A long time ago, I decided one of my pandemic projects was going to be... To put fiber in the house. And we talked about this, I think it was like 2020 or something like that. I've been waiting for the fiber update. We all have. No, this is going to be his like Project Titan announcement. He's like, you know, Project Fiber has been canceled. Everyone is fired. We've reassigned all the...
staff of this project we have spent 10 billion dollars on it but it turns out it's not going to happen go home everybody uh you're not you're not far from the truth no um what happened was uh you know i i found other pandemic projects that i wanted to do um i replaced we've talked about this many times i replaced all these switches in the house with instead of the little nubbins that you grab americans know what i'm talking about europeans are like what
That's not how I would describe them, but yes, I think I know what you mean. So I think the technical term is a toggle switch instead of a paddle switch, I believe is what it's called. You're talking about Decora-style switches? Yes, yes, we're saying the same thing. I switched from... From the like old school, like 80s era, you know, like there's little things sticking out of the wall to the thing that's like a flat paddle. No, you got it wrong, sir.
The 80s era things are the Decorah switches. That's what you switched to. You switched into the 80s. You moved from the 50s and 60s and 70s. You moved directly into the 80s. All right. Well, fair enough. And I'm not here to argue about that one way or the other. I'm not saying you're wrong, but whatever. I just think the flat...
ones look better right so i did all the switches in the house like the 80s uh just like the 80s yep so uh i also put on shoulder pads no wait that's not right uh so anyway uh that was one of my projects the garage door you know
disaster was one of the projects. I mean, it worked, but it was a Rube Goldberg machine to say the least. That was one of my pandemic projects. And I told you guys that I wanted one of my pandemic projects to be to wire the house for Ethernet. And my thought was I would have the garage.
to be the command center, which upon reflecting, and I think you two both said this at the time, the temperature scenario in the garage is not really conducive to it. But at the time I thought, okay, the garage will be the command center. I've got decommissioned HVAC. plumbing, tubing, whatever you want to call it, that isn't being used anymore, that would get me from the garage to the attic. Everything will be easy peasy, you know, lemon squeezy.
And then I got doing a bunch of other things and, you know, kids were getting older and then the pandemic eventually mostly ended and it just got on the back burner. So. A couple of days ago, well, my birthday was on Monday, and that's actually not the point. But the point is, my friend Spencer, who you guys have met several times, you probably know at this point, he and I will exchange, you know, small, like, mostly gag birthday gifts with each other.
when the time comes, uh, coincidentally, he shares your birthday, John. And I got a message from Spencer on my actual birthday saying, Oh, your gift isn't there. It'll be there tomorrow. And I was like, okay, I mean, whatever, that's fine. Um, And then there were three different boxes on my doorstep. You got Spencer gifts.
I got Spencer gifts. Exactly right. Uh, there were three Spencer gifts on, uh, gosh, that, that store was such a disaster, but I loved it. Um, I got three Spencer gifts or three boxes anyway, and I put in, in the Slack, I'm not going to be sharing this picture publicly. because it's inside the house and it was not very well done. But suffice to say, Spencer has sent me...
Two 10 gigabit SFP media converters, which basically goes from fiber to ethernet. Two SFP actual doodads that you plug into devices to get. to get onto fiber and literally 100 meters of fiber. And so the message from Spencer was, you have no more excuses. Make it happen. So now I've got a problem. And now I've got to wire the house for fiber. How did the rest of the family feel about this gift?
Uh, Aaron's eyes rolled pretty much right out of her head. And the kids were like, why are all these boxes on the kitchen table? Which is where they found them. They have since moved from the kitchen table, but that's where they were. So I have no other updates beside that. But thanks to Spencer, at some point, I think I'm actually going to have to put at least a little bit of fiber in the house. And I get asked about this.
Like once every month or two, someone lists an early email and be like, hey, what's going on with the fiber thing? Or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. P.S. Why didn't Casey ever do fiber? So that's the deal. Now, as soon as I received this, the first thing I did was I said... Thank you so very much, Spencer, because this was not a gag gift. This was a...
probably quite a bit of money. And that was very unnecessary, very kind. But the second thing I did was say to Stephen Hackett, when are you coming so we can install this? I thought what you would have done is write the date on all these boxes. Why?
So in case there's an expiration date, so it's six years from now, you're like, have you opened those boxes yet, Casey? Like, I'll get to it eventually. And we're like, well, check the dates. Check the dates. They might have expired. It's not milk, John. It'll be fine.
Uh, so anyway, so yeah, so that's the thing. And, uh, I don't know. I'm trying to convince Steven to come up and make a project of it with me and, you know, wire the house for ethernet and fiber to a degree. He's already doing his own. I know he's an expert. So it's funny. got his own stuff going on.
Yeah, well, there will hopefully come a time that he doesn't, and maybe we can have a little adventure together. Plus, I can show him what good barbecue is. Shots fired! Anyway, so that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. But yeah, thank you, and also no thank you, Spencer. I told Aaron, this is both an extremely kind and also extremely trolly gift. And I think it's both of those things at the same time. It's calling your bluff.
He is. He really, really is. I mean, does this work for other projects? Like, can I just like mail you other things to do? Only if he's declared that he's looking into doing them in his house and you have to wait a few years. All right. So speaking of forcing other people to do things, Marco, I have compelled you to watch the 30-minute Vision Pro Metallica immersive special. Let me quickly set the stage. We talked about this last week.
announced like a week and a half ago, something like that, that they're going to have this roughly, like I said, 30 minute Metallica special. It was pitched as basically a concert film, but only three songs. I believe it was Whiplash, One, and Enter Sandman, if I'm not mistaken. So one way or another, that was released this past Friday. I have now watched it twice. I have plenty of thoughts, but Marco, would you prefer to start? Would you like me to start? How would you like to do this?
I'll start because I think I'll be quick and I think I'll probably be a little more critical than you. So, you know, I'll go into this by saying that, like, I'm not like a massive Metallica fan. I respect their music. I'm just not really like a metal person. but I respect, you know, they are talented at what they do. You know, I went through an SM phase like everyone else, but that was a very good album. But anyway, so I did watch the whole thing in one go. I did it without...
AirPods. I used the built-in speaker sticks on the ears. That was a mistake. It was. But I understand it. I understand it. But it was a mistake. Yeah. Mainly because this is obviously a band that has a lot of bass. And there is just no bass in the ear pod things that are on the sticks of the Vision Pro. And there's also one thing that I immediately felt for a concert video. You really need easy volume control. Yes. And Division Pro doesn't have that.
That's fair. Don't forget that you can do the look at your hand and then flip your hand over. Do you remember what I'm talking about? I tried that and I was playing. Eventually I got it.
The Vision Pro, if one of the main features of this device that makes it possibly compelling is... you know audio and video like video experiences it needs a hardware volume control and they had the foresight to put a knob on it like apple does they they have all these digital crowns lying around like we got to shove these everywhere um but they they use the digital crown for something else they use it for
More like the pass-through versus virtualized world toggle. So there is no volume control. There's no hardware volume control in the Vision Pro. It really needs one. Sorry, it really needs one. Anyway, once I got past the physical setup there, the actual Metallica video, I'm glad they did it because this is the... kind of direction they need to start going in. But I think they made some poor choices and stylistic choices in doing this. So what I've been saying for a while...
And actually, I was surprised to hear Ben Thompson on Stratechery also really chimed in about this, saying very similar things this past week. What I've been wanting for a while is... Just give me like a fixed camera so I can experience the concert as if I was there. Experiencing a live event as if you are there is something the Vision Pro can deliver that other video screens can't.
And so I think that really would benefit from basically just a fixed camera and a really good seat. That's not what this was. It also, like I was saying last week, like, why do they do a concert and only do three songs? Yes. Having seen it. I think they should have done two songs because I was bored. Because what they created was sort of a documentary, sort of a concert film hybrid. And the style of it...
They had, you know, occasional like interludes between songs, you know, showing like these slow panning shots of one of the members of the band and saying something pithy in the background as the narration. The spotlight goes across the dude's face and it's like it looks.
You know, they're trying to be dramatic and everything, but I'm just kind of just like, can we get to the songs, please? So, you know, it goes through all that, whatever. And then when they were in the songs, they were just constant cuts. Tons of cuts. There was a cut like every couple of seconds. It was shot like it was a music documentary or music video. It was not shot like a concert.
What they chose to do was a lot... of really intense close-up shots both with the band members as they played and with the fans around it so you know we get to see a lot of Lars Ulrichs taking his tongue out yup it's okay one shot of that but like literally every shot with Lars in it. He's sticking his tongue out at the camera. I mean, I guess he thinks he's cool. I don't know. Maybe that's a metal thing that I don't understand. Whatever. But...
So, you know, we saw a lot of Lars Ulrich's tongue, but we also, like, they kept cutting to shots of, like, the fans going, you know, into the camera. And we were, again, like... Like all the other Vision Pro immersive content, we were so close to everyone. It was like a bunch of fans were sticking their tongue in my eye as I'm trying to watch this. And I'm like, I...
