From a perspective of following, covering, and enjoying Apple, the past two weeks I think have been the perfect example of the current dichotomy of Apple, where you have excellent, truly industry-leading hardware. We had the iPhone S16e, which not an exciting phone, but it does have like the C1 modem. The new Mac Studio, which has the M3 Ultra and the M4 Max, two very powerful chips. The MacBook Air with the M4.
probably the best laptop in the industry, the laptop most people should buy, then simultaneously you have software. And Apple capped off those two very interesting and exciting weeks of hardware announcements with a real bummer announcement. The classic Friday night news dump. It was Friday morning, to give them some credit, but yes, the classic Friday. I guess it was more evening in my time. Yeah. So they issued a statement to John Gruber during Fireball.
It starts by touting Siri as a platform. Then it goes into touting some of the new things that have come to Siri, like product knowledge and integration with ChatGPT. Then it gets into the bad news where Apple says, We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps.
It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver these features, and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. So those are the much anticipated on-screen awareness, personal context, and in-app actions features that we've talked about. Right off the bat, the thing we all read into is what the hell does in the coming year actually mean? Does it mean throughout the rest of 2025? Does it mean...
The 12 months from when the statement was issued on March 7th, so stretching all the way to 2026. Does it mean the iOS 18 cycle? Does it mean the iOS 19 cycle? And the fact that Apple, a company that is very, very, very careful with the words that they use in these statements that they give to the press, the fact that they were so vague and didn't have that additional detail tells me that even they aren't quite sure.
What's going on? It was like the straw that breaks the camel's back on it, right? It's like... Yes. If they can't even give you a new date or time window, it's looking rough. So yeah, before we get into all the implications, I think in the coming year is probably meant to mean not iOS 18. sometime in iOS 19's lifespan which
probably means the spring of next year, if you're being practical. Because I feel like if it was coming sooner than that, they would have said later this year, you know? Right, yep. In the coming year gives them latitude where I guess if they really get ahead of themselves, they could still ship it late this year and be...
under the wire and people would be happy but practically speaking they're bracing for a sometime in 2026 and hopefully closer to the start of the year before they get into the ios 20 life cycle So basically sometime before June 26 is what I took us in the coming year to mean. And there were headlines from CNBC and Reuters, I think, both of which said in the headline, delayed till 2026.
And when I first saw those headlines, I was like, oh, they're going to get a call from Apple PR saying, that's not what we said. That's not accurate. Can you please change it? As far as I can tell, they never changed it, which means Apple is perfectly fine with people saying delay till 2026.
Yeah, if they thought it was coming in 25, they wouldn't have said in the coming year. They'd have said later this year. The delays of these features, I think, are a real bummer because one of the things I've been saying all along is how smart it seemed for Apple to tackle.
This type of stuff like personal context and in-app actions before bringing the quote-unquote proper LLM theory, the proper more conversational theory because these are the things that only Apple can do. Only Apple has access to. that personal data on your device to tie together something you say to Siri, something in your mail app, something in the calendar, something in messages. Only they can tie all that together. So I thought it was a great idea to prioritize those features over an LLM.
ChatGPT style Siri. Yeah, these are the things that Apple can do uniquely, right? Rather than just follow the crowd. So I was okay with the reports from like Bloomberg, which said this conversational Siri wouldn't come out until... 2026 or 2027, just because they were due, Apple was focused on what they can do and only they can do. Now we're just left standing with like a empty bag of promises where we don't have a truly next generation conversational Siri.
And the truly impressive features that were announced at WWDC for Apple Intelligence are missing in action with no concrete timeline. We still haven't actually seen the features work. We saw a demo. Or not even a demo, just an example. During the WWDC keynote, we saw the promotions and advertising, which we'll talk about, I'm sure. But we still haven't seen a proper example, a proper demonstration, whether by Apple or by someone in the press of these features working.
And that leaves us to where we basically have the Apple intelligence features that launched in iOS 18.1 and iOS 18.2. Things like writing tools, things like smart reply, priority sorting in the mail app. notification summaries, chat GPT, Genmoji, image playground, all of that stuff. The photos updates, the memory movies, the better photo search. Yeah. And that's all we have now. Like there are no more Apple intelligence features.
in the imminent pipeline, unless I'm forgetting something. Well, the only exception is priority notifications on the lock screen, which is in the current 18.4 betas. Yeah. And that does work. It exists. It does.
So what happens next? And I don't know the answer to that. Because interestingly, German said that he doesn't think that for iOS 19 there's going to be another suite of... apple intelligence features to be announced he said he kind of described it as they're just going to bring the current features to more apps and more situations which might include like you know bringing image generation to making
artwork for your playlist in the music app for instance but there's not going to be like and here's these other different capabilities that are powered by generational intelligence um in any kind of implied that The delays on getting this stuff done has then meant other stuff has slipped even further as they get pushed back and pushed back. And the implementation of things like personal context and on-screen awareness has hit so many issues that they might have to like...
quote unquote scrap it and start from start all over again basing it on a new foundation which is their you know more conversational back end um so it's like a domino effect of one thing leads into another which is rare this gets really really rough right because these obviously these things that are now indefinitely delayed are the most ambitious parts of the apple intelligence suite that were announced
And in my opinion, the most compelling and interesting because they were different enough, right? Like the other capabilities that you just enumerated are things that... chat gpt3 could have done a year and a half ago it's just integrating into the system apps useful nice that it was free and a nice little add-on but there was nothing there to like give apple its like stamp on the industry it was all very much like
me too features right with maybe the possible exception of gemmoji not because image generation is novel but the application of that to emoji i feel that was pretty unique um but the the idea that you had this like voice assistant in your phone that could access all the other data on your device and use a semantic index to get you know to understand quote unquote
relationships and connections between your family and what you're talking about in your conversations and then actually be able to surface that back up to you whenever you needed it was pretty individual because apple had you know exclusive access to the device google and android has done some of it but not to the same degree um because they don't have as much access to every piece of information you've got whereas for apple this is pretty novel and unique and yeah they weren't doing the
uh what i just correctly refer to as like voice mode of chat gbt right where it's just a more like chatty assistant using an lm to talk to um they weren't doing that in the first version but they were doing these things that are pretty
pretty cool when like the idea that you can like look at a photo in your photo library and say like you know make this pop or increase or improve the contrast and then it would know that this is the photo you're currently looking at and then be able to perform the editing actions to actually make it match what you asked for rather than you have to like dig into menus and because like I thought that was a good example because if you're on the phone
Going into the edit menu in the Photos app and going to all those different sliders for contrast and vibrancy is kind of a pain, right? There's a lot of clicking, a lot of dragging around, and it's kind of annoying. If you could just ask your phone to just do that thing... be asking the one sentence command would be quicker than doing it with touches right and tapping around 20 times um so i was quite interested in that actually coming to the market and now we don't know
not that it will never will but when it will is definitely now up in the air and the industry is not standing still right so these features that were quite unique and quite novel personal context on screen awareness in app actions The longer it takes for Apple to ship them, the more time there is for the other people in the market to basically offer the same functionality or even surpass it. Like you see ChatGPT app.
