Primary Technology

Primary Technology

menu close

Apple’s Siri Just Lost to Perplexity, iPhone 17 Air Looks Real, Apple Watch 10th Birthday

/ 01:22:03/E72 Download MP3
Stephen Robles:

Darby Shaw, you take my breath away. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Google has lost not one but two court cases, and it could mean big things for the future of Chrome, Android, and more. We're gonna talk about that. Apple's Siri team is getting overhauled.

Stephen Robles:

The Perplexity came in with voice AI in their app, and it's actually pretty good. The Humane AI pin might be resurrecting. IPhone 17 Air might have a model of it and what it looks like and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by not one but two sponsors, Insta three sixty and Notion, and, of course, all of you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me, wondering if he got the movie quote from the beginning, Jason Aiten.

Stephen Robles:

How's it going?

Jason Aten:

Well, I'm wondering if I got the movie quote. Is that what you're trying to say? Oh, no. No. I'm wondering.

Jason Aten:

Darby you and wondering. Yeah. I mean, it's not really it's, like, not really helpful. It's like, Han Solo, what do you think? Like, it's hard to know.

Jason Aten:

Well, actually, that would be harder because there's Han Solo's in a lot of movies. Well, yeah, there's a lot

Stephen Robles:

of movies. Do you know the character Darby Shaw and what he might be

Jason Aten:

Julia Roberts. What's the John Grisham book? The Pelican Brief.

Stephen Robles:

Ah, there it is. The Pelican Brief.

Jason Aten:

I've well, I've read every John Grisham book, just so you know, and I've probably seen most of the movies.

Stephen Robles:

John Grisham, I I got into the Pelican Brief was my inroad to it, and then I, yeah, I read a bunch

Jason Aten:

Not the firm? Yeah. I mean, my I don't

Stephen Robles:

know why The Pelican Brief was more around when I was, I guess, getting into that stuff.

Jason Aten:

Okay. How many John Grisham books have you read?

Stephen Robles:

Well, knew you gonna ask me this.

Jason Aten:

Let me list let me list a couple. The Firm? Have you read The Firm?

Stephen Robles:

No. Didn't read The Firm.

Jason Aten:

Wait. Have you okay. Have you read any of these books or have

Stephen Robles:

you just read No. I read The Pelican Brief. Cover to cover.

Jason Aten:

Okay. I read

Stephen Robles:

The Pelican Brief. I know I've read one or two of them.

Jason Aten:

Read the book or seen the movie, The Firm?

Stephen Robles:

I think I've seen half the movie, but keep going.

Jason Aten:

You know who was in it. Right? Tom Cruise?

Stephen Robles:

Tom Cruise. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And the guy that just passed away. What was his name?

Stephen Robles:

I was gonna say Al Pacino, but then you said he passed away, and that's not.

Jason Aten:

Al Pacino, no. A Time to Kill.

Stephen Robles:

I think I saw that movie.

Jason Aten:

The Runaway Jury? Yes. The Client?

Stephen Robles:

The Client. Yes. I've seen yes. Partner? No.

Stephen Robles:

Not

Jason Aten:

the partner. The Rainmaker. That was a Matt Damon movie, I think.

Stephen Robles:

I think I saw The Rainmaker. I'm also who is the other author? Not John Grisham, but the guy who wrote, like, Rainbow Six and those books.

Jason Aten:

Tom Clancy?

Stephen Robles:

Tom Clancy. I I get I get

Jason Aten:

This is so fun to talk about pop culture with you. Like, you're the guy with the movie podcast, podcast,

Stephen Robles:

and I'm the one No. You have all the knowledge.

Jason Aten:

Of the information.

Stephen Robles:

No. But Tom Clancy, I think I read more of his books. And his were less, I think, cerebral and more, like, action packed and stuff like that. And they also had some video games based on those books.

Jason Aten:

Well, the difference is that one of them are spy books, the other one takes they all take place in courtrooms.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Exact yeah. Exactly. And the spy

Jason Aten:

With the exception of the Pelican Brief, which is where a supreme court justice is assassinated. Exactly. Part of that takes place in a movie theater.

Stephen Robles:

But the movie right. Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Pelican Brief. We have a lot of news. Was looking for my

Jason Aten:

None of it relates to any of that.

Stephen Robles:

Sorry. We were a tech podcast. Believe it or not, if this is your first time listening, we are not a John Grisham, Tom Clancy podcast. We are a tech podcast, and there's a lot of tech news. I was looking for my low battery shirt this morning because I stayed up trying to preorder the Nintendo Switch two.

Stephen Robles:

Did you

Jason Aten:

I saw your posts about that.

Stephen Robles:

Did you? I assume you did not.

Jason Aten:

I registered, but I didn't get any a notification.

Stephen Robles:

Well, it was weird because the Nintendo ones, it's some kind of lottery that you may or may not get in to preorder. Oh. But last night, preorders opened for Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. And Jason, it was a bloodbath. I mean, this this thing was like

Jason Aten:

You're pushing people off the website, weren't

Stephen Robles:

you? I was literally fighting people virtually. I, like, with my refresh button, it was a dumpster fire. First of all, real quick, Target, totally total dumpster fire. Like, I tried hitting the checkout button a thousand times.

Stephen Robles:

It kept erroring out. Some people, like Quinn Nelson and others, posted these pictures. They would let you get through to the order and then send you an email that your order was canceled, like, minutes later. So never got Target to work. Best Buy, it showed it as, like, not available.

Stephen Robles:

And then around 12:30 eastern time, you could start preordering it, but you had to, like, wait in line, which is the weirdest, like, web thing to look at. It's like, well, what do I do now? Do I just stare at this?

Jason Aten:

It's like the Taylor Swift ticket thing where Ticketmaster, right, makes you wait in line. I'm like, what line?

Stephen Robles:

Is the yeah. Like, what line time this? Can I at least get a counter? And, like, there's a little circle thing going, but it was I don't know if to refresh the page. So, anyway, the Best Buy thing, never got it to go through.

Stephen Robles:

But out of Rack 1245, I did not expect this to be the hero of the night. Walmart Walmart let me go in and preorder, didn't make me wait in line, and supposedly, I got it for June 5, like launch day. It's supposedly coming.

Jason Aten:

I don't understand this. And the but the these websites are all hosted on AWS. Right? And if they can, like they host the entire Internet. They host Netflix.

Jason Aten:

Netflix had 60,000,000 people watching, like, football and

Stephen Robles:

That Mike Tyson Fight, though, started buffering. They couldn't handle that.

Jason Aten:

But since then, that wasn't that was a Netflix problem, not an AWS problem. So maybe that wasn't the best thing. But I'm like, do they not pay for enough? Like, what I don't know. What line is what I'm but here's the best part, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

Yes.

Jason Aten:

Right now on Target, Nintendo Switch two console has a 2.1 star rating. 71 of the ratings on there are one star. And is it just because people are mad because of the dumpster fire? How could they possibly have even rated I don't even know why do they let people rate things

Stephen Robles:

That doesn't

Jason Aten:

that haven't actually shipped yet.

Stephen Robles:

That's why star ratings on the Internet. That's that's a tough one. You know, I've been seeing on Amazon a lot saying frequently returned item, and it could even be, like, a highly rated item. It'll be, like, four and a half stars with a thousand reviews, but it says frequently returned. And I'm getting hesitant to, like, buy some of this stuff.

Stephen Robles:

I'm curious. Not that I need more MagSafe chargers, but

Jason Aten:

I mean, if it's like clothing and stuff that makes sense, you'll buy a bunch of different sour shoes. You buy, like, four sizes of them, and then you return three of them. So, yeah, that's a pretty highly returned item.

Stephen Robles:

No. It's it was weird things. But, anyway, anyway, I got into Walmart. Supposedly, I'm getting it. We'll see.

Stephen Robles:

But it was it was a fight to the death, and so I I was up trying to order that, and, yeah, it was wild.

Jason Aten:

But the price didn't change.

Stephen Robles:

No. The price didn't change. Oh, yeah.

Jason Aten:

For the They were talking about that the price was gonna change, and the price appears to be the same.

Stephen Robles:

It appears to be the same. And also yesterday, Nintendo tweeted out that there's crazy demand for the Switch two and telling people, like, their lottery system for those who signed up on the Nintendo website may like, people in Japan, like, you're it's gonna be very difficult to get one. And I don't know how they allocate numbers, like, for different countries or whatever. But anyway, I got my name. We'll see.

Jason Aten:

I I have one last question.

Stephen Robles:

Yes. You there.

Jason Aten:

How can an item that ships on June 5 be sold out?

Stephen Robles:

Well, that's just what they have. That's just, like, what they

Jason Aten:

Can they not make more between now and June 5? Like, that's what? Three month two months away?

Stephen Robles:

But each retailer has allocated a certain number. Like, there were GameStops literally printing out, like, pieces of paper and taping them to their door saying, this location will have 50 Nintendo Switch two bundles and 32 Nintendo Switch consoles. And so, like, that's just how many you can preorder. So it's just like a limited stock for each retailer.

Jason Aten:

So here's my thing, and I want our listeners. I wanna I wanna know what you think about this. I think artificially limiting supply for something that doesn't come out for two months is the most ridiculous customer experience possible because they can make more between now and then. What? Did they shut the factory down and they're moving onto the Switch three already?

Jason Aten:

Like, come on. Like, make more.

Stephen Robles:

That's not coming for another ten year. Well, and this is, again, kudos to Apple's preorder process, which, you know

Jason Aten:

Well, have they ever said, I'm sorry. No. You can't have an iPhone 16 Pro. Right. They might say it's gonna take you six more weeks.

Stephen Robles:

You could have bought the twenty thirteen Mac Pro all the way up to 2018. Like, no.

Jason Aten:

And still paid $5,000 for

Stephen Robles:

it. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. They should just say, you're not gonna get it on launch date.

Stephen Robles:

Like what Apple does. Like, well, now the shipping time is in July or now it's in September or whatever it is. But after last night, I will say I am thankful for Apple's recent preorder processes because I think I've never not hold on. I don't wanna let me not triple negative this. I have gotten everything I've preordered on launch day for the last five, six years, and I don't remember the last time it was it was delayed.

Stephen Robles:

I remember there being, like, stressful preorder process. I don't know if it was iPhone 10 or 11, and it was like, you know, the Apple store would crash or wouldn't let you check out. And typically what I run into, like if I'm gonna preorder something, I would like to pick it up in the store because you can get it earlier that day. But the problem is checking out with a with a win a window for pickup means if that window gets taken while you're checking out, it'll error out the order. And then you have to go back and select a later time.

Stephen Robles:

And it's like, if I tap the order, can you just hold it for, like, two seconds so I can Face ID this payment? But that's why I typically default to delivery and then meet the UPS guy at a random gas station. That's something I actually do. But

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Just just scroll through Steven's Twitter feed. You'll find it.