Is this pleasant to anybody? When 3D movies first became possible to show to the public, what was largely shown on them was gimmicky stuff where like... a shark comes out of the screen and comes at you. You're like, Whoa, like it almost seems like the vision pro, like the, whatever the immersive video production team is, you know, whatever that studio is or whatever. It almost seems like they're trying to like, wow us with the 3D-ness by having a bunch of stuff come really close to us.
And I think that's a mistake for a bunch of reasons. Number one, it feels weird as a viewer. Number two, the Vision Pro and the content being streamed to it is not that high resolution. So when things are shown very close to you...
you see the limits of the resolution. You see the limits of those screens. You see the limits of the codec and the video that's being shown to you. So it actually doesn't look very good. Whereas when stuff is like, when you're viewing things at a more moderate distance, You really don't notice the pixelation or the blurriness or the lack of proper convergence and focus and things like that. So it is a mistake in lots of ways for them to be showing.
All these things that get in your face. But it seems like the creative decision making of their video production keeps doing that. Again, I think that's a mistake. But anyway, so back to the concert. It was this huge rock band. In this venue, I think it was like a 60,000 seat venue. In this massive band, in this massive venue. But the way they shot it, it felt small.
They were shooting it mostly with cameras that were like on the stage, looking right onto Lars Ulrich's tongue. Like you were so close. You didn't get the spectacle. We were too close to the performers, and that's what made it feel small. When you're at a big concert, in a big arena...
They have things like the pyrotechnic firework blasts when they hit certain notes. They obviously use a big lighting show. There were a couple times they had those firework blasts, but you only knew the fireworks blasted because... The shot after they blasted, you could see the trails. There was one moment in Enter Sandman where I guess they dropped a bunch of beach balls on the audience, like big, giant beach balls.
And you didn't know because you didn't see them drop because they were zoomed in when it happened. And then on like a following shot, then you saw, oh, there's beach balls all over the audience. When did that happen? Like, they shot it so close that it made this huge spectacle in this huge arena of this huge band feel really, really small.
And instead of being a cool spectacle, it looked like four old guys playing wireless instruments. And it really didn't convey the scale or the spectacle of a concert arena, which is what it was. I think the idea of concerts in immersive video is a great idea, but I think...
It's almost as if the people who are filming or editing or making those creative decisions on how to present this and how to shoot this, it almost feels like they've never used a Vision Pro. They overproduced. They went too far. And they succeeded yet again in making like a demo, a content snack. Like I said last week, everything the Vision Pro has delivered so far is not content. It's a demo of what content could be like on the Vision Pro.
It's like everything in the Vision Pro is a sample project. Here's an example app that you might be able to do one day. Here's some example video styles that we might be able to use. Okay, well, it's been out for over a year. When do we get to actually get?
the content is this it i hope not this still feels like a demo and not a good one so i i think it would be in apple's best interest if they won't make you know, the pedestrian version of just fixed cameras in front of like live events of various types, concerts, sports, theater, like if Apple won't make that. open up the doors and let someone else do it. Like, I don't know, get these cameras in the hands of more people. I don't know what they have to do, but the Apple-directed studio...
I think is making the wrong creative stylistic decisions on what kind of content to make and how to make it. I hear everything you said, and particularly the specific quibbles. I largely agree with. There was too much of Lars Ulrich's tongue. There were too many cuts. I do agree with that. Overall, as someone who loves...
a concert film, a concert video, whatever you want to call it. I freaking loved it. I absolutely freaking loved it. I find Ben Thompson to be frustratingly bright. I feel like he is so much smarter than me in so many different ways. It's almost off-putting how smart he is. And I cannot disagree with him more. And now by proxy, you, who is also very smart, I cannot disagree with you two more that plunking a camera down on stage is the better approach. I totally... Not on stage, to be clear.
Plunking a camera in a good audience seat. I hear you and I still disagree with you. It is an important distinction, however, but I still disagree with you. The thing of it is there's a couple of problems here. Number one, this stage was, the way it worked was there was a, the stage was circular in the center of that circle.
circle, it was a hole, it was like a donut, right? And so in the center, the donut hole, if you will, was, I believe it's called the snake pit or something like that. Now I'm showing both my age and my ignorance. Oh, is that what they were talking about? I saw that term flow by, I'm like, what are they talking about? I think that's what that is.
Honestly, you don't need to correct us. It's fine. But basically, there were a bunch of people packed like sardines in the center there. And then there were a bunch of people outside the donut, if you will. To begin with, that sort of a concert where it's very dynamic and they're walking around this donut, that would have been awful. If you had a stationary camera. Okay, so maybe you have several stationary cameras around the entire venue. Okay.
I guess. But what if you're, what, what if Lars is soloing or something like that in, in the nearest camera to him is. 40 feet away or, or for whatever reason, the director has chosen a different camera. Like I still don't think that makes this that much better. Now, again, I want to reiterate, there are too many cuts, absolutely unequivocally too many cuts. It got better as the concert got.
that got further through the three, can I even call it a concert if it's three songs? But as the concert went on, it did get better. And I feel like they kind of pulled back a little bit on that, but. Could not agree more. Still too many cuts. For the love of all that is good and holy, Apple Century LLC, whatever the thing is that produces these videos that they show at the end, let your directors hang onto a shot. I beg of you.
Hang on to the shot. And the way you know this is better is, I believe it was during one, which is the middle song. which is, I'm not a Metallica super fan by any means, but I enjoy Metallica. I also went through my S&M The Album phase, and it's an incredible album. I generally enjoy their work, even though I don't seek it out very often. One is one of my favorite songs of their...
airs which is not very hot take at all that's about the coldest take in the world yeah i also agree i think that's their best song in my opinion during the performance of one we were fairly close to james and actually let me interrupt myself the extreme close-ups of Human faces? Too much. It's too f***ing much, Apple. It's too much. It's in every video. Every video. That's what I'm saying. Like, who wants this? It's really weird.
It's funny. It's funny because it's so, it's every video. Like you just said, it's every freaking video. It's too much Apple. Anyways. We were not in extreme close-up mode at this point, but we were very, very close. We were two Jameses, the lead singer's left-hand side. And he's kneeling at the edge of the stage, and he's soloing to a degree. And the fans are right in front of him.
inches away from him and there's one fan in particular who's got you know the horns up with his hands and he's like rocking out or whatever and and james is way off mike because you know he's he turns out he's very tall which we'll get come back to in a second but he's way off mike he's kneeling down
And he, like, yells in an excited, happy way. Like, right in this guy's face. Not in an angry, you know, mean way. In a happy, like, we're in the moment together, this frickin' rules way. And he yells in this guy's face. And he then immediately gets up and does the cool kid, like, walk. away thing not again not a mean way not a bad way he's just moving on to the next moment of the concert but the key is the camera stage yes the camera stage i love this shot watch you could watch this man lose
his shit in a perfect, beautiful way. And I know that seems kind of stupid for me to say beautiful, but really and truly. What I love so much about live music, even as someone who doesn't go to very many live music concerts because I'm old and value my hearing and have children, but as someone who loves live music, even recorded live music like this.
It's that moment that is just truly a beautiful, beautiful moment because he loses it. You can see him like throw his head back in like ecstasy and then like kind of almost. keel over because he's like, what just happened to me? How did this just happen? It is truly a beautiful moment. And the key to this, the key to this is that they let it air. They let the shot
air. And this is what you've been saying. This is what I've been saying. This is what everyone has been saying. I violently disagree with you that you need to plunk one camera and then walk away. And part of the reason why I don't agree with you there is the... Absolutely incredible version of the talk show where there was the immersive camera right up front. Maybe it wasn't immersive. It wasn't like Apple's official immersive format because I don't think they...
at that time, had released any cameras or anything to do that to the public yet. But it was basically what I'm talking about. It was very close to what I'm talking about. And that was great. I'm not trying to take away from that. It was great.
But honestly, the immersive thing, it didn't add that much. There's depth, which is neat, but there's nothing happening. You're just watching some dudes talk. And I don't think that watching some people play music is... that different so i disagree that having a completely immobile camera is better but i as violently as i disagree with both you and ben in that regard i violently agree with you if that's possible you need to let the show
air out they need to let the shots air out there's so many times that it's just rapid fire rapid fire rapid fire and it's not Helpful. Let it breathe. Even if you're not watching the soloist, which is frustrating in and of itself. Just let it breathe for a minute, man. I could deal with less letting it breathe on Lars' tongue, but nevertheless, let it breathe. Now, to back up quite a bit.
The film starts, and it is like a documentary slash concert film, like you had said. It starts by watching James Hetfield, the lead singer, walk out. Well, I'm sorry. It starts by the four of them kind of grouping and getting ready for the show. And then they follow James, and later they follow the rest of them, walk out.
And they walk out from backstage through the crowd, like there's a pathway, but through the crowd, and presumably they end up on the stage, but you don't actually see that part. It's those moments that I think are what makes this so unique because unlike anything I've ever seen, when there's depth to it, when you can pitch your head and look around,
It is real in a way that nothing else I have experienced is real. I'm not saying that Vision Pro is the only way to accomplish this. Presumably, you know, there's equivalent things for the meta quest, whatever you call it. But... It is, for me, unlike anything I've experienced.