It doesn't have access to the system, so it doesn't know what apps you've got open or what's happening right now, but they've come up with a workaround, a high-level inefficient workaround, but it's a workaround that actually... is shipping where you can um start like basically like a video call with chat gpt and it does like screen recording it uses a screen recording api to just get like a bitmap of what's currently on your screen and then does you know um
convolutional neural networks to figure out what app you're currently in and figure out the content on your screen that way like a big roundabout way to get access to the same kind of information but that is If it's not shipping for everyone, it's shipping for some people. And it actually works, you know? And they had like a demo of helping a kid with a math problem because they could like write it out on the iPad and they've got just the ChatGPT app running in a sidebar. Meanwhile, Apple is...
you know can't even do it when they've got the home the home field advantage of just being able to like get the access to the text labels that are currently rendered on the screen you know so that's where it becomes very bad and it slips further and further because let's say these things do ship in spring of 26
By that time, these features won't be considered new and interesting anymore. They'll be considered table stakes. So when this was announced in June, this is kind of cool and kind of innovative and kind of different if they'd have shipped.
even today or in 18.4, even 18.5, I think they still would have had that sheen on them and that kind of, you know, things that make them stand apart. But if it takes a whole nother year and change, all these features might be like old hat by that point, you know. It gives more time for Amazon to ship similar functionality as they've started to demo with Alexa Plus.
right for for their ecosystem google's not standing still with gemini you know they they'll be announcing another version of android in like may and i'm sure that'll have even deeper integration with gemini than they already offer and they've been doing a lot and they have some of this stuff where you can kind of
talk to you about your calendar and get some context and it kind of knows your connections because it has integrations with gmail and stuff um so along the same kind of lines um meanwhile apple shipping nothing so that's where it really becomes stark in that Not only is the delays meaning that Apple will look...
less impressive when they finally do eventually ship this stuff but also then goerman implies it's having a knock-on effect on their pipeline internally so any other features that are further bit that they're already further behind on now even further behind you know it's like a compounding impact that is not
that is not good when we covered the german story a couple of about a month ago about oh these features are having problems and they're buggy and they might have to be delayed from 18.4 to 18.5 I kind of shrug that off, right? Because it's like, well, 18.4, 18.5, what's the difference there? It's a month, you know, essentially. Rather than April, it means May. But now the official news is it's not coming 18.5, it's coming who knows when.
And that bigger time difference, I think, makes a big difference in how I feel about it. And it's not good. You mentioned that these features will or could be table stakes by the time they actually ship on Apple's part, but from Apple's perspective. For better or for worse, nobody can do this stuff on the iPhone, right? Without those awkward, put aside the awkward workarounds, nobody can have that deep integration with the iPhone that Apple can have.
Well, Google's trying to emulate it by basically saying, if you use all Google services, we have access to that information that way around. So even if you use an iPhone... If you're using Google Photos, you're using Google Gmail, using Google Calendar, we can kind of synthesize the same information as long as you're in our ecosystem, right? Whereas the Apple idea would be it wouldn't matter necessarily if you used...
are all of our services because we can just get it from the os level even though i think in practice a lot of the personal context features will work best if you are using iMessage rather than facebook messenger do you know what i mean so it's kind of similar-ish
But that's something that's been in the back of my mind throughout all of the Apple intelligence drama is how much does this actually matter with Apple as the platform owner? If Apple delays things for a year and these features don't come out until iOS 19.4 next spring. Are they at risk? Is there an actual impact on end users who are going to leave the platform because these features don't exist? I don't think so.
You don't think so? No. That doesn't make me feel better about it, but... Right. No, that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm just saying that. Yeah. There's a certain level of complacency you can have when you're the platform owner. And I think this is probably one of the best examples yet of Apple recognizing and taking advantage of the fact that they own the platform and they can be more complacent and they know that they can announce things to WWDC and promise that they're coming.
And people will hang around on the platform because those features are coming. People aren't going to leave the platform. Yeah, it's a hard thing to analyze because... It's not like they miss on one thing and then you're going to leave the ecosystem, right? It's not how it works. It's like a very slow, gradual malaise of, you know, goodwill fading away. And they're using up a lot of goodwill.
on being quote-unquote behind in AI in general, right? I think day-to-day customers, they're not quite at the point where these features are so table stakes that if the phone doesn't have them, they're going to switch platform. Because... you know switching barriers are high costs are high people like the iphone in many respects and the phone does not define itself right now on
in apple intelligence being good or not right like that's just not how they're like it's like it's still in the vein of fun extras and it's the same on android and the same on anything else you can buy there are impending risks
in the five-year time span of, you know, maybe if someone makes a really AI-driven phone that can do everything for you on your behalf and you don't have to lift a finger and it's so convenient that that makes the iPhone look straight up antiquated with, oh, you've got to open apps yourself, like, you know.
How childish. We can just do it without even blinking or just saying one command to the air and it can go off and do everything for us. Or you have like maybe other form factors that are always a potential risk. Like maybe this gives meta more inroads if they can make a good...
you know lm-based assistant and drive that through on their glasses or whatever else or obviously open ai has talked about making hardware at some point and maybe even working with johnny ive on industrial design for it you know like there's all these areas that for every month that goes by where Apple is underdeveloped and behind, these other things become bigger risk factors. But it's not like, are people buying the iPhone 16 because of personal context on screen awareness and app actions?
I don't think that's the case. I mean, you can kind of use Apple words against it, right? Because Tim Cook on the last earnings call was like, we saw more people buy iPhones in regions where Apple intelligence was available. And now parts of Apple intelligence are not available for anyone for a year and a half. So I guess that...
directly has a sales impact if that's what he's saying but I don't really believe what he's saying there because I still think most people are buying the iPhone for other reasons so yeah there's like this for me I'm not gonna you know I like Apple products uh but i do like at some point if they just if they became stayed and and underdeveloped at some point you have to consider other options right but
individual instances of like this are not like oh i haven't gone out and sold my laptop and my airpods and my phone and my watch you know my apple tv on just this case but it certainly makes me more frustrated about it you know and yeah how many how many how many times can they frustrate you and feel like you're behind before you make a switch well that's a hard question but this isn't enough on its own but it's i prefer to be in an ecosystem
that is nice and you know aesthetic and works well and also is on the cutting edge of technology and at least in this area right now it feels like they're not I still think they've probably got enough time and enough buffer to catch up in the wider scope of things. But on this individual issue, they were selling this story and now the next time they try and sell you a story...
about features that aren't shipping on day one, you're going to be a lot more skeptical. Right? Exactly. And I think I wasn't trying to say that it's a good thing that Apple has the dominance and won't face ramifications for delaying these features.
My point primarily is that if you look at the iPhone ecosystem and you look at ways that Apple can take advantage and currently does take advantage of its dominance, you have things like the App Store and then you have things like this where it doesn't have to be first to a new feature or a new category of features.
But like you said, there's a limited amount of times, a limited amount of examples where you can get away with that, where you can cash that check and say, okay, we can't do this right now, but we own the platform. People are not going to leave the platform.
And this is probably the biggest example yet of them relying on that dominance and relying on the fact that they have an ecosystem that people don't want to leave for better or for worse. Because I think if you're in a phone shop and you're looking to buy a new phone... If you can do a demo like that where it's like, I just talked to my phone and get it to do this thing for me and it immediately does it.
that's a pretty good sales thing if you're in a shop between one model and the other and they cost the same price and people are ambivalent and they're looking for a change right like you don't want to give people excuses to want to leave right
You can have a really nice garden, but if you look over the hedge and something looks attractive, at some point, some people are going to jump over the fence, right? And that's kind of what happens here. I think Siri as an overarching theme is exactly the same, right? Siri... has been bad, weak, underdeveloped in many regards for 10 years.
Right? Just because Siri was bad didn't mean I stopped buying the iPhone. But I'd sure like the iPhone more if Siri was as good as the competition on all aspects. And there are some areas... where I do think Siri is pretty good, like home control. And that's why I have a load of HomeKit stuff, because I actually think it works really well. But there's other things, like the fact that even today, in 2025, you can't reliably ask it to convert one time zone to another and it can give you an answer.
And that's been the case from literally day one of Siri coming out through the last 10 years, through the new version of iOS 18. It still can't do like time zone conversions appropriately when Google Assistant doesn't, I'm not talking about Gemini, right? The basic Google Assistant could do that from like 2012 onwards. And it's frustrating me on and off.
the entire time because it feels like such an obvious thing that you could be able to ask an assistant to do, you know, convert this one time zone to another, which I do quite a lot in my daily job, you know, conversing with people in America and stuff. And the Apple voice assistant has never been good at doing that.
So what do I do? I always resort to like Googling it. And the Google automatic suggestion only gives you the answer. But I would really wish my voice assistant would do it. But it just never has and never will. And them fixing that problem didn't rely on them being on the cutting edge of AI. It's just...
care and attention to one feature of their platform that they never bothered with and so that's always been a bit of a graining factor you know it's just been exacerbated in more recent years from the llm revolution The other side to all of this is the marketing perspective. Apple released the iPhone 16 in September. And I remember us on this very show talking about the marketing dilemma that Apple was going to face in knowing that the iPhone 16 was, quote unquote, built for Apple intelligence.