Stephen Robles:

Do you do you remember I'll I'll recall the last preorder process, but the last time maybe you didn't get something on launch day or that it was super stressful. I remember this is way long ago, but the iPhone six, it was the last iPhone I preordered through my carrier AT and T, and that process was a dumpster fire. And I was like, the AT and T website just could not do it. Like you're saying, I don't know AWS. I don't know what the deal is, but I just I did get it.

Stephen Robles:

I did get it on launch day, but it was, an hour of refreshing, whatever. But

Jason Aten:

The only time I can think of that I didn't that I wasn't gonna be able to get something on launch day through a preorder, I just showed up at the Apple store on launch day and got one.

Stephen Robles:

And you got one.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. They all you can listen. By the way, listeners, pro tip, you can almost always do that.

Stephen Robles:

You can't

Jason Aten:

in New York City, you can almost always show up at an Apple Store on launch day and get the thing you want.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. I don't know the the brand in Florida Apple Store, though, they get, like, five of whatever for launch day nonpreorders, I think.

Jason Aten:

So you have you have to

Stephen Robles:

go to a a bigger store. That's just my recommendation. Go to a store that's, like, bigger than the the single aisle, Apple Store that we have here.

Jason Aten:

Well, maybe a better way of saying it is they get new stock every day, and you can usually identify what stock they have by some I don't remember when it is. It's either, like, 9PM or it's, like, whatever. And you could go in and see if you can order one for pickup the next day.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And so you may not get it on launch day, but you'll definitely get it before, like, November. Like, if you just do that on a fairly regular basis. Right.

Stephen Robles:

And if you didn't order pre, Switch two last night, you can probably get one twenty twenty eight, I think. I think that's when it will be

Jason Aten:

You can buy one used probably from Steven after realizes that it's gonna sit on his desk next to his humane AI pin. Oh.

Stephen Robles:

Now listen. Now we gotta get to that. Hold on. We gotta get to that. I wanna do three five star review shout outs real quick.

Stephen Robles:

Thank you for your five star reviews. We're still a 4.9 star show, But with your help, I think we can get back to five stars. Norbert Adams junior from The USA. We inspired them to start their own tech channel, which is very kind. Jonathan Speak from The USA, we're his fave tech podcast.

Stephen Robles:

And he said brass players are the best, which I have to agree. I play trumpet if you didn't know. And Mikhail Klimovic. I don't know if I said his his name last week, but from Czech Republic that were fun to recommend. Let's compliment.

Stephen Robles:

Fun to recommend.

Jason Aten:

I wonder if there's a translation thing happening there because fun to recommend No. That makes sense. Interesting.

Stephen Robles:

That's what I mean, listen. You tell somebody about primary tech, which you a % should do, you have fun doing it because you know they're gonna have a great time.

Jason Aten:

That's a good point.

Stephen Robles:

Exactly. Alright. One housekeeping thing before we get to news. We did a poll in the community last week for what member benefits you would like in addition to the ad free versions of the show and bonus episodes. We had a small sample set, but I realized there's a bunch of you listeners out there who are not in the community, and we really need to know who is actually a member right now and what benefits they would want, and who would actually sign up with this new benefit.

Stephen Robles:

What benefit would motivate someone to sign up? So we have another poll, so please go take it. It'll be in the show notes, but it's a Google form, and you don't have to sign in. It doesn't collect your email. It doesn't even ask for your name.

Stephen Robles:

Totally anonymous, but you could just three clicks. Click the form, click one of the check boxes or more, or you could we have other box if you wanted to sec suggest a different benefit, and we just ask if you're a current member. And so if you could, everybody, like, there's literally thousands of you. Like, there's not even an exaggeration. There are thousands of you out there.

Stephen Robles:

We would love to have a bunch of you let us know what benefit would you be like, yes. I will now support primary tech, because they do this. Or if you have a suggestion, could put it in the other box. Give me the first link in the show notes, and, we would love to hear from you because, yeah, we're excited to it. People were leaning towards a daily podcast with the top headlines, like a short show, which is something I can do in Apple Podcasts and Memberful, but we wanna know.

Stephen Robles:

We wanna know what what

Jason Aten:

Like, maybe what you want is for us to do a monthly review of a John Grisham book. Like, just tell us. You can fill up the other. And when Steven says, like, he, the he we did a poll and then realized there were some problems. What do you mean?

Jason Aten:

I just want you all to know Steven is so excited about this because we really appreciate our members so much. We do. But he was, like, ready to launch, like, seven things today. And I said, hang on. I feel like there's one additional piece of information we need.

Jason Aten:

And so what we just wanna know is if you are a member, we appreciate you. What are the additional benefits that would just make you want to continue being a member? Exactly. And if you're not a member, that means that, like, having an ad free version of the show, not as important to you. We would love to know what would be important to you Yes.

Jason Aten:

That would make you wanna be a member. So just just wanted to clarify that.

Stephen Robles:

Yes. Bottom line too, we appreciate everyone listening and watching. We are a growing show. We've been growing over the last year. It's almost a year and a half now.

Stephen Robles:

We started last January. And so, yeah, we appreciate everyone just listening and watching. And let us know. Let us know what you'd like more of or different of, and now you can use that form to do it. And you know what else you can want more of?

Stephen Robles:

There's more humane AI pin. We're spend three seconds on this. But this project called openpin.org, they have now, like, some code or something that you can connect your Humane AI PIN to a computer, run this whatever, and it will unbrick it. Because if you're unfamiliar, Humane AI PIN, the failed AI device, since Humane is now defunct, it's basically a paperweight and has been on my desk as a paperweight ever since, but I never took it off. I don't know why.

Stephen Robles:

Maybe in the back of my mind, I thought someone will do this. And so you have to buy this, like, weird pin thing. Sorry. Not the Humane pin. An interposer, which is like a device that will allow you to connect your Humane AI pin to your computer and then, like, have a USB connected to your computer via USB.

Stephen Robles:

I bought this immediately. It's like $40. Whoever's making it is apparently in Florida because it ships from Florida. So it already shipped. It's on it's on its way to me right now, and I'm gonna try and hack into my Humane AI pin to see if I can actually use it again.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know what it'll do.

Jason Aten:

But, Steven, Steven, you didn't use it when it worked. What are you going to do now with the unbricked version? The thing basically shipped to you bricked because there was no useful reason to have it, and you're going to spend. I mean, actually, for the I'm so glad you're doing this because it's giving me opportunity to just point out that you didn't want to use it when it was working the way Humane sent sent it to you. What more will it it's not going to do anything.

Stephen Robles:

Apparently, I'm looking at this website. It'll do translation. You can do the assistant with vision. So I don't know if this is like hacking it to just be able to still ask chatty things, but even like take pictures and stuff. So I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

We'll see. I'm gonna test it out. I'll probably make a video about it because this is wild, and I haven't seen anybody else do it. I don't know if anybody cares, but I'm gonna do it.

Jason Aten:

I think you should definitely do it.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. I'm gonna definitely

Jason Aten:

do it. Both for your YouTube channel and for the show. I just wanna be on the record that the thing didn't do anything when it worked. I don't think it's going to do anything more now.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. That is true. Okay. Well, you know what does do stuff? And this is wild.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know if you've had a chance to play with this. Perplexity, which is honestly one one of the AI tools that I have not been using as much as Chechiuti and as much, I mean, basically at all. But yesterday, they updated the Perplexity app on iPhone to integrate the voice assistant in their app with multiple a multiple features on the iPhone, and it is pretty incredible what it can do. I was playing around with it yesterday. It can you can set reminders, create reminders with the alerts.

Stephen Robles:

It can create calendar events. It can play Apple Music, Apple Podcasts. You can ask it to search for YouTube videos, and it can do all of that. And then even use maps. Use Apple Maps and then make reservations at restaurants all, like, through the Perplexity voice assistant.

Stephen Robles:

It does have to kick you over to, like, OpenTable to finish the reservation. But Apple Maps results and using that information, it's all, like, there. You can just do it all. And, honestly, it is even with the limited access it has now, it is so much better than Apple's voice assistant because it just understands you and, like, it works. So I'm just gonna do a quick example here.

Stephen Robles:

I I created a a new action button shortcut where it's very complicated. I'm gonna talk about it in a video probably later today. Anyway, starting the the thing, and I'll say, show me the best Vietnamese restaurants in Lakeland, Florida. 1 thing about Perplexity is the voice is very slow, like, it's responding, which is kinda Here are some of the best Vietnamese restaurant I'm sorry. I'm sure That

Jason Aten:

was Yeah. That worked really well. That's a good demo.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. Look. It gives me the okay. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

All right. Calm down. Calm down. But anyway, so it gives me the map. Like you see the Apple Maps results, you see all the stuff.

Stephen Robles:

And then it will say like, do wanna make a reservation at one of these places? And then you can just do it. But let me let me try another one, and hopefully it will be less verbose. But you can ask it things like, play that song from the Minecraft movie where Jack Black sings about his dog. I'm a try and do this.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Well, that didn't work as well. It gave me a result for the Tampa Theater. I don't know what that oh, no. No.

Stephen Robles:

Here it is. Here it is. It's playing the song. It's playing it from YouTube, but if I asked for Apple Music, it probably would do that. But, Jason, that's, like, good at understanding.

Stephen Robles:

If you ever tried to have the voice assistant Apple's voice assistant play a song from a certain artist, you know how, like, frustrating that can be? Perplexity has gotten it way more times.

Jason Aten:

I just wanna remind our listeners that Perplexity is the AI startup that basically has been accused by everyone of just blatantly plagiarizing. Like, they're the ones in the Wired story where Sure. They asked it to write a story, and it basically just plagiarized the Wired story about how it plagiarizes them.

Stephen Robles:

I am not advocating for perplexity.

Jason Aten:

Just wanna say that every time perplexity comes up Oh, yeah. Yeah. As if the entire AI landscape wasn't on questionable copyright grounds, perplexity is not on shaky grounds. It has fallen deep into the hole of copyright

Stephen Robles:

But plagiarism. But this feature in particular is more so the impressive part for me is how it has integrated into multiple iPhone features being just a sandboxed app, which other apps do this, you know, like reminders, calendars, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, which you you can ask it for, like, primary technology show, which I should probably do. You could like, other apps have access to that. Like, that's why Fantastical can show you reminders and calendar events in its app, or the Things app can show reminders and calendar events there. Like, there are hooks into those parts of your phone.

Stephen Robles:

Also, Apple Music and Podcasts, you can, like, log into those accounts on third party devices and services, some cars. And so there there were already hooks into all of this, but the impressive part is that they've somehow managed to pair your requests with Perplexity's system to then actually go to those hooks reliably. And some people were having issues with, like, reminders and calendar events, but I found it to be pretty rely like, reminders and stuff worked well. Play the latest episode of the primary technology podcast from Apple Podcasts. And, also, it's, like, way better just than natural language and stuff.

Stephen Robles:

So let's see if it did it. It also tells you all the sources. And look, it actually just opened primary technology in the Apple Podcasts app, and it's ready to go.