My mom has said for my entire life, like, she doesn't believe in reincarnation. I'm sure I've told this story. She doesn't believe in reincarnation. But if she could reincarnate as someone, she would want to be like an actor or a musician where they walk on stage and they hear everyone.
cheering for them. And you're walking right behind James and you're watching him high five all these people. And it's as close as I've been other than when we've done a live show. I was going to say, you've had that experience. Which is a mind screw in a bunch. That's not 60,000 people, right? That's several thousand. I think it's a thousand at best. And so I am overjoyed that I've ever had that experience once, let alone been lucky enough to have it many times.
times, but this is a whole different level, right? And to see these people just losing their minds to touch this man's hand, it's very, very, very cool. The other thing I really liked about it was that they were no longer very precious.
about the cameras being visible. If you look at the concert for one for Raya or whatever her name is, she's incredibly talented. Forgive me. I always butcher her name. Ray, Raya, I forget. They basically had one camera. Like you're describing, they occasionally cut to other ones, but it was mostly one camera.
And you could never see that there were other immersive cameras there. And similarly, the concert for one with Alicia Keys, they put the cameras in like these monolith things. So you couldn't really tell. I mean, if you thought about it, you could tell, oh, that's where the camera is, but you couldn't really see them. In this, you could see the cameras. You could see the one behind Lars. You could see the ones floating around on cabling. You could see the cameras.
And it didn't take away from it at all. It was fine. And I'm glad they weren't precious about it. The fireworks thing was another thing I took note of. It's funny what you said about not really seeing them because I didn't either. But because I had my AirPods in... I heard it. I heard it in the left channel. And what did I do? I turned my head. And look at that.
Over there, there's fireworks. You probably didn't get this because you were open air, which is totally reasonable. It's totally fine. But I think had you had your AirPods in, it would have had... not a deeper meaning, that's a bit dramatic, but you would have caught it better, right? And you would have understood it better because you'd hear it pounding in your left ear and you would have turned your head to the left and you would have seen it. So much of this.
was so incredible and so cool. And I don't, other than saying, you know, just stick a camera somewhere and walk away, I don't particularly disagree with anything you said. I think it is too short. It is, it was weirdly... dancing on the line between documentary and film and concert film, which is fine, but it was a little weird. Uh, the extreme closeups too much. We've already talked about it too much. Let the shots breathe. Obviously we talked about that. Just let them breathe. But.
Ultimately, this was, to me, extremely cool. I'm so glad they did it. I'm so glad they're starting to walk down this road. I'm so glad that they're giving people the opportunity to watch at least some of this at the Apple store. John, I should have made you do this. I regret not having done so in retrospect. I know you never leave your house, but...
You're talking about I never leave my house. Leave my house the same amount you are. But anyways, one way or another, I should have had you do this. And if you have the chance in the future, I strongly encourage you to do so. It is incredible. The one final note I'd like to add, because I've already gone on. too long is for the love of all that is good and holy. Can we please take a screenshot of this? Can we make a gift of this somehow? It's Apple's own stuff.
You own the rights! You're trying to steal from Metallica again, aren't you? Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I just, like, I can't, I cannot... I can't. Oh, that was a Napster reference. It blew right over my head and then I brought it back. Well done, John. I did not give you the credit you deserved. I'm sorry. Anyway, I just want to be able to take a screenshot of James screaming in this fan's face. And it's just, again, it's such.
a beautiful moment. It's what makes music so powerful and so amazing. And I want to take a screenshot of it just so I can have some sort of visual aid to help people see what I see. And admittedly, I didn't try it. So maybe I'm going to be made a fool. People say, no, you can do that, you moron. But I didn't even bother trying because I'm sure it'll just be a black damn box. And please, Apple, for your own stuff, can I please take a screenshot? Pretty, pretty, please.
Anyway, this was extremely cool. I appreciate you indulging me. I'm glad you tried it. And I hope, I beg of you, Apple, please, more of this. We are sponsored this episode by Mack Weldon. They have everything you need to stay cool, comfortable, and stylish, regardless of the temperature, all year long.
There is not a clothing brand that I personally wear more than Mack Weldon. I wear them literally every single day. And I've been wearing them every single day since they sponsored podcasts like a million years ago. So many, many years now, I've been wearing Mack Weldon. it every day, I know this, is because all of my underwear is Mack Waldron. I know you don't want to know about my underwear details, but...
If you care about underwear details, Mack Weldon makes the best underwear. And one thing I love about it, this is why all of my underwear is Mack Weldon. All of my undershirts are Mack Weldon. Most of my t-shirts are Mack Weldon, as well as many of my other things. Long sleeves are great. The reason why is they have this amazing set of fabrics. My favorite fabric is the silver fabric. This is naturally antimicrobial because it contains real silver fibers woven in the fabric blend. I love.
the silver lining. I can't speak enough. It will never stink. Like you can do whatever you want to a Mack Weldon silver shirt. It won't stink. Most of the time, most days, I'm wearing definitely their underwear. Most of the time, I'm also wearing one of their V-neck silver T-shirts. And possibly sometimes I'm wearing their exercise shorts. They have a whole line of workout gear. Like, I just love Mackwell and stuff. It's very high. quality. It lasts a very long time. I don't think I have ever
had to throw away a Mack Weldon piece because it wore out. Like, that's how long it lasts. They are incredible clothing. And everything, they have such a huge product line now. They just launched a tech linen line that combines their Coolmax tech with linen. I'm definitely checking that out this summer. And all of these clothing items from Mac Weldon, again, super high quality.
Explore polos, sweaters, hoodies, and so much more at MackWeldon.com and get 25% off your first order with code ATP. That's MackWeldon.com, 25% off your first order with code ATP. Thank you so much to Mack Weldon for being so awesome and for sponsoring our show. All right, let's talk about colorful Macs. George Tharp writes, my sister is a very talented video editor. Many years ago when she was graduating from high school, she asked me which Mac she should get for video editing.
Naturally, I told her to get a MacBook Pro. However, the MacBook Adorable, i.e. the 12-inch one USB port MacBook, i.e. Casey's favorite, had just been released with a pink color option. Despite my best efforts to convince my sister otherwise, she decided... to get the pink MacBook adorable, knowing full well this would be underpowered for her needs. The next two years were filled with phone calls to me asking why the computer was constantly beachballing. Yep.
as well as complaints that she couldn't charge her computer while uploading videos from the camera. Yep. Since the computer only had one port. Having said all that, she loved being one of the only students with a pink... MacBook computer. So much that years later, she will still buy the pink iPhone if one is available, regardless of how much better the non-pink iPhone Pro might be for all the videos that she shoots.
Anyway, all that is to say, I'm sure my sister's not alone and there are countless other people that will buy a product solely for the color and not the actual performance and functionality of the device. So two things about this. One, this is another case where Apple's shooting themselves in the foot because people are color motivated.
and by confining the colors to the cheaper ones, A, Apple's missing out on money because she would have bought the more expensive one with, you know, higher profit margins and she didn't. And B, it's giving worse experiences with your products. Like she basically bought the wrong computer for her because she loved it.
the pink that much and that's not on her so much it's really kind of on apple for just confining the colors to the computers that are inappropriate to her and then the second thing is uh one way this is manifested in my uh at least my daughter's life anyway
She was the first one to introduce the idea, probably because she saw her peers doing it at school, of getting a case for your laptop. And I don't mean a case that you put it into when it's inside your backpack, because I got one of those as well. I mean a case like a phone case that is stuck to your laptop all the time.
what that opens the door for her laptop has basically been purple for all of high school but apple doesn't sell a purple laptop but hers was purple because it's got these little thin hard plastic shells snapped onto it uh and so you can get a silver one or whatever and you can make it pink by putting a case on it
Naked robotic laptop. Then, conflictingly, Andrew Cohn writes, while I would love a colorful Mac as well, the fact is most people don't. They may think they do, but they really don't. Let me explain. In a previous job of mine, we would often survey our customers and find out what kind of pizza they would be interested in buying.
Overwhelmingly, the customers said they wanted a healthier version, something with more vegetables, better protein, healthier meats, etc. And every time we would introduce one of those, it would be our worst-selling product ever. But when we introduced a pizza with three different kinds of pepperoni on it, it ended up being our best-selling product by a landslide.
I think the same is true here. Everybody will say they want colors, but then go look at the cars that drive down the street. They're all shades of gray ranging from white to black. Rarely do we see a car with real color, although I admit that trend is slowly changing. I think this is the same phenomenon. desires do not match where we are actually willing to spend money.