But the very first Apple Intelligence feature is not shipping until October. They went all in on touting Apple Intelligence as a flagship feature of the iPhone 16. They changed the cube in New York City to have the glowing effect around the outside of the building.
They ran these TV ads showing off different Apple intelligence features. And perhaps the most damning of which is the iPhone 16 ad that we talked about when it aired with Bella Ramsey. And that's where Bella Ramsey sees like a person approaching.
And ask Siri the name of the person that they had a meeting with the previous month at a specific restaurant. The idea being that that's Apple intelligence, personal context, tying together all of that information to tell Bella Ramsey who that person is before.
there's an awkward interaction with a pretty complex query that you couldn't just like right google or even just like open your calendar and find you know what i mean it's a lot faster to have that like one sentence question so it was quite a compelling idea of you know
how this feature could actually help you. And sure enough, that ad, the same day that Apple announced that they were delaying these features and definitely that ad was pulled from YouTube. I'm presuming it was pulled from social media and I know it ran a whole bunch on TV during like the NFL playoffs.
I'm assuming that will stop as well. Yeah, and I remember at the time, I think I said I was disappointed that they were advertising this when they hadn't even promised it was coming out. Because at that time, it was coming out early next year kind of range, right?
I didn't mind as much when they were advertising the writing tools, you know, when it was coming in October and then it shipped in October. But even at the time, that personal context thing, I was like, really Apple? You should probably be holding off on this one until you have something concrete, at least in the beta channel, you know?
And sure enough, it came back to buy them. And there's multiple different failure points into the rollout and launch of these features. You have the decision to announce the features first and foremost at WWDC, knowing full well that...
they didn't have a working example. They didn't have an example or a demo of this feature working, any of these features working. So that's failure point number one. Yeah, because they never demoed it to the press, right? Even in like a controlled environment. They just, all you had were the videos.
the pre-recorded videos, which could have been completely invented. Which it's looking like that's the case. In the olden days, when you had stage demos, you could always fake the Siri interactions there too, right? You never 100% knew if they were actually talking to a real-life server or not.
but you just kind of assumed them do because they had the benefit of the doubt now you've got these videos where you can be a bit more loosey-goosey and in the past i think we've generally given them better than doubt and most of the times they've come and delivered but you know next wwdc rolls around and they have
if they announce features this is the thing it was the classic phrase from from 24 thing when they talk about Siri Siri will be able to do you remember that like they said that what like seven different times if they say that again people are gonna like laugh in their faces because they you know they just
It's just recent history is going to burn them. So if WWDC is failure point number one, failure point number two is the decision to market those features starting in September. Again, knowing full well that you are nowhere close to shipping the things like personal context. Like you said, marketing.
Writing tools in Genmoji and Image Playground. While still a little bit weird, they clearly knew that those were coming soon. They were in beta. That was a pretty safe bet that those features were going to ship. My big question now is what's the fallout from this? There's clearly been failures throughout software engineering, throughout marketing, and throughout the artificial intelligence machine learning strategy team. So that's people like...
Greg Federighi on the software side, John Gianandria on the AI ML side, and then Greg Joswiak on the marketing side. Was the dichotomy here that all three of these people... weren't talking to each other? Was it that Federighi and Gianandrea weren't talking to JAWS about the actual status of those features? Above all of that, you have Tim Cook, where was he the one making the final call that, okay, we can market these features?
even though we don't know when they're going to ship, even though we haven't actually seen them work. Like caving to investor pressure that AI is the hot thing, we need to show that we're here kind of deal, even if we haven't quite got the goods yet. And one thing that I...
Would never do, and you might hear this on other podcasts, but one thing I would never do is call for someone to be fired or someone to lose their job. You don't have enough context to ever say that. Yeah, because as outsiders, you're relying on primarily what reporting from Bloomberg. And whoever is talking to Bloomberg, whoever Mark Gurman's sources are on this matter, are clearly setting it up so that John Gianandrea is the fall guy. But you don't know who he's talking to.
You don't know if he's talking to somebody who has a vendetta against Gianandria. He's talking to somebody on Federighi's team who likes Federighi as a boss and doesn't want Federighi to get ousted. So they're painting Gianandria as the fall guy. You always have to consider the motivation. of the source who was talking to somebody like German. I mean, Feneri is the one who presented these features at WWDC. Yeah.
I don't care who you are. He's a senior vice president presenting, saying the words. He could have really put his foot down if he wanted to and said, no, we're not going to talk about this yet. Or we're going to couch it in much more...
uh qualified language but he was happy enough to present it and have it recorded on video you know he could have said at any moment i'm not going to have it go out we're going to cut this part out you know we're not going to talk about this or we're just going to put this in like a you know put more beta labels around it and say this is
where we're going rather than presenting as if this is what's going to ship like you even if he's not the one who's responsible in making the features work he's involved right like he is partly everyone has partial liability and that's why It's kind of irresponsible, I think, to lay it at one person's feet. Obviously, if you want to be from the outside, the easiest target is the person who's ahead of AI, which is Jean Andrea. But I think you can very easily make the argument that maybe like...
none of the Apple intelligence feature would have shipped at all if it wasn't for Gia and Andrea. So when you're just on the exterior, I think it's pretty rash to just single one person out. It's like...
head should roll and here's the person that should do it when you just don't know all the information because everybody's fighting against each other and everybody has at least somewhat to blame it's as much a marketing blame as anything else like you why don't you put all the blame at joz react's feet for instance like
Obviously, G. Andrews is the fool guy because everybody likes Federighi because he seems to come across as a nice guy and he's developer-friendly and everybody loves him. And G. Andrews is also the person that just gets less time in the spotlight in general. Apple doesn't... put him out there very much um in fact i think the first time he made a public appearance under his apple job was
at wwc last year in the in the after um afternoon sessions where he was talking to developers and doing the you know the little chat with like i just seen and stuff was there and janji was there which was kind of a remark is the first time we kind of seen that in the wild so it's very easy for like
a random person to put it at his feet i don't think you could it's not that simple in any of these cases is it bad and does he definitely have partial blade of course he does but yeah does that solely mean that oh it must mean that now he's got to go i don't think that's really true But maybe Tim Cook will want to make a statement out of someone. Like he did Scott Forstall. It does feel like, to a degree, that some of this stuff is just as bad as the Apple Maps fiasco.
But the difference is that Apple Maps was terrible. The version one of Apple Maps was terrible. It was god-awful. It was horrible. And it shipped to people. This is at least Apple saying, okay, these features don't work. We cannot ship them. And that's one of the examples in the most recent Bloomberg reporting on this where one of the final straws to delaying these features and perhaps scrapping them and rebuilding them from scratch altogether.
is they didn't work for Craig Federighi in his personal life. Like he was trying to use these features and they just didn't work. So I guess you can give Apple like one-tenth of a point for not actually shipping these features.
Yeah, it's a better time than them shipping them and being an embarrassment, right? Yes. They're still embarrassed, clearly, by what's happening now, but less so than if the features had shipped. Yeah, I think you can definitely call it the lesser of two evils for sure. Yeah.
And the other thing that's kind of interesting is everyone likes to package these up as these three features and they're like one unit. But I'm kind of surprised that all of them are delayed. Like the personal context one is the one that I always put in the... you know, the most sci-fi isn't the hardest one to actually do.
because you've got to like synthesize an index of like all the information on your device and then find a model that can surface it back to you in an appropriate way and find just the little nuggets of information that are relevant to what you just said. Like that always felt like the really, really high complicated bar for an on-
device model to be able to do the on-screen awareness and the in-app action stuff that felt more achievable you know because it's just like look at the screen take all the text on the screen and then shove it into a little lmm to work out what's there
or just talk to the shortcut system which basically already exists and just look at the actions that are exposed through the app intense framework which already exists and is already there and you just need a little you know assistant to be able to find the action that matches the current context like those features felt way more near term than the personal context thing did um and it's kind of crazy to me that all three of them are now indefinitely delayed like
before this came out as official, if you'd have told me, oh, personal content is delayed, but on-screen on my ass is shipping 8.5, I'd have probably been, yeah, that probably sounds about right. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's kind of meant all three of them are now pushed back for the future. Because the other thing about... One more thing. Apple presented their Apple intelligence idea as you're going to have on-device models combined with this private cloud compute thing. But critically...
all of your personal information stays on your device in the semantic index that is local. And if you do need a request that is going to private cloud compute, only at the time of the request will your device work out which pieces of information on your phone.
are relevant to the request, package them up, encrypt them and send them to the private cloud compute thing for analysis and then get you back a result, right? That was their model and that's how they presented it. But if the personal context features aren't viable or aren't shipping, then...
