607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast

I installed my first Windows malware in a long time. Oh, well, that's fun. Like a real malware or a sarcastic malware. No, well, I don't know the extent of it yet. So there was some saga with my son's gaming PC in trying to figure out what was going on with his laptops cooling system or thermals or whatever.

I wanted to know, like, what do people use on Windows to show CPU and GPU temperatures to themselves? And this is one thing, honestly, I have found the web in general to be absolutely horrific at this, but chat GBT to be pretty good at recommending stuff like this. Like, you know, what do people use for software type X that would be something I would normally just search, you know, the app store of the device on, which I tried and there's nothing.

Or you know, search the web and it's, you know, useless garbage constantly. So I actually got pretty good results. And so there's a program called CPU ID, HW monitor or something that everybody uses. And I was like, okay, that's, I remember that from my old HARDO CP days. That's the looks. It's okay. Great. I'll download that.

And it's one of those things where like the download link opens up like an overlay on the pigs that looks like a download link, but it's actually an ad that is made to look like a download link. It's like trying to download Minecraft mods. Yeah, it's like, it's constant. Just like, okay, here's the real download link download now, but it's like, that's not really the only thing you close the ad. The download is behind it or something.

Anyway, I threw all the logistics of trying to find the real download link to this app. I had one wrong try and I installed apparently PC app store. I messed up all like all his browser search parameters and stuff. It was a whole thing. So now I got to figure out like, how do I get rid of this now? Like, of course, Windows Defenders, like everything's fine.

No, trust me. Everything's not fine. So now I have to like do something else. I guess like malware bites is like, what do people do? Do you know, like, what do people do on Windows now? I've already forgot what was the name of the thing that caused the big downtime recently. Crowd strike. Crowd strike. Yeah. So no, we're not going to do Crowd Strike. No, that's it seems like a bad idea.

And also that's isn't that like expensive enterprise stuff. I don't know. It's a free trial all these secure all these PC security things are all like, you know, guys with guns in the desert. I'm just like, I don't I don't want to, you know, it's very easy to make a wrong step here. Anyway, so I think I've removed some of it.

I would love recommendations on what people like, what do people who are not guys with guns and deserts? What do you use to just keep malware off of Windows PCs that your kid is using for gaming? I think people just live with it and have 800 toolbars in their browser. Yeah. And, and, you know, and he also like, he'll install stuff like, you know, from random, you know, discords, the telemode use this auto clicker to cheat this game. So like God knows what else was on this PC.

So I just, but like I just I want something that just like is a little bit decent. Like I don't, I don't know. I'm sorry. I, I moved to the Mac roundabouts of 2008. And I think I think that's right. And I was still a Windows developer by trade until. Oh, geez, 2016 or so. But I don't think I've spent more than five minutes using windows since I left.

Since I left that job, not not the most recent job one. Since when I got my most recent job. So I haven't really used Windows since 2016. It's been almost 10 years. And it's glorious. It's so great. Because I don't have to worry about this. I just don't care. Do not care. And I know this is coming for me because there's probably going to be a gaming PC in my future. Little do I know.

But right now it ignorance is less. Oh, it's so great. And the thing is like after not using Windows for so long, I too, I thought I assumed like surely things have gotten a lot better. And like not like they're a little bit different. I wouldn't say they're better. They're just different. All right. Let's do some follow up. And we have to start with a genuine and heartfelt thank you to our ATP listeners. It is no longer September.

So it is no longer Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. However, during the month of September, relay and ATP, but mostly relay raised over one million dollars. As I sit here tonight, one million sixty one thousand six hundred fifty two dollars and four cents. And that is truly incredible. The last year record last year was the previous record for relay. And that was somewhere to the order of seven hundred and seventy six thousand dollars.

Here we are a year later over a million dollars. And I want to say from the bottom of my heart. And I know I speak for you to thank you so much to everyone who gave a dollar five dollars ten dollars. It doesn't matter any amount of money. Thank you to all of you look at what we have accomplished together. Truly we have accomplished this together. And that's something to be extremely, extremely proud of.

And I hope that anyone who donated feels some amount of ownership over this because you do have some amount of ownership over this. I will as a final note for this year, I will remind you that corporate matching is a thing. And if you go to std.org slash relay, there's a little bit of information about employer matching and how you can get credit or how relayed.

Get credit for an employer match perhaps based on your own donation. So please check it out. But don't don't feel like you can't donate for the rest of the year or the beginning of next year. You certainly can. That's fine. Nobody's going to complain. But but genuinely thank you so very much for the incredible amount of money that we all raised. I am incredibly proud of all of us and thankful to all of you. So thank you.

We have some anonymous feedback with regard to the hardwired camera indicator light from years past. Anonymous writes when the first built in camera was designed for the first Intel iMac user notification was designed into the hardware.

The camera board was separate, not integrated into the computing board. At the specific direction of a key individual, the light was hardwired directly into the board's power circuit. If the board was receiving power, the light was turned on. If the board was not receiving power, the light was off. No software was involved. This design was passed on to the laptop team. Yeah, this is just anti laptop propaganda. I don't want to read the rest of this.

The design was passed on to the laptop. Don't extrapolate that laptops are bad just from this one example. I can't. I'm not included in I drew. I feel you're getting defensive for no reason. Because I know you. I designed this. This design was passed on to the laptop team. Much later news of the camera light hack mentioned on the previous episode of ATP went around Apple alarms went off.

Circuit designs were laid out on tables and a lot of shouting happened turns out the laptop team had later quote unquote improved the design accidentally making this hack possible. It's amazing to think that this quote unquote secure X-Clave is a return to the spirit of the original design requirement.

This is big companies you know it's hard to make sure that the community things are communicated across groups you know across years across different hardware platform so it is interesting to know that the design initially at least according to this person was sound it just sort of got.

The sound is kind of lost in translation and eventually they shipped a thing that was supposed to be hack proof but was in fact hackable indeed. Yeah, it's it's a bummer with like you said that's big business for you. Wayne Dixon writes with regard to AirPods for the base on the AirPods for with ANC is definitely heavier than the AirPods 3 according to Wayne I have no personal experience I'll take a wings word on this.

Wayne continues also the new Magsafe puck does not align itself with the AirPods 4 case either despite being slightly smaller than the old puck. Mark was asking how to tell the difference between the two of them someone wrote it and decided that the new ones have braid to cables and the old ones don't I'm not sure if that's true but that was a suggestion from a listener.

So I'm going to talk about the new ones that are going to be used to the ear sensors in AirPods 4 this is quoting from a YouTube video which we will link in the show notes these buds use apples old optical detection sensor so anything opaque that modifies light to this spot will pause and resume music.

Apple does appear to be using the onboard accelerometers to prevent music from being resumed when the buds are when the buds are at opposing angles so you would think that it might be okay in your pocket but it's not bulletproof placing one of both your buds in my pocket will often resume music unexpectedly.

This was a solve problem the outgoing AirPods 3 at a sensor that only responded to capacitive skin is a real bummer of a downgrade and compromise that I hope was only made for that thinner fitment comfort rather than to save a buck or to artificially segment the lineup.

For whatever it's worth I have this problem on the AirPods pros like the air I think the AirPods Pro don't have skin sensing I could be wrong but I I will often have like you know I'll put him like in like my pants pocket for a minute of going on a building or something and I will I will sometimes find out that it has been playing in my pocket so I don't know if this is just a good experiment and use your finger versus like covering with the car board or something that's too much work.

John do you want to tell us about discoveries with regard to the 18 and 18 pro please so the real hardware folks are finally getting to give us the hardware answers that we crave in these next two items the first one something that we talked about when these phones were announced based on the specs that Apple gave it was like boy the 18 and the 18 pro seem very similar and some people are speculating that the 18 pro my 18 might be just a bend version of the 18 pro based on like oh you know 18 pro at 6 GPU cores and they are not going to be a good thing to do.

So I think the 18 has 5 maybe they're just been and I went through all the differences on the announcement show and the differences were many besides just the GPU course and I was like technically it could technically be a been one but there's so much that is different about the 18 pro that it seems it would be totally unprecedented for them to be intentionally disabling so much of the chip so now we have actual die shots of someone who cut the 18 the 18 pro open and

but they're not the same chip so know the 18 is not a bend 18 pro there just to similar ships and you can look this is from chip wise dot tech you can look at their die shots and then Fabian house there also put in like a sort of a markup interpretation labeling the parts of the chips to see what they are.

I'm putting them for reference as well so 18 18 pro to separate chips what and this actually like I didn't mention this when we first were talking about these but I kind of regret it afterwards not not mentioning it that like if you look at why they might be doing this like the 18 being its own special chip. It's now the smallest and most likely there for cheapest chip and apples lineup that can run apple intelligence so this is not just going to be in the iPhone 16.

It is most likely going to also be in all upcoming Apple products that don't have a need for massive CPU power otherwise but want to run Apple intelligence so think about things like future home pods like the rumored home pod with the screen or the robot arm thing whatever that's going to be like you know that kind of thing low end iPads maybe possibly the next Apple TV who knows like there's lots of products across apples lineup that they're going to want to put apple.

They're going to want to put apple intelligence in you know maybe because they are a series based like like a home pod or things like that like they're going to want that across as much of their product line as possible as quickly as possible so I'm guessing the base 18 is most likely going to be the next chip in lots of different things probably all releasing over the following you know year two and it's probably find out first when we get an update to the low end iPads I bet it will be powering that I hope that's true and I know Apple probably says that the 18 is the minimum chip that can run Apple intelligence but.

I don't think the neural engine the 18 is actually any faster than the 17 or maybe even the 16 when we're looking at the T flops or whatever I forget there was a big difference obviously the GPU slower the CPUs or slower whatever it just seems to me that ram is the real limiting factor because not like you can't run Apple intelligence on older trips it will just obviously be slower the limiting factor that would make it so you literally can't is ram but you know practically speaking they might just say 18 is the minimum spec going forward and yeah these chips sent to live on for a long time.

And the ones that live on are not the pro chips so yeah 18 hopefully is in our future I mean I'm saying hopefully because I don't want them to like like historically the home pod line has not received the cream of the crop of chips and even though 18 is the men you know maybe

is Apple's current minimum spec for Apple intelligence due to the ram associated with it and whatever stuff they claim about the minimum speed required for the GPU and neural engine and CPU I can see them shipping like for example that robot arm thing with a chip older than the 18 I hope

they don't do that but we'll see and in the same spirits it turns out there is a tiny hardware difference between the two these air pods so John what's what's going on here I fix it took a pot the air pods for painfully because they do not come apart easily and here's what they had to say in a video we will link in the show notes both versions talking about both the versions of the air pods for the ones with a without ANC both

versions have the exact same system and package or set housing the brains in fact they said we won't be tearing down the air pods for with ANC because the only difference between the two air buds appears to be a single outward facing microphone the ANC version having a bigger beefier mic so you know linked to the video you can look these products as far as I fix it can tell our identical right down to the number of microphones the only

differences the air pods for with ANC one of the microphones is bigger than it is in the air pods for which if this is true I mean obviously they can't tell every single my new component but they can tell the sip they can tell they can count the things that are in it they have

whatever this weird scanning microscope thing that shows them all the guts or whatever like now I'm looking at I'm thinking why didn't Apple make the hardware the same like they estimated I don't know if it's a sarcastic thing estimated as a two dollar part that's a difference between them and I guess maybe that adds up like they said

two dollar parts so maybe the other one in the air pods for is a one dollar parts is a one dollar difference I suppose when you're making millions of millions of things that one dollar really does add up so they should make them separate but

wow like these really are you know for the fifty dollar difference you get a different case which we'll get to in a second and you get a slightly bigger microphone in one of the places pretty amazing I mean maybe they did it this way so that it wouldn't be some big scandal that it's just like a software lockout kind of thing

yeah yeah that's an interesting point I mean again it could just be that one dollar difference that you know I don't know I fix it off and comment one or two dollar difference times millions of air pods is millions of dollars so there's that and then additionally from I fix it if we take a look at the x-rays of the ANC version of the case we can

see the exact same PCB but with a speaker inside the housing this is another component that contributes to the extra fifty dollars you'd pay for the ANC version as far as I can tell those are the only two differences so they kept the guts of the case the

same to except for obviously I mean the case itself I think is different because it has got holes for the speaker so there's one hardware difference in the second one is hey there's a speaker behind those holes and so you know for the fifty dollars for the