I have no facts to back this up, but I strongly disagree with this. I absolutely. We kind of talked about this exact thing last week. I think maybe I've forgotten that this was upcoming in the next week's follow up. But the main thing I'll add here, aside from I like the pizza example, is that. Um, the difference is that the, the thing that people do, like the sort of guilty pleasure, give me the one with three different kinds of pepperoni instead of the healthy one. That's colors.
colors is the three pepperonis it is the guilty pleasure you know you shouldn't buy the pink one you know you shouldn't buy the pink laptop because it's not appropriate for your video editing needs but you just love pink so much you just love pepperoni so much that's the difference so that's why i think this example is not apt even if
was apt to see last week's episode discussion of you got to make the colorful ones just to get people excited even if most people are going to buy the gray and they will mostly buy the gray but anyway i think the colors of the pepperoni here uh people want to indulge in some fun with their laptops and if you put that in front of them they will take it even if it's the wrong computer for them just because they like it so much
Yeah, because look, there's nothing wrong with like buying or choosing something because you love it. When somebody makes the decision of like, I'm going to buy this pink one because I love it and want it, even though it is. in certain technical aspects, worse for my needs, that's not necessarily them making a mistake. They could very well know, yes, this other one would be faster, but I don't love it.
And that can be enough. Like if when you look at an item that you have and you're like, damn, I love that thing. Sometimes that's more important than to you or to that situation than like, well, it would complete this task 20% faster.
And it's a factor that nerds like us often don't fully consider or we might forget about it or ignore it or minimize it. But when people make that kind of choice, they're not necessarily always just doing it out of... ignorance of the technical specs they're making a decision that you know what i i care more about the feeling i get when i look at this thing or like it makes me happier
This one makes me happier than this other one that would be a better fit for my needs. I mean, look, I can personally speak to this on a slightly different level that my travel laptop that I use... constantly on the train, on the ferry, is a MacBook Air. For my needs, I've said on the show, the screen not being very bright and not having nanotexture actually really hurts its usability for me.
What also hurts its usability for me is the ports only being on one side. And often I run into needing an SD card slot. The MacBook Air doesn't have those. I really probably should use a 14-inch MacBook Pro for that role instead. It has nanotexture. It has... the brighter, better screen. It has better speakers when I use those. I also use it for FaceTime workouts, so I use the speakers all the time. It has the ports on both sides. It has the SD card reader. It even has better battery life.
And by all accounts, I should be using a Fortune X MacBook Pro, but I still choose the Air. Why? Because I love the way it feels when I pick it up. That's it. That's the reason the MacBook Air feels better in my hands. I'm physically strong enough to lift the extra, you know, whatever half pound is the difference like between that and the 14 inch. I can pick up the 14 inch just fine. It's fine.
But I choose the Air, even though it is technically substantially worse for my actual needs for that computer. Because when I pick up a 14-inch MacBook Pro, I don't love it. And when I pick up the Air, I love it. So these kind of factors matter. That's why the same thing applied to the 12-inch. People love that thing, including Casey. We loved it and we hated it.
because it felt amazing to pick it up and it looked it was so small and it was so crappy in so many other ways but people loved it and part of it was because it was pink and part of it was because it was super small and thin and it felt great in the hand like that and that's those
Those factors matter a lot. So for Apple to continue to do very well in one area, like the thin and light stuff mattering, they do great in that area. For them to continue to... under-deliver or underserve the color market, I think is a missed opportunity. Because people love colors. They love computers that have colors. And all of that love that people have for their computer that could be there from it being a fun color, Apple's just leaving that on the table and not serving it.
yeah and again getting back to this analogy the logical thing of like you know you should get the 14 inch because it has the specs that you need you know what the logical choice is i should get the food that's healthier for me i shouldn't eat so much saturated fat you know i i should get more vegetables on my pizza the vegetable healthy pizza
is the laptop that has the right specs for you, but the one you love is the one with pepperoni. This is slightly complicated by the fact that, you know, it actually does affect your health badly to get the pizza that you love, whereas getting a laptop that you love probably won't affect your health, but it's the best I could do with this analogy. Anyway, I think it's basically flipped. All right.
We got a couple of anonymous people that wrote in to us with regard to Hydra, H-I-D-R-A, kind of combining their feedback. All Apple SoCs are named after systems on a chip, are named after islands. reference in the choice of the island, but that's not guaranteed. The processor core names are more varied, although the power and efficiency cores of the same generation often have names that work together. So some examples. The A14 was Sicily and the M1 was Tonga.
The A15 was Ellis, the M2 was Staten, and M2 Pro Max Ultra were Rhodes. A16 was Crete, the M3 was Ibiza, and the M3 Pro was Lobos, and the M3 Max Ultra was Palma. When the pro variant has the same codename as the max and ultra variants, the codename gets the chop suffix. The max and ultra variants get the c-die and two c-die suffix, but we've already talked about that in past shows.
Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page of Apple Codenames. They have a section in the Wikipedia page for the SOCs so you can see it. And we'll, again, put a link that we had in last week as well to that island off the coast of Norway called HIDRA, which I still think sounds like hedra. But Casey says Hydra. Well, no, no. You may be right. Now that I know it was unequivocally based on that island.
I don't have the faintest idea how to pronounce that word. We don't know this unequivocally. It's just almost certain. I mean, okay, maybe not unequivocally, but it's based off that island. And so I don't know how that island's name is pronounced. When I was giving you stick about it a couple of weeks ago, it was because...
I thought it was just an alternate spelling of the mythical beast. I didn't realize that there was also the island. Either way, yeah, it sounds like this is, well, I can't say unequivocally, but it is almost certainly. Almost certainly. based on the island. And then in front of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr. writes with regard to the M3 and M4 Max and interposers.
John, do you want to handle this? Do you want to read this? How do you want to approach it? I can do it. So he, as usual, provided a giant email, which we cannot include in the show because it's too much information. He provided a bunch of links, most of which are either paywalled or in Japanese. So that kind of hampers our ability to link you to...
them we'll put a couple of japanese ones in there i tried google translating on them but anyway i'm relying on jonathan deets a long time contributor to the show to parse these out so here are the takeaways first and a couple people wrote about this a little bit more precision in terms John wants us to know that...
The interposer is the piece of silicon that sits between the logic dies and the organic substrate, hence the name. It is not the name of the interface on the logic dies themselves, which is a die-to-die interface, or D numeral 2D, D2D for short. I... get that uh the reason i always say interposer is just kind of shorthand because it's the thing that the interposer connects to or whatever but yes it is more technically accurate say what we're looking for on these die shots is
Show me the D2D interface. Show me the place where the interposer is supposed to connect to this chip, because if there isn't one, that means this chip isn't wired to connect to an interposer and another chip through it. So that's what we've been looking for. So terminology, I'll probably just keep calling it.
proser but and maybe i'll be able to switch to d2d we'll see how we go i'll try to during this feedback here anyway uh the next item the m3 max does not have a d2d interface i'll put some links for this uh this is jonathan's interpretation of these links that i either can't see
because they're paywall by an expensive thing that i'm not going to pay for or they're in japanese uh what in one of the links uh john says all these images show no d2d interface on the m3 max die yet clearly the m3 ultra exists the most likely explanation is that apple made two mask sets one was d2d and one without considering how many fewer ultras they sell ultras they sell their maxes
This probably makes sense financially, especially considering they committed to volume production on the M3 Max very early in the M3, I'm assuming he means M3B, ramp up. So that's the idea. Those rumors were true. The M3 Max really didn't have a place for an enterprise.
to connect the images weren't just cropped and yet that didn't mean that the m3 ultra wasn't coming because in fact it did arrive although the m3 ultra is actually different in some substantial ways um second item the m4 axe does the m4 max does not have a d2d interface again supported by these articles in japanese that i can't read but i believe it uh now does that mean they'll never be an m4 ultra
Didn't mean that for the M3, but then again, Apple said probably every generation will not have an Ultra. So that's why we're saying no M4 Ultra. But anyway, I guess the practice of looking at the Max chip to see if the... d2d interfaces on the die is not useful so oh well and then finally regarding the reticle limit which is how big a single chip can you make uh given the current process technology
Jonathan said, until TSMC starts using the high NA EUV, there is room for about a 75% area increase beyond the size of the MP3 Max. on the current process or on the three nanometer process at TSMC, we do have a little more room to grow. So keep hope alive for those two chips that are bigger than a max stuck together in the M3 or 4 Extreme at WWDC. And then also John has a spreadsheet that he keeps up to date on Google Sheets if you want to see some facts and figures about Apple Silicon stuff.
Then with regard to Apple's multi-OS redesign, John Tatum writes, iOS 7 is a decade old. Gosh, I can't. I can't. Anyway, how long should a theme last on an OS? I'm looking forward to the new look. We can't expect the operating system to be static from a visual standpoint. Also, isn't this a pitch for subscription software? I thought that's why I supported apps in this way. so that they could be updated regularly with features, but also with system changes.
Well, so that is part of the reason you need recurring revenue, because there is a certain amount of minimum amount of work you need to do to keep up with the OS upgrade cycle. But it's a question of where you want those resources allocated. You say, I want features, but also want you to keep up with system changes. Well, if a system change is big enough.
that could swamp all the features you were going to get. And you may be okay with that, but what usually happens is users think I... subscribe to this so i expect it to be maintained to the level i expect and then also when there's a system update that should just come for free as in i still expect the exact same features i always expect because From the outside, it doesn't look like updating for the new OS look should be that much work, but it actually is.