A lot of that infrastructure is kind of pointless. You could just have an impersonal LLM running a server in the cloud and get better results because you don't have to worry about on-device models at all. If you're not getting personal responses to questions... You just might as well directly go to a chat GPT or similar, you know, and get a response back. So their whole like framework of how they're going to do this and pull this off.
is kind of undermined if they can't ship the central tenant of that. Right. Because you could have a much more capable world knowledge. LLM that just doesn't answer any personal questions whatsoever and you get better results for the things you can ask Siri today and no different to the stuff that you can't ask it because it wouldn't know anything about it which is the exact same situation we're in right now so what they
Their strategy has now been somewhat sabotaged by themselves. Do you think there's an outcome here where Apple just acquires somebody? They acquire a company like Anthropic to power these AI features? Because that's something that I see passed around quite a bit.
But I don't think you could bring Anthropic or anybody into the equation and do what Apple has announced they're going to do. Like you said, with all of that infrastructure, with private cloud compute, with the privacy angles, I don't think you can just buy it. quote-unquote off-the-shelf AI startup and solve all your problems. The problems run a lot deeper. Yeah, not if you want to retain the on-device nature of it. Right. It's a very different problem set. If Apple wanted to make...
Siri smarter full stop and ignore any of the other ramifications, they could... buy out more server capacity and run like the open source llama model which meta creates right and it would yeah right give you an llm voice mode situation almost out of the box it's literally open source thing anyone can run it you just need enough servers to be able to power the millions of users and then
you go but then they obviously don't want to do that because they have a different approach and they want to do it differently but though that different obviously what they presented last year was that this different approach would have no downsides because it's going to be great and we're going to do it like this Obviously, it has downsides and they seem limited in what they can do because they can't even get the basics out the door at this point.
let alone offering world knowledge of their own i mean it's the same thing with the image generation stuff like people hammer on image playgrounds for like making bad results or making bad images or it feels so outdated or it looks like image generation from three years ago compared to what the state-of-the-art models can do but they always forget the image playground stuff is happening on your device for an on-device model the images it produces are pretty
competitive with anything else that can run on that constrained environment if apple wanted to make image playgrounds produce more realistic high quality images they should run an image generation model in the cloud and just send requests to that But they chose not to. They chose to run it on device and then you get the benefits and the trade-offs of that approach. So that's where we are. Maybe this fiasco causes them to rethink it a little bit.
And they'll run even more just in a cloud somewhere and store even more information and just access, you know, with an opt-in, they can just access more of your data directly instead of trying to do this super encrypted end-to-end approach where it relies on the local device and the server. because obviously they're hitting roadblocks with it. As well as the accepted issue of to even use this stuff, you need a relatively modern device that can run the on-device models at all.
Right. Whereas if they'd done it on the server, they could have just made it like a subscription thing and make it a little service where even if you've got an iPhone 12, you could just contact the Apple intelligence server and ask, you know, do you get what I'm saying? Like, yeah.
Whereas where they are right now, they're kind of taking a lot of downsides because they need everybody to buy newer devices and they can't even ship it on that platform either. And then you've got all the question marks about the lower power devices that don't have any chance of running.
a foundation model on their device yet like the home pod or the apple tv or the apple watch even um so they've taken a lot of downsides and so far haven't been able to cash in on the on the upside because they've been able to ship them like i said at the very start of this conversation
The place we find ourselves now is what's on the roadmap, and right now there's nothing on the roadmap, or at least the imminent roadmap. These features clearly aren't coming until iOS 19.4 or whatever. If Garmin's reporting is correct, there's not much on. the roadmap for iOS 19.0, like new unannounced features coming at WWDC, if you look for near-term solutions, near-term Apple intelligence announcements they can make,
The only thing that comes to my mind is more integrations with third parties like they have now with ChatGPT. We've heard for months at this point that they've been in talks with Google to integrate Gemini.
We've heard Craig Federighi say that they could integrate models that are good for specific domains, like a model that's really good for coding. And if you look at the deal that they got with ChatGPT where no money is changing hands, ChatGPT is doing all of this for the quote-unquote exposure.
That has to be a priority in Apple's mind to expand those options. Because if they can't ship their own AI features, the best thing they can do in the short term is become a place where you can integrate all the other AI platforms into one.
central location why don't they let you use chat gpt image generation in image playgrounds for instance yeah and that's what i was going to say too is Part of the problem with that strategy is that they have to improve the integration of those services because right now, as has been well documented, there are times when Siri even screws up that transition, deciding when to ask ChatGPT something versus handling.
the query itself. Even that very basic handoff just doesn't work a lot of the times. I saw one example over the weekend where someone had asked to Siri, and this was directly what they said. Ask ChatGPT to do X. I can't remember exactly what the X was, but it was Ask ChatGPT to X. And somehow... What Siri did is it looked up in their contacts for someone called ChatGPT and was like, I can't find anyone called ChatGPT to ask.
And it's like, something needs to change there, really. And that does, again, that has no impact or no relevance or no association to any of the modern LLM stuff. They could do that on basic things like they were doing before. You just need to, you know, root the domains better. But Siri has always been seemingly under-resourced or underserved. And now they're really reaping what they sowed about it. And the last thing on all of this is the fallout is going to continue.
We've already seen a report this week from Bloomberg saying that the 7-inch Home Hub smart device display product that we've been talking about is delayed, due in part to the delay of some of these Apple intelligence features. Bloomberg had previously said this device would be heavily reliant on the app intents, the in-app actions, Apple intelligence feature, which is one of the ones that was delayed indefinitely.
I think we're in agreement here, Mayor, where they could ship this product in some form or fashion. Maybe without those top end Apple intelligence features, it's just a question of where and if they're able to make those compromises. Yeah, like a... A HomePod with a screen is a shippable product that we've been asking them to do even before Apple intelligence even on the table. I guess they had the marketing more centered around a more autonomous thing.
with these you know ai connections uh but if if they like can they really hold this smart display for like a year you know like if they have to i feel like they could probably just strip the product down a little bit and ship it
And then follow up with software updates in the future. But it does seem like the fallout will continue. And we're at an interesting point too where the thing Tim Cook always talks about is the intersection of the hardware, software and the services. The hardware is doing great.
Honestly, Apple services pretty much thriving on most fronts. Apple Music is growing and gray. Apple TV Plus is becoming an integral streaming service. We used to talk about iCloud reliability being the problem, you know? Yeah. Say what you want. They've improved that a lot and it doesn't really come up anymore. So like Apple's weaknesses on services do get better over time. It just takes them a long time. And like the iCloud thing, I feel like it's kind of been resolved.
That was the big question. That was the big looming issue with Apple services narrative in, you know, five, 10 years ago was like... Is iCloud any good or not? But they've definitely made it good enough. Now people rely on it and I happily recommend people use iCloud for a library and everything else. And I have no issues with it. Same. So they do get there.
on these things, but they're obviously not core competency, so it takes them a while. Anything else on the Apple intelligence drama? I guess we'll probably see a lawsuit from someone trying... I was wondering about that. Like, I mean... I would feel... I didn't buy an iPhone 16, right? But I got given one from Apple PR for the iPhone 16 Plus. But if I'd have bought all my own money, I think I'd be pretty annoyed or miffed that...
Some of these features that were advertised ahead of release are now maybe not even coming out until well beyond the iPhone 17's lifetime. I don't know whether that has legal standing or not.