AirPods for the ANC you get might one of the microphones is bigger in the in each earbud and you get a single speaker component that is not and the three holes that it talks through in the case and that's it everything else about them is the same good profit margins on the high end product what else is new from Apple

all right and then Tom's hardware Tom Scott whatever calling themselves these days did a large test of the iPhones 16 battery life and there you have a summary table that John has been kind enough to put in the show notes for me they

didn't have a summary table I made a summary table they just had a bunch of numbers and that's the best thing like when these people do reviews it always boggles my mind that they're they spend all the time to do these test they do all this hard work and they have all these measurements and they put them in a bunch of

table so it's like you got to you got to do the final step which is like like sum it up tell me what this means don't make me do the math which I had to do for all this to find out the actual important information here was I was trying to credit you and apparently I did not give you sufficient credit so I apologize you didn't you didn't yell Tom's got enough that was okay I say follow up copy right twenty eleven

John sir Cusis so anyway battery size for the iPhone 16 it's up 6.3% battery life up for almost 15% battery size for the 16 plus up almost 7% battery life up almost 16% 16 pro gets about 9% and 30% increased battery life 16

pro max 6% battery size increase and again about 30% battery life increase that is quite impressive and so the reason why this these are the things you put in like this is sort of the bottom line sum it up for me is how much bigger to the battery yet and yet I did the math on like how many

milliamp hours or whatever but you really want to percentage wise yeah and this is all versus its predecessor so 16 versus 15 16 plus versus 15 plus 16 pro versus you know it's directly versus their predecessors because there are direct predecessors for all these phones it's like what percentage bigger to the battery get and then for that increase in battery size what percentage better is the battery life and Tom's hardware is in a position to do that they put the numbers and for these

phones because presumably they ran the same tests on all the 15s that they did on the 16s and they come up with the number that's you know representative of whatever their test is so in all these cases the battery got some percent bigger but the battery life increased much more than the battery

increase size increase so you know again the 16 pro got a 10% bigger battery but 30% bigger battery life that is huge and then I put the absolute values here like what does that even mean so the increased battery life in terms of wall clock time for the iPhone 16 is an hour 38 for the 16 plus it's two hours and 15 minutes 16 pro is three hours and 14 minutes and 16 pro max is four hours and four minutes these are not small battery increases like oh you

get extra 10 minutes to 30 minutes again how representative is this Tom's hard Tom's guide test like is it light web browsing is it representative of how you use your phones but they made all the batteries bigger by a significant percentage and the battery life got way bigger than the percentage increase and you will

feel those for most of these things is they're measured in only one of them as a single hour and all the other ones are in multiple hours and this brings me to the next topic I have a 16 pro with which apparently gets 30% battery life better battery life than the 15 pro did which equates to an extra three hours and 14 minutes of battery life in in the Tom's test what I did after having my phone for a day or two was I took put on the 80% battery

limit I said I don't think I need to charge just think to 100% so in the battery this is the first time I've had a phone that is the first time I've had a phone that supports the setting so my 14 pro didn't support it so I went into battery or whatever and I said never charge yourself more than 80% and then for the next several days I intentionally did not charge my phone during the day even though I could have like I could

you know plug it in when I'm doing dishes or whatever I intentionally didn't do that just to see is 80% enough to get me through a regular day and right now on a brand new 16 pro 80% is more than enough intentionally not charging like I would normally

and so I'm currently on the the 80% plan and there's been lots of debate about this people saying oh that's a waste you're never getting the full capacity of your phone you should charge it to 100% don't worry about it or whatever but if I don't need to charge it to 100% I'm you know making my battery last longer especially since I keep a phone for two years than if I did otherwise so that's my plan and there will put a link in the show

and I want to do some sort of anic data from Nick here who had like a survey of like a hundred people and said hey are you charging 80% and if so you know how's it going for you or whatever I I think this is something people should at least consider might be a possibility for them again you know everyone knows your own life if you're on a commute and you have no place to charge during the day and you barely make it through 100% charge you're 100% like by all means but I thought I could make it with 80% and so far I can and so I'm going to keep it there and it turns out I can't make it with 80%

I probably crank it to 90 and then go up to 100 and we'll see at the end of my two years how my battery life is doing can you crank it to 90 or 100 I thought it was either 80 or nothing yeah so like a slider like I pray maybe you can go by five

center member but yeah like a little slider bar in the settings well for some reason I thought it was the same I think the laptops are 80 or 100 and I thought it was the same on the phones I'm not saying you're wrong I'm wrong I just I didn't realize and on laptops that people always recommend this and I forget to write it down but they're the

programs for the Mac that give you even more control over this that like not just the OS things what does that one call this maybe it's coconut battery maybe it's something else is a bunch of macOS programs that let you do the same thing for your laptop battery and choose what you want to limit to and do all these fancy stuff I'll dent a is the one that most people recommend a ld nt I will put it in the show notes David

job has some input or correction really we were talking last episode or the episode before about the glue that that becomes not so sticky when you apply a voltage to it and it remind me what exactly we said would happen if we if you reverse player yeah I was trying to remember what happened if you reverse the polarity and I misinterpreted the our misremembered the the iFixit video that was explaining this so David wrote in with the

direction so David writes when making the positive and negative electrical connections to release an iPhone 16 battery the polarity determines which side the glue residue is left on when it unstick so if you mistakenly reverse the positive and negative connections the residue is left on the chassis which is hard to clean instead of the battery which is where you want it.

Yeah, it's like the sticky gun. There is sticky gun can you get to choose where it's left and you don't want it to be in the phone so that's why you have to be careful about the polarity but it will not like a re-stick in deed and then Eric Westland writes in to corroborate your story with regard to Verizon activation problems Eric writes I bought my iPhone unlocked from Apple as did I I had the exact same experience as John my last phone was three

years ago and I had the same problem then to Verizon just stinks at this I will interject as me now hi this is Casey. Wow. I will say that for me I think we talked about last week about how it did not my phone did not activate initially and then if memory serves it was like once I got to the standard springboard iOS screen I think it was

at that point it was like hey you're not activated you want to do it again I said yeah and then it worked no problem the second time for Aaron's phone I did the exact same thing I did on my phone and it worked no sweat now hers was Tuesday or Wednesday after release I think it was where I was doing it the Sunday the weekend of release so I would imagine

things were still a bit busy on both the carrier and apple sides of things so maybe it was just that it was you know things were overwhelmed when John was trying to do it and Eric apparently but who knows I'm sure that's what it was like I'm doing it like the phones are arriving at people's doorsteps that day

right and so it's the worst possible time to do it but you have Verizon is apparently very bad at this and by the way I think Eric said he did it in two different states I think one like Massachusetts and Iowa have the same problem so yeah moral the story is even if you get a unlock phone from Verizon if you get it on day one and you try to do activation good luck.

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John I believe this is your case review that we would like to talk about next I'm Arkansas the same case we can both talk about it but yeah I got the leather bull strap case with the open bottom on it will put a link in the

box. This is the one that has a hole for the camera control as do nearly all but not all third party cases previously I was using the beats case which I talked about on an earlier show and so here's my review of the bull strap case leather is nicer than the material for as far as I'm concerned then then the the beats case I do think this one the corners had some wrinkles on them that's a little bit

different but you know it's a artisanal product everyone is a little bit different everything about it is the same as my iPhone 14 pro case obviously except for the camera control cut out Marko talked about the peak design camera control cut out which had sort of like a sloping on all sides to get down to the camera control and that was not pleasing to him bull strap has decided to try to avoid that problem which I think is smart of them by not making it so there's like sloping things on all

sides you have to kind of shove your fleshy finger into this little valley to get to the thing they decided one of the sides is not going to exist so if you look at the phone from the front it's just a regular you know you see the case going all the way around but if you look phone from the back you see part of the side wall of the case has been notched out right so it's not symmetrical it is not a symmetrical hole in the side of your case there is a wall on the screen side then there's the

camera button and there's no wall on the other side like basically the bottom of the case just comes to an end and that's it and it's not really it doesn't really center the camera control either so it's interesting there is it feels flimsy or on that side it feels like this a gigantic notch taking out the side of the phone because there is a gigantic notch thing out of the side of the phone the sort of little stick or pole or

whatever that is that is the front of the side wall over the camera control seems delicate and yeah fidgety and creaky and I just generally hate this the whole in the side of the case at all I can get to the camera control I can press it but it is annoying to do so and now all so I'm going to leave this on the phone because I'm like I don't know if I can handle this maybe I'm going to go

back to the beads case but after having it for like a week or so I've decided the advantages of the leather the grippiness of the leather out way the terribleness of this hole in the side of the thing so I'm going to keep us on until or unless it breaks but as of right now what I'm looking for is basically this case a leather case with an open bottom but with the pass through camera control and third parties I think there's like two or three or maybe

four third party case manufacturers that do have passed through one of them I saw doesn't even use the quartz thing it uses a piece of plastic with a bunch of little copper wires going through it to do the conductance thing look I'm whatever you got to do third party cases but I'm out here saying bullstrap Ryan London and the five other manufacturers who apparently sell this exact same case for

different prices I know you had to do the thing with the whole on day one you couldn't maybe you can feel like everyone else had it to I get it I bought your case at great expense I'm using it on my phone but please somebody somebody out there make a leather open bottom case with a quartz pass through for the camera control that's what I want and until then I'm just going to have a gigantic wound in the

side of my phone that I feel every day makes it slightly less satisfying Mark what do you think of the bullstrap case after however many weeks it's been one two of using the Apple silicone case I actually also switched to my bullstrap case a couple of days ago because the silicone case it's it's just too hard getting in and out of jeans pockets it like pulls the whole

pocket liner out with it you know so just I wanted to try this and you know the leather does feel a lot better like I bullstrap's leather is very very good but yeah I too hate the camera cut out it doesn't feel good it doesn't work well doesn't certainly doesn't look good and I I too worry about the longevity of that little thin piece of leather that comes down across the front

edge of it this look this is all we're no one's going to have this design next year like by the time everyone makes their cases for next year's phones like no one will be using this design on a good case and there's a reason for that it's not a good design you know they did what they had to do with day one unknowns but yeah like John I'm hoping for a better version of this case in the future that has a button cover for the camera control that works

so you agree that their decision to omit one of the side walls surrounding the camera draw makes it more comfortable to you than the peak design version of the whole I think it's only more comfortable because leather is softer than hard plastic you know because in here I put the

cute design one right here like the peak design one it actually has about the same indentation shape like it is just as thin on a little skinny piece in front of the camera control button like but look at the other side of the camera told there's no wall there you mean like the back of the phone yeah yeah they're like there's it's not equal size walls on the front and the back of the phone in terms of

surrounding the camera control DC what I mean I see what you mean it's pretty subtle the peak design one is symmetric but that's a pretty subtle difference I don't think that matters I think what I didn't like about the design is merely that you know that their plastic is harder than leather and neither one of these feels good but the I will I'm tolerating the bullstrap case because it is the it is the smallest number of bad trade offs that I have found yet I also have the apple clear case I

thought that would solve my problems and it does not the clear the apple clear case I found to have very bad buttons like the ones especially the sleep it's much harder to push than the other cases I have and it is not doesn't have good feedback so I think it's just like a lower quality or maybe it's a materials thing like the apple so far the apple silicon case works the best and feels the best in use it just sucks going in

out of pockets which is the problem they've always had whereas the the bear bottom bullstrap case is the nicest leather case that I have found so far but with the exception of that giant thing the John can lead about the giant camera cut out and that by the way of apple made an open bottom silicon case I would probably be using it said a leather one because I don't have so many problems with getting in at a pockets and I'm just I'm desperate to not have this

giant hole inside of my phone it's feels like like a chicken pox car yeah I hope like you know I hope in a few months people have remade these cases with better designs I'm I'm so afraid they're going to be like I will do that for the next phone this phone tough lock right I really hope that they come out with version two it's like we couldn't have from day one but now everyone knows how to do the

quartz pats through so here's like I'll buy a second case ball strap just put it out you know I don't want to be like well we could never figure it out for the 16 line but for the 17 will have the quartz pats through that doesn't help me because I'm not getting a 17 yeah I hope they do I hope they do you say that and I agree with you in principle but last year when I was casting about for a case for the my 15 pro max I had gotten a

appeal case which I loved but it had a cut out for the action button which at the time most cases were doing and I hated that and I and I'm currently going caseless case elis on the iPhone 16 that I have and I'll probably continue to do that but I was looking and I was wondering hey I wonder if since last year did peak end up doing or I think it's no peel I'm so you know did peel end up doing an action button and how have they handled the camera control and the

answers they did not do an action button and they just have a hole for the camera control as they do for all of the buttons and it's too bad because like the way I remember this was a year ago now but the way I remember it the case felt great it was thin because I don't want a I'm not an

a person like I want something thin but more than zero if I'm going to do a case at all and the key to the peel and they say it as a piece of marketing as they should say it with me gentlemen no branding no branding and I loved that and what I ended up doing was

returning that case because I hated the lack of like a fake button if you will for the action button and I got a tourist to RRA S which also doesn't have any outward facing facing branding but the case was fine like I didn't like it near as much as I liked the

peel but I could not abide by the gaps for the buttons and I was hoping so much that by the 16 they would at least have an action button even if they punted on the camera control and from everything I can tell nope just a bunch of holes just like your Mac pro