It just adds an additional burden. And practically speaking, it can make it, especially for independent developers with small staffs or a single person, make it so you have to halt all feature work and just spend all your time on the system updates before you can resume feature work again.
Yeah. And I think also, you know, first of all, I would disagree with the characterization that the theme that we have now is that much like iOS 7 because I think it's pretty different. You know, certainly the some of the broad strokes are still there. So I see why people say this. But yet many. if not most, of the details are very, very different. That being said, okay, sometimes, yes, you should redesign things sometimes to keep them fresh. But redesigning the OS, as I mentioned last episode,
is just incredibly expensive, not only on Apple, but on the entire ecosystem. So you have to enter that very carefully, and you have to do it from a position of strength, both within Apple and into a strong ecosystem. And as we're going to maybe talk about, do we all think Apple has...
so little else to improve about their software that they can tackle this right now? And do we trust Apple to do a good job of this right now? I don't know how confident I would be in saying yes to those. And then finally... How do we feel about Apple's position with their developer ecosystem and the ecosystem of iOS apps? When there's a big system redesign, many apps will fall behind. Many apps will take a long time to implement it.
And it certainly puts a big burden on those apps, as John was saying, because it is so much work usually to adopt a new system design that whatever features you were hoping that those apps would add this year, they probably won't be able to. Are we doing this at a time when the ecosystem is healthy and robust enough to absorb that burden? And again, I don't know if I'd confidently say yes to that either.
What we have is this rumored giant redesign from a company that probably should be doing other things with its software engineering resources right now into an ecosystem of developers that are not in the healthiest state. nor is the relationship with Apple in the healthiest state. And the people who would implement such a design at Apple, I'm not sure we have a lot of trust in their taste or abilities to do so, especially on platforms like macOS.
That's where the hesitation is coming from here. It's not that we want to hold on to a certain design forever. It's changing a design is incredibly expensive and burdensome and risky. And do we trust? today's apple with their priorities and resources to do a good job of this and implement it this year i don't know yeah it's tough and obviously what with um
What with the developer whole sphere being none too happy with Apple right now, it's a tough time, and I don't know how it's going to work out. But I will use this opportunity to... plug your podcast with underscore David Smith, where you just had a really good episode about choosing optimism over pessimism, which certainly hit home for me, something that I don't think I do a good job with.
And I think that I need to take Dave's advice to heart for sure. Me too. I was going to say, we know which one of the two hosts of that show that sentiment is coming from. Yeah. And, you know, the reality is like. We're all in this. We're all in the Apple ecosystem. For most of what most of us do, that is still the overall best choice. In many cases, it's the only choice. We're in this no matter what.
I hope that this all works out great. I don't want to have to be complaining on our show for the next three years about how the new design broke Mac OS. I don't want to be doing that. I want it to be awesome, and I'm rooting for it to be awesome. I'm just concerned that it might not be. And here we are. Like, we're in this no matter what. So I hope it works out.
All right, as a final follow-up item, Mac OS Sequoia 15.4 will have Mac set up via iPhone. John, you caught this. I think you were the first person I see to catch this, but an excerpt... from Apple's press release for the new MacBook Air and also on the Mac Studio. It reads as follows. Next month, macOS Sequoia 15.4 will make it easier than ever to set up the new MacBook Air with iPhone.
I hate that it's not the iPhone, but I don't need to open that can of worms again. Anyway, by simply bringing iPhone close to the Mac. Oh, it's close to Mac. God, I hate this so much. Oh, my God. Just bring it close to your friend Mac. Right? Users can quickly and conveniently.
sign into their Apple account to get their files, photos, messages, passwords, and more onto their new MacBook Air. Asterisk! Requires iOS 18.4 and macOS, excuse me, iPadOS 18.4 later. Yeah, that's an interesting choice. I mean, like... So many aspects of the phone setup process are still better than the Mac setup process. And this is kind of like, well...
We can kind of help you there. Like, you hate typing in your password. You used to just be able to, you know, use your phone to sign into things. We can do that. We kind of need if you could bring your old Mac close to your new Mac and do it.
Anyway, baby steps here. I think this will actually improve things a little bit. I wish it was kind of like you would just set up your Mac and it would show you a menu of all your Mac iCloud backups, but oh, that doesn't exist. So, you know, we'll get there someday.
We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from product...
to content to time, all in one place and all on your terms. Frankly, I love Squarespace. This is where I have set up so many people to have their own websites without having to rely on nerds like me to maintain them for them. And this is what that means, what setting up me. is literally telling them, hey, go try Squarespace. And that's it. It's so easy. They figure it out themselves without having any kind of computer skills or nerdery or no coding, of course.
It's all visual. It's all drag and drop. It's all like blocks you move around and then you make it your own. They have this whole new system called design intelligence. This combines all of these two decades of interleaving design expertise with cutting edge AI to unlock your strongest creative potential.
Design intelligence empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to their unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across your entire online presence. So Squarespace is super easy and it helps you get your best creativity out there. Of course, all the business features you might want are there. It supports obviously storefronts.
you know, private content, things like, you know, of course you can download like eBooks and stuff. You could also have member areas, private podcasts, paid newsletters. And of course, any kind of story you can imagine, physical goods, digital goods. It's amazing what you can do with Squarespace. And it's so easy. You can tell the people in your life or you, like when you have to host your own website, you don't need to code it from scratch.
The time for that has long since passed. Go to Squarespace. It's so easy. Save yourself all that time. Go to squarespace.com to see for yourself to start a free trial. When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website.
So once again, squarespace.com to start that free trial today. Squarespace.com slash ATP when you're ready to launch to save 10% off. Thank you so much to Squarespace for being so awesome for so long and for sponsoring our show. All right, let's talk. There's been a lot of news this last week. It all started with a post on Daring Fireball. And John Gruber, I guess exclusively, got a statement from Apple with regard to upcoming personalized in Siri Apple intelligence features.
And so that post reads, or their comment reads as follows. Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly. And in the past six months, we've made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with chat GPT. We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness.
of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features, and we anticipate them rolling them out in the coming year. So what this means is all of the stuff that they promised, well, I shouldn't say all, a lot of the stuff they promised at WWDC isn't going to land perhaps this calendar year? What does in the coming year mean? What is year? You want to take bets right now?
Ever? I don't know. I mean, the thing about their announcement of Apple Intelligence and all the features that are involved and how they're rolling out in the coming year and stuff like that...
that they've done that for the past many years with the features. And it's just, it's real easy to just lose track of which feature that they announced is coming out and which release was that supposed to be in the point one or that one's coming in the point four or like, it's just so hard to keep track of that.
you just start to kind of just start to forget about it like i think they can actually get away with for a while just like disappearing features like we announced this but we're never going to speak of it again and you'll just forget about it and that would probably work for a lot of this stuff but unfortunately the the main one that they're talking about here in this announcement is like we're going to be later than we thought Which is the...
time that we're not going to define for you, but just assume that you, whatever you were thinking it was going to be, whatever vague thing that we said before, whatever you had in your mind about when you were going to get this one flagship feature, it's going to be later than that. And what is that one flagship feature? Make Siri better.
that's that's the one they talk about like there are there are other things here there are other things that they they promise that are going to be coming later as well i'm sure but it's like the new more personalized siri with context awareness it doesn't like the the cool siri the better siri the improved siri the siri It should have been bundled with the new appearance, but wasn't, right? That thing, that thing that you've been waiting for, again,
We anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. Lots of room there for... Well, we didn't say they were coming out in the coming year. We said we anticipate rolling them out. And rolling them out doesn't mean releasing them. It maybe means like... doling them rolling them out a piece at a time and the coming year could mean 365 days from the time you got this announcement or it could mean the end of calendar year or it could be the fiscal year could be the lunar year we don't know
Anyway, the upshot is things are taking longer than they thought on Apple AI. And that announcement and that release of statement to Gruber triggered a crisis of faith. And our friend John Gruber, he had a lot to say about that on his website. He did. The whole post, it is a little bit on the longer side for Gruber, but it is worth it. Every word was...
Really, really good. I mean, Gruber, man, when he is on, he is so freaking on. But anyways, John pulled a couple of quotes from this, one of which I went to pull and then realized that John beat me to it. This is Syracuse, that is. But anyways, reading from John Gruber.
In the two decades I've been in this racket, I've never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple's announcement on Friday that the more personalized Siri features of Apple intelligence scheduled to appear between now and WWDC would be delayed until the coming year.
I should have my head examined. This announcement dropped as a surprise and certainly took me by surprise to some extent. But it was all there from the start. I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year. And I am embarrassed.
and sorry that i didn't see what should have been very clear to me from the start how i missed this is twofold first i'd been lulled into complacency by apple's track record of consistently shipping pre-announced products and features Then later on in the same post... It's easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing we need to show something that only Apple can do at WWDC last year. But it turns out they announced something that Apple couldn't do.