Jason Aten:

I mean, that's not the latest episode because, buddy, we're making

Stephen Robles:

the latest episode right now. That didn't know so. That didn't

Jason Aten:

know so. Listen, it is impressive, but that is like saying that I would be a very impressive writer if all I did was plagiarize Hemingway, Malcolm Gladwell, and her and, you know, like, Shakespeare

Stephen Robles:

or Listen.

Jason Aten:

John Grisham. John Grisham. That's the name

Stephen Robles:

of person. Is perplexity. A sandboxed app that does not have as much access to the iOS that Apple does, has made a better voice assistant in whatever, the last two years than Apple has made in the last and so, you know, a lot of people on social media were like, Apple just needs to buy Perplexity. Maybe that's not a bad idea. Maybe that would fix some issues.

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna talk about that in a second. But I find it impressive. You can do it for free. You don't have to pay for Perplexity Pro to use the voice assistant with the iOS hooks. I would encourage you to try it out.

Stephen Robles:

I've mapped it now to my action button because especially for music requests, it's just better. Like, it's just better. So that's the impressive part. It it beat Siri already.

Jason Aten:

It's it's better at plagiarism than Siri,

Stephen Robles:

Are you are you mad about perplexity? You just are you do you have, like, a a vendetta?

Jason Aten:

I think that of all of the I think of all the AIs I mean, like, realistically,

Stephen Robles:

all

Jason Aten:

of them are just siphoning up all of the information on the Internet. Right? But the difference is that what perplexity will just do is it will just present you that information as if it did it itself.

Stephen Robles:

I see.

Jason Aten:

It's just literally played

Stephen Robles:

So it's not it's not credit

Jason Aten:

me as a

Stephen Robles:

Properly. Is that what you're

Jason Aten:

saying?

Stephen Robles:

It's not

Jason Aten:

just that it's not crediting the stuff. It's it because it will it it's a I think they were, like, billing themselves as, like, an answer engine. Right? Because, essentially, perplexity is not necessarily an an LLM the way we think about, like, chattypty's models or whatever. It's using different types of model things, and it's using it to try to go out and get information for you.

Jason Aten:

But when you ask it to do chat body type things, what it will often do is just literally regurgitate and plagiarize things just like a high school student does. And so to me, I'm and and, actually, the thing that makes it worse is when called on it, like, when asked about it, the CEO was just like, I mean, that's just a misunderstanding about how the Internet works, which is really just saying, please let us copy you know, steal copyrighted information because otherwise our model doesn't business plan doesn't work.

Stephen Robles:

So Now Yeah.

Jason Aten:

I'm I'm not a big fan of perplexity.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Now I'm not trying to catch you on anything here, but I know you do enjoy ChatuchipiT's deep research feature. Do you put that in a different category as far as, like, what it's doing with the source material, or is that just useful enough where you're just gonna use it because it's there anyway?

Jason Aten:

Well, deep research, to my knowledge, and I haven't read anyone else, who has suggested this, is not plagiarizing things. Now Right. That doesn't mean that OpenAI didn't didn't scoop up a bunch of copyrighted information. I I'm not and so I know this wasn't the thing we wanted to talk about. I actually have no idea what to think about this because copyright literally means you're making a copy of a thing.

Jason Aten:

K. There's that. But I don't really know how I'm just taking the devil's advocate approach to this. When you ask a large language model to scoop up a bunch of information so that it can, quote, learn so that it can then answer things, that's literally the same thing that we do as human beings. The difference is there's zero friction.

Jason Aten:

Right? So so I'm not arguing that it's okay all of a sudden because copyright is a real thing. Right. I'm a writer. I make a living in copyright.

Jason Aten:

Like, right? So I'm okay with that. But it's I think it's very nuanced, but that's different than plagiarism.

Stephen Robles:

Sure. And plagiarism because it's like an exact replica

Jason Aten:

of Well, plagiarism is taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own.

Stephen Robles:

Even if it's

Jason Aten:

As opposed to Right.

Stephen Robles:

Word is

Jason Aten:

It's like instead of reading a book and learning about something Right. And then writing about the thing you learned about from the book, it's just taking paragraphs from

Stephen Robles:

the

Jason Aten:

book and putting them in your thing.

Stephen Robles:

And that's what it was caught doing, like, literally verbatim copy pasting kind of stuff.

Jason Aten:

Like, they they literally like, Wired published a story about perplexity, And in the story, they were talking about how well, then the other thing they were doing is that the story pointed out that they were indexing content that publishers had put the no index, you know, the

Stephen Robles:

Right. I remember that. Unsavory.

Jason Aten:

And they're saying, like, don't do this, and they kept switching to different ones all the time. Right. So Well, I'll put this well, I found

Stephen Robles:

the Wired article. I'll put it in there. I do remember that Perplexity was ignoring the tags to say, don't scrape this, which is super unsavory. And so maybe I shouldn't be as bullish on it. I just think

Jason Aten:

I agree with you about the point that, like, why can't Apple figure this I just wish that someone else would figure it out and not these guys.

Stephen Robles:

Well, and I'm curious if they if Apple should have just bought one of these LLMs earlier on, like a year ago, two years ago, maybe maybe they would still get a a jump ahead or at least skip forward some steps if they were to do something like that to integrate it. But

Jason Aten:

Yeah. A % they should have bought Anthropic.

Stephen Robles:

Anthropic. You think that's the one they should have bought?

Jason Aten:

I think that was the one that they could have gotten. Okay. I don't think there's ever gonna be a time they could buy OpenEye.

Stephen Robles:

No. They can't do that now.

Jason Aten:

0%. Because no one was even thinking about ChelChat GPT and that it was, like, huge. Like, instantly, there's just no way Sam Altman, when you get a hundred million users in a week, would be like there's no price. Like, he that's gonna be a $2,000,000,000,000 company someday.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. And it's crazy. ChatGPT is only, like, two and a half years old.

Jason Aten:

Basically. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

It's I'm looking well, at least the Google AI overview about ChatGPT, like it's like a Russian nesting doll of AI.

Jason Aten:

It's like inception here.

Stephen Robles:

It's terrible. Anyway, yeah, 11/30/2022. So that's, yeah, it's about two and a half years, which is wild. I mean, is one of those things where I don't know what I'm sure there's a psychological term for it, but when you think something's been around forever, but it's really only been like two and a half years.

Jason Aten:

I mean, feels weird because a year later, the guy was fired and rehired in like span of four days over Thanksgiving

Stephen Robles:

while he

Jason Aten:

was trying to sit on the beach. And

Stephen Robles:

He's, you were in Florida at the time.

Jason Aten:

Right? Because it

Stephen Robles:

was over Thanksgiving.

Jason Aten:

I was in Florida trying to just chill and sit on the beach, and I had to, like, work on my vacation because the guy was fired And rehired. And then Sachin Nadella went in with, like, a machine gun, and he's like, Say hello to my little friend.

Stephen Robles:

So so many references. Yeah. Alright. Well, that's perplexity. So speaking of Apple's AI team, there was another Bloomberg article talking about all the changes that they are making to the voice assistant team since John Gianandrea has been moved to, like, AI research, which seems like some label of a position that, I don't know, probably not gonna be doing much.

Stephen Robles:

Let's

Jason Aten:

be honest. I mean, that was what he was hired to do originally. What it was hired to do? He's just gonna go back to doing that and not actually making it.

Stephen Robles:

But how that's gonna fit actually into Apple's products, like, we'll see. We'll see how long is it. But anyway, this is in the Bloomberg article, Mark Gurman is saying that long time vision it's like they moved a bunch of VisionPro people, which along with Mike Rockwell, led the team. But VisionPro engineering lead Ranjit Desai will oversee Siri engineering, including platform and systems groups. VisionPRO senior director Olivier Gudnecht will lead the team that designs the user experience, and VisionPRO engineering director Nate Benjamin and CoreOS senior director Tom Duffy will work on Siri's underlying architecture.

Stephen Robles:

I'm curious who's still working on VisionPRO at this point?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. This all the rumors about another VisionPRO, never gonna happen.

Stephen Robles:

It's like

Jason Aten:

Because they just raided the building. It's empty now. There are just desks everywhere, and these guys are all working on seriously.

Stephen Robles:

Walks into that VisionPro and was like, hey. All you guys, get over here.

Jason Aten:

Just He's like, he walks in. He's like, pack your stuff. And they're all like, oh, that's it. We're getting fired. He's like, no.

Jason Aten:

Listen. We need you to do something else now because we have a worse product than the Vision Pro.

Stephen Robles:

Exactly. Vision Pro, it'll be fine. Let's go. So, yeah, I'm curious of what that is. But anyway, everybody's moving over to the voice assistant team.

Stephen Robles:

So we'll see. There's no way that this new team could build something in time for Dub Dub in a month to announce. And so un I feel like unless they make up some demos again, like concept videos like they did last year, we're not gonna see anything at Dub Dub as a result of these moves. Right? I mean, it's

Jason Aten:

And well, so you're let's distinguish because there is a difference between Apple intelligence and Siri.

Stephen Robles:

Fair.

Jason Aten:

So there's a I think it's very likely we'll see some kind of Apple Intelligence demos. And I think it's also possible that there are things that they were working on already planning on announcing at Dub Dub that they may still roll out. Right? This I feel like there are two things happen. Like, these two things are happening sort of in parallel now.

Jason Aten:

Right? These guys are coming in and they're like, okay. Here's where we need to be by next year. Here's where we need to be in three years. Right.

Jason Aten:

But the stuff, they didn't just all of a sudden be like I mean, the Vision Pro guys aren't working on the Vision Pro anymore, but presumably, there were still people working on Siri that are still doing those things. It's just gonna take them some time. Because I think what they have to do is build a whole new system and then figure out how do we replace the old system with the new system without making everybody mad because nothing works anymore. Because Steven will be very mad if you cannot open his blinds and turn on his fan.

Stephen Robles:

Don't break HomeKit. Absolutely. If anything breaks his HomeKit, there's gonna be you're gonna have a problem.

Jason Aten:

The product the or the the OS that only, like, 17

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No. Don't break There's lots of HomeKit people out there. I know the home the HomeKit ears.

Jason Aten:

Relative, though, to Vision Pro, what do you think? Over or under?

Stephen Robles:

Oh my god. There are way more HomeKit people than Vision Pro.

Jason Aten:

You really think so?

Stephen Robles:

There's entire YouTube channels about HomeKit stuff. I don't see any YouTube channels just VisionPRO. I'm just saying.

Jason Aten:

Alright. You're probably right.

Stephen Robles:

I'm just saying Eric Welander, Shane Wadley, all those guys, those are all HomeKits. That's all HomeKits stuff.

Jason Aten:

Email the other guy at podcast wait. The email, the other guy @primary.fm if you are a HomeKit user and you don't have a VisionPro.

Stephen Robles:

And you don't have a VisionPro. That email does work. The other guy at primary tech dot f m.

Jason Aten:

If you can figure out what group of people I just described and you're in it, you can email me.