I really hope they update these cases not I don't know what I was like if that little delicate thing does break what am I going to go back to the beats case by a second one of these great expensive honestly like because because all I get an Instagram now or ads for phone cases I

can imagine I'm really seeing how many different people sell that resell this exact same Ryan London bull strap like I think with the other brand that's our reason is like at least three or four maybe even five different brands that are clearly selling the same case that

was some manufacturer makes in China somewhere right and so we say bull straps leather is good is not bull straps leather but they do a stamp the little bull thing on it and put it in a pretty box and sell it to us for way more money than everyone else does which is fine like

whatever I'll take it you know they were the first ones to ship so that's why they got my money but please somebody out there open but as that was I'm asking for a lot nobody cares about open bottom but me right open bottom leather quartz camera control otherwise I'm going to be using this weird scarred case for two years it's at times I part of the wonders if we should you know try to design a case that makes all of us happy and then I immediately decide that that's a terrible

terrible terrible decision can you imagine trying to design a case that would please John that wouldn't actually be that hard but the problem is we you know the most we you know we most we'd ever be able to sell so we sold this as a product or listen is like a you know a few hundred cases at best right and no one's going to manufacture anything with those kind of small numbers that's probably why these companies are not good not going to

make a new case because they have to pre-order like million not millions like thousands and thousands of them to get whatever good price they get on them and they can't afford to say you know let's let's design a whole new case and buy a few thousand of those they have to sell through the all these ones that they made and paid for and then by then it's

time for a new phone. I mean hey we did it for the chicken hat can be done yeah I think the chicken hat is a little bit easier to manufacture than something that's to be precisely fit around an iPhone yeah and first of all imagine if we had to make the chicken hat but we didn't know where people's ears would be or how they their heads would be until until after they were all made and by the way we did know where people's ears

are we did know how big people's heads are and we still had a lot of fit complaints about the chicken hat let's be honest the chicken hat was well the good thing about the chicken hat was first of all the manufacturer is making it for us was in the US and had a short turnaround time and second of all we had a prototype which is my actual chicken hat and the chicken hats we sold if you lay them down on top of my

actual chicken hat they pretty much nailed it I bought several of these hats that we sold and I have the original and I can just lay them on top of each other they're constructed the same way they're the same size like pretty much down to the millimeter now again they ended up being too small for a lot of people's heads because my chicken had to do small for a lot of people's heads but I know you know what you

got with the chicken I was exactly what we were selling which is as close a clone as possible to be get to my chicken hat and so you know I think we did a pretty good job with that but yeah trying to do something like that with a complicated product like this manufacturer not in the US with you know six months turnaround time not gonna happen but somebody out there somebody somebody please find this manufacturer in China that's making these cases for all these if they sell one with the quartz

pass through on it somebody by 10,000 of those and start selling them I will buy one and then step three profit I don't know only 9,999 left this is the complaint about the Apple store corner Ely Leibman writes I was planning to upgrade to the series 10 watch but wasn't sure which size to get and wanted to see them in person before purchasing after confirming online that both sizes were available for pickup at my local store I

made my way there to choose and purchase my new watch I found an employee and asked to purchase the watch the conversation went like this a Marco actually would you mind playing the role of Apple in this little skip for

me please sure on wait should I should I play it cool I like to buy this watch please do you have an item I wanted to see I didn't know which one I wanted and I wanted to see see them before I purchased it all of our new products required online order and an appointment to pick it up

huh I didn't know that is the watching stock yes Jesus so can I buy it no first you need to make an appointment okay one's an extra appointment in two and a half hours so even though the items and stock and I'm standing right here I need to come back into and a half hours in order to purchase it

exactly thank you Marco very well done yeah so Ely writes so I left in order to watch an Amazon where it was delivered to me later that same day it's just terrible anyway Ely continues I can't think of another store with this would be acceptable if they were busy sure I wouldn't expect to be

help before folks who made an appointment but the store was empty why is it acceptable to tell customer to come back in a few hours to purchase an item that is in stock it seems like they don't value their customers time I have things to do I already took time away from work to come to the store

I've been buying Apple products for almost 20 years and this is the first time I've had a negative in store experience when trying to purchase something well used to be magical watching the employee pull out a receipt from under the table was delightful is now simply inconvenient I

truly believed Apple solved the retail experience but not anymore this is the danger when saying like we're reimagining the experience of retail you always picture in your head that what you're going to be doing is not accepting sort of the status quo for all the bad things and saying people

just accept x y and z here just the way stores have to be well you don't think that way anything is on the table we're reimagining the whole experience but if you're not careful and you just stick to that philosophy and you're like you know we're reimagining the experience what you can end up

doing is removing some of the good things and reimagining them to be way way worse and one of the good things is if you walk into a store and they have a product in stock you can give someone money for it and walk in the store like you can buy it like do you have this product is

it in stock I'm here and you're here and the practice here my money is here let's make this happen in an empty store and when they say to you no please make an appointment on the app and the first appointment is two hours from now that is reimagining the retail experience so you are following your philosophy of reimagining the retail experience but for the worse that you get into just ridiculous territory like I would you know we've complained that even the whole like oh there are no lines

is an example of reimagining that maybe isn't positive but this is definitely not positive like you should be able to go in there and buy something it's like I have money you have product let's let's make this happen but like no make an appointment come back in two hours that's no good it's so bad

and I know that some of this is just the east coaster in me coming out I want a line I want a queue I want a order I want everything to be ordered I want to get in get out as quickly as possible but that being said

it's just it's unnecessarily complicated and this is the sort of thing that we would just eviscerate a Microsoft store for and here it is Apple doing it I mean if there was ever too many people in Microsoft store that would require a section system like those oh that's true yeah like it's just

as you know I point out it doesn't value the customers time they drove to the store came to the place brought their money and they're wallet and they want to like look at it and buy a thing and you're like no

make an appointment for two hours now that who's that's that doesn't value the time of the person who made the trip especially if the Apple store is like far away from them it's it's not acceptable we're sponsored this episode by square space the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs

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square space dot com thank you so much to square space for sponsoring our show I have a small request for two apps that I can't find so build a man come on it's tempting not honestly but you know I have I have been on my plate right now with my with the app I do have so I don't have time to make these right now I assume someone has made them but I cannot find them so number one I recently started sleep tracking I'm just wearing the Apple watch to bed I even discovered the sleep focus mode

which I'm finally using because it makes the screen turn off at night I tried to find a thing before I hadn't been using the sleep focus mode for whatever reason I just used auto to disturb at night and I'm trying to figure out how do I make the watch screen turn off

while I'm sleeping because it was you know bothering my wife and so on my guard that's what I tried theater mode guess what theater mode turns off alarms does it yep sure does remember when the alarm went off and the person was in the theater remember that whole country yes I do yes yes yes so one night of that I'm like okay well that's not the answer is like the equivalent of the the shoe bomber twenty five years later theater mode so this is not the alarms go off yeah anyways yeah

not it but this turns out the sleep focus does that so all I want to do is I want an app that every morning I can tag the sleep I had the night before with arbitrary tags that I input things like you know whether I like stayed up too late or maybe I had a late meal

or maybe I was like you know sleeping alone I was you know at the beach by myself or something like you know like I want to have like tags that I can tag my sleep you know late coffee alcohol consumption things like that and then I want to be able to see in the future

like I want to be able to pick a tag and see like okay with this tag your sleep with this one are you know twelve percent better on average than sleeps that don't have this tag or twelve percent worse that Merlin always talks about it makes fun of yeah it's like you know when you are in Washington you sleep worse like you are you you way more but sleep worse so I have been looking for apps to do this and I have so thanks to you know some chat GPD research I installed the top couple of sleep apps

they have been like super disasters of just gross like massive privacy invasion huge suites of functionality doing all sorts of stuff I don't need there was one one app this is one of the top rated sleep apps in the app store that first of all puts you through a in at purchase flow immediately and with no way to get around it so I'm pretty sure that actually violates the app store rule against minimum functionality but the app store rules are not being enforced here in lots of ways

and this is like one of the there's like a handful of top sleep apps in the app store and this is one of them one of them one of them offered me to pay forty dollars a year for premium features including I can listen to recordings of my own Farts from my sleep the next morning nice oh cool and I learned when I saw that for forty dollars a year not only have we really hit app store bottom here but that's when I decided I think I should probably raise the overcast subscription price

which is currently a quarter of that how many Farts is overcast that you care?

None well depending what what are people generally you know you got up your fart game if you're going to compete in those leagues Obviously yeah maybe I'm just tackling the wrong feature set apparently I mean we started out with far apps on the app store and we come full circle now you have to supply the Farts Exactly real thing followed by the way apparently exist.io is the app that Merlin always talks about yes I remember that now

so thank you to people in chat you said that but yeah so anyway so I just want to simple up to you So if you want to do this app they want to be they want to give you like a meditation routine and be custom alarms

and tie into like you know layer put layer phone on the pillow and subscribe to our service so we can life coach your partner and it's like oh my god just let me just tag my sleep and see data that's it that's all I want so far I have not found anything to do doesn't underscore I have a sleep app

Yeah sleep of spots yes I don't believe it has that feature though Well I think I have a direct line to getting that feature added I mean that's probably usually making it myself anyway so that's one thing I want the second thing I want I finally set up the rest of my sono system

I finally move my sono speakers out of my office downstairs to where they were originally purchased for the living room TV so I have the the arc sound bar two air 300s as the surrounds and a sub good God it is a very nice system however the one challenge with setting up a sonos sound bar stuff is audio delay there you know any any sonos input introduces latency because of the way their system you know buffers and processes things and has network Wi-Fi stuff

there's always latency on the input on the audio and TVs have ways to adjust the audio sync the Apple TV also has a built-in way something like calibrate wireless audio sync where like if you're using home pods or anything else it'll it'll it's like all right place your phone in front of the Apple TV and we'll figure out your audio sync for you which seems to change things but not correctly anyway

so you know I'm trying to like watch TV and everyone's lips aren't matching up to their audio which doesn't fear getting and so I'm trying to align it my TV also has a built-in control but it's you know like negative five through positive three or something it's you know these units make no sense and so I'm like all right well what is it and I've been adjusting trying to figure out what it is eventually I would I looked like there has to be an app to like automatically like you can use my phone

and the TV to tell me like all right you're your 50 milliseconds behind your 30 milliseconds behind like you know show me an actual number like play something on the TV use the phone to show me an actual number and there's even videos on YouTube that will let that show you like it like plays beep beep every few seconds beep and it shows you like a little bar going across when it hits the middle right when the beep happens so you can tell if you use your own phone

to shoot video of the TV screen and then slow-mo through the video to find where does the beep happen if you can see the waveform so here's how I did this.