Sick burn. And now they look so far, so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state of the art in AI, but they don't even know what they can ship or when. features from nine months ago not only haven't shipped but still haven't even been demonstrated which i for one now presume means they can't be demonstrated because they don't work yeah so this big post which has gotten a lot of tension
It is framed like that. The first passage you read, I believe, is the very start of the post. It is framed as and I think substantially is mostly a post about John Gruber's personal disillusionment. And kicking himself for missing the signs that were there that...
he should have expected that they weren't going to deliver what they were said going to deliver based on everything that he had seen about them. And as he said, like, how did he miss it? He was just like, well, they always say they're going to do stuff in the coming year and they always do. So why wouldn't they do it this time? And then.
Like I said before, Apple intelligence, well, they just amount so much stuff and like some stuff shipped with the point. Oh, and then some stuff was coming later. And eventually you just kind of lose track of like which things were supposed to be coming when and are they late or are they early and which things do they demonstrate for real? He does a lot of things in the post about talking.
about things that they demo uh things that are in the video things that they demo where an apple person holds a device and shows someone from the press and then things where the press gets to touch it and things where the public gets to touch like the different levels of like doneness and when the software is released so
I think the post is worth reading to get an idea of kind of the nuts and bolts of how things are judged in this way. Now, I did read it thinking a lot that this post really was a lot more about... Gruber than it was, say, about the three of us or a lot of other people who are...
I think, constitutionally more skeptical and grumpy about Apple than Gruber is, let's say. I mean, if you are an ATP listener, you probably heard lots of skepticism about all things AI, including Apple intelligence, and maybe less so if you have been reading Daring Farm. ball because he seemed to believe these were coming uh more they're more likely to be coming but there's one
One angle on this that I haven't heard mentioned that I'm kind of glad no one brought up, since this was put out last week sometime, now I have time to talk about an ATP. And that's this. It's another one of my hobby horses, so you might not be surprised to hear me talk about it.
lots of times apple will announce a feature and then like sometimes it's not in the first beta back before they got into the habit of saying this will be this will be released in the coming year remember when just the features weren't in the first wwc build Like there were many years of that where it's like, huh, weird. Like the feature they demonstrated, it's not actually in this build, but they tell me in a future build, it'll be in it.
so you're at wwc you're doing stuff you're like i'd really love to use that feature but i guess it's not in this build but it'll you know when we all go home the next build it'll have the feature and then it was then we entered there was a couple years where that happened then we entered a couple years where it was like
um this will be coming out in the coming years it's not even going to be in the 0.0 and then of course this thing where it like it's not going to be it's just not going to make the year period
But I think there's a specific difference between Apple intelligence and all of the past things. And it doesn't have to do with... something being rotten in cupertino and like the whole thing of like who who inside apple said uh that we should announce this and other people said we shouldn't it's not ready and someone insisted on it and stuff like that because i think again i don't know for sure but i think from the outside that
I don't know, multiple decades at Apple, they have had someone in a position of power saying we're going to announce this even though it's not ready. And things have been just super not ready. Just, you know, some of them didn't exist at all. Some of them barely existed. Just.
That is not a new phenomenon. It is not as if suddenly Apple of today has done something that has never done before. They used to be so good about making sure that they wouldn't announce a product unless they sure it was going to ship. for in the software realm and i don't think that's the case i think this is the case that they would always do that they would always aggressively announce things that absolutely were not ready but they were saved by the fact that
Most of the time, you could burn out your employees and work them real hard and get it to the point where you could ship something. And very often that something, it would ship super broken, but they would fix it afterwards.
that happened a lot where a feature would be announced and we didn't unbeknownst to us it was just so massively far behind inside apple and we would kind of get a feel of that because you're like wow this is super broken in the beta did you notice this doesn't work at all in the beta
Like, I mean, whatever, maybe, you know, obviously the betas we get are behind what Apple does. So it's probably better inside there. But it turns out, no, it was a disaster inside Apple, too. And even though our beta was older.
their current ones inside the company were still broken and they'd be broken right up to 0.0 release day. And sometimes they'd be broken in 0.0 and then we get fixed and we would just forget about it and all goes fine. But that only works. This is the difference. That only works. If you're working on a piece of software. that you can fix by having programmers find and fix bugs in it.
let me just think of like what is the one that marco regrets putting on his thing when they had notification center for like ios 5 or something yep me too how super broken that was ios 5 beta 1 i'll never live it down nope it was a mess there have been mac os 10 releases where like the
at wwc was just super broken in lots of different ways uh back in the mac os 10 days even in mac os days right the difference all those is you can imagine a team just going heads down and being like all right it's broken but you know SMOP, Simple Matter of Programming, by putting in too long hours and working ourselves too hard and regretting all of our poor planning and regretting the aggressive deadline set, impossible deadline set to us.
set for us by our bosses especially back in the steve jobs day when he'd be like just do it it's got to be ready for wwdc right they would make it happen with apple intelligence here's the difference they can't do that with lm type stuff this is what i i was saying snarkily when and i'm surprised more people didn't call me on it because technically you can
think that it's not entirely accurate if interpreted in a certain way. Remember when I said when they got the bad notification summaries? I was like, why don't they just fix it? Because their announcement was like, oh, we'll disable it or whatever, and we'll work on this.
Why don't they just fix it? It's a bug. Why don't you fix it? Because they can't fix it. And I didn't mean they can't as in it will never be better or it's impossible to fix. I meant they can't fix that as in you can't have the team come in and work over the weekend and. get, you know, notification summaries to stop making mistakes. In the same way, you can't tell everybody, well, just work harder on it and make the LLM not make mistakes anymore.
Because nobody knows how to do that. And it's like the LLM is a bucket of numbers and it takes time and energy to train it. And your iteration cycle is long and it takes huge amounts of money. And they're using other people's foundation models or they're using their foundation models that were made a long time ago. It's not.
a simple matter of programming you can't just go find the bugs fix the bugs you know trim off the features that you're not going to you can't treat it like regular software developing llm powered systems is like trying to introduce you know a dragon so use more dragon analogies into your tech stack it's like well you can't really tell it what to do and it's hard to understand there's lots of weird stuff going on inside there but it's super important and powerful that's why
I think they missed on Apple Intelligence. It's not because... they made a judgment call that was worse than previous ones they had made it was a bad judgment call and but they've made bad ones before it's because they did not have the ability to recover from or rise to the challenge of a typical
uh, aggressive timeline because that's not how development with LLMs work. Like think if you were on that team and they told you, well, the LLM keeps making mistakes, fix it. And you're like, but, um, like I'm, I'm on the team that makes the UI for. siri and or like i just i don't i can't the lm does what do we have should we train a new model like has is anyone else have an error rate that we would find acceptable like there's an article about this it says like uh the the uh
what do you call it? Pep talk that they were giving to the Siri team and everything. And the rumors that the error rate was like, it was getting 80% things correct and 20% wrong. It's like, well, just, you know, just come in on weekends and fix that 20%. No one knows how to do that. You cannot program your way out of this hole. And that I think is at the foundation of the whole LLM powered product scenario and how it has just...
slammed head-on into Apple's need to ship something that they think is satisfactory, combined with their typical decades-long habit of setting incredibly aggressive goals and then trying to rise to meet them. In this case, they simply could not and cannot for a technical reason.
So what do they do about it? Do they just bail entirely? Do they just delay, delay, delay? What do you suggest they do? I think if there was kind of a strategic error here is not recognizing that this difference exists. Thinking like just in the same way that we just set aggressive goals in the notification center and people come in.
on weekends and they fix it. We'll just do that again. Not realizing that nobody has figured out how to make the thing you want to make to the level that you want to make it. You want Siri to be smarter and do all this stuff, but you also want it to not tell people to put glue on their pizza and not make mistakes and do this and do that. And it's like, okay, well, has anyone else done that? And the answer is no.
The people, other people ship products where that is acceptable or like an expectation. When you talk to chat GPT, you know, it's going to have BS information. You know, it's going to be wrong or whatever. But Apple's like, we're going to use it to enhance our voice assistant and we'll be able to do all.
these amazing things and control your apps and nowhere in they they say oh and don't worry 20 of the time they'll do the wrong thing with your app but i'm sure it'll be fine like they're just like when we do it it will be better somehow but they didn't have a way to do it so they should have recognized that how do they you know what could they have done differently they should have so like this technology lm-based technology
We have to deploy it in ways where its current capabilities are fit for the need. And there are ones, like we said, you can enhance Siri a lot.
with existing llm capabilities the example i always give back in the the day when we're talking about this is have the llm figure out what the heck the user is trying to say and have it translated into the stilted fixed limited syntax that siri requires behind the scenes so that at the very least you can do simple things like the one i just saw fly by before we started recording is uh hey dingus what month is it and siri blows this so bad
Like you can phrase it seven different ways and it just doesn't know. There's probably a right way to ask it. Have the LLM sit in front, figure out when people are asking what month it is, translate it into Siri speak and how, you know, like.