Apple's very quickly putting disclaimers and everything on their website, which basically say these features are becoming a future software update, which I guess kind of cuts off what a class action lawsuit could include, because basically it can only include everybody up to that point, right, rather than before.
lawyers like to lawyer so i'm sure they'll try and maybe you know have some have some fall out for that and the other thing to watch for is whether there is any more news on personnel right in terms of Yeah. People leaving or joining or acquisitions. And obviously about a month ago, like Kim Vorath was assigned to kind of lead that and sort it out. And maybe some of that was the undercurrent behind this impending problem, you know?
Yeah, that's true. Good point. And maybe Gene Andrew will leave and someone else will take over, but I don't necessarily think that's a definite outcome. Like, it really depends on the internals and ultimately the only... There's very few people that can make that choice. And it's certainly not, you know, podcasters. It's like an executive board decision. So that's something to keep an eye on. But I kind of feel like they're going to try and...
present uh stability you know and they're gonna take this on the chin and it sucks but they're probably gonna try and just not talk about it ever again until they're finally ready to ship these features you know um and like we said a kind of science conversation they do have a buffer
of dominance to be able to get away with that. The elephant in the room on trying to sweep it all into the rug is we are only three months away from WWDC. People are going to be waiting around to hear whether they address these delays, whether they have new features to announce. It's going to be hard to sweep it under the rug for at least, I don't know, forever, probably. Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by Green Chef.
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Thanks to 1Password for sponsoring the show. In happier and more exciting news, Bloomberg reports that iOS 19 will be one of the most dramatic software overhauls in Apple's history. with some of the biggest design changes we've seen since iOS 7. It's also planning similar updates to the Mac and the iPad, so that's macOS 16 and iPadOS 19. The report from Bloomberg makes these...
Pretty grandiose claims. Again, like it's one of the most dramatic software overhauls in Apple's history. The biggest since iOS 7. There aren't exactly many details on what Apple is planning to do. There's a line. Apple will update the style of icons, menus, apps, windows, and system buttons with a design loosely based on Vision OS. And Apple's goal is to make the design of its software platforms more consistent from one device to the other.
The report says the changes will go well beyond a new design language and aesthetic, and Apple plans to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices. So some big claims, no specific details. But I think it does kind of counteract at least the point I've made on the show before, and I think we both made, where the times of Apple doing an iOS 7 top-down redesign.
of the iphone software were behind us because it sounds like that's what ios 19 is going to be at least that's how that first report was presented right it's hard to say that without specific examples because what if it's just like all the home screen icons on the iPhone get refreshed and they look more 3D and, you know, more like the VNOS icons. Circular.
Circular app icons, yeah. Not even necessarily circular, but you know how they're now quite flat and two-tone colours, a lot of the icons. Whereas you look at Vision OS icons, there's a bit more depth to them, a bit more shadow and gloss.
I think the Vision OS icon set looks really nice. If they want to apply that to the iPhone, that'd be great, and it would make the platforms more consistent, even if they don't go from circles to random rectangles, you know, but it would stand out more, I guess, if they went to circulars, if they went to circles. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're then going to change how every single app looks. Maybe there's more of a change to macOS, right? Because on the Mac, it's easier to...
I'd say it's easier for Apple to make a design overhaul on macOS than iOS because macOS apps just generally rely on more standard system components, right? Like there's less custom UI everywhere. And so they can refresh how... mac os windows menus icons toolbars look like without changing and having massive like
having to do a lot of work on every single app individually so they can get a lot of value out of just doing one set of changes. So if they wanted to make the platforms more consistent, they could redesign macOS to make it look more like iOS and leave iOS relatively untouched.
I still am skeptical that in 2025, they can pull off an iOS 7 style top to bottom redesign. And I think German even goes further, right? He says this goes beyond iOS 7 that was like a coat of paint. That's like a line from his report. Because he's kind of implying there's going to be like navigational behavioral changes. And that involves a whole new can of worms because...
If you want to give two examples of navigational behavioral changes to core iOS interfaces in the last year, you've got the Photos app. And you've got the Mail app, right? And those have been nothing but controversial and divisive. And if they're going to come in here in June and then do that kind of change to many apps on the phone...
they could be in for a lot of blowback from regular customers, right? Because I still think a lot of people are annoyed or frustrated by the Photos app. And I think it's clearly not like a... oh, everybody loved it. Even if they got used to it by now, maybe you can argue. I think if that kind of approach was then taken to every app on the phone, I'm not sure it would achieve the goal.
of what, making things simpler? Wasn't that what the line was? So, it's a... What Germa described is a very tall bar that I'm still a...
A bit sceptical will happen. I'm sure some apps on the phone will look different. We've already seen the leaks about the camera app, right? From Jon Prosser and stuff. And there are apps on the phone that have been... left alone for a while, maybe could do with a bigger refresh than others, but do you really think in iOS 19 they're going to come back and, you know...
the Mail app's going to look even more different and the Photos app is going to look even more different after they only just refreshed this app last year. Like, surely the idea that every single app on the phone is going to get redesigned is probably overstating it, you know? And Vision OS, it's easy to say, oh, things will look like Vision OS. Vision OS looks like it does.
Because it's in a different context, right? Windows are transparent because you're in an augmented reality interface. So Windows have to be transparent, otherwise everything will be covered up. The iPhone is not like that. It's always going to be backed by...
white and black you know whether you're in dark mode or light mode and so you can't go all the way into making everything glossy and transparent on the iphone because it just will never happen because there's always a base layer to that device um just like how The Apple Watch has always looked...
quite different from iOS, you know? And they've changed this more in more recent years, but originally every screen on the watch was backed by black, right? Because they were taking advantage of the OLED black screen to make the kind of borders kind of vanish. In more recent versions, they've embraced, you know, full color.
backgrounds a bit more but still it doesn't look you wouldn't look at watch os and go that looks like ios apps right especially when you maybe the icons look similar but like you go into the mail app the layout and the treatment of the visual style of the list of emails is very different to what it looks like on the iPhone because it's accommodating the smaller screen size, the different form factor, like all these variables. I think it's incredibly a non-goal.
to make every operating system look the same. Because you're just then doing the lowest common denominator approach, which is always bad. So I'm not sure I buy the, oh, they're going to make all their platforms look more consistent because the whole point of having different platforms is that they can then take an advantage of what makes each one individually good. The Mac looks a lot the way it does because it's still predominantly...
You know, cursor input with a trackpad, right? Or a mouse. They're not going to make them all iOS sized icons and iOS sized toolbars because that would be stupid, you know? I mean, I guess if you want to counter that, there's the chatter about adding touchscreens to Mac, so maybe they should make it more touch-friendly. I don't know. People said that with the Big Sur redesign in 2020, that they were making it more touch-friendly.
has not materialized yet there is scope for a big sir style redesign again to happen to mac os if they wanted to right because they can change the toolbars they can change the menu bar they can change do you know what i mean like it's a lot easier to do that kind of stuff
than it is to change how like every app on the iPhone looks. Because they all kind of a bit more unique and different and have different prompts. And they don't all, like the Mac apps depend a lot more heavily on like a stock library of components. Like here's a toolbar, here's a sidebar.
The iPhone's always been more unique in that and each app kind of looks different. And so I never think you're really going to have a chance to do an iOS 7 style overhaul because what would they even do? Like when iOS 6 was around... The trend was towards flat design, right? Skeomorphism was going out the window. What is the current trend that the iPhone is behind on in terms of visual style?
I couldn't tell you. And in fact, I would say one of the trends is more personalization and customization, which Apple itself kind of kickstarted with iOS 14 and the home screen widgets and all of the ensuing aesthetic.
things people wanted after i was 14 was released so in some ways doing a top-down redesign goes against that personalization trend oh so they they redesigned the os and now it looks ugly and everybody hates it because of that yeah yeah yeah exactly like i don't think there's a pressing requirement for them to change how every app looks and i'm not even sure how they would do it you know like
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe put some more borders around more icons, I guess. One thing I do appreciate in the Mail app that is completely separate to the new categorization is they put the little rounded palettes around the select button or the dot, dot, dot button in the top right.