Oh by the way this all sounds familiar to you listeners because we talked about this in episode 297 of ATP when I set up my AV setup including the probably exact video that Marco was looking at and me recording on my phone and slow motion seeing the waveform in iMovie so we'll put a link in the show notes to that episode of ATP and also to the two apps slash videos that I used for that.

I did the same thing but the final cut so I didn't have my movie on my computer but I had Final Cut still so my guy and this is like such a ridiculous like over use of a tool like Final Cut is not this is not what this is for it fights you at every turn it should not be doing this and yet you know that's what that's what I was able to see where the wave

form of the video is well looking at the only and then you still have to make the choice like I said in episode 97 then you still have to decide all right so when the little bars in the middle in the video should that be just as the wave form goes from silent to not

silent right to be the peak of the wave form where the volume of the amplitude is the highest you have to make all these judgment calls but I can tell you from experience that no matter how you make the judgment calls as long as you do something reasonable you can get it so close to being

perfect that you won't notice it anymore yeah but what I want like this process would be very easy so here here's what this process should be the phone plays a video over air play to the Apple TV or you just have a YouTube video that you can

point your app to and say play this video on the Apple TV and then the phone uses its camera and microphone to watch for a big white flash on the video and listen to the microphone and listen to the beep and you can see you can see those impulses on the input

video and on the input audio and the app should be able to tell you every time it sees flash beep every time it should be able to tell you your 35 milliseconds behind like it can tell you that that's not hard to write I could write I just don't I just

shouldn't write the tricky part of that is when you get down to these kind of timings that the time between when a photon hits the camera and the time when an app registered that that took place is probably a handful of milliseconds and you have to account for that

and I might vary from phone to phone so that's a little bit tricky I'm guessing that's that's probably less than a frame of time maybe I mean but like again maybe it varies by device like it's not something that comes up normally like when you're recording

video or something like that like oh how much lag is there how much lag between again photon sitting the lens of the camera and a program that is watching for that knowing that that happened but yeah it would definitely be better than the doing it the manual way which is very annoying and you know why Marco was using Final Cut and when I was using my movie is because you need a visual representation of the audio you need to be able to see a wave form and I don't think there are at least

that there was no apps that I knew of on the phone that did that they were not like full-fledged video editors and honestly I'd rather just do it on the Mac so I was recording videos coming back to the Mac opening the video and I movie watching the slow motion thing going frame by

frame seeing where the wave form is and then adjusting the you know the delay until I dialed it in and I did that in 2022 and haven't touched it sink and it's been great so I believe in you Marco you can get over this hump like I have it set up that it's like it seems okay now but it still doesn't seem quite right but I think it's so close and I have it you know between like you know negative three and negative four on my TV is like I like if I put it

between if I put it on the next one over it looks too wrong so I think this is about as good as it's going to get but I still like this process took me like 40 minutes and it could have taken me four minutes yeah no the the tricky part for you is like I don't know maybe it's not true maybe it'll be the same like what you hope is like you get some scenario where you're tweaking it right and you get it so you get it right there like okay it's right is it right for all

video sources and all output types and all like for example you did it through airplay does that apply to things you play on Apple TV does that apply to things you watch over regular TV if you have like any other video source connected if you have a video game system connected like you're hoping that you'll be able to configure this in one place and it will apply to any picture that ever shows in your TV but you have to be careful of where you're doing it like for example if you're

doing on the Apple TV it's not going to apply when you're playing a video game because the Apple TV is not involved if you're playing like in time to switch or something it's not going to be involved in that and so now you have a second place where you have to dial it in and this is one of the places where it comes in handy to have something like a receiver which is central central meeting point for all the audio in the video and that's where I made my adjustment and everything that goes on my

TV screen goes through my receiver and my receiver applies the delay and so far so good for me.

Yes, but everything else about having a receiver sucks and I will accept no other contrary arguments anyway I should note that in the sono sap if you go to the gear and the upper rights and then go to your living room or whatever setup and then scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll way down in the home theater section there's TV dialog sync and I have mine cranked to five seconds for my 2019 LG OLED or five units sorry sorry five units I

think I said seconds five units it's zero to five I believe anyways and that has worked for me across switch across we across TV I have to look at that I assume that would because it's only like a positive offset correct I assume that would change it in the wrong direction I mean give it a shot you may not have the good experience I did but it can't hurt to try because what what has to happen is the TV has to

hold the video back the TV has to buffer the video for a few milliseconds while the audio catches up because the audio is what is where so does introducing latency but yeah but the TV's also have latency as well so it depends on which adding more latency and kind of match them up but like the audio

advice video it's a YouTube video that I used to do by judgement has helpful labels on the plus and minus sign where it says basically like it says audio early increase the delay and then audio late decrease the delay but bottom line is once you have something that you can measure on you just push

you just push the delay like to the maximum minimum value and see which side of the zero it's at and then you you know which direction you need to adjust it to you know get it in mine I think was on I can't even see in this picture is too blurry mine was like 120 is that milliseconds maybe it's milliseconds maybe it's microseconds no it's right to milliseconds anyway 120 milliseconds is what what mine is set to in this

image from the show notes from episode 297 you said 297 is actually 497 isn't it 297 oh you 497 sorry typo yes 497 august 25th 2022 there you go all right we have some breaking-ish news from a few days ago if you remember our friends at Massimo that do the blood oxygen detection thing and have a patent for it oh boy we've patented it and so they have been in a bitter fight with apple to the point that

it went to the courts the court said that apple cannot enable the blood oxygen detection in new apple watches including the one on my wrist right now and they've been battling it out for a while now personally I don't understand why apple doesn't just pay them all the money and make them go away not to say that they're wrong but just make them go away you have all the money in the world you have infinite money

less the 15 billion you just gave to Ireland but you have infinite money just make them go away it'll be fine but here we are anyways the breaking news a few days ago actually a couple of weeks ago now or maybe a week ago is that the founder and CEO has resigned after he was removed from the board so Reuters writes Massimo said that on September 25 founder Joe Keanu has decided to step down as the medical device maker

CEO days after shareholder shareholders voted to remove him from the company's board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Paulitan capital management so the answer to question of like I don't understand what apple doesn't pay this the one of the rumors is that it's because the CEO was being unreasonable and would just not accept any kind of reasonable offer and this hedge fund thing here like again I don't know any truth to this but some of the things I've

heard swirling as people speculating was that like oh this hedge fund is actually the hedge fund and the shareholders and basically everybody who's not the CEO were like Massimo take the money you've got you won you've got up over a barrel they have to pay you maybe they're even offering to pay you we as the people who are either current you know shareholders and board members of the company or speculative

shareholders who want to invest these hedge fund things remember we you know whatever like we we think weak if you let us be in charge of the company we could make you our money because we wouldn't be dummies like your CEO and we would just take the apple money and make us all rich and so I don't

know if any of that is if that's just speculation or rumors or whatever but it sure likes like from the outside that there may have been one person and one who is no me who is stopping this from being resolved with large amounts of money and that was the founder and CEO and he is out and there's

more from Matt Levina Bloomberg if you want to read about this it will we'll find out in the coming weeks and months if oh suddenly there's a Massimo deal between apple and Massimo and they get a lot of money we'll see if that happens it seems like again from the outside looking and it seems like

finally there is the way is clear for large amounts of money to change hands but if he gets kicked out and still we go years and years and apple still can't enable this feature in the US then I'm out of ideas I mean it sure seems like apple just didn't want to pay anything for it so I don't

know I don't know that this was the problem here but we'll find out there's also some news over the last week or so I made a meta meta what everyone call them face but are you saying made a has this anyone pronounce it that way sorry

well I do sometimes anyways the that company that Facebook would not they have really or not release sessions they but have demoed some AR glasses that they're calling Orion and apparently this stuff is really freaking slick there's a wrap up at the verge for meta connect which is

there you know kind of equivalent of WBC there's also a post where one of their authors whose name don't have in front of me I am so sorry Alex he's actually got to demo the Orion glasses in part with Mark Zuckerberg and there's also a post over a couple of posts I think over at Stratekery

with our friend Ben Thompson I will try to dig up a link for the show notes for at least one of those but anyways everything I haven't read a lot on this but everything I've read on this is oh my this is the future the vision pro is a mistake what when can we have this in the answer is well probably not soon so let me read some stuff so from the verge meta not made has revealed its Orion augmented reality glasses and they look almost like a trendy pair of frames you could pick up

without all the tech inside Orion uses micro LED projectors inside the frame and beams images in front of your eyes via wave guides in the lenses the glasses pair with a wireless compute puck and a neural wristband you wear in your arm that responds to gestures like pinches again from this from the Orion review now Orion met as first pair of augmented reality glasses was supposed to be a product you could buy

when the glasses graduated from a skunk works project in Meta's research division back in 2018 the goal was to start shipping them in the low tens of thousands by now but in 2022 amidst a phase of broader belt tightening across the company Zuckerberg made the call to shelve its release as Meta's executives retell it the decision to shelve Orion mostly came down to the devices astronomical cost to build which allegedly is in the ballpark of $10,000 per unit

most of that cost is due to how difficult and expensive it is to reliably manufacture the silicon carbide lenses when it started designing Orion met expect the material to become more commonly used across the industry and therefore cheaper but that didn't happen quote you can't imagine how horrible the yields are since the Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth of the lenses instead the company prohibited to making about a thousand pairs of the Orion glasses for internal development and external demos

quote it's probably turned out significantly better than our 5050 estimates of what it would be but we didn't get there on everything we wanted to Zuckerberg says the device quote we still want it to be a little smaller a little brighter a little bit higher resolution

and a lot more affordable before we put it out there as a product and look we have a line of sight to all those things this is really shaken up the tech press world over the last week because and I don't understand why well I'm sure people have had that take but I said I agree with you this is like the tech press is all over this people like oh my god it's this is that but like honestly people

like there is no new anything here that changes anything as far as I'm concerned well I don't know I mean so what they've shown this is first of all this is very smart by Meta I think because this goes along with first of all with their overall you know pretty pretty I would say successful rebranding efforts we are the last people calling Facebook they've rebranded themselves as met they've dropped their terrible baggage from the

Facebook name to almost everybody Mark Zuckerberg is out there like rebranding himself as it's like cool normal guys somehow good luck with that it's working yeah it's working no I disagree rebrands work like that's that's why people do them because you you can hold on as much as you can

to the old one but the rest of the world moves on and listens to it like they work I the renaming I think it's going better than alphabet for sure because everyone just keeps calling them Google but like the whole matter renaming was about the