Stephen Robles:

Now, yeah, I want to I wanna see some video parody of, like, when they finally get the voice assistant to a good place of, like, Tim Cook saying, we gotta go to the Siri team. But it's like they go to, like, to the basement of Apple Park, and they open a door, and it's like moths fly out. I'm like, what? I know they wouldn't do that, but, like, that would be hilarious. It was just, like, this old decrepit.

Stephen Robles:

Like, alright. Let's go. Or it's, oh, even better, you should make it a severance office. They should do, like, a severance floor, and that's where they I'm just giving free ideas, Apple. I'm just saying.

Stephen Robles:

But also Apple, do not break HomeKit. Okay? Don't do it. Also, shortcuts actions. Okay?

Stephen Robles:

We need Apple intelligent shortcuts actions. Summarize, transcribe, what is happening? Anyway, okay. I'm done.

Jason Aten:

This is the most terrifying segment of the

Stephen Robles:

show. I got real close to the camera if you watch on YouTube, so hopefully somebody doesn't clip that.

Jason Aten:

I think that that came through on the audio too, to be honest. Just everything about that was very close and personal. People were listening to this in their car, just drove off the side of the road because suddenly they thought Steven was right

Stephen Robles:

behind them. In the car with them. That's right.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. The noise that calls come

Stephen Robles:

from inside house. Alright. Last thing before we take a break. Did you see did you see the new the latest we're gonna talk about Apple ads now on the show and just we should rate them. We should have, like, an Apple ads, like, rating system.

Stephen Robles:

Did you see the latest ad?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Apple's ads are getting weird.

Stephen Robles:

This that was literally part of the show title last week. This is the latest Apple intelligence ad, which to Apple's credit is actually a feature that works and exists right now and is actually probably one of the best features currently. And, this ad is basically a dude flexing in his room, and his mom is taking pictures of him flexing, I guess, to post on Tinder or whatever. And so he then uses the cleanup feature, which is an Apple intelligence feature, to remove her from the mirror reflections. And that is the that is the ad.

Stephen Robles:

What do we think? What's the over under, Jason? Do like this ad better or the shirtless guy on the roof that we looked

Jason Aten:

at? This is a trillion times better. And I don't like this ad, but it's a it's it's super better than the other one.

Stephen Robles:

It is I think it is super better than the other one. Now you said you said we had to watch that ad last week with audio.

Jason Aten:

I watched the ad afterwards because I was gonna write about it, and I still might. But if you listen to the ad, there's, like, the voice of the person going glare. Glare.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Okay.

Jason Aten:

And then it's like, no glare. So it makes a slightly better, like, connection between the thing.

Stephen Robles:

Let me try to actually play this.

Jason Aten:

Glare. Glare. Glare. Okay.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, someone was asking, do we think that's an AirTag on his chest?

Jason Aten:

I don't think is good. Would be a really weird product, like, especially since Apple form, like, officially says you should not put AirTags on people.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, really?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. They when they first came out, I think they said don't put them on people or pets.

Stephen Robles:

But if you put an AirTag in a necklace around your own neck, can you then never lose yourself?

Jason Aten:

I lost an AirTag tag the other day, and my phone kept telling me I had left my keys somewhere. And I'm like, they're right here. And then it occurred to me, oh, the air tag fell out of the little case. I just

Stephen Robles:

Oh my. Well, that's a bad case. That's a cheap Amazon case. You gotta get

Jason Aten:

Actually, you're right. Is a case.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. You I'm

Jason Aten:

thinking of because this this little case, could just, like

Stephen Robles:

No. No. No. It just fell out.

Jason Aten:

It just fell out. No.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. No. Get the the apple leather one.

Jason Aten:

Oh, no. I have a I have a couple good ones

Stephen Robles:

on some of keys. You can't be doing that. Anyway, this is oh, gone.

Jason Aten:

Gone. That's what it says. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. I mean, with with the audio, it's kinda funny.

Jason Aten:

It still is bad, but it makes more sense.

Stephen Robles:

I will put both the new Apple intelligence ad and the glare ad. I hope you enjoyed that audio too. That's gonna be some ASMR.

Jason Aten:

It was real loud. Glare.

Stephen Robles:

Was it loud? Yeah. But we'll see. I'll have to I'll have to watch it in the editor. See how it goes.

Stephen Robles:

Anyway, yeah, Apple intelligence ads are getting interesting. We just talked about iPhone 17 Air models are out. Apple Sports app got updated, which maybe Jason will care about the sports ball. Ads are finally coming to threads and Google's big court case, is significantly gonna affect their business. But before we do, we have not one but two sponsors today.

Stephen Robles:

Sponsor number one, Insta three 60. Let's be honest. You probably saw this camera on the Internet recently because it's been all over and for good reason. I I don't have the camera to review, but I watched or saw the verge's review of it, and they actually said it's actually an incredible camera. It is the new Insta three sixty x five.

Stephen Robles:

It's the new flagship three sixty camera. It has eight k three sixty degree video, enhanced low light performance, hundred and eighty five minute battery life. You can almost record a full episode of primary technology with it. No. I'm just kidding.

Stephen Robles:

User replaceable lenses and the most durable yet. And if you did you go see some of the videos? You can actually see people like, the lens now being replaceable means people are, like, basically breaking it, and then you can, like, replace it. So it's built from tougher optical glass. So superior drop resistance capability.

Stephen Robles:

It's now easily replaceable by the user, which is wild. So that you can get a replacement lens kit, and you can replace the lens yourself. So you're gonna be doing things action wise down the ski slope. I know Jason, do you ski?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. You do really? I could yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Well, there you go. As Jason skis, maybe he can put, like, an Insta three sixty in his something. You know, you hold the thing.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I've always wanted to catch it on video when I fall and break my lane.

Stephen Robles:

Listen. That'd great for FailArmy. You should totally do it because, also, you can get the invisible selfie stick so you can get that third person views. You can shoot first person, point later. How did you get that third person angles?

Stephen Robles:

And drone like follow shots and iconic 360 degree views, so the pole disappears. You ever see those videos and you're like, how are they capturing this? It's with these Insta three sixty cameras with the invisible pole thing. So you can get the Insta three sixty x five. Again, it has that long longer battery life and I p 68 waterproofing.

Stephen Robles:

So up to 15 meters or 49 feet deep in the water. So if you go in scuba diving, all the action you're gonna be doing this summer, capture it with the Insta three sixty x five and a huge battery, built in WindGuard, and improved audio algorithm. Try it out. So here's what you do. To bag a free 45 inch invisible selfie stick so, Jason, you can get the invisible selfie stick worth $25 with your Insta three sixty x five purchase.

Stephen Robles:

Go to store.Insta360.com and use the promo code primary, just one word. Primary is the promo code available for the first thirty purchases only. So, yeah, I guess better run and go get it. For more information, be sure to check out the links in the show notes. You can get the direct link in the show notes to the x five and use promo code primary.

Stephen Robles:

And, yeah, that's awesome. Insta three sixty x five. Thanks for sponsoring the show. And our good friends who power our show notes, at least the ones between Jason and I, Notion. We're literally using Notion right now.

Stephen Robles:

I'm staring at Notion with my eyeballs, and I see Jason's little, j because I see where his cursor is. Not to be creepy. You know what I mean?

Jason Aten:

I don't even know where my cursor is, but I'm glad that you can See? See

Stephen Robles:

it. That's why Notion AI is the best, especially we collaborate on our show notes every week with Notion, and it's incredible. You could create documents, project manage. I do video project management in Notion and a ton of other stuff. Notion is super powerful, combines notes, docs, projects in one space that's simple and beautifully designed, and you can now leverage the power of AI right inside Notion.

Stephen Robles:

This is really powerful when you just put everything there. So if you're doing your notes in Notion, your projects, your tasks, you can put full video transcripts. I've done that. Put all of your notes and docs in there, and then use Notion AI all in one place. You don't have to jump back and forth between another AI app and where you have your notes and documents.

Stephen Robles:

The fully integrated Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. And I will say the Notion search is amazing. So we have all of our past episodes in our Notion space. And so when you search Notion, we can get information. What episode did we talk about this?

Stephen Robles:

Or give me a summary about, you know, the most talked about topics, things like that. You can use Notion AI for all of that. It's used by over half of Fortune 500 companies and primary technology, an almost five star podcast in Apple Podcast. So try Notion for free when you go to Notion.com/primarytechnology. The link is also in the show notes.

Stephen Robles:

All lowercase letters, Notion.com/primarytechnology to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. I'm gonna use our link for supporting the show. Just try it for free, Notion.com/primarytechnology. Our thanks to Notion and Insta three sixty for sponsoring this episode. Notion?

Stephen Robles:

Alright. IPhone 17 Air. There was a dummy model, which these come out every year, like, around the summertime. These are dummy models that I imagine, like, case makers probably get these and others, but this is Unbox Therapy. He had the models.

Stephen Robles:

He's holding them up. Seems very, very thin. And this seems now very, very likely they were going to be getting an iPhone 17 Air model. This looks like the Pro Max maybe or yeah. Pro and then the regular iPhone 17 and then the Air.

Stephen Robles:

That's a very thin phone, Jason. That's very thin. Does that tempt you at all? That thin of a phone?

Jason Aten:

No. Not even a little bit. It it it super looks like there's a giant, like, what are those things called? Like, callus on the back. Like, a a planter wort or whatever they call those things on the back of that thing.

Jason Aten:

That can't I don't under

Stephen Robles:

I mean, you want you still want the good camera, but that is a thin phone.

Jason Aten:

No. Here's what I want. Do you wanna know what I want? Thick phone. I want them no.

Jason Aten:

No. No. No. I don't want a thick phone. I want this is the only thing I care about when it comes to the phone.

Jason Aten:

Because I go back and forth between using this iPhone 16 Pro all the time, but I also carry around an iPhone 16, which is fun because all I use it for is a hotspot and to like, I'm staring at it right now.

Stephen Robles:

Continuity camera.

Jason Aten:

It's my it's my camera. Yeah. I if they put three cameras on that thing, I would never buy a Pro again. If the cameras were as good and it had promotion like, I just want you to make the Pro phone lighter. Just don't change anything else about it, but stop using stupid metals that are, like, 14 pounds per square

Stephen Robles:

Well, titanium well, come on. Titanium got lighter because it the steel was heavy, and the titanium got lighter.

Jason Aten:

Sure.

Stephen Robles:

You didn't even use the max size. Right? You're on the regular pro?

Jason Aten:

No, I don't. Yeah. My phone got lighter because I went from the max to max size.

Stephen Robles:

You can let

Jason Aten:

it I pick this thing up and then I pick up that, which I won't do right now because y'all get

Stephen Robles:

emotions on this.

Jason Aten:

If I do, it is like no comparison and my heart just craves a lighter phone. I'm there are times when I'm tempted. I'm like, I could live the, the non pro lifestyle, but then I'm like, but I really do appreciate the camera features. And I really do appreciate, I think I don't know if I could deal with the not promotion.

