope. This happens to me, and it's actually really confusing because the coat closet in our hallway and our main or our walk in closet for the primary bedroom are back to bed. There's a wall between them. Right?

Jason Aten:

But they're back to back. So the number of times that I'm looking for something and it's pointing me, and I have to decide which side of the wall is it on because it's like

Stephen Robles:

a Right.

Jason Aten:

Right. It's about a hundred foot well, not a hundred foot. It's like a 25 foot walk around that way, but it's just pointing right there. I'm like, is it in a coat pocket or is it in my sweatshirt and what is it? But, yeah, the but the the reason for it is the the if it was your Mac, the point is get you in the right room and hopefully your eyeballs will just do the rest of the work.

Jason Aten:

Or if it's an AirPod, you need a little extra help or an AirTag.

Stephen Robles:

But even even, like, on the grand, like, find my network deal, you know what I mean, it would be nice. Like, there's no you

Jason Aten:

want point to point directions to my wife's office to tell me, like, this is how you get that. You can do that, actually. You can just be like, oh, yeah. Take me to that location.

Stephen Robles:

That yeah. That's true. Anyway, in my mind, when it works, it's great, and it does work reliably most of the

Jason Aten:

Almost all the time. Yeah. It's just just be aware. There is a slight lag in the Yeah. Updating of AirTags.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. That's right. Alright. For our bonus episode this week, I'm gonna ask Jason about aliens. But I'm also gonna ask him what news I should subscribe to.

Stephen Robles:

But it's

Jason Aten:

We're gonna I feel like those two things are more correlated than they should be. I think we need to get you some better news sources, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

They are very connected as far as that. So gonna be our bonus episode. We're gonna go record that now. If you would like to hear it, you can go to join.primarytech.fm, support the show. You get bonus episode every week, an ad free version of the show, and there's gonna be some future benefits, which we would love to hear from you.

Stephen Robles:

And so there's gonna be a link in the show notes to take a poll and comment on it and ask what kind of benefits, would you like to see from the membership. So those who pay already, these would be additional benefits. And for those who don't already subscribe, you would get all of this stuff. So links to all of that in the show notes. Join .primarytech.fm to get the bonus episodes, and you can also watch the show on YouTube, YouTube.com/@primarytechshow.

Stephen Robles:

You can also follow me and Jason on all the social networks, even ChatGP2 when that becomes an actual social network. Maybe we'll see. We'll put links to all that in the show notes. But thanks for listening. Thank you for watching.

Stephen Robles:

Thank you for all those who support the show. 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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