Metaverse which bombed and so now they're just a company who doesn't want to be associated with one product called Facebook and so they renew self-med it's fine but like the Metaverse still is not a thing and they're the leader in glasses but they were before they

rename themselves to because they're both like us well yeah but the thing is well I mean that's true but I I would say in the same way that like yes they bought Instagram they didn't make it from scratch but Instagram is way more Facebook now than it then it's Instagram like you know the in that same way like you know their VR products are way more meta than they were Oculus at this point but anyway they show a very different approach to AR and VR then what we see from Apple what we

see and Microsoft and everyone else who's tried it you know what we see from meta has been pretty successful at the low end gaming market for VR headsets with some basic pass through features and we see that you know using that foundation to slowly build towards something like this and what we see from Apple is really is like the total opposite approach with vision pro platform and products which is like you know Apple had Apple started at the extraordinarily high end

with no gaming to speak of no software to speak of really not seemingly not putting you know much faith in this being a consumer product at all but for some reason putting it out there but I continued to doubt at this point but anyway meta is you know doing great at the low end and the mid range with their gaming stuff and they're not even touching the high end anymore they had a brief time trying to make the quest pro happen didn't happen they backed off of it they had a

high end one plan that they canceled because they saw vision pro and like yeah no thanks they're doing fine to low end with VR stuff with gaming and with kids and everything and now they they're demoing kind of where they think the high end can go and all of the tech demo or all the demos from the people who had them people come away being blown away by like everyone's like oh my god this is the future now granted it's a tech demo it's not a shipping product that is a massive difference

obviously but this kind of shows where there is huge value to this is in the AR glasses format in that kind of physical product format AR glasses are a thing that people think is very cool and has a lot of promise VR headsets are a different thing that people also think is cool and has promise but for very different reasons and in very different use cases you can kind of see like you know the two companies trying to solve this from two different ways but I think meta

as approach is more likely to succeed to be honest there are so many physical challenges around these products so many technical challenges so many fashion and just coolness challenges and so many practicality challenges to these products Apple took a really big swing

and I think has almost completely missed I think they went down almost every wrong path possible and shipped it out there and I think part of the reason why we're hearing all these rumors around the vision pro launch that like maybe some people in the company

aren't really supportive of it or they weren't sure if they should release it or it was divisive within the company we've heard that for a long time I think we see why it's a really hard area to get right and the vision pro didn't get it right and what meta showing here doesn't exist yet

but there is like they're going towards that and I think what everyone is kind of seeing is oh they have a pretty good chance of doing something good here whereas what we're seeing from Apple has not really let us in that direction yet I at this point I would be surprised if we ever saw another vision hardware release from Apple like that that's how I think the platform has gotten off on such a wrong foot I honestly would be surprised if we ever see a sequel to it

if they do anything in this space I think it will be radically different not this not the same thing but a little bit better on a little bit cheaper I think it will be radically different if at all and not soon but we see from that is like they're already succeeding in the VR market

better than anybody else ever has they're doing great in that market it's still a small market but they're doing great in it and they might be doing this thing at the high end that's why everyone's excited because like everyone's using like huh you know it has some trade-offs some pretty big trade-offs and you know with the largest asterisk being it literally is not shipping and is not viable and will never ship in this form

so you know it's this is literally just a tech demo however people like it and they're excited by it now that being said I don't think AR and VR even in a great form like this I don't think that's going to replace the smartphone I don't think it's going to be nearly as big or as important

as a lot of people think or hope that it will what we're seeing with the actual products that exist in this category is they're fun they're useful to certain people they're not replacing phones they're replacing game consoles they're not replacing TVs in any kind of meaningful numbers

I think the whole investment in this area is interesting and in certain ways it's exciting but I don't think it's the future of computing I think it's the future of you know more wearables to add to our lives in the same way that the Apple Watch and wearables like it didn't replace smartphones

they just added to them I think AR glasses will add to our computing lives as well I don't think they will be replacing nearly anything however if they are to succeed the approach meta is taking look they and they already have the Rayban glasses that are pretty successful

I think that approach like what meta is doing slowly adding things the people will add to their computing lives not replace things with that's working and this is the latest demo of like where that's going that's working and I think what Apple's doing is not working here's what I think this is non story and very disappointed in the press for how they've handled this ever since we've been talking about this topic at all on the show or in the Apple world or in the entire tech world

everyone has known that some kind of glasses thing would be amazing but too bad we can't build that and when years ago when the rumors were about Apple's headset thing it was like Apple's not going to do a headset they're going to do glasses because they know headsets are big and clunky and crappy

and Tim Cook would just constantly anytime he's asked about this for years we're interested in AR not VR we're all about augmenting reality have you seen all the AR features we've added to our phones and iPads over the years we don't want to be closed off inside of VR headset we're all about augmented reality right the reason Apple was into that it's not just like oh Apple thought AR would be good everybody thinks AR is good

everyone thinks glasses with it like you magically see the world but also stuff laid on top of it is a great idea science fiction books and our culture it's baked into everything and that is an Apple strategy from day one when we eventually heard actually Apple's going to ship a VR headset you're like what about all that stuff Tim Cook's been saying about the glasses and the basic consensus was well nobody can make the glasses so Apple's going to ship something

and what they did ship was their attempt to say you know in typical Apple fashion super expensive VR headset but look we do it one of the reasons it's so expensive is we're trying to give you that AR glasses experience of like look the past through his magical it's like you don't even know you're looking through cameras or whatever but of course it's not an AR thing you're not actually looking at the room we're just applying technology and money to try to get something out there

that has some desirable attributes that are better than the competitors that we try to spend as a computing device and get into the whole thing but the bottom line is Apple didn't wait until they could ship glasses they shipped a headset that they kind of sort of tried to push in the AR direction but wasn't really that and setting the vision pro aside and all his failures or whatever that's what they did but at no point during this did anyone say

Apple doesn't think AR is the future or they shouldn't have said that it was just simply the fact that no one has technology to ship something that looks like what the vision pro looks like but as a pair of glasses that you can see the room through that doesn't exist right

so here's Facebook and they're like they come out with this thing now first of all AR glasses have existed for a while there was magic leap there's a hall ends one and two it's very difficult to do this obviously the screen technology is not great they come out with their thing and I look it's glasses that you can see through but it doesn't really change anything about everything I just laid out everyone knows glasses are going to be awesome someday

everyone also knows we can't actually currently do them and I would say a $10,000 device that doesn't look as good as division pros an example of not being able to do them I mean like it's not you can't ship this to people it's not a product and it's not even as good it doesn't even look as good as vision pro in terms of the graphics setting aside the room that you're actually looking at or whatever right so this is the type of thing I would imagine

that Apple would have and say well we can't ship this it's not a shipable product the only difference is Facebook says well okay we have something it's not a shipable product let show it to the world try to basically get our investors off our back but we're spending all this money they think we're just burning it because the metaverse didn't happen and we're just selling a bunch of quest heads at some why do we keep burning these billions of dollars

and Facebook's got to come out there and say this is why we're burning billions of dollars because we think someday we'll be able to make something like this only good and shipable and as Zuckerberg says we have a line of sight on that if they had come out with a product that you could buy that did this stuff maybe we could say there ahead of everybody else Apple couldn't find anything that they could ship but Facebook could

but they can't ship this it's not a shipable thing and even if it was shipable certain attributes aren't even as good as vision pro fidelity wise so I don't think this is anything other than Facebook trying to get some good press out of a thing that is essentially on par with

what everyone else has in the industry but everyone knows that it's not shipable and when Apple has something that's not shipable they don't talk about it right now since we know nothing about what's going on inside Apple it is possible that Apple at some point three years ago diverted all their resources in division pro and left their glasses efforts dying on the vine and Facebook really is ahead of them but we don't know that just like we don't know anything about what going on inside Apple

so we can't say by Facebook showing us this prototype there ahead of Apple Apple is never going to catch up Apple doesn't have glasses like this we just don't know the answer to that question I would imagine that if Apple if you went into an Apple lab and wanted to get the same experience although they might

not look as nice as these with a little frame around the whatever you could probably get something similar if Apple had continued their AR thing but we don't know if they continued it if you look at this product though one of the things that it does seem to hit hit hit from vision pro is the idea of eye tracking and pinching as your interface but interestingly it doesn't use cameras to track your hands it uses the little wristband

this is something that Apple could maybe see how that works out try the prototype get to see how it goes if they haven't already been trying this choosing how you are going to do eye tracking and pinching is kind of like an implementation detail versus deciding eye tracking and pinching is how you should interact with things like in other words they're not saying Orion it comes with quest hand controllers quest hand

controller is great for games maybe not so great for what you would imagine you would do something that's more like a pair of glasses these things seem to have like the wristband has like a little electrical conductor sensor thingies that catch your nerve signals or whatever it's a nice way to do it that doesn't require you to have line of sight on your fingers

and doesn't require like these glasses frames to be bristling with even more cameras that are tracking where your fingers are as opposed to the ones that are tracking your eyeballs anyway like I don't like people saying this inside where the people out there who are like previously I didn't think augmented reality glasses would be a good idea

but now that I've been able to try a prototype I do think they're a good idea I suppose there are people like this but like read a sci-fi book we all want magic glasses that you put them on and they cover the world with information and you can see all the things and you're walking

directions go like that and as we said there's a name tag over people's heads and there's that whole story about like the ray of an glasses that do like image look ups for people like doxam as you walk around yeah that's the sci-fi future just to be an n utopian that we're all talking about here right there's going to be a lot of problems with it but like first things first we got to figure out how to get the screens

and by the way the things work is like they have like a little tiny screen that projects a little image into the lenses and tries the lenses try to bounce the image from the screen off of the lenses and into your eyes so they focus on the back of your eye and yes that is as annoyingly hard as you can imagine it is because it's not like you can

put a big mirror in there but that would block your view of the outside world so these waveguides are essentially taking the image of a tiny little screen that's projecting like up from the side on an angle into the lens and internally bouncing it inside the last lens until it exits the lens at just the right angle so it focuses on your

eye it is as complicated and apparently very expensive to manufacture as you would think and in the end still doesn't have the fidelity of you know a very expensive closed in VR headset where you don't have to worry about all that business you can just literally project the screen right into their eyeballs because you're not worried about them seeing

through it to the outside world. Final thing I'll say about this is the the way the hardware is implemented having the little I don't know puck stick thing where the computer is is you know if you want if you want something that's like glasses don't put all the computer stuff inside the glasses right so they didn't they put the

computer stuff inside a puck and I've seen a lot of people look at that puck and say well the future is going to be that puck will just be your phone maybe the distant future but the near future no because in the near future a you're not going to want to literally destroy your phone's battery by getting two hours of a argol and this thing and be the hardware that you would want to put in that puck is going to have to be it's on the

ragged edge of what's possible it's going to have to be so purpose built and so like high end for a portable thing phones have to do so much different stuff they have to have their cameras and the battery life for that and it's for web browsing all the Wi-Fi readers were in this is a purpose built device that the first one of these that actually

ships somewhere needs to just be a thing that feeds these glasses eventually yes why have a separate thing right but that's going to be when we have so much excess computing capacity that it's no problem for our phones to do and I would say today it is not no problems for our phones to do with that little puck is doing so I suspect whoever gets to be the first one to ship something like this and again arguably magic leap and hold and already did ships

and I guess all be it a much lower fidelity about the same Apple vision probe inspired you why it's going to be a separate puck I think it'll be a separate puck for many years which is fine and is the right move and it is much better than hanging off a giant computer with a

metal case off your face like the Apple vision pro does but for now I would expect there to be a puck now we'll find out in a few years when the you know or many years when the tell all things come out and it's like oh Apple abandoned AR because

it was convinced that there was no way they were going to do it within the next 50 years so we should stop and they didn't see these silicon carbide lenses coming or whatever but I would hope that inside Apple all the technology you just saw Facebook demonstrate was also known to them and had been

and they realized that for the next X number of years it's not a viable product so they're going to try this vision pro thing and it's not going great for them but I don't think philosophically anything I don't I don't actually think there's a philosophical difference when it comes to the long term view of AR between a meta and Apple I think they both believe glasses of the future and they want to get there as fast as they possibly can the only

differences has that manifest for Facebook and manifest with tech demos of $10,000 headsets for Apple and manifests for saying nothing and shipping an entirely different product they can actually manufacture and hoping that works out.