Stephen Robles:

Promotion's a big deal because, you know, promotion on the MacBook Pro, yes, I appreciate it. But now that I've been using the MacBook Air, I don't miss it, now that I'm only staring

Jason Aten:

at it. I don't scroll things as often on my computer as I do on my phone.

Stephen Robles:

Right. And that's exactly what it is. And so scrolling on the phone, and like I've said before, ProMotion on the iPad when I'm editing this podcast, the audio version, that ProMotion makes a big difference. Because if you're swiping fast and trying to look at audio waveforms as you swipe, the promotion is a big deal because it refreshes faster and you see more detail. But, yeah, I mean, I'll probably get it just to talk about it, but I would would not use the Air And that battery, I'm very not very, but I am concerned of what battery life is gonna be on that phone because there's not gonna be much battery in that device.

Jason Aten:

This just feels like is that really a thing that I don't know. Do we think people are, like, asking for this?

Stephen Robles:

I think people will like it for the visual appeal of a hyperthin phone and having, you know, a different body style iPhone. You know, just having because I imagine. Now the camera's supposedly gonna be different too. Know, it's gonna have the big bar across. So this year's iPhones, everything's gonna look different.

Stephen Robles:

The camera bump, having a thin one, a thin version, maybe. I don't know.

Jason Aten:

It would be it'll It's gonna but I mean, it's the camera is gonna be basically like the 16 e. Right?

Stephen Robles:

It looks like one camera lens, at least in in these mock ups. But, you know, they could throw in no. They're not gonna do promotion.

Jason Aten:

No. They're not gonna throw in

Stephen Robles:

anything They're not throw in anything else. Never mind. But now pricing wise, it you know, if it is the cheaper iPhone, that would be interesting. I don't know if it would be, but if you could do cheaper

Jason Aten:

I mean, the iPad mini is $200 more expensive than the iPad. Yeah. That is true. This is and the iPad Air is a lot more expensive than the I this thing's gonna be, like, $699.

Stephen Robles:

Which is isn't that the current price for, like, Apple?

Jason Aten:

I'm saying it's not going to be cheaper than anything. That's the minimum they're gonna charge for this thing.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. You're probably right. Okay. Well, we'll see.

Jason Aten:

And Or it's Apple, so it'll probably be 1,500.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. No. Well, you would you would probably pay a premium for, like, the new innovation being the thin film.

Jason Aten:

I just don't.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Maybe it'll be great. Who knows?

Stephen Robles:

Anyway, iPhone 17, it looks like it's gonna be a thing. That's that's the big thing.

Jason Aten:

Either way, props to Apple. They are the only company I know that can be like, here's less of a thing. Give us more money.

Stephen Robles:

Making something thinner is is the iPad, I mean, that was the whole Crush ad, is the thinnest iPad ever. And when you're gonna put it in something, like a case, it is nice to have something thinner. You know what I mean? Because then which oh, did you see my my fun case video the other day?

Jason Aten:

I didn't. I'm sorry. I need to

Stephen Robles:

get It was a short.

Jason Aten:

Back into the

Stephen Robles:

You said, have you seen this case? No. This is a hilarious case. It is from, I don't even know, Salt Inc or something. Anyway, if you don't want a camera bump, this is the case for you.

Stephen Robles:

Because it basically hugs the entire back of the phone, and now there is no camera bump.

Jason Aten:

It's I wondered why it kinda looked like a zombie, and now I understand. It's missing facial features.

Stephen Robles:

It's just completely flat now. It obviously makes the phone much thicker to hold because it basically has to pad the back of the case, but it does have a camera button. So it actually has a physical sapphire camera button, and it works really well even with the light touches. And now this is gonna be my beach case when I go to the beach and sand and stuff because it's real rubbery. And I like I like to protect the foam.

Jason Aten:

Oh, yeah. Sand and rubbery is a great

Stephen Robles:

Well, better than leather and stuff because then, you know, leather gets nasty. Anyway, I've been using the suit tee back anyway. So that Wait.

Jason Aten:

I thought you called it a patina. Did you just say it's nasty?

Stephen Robles:

No. I say no. I said taking you to the beach is nasty if you get all sand and salt water on it. That's my patina right there for the Ryan London leather case.

Jason Aten:

Oh my gosh. That's

Stephen Robles:

Jason gets grossed out whenever I show that. Anyway Claire. This applies this applies to you more than me, but Apple Sports Ball, that's the official name of the app, got updated recently.

Jason Aten:

It's not the name.

Stephen Robles:

So now you can share the game cards via messages. So if you're following a game and you wanna send the score and, I guess, spoil it for your friend who maybe hasn't seen the game yet, you can do that. You could text it, and it looks like this nice rich card there. I don't know if I will ever share something from the sports app to anyone ever. Maybe I'll do it to Jason just because.

Stephen Robles:

But yeah.

Jason Aten:

And I'm gonna my response will be like, do you know who what sport this actually was, these two teams? I know. There was a thing did you see this is this is actually for

Stephen Robles:

you, Steven.

Jason Aten:

This is I'm gonna this is related. I don't even know if this is true because I just saw it in, like, a Twitter post or something like that. Or, no, it was an Instagram post, and it was some sponsored thing. So you never know what you're But what it said was that there's a feature now. You can use Gemini in, like, Google Sheets, for example.

Jason Aten:

So I'm sure this is true. And it had a list of teams, just a list of, you know, Milwaukee bucks, Golden State warriors, Detroit lions, North Carolina tar heels, whatever. And it just listed all these teams, and the tar heels would be a bad example. But and instead then in the next one, it had you can use AI as a function, and it says, what type of a team is this? So you copied it in there, when you execute it, it's like basketball, basketball, baseball, football, baseball, basketball.

Jason Aten:

So this would be

Stephen Robles:

great for you. Alright. Maybe

Jason Aten:

That that that feature looks a lot like the thing with, Flighty. So you can share your flight information. It show it looks exactly like that. That's cool.

Stephen Robles:

Let's play a quick game. Give me a random team name that I probably don't know, and I will try and guess the sport.

Jason Aten:

A random team

Stephen Robles:

name that

Jason Aten:

you probably don't know.

Stephen Robles:

If you go, like, professional, I'll I think I would get it.

Jason Aten:

The problem with the college is they have them all. So I can't be like Michigan State Spartans because you're gonna be like basketball. Yep. Football. Yep.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, really? Yep. Alright. Well, do do a do a

Jason Aten:

Wait a minute. New professional. Hold on. Oh, really? You say

Stephen Robles:

I don't I don't know. I don't I mean, that seems odd.

Jason Aten:

You don't know that most division one colleges have all the sports?

Stephen Robles:

No. That they would use the same name for all of them. But I guess, yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense.

Jason Aten:

Don't fall sports. Mascot.

Stephen Robles:

I don't play yeah. I don't fall sports ball. Anyway, well, then do do do professional ball.

Jason Aten:

Okay. Cleveland Indians.

Stephen Robles:

That was baseball.

Jason Aten:

Okay.

Stephen Robles:

I got that. I mean, come on.

Jason Aten:

Good?

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Yeah. Alright.

Jason Aten:

What do you mean what do you mean come on?

Stephen Robles:

Wait. That seems like a like a common name. I know there's also some teams that have, like, changed names recently. Go ahead.

Jason Aten:

Well, that's true. How about the, the Giants?

Stephen Robles:

The New York Giants NFL team?

Jason Aten:

I said the Giants.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, I see. Now wait a minute. No. This is you can't give me a trick question because isn't

Jason Aten:

Why is it a trick question?

Stephen Robles:

Both football and baseball?

Jason Aten:

Where would be the baseball team located? That was California? But where's the which city?

Stephen Robles:

I know it's California. San Francisco. San Francisco? Okay.

Jason Aten:

I did try to trick you because there's a Giants that's more than Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. But I still got it. I got both sports. I got both sports. I just said I know the sport.

Stephen Robles:

I didn't say I know where. I got the sports.

Jason Aten:

I could give it one more. That's impressive.

Stephen Robles:

Thank

Jason Aten:

you. I'll give you one more. Yes. The I I was gonna say, like, a hockey team, but it was they're all, like, in Canada, you'd be just the the Rays.

Stephen Robles:

The Tampa Bay Rays, our baseball team?

Jason Aten:

I mean, I don't know. Are there other Rays?

Stephen Robles:

I don't know. Are there? I just know the baseball team.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. The Tampa Bay I did I did wanna give you one just to make sure that you weren't Oh, no. I'm not I'm not I'm not googling anything.

Stephen Robles:

There's no there's no AI. Not

Jason Aten:

This is

Stephen Robles:

fine. Using voice assistant. There's gotta be a weirder one. Right?

Jason Aten:

Okay. One more. Diamondbacks.

Stephen Robles:

Now hold on a second. That's a baseball team. Right?

Jason Aten:

They are.

Stephen Robles:

Arizona?

Jason Aten:

Know where they are. Yep. There you go. Listen. By the way, yesterday, they played the Tampa Bay Rays.

Jason Aten:

Oh, I know. Just want you

Stephen Robles:

to know. I will say I did watch the Apple Vision Pro Yankee Stadium immersive video. Did you see that?

Jason Aten:

No.

Stephen Robles:

That was it was pretty cool. And I think they've had a number of immersive sports related videos. Like, they had the Super Bowl last year, like, the recap of that. They had the soccer one, and now they have the Yankee Stadium 1. I always find those immersive videos to be compelling and enjoyable.

Stephen Robles:

And I always think, man, if you could watch a whole sports game with that because, like, they even switched there was a one view of from the stands, and there was, like, a couple fans, like, turning around and talking to each other. And somebody with a New York accent, like, oh, yeah. But, you know, that's not a good New York. I don't know. I didn't know what to say.

Stephen Robles:

I I don't know enough sports terminology. But, anyway, like, you could feel like you're in the stands, and then it went down to the field. There was, like, in the dugout, there was a number of shots and, like, the team is just around you, and you're, like, in the dugout with them. Doesn't seem very compelling. It seemed like if you could watch full games that way, people would love it.

Stephen Robles:

So maybe there's a feature there. I don't know. I think so.

Jason Aten:

Maybe.

Stephen Robles:

And you should watch it. It's it's a it's a good one. Have you watched any recent immersive ones like the the climbing guy or the ice surfing?

Jason Aten:

No. Because, again, I don't really use my Vision Pro for

Stephen Robles:

Vision Pro things?

Jason Aten:

Entertainment y things. Yeah. Well, not use them for, like, I'll either use my Mac mirrored into it or actually, really, what I usually do is I usually have the Mac mirrored into it and then I have, like, three or four Vision Pro native windows open.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Alright. Let's, let me try and speed through a couple things here. Unfortunately, ads ads have come to Instagram. Adam Messeri announced yesterday that ads are rolling out more broadly on threads today, and our goal is still for them to enhance your overall experience.