Oh, yeah. They could do that on every app. Biggest change since iOS 7. Exactly. That would fulfill German's description. And I would appreciate it because I do think... the buttons with a background around them look better than the standard like link style buttons which are just the text you know because even in the mail app if you're in the list of emails it has selecting the dot dot dot buttons with those nice you know rounded rectangle backgrounds
But then you go back to the mailboxes list and the edit button there doesn't have that rounded rectangle on it. And it's like, why? You know, that just seems stupid. So if they want to do something like that where they put nice rounded rectangles around all the buttons again.
I'd be happy with that, but I wouldn't call that a design that's bigger than what they did with iOS 7, because iOS 7, to a common layperson, always looked different, right? You couldn't not say that this didn't look different.
I struggle to imagine in the current, you know, ethos or... design aesthetics of the current modern design languages that exist there isn't really another one they could go to that would be that dramatic so in the eyes of a common lay person nothing's going to beat ios 7 and let's not forget ios 7 caused problems it caused pain people were upset about it it was buggy some things look ugly it took them what
A good five years to get back onto a stable foundation again where people were kind of happy with it and they had to retrench some of the things they did with iOS 7. Like iOS 7 launched with fonts that were so thin, you know, wafer thin. They ended up having to...
deploy an entirely new font of their own designs with San Francisco, you know? Originally iOS 7 was Helvetica and then they followed up in successive years with the different fonts that... more people more happy with they changed all the icons you know sf symbols came out of the fact that people weren't happy with the kind of boxy symbols that ios 7 brought in
It took them a long time to get back to a stable foundation. I really don't think 2025 is the time for them to do superficial design changes that are going to stretch over into several years and cycles.
when people aren't here begging for it to look that much different, you know? They can do a lick of paint. They can do some sprucing. I kind of refuse to believe that it's going to be so foundational and transformational because I just don't think they got the bandwidth to do it. And I don't even think there's a...
something that you can go to oh this is what they're going to change to because it makes sense it just doesn't exist in my head maybe i'm short-sighted it does kind of go to that steve jobs quote which is where people don't know what they want until you show it to them and maybe people don't know that they want a new ios design but apple will show them something and they'll say okay this is a lot better this is a lot more modern than what we have now
The question is whether it's change for the sake of change, which is certainly a trap that Apple has fallen into and that anyone falls into where you're just changing something because it hasn't changed in a while. I mean, software always has elements of fashion, right? And fashion changes. So you always want to be like moving forward. But...
Like they do do that on a continuing basis. I mean, a good example, you know, the tool headers that you get in a lot of the apps with lists and you scroll up and that tool headers go away and you just got the tiny little inline header. That wasn't in part of iOS 7. right that was added i think i was nine like they add those things and they move along but it's not like the whole system changes in one go because i just don't think they've got the human bandwidth to really pull it off successfully
And you need a lot of motivation to kickstart that. I'm sure some apps on the phone will change with iOS 19 and great. The camera app might be completely redesigned. A few other key apps might be completely redesigned. Do you really think every app on the system... that also then involves the entire third-party app ecosystem of the App Store to also change, I really don't think there's justification for it. It'd be kind of wild if they did it, but I'm very sceptical, you know?
I don't know if I care about justification as much as this would just be really cool and really fun to see. And to have an exciting beta cycle where people are complaining. Apple's making changes from one beta to the next. There's like a clear back and forth between Apple and beta testers, which we haven't had for a while. I just struggle to imagine what they're actually going to change to make it look more loosely like Vision OS than what it currently looks like now.
yeah you know it's not that far apart and that's the problem it's very different from ios 6 to ios 7 you know yeah it's more like ios 8 to ios 9 or ios 8 to ios 10 you know like small incremental changes that could bring iPhone and the Apple Vision Pro closer together, if that's what they want. I think if you change the home screen icons, everyone will notice, but that's different to every app on the phone getting redesigned, you know?
But it would be cool if they do redesign the icon set because some of those icons are literally the same as they were from iOS 7 and I've hated them from the day they were introduced. Like the Safari icon, for instance. The Safari icon on iPhone is a travesty.
I always have hated it from the day dot of iOS 7 coming out. It's always looked bad. The Mac icon looks way better because it actually has some sort of depth and texture to it. You know, the little spindle isn't just two triangles, one red and one white. You know, it actually has...
shadowing and depth and like and the and the safari icon on vision on vision os is not like the safari icon on iphone either it looks more realistic right it looks better so if they want to change all the icons and make them look better i'd be all for it but I don't think it's going to be like the Safari icon looks different and then you open the app and then everything inside Safari is also completely changed. Because what would they change about it, you know? I don't think it's...
Safari feels pretty modern still. It's so different to the iOS 6 days where stuff was starting to feel actively old. There is a pretty easy argument to be made that by doing a complete redesign of iOS would be a... Great way to distract from the Apple intelligence delays because the vast, vast, vast majority of iPhone users will notice and care if their phone gets a huge redesign overnight. Most iPhone users probably don't know.
that Apple intelligence features are delayed. They don't even know that these features were coming. I mean, it's not a reaction because if this was what they were doing, they'd have had to start it like last year, you know. You can't do a whole EOS redesign starting in March. So...
part of the reason iOS 7 was so bad is they did rush it out because it kind of started in like September, October when Force 2 was being shown the door. Yeah. And then, you know, it was really bad. It wasn't like the first beta wasn't even on the iPad, remember? Like there was like all those lags and issues and...
Some apps won't change and stuff. So if they're going to do a full OS redesign, I sure hope they deploy it and execute it much better than they did the iOS 7 thing. Because the iOS just has way more screens than it ever did 10 years ago. And it was a disaster last time. So I really hope if that's what they are doing, they really need to tread carefully. If I was the CEO of Apple, I would not be advocating for a full OS redesign for no reason.
Because I just think there's so much risk and so much potential for stuff to go wrong. Or even if it all works, people to be annoyed or frustrated with the result. Changing navigational hierarchy is a really risky thing to do. As we've kind of seen on a smaller scale with the email app and the photos app. So do you just never change anything? Does iOS say... No, you just slowly evolve. Like... Yeah. It's always incremental. I really, like...
I will be gobsmacked if iOS 19, every app looks different and navigational structures of every app has changed. Yeah. I'll say that today, right? And that's kind of what the Bloomberg report implies. And it sounds cool and it sounds awesome. Like, you know... in the abstract but when you actually think about it coming into reality i'm i just don't think it adds up properly well that's the whole problem with the bloomberg report is that there are no details about what
it'll look like or the reality of the changes this that this is the concept they have concepts of a plan for a new ios 19 design one specific example right i was trying to think of an app that's kind of essential to the iphone that hasn't been redesigned recently so not safari
Not mail and not photos, right? Camera we've already talked about. Camera are obvious ways you can get better. Messages, right? Yeah. What is messages? It's a list of messages that you tap through and then you see message bubbles. How different does Messages look on the iPhone to how it looks on Vision OS? Not that different at all. Would you disagree? No. How different, if you look at the overall structure of the app from iOS 6 to iOS 7.
What, they changed the font? They changed the colors? Like, that's all they can do this time, too. There isn't much of a navigational hierarchy change you can make to messages. But that's what German just told us. Well, yeah. They can have navigational changes across the operating system.
I just don't think it can bear fruit, you know? Yeah. And even if you just take visuals alone, what are they going to do to messages to really make it look different apart from like make the buttons look like buttons? I don't know. Change the font again. Change the font again, but... But the San Francisco font is so good. And that's what Vision OS uses, you know? Like, if you really want to be stupid, I guess you could, like, all the list items could then be an individual...