There are ways you can use the technology to enhance your products. I think they used the LM type stuff, what they then called transformer models, to improve autocomplete. And granted, people still have complaints about how it works, but it was way worse before they added the transformer model. They needed to, like everyone else in the industry, needed to deploy this new technology.
according to what it can do not what people say they think it might someday be able to do like have a clear-eyed view of what can this actually do in particular have a clear-eyed view of given its capabilities if you if it makes mistakes or you want to improve it what does it take to do that
Do you have to spend a hundred million dollars to retrain a model? Are you going, are you trying to, are you telling your people, your, your understaffed team to do something that literally no one else in the entire world has ever been able to do, which is make an LN that doesn't make mistakes. So I think they were kind of.
set up for failure here and you know in the end it is on leadership like the team can't help with this or whatever but that's that's why i think they missed this it makes gruber feel any better i would say it's the same mistake leadership always makes with respect of setting two aggressive deadlines the mistake they made was
industry-wide i think everyone in the industry just think looks at lms and and just like closes their eye to the limitations and just says la la la i'm not listening lm it'll do every like they they take the uh Or is it like Instagram is other people's highlight reel, right? And you're comparing it to your whole life. Lots of people are comparing their product ambitions to LLM's highlight reel. The highlight reel for LLM's is real great, but that's not the whole story. Yeah.
It's tough. I mean, I feel especially for the rank and file because obviously I think it's pretty clear they're doing everything they can. They're trying their hardest. you know, everyone, including the three of us is kind of pooping all over it, but it's bad. It's not good. I mean, Siri has been not good for a long time. And I feel like we've.
given the benefit of the doubt to Siri to a degree for what, 10, 12 years. When was it? Was it the iPhone four or something like that? 2011. Yeah. I mean, it's.
longer than, longer than Declan's been alive. I mean, it's, it's been a long time and Siri should have gotten better by now. And it just, hasn't oh i know what i talked about as an upgrade too but it's worth uh re-mentioning here is i just think i just saw someone mentioned in the chat they were complaining about uh gruber's conclusion let me just scroll and to make sure they're complaining about the thing they think they're complaining about um
Yeah. So this, Jason and I talked about this. There are the leak of the meeting. with the siri team it was like one of the one of the managers of the siri team not the big wigs or whatever one of the people talking to the team and trying to reassure them and say we've done some great things we work real hard it's a shame that has to be delayed yada yada
And I grew up brought up the same thing that I think I bought brought up a couple weeks ago Just because we have the same set of experiences and cliches in our head about Apple I think it was in the context of Siri. Maybe you two. Well, I'm asking why am I asking Casey? When I brought up the mobile me thing wasn't like two or three shows ago where I was like
Like remember the mobile meeting where Steve Jobs asks like, what is mobile be supposed to do? And then the person answers and he says, why the F doesn't it do this? Gruber is all for like, he was upset that there was this meeting, this all hands meeting where they were trying to console the team and tell them we've done.
amazing things we just need to work harder blah blah blah he feels like that what should have happened in that meeting is you should have had a steve jobs like figure up they're saying oh the why the f doesn't siri do what it's supposed to do like that they you know
it wasn't appropriate to try to puff up or encourage the Siri team they need to be yelled at. And Jason and I both agree, having worked in large companies much more than Gruber has, that that's not how you lead a team. You don't want to go in there and yell at people.
jobs is a jerk that is not the best way to lead people it's not to say that you should like tell them that everything's great and say you did a great job and everyone is wrong to say things are bad you have to be clear-eyed and say we all know we are not Not working up the potential. We know we have not met our own standards for excellence here. But...
You don't yell at them. You don't say, why the F doesn't do that? You're a bunch of losers. You should be ashamed of yourself. And you should, they already feel bad. Believe me, everyone on the Siri teams already feels bad. Like they know what's out there and they know that what Siri is like.
There is a balance to be struck between being honest and clear eyed with your employees and just yelling at them. I think in an upgrade, I compared it to when a puppy makes a poop in the house and you shove the dog's nose in it. That is. A bad way to treat a dog, that is a bad way to train a dog, and that's a bad way to treat a human. And that's not leadership.
So I also disagree with that final paragraph. It may be from the outside. It may be cathartic for us to imagine the people who are screwing up the technology that we care about get yelled at or something. But that's not that's not the way to treat people. And that's not that's not even the best way to lead. It's not like we should do it because it would be mean to them.
it produces subpar results. It's better to be a leader and to rally them to do better next time while being honest about how far they are behind, right? Don't sugarcoat it, but don't be mean. I mean, yeah, and I think that's... There is kind of a cultural challenge there sometimes where like you can give honest feedback to people. You can say like, hey, this isn't this isn't working.
This isn't good enough. You can say that without being a jerk and without yelling at them, without berating them. And you can make drastic changes, too. Don't just say, oh, it's business as usual. By all means, fire people who are in charge. Change the structure of the organization. Do something radically different. Just keep doing what you're doing. Yeah, exactly. And I think it is very important. We have seen over the last, I don't know, at least five years.
We've seen very much a kind of like support the troops attitude coming out of Apple. What that results in is Apple excusing itself for things being really hard. Or the team having worked really hard on something. And using that as an excuse that we should not talk about it's not good enough. And I think that's a BS excuse. And I think you can see that as being BS while also not wanting to yell at people and berate them and be a jerk to them. I think those are different things.
Yeah, like that was one of the good things that Steve Jobs was good at in that this is a thing you won't see modern Apple do. And I think it was a good manifestation of his jerkiness. And I think it was brought up in the same article. It was like. He shouldn't be in there yelling at people and being mean to them. Right. But he also, when he like, for example, when he rolled out iCloud, what he said on stage is like.
iCloud, you're saying this is from the team that brought us MobileMe? Why should I trust them? Like, why should I trust? These are the losers who brought us MobileMe. And modern Apple would never denigrate one of its past things, even if everybody in the world knows it was sucky. That... Despite that it's still coming from a position of Steve Jobs being mean, being honest about your own past failings to the public is also an important part of building trust and leadership.
Because Apple is so allergic to ever implying that anything they have ever done in the past is less than wonderful. They'll always say the new thing. We love the new thing. But they'll never, they'll never even just admit like, it's like everybody knows Siri sucks. You not saying that to us in public.
not acknowledging it to us in public, acknowledging that you know, that we know that you're behind on this. You don't have to do it in a mean way, but by not doing it all, it really gives the impression, like you said, that it was just like, nope, everything's fine, right? We don't know what goes on inside the company. I'm sure the people are yelling.
on each other in big boardrooms and stuff right because that's just the way it is in any company but the inability to be honest with your public about your past mistakes does not build trust like it's that that is the the take it's taking press uh you know
public relations too far to say we just need to be disciplined we never need to denigrate our best products whatever sometimes you have to admit yeah old Siri sucked and we think the new one is great and here it is well and I think it's hard for us to trust recently first of all that apple stuff will work the way they say it will because of things like this like look how many things have they demoed in a keynote in the last five years that looked really cool
And look, it was going to really solve a problem, people. And then you get the real thing and you're like, well, never really, never really panned out all the way or it's not as useful as they said or it doesn't work as well as they said it would. You know, this is not the first. example this is this is just probably the biggest and most egregious one but we can look at recent and and i don't mean just this past year like you know the last 10 years look at apple over you know a recent period
They do seem to be able to fix things very, very, very slowly. And it seems like the feedback loop, for whatever reason, between Apple putting something out there that is broken... or doesn't land well, or is poorly received, and them fixing it is very long.
It's like retraining an LLM. Maybe Apple's one giant LLM. They can never get it exactly right, but they will eventually improve things. It just takes so long to retrain and hundreds of millions of dollars of us buying iPhones. Yeah, yeah. And like, they do have... substantial cultural problems we can we can see just the surface level of like there is a culture in this company of such arrogance and such hubris
that they not only misread the room a lot and with increasing frequency, and I put that right on Tim Cook, they misread the room constantly. But then when they do ship something that... is not very good or poorly received or doesn't work, it seems to take a very long time to fix that. That is a problem. And so I think this is kind of this, you know, the Siri delay.
is kind of a culmination of an example of that. In terms of what it will look like in the public, how much will it damage Apple? I think it's not going to end the company or anything.
However, I do think they have a false advertising class action lawsuit probably coming their way. Yeah, that was another thing that we didn't mention is like that the Apple pulled the ads. They had ads advertising features that they now know are going to ship even later than they thought. So first of all, they ran the ads before the... features were released.
Has also happened in the past, but usually when Apple thinks those things are imminent. So that was another bad call on their part. But just like Gruber, I think inside Apple, they were like, yeah, but this always happens. It's always it's always a shambles. And we always just work real hard and it comes out. So run. ads uh and again they think the mistake here was this time you can't just go in there and fix the bugs and it will work you're you don't have a path
to your destination. You don't know how to get there. You can't just have people work harder on it. And that came back. So they literally pulled the ads. They ran the ads for what? How long? How many months? Months. We've been seeing these ads about Apple intelligence features that don't exist and haven't been released.