Stephen Robles:

Jason, they're enhancing the threads experience. We're closely monitoring, and we'll continue listening to your feedback as we scale. Right under that is apparently a creator who has not been paid, which is that's an unfortunate, first reply for Instagram and threads. But, Jason, I would I don't know. Has ads ever enhanced your overall experience to anything?

Jason Aten:

The only way that ads enhance an experience is it means that they don't send you, like, a bill. They don't charge your credit card for using the service.

Stephen Robles:

Fair. Fair. It did not enhance the current threads experience because that already did not have ads. So Right. That is

Jason Aten:

a different If you take something that doesn't suck and you make it suck a little bit, you did not enhance the experience.

Stephen Robles:

No no enhancement there. So, yeah, ads, finally come to threads. We we figured that would be coming for a long time. And, yeah. Oh, I finally got my Instagram account back.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know if I said it on the show.

Jason Aten:

You said that last

Stephen Robles:

on the show? Okay. Yeah. It's very happy. And then yeah.

Stephen Robles:

It's great. Wonderful. Anyway, speak oh, one other Instagram news. The Edits app, which is the CapCut competitor Instagram launched or announced months ago, is finally available for everyone. You can download it for free.

Stephen Robles:

You can get it on iPhone or Android. You can download on your iPad too, even though it's just an iPhone app blown up. But turns out it's actually pretty good. I downloaded it. I tried editing a little bit.

Stephen Robles:

It is a good editor on mobile. Not as many features as CapCut, which is TikTok's editor. Literally all like, it is literally the video editor from TikTok in a separate app, also owned by ByteDance. But the Edits app, it's free. You could try it out.

Stephen Robles:

They have some templates or, like, you know, the trending things. But if you're if you are someone who wanted to make short form video or someone you know and they didn't know what app to use, this is a pretty good one, the edits app. Have you tried it?

Jason Aten:

No. I actually tried to download it on Sunday, and it was not available. And so I need to download it. But because I I mean, CapCut is great. Like, it is It is great.

Jason Aten:

And it's actually really good on the Mac too, to be honest.

Stephen Robles:

Really?

Jason Aten:

It's a good Mac app.

Stephen Robles:

I know a lot of people say that. I will say I every once in a while, I'll make a short form video, and I would always struggle with, let me bring this into Final Cut and do it. And when I went for the iPhone 16 e launch, I was, I went to the Apple Store, and I got a review unit there. But I was like, let me make a short. Let me actually try CapCut because I'm I'm here sitting in a mall.

Stephen Robles:

I really don't want to break out Final Cut. Let me just try the CapCut app. And I had to go back to my boys who use CapCut to make their own videos. And I was like, you guys were right. CapCut is actually a great video editor for the iPhone.

Stephen Robles:

And it's, it's easy to use. You can the captions, the like, everything is it's a very good app. And so edits is also very good though. And so if you didn't want to use ByteDance's product, you should try it. And it's good.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And it's cap the thing that CapCut CapCut got right, and I'll be interested to see, I'm downloading edits right now, is that all of the things that you're like, I wouldn't it be nice if I could do this? Like, CapCut just knows what those things are and makes it very easy to do that.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Because they are very motivated for you to create vertical video content.

Jason Aten:

Make more video and, yeah, make it shareable and that kind the only thing I don't like yeah. The only thing I don't like about it is I have to always remember that it automatically ends as an end card that says cap cut

Stephen Robles:

on it, and I

Jason Aten:

have to

Stephen Robles:

delete it. You have to delete it. But you can but you can delete it. That's you know?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. That's

Stephen Robles:

true. And Instagram, can download or in the edits app, you can download the video without a watermark so you can repost it on other platforms. So, yeah, kudos for that. You know, there's that. Alright.

Stephen Robles:

The Google case. Google was in a DOJ and FTC case, and they lost both. It's not a good day for Google.

Jason Aten:

So they lost the the DOJ case a while ago.

Stephen Robles:

Last week?

Jason Aten:

That that was

Stephen Robles:

the case. Week?

Jason Aten:

No. No. No.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, that was

Jason Aten:

The DOJ case, they lost a while.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, okay. Okay.

Jason Aten:

And the remedies trial has just begun for that. Then there was a second case. So that case was about its search dominance, and it's essentially that's the one where the government is proposing that they should have to sell off Chrome. K? So that has a solution to that, which is complicated, but that's the one.

Jason Aten:

Then they just last week lost the FTC case, which is about Google's ad stack, and it basically it's that's all of its nonsearch engine ads. So these are the ads that are on websites. These are the ads that basically pay for the open web, by the way. Right. Right?

Jason Aten:

Like, these this is a very small percentage of Google's revenue. I think it's, like, 10%, and it's a decreasing percentage of its overall revenue because it makes most of its money from search ads because the search ad business is the single best business ever created in the history of all things. Because it, like Yeah. If you want to target ads at people, the single best business model is the people just tell you what they're looking for, and someone will pay you to show it to them.

Stephen Robles:

You can have zero data on someone, and they can search for best

Jason Aten:

You don't yeah. That's the thing. Like, the other news that happened this week is that Google said, yeah. That thing where we said we promised we were gonna, deprecate third party cookies, we're not gonna do that anymore. Right.

Jason Aten:

Because, we, well everyone thinks, well, that's because Google's tracking you. Google doesn't have to then they are, but they don't have to because, literally, you just tell them what you want, and then they just show you those links, and sometimes people pay for some of those links.

Stephen Robles:

Exactly. So one

Jason Aten:

that one is essentially Google owns the technology used by advertisers to buy ads, publishers to host those ads on their sites, and then the exchange in between. Right? That's essentially the way it's not exactly the way it works, but they own all pieces of the stack. Right. So they have a the judge just said they have a monopoly on two of the three.

Jason Aten:

I and I'm not gonna able to tell you which the difference is. So there will be a further remedies phase in that as

Stephen Robles:

well. So the No. The current remedies phase, which was the DOJ case that is now in remedy, the three things they are looking to change, prevent Google from striking deals for Prime search engine placement is number one, which would

Jason Aten:

So that's the Safari deal.

Stephen Robles:

That's what would typically affect Apple and the $2,020,000,000,000 dollars a year. Right?

Jason Aten:

Basically what we

Stephen Robles:

$20,000,000,000 a year that Google

Jason Aten:

pays that. Gotta be more by now, but, yeah. Right. That's what it was when the trial was happening.

Stephen Robles:

That's what Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari on your iPhone. Number two, requiring Google to divest Chrome, so having to sell the Chrome browser, which I think would be also be a significant hit because they do collect a lot of information on everyone that uses Chrome, and it's the biggest browser in the world.

Jason Aten:

Well, Anne, the reason that I wrote about this this morning, but the reason that this is a big deal is that Google created Chrome so that it would not be its search engine would not be at the mercy of, like Browsers. You know, other browsers. Right? They wanted to own that form of distribution to protect the search engine. Whether it's the default or not, you could just imagine a scenario where someone like Apple who has a browser could be like, nah.

Jason Aten:

We don't we we don't like what you're doing, so we're just gonna make it hard for people to get to Google. Right? It's just it's the same that happens. If you use Edge, it's real hard to get Google set as your default. It's, like, buried four levels deep.

Jason Aten:

Do you? Right?

Stephen Robles:

And then if you want.

Jason Aten:

And then it's, like, every fifteenth time you open the browser, it's like, oh, there was something that happened and we had to reset your defaults. Like, this has literally happened to me.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Bing just just pops up again. Hey.

Jason Aten:

It's like, how did Bing get back in the door? What do you do with Bing? Swear I locked that door. Anyway, so

Stephen Robles:

That's okay. And and number three, that Google they might force Google to license its search data to competitors. Now, obviously, Google argues these remedies would unfairly benefit competitors and harm innovation, quote unquote. But the DOJ contends that Google's dominance hinders competition and requires intervention. And then for divesting Chrome, several people have come out of the woodwork saying, I'll buy Chrome.

Stephen Robles:

One of them being Perplexity, which we talked about earlier, which doesn't have the money and is not even they don't even have revenue or profit. I don't even know. They're not profitable. That's for sure. Right.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. But also Sam Altman, which you wrote about was like, you know what? I'll buy Chrome. Let's do it.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I I mean, OpenAI is the most logical company to do this. Right? Like, and he actually testified in court that it's like well, no. He didn't.

Jason Aten:

I'm sorry. It wasn't Sam Altman, but it was someone from OpenAI. It was their, like, head of chat, GPT, or whatever. He's like, yeah. I mean, he was literally asked by the prosecutors if they'd be interested in, like, yeah, we would buy it.

Jason Aten:

So it probably a lot of people. Well, of course, everyone would wanna like Yeah. Anybody who could would be seriously interested in buying Chrome. I'm sure Meta would love to buy Chrome. Like, are you kidding me?

Jason Aten:

There's no way that they would allow that to happen. But this is weird because if you think about this, the DOJ is gonna wants to force Google to sell Chrome. But then the question is to who? And all of the people who are capable of buying Chrome are probably not people that they would want to own it. Right?

Jason Aten:

Because does the does the government really want OpenAI, which is literally I mean, someday, they're gonna be a $2,000,000,000,000 company. They will be right up there with Meta face you know, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, all these companies. They're gonna Google. They're gonna be that big someday. Do you really wanna give them control of the browser?

Jason Aten:

Also, do you really want it to be that easy for them to scrape the things that you're interested in and just feed them into the models? It's like, oh, you won't let us just go out and scrape the web. What if we just watch what people do when they're

Stephen Robles:

on it? Well, I

Jason Aten:

don't know.

Stephen Robles:

There's that, but also the DOJ's point is to improve competition and not hinder it. OpenAI has its own search product. Search in ChatGPT, which you have said you use. I've talked to many people in the last week who increasingly use ChatGPT search. You would basically again, combining two big search products, OpenAI's ChatGPT and then Google Chrome.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I guess it wouldn't be search. Would just be the browser. But you're giving people you're giving OpenAI, the biggest front door where they can just set ChatGPT as the default search engine in the most popular browser in the world, and now a bunch more people are using it. And the homepage could be set to chat.com. There's a bunch of anticompetitive behavior there.

Stephen Robles:

So yeah.

Jason Aten:

Well, and you know what? Don't know what the biggest irony of the whole thing is.

Stephen Robles:

What is it?

Jason Aten:

Search GPG, which is ChatGPT's search engine. It just uses Bing.

Stephen Robles:

Really?

Jason Aten:

It uses Bing's real time index. Yeah. I mean, think about it. How there's Chad, it it takes a very long time to build a search engine.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I thought they spared the Internet, so I figured they would just

Jason Aten:

So there's a difference between vacuuming up all the content on the Internet to feed it into an LLM and creating an index in real time of because think about it. Every single time I post an article, the search engines know about it.

Stephen Robles:

Like Right. And they're crawling everything.

Jason Aten:

Yes. Exactly. So the so Bing does license its garbage search results. Lots of people are happy to pay for it, and ChatGPT is one of them.