Randy, rectangles of their own if you really wanted to do that, I guess. I was thinking about that in terms of the Vision OS design. Yeah. Yeah. I just think that's change for change sake. It doesn't make it any better. At least on Vision OS, you put them in bubbles because then they're distinct elements that you can tap on individually and they're separate from the background, right? On the iPhone, you have list separators, right? We'll see. But I'm pretty skeptical about...
how this report like we really need going to follow up with more specific examples yeah just broad strokes the whole earth is going to look different i just don't think we'll play out in rally i will say that the idea of an ios redesign ios 19 being completely new
That excites me. But the idea of a Mac OS redesign, I say, just keep your hands off the Mac. Like the Mac is so integral to how we work on a day-to-day basis. So much of it is crucial muscle memory. Please don't ruin the Mac, but change the iPhone, try new things on the iPhone. That's fine with me.
which is the exact opposite of how Apple probably should be thinking in terms of an install base size. There are so many more risks with changing the iPhone than the Mac. But personally, I'd rather them change iOS than touch the Mac at all. Happy Hour This Week is brought to you by Shopify. Check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour.
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Pre-order the Flash Pro Ultra today. The campaign runs until April 12th, so don't miss your chance to get in early and take advantage of the limited pre-order prices. Shipping begins in August. Thanks again to ChargeASAP for sponsoring the show. The reviews of the new Mac Studio and MacBook Air hit this week. M3 Ultra, M3, here I go again. M3 Ultra, M4 Max, Mac Studio. Before we dive into the Mac Studio though, Mayo, because I know you have a few things to say.
Is the MacBook Air blue? That's the debate this week. It's more blue than silver. That is true. That is true. Are you doing that? Because there's people who put it under like on a blue background of like table and then it looks more white. Yeah, it looks white or so. I don't know. It does not look very blue, but I like it. I think it looks good. It's just not.
Very blue? It's got a very hint of blue in it, right? It's got less blue than Starlight has gold, I think. Because the Starlight color at least looks somewhat different than silver. even in bad lighting and bad or low lighting. The sky blue, at least based on the images and videos I've seen, because I haven't seen it in person yet. It doesn't look super blue. It looks.
It reminds me of the iPhone generation from last year, you know, when it was like the super pastel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The very slightest drops of colored ink going into the paint, you know. Because the one thing it doesn't look like is the Pacific blue from the iPhone 12, I think. The iPhone 12 Pro. Yeah, that was pretty saturated. That was saturated, yeah. It's not anywhere close to that. It's much more like the last.
round of iphones that was pastel colors which i think was the 15 series right um not the pros the base models yeah um i think it looks nice i do think it is blue like but sky blue is doing a lot of heavy lifting you know It's like off-white blue, kind of. But the more important reviews probably were the Mac Studio. Because what is there to say about the M4 MacBook Air? It's great, yeah. They get a spec update. It supports two external displays with the lid open properly.
It's faster. It's cheaper, right? And if you want to include the 16 gigabytes of RAM boost from middleware through last year, it's even cheaper than it is effectively, right? Because you don't even have to pay for the RAM upgrade. Fantastic computer. everyone should bite in spades i think it's interesting that apple's most popular laptop which is the macbook air they still see is important enough to make it cheaper right because it's their best-selling laptop
There's an argument they shouldn't make the prices just right where it was. But they were like, no, we want it at $1,000. We're going to get rid of the M2 and the M3 in one sweep. They could have kept around a previous gen and kept it at $10.99, but they didn't. They went straight for $9.99. Fantastic. Awesome. Like, I don't think any of the reviews disagree with what we just said because there's nothing to complain about. It was funny, some of the reviews...
I think they were kind of looking for something negative to say. So they found that now was the time to complain that maybe you could add more ports. Maybe you need a better than 60 hertz screen. Because the tech meme, I saw this going around on threads. The tech meme, like, because tech meme.
rewrites headlines when they post them and they aggregate the stories. And their headline was Apple MacBook Air M4 review. Fast, thin, and light. Great keyboard and touchpad. Excellent battery life, but could use more ports and only a 60 hertz screen.
and it's like i think it was matthew panzerino equipped like best laptop ever made one star it's just people are looking for things to be negative about because it is just so good and i mean there are reasons to buy you for more expensive map books if you want to yeah but For the $9.99 machine, it is so hard to criticize. I think it's great. MacStudio, on the other hand, there were some more interesting tidbits in the reviews. The complete opposite of the cheapest Mac you can buy. Yeah.
So last week's show, we kind of summarized it like the M3 Ultra will still be faster. than the M4 Max at multi-core tasks, right? Because it has more cores for CPU operations. The Geekbench scores are now out from these reviews and it's...
While what I said was true, it is far closer than I thought it would be, which I guess kind of... is a little disappointing for people that want to pay the extra because really if you're going to the m3 ultra you need to be taking advantage of the additional unified memory you can get up to 512 gigabytes or you have gpu focus workloads if you're on a cpu centric task the m3 ultra is kind of superfluous because the geekbench scores uh on single core sorry so on single core
The M4 will win, right? Just like any M4 chip will beat the M3 Ultra chip on single core because the M4 architecture is just quicker than M3 by about 15-20%. But then that actually rolls into the multi-core performance.
Because although there's more cores on the M3 Ultra, the cores that are on the 16-core M4 Max are all faster, right? So if you actually look at the final scores, the M4 Max gets about 27,000, and the M3 Ultra... gets for all its additional cores that it has on the multicore score it gets 28,000 so like less than 10% improvement maybe 5% improvement
on the task that I thought it would do best at in terms of the CPU, right? The multi-core score. It's so marginal that there's probably no reason to buy the M3 Ultra if what you care about is CPU. If it was an M4 Ultra... then the scores would be off the chart right because then it then you'd be getting the 20 boost from the architecture jump and the extra cores so it'd be more like 35 000 or something rather than 28 000 but right now if you're caring about cpu
you shouldn't really care about the M3 Ultra because it gets trounced on single core and almost the same on multi-core scores. And a lot of stuff that you do on a computer is single core. So... that multi-core score would have to be really high for it to kind of offset it. If you have GPU specific workloads, it's different. And yes, the M3 Ultra will be a lot better because it has like 80 cores of GPU power.
But yeah, CPU exclusively is not a great story. I kind of, another week on reflection, it does kind of feel like the M3 Ultra was delayed, right? And it should have come out last year.
not simultaneously with the M4 Max. Because the idea that Apple says where you shouldn't expect an Ultra every single year, that's fine, but I don't think you should expect the... ultras that do come out to come out at the same time as the max of the next generation chip i just feel like something went slightly awry somewhere and the m3 ultra for whatever reason was delayed and so now we have even worse side-by-side comparisons when the m4 max comes out at the same time
So are you going to buy an M3 Ultra Max Studio or no? Oh, of course not. Not the $14,000 configuration. If I was considering switching to a desktop configuration rather than a laptop. which I'm not, but if I was, I would get the M4 Max chip because I don't really have GPU needs. I could get the 96 gigs of RAM option on the M4 Max and be just fine doing CPU bound tasks.
but it is going to suck when the mac pro if the mac pro comes out and it has the m3 ultra and it's like because the base price of the mac pro is another two grand higher than the studio right so six thousand right or yeah something mental like that It's like 6,000 versus 4,000. And the Mac Studio M4 Max, which is the cheap one, not the ultra one, will best it on single core, essentially, and basically identical on one core. So I feel like the Mac Pro is kind of out there as a...
maybe it won't exist anymore kind of product. There was the Mark Garvin report that correctly predicted that the Mac Studio would come in M3 and M4 flavors and sure enough it did. the Ultra and the Max. That same report said that the Mac Pro would get a different chip called Hydra, H-I-D-R-A. Oh, yeah. Which is supposedly from the M4 family. So if that plan's still going...
There might be an even better than M4 Max chip that the Mac Pro might get, but they might have just given up on that or something because why wouldn't you give that chip to the Mac Studio, you know? Unless it's a chip that's so different to every other Apple Silicon chip that it has like...
vastly different thermal requirements and can't fit inside a studio body and they've actually gone they've they've dedicated all of the resources to make a chip for their you know 0.1 sales mac pro uh that would explain it But that just seems like an unlikely route for them to take. It would be easier for them, I think, to make an M4 Ultra, which obviously they're not doing. There was also the report. Was it the information?
who said that Apple had scrapped its work on a higher end Mac Pro-style chip in favor of, what was it, AI chips of some sort for data centers? which never really made sense. But, I mean, it is out there as a reported possibility, I guess. Yeah, and to be fair, it was also not clear when the information was referring to the...