I don't I I both agree and disagree with basically everything that you guys just said I'm not so disappointed in the tech press as John is I concur that it's been obvious to anyone who's paid even the tiniest bit of attention that this is what Apple is angling for that they want something that looks maybe not aesthetically but in principle like functionally looks if you will like Orion that you don't have pass through because you're

already looking at the real world and you're just augmenting that hence Tim saying over and over again AR is very interesting to us. It's it's clear that's what Apple wants and I think a reasonable way to get there reasonable way to get there is to say well let's make some hyper hyper great looking internal pass through inside these goggles that lock you away from the world to get us used to what it'll be like when we don't have to

have pass through when the pass through is the real world hopefully making sense here and to get ahead of that and to hopefully build a developer story around that you just fake it until you make it and that's what Apple is done now the problem is they haven't really made it right in the sense that developers are mostly ignoring it and I think that Apple is largely mostly ignoring the vision pro

but I don't think it's unreasonable for Ben and others in the tech press to say oh my god this was amazing oh my god this is the future today I don't think that's unreasonable now it should be couched and there should be asterisks and daggers and double daggers saying well yes this is the future today but you can't buy it because it is what the future I don't I don't

fault them for being impressed by by a cool tech demo I I fault the people and it's not Ben Ben knows what's up but it's other people saying basically like this shows that Apple is going in the wrong direction and meta knows what's up they're both going exactly the same direction long term they both have VR headsets albeit very different ones right and I think they both have a our headsets is just that Facebook is showing you there is that they can't ship an apple is not showing you

the ship you know me and again we don't know that's true I'm speculating because Apple doesn't say anything but like the people who are citing this as like a condemnation of Apple has dropped the ball they've taken the eye off the ball they shouldn't be bothering with VR headsets meta is also bothering with VR headsets there's a difference in strategy

there which we've talked about at length between how they're doing with your headsets but VR headsets is what we can make now and you know they have different opinions about how to do that but that's the difference in their strategy is like Apple has taken one direction VR and Facebook say the other a difference in the strategy is not that meta thinks AR is the future and Apple does not that's insanity and that's what I can't handle from the video you're like Apple doesn't think AR is

the future but meta does meta showing Apple how it's done no that is absolutely not the case based on public statements from the CEO of the company yeah I would agree with that I don't know and I also I know it's fun for everyone including sometimes me to slag on the vision pro and I'll

be honest with you I don't use my vision pro very often and if it wasn't purchased for my job like if I had done this just because I thought it was neat and I wanted one I would really really regret spending all the money I did on it that being said I maintain that for specific things the vision pro

was really incredible it is not in all things to all people device if you ask me even though I think that's what Apple wanted it to be if you were to look at you know keynotes when it was announced and whatnot but I cannot say enough good things about the immersive video that Apple is put out now

admittedly they've put out very little of it and it's coming in at a snail's pace but it is unlike anything I've ever experienced it is so much better than any other cinema like experience I've ever had it is truly truly phenomenal and there they are releasing more stuff it is way too

slow but they are doing it and I believe there's going to be a immersive film I don't know if it's a short film or film film sometime either lethars here or really next year and I'm really excited to watch it because I think it will be super cool additionally when I went to Memphis a couple of

weeks ago I did travel with the vision pro but because both of my flights were so darn short I didn't bother using it on the plane but on occasions that I have used them on a plane leaving aside that you are one trillion percent that guy if you don't mind being that guy it's unreal because you're in an incredible movie theater you're not in a plane you're in an incredible movie theater by yourself nobody's around you and it's amazing

additionally when I was in Memphis I did get the vision pro out because I did have a little bit of down time to do work and you know what the vision pro is it's a giant screen that doesn't take up a giant ass amount of space in your bag well it doesn't take up a small amount of space in your bag

it's a pretty big space in the bag actually you know what I mean but it doesn't take up a lot of length and width I wonder volume wise if it would actually be the same as a very thin screen maybe but you know I mean we're snarking but you know exactly what I'm saying and it was

really great for that it really truly was I was in this actually very small hotel room and yes it had a you know mediocre TV that I think I probably could have hooked up to my laptop but it was so much nicer to use vision pro because I was suddenly in a different space and I've got this

huge screen in front of me and especially with the developer strap it is basically lag free I think the fidelity of it admittedly my eyes are not perfect with the fidelity of it is great like there are times the vision pros incredible I do not argue that it is I to my eyes it appears that it is a flop now we don't know what apples expectations were maybe they expected to sell three of them in which case mission accomplished but I suspect they wanted to sell a whole heck of

a lot more certainly the rumblings we've heard in the process that they wanted to sell a whole heck of a lot more and they haven't so it is a flop by most measures but if you have an obscene amount of money to burn and you know light on fire and have these specific use cases I don't I don't

want to continue to slag in the vision pro because in certain circumstances it's unlike and better than everything else I've ever tried admittedly those circumstances are few and far between but they do exist and and I do think that this is a really solid precursor to

something like you know AR glasses it's it's going to look way different both you know inside outside and every way it's going to look different than the vision pro does but I think it is a reasonable precursor and those who have embraced the you know vision OS and

vision pro their AR experience when when designing you know stuff for apple glasses they're going to be ahead of the game because they've already done it the same way that like you know underscores was way ahead of the game for widgets on iOS because all the api's were basically just

ripped from watch OS you know for complications and stuff I think I have those that right be got the idea either way underscores way ahead of the game because he's basically already done that and so that's part of the reason I think that widget Smith was there on day one and was so good is because he had so much experience in a slightly different context but using basically the same api's and I think that people who really and truly embrace the vision pro and vision OS I would say I

have reluctantly shown it a small amount of attention I would not say I've embraced it but anyways those who have really embraced it I think they'll be way ahead of the game and I think that everyone would agree that something that's like like Orion is the future

if we can get there. Yeah I think your point about the like vision pro being like oh well we can't do our glasses but just if you get used to this like as a platform extension like we build this platform over many years inside these stupid goggles this platform doesn't look that much different than the platform we would build for our glasses and I'm sure meta's doing exactly the same thing they've got the quest headsets which are you know addressing a different market in a different way

but whatever interface and api's and compatibility they're building up there even though they don't emphasize past there is much I would imagine that as they extend into our glasses they will it will be an expansion of their existing VR platforms if they're smart rather than just saying oh here's all new platform nothing you did on the quest headsets is applicable at all to this I hope they don't do that now Apple I think has a little bit of a head start in this

because their VR headset is so focused on pretending it's an AR headset and the quests are not even like I said down to the choice of how to do the UI vision pro does eye tracking and you use your fingers to like pinch and do stuff right so does Orion but quest is not quest is not lean that heavily on that type of interface on the other hand quest uses the wristband instead of cameras to track but still like the whole idea of like

how would you want to use sci-fi type of AR glasses you probably wouldn't want to have hand controllers because that kind of defeats the purpose of like oh they're just like regular glasses you put them on where do the hand controllers fit in that so it's going to probably have to be how do I how do I do stuff well how about if you look that and adjusters with your hands and then it's just a question of how do we implement that looking at stuff eye tracking

that seems to be obvious gestures with your hands you could look at your hands with cameras you could have a wristband you could do both at the same time you could use your Apple watch like there's all sorts of like platform synergies that sort of you know I think I heard Ben and Gruber talking about like what if your Apple watch was was like the neural check the nerve checking thing and what if your phone was like the puck for the glasses and it's like yeah maybe

eventually let's hold your horses like I said I feel like AR glasses are going to be so close to the edge of what's even possible for so many years that there's going to have to be dedicated hardware for it and you and like I said you wouldn't want to destroy your phone's battery on this like it's not okay but it is the status quo that the vision pro gets like two hours of battery life right Orion gets two hours of battery life your phone you do not want to have two hours of battery

also let's wait on this let's it's you know $10,000 doesn't look as good as vision pro the battery less two hours right we'll get there eventually but but yes there are platform synergies that Apple is well positioned to take advantage of but Apple is not going to show you

their AR glasses demo things until they actually have a product they can ship and we've been talking about vision pro and we haven't been like oh boy I can't wait until next year when Apple ships the glasses no we don't think that's coming next year

and guess what it's not coming next year from metta either despite Zuckerberg's we have a line of sight on that I'll believe it when I see it again you should look at it on a surprise I haven't seen many people talking about this hollow lens and magically

put over the health of things well there have been AR glasses that have shipped as actual shipping products over many years from both Microsoft and magically start up and they didn't look great and they weren't popular and they made slightly different choices but they have existed

so it's not like we don't know like real shipping products that you could buy with less than $10,000 worth of money that would let you see the room and also see images projected on it many of them have existed it's just like the people looked at them and said

they're not very good yet and even Orion I mean it's the best it's the most impressive that anyone has seen outside of you know development labs inside Apple or wherever but still it's like okay but this is not I can't buy this and if I could it would cost too much money

and even if I could even if it didn't cost a lot of money and I could buy it it still has limitations compared to let's say the best images you can see inside vision pro or whatever so we'll get there eventually but I really think this is a perhaps

very shrewd PR move from Facebook to satisfy the people who are upset that Facebook is spending billions of dollars on the metaverse and they have to say no no like we're not spending a million dollars or that millions of dollars and that thing where people with no likes talk to each other

and meetings what we're actually trying to do is this and we haven't actually done it yet but let's show you like what we've got so far so you know we're not just like making the quest 3s and we think that's all we're doing with these billions

yeah I was listening to upgrade and they had a really good turn of phrase for it which I've already forgotten but they were saying another thing that that this might accomplish is kind of like reverse osborning anything that Apple's doing right because now it's like look you know the vision pro is lame because you got to put this thing on the keeps you away from the world you know the thing need to do that to the vision pro is it selling so much it needs to be tamped down

you're not wrong like look look if they're osborning anything they could be osborning their own actually you know well selling the quest heads I don't think anyone sees a product that they can't even buy and like known who's playing beat saber is like I want those $10,000 glasses

where I can't play beat saber no like it's it's a tech it's a tech demo that shows how far how close are we to air glasses and the answer is closer than we were but still not really that close anyway back to your VR stuff unlike a if vision pro had been selling like crazy I can see how this working is like like you said like a hey stop be going go go vision pro that's not the the goal the goal is this and work closer to it than Apple

but like there I don't think they need to stop vision pro from selling I don't think there is any juggernaut that needs to be tamped down. All right the other bit of breaking news over the last few days is that Google will I'm a little fuzzy on the details here but apparently you can point notebook LM which is I think a pre existing product of theirs that I was not previously familiar with and you can I guess it's like a

data management thing or like knowledge management thing it's like a research tool okay I haven't looked too much into notebook itself but it's it's like you know you like add your documents and stuff that you're researching on this topic to notebook LM and it can tell you stuff using LM's about about your documents. There's like study guides too is this the same product I think so yeah you can put in like PDFs or you know websites and things like that it will tell you stuff about them.

It'll be canceled in five years or less than that but what's interesting about this is they introduce a feature called audio overview which auto generates podcasts about whatever you put in and so of course people have been having a lot of fun

with this however before I've been have either of you heard one of these podcasts yet I sure have same in this case this won't be as much for surprise to you but I'd like to welcome to our show some guests oh no so we get we get pitch all the time for you know guests

for our show it's just from PR spam I would be worried about what you're about to do causing that to increase but it's so clear that those people never listen to our show so it's fine yeah no definitely no I listen to one of the podcasts that was generated by notebook LM and it kind of blew my mind agreed it was not anything that made me scared about us and our culture as a show however I think this is worth hearing so now I like to play what I fed notebook LM for this for this guest appearance

here was John's post on hypercritical entitled I made this oh gosh which so this is a podcast that notebook LM generated it's seven minutes long I'll chapterize it if you want to skip it you can't listeners but I suggest you listen to it now I have not heard this one yet I saved this for the three of us to listen to live on the show so here is this this AI podcast discussing John's post about a creation entitled I made this hey everyone welcome back we're going to be

to dive in some pretty fascinating territory today AI art you guys send in some really interesting questions about John Syracuse's blog post I made this and to be honest it's got us thinking pretty hard over here too yeah it really gets some thorny territory fast it does it does so I mean everybody's sort of played around with those early AI art generators by now right but Syracuse is kind of digging deeper here he's asking like who actually

creates AI art it's a great question because on the one hand you've got these AI systems so fake giant sponges just soaking up all this data right images styles exactly and they can pump out these crazy realistic images in second which is mind blowing in itself totally but Syracuse is really wrestling with something more fundamental I think he's trying to figure out if we can even call it creation when it comes to AI

right like are we just talking about fancy algorithms here or is there something more going on and that's right it's interesting because he uses this analogy of emailing an artist and asking them to paint you know polar bear wearing a cowboy hat riding a unicycle right more interested I think

the artist goes and paints it beautiful masterpiece they own the copyright no problem makes sense but what if you swap out the artist with an AI right you just type that same request into a text box and boom you've got your polar bear unicycle is exactly so then who's the creator in that scenario you miss the middle part or you ask an artist to do it or is it the company that made the important part because it's their technology finally we get the

experience of yelling at a podcast before we can even begin to untangle the whole question of ownership like who owns the copyright to AI art we need to grapple with this more fundamental question of who or what is the creator in the first place because if we don't know who the creator is how can we say who owns it precisely and that's where things start to get really interesting and complicated and I think that's what makes