Stephen Robles:

Interesting. The tangled web we weave. They should sell they they should who should buy Chrome, Jason? I think the DOJ should force Google to sell Chrome to some, like, Dell or some Dell. Some

Jason Aten:

I think you should add to the poll which member benefits we should buy Chrome should be one of them.

Stephen Robles:

We buy Chrome. Primary technology buys Chrome.

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Clearly. And then the homepage for everyone in the world when they open Chrome is just primary.

Jason Aten:

Primary. Yeah. I honestly I don't know how we're gonna make this into a business, but I definitely We

Stephen Robles:

just need a couple investors. Listen. We just if Sam Altman can tweet and have a a dump truck of money show up at his door, mean, we could probably do that. Right?

Jason Aten:

By we need a couple investors, what he means is we need 4,000,000,000 paying members, and then we could afford Chrome.

Stephen Robles:

That's it. No problem. No problem.

Jason Aten:

It's only half of the population of the earth. I mean, that's a pretty successful podcast right there.

Stephen Robles:

The most the most successful, actually. Speaking of lots of money, though, Apple got fined and has to pay a bunch of money in the EU because the EU has ruled that they What is the word? They went against the

Jason Aten:

What did they do?

Stephen Robles:

The Digital Markets Act. Anyway Basically,

Jason Aten:

let me help you out. No. Know what they did.

Stephen Robles:

Was the anti steering thing. They basically the European Union found that they did not allow developers or the anti steering practices that Apple imposes on developers is not okay with the Digital Markets Act. So Apple has failed pay a fine for that, but I couldn't figure out So basic I couldn't figure out the word.

Jason Aten:

Just say some

Stephen Robles:

Apple

Jason Aten:

I'm gonna say some different words

Stephen Robles:

some different words. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

The EU required Apple to allow developers to link out in their apps to their own way of making payments and stuff. And Apple sort of complied, but this is that malicious compliance thing. So the EU is basically like, no. No. No.

Jason Aten:

That's not what we meant. And they find them. And here's the thing. This is actually a ridiculously small amount of money that they find them. Because remember, they could find them up to, what is it, 10% of their global revenue.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And I think Apple's global revenue is somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000,000,000 on an annual basis, somewhere like in that neighborhood. Don't quote me. But it's a lot of money, and so this is basically money that Tim Cook will find when he moves his desk Right. So they can vacuum next week or whatever.

Jason Aten:

Like, this is not an amount of money that means anything to Apple. Right? They put more money in the iPhones that they were airlifting over because they were worried about the tariffs. Okay? And the the story here is basically that a lot of the EU had to make a point.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

But the EU is also very uncertain right now about how much of a point it can make because what they don't wanna do is be like, oh, we charge our your company $10,000,000,000. And all of a sudden, the White House is like, and we will add a 350% tariff to all of the Beats that you wanted to import or whatever. Not the headphone Beats, like the thing. So

Stephen Robles:

B E E TS. Yeah. What I think let me know about this. So the the European Commission ordered Apple to remove the technical and commercial restrictions on steering. So they want Apple to change the restrictions in the apps and for developers.

Stephen Robles:

Otherwise, it's gonna be noncompliant in the future. Do you think Apple will change anything or will just pay this fine whenever it comes up?

Jason Aten:

I think Apple's lawyers are a lot smarter than the EU's lawyers. And so Apple will make a change that barely, like, that that sort of does the they're gonna be it's like, we will do exactly the thing that you say precisely in the words based on our interpretation of it. But, really, what they want is for Apple to just not have any restrictions on what developers can do. They they want Apple to host the platform, meaning the App Store, and developers to be able to sell into that for in any way that they want to

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And link back in any way they want to. And there's zero percent chance that Apple's going to to do that. I mean, they already allowed side loading. Yeah. Right?

Jason Aten:

There is an alternative to do that. Right.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. That true. So The fine was €500,000,000, 5 hundred and 70 US dollars, if you're one. So

Jason Aten:

570,000,000 US dollars.

Stephen Robles:

Alright. Last couple stories. Tim Cook, senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Tim Cook requesting, how did you get around this tariff this tariff thing? Basically, wanting to know how do they go about this exemption. Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks that the million dollar donation that Tim Cook made to the Trump administration's campaign and maybe the nature of, like, being at the inauguration and other things might have had to do with this tariff thing.

Stephen Robles:

And so she wants to know what the deal is. I I don't know. I mean, I don't think Tim Cook is required to say anything about that. I mean, there's no

Jason Aten:

I mean, this is just this was just Tim Cook earning his paycheck. Right? Right. This is the thing that this is why Tim Cook is still CEO.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

Right? Right. If he if if someone else had been elected president like, I don't mean, like, if Kamala Harris had I'm just saying if in a different alternate timeline, we would be hearing about how John Ternis is taking over in a year and a half or whatever. But, like, he cannot retire now

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

Until Trump is no longer president. This is the like, this is the only thing he this is why, like what was it last week we were talking about where Tim Cook doesn't want his subordinates to bring him conflicts? He's like, do you understand I have to call the president every day? I don't have time for your petty fights about Siri. Like, just just cancel it.

Jason Aten:

I don't care.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know if he'll nothing will probably come of that. But last thing, and then we get to personal tech. I like the personal tech you put in there, the Apple Watch's tenth birthday. Is that today? The twenty fourth?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Today.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, yeah. Well, let's talk about that. The last thing I do wanna mention, Blue Sky, which I feel like has been gaining traction. I've been seeing more and more activity on Blue Sky. It's a different kind of activity than you see on on Threads and X, but it's good.

Stephen Robles:

And I like it over there. I I also love the Croissant app that I use to post to Blue Sky, Mastathon, and Threads all simultaneously. And I can even put alt text for accessibility, and it sends it to all those platforms. So Croissant app, just throwing that out there. But Blue Sky is going to launch BlueCheck verification.

Stephen Robles:

So just like x has although x, again, you could pay for the BlueCheck. Meta, Instagram, and threads, you can also pay for the blue check. But this blue check is going to be something they bestow onto people. This is not something there's no application process. You can't buy it.

Stephen Robles:

They're just going to preemptively verify accounts as significant or whatever. And listen. I I don't know what it is. I don't know what's broken inside of me. I don't know the psychology of this, but I want a blue check.

Stephen Robles:

I want. I remember

Jason Aten:

I'm blue sky?

Stephen Robles:

I just want blue I just want blue checks everywhere. I don't know. I just feel like I like the blue check. Here's the thing. Here's the thing.

Stephen Robles:

This was back when we first like started getting to know each other talking. I was on Twitter because it was Twitter at the time. And I was hosting the Apple Insider podcast. And I had let my Twitter be dormant for a while. And then I started it up again when I started doing the Apple Insider podcast because it was a big part of the audience on there.

Stephen Robles:

And I wanted I wanted the blue check. And they finally opened up like that. You know, for a long time, Twitter would just blue check people, and there was no way to proactively request it or apply for it. And then I remember whenever I was hosting, might have been 2021, they actually opened up the applications. You could say you can apply for the blue check to be verified, but you needed to supply links or resources that show you are, like, an important person.

Jason Aten:

Notable. You gotta be notable.

Stephen Robles:

Notable. Notable is the word. And the links that I used that I think helped me get verified were inc.com because you had written several articles that mentioned

Jason Aten:

You're so welcome.

Stephen Robles:

That mentioned my name.

Jason Aten:

So happy.

Stephen Robles:

And, yeah, that that got me verified. And I think you can still see, like, if you go on x, if you go to our profile, even if someone pays for the blue check, you can tap on a account's blue check, and it will say verified since. And, I was right. 2021 that I've been verified since June 2021. And it was because I did that application process, and I think those articles did.

Stephen Robles:

And, of course, the Apple Insider articles, I had a few of them with my byline. And so that helped the verification. So I don't know. It's a silly validation thing. I did it then.

Stephen Robles:

Now it matters less because you can just buy the blue check on all these platforms, but you can't buy it on Blue Sky. So what is it, like artificial scarcity? Because you can't buy it, now I want it on blue sky.

Jason Aten:

I don't know. I will say about this. So I did I had a blue check for a long time, and then Elon took it away from me. And I was not one of the people that he they gave it back to. Like, there were some people, like Ben Thompson, John Gruber, they gave them back the checks that even if they didn't pay for it, I and I'm I just, like, on principle, I'm not gonna pay for it.

Jason Aten:

I didn't pay for it the first time. And I also, like, have a blue check on on, Instagram and Facebook, and I don't know why because I don't have that many Instagram followers. Like, I really don't have that many Instagram followers at all. But I'm verified on Instagram, and every so every so often, I go into my, my daughter's high school and teach in the journalism class. Uh-huh.

Jason Aten:

And literally, the only thing they care about is, your dad is verified on Instagram.

Stephen Robles:

Really? Like Do they know you can buy it now?

Jason Aten:

It is my only I don't know if they know that or not. I did not buy it, but I just I think it's because it's I'm listed as a journalist on there. But I think it's it's just like they just think that the number of times like, my my freshman daughter's friends will follow me on usually because I'll post pictures of, like Soccer. I'll post a picture from something that's going on. Right.

Jason Aten:

And so they'll start following me, and then she'll come home and say, yeah. One of my so and so was like,

Jason Aten:

your dad's verified.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean And you're

Stephen Robles:

a president of these high schoolers.

Jason Aten:

That's what all high schoolers sound like to me,

Jason Aten:

Steven. You're verified?

Stephen Robles:

They all sound like

Jason Aten:

Your dad is verified on Instagram.

Jason Aten:

They all sound they all sound like what's his name? Napoleon Dynamite.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, yeah. Tina Trifur.

Jason Aten:

Your dad's fair of food.

Stephen Robles:

I think I talked about it before, but I talked to there was a Great American Teach In a couple months ago where people can go in and talk about their jobs or whatever, and I was invited by a friend. And I talked about doing YouTube stuff. And when I talk about how I have a hundred k subscribers, elementary school kids lost their mind that I had a hundred k subscribers. There was one I talked to several classes. One of them was, like, third, fourth, fifth grader, somewhere around there.

Stephen Robles:

And there was a like, one of them, listen, one of them asked for my autograph. And I was like, I mean, I'll sign a piece of paper. This means nothing. I didn't say it means nothing, but I was like, I don't think this is It's not that big of a deal.

Jason Aten:

You can't deposit this. It's not a challenge.

Stephen Robles:

You're not gonna sell this on eBay. But one per one of the students asked for it, and then, like, 10 or 12 were like, sign this. Sign this. I was like, my signature also looks, like, garbage. I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

I'm sorry. But anyway.

Jason Aten:

Well, it was funny because I'm standing there, and I was talking about how they asked about how what's the most popular thing you've ever written? And it's still to this day, article I wrote about Lego, and it's, I don't know, four and a half million readers or something like that by this point. And the kids are like, okay. They probably don't have much context for what that really means, but then I can put up a slide and it's like,

Jason Aten:

you're verified on Instagram?

Stephen Robles:

4,000,000 readers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, blue check.