M4 Hydra or it was referring to the older like M2 Extreme proposition. Yeah, that's true. Which Bloomberg also reported got canned, right? So far, German has not... retracted his claim about the Hydra like he hasn't done a follow up saying they're not doing the Hydra chip anymore so I guess that's still in the ether which would be a cool curveball if they do come out with that in like at June maybe and like hey here's the Mac Pro and it has this cool chip but then
Unless it has crazy thermal requirements, why wouldn't they put that in the Mac Studio as well? Maybe the Hydra is like an M4 CPU, but it can accommodate different GPUs and different RAM and different storage. So that's why it's different. but it's not like superior in terms of the core count or anything i guess that would be a different path but i just don't really see that happening because
The core of Apple. Apple gets its economies of scale out of keeping the foundations of all the Apple silicon chips the same. And so why would they go out of their way to make such a dramatically different variant for their least popular computer? We all know in our heart of hearts they could just stop selling the Mac Pro tomorrow and no one would blink an eyelid. Even though it'd be sad.
And for context, apparently the Mac Pro starts at $7,000, not $6,000. It's $3,000 more than the M3 Ultra Mac Studio. Finally this week, a report from Ming-Chi Kuo with some notable specs for... Apple's foldable iPhone. I think the current expectation both from this Quo report and from Bloomberg is that we're expecting the first foldable iPhone next year. And Quo says the device will have
A chassis that is four and a half millimeters thick when unfolded. A 7.8 inch inner display and a 5.5 inch outer display. There won't be a crease in the display, which is something we've talked about before is one of the biggest limitations with a lot of the foldables on the market from companies like Google and Samsung. Nine and a half millimeters thick when folded.
Kuo says that the thinness of the device might come at the cost of Face ID, and he says Touch ID will return. But there was a separate supply chain report yesterday that said Face ID might be on at least some of Apple's foldables after all. It's unclear what exactly, what exact device that's referring to. It could be the 18-inch foldable MacBook slash iPad rather than the phone. And then, quote...
in purely speculation mode, I think, says it will cost well in excess of $2,000. It's a compelling package, and I'm not surprised by that price point at all, but I would just caution that Quo is just guessing on the price.
The more interesting part of all of this is that suite of features. Yeah. The price is not, it's a, you know, makes for a good headline. But if you look at like what Samsung charges for their top end foldables, it's like, what, 1800? Yeah. You add on a little Apple price premium. two thousand around that price isn't crazy you know um so it's like oh that's a sticker shock but it's not out of the realm of realism realism in terms of what other foldables are priced at um
The thinness metrics, I think he says four and a half millimeters when unfolded or 9.5 when folded. That is on the lower end of the foldables that are out there at the moment, but it's not like the thinnest foldable. So just for context, it's kind of on the lower side of the spectrum. So good, but not like industry leading. I think you can find foldables that are a bit thinner. But that's pretty good because like the current...
The current iPhone is, what, 8.2 millimeters thick? So this would be 9.5 in its thickest configuration, i.e. the folded up one. So only another little extra millimeter and change. in terms of what the foldable phone would be and then it's four and a half millimeters when unfolded which is thinner even than the ipad pro which feels really thin right um the lack of face id does kind of suck
He says it's because there's just not enough space in the enclosure to be able to fit those components, which could very well be true. And I guess if it's the choice between making a photo or not, they're going to do it and just sack the face ID off and basically offer a... touch already side button like they have on the ipad air right um and i guess that kind of makes sense why the bigger 18 inch one might get face today because it's just more space to fit more components in um but yeah like
obviously Faye said he's kind of expected for all of Apple's products these days of all their high-end products these days and so this would be an outlier there but you can kind of see how they could explain it away because it is such a different form factor
uh and then the other thing i thought was interesting is that quo said the device will feature two cameras uh one on the back one on the front and the front facing camera will be available in both folded and unfolded configurations the rear camera will have two lenses so you'll have you know 0.5x and 1x2x I presume and then you also have the front facing camera which is so that means as well as the iPhone Air Slim that we're getting which are one camera lens in the back
There'll also be another pro iPhone in the imminent future, obviously not this year, but next year, that'll have two lenses, not three. So Apple's clearly not afraid of getting away from all of their pro cameras, all their pro phones have three lenses, right? They're mixing up the options there. Would you buy this? Do you have any interest in a foldable? I would seriously consider it. Really? That surprises me. Because it is different, right?
It is different. It's very different. He does say that it has a 5.5-inch outer display and approximately 8-inch display inner when unfolded. So... If you're in the folded configuration, you're actually getting a smaller screen than my current phone, right? Because my current phone is 6.1. And if I got the modern version of this one, it'd be 6.3. And I think one of the issues with foldables is that a lot of people just...
don't unfold them that often. And so they just ended up using them as slightly compromised folding ones. But the concept does appeal somewhat, especially as I don't... have an iPad, right? But sometimes you just want to have an iPad. I do have an iPad as don't use it, right? It's my personal device that I've bought with my own money. I don't find a need to buy an iPad, but there is an idea that one of the things I...
do occasionally want to do on an iPad-style device, just watch a movie. So maybe if you just had a phone that could be unfolded to an 8-inch screen, which is kind of like iPad mini size and a bit larger, you know. So I'd consider it. I'm not like...
jumping at the bit for it i certainly haven't had much envy for the foldables on the market today but a lot of that is to do with the crease i'll be honest like yeah the creasing kind of puts me off and so if they've come up with this like crease free display option then that's
makes it a lot more compelling uh i don't want to be spending like two thousand dollars on something that under normal use there'll be a big line down the middle of the screen right even though i know people say you can't see it and you can't notice it but you can definitely feel it on the photo was i've had temporary experience with and you can definitely see it even if the screen's off and that kind of puts me off right like
So if they've done a crease-free one that you can't feel it when you're putting the thing in the middle and there aren't other compromises, like you get decent battery life and the likes of that, I would consider it. I'm not saying I'd definitely get it, but it would definitely be on the table. What about you? I would consider it. I think it comes down to what other compromises there are, just because the Quo report really focuses on the removal of face ideas being the biggest compromise.
I don't think I would really care about that. I love Face ID. Touch ID is fine. As long as there's some form of biometric authentication, I think it's fine. The question is, what other compromises are there that haven't been reported yet? But the idea of a foldable, like you said, without a crease, which is the biggest compromise other manufacturers make, it's enticing. And honestly, I'm...
just excited to see an iPhone in a new form factor. Like I'm excited for the iPhone 17 air this fall, even though that's largely just a thinner form factor for the same. bar of soap square design that we've had since forever. This will be the first truly new iPhone form factor. There are also questions I have about the software side of things, like when you unfold it to 7.8 inches.
How does iOS handle that? Does it switch over to some iPadOS like hybrid? Because the iPad mini is 8.3, I think. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is 6.9 inches. So you're getting a full... extra inch on this foldable device do they just use the same ios as they use now do they add proper support for something like split view which doesn't exist on the iphone today there's some questions about the software too but it is a pretty compelling
package from a hardware perspective yeah a lot of the ipad apps run in when you do them in split view in that single column you know the one-third column they basically look like the iphone layouts so you could see this folder with iphone run ipad os you know and it would just if you're using it unfolded it it is in that layout and then you unfold it and it fills the screen and you get an ipad style layout like an ipad mini does um
obviously they'd still call it ios and you'd basically make it work the same you know and give it a split view kind of uh backing and i also think just colloquially people see foldables around and even though they don't necessarily rush out to buy them they go, they look cool, you know? So I definitely think there's a general vibe of these things are interesting to people. But I think the price puts people off, right? So like, even if Apple does do a crease-free foldable...
As long as it's expensive, people aren't going to buy it in droves. So the price does need to come down more if they want it to supplant other models, but it's not like Apple's giving up on their existing lineup. This would be an addition to the standard. you know, three pro models or, you know, standard four iPhone lineup, this one and the foldable. All right. I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review.
Find an ad-free version of the show at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year with bonus content each and every week. Send us feedback happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads, Twitter, and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZMAO. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.