this a lot right it's not just some theoretical debate happening in a vacuum this stuff has real world implications absolutely I mean you think about all the different fields that could be impacted photography graphic design music even things like writing and filmmaking I mean the potential here is huge and it's already happening right like it's not even a question of if AI will disrupt these industries it's already starting to

exactly and that raises a whole host of questions about jobs and livelihoods and you know copyright law is scrambling to catch up with all of this which is a whole other can of worms totally but beyond even the economic and legal questions Syracuse makes this really interesting point about the impact of all this on human creativity like what happens to us what happens to art when suddenly anyone with an internet connection can crank out

something that looks like a master but I don't think I made that point at all if you don't have to that is a graph over the years the creators of practice does that diminish the drive to create in the first place right like you think about your own creative pursuits whatever they might be there's a certain satisfaction that comes from the process itself from pushing through those frustrating moments those

creative blocks and coming out the other side with something you're proud of something that's uniquely yours absolutely I mean I was working on this song a while back yeah and I hit this wall just totally stuck couldn't figure out where to go with it almost gave up but then I don't know something

clicked and I finally broke through it and that feeling of having right and finally found the solution it's just incredible and I can't imagine getting that same feeling from just typing a few words into a computer yeah it really makes you question what it is we value about art in the first place

is it purely about the end result or is there something inherently valuable about the human element the intention the struggle the imperfections even that go into the creative process like is it even possible for AI to replicate that experience and if it is do we want to I mean

it's a lot to unpack so like where do we even go from here we've got this potential decline in human creativity this legal minefield around ownership what's the next step well Syracuse it doesn't pretend to have all the answers but he does offer this really intriguing what if he suggests

that maybe trying to force a I R into our existing copyright law is kind of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole is that what you said no creation has to be this single definable act by a single entity right which has always been the basis of copyright law you can

pinpoint the creator and therefore you can determine ownership is the whole thing about hiring someone to do it but it throws a wrench in that whole system because it's not always so clear cut is the creator the programmer who wrote the AI's code or is it the user who typed in the prompt or is it somehow the data that the AI was trained on all those millions of images and text snippets it's like this weird blend of human and machine creativity where it's almost impossible to separate the two

right and so Syracuse's point is that maybe instead of trying to cram AI R into this outdated framework maybe we need to rethink the whole concept of creation and ownership for the digital age so instead of black and white it's more like shades of gray precisely he's suggesting that maybe we

need to embrace the ambiguity and complexity that AI brings to the table instead of trying to erase it it's like AI is making us rethink like centuries of assumptions about what art is and who gets to be called an artist yeah and you know that can be a little unsettling for some people like

it's challenging these deadly held beliefs about human exceptionalism definitely held belief but for others it's like this really exciting time this explosion of possibilities like we're on the verge of something totally new and uncharted exactly and I think Syracuse

captures that tension really well he doesn't shy away from the hard questions no he definitely doesn't and speaking of hard questions he leaves us with a pretty big one go on he says instead of just asking you know who made this when it comes to AI art maybe we should be asking how do we

want to define made in a world where AI is because this powerful creative force I love that question because it shifts the question that is not just the artist trying to find the one true creator and it puts the emphasis on what kind of future we're trying to create exactly like

it's not about assigning blame or credit anymore it's about taking responsibility for the tools we're building in the impact they're having and it's about recognizing that AI isn't just this neutral technology it's shaped by our values or biases the choices we make as a society

it makes you think about the ethical implication all the unintended consequences that we might now be able to foresee right now absolutely it's like a opening pandora's box in a way but instead of just fearing what might come out maybe we can try to steer it in a direction

that benefits humanity so it's not just a technological challenge anymore right it's a philosophical one a social one an ethical one totally all right so about figuring out what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines and what role creativity will play in all of this yeah

and I don't think there are any easy answers here but I do think Syracuse it gives us a good place to start but this is the end we didn't get anywhere without having those difficult conversations being willing to challenge our own assumptions and being open to new perspectives

and I think that's something we've tried to do here today to really grapple with the complexities of AI and we're going to do a square space ad now absolutely and I think it's a conversation that's only going to become more important more urgent as AI continues to evolve

so on that note I want to thank you all for joining us for this deep dive into the world of AI art it's been quite a journey it really has it's just the beginning definitely yeah so until next time keep those creative sparks flying with their human or artificial good

and we'll see y'all in the next one here to that to quote a famous line from a nerdy show the line being maybe I used too many monkeys maybe they used too many cliches when they trained this LLM because wow there was like the whole thing was just how many different

cliches can we work in at the same time it missed the main point of my article which is not a great I mean you would think people like oh LL is the great at summarizing not if you miss like the main most important point even when they were parroting back

the beginning in the part in the part of whatever they trained that on us like this is the part where we're going to go over the article they did not get the crux of it and when they sort of did verbatim the example I had in the middle they missed the

the important part of the example which was the similarity between typing a prompt and then typing an email to an artist who makes it for you they omitted that entirely and the only two examples they had were typing a prompt and you making it yourself and that's not there's nothing interesting oh my god anyway this is a bad podcast that if I heard a person doing a podcast like this I would be to quote another famous line Woody Allen whatever what was this was any haul you don't know

think of my work boy following life we're really like this all people know what I'm talking about anyway yeah they know nothing of my work they the LLM did not get it it's a shame and they talked in circles a lot and they use so many cliches and

it's obvious that they've trained on a lot of information surrounding AI and stuff which is not surprising so they can riff freeform riff on it but as an example of trying to look at an article and talk about what the article is talking about they fail as an example of natural sounding voices

speaking text generated by an LLM these things are actually pretty okay you can still tell if you've heard a few of them because there's kind of a sameness to what they do but honestly there's kind of a sameness to what a lot of humans do in certain things anyway I bet if you trained

an LLM on our hundreds and hundreds of hours they could do a pretty good job of simulating us but I think they'd make us say even dumber things than we already say well what what's interesting about this so to me like when I hear the podcast generated by the book LLM they don't sound that ridiculous to me they don't sound that bad absolutely not the words that they're saying or the voice that they're saying them because it's two different things the actual content is not nearly as bad as I

expected it to be well but I think the actual content is very similar to the actual content of text that comes out of an LLM when you type in the chat gpt and it gives you a big answer and you read the text it's coherent right that's the whole point

that's why people are always so impressed by it that's why it fools so many people want to thinking that it's actually intelligent because the text is like it makes sense like the sentences join to one another or whatever now maybe the sentences are filled with

you know made up stuff or whatever but the sentences of self-join so I think the most impressive thing is about these is taking that text that you would see in chat gpt and then reading it in the style of a podcaster with the same umbs and oozes and pauses and emphasis or whatever and that is the

the more impressive thing from my perspective and that is what they're doing like you know this is this is still based on modern LLM generation techniques and summarization and that and you know obviously they're they're then forming it into a podcast with you know these these kind of podcast formats of people saying hey what about this hey welcome back guys hey what that's a good point you know and but to me like this shows I think the immense power of generative AI

to actually replace a bunch of mediocre media like what this sounds like to me is a lot of real podcasts that are out there nothing that I really listen to but it sounds like a lot of podcasts out there and in many ways the the style of speaking where they're they're very prepared and professional and yet there's no personality being shown whatsoever hey that's a good point Jane you know like it sounds a lot like news anchors talking to each other and trying to

appear human or like like what what a news anchor or a host or I don't know a presenter you would call them in the UK what they're asked to do what part of their job is is to fake interest in things that they have no interest in you can't if you're like a news anchor you can't have interest in every news story but it's your job to pretend that you are interested in this big sale or the you know the school budget committee or whatever like your your

job is to make it sound interesting and engaging but you as an actual newscaster can't possibly be interested in all those things which is why we read news casters for example as having their interest or like a print on a morning show and they're talking about oh so you won the pie competition tell me about that we know they're not actually interested in the pie competition or the fact that these people won't but it's their job to pretend they're interested which is why

they read is fake to many of us but morning shows are popular people like seeing that and so that that artificiality is essentially what we're paying those people for and it is a service that people like to consume and I think this provides the same thing and that we listen to it and we're like okay well there's no actual person is actually interested in anything here but is it that much different than the hosts of good morning America feigning interest in

the world's biggest ball of yarn I don't think it is right and the thing is what I am into podcasts for is people and the personalities and the chemistry between hosts and like you know how people just interact with each other

and I have interest in conversations and this is not that and doesn't sound like it will ever be that however there's also a lot of people out there who just want like information digest here is like what happened today in X or whatever my industry or interest is I want to hear the latest in that

summarize the news headlines for me and give me a little bit of context for each of those that I can listen to every day am I on my jog or whatever there is a large market for utilitarian mediocrity and that's what this delivers it's not going to replace like Dubai Friday but it is going to

replace a lot of mediocrity this out there because a lot of people like and especially because you can make something that is specialized to like you're like one thing like if you're the only person who wants to hear a summary podcast of topic X you can do that here and I think that's very powerful

you you really like individualize your media it's like this is exactly what you want even if no one else wants to hear this or it's interested in this or it's about something that's like private documentation that only you have

for whatever reason you know like your own content like you can listen to that kind of say you can you can use as a learning tool it can be a summarization tool it can be like you know get me up to date like give me like a quick refresher on the notes for my presentation before I give my

presentation in an hour like on my drive to work like well now you're getting into things where accuracy might be required and I would be wary about that sure okay yeah but like because because on the test they're going to want to get the answer right not just well I told you what my LM told me

but this like this blew my mind because yeah this does not sound as good as a good podcast but it sounds better than a lot of bad podcast that I've heard from actual people I would rather listen to these than a lot of actual

podcasts I have heard did you hear the Facebook's going to one of the things they're proposing or slash implementing is in the in the Facebook like what I don't know the news feed the feed that is personalized for you where they take it stuff from your social network on Facebook well they

also throw stuff in your face that they think you might be interested in based on what they know about you and then the third leg of that stool is going to be and also we will AI generate stuff that we think you might be interested oh yeah because because like the old way was like stuff from people you follow who are in your network and then it was like but also stuff that are algorithm you might think to be interested but all that stuff is stuff that presumably humans were

creating and now it's like you know what there's a third leg which is stuff that we create out of thin air based on LM stuff and we'll put that in your feed too and to Marcos point do you think people will notice that that is not different than the stuff they're being algorithmically fed and the stuff that is from people in their network like depending on what the stuff is lots of lots of things created by humans have that same look and feel and if if