Jason Aten:

I'm like, I have 600 followers on Instagram and you're impressed because there's a blue check next to my name, but there's a four. I've had four and a half million people read an article I wrote about Lego and you're like, I'm not gonna get this.

Stephen Robles:

I will I will say one other check I'm proud of is YouTube because when you reach a hundred k, you do get the check next to your name and you get to, like, verify your account. And so, yeah, I enjoy that.

Jason Aten:

Well, and I realize that the reason is because these people all follow, like, Instagram influencers and TikTok influencers who all have, like, millions of followers. So, like, four and a half million readers doesn't seem like that.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Exactly. Alright. Personal tech. I love that you put this in here.

Stephen Robles:

The original Apple Watch, ten years old. I just found I don't know if knew this. I wrote the review for Apple Insider for the original Apple Watch.

Jason Aten:

I did not know that.

Stephen Robles:

I this will be the last link in the show paper. Look at this. My name. This is Look at that.

Jason Aten:

April. I

Jason Aten:

helped you get verified.

Stephen Robles:

It probably did. So it it launched the twenty fourth. Is that right? Like, twenty fourth was

Jason Aten:

Well, and today is the

Stephen Robles:

'20 Today the fourth as we record. This review is the twenty ninth because I did give it a few days. Look at the look at that. Look at that. Milanese loop

Jason Aten:

Looks like an

Stephen Robles:

Apple Watch. Stainless steel original Apple Watch with the night the box that you used to get when you got, like, the fancy ones. Oh, man. I loved it. I was working at the travel company at the time, and all these pictures of the Apple Watch are on my desk at the travel company.

Stephen Robles:

House.

Jason Aten:

Nice.

Stephen Robles:

Because it was nothing at home looked, like, picture worthy. Look at that macro. I use a real camera for that picture, Jason.

Jason Aten:

A real camera?

Stephen Robles:

I think it was the Nikon d 7,000 I used for that. It's not a great camera, but it was the one I had at this time. It's when I had look at this watch. Oh my goodness. I'm

Jason Aten:

Look at that bezel.

Stephen Robles:

And look at that bezel with the screen. Oh my goodness. The original Apple Watch, it's special to me, not only because I got to write this review. This was like the first big product review I ever did, but it was also the first launch day device I got for Apple. I didn't get the original iPhone.

Stephen Robles:

I didn't get the original iPad at launch. This was the first one I got on launch day, and I was very excited. And yeah, I don't know what it did did you have the original original?

Jason Aten:

No. So I was looking because I have my the first Apple Watch I ever bought. I couldn't I can't find it, but it was the series four.

Stephen Robles:

Okay.

Jason Aten:

It was the first one I ever bought. And then I then I had a series six, which I could find. Then I bought a series seven because there was actually a I don't remember what the big thing was besides the sensors.

Stephen Robles:

The seven was a faster screen a faster charging and larger screen, I think. It's when the bezel got less.

Jason Aten:

I think it's a I think that was a six actually, because I think that's why I got the six compared to the four. Okay. I think but the seven has, like, the the blood oxygen sensor and some other stuff. Right. And so I actually still wear the series seven to sleep.

Stephen Robles:

Okay.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. That's I wear it. It's nice. And it's honestly, the series seven's probably my favorite Apple Watch I've ever owned. I like You have

Stephen Robles:

the 10, or did

Jason Aten:

you try the 10? Have no. I have a review unit still of the 10.

Stephen Robles:

You like the seven better than the 10?

Jason Aten:

So here's my I'm tainted by the fact that I really, really like the stainless steel Apple watches. Yes. And the re they never send you that as a review unit. Right. Right.

Jason Aten:

So it's just the it's like the polished black aluminum. Right. And it's okay. But to me, that looks more like a gadget. Right?

Jason Aten:

And I just I really like the stainless steel ones. So the all three of them were the four, the six, and the seven were all stainless. And then now I have the ultra two, which is obviously titanium, but and it's fine. But, that series seven.

Stephen Robles:

Stainless steel was always my go to until the titanium came out. And I I've been titanium since, and now I have the Ultra. I still regret to this day not getting the series five ceramic. I never got the ceramic. It was the only model they made with ceramic.

Stephen Robles:

I don't know if they'll ever do it again. And, you know, it's it would've just been a nice thing to look at. It was very expensive at the time, and I think that's why I didn't get it. It was, like, over a thousand dollars for the ceramic version, but it looks so cool. And I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

I know maybe basic Apple guy, maybe he's a ceramic still. But, anyway, Apple watch what do we think? Apple

Jason Aten:

What is your well, I wanna know your favorite, not the best one you've ever had, but what is your favorite Apple Watch you you you had that you bought?

Stephen Robles:

Favorite Apple Watch.

Jason Aten:

Because I already said mine was the series seven. Like, that's I love that thing, and I I've actually been tempted several times to go in and pay the $79 to have them replace the battery.

Stephen Robles:

They'll do it on that older device?

Jason Aten:

Mhmm. It's only, like, 81% battery health or whatever. That's why I just weren't sleeping.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, bad. No. That you know, I really I really do love the Ultra. I feel like the Ultra one versus Ultra two, like, negligible difference, but the the Ultra battery life just became so like, you never have to think about it. I think that was worth it.

Stephen Robles:

Like, that that felt like, okay. Now the Apple Watch can just be a thing you wear and yeah. Great. But now now that now that I'm thinking about it, this is gonna be funny. But the Apple Watch series seven, I remember it was the first one that they said was, like, dustproof or something, and I'm trying to find pictures of it.

Stephen Robles:

But it was again, I did the video review for Apple Insider for the series seven, and I was really happy with the of the pictures I took of the watch. And I just I can't find it. But, anyway, yeah, I I do think the series seven, for some reason, it was, like, the perfect balance with, like, the screen size and the speed and, you know, it was the larger faces. And it was and I had a stainless steel one. And that was a it was very nice.

Stephen Robles:

I think I might agree with you. I think the series seven was chef's kiss.

Jason Aten:

I guess the series six also had blood oxygen. I'm trying to think what would have been the reason that I bought the series seven because I normally wouldn't have that it has the

Stephen Robles:

easy I know. It it was a bigger okay. I just I actually wrote the review for the series seven too for Upland Sider. So here this was my review of the series seven, and it was the it was an increase in screen size because it was increasing the size from series six to series seven. It comes in a forty one and forty five millimeter, one millimeter larger than the previous Apple Watch series six.

Stephen Robles:

Also had the, you know, like, speaker difference there. It was supposedly a brighter display. Series seven was 70% brighter than the series six.

Jason Aten:

Was it the first always on display?

Stephen Robles:

No. That was five. Series five. Yeah. But the seven was the first one to have a full QWERTY keyboard.

Stephen Robles:

If you wanted to type or swipe type, it was the first one to it. This was the picture okay. This is the picture I was looking for. I'll put this article in show notes too. But this picture I took with the braided solo loop, I don't if it was the first year they had those kinds of loops, but the contour face was new with the seven because of that slightly larger screen edge to edge screen.

Stephen Robles:

And this was one of my favorite photos I ever took of the Apple Watch. That's a nice photo.

Jason Aten:

It's good. I like that.

Stephen Robles:

Thank you. And it's

Jason Aten:

a good I like that face, that that watch face. Yeah. The brightness, I don't know why I did that. Why did I get the series?

Stephen Robles:

Oh, also the modular duo was new for the seven. You couldn't get that on the series six.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. It was definitely for that one.

Stephen Robles:

I'm just saying. See, I also went to, like, these sand dunes and in for this review, because again, I was testing, like, the dust resistance, which was new on the series seven. And I remember I would throw it in, like, this sand. Like, this is literally a picture of me throwing it in the sand. And after I did that a bunch of it was the last thing I did because I like, I don't know if I'm gonna ruin this watch by doing it.

Stephen Robles:

Once I threw in a bunch of sand, the digital crown couldn't it, like, didn't spin. And I was like, oh my goodness. I just I just busted this.

Jason Aten:

That's So

Stephen Robles:

I brought it home, ran it under the faucet, and I, like, kept pushing the digital crown. Eventually, like, pushed it through and knocked out whatever grain was there and kept spinning, kept spinning. Digital crown was perfect. No problem. Used I think I still I think one of my kids actually still has it to this day.

Stephen Robles:

I think I passed it down. They might have battery life is terrible, but they they still have it. How's it going? Any other fun Apple Watch memories or that's all I got.

Jason Aten:

I I like the the Ultra two. I have the Ultra two. Yeah. I just checked, and its battery life is at 95%, which is discouraging to me.

Stephen Robles:

Don't need check.

Jason Aten:

I do wear it all the time. But I think I liked the I like the form factor of the Apple the originals, like, the series Apple Watch. That's how Apple refers to those, the series watches versus the Ultra. And I do I just I really like that stainless steel.

Stephen Robles:

Stainless steel is nice. 96%. Ninety six % battery health for me. It's not bad because I didn't buy the like, last this past September, I didn't buy another one.

Jason Aten:

No. Yeah. This is this is an original two.

Stephen Robles:

Original two. It's one and a half years old. And Yes. I will probably upgrade to whatever the three is this year.

Jason Aten:

I'm gonna find a refurbished seven.

Stephen Robles:

No. You're not gonna do that. All right. We're what are we recording? I don't have a bonus topic.

Stephen Robles:

We have a couple in here, but I don't know I don't know what our bonus topic should be. Wish our list we see if we if we livestreamed, we could ask our listeners right now what they would want to hear as a bonus.

Jason Aten:

That should be a member benefit. We should livestream the show. We should not livestream

Stephen Robles:

the show. We could livestream the show, Jason. We don't we like, I do no editing. Pressure. Base Suit.

Stephen Robles:

Basically, people

Jason Aten:

So much. So much pressure.

Stephen Robles:

Cut out all your yelling that you when you yell at me in between segments, but that's you know?

Jason Aten:

That's true. I appreciate that you do that.

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna figure out a bonus topic, and here's what you do. Be if you can get an ad free version of the show, you get access to all the back catalog of bonus episodes and the one we're about to record, which you'll see the title, in the thing, but there's gonna be more benefits soon. So if you could take that poll, it'll be the first link in the show notes. Let us know what member benefits would motivate you to

Jason Aten:

sign up. But, also, just sign up now.

Stephen Robles:

Get the ad free bonus episodes. Give us a five star rating in Apple Podcast. If you could, maybe we can get up to a five star rating once again here in Apple Podcast. And, of course, you can watch the show at YouTube.com/@primarytechshow. That link's in the show notes as well.

Stephen Robles:

Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. 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
X LinkedIn Mastodon Threads Bluesky Website Link
Stephen Robles
Host
Stephen Robles
Making technology more useful for everyone 📺 video and podcast creator 🎼 musical theater kid at heart
X LinkedIn Mastodon Threads Instagram Bluesky YouTube Website Link
Apple’s Siri Just Lost to Perplexity, iPhone 17 Air Looks Real, Apple Watch 10th Birthday

headphones Listen Anywhere

More Options »
Broadcast by