Facebook AI generates something that's you don't be not to use specifically for like you or a tiny slice of the population but it looks just like the thing they fed you from people magazine as far as your concern that's like that you'd never be able to distinguish the AI generated like the average

person every able to distinguish the AI generated content from the real people magazine content because they are really kind of at the same level and they both fulfill the same need the problem of course is if the AI generated thing is

just completely made up yes that you know is filled with lies or for example a podcast discussing an article that misses all the major points of the article that's not great but you know maybe people will notice but still like that I think a large effect that that we had that we are already

having with generative AI and LLM that we that will continue to to get even more severe in the future is there's a lot of media out there that is formulaic and low personality and is mostly being used to just generate stuff for that for people to consume in mediocrity I think there

will be a lot of AI stuff that will replace that like a lot of AI generation will replace a lot of that mediocrity and it this is going to be a large theme of the AI age in general that there's a huge amount of mediocrity out there that can be easily automated and the results will

be good enough or better and I think this this isn't like this blew my mind when I heard it because like it's way better than I would have guessed it's not great but it's way better than I thought it could be at this stage yeah I very much agree yeah what I heard the the pre or the one

that somebody had done I forgot I will put a link in the show that somebody had done one of these about a subject that I knew nothing about and I only listened to the first couple minutes and I was gobsmacked by how real it sounded and yes if you really pay attention and if you really listen if

you do active listening or whatever you can tell that it's probably not real but note that I said probably because genuinely I was if I didn't know that I was listening to AI I would have thought that these were typical but not terribly skilled podcasters and the the ums and the

and the inflections or maybe they weren't arms but the inflections and there are they answer them there you go and there's not it's not just monotone right and they play off each other well and it sounds real it certainly at a glance and I would argue unless you're really really

really paying attention it sounds real I was stunned at how real it sounds I could not and I still can't believe it and yes that part is new by the way like they've been able to do people speaking like this and obviously the texture melons that's all been around for a while now the new thing that I

think is impressive about this is understanding of the podcast format how do I make it and I know it sounds like how do I make a podcast out of this it's clear that this has been trained on how podcasters structured right down to like hey we're going to talk about this article first we're going to

talk about like we'll give you an overview of the article then we're going to get into some of the details and then after that we're going to spin off into a more freeform discussion on ideas from the like that is the structure of a podcast discussion and that's what this model knows and if you haven't heard voices like this before you're impressed by the intonation of everybody previously this same type of voice would be saying things but it wouldn't

sound like a podcast because it would just be like look we can make this voice recite this passage from the book and it sounds very expressive and it does ums and odds and aren't you fooled by it like this is the whole like origin

of all the deep fake stuff is out there but this one is like how I mean I guess they just fed it the transcripts or the audio of podcast or whatever they did it it definitely gets the the structure and the vibe of a podcast despite the content being terrible but the thing it like you

know obviously you're going to be I think a more critical evaluator than many but that's the thing about all these like when Casey was saying he listened to one that was about a topic he didn't know about that's the danger of these is whole the whole thing of LMS is like you know like pets

and many other things they so easy to fool humans into thinking that like there's a spirit living in the tree or the chair or whatever like it should we will personify anything and so it's so easy to fool us into thinking that that's a real person expressing real things and blah blah

and it's the worst when this the content is in it has no rhyme or reason to then just a bunch of statistical probabilities and so you end up listening to a podcast about a topic you know nothing about and at the end of it your head is filled with completely false information because

the accuracy of the podcast is not really important at all and you're like well it was a person saying it to me so I really totally believe it so I guess that's the truth and it's like no not even close and that's why that's why I feel like it's the utility is potentially somewhat

limited like we talked about the summarization of notifications once you rely on this or like studying for a test once there's like a once there is a measurement to to like that you compare against like okay but the summary of my notifications has to be accurate otherwise it's useless

okay but the study guide needs to tell me the correct capital of Minnesota because when I enter it on the test if it's wrong I can't say well that's what the LLM said because there actually is a right answer and the purpose of the study guide is to let me know the right answer the purpose of the study guide is not to fool me into thinking that this is a good study guide because I thought that right up to the point until I took the test and so I would

say podcasts are somewhere in the middle like do you care if this this podcast about avocados is full of lies that but there's plenty of real podcasts about avocados that will hold lies maybe it doesn't matter but right until you get to the point of like even something as simple as oh I

phone summarized my notifications and that's not accurate the stakes are still low but suddenly now you're mad and now you're not impressed by the intonation and the ums of the voice that was reading the thing you're like well what the hell if you're not going to be accurate about the summaries and I think I'm just going to turn this feature off well I'll tell you what I've been living with the notification summaries on 18.1 for the last week or

so whatever I find them very useful even when they are not always right I think I find them very useful and when I listen to notebook lm generated podcasts about things I do know about I find their error rate to be about the same as people podcasts covering the same topics I really do like

it's not like this is closer than you think to human accuracy like is that pod podcasts are somewhere in the middle you're not being tested on them and in the end you knowing false information avocados isn't that big a deal but like notifications that's an annoyance question of like whether

you're annoyed when it gets things wrong but like study guides now we're starting to get into like it actually kind of matters if it gets it right because I don't want to study incorrect information that's just going to make me mad and then obviously you crank that up into like you know let this lm

control the surgery machine yeah no my my this point my only problem with apples note apple summarization on apple intelligence beta so far and this is a big problem is that there is no api for you to as an app developer to try to make the summaries better or for me to use them at all

in my app like for example it's applied to you not yeah yeah in mail it can show in the table list there a summary of each message right I can't do that in my app yeah and the most infuriating thing apple senate a developer email a two weeks ago saying bring apple intelligence to your apps

and every single thing the email suggests that you do is not apple intelligence they're just using that to brand like here's our m l features that we've had for years use this here's a spotlight try to use that we guess all of the apple intelligence features that they're advertising everywhere else is apple intelligence are not available in any api's to any developers right now but by doing like the spotlight thing that feeds into their semantic model on the phone

no not yet it doesn't it might some day you've got to do it's check an egg they want you to do it so when they roll that out this is this is like the biggest apple development on iOS in iOS history that only apple can use they have opened up zero of it there's no api for any of it and that makes me

very angry anyway but the besides that I like them but that's a that's a big thing that I will keep harping on and you and by the way you we talked about this on on past shows you can you can disable those summaries both on

individual app basis and I think also globally if you don't like them honestly I live with them for a couple days before you do I have found them to be very useful and and accurate enough to be useful you know I'm gonna I'm the one who asked my three different voices in the same question

I'm just I'd question the utility for people who are doing what I'm doing all right thank you to our sponsors this week square space and qa wolf and thanks to our members of supporters directly can join at the FM slash join one of the member perks is ATP overtime a weekly bonus segment that

is available exclusively to members this week's overtime we'll be talking about school cell phone bands and kids and cell phones and kind of your the parenting and school decisions and legal decisions around at whether your kids should have a phone in school we'll talk about that and overtime you

can join a listen at the FM slash join thanks listening everybody and we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental or was accidental John didn't do any research Mark going KC wouldn't let him because it was accidental and he was accidental

and you can find the show notes at ATP dot FM and if you're into master dot you can follow them at c a s e y l i s s so that's k c list m a r c o a r m and T Marko arm and s i r a c u s s e r qs it's accidental they didn't mean to accidental tech podcast so long right get ready to fire up those stoves today were diving into something seemingly simple but surprisingly nuanced john seracusa's legendary basic pasta sauce you wouldn't think a simple tomato sauce would require such a deep dive

but trust me seracusa approaches this recipe with almost philosophical reverence what's fascinating is how he breaks it down into the soft you should know emphasizing that the ingredients the process and the time all hold equal weight you can't just nail one of these elements you have

to treat them all with equal importance okay so it's like three-legged stool neglect one leg and the whole thing collapses I got to start with the foundation ingredient and seracusa didn't hold back on his thoughts about tomatoes oh no he goes deep especially on the sand Mars on our tomatoes

he could have just said use canned tomatoes but no he practically wrote a dissertation on finding the perfect for those of us who haven't quite reached that level of tomato enthusiasm what is it about these sand Mars on us what makes them so special

they have this unique combination of lowest of these natural sweetness and a meaty texture which makes them ideal for a well-balanced flavorful sauce however seracusa is also realistic he knows finding truly authentic sand Mars on us can be a challenge he even links to this hilarious video where he's case testing different brands wow and some of the other I'm sorry watch the oh man I've got to see this video it's like finding you to yeah I'm not made of video can they generate that for us

he does get good sand Mars on us dial tomato you enjoy is better than an authentic one you don't right exactly and that actually ties into his whole philosophy to two different people it's in voice is that the third person ultimately trusting your own judgment

there's that trust element again just like with the sauce Trinity you have to trust your gut which leads us perfectly adding to our to this actually this is not that much text and seracusa gets real about the anxiety of burning the sauce he does even real

people stopping quite start getting real about burning sauce who references a low and slow cooking he says a burn sauce ruins the entire batch which does the other throughout for your we've all experienced in the kitchen I hope you have what's the sign behind this low and slow approach

low heat allows the flavors to develop slow the beginning for the again you get from high heat and it prevents burning which can ruin the flavor of the whole sauce he's also a stickler for stirring not just letting it simmer on its own so it's about being engaged in the process not just simmer

so you don't need to go back if someone wrote like this it's like top of mind is my daughter's the kind of sauce yeah speaking of being present and engaged let's talk about seracuses very specific instructions on fresh herbs oh yes the fresh factor as I like to call it

he's very clear about wanting to call it only fresh parsley and basil chopped right before they go into the pot he is and I love how he emphasizes not refrigerating the basil saying it dulls the flavor it's like he wants to capture the essence of the herbs

and that little tip about storing parsley in a glass of water like a bouquet of flowers so simply get brilliant so brilliant so brilliant I'm the first person to ever think about stuff he would argue and I have to agree that it makes a world of difference see fresh herbs have these volatile oils

oh my god they're ready for me again buy a brand almost nuanced flavor which you just don't get with dry I love this method of torture for John like have somebody poorly summarize your own content back to you and expand on it in the most kind of like you know what is this whole thing about low heat

I expect them to start quoting thermodynamics it's like a culinary magic trick no it infuses the sauce with this really subtle depth of flavor so it's like a secret ingredient that disappears leaving behind its essence it's a classic leaf to add to the flavor it's literally in the recipe

it's about overpowering the other flavors think of it like using a bay leaf you don't eat it but it subtly enhances the overall taste mind blown it's like you're just cheating up do you think Jesus you even want to go to something as basic as an onion

now his actual cooking process seems pretty straightforward wouldn't you say it is but straightforward doesn't mean foolproof this is longer than the recipe you know it's way longer it is it's a simple time ah yes the simmer he does have some specific guidelines about that right

he does he recommends simmering for one to two hours which seems pretty standard for a good tomato sauce but then he throws it into the interesting curveball he says he often finds less is more wait hold on it's not like baking where you absolutely need to follow the recipe to the letter

you're telling me he's cool with me eyeballing it that's classic you are a voice the man could explain the nuances of drawing herbs and make it sound like a suspense thriller no he emphasized because it's simmering because over cooking can make it bland wow wow you're fine

you cook it the more flavorful it gets that's what's so great about your kisses approach he encourages you to trust your instincts not just the clock you're in and definitely not starting adding those optional meat additions right we briefly touched on the meatballs and sausage before

how does simmering time come into play when you're adding those to the mix well now you're not just simmering for flavor you're also making sure those meats are cooked through and of course your cue say has some very specific thoughts on this as well

I bet he does does he have a size guideline for the meatballs he does he actually compares them to sports equipment he says they should be bigger than a ball but it's pretty it's the way you use the way maximum size only Syracuse could use sports equipment as a meatball size guide oh

what's the reasoning behind this it all comes back to that final element of the sauce Trinity time the larger the meatball the longer it will take to cook through three point five and I want to end up with undercooked meat in your sauce safety first so that's all about finding that balance between

simmering long enough to develop those deep rich flavors but not so long that you end up with a bland or even worse undercooked sauce it's a delicate dance but clueless undercooked why are we cooking it so long we can highlight how even a seemingly simple sauce requires a certain level of

like attention and care it does and that's what makes Syracuse's approach so fascinating he doesn't just throw a recipe at you he guides you through the process and encourages you to understand so he needs to feed this model more podcast where they trash something because they're very so positive

it's about trusting your playing these things and not you can tell they're not friends in our show you know that note mind blown thoughts would you leave our listeners with is they embark on their own pasta making adventures I'd say use this recipe as a starting point

a foundation upon which to build your own culinary masterpiece don't be afraid to experiment with different tomatoes maybe try and mix herbs or even adjust the simmering time to suit your taste so just like he trusts us to find the perfect San Marzano

he's also giving us permission to make this recipe our own precisely that's a vast discovery what brings enjoy in the kitchen cooking shouldn't feel like a chore it should be a sell-in from a competing or other other recipe and on that note I think we've given our listeners plenty to chew on today

indeed she won the new ones is San Marzano tomatoes the importance of low and slow cooking the magic of a whole onion and the empowering realization that even a basic pasta sauce can be a platform for culinary exploration who knew there was so much to unpack and a simple tomato sauce

a huge thank you to our expert for guiding us through this delicious deep dive the pleasure was all mine and to our listeners we hope this episode inspires you to approach all your culinary endeavors with a newfound appreciation for the process

the details and the joy of creating something truly delicious until next time happy cooking happy cooking John mm-hmm you're so miserable it just like it makes things worse it's the magic power of like making anything worse by having those people try to explain it but see there is a market for like

talk to me about this thing for a few minutes nobody wants that they just want the recipe you know even when they go to the recipe they don't want to hear the big story just give eating greens in the directions