And instead of saying, well, we'll just keep running the ads till it release now, they just stop running the ads. And yeah, if someone complains, hey, I bought an iPhone because of XYZ, they'll probably just say, oh, there was a fine print at the ad that says features not year release, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Professional driver closed course. But like literally even that, that is false advertising. If you advertise, you know, this is what the iPhone 16 can do. Go buy one and then you go buy one and it doesn't do that.
That's false advertising. Coming soon to the iPhone 16, maybe. Yeah, it depends on the... I'm sure someone will file it. Apple is never at a loss for class action lawsuits. Yeah, and I mean, look, they get a lot of... class actions that are bs i don't think this would be bs i think this would be warranted that we are going to get like 31 checks like with the keyboards that ad should never have aired there's multiple it wasn't just one ad it's more than yes
The entire ad campaign for the iPhone 16 line has been all about Apple intelligence, mostly about features that aren't really there. This is a big problem for them. Why is it that they chose to run these ads that are... pretty false advertising. I think they thought they would be done. It would be a little late, but they'd work hard and they'd come out. But then how did that...
It is inexcusable. As I'm saying, this is the one time that they didn't realize they were dealing with a different beast. That it is not just a bunch of Objective-C and Swift code that controls UI and so on and so forth. That's not what it is. It's a fundamental technological problem that literally no one in the world has solved.
how can we make this LLM stop being stupid yeah but and that no no amount of extra weekends would fix it and that's the problem like certainly like somewhere there was a series of massive failures inside the company for That to not be...
communicated or heard by the top people or realize that's what i think a lot of people really i mean maybe not the at the rank and file but as you go up levels i think a lot of people a lot of people in this whole industry really believe in their guts that yeah lms make some
mistakes but hand wave hand wave it's probably mostly fine right like i see it all the time where people will talk about them as if these are not problems or as if the problems are so trivial that surely they'll be solved by tomorrow and tomorrow keeps coming and coming and coming and they're not solving people keeps talking about them like these problems don't exist. And I bet a lot of levels inside the company have gotten that, picked up that, that sort of overall, uh, like.
consensus within the industry that LLMs are always on the verge of not having these silly problems. Of course, we'll solve this problem real soon. Glue on pizza. Haha, that was last year, but we don't have that problem anymore. You still do. But there seems to be a bigger problem than that. I think you're right. That is a problem with LLMs that I think the entire industry is still battling with. However...
What was the problem inside of Apple that led them to advertise, to demo a feature that seems like it was probably a totally faked demo to advertise? a whole new iPhone line based on this feature to run TV commercials based on a feature that seems like it probably doesn't exist or at least is nowhere near shippable and might never be shippable. Like, it seems like... This is the result of so many cultural problems.
of the company in this era. And look, I don't know if it's a Tim Cook thing specifically, but it's the Tim Cook era of Apple. This is an era of huge growth of the company, lots of levels of management and bigger expansion and big departments and everything. There is a problem there. There is a significant cultural problem there that the people at the top seem to not have a good feedback mechanism for when things are ready, for what will be ready.
for how things are advertised, how things are shown, and setting expectations to the public and even maybe to themselves. It seems like the deepest problem here is that the people at the top of Apple today don't seem, and this goes right back to Siri, They don't seem to have a good idea of what sucks.
about what they ship or about what they are doing which which is very common in all big companies and used to be less common in apple they were an anomaly in that regard i was the quote i was trying to remember an upgrade which i just looked up now is the upton sinclair quote uh it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding. Slightly gendered there, but anyway.
The idea that if you're in charge of the software group or whatever, it behooves you to sort of manage upward and make sure that the people above you think that everything's going okay. in the group that you manage because things if things aren't going okay well then you're not doing a good job and just repeat that for every single level in an org chart and it takes a lot of effort to combat that to be honest to Be willing to say ASAP.
uh you know this is not working and you know we've had you know since since 2011 the entire pre-llm series and evidence of like this is not working but that information was not getting up to the highest level to reprioritize it and we talked about that last week but with lms in particular like the other
factor that i bet people have already sent us feedback about if they're listening to this now you should always wait till you hear the end of the episode is that uh lms and the ai revolution put an extra amount of pressure on apple like like we said last week with like the uh
you know, is this the time to do an OS redesign when there's this AI disaster? But like Apple felt the heat. Oh, AI stuff is happening and it's kind of happening without us. And whatever, three years ago that Craig Federighi... to his credit, noted that it was happening and got Apple to scramble. You know, the best time to figure that out, Craig, was, you know, three years earlier than you did. But the second best time was then.
I've kind of mangled that one. But anyway, he figured it out late, but he did say, oh, we got to get on top of this. And he pivoted. Everybody pivoted. The whole company pivoted to AI everything. And they did it late, but that added extra pressure. And that is another contributing factor. Like why run these ads? Why do this thing? Why did you feel like you had to do this?
Like I said, I don't think it's that far out of bounds. They do that all the time. But also, why did you feel the extra pressure to do it? So maybe the feedback did come up that was like, you know, this actually is different. It's not the same as just whipping together some widgets and some buttons and making it work. This is actually different by nature.
And the counter-revailing force was, yeah, but AI. We're going to look like we're behind the times if we don't make a big splash of WWDC 2024 with Apple intelligence. And so all those factors combined.
to make it so that they were highly motivated to announce things that weren't ready which again they've done many times in the past but also against the advice of people who i'm sure said from below this is different this time not only is it not ready it's not going to be ready next week or next month or actually we have no idea how to do this and they said ship it anyway and yeah that's
That's part of the problem of leadership. And it is one of the weaknesses of Tim Cook as somebody who necessarily, and I think wisely, given his skill set, delegates a lot of this stuff to his subordinates.
uh in the steve jobs thing he always considered himself the arbiter of like look i'll tell you what when it's good or it's bad right i'll you know he'll look at it let me let me see the stuff we're supposed to be announcing a few months before nope that's no good go back to the drawing board like he had no problem being decisive when he fixed his gaze upon something to decide, is this up to Apple quality or not? Tim Cook should not do that.
Because he can't do that because that's not where his skills lie. So he has wisely delegated that to his subordinates, but unfortunately his subordinates are motivated to make it look like they're not screwing up. Which is a big problem.
I mean, it's true of every company. Like, they understand this. I'm saying it's like, oh, they don't know how to, like, everybody in every company knows this. It's just so hard to fight against it. And Apple does probably one of the best jobs of any large company in fighting against this.
But sometimes it's just not enough. Like you're you're you're battling the tide here. Like, you know, you don't want to make it seem like you're not doing a good job at your job. But part of your job is also being honest. But like and because Tim Cook is never going to and shouldn't like override his subordinates and say.
You've told me this is good enough, but I disagree. Maybe he does that occasionally when it's really clear, but I think you'd be mad at that subordinate. It's not where his skills lie, so at least he knows enough to not be like the pretendy Steve Jobs.
I mean, making product decisions at every level of the org chart has reached Steve Jobs, just reach down to the lowest level of the org chart and tell someone to change a button or whatever, because that's what he could do all the way up to the highest level of this is no good.
I think when Gruber was talking about this on one of his shows, like, that MobileMe was terrible and Steve Jobs maybe just didn't even pay attention to it because he thought, like, this will be fine. But as soon as it was released and it was bad, suddenly he paid attention to it. It got better real fast because he would say this is...
not good enough and we're going to do better and the next thing we release is not going to be released until i say it's good enough um unfortunately he was dying at that point but you know even then uh anyway i It's a difficult situation like this. All these things, everything that has happened in the past, let's say, three or four years has really slowly swayed me to the opinion that.
certain features of the leadership of Apple have probably like been there too long and we need some fresh blood in here because a lot of the decisions that just seem unchangeable that seem to not be moving over time.
You just got to get some new opinions in there at the highest level because I feel like the same old team, they have the same old strengths they always did, but they also have the same old weaknesses. And I would like to see some turnover there. Yeah, I think we have... gotten all the value we're going to get.
out of a lot of the upper leadership and it's time for a generational turnover like yeah and they're all they're all so wealthy go on vacation like retire like you have you can live i know it's hard like when you are an important person at an important company doing work that you love like i'm not saying like you should just retire
and just do nothing at a beach all the time because they love their jobs. I get that. But yeah, sometimes you just need some fresh ideas. There's a reason why when a company is in trouble...
They bring in new people. They don't just ask the existing people to do different things. And if you really want to see something really different, like a different attitude towards developers, a different attitude toward third party integration, a different attitude towards regulations in the EU. I'm sorry if you're expecting us to talk about this stuff, but we'll probably.
to it next week or something um or a different you know being on top of industry trends instead of following them or knowing what to do with ai Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes. It doesn't mean everybody needs to leave or people need to be fired or whatever, but it does mean you need people, new people need to have a seat at the table. I want to slightly disagree with something you had said earlier. I think.
that the siri team knows full well that siri's pilot garbage i really do there's a lot of stuff i said didn't i I thought you said that they were not so convinced. No, I said the series team knows it sucks. But anyway, continue. I agree with you. Do you think the leadership knows it sucks? Honest question.
It's like, I mean, look, I'm sure a huge part of this is just marketing. You know, Apple's never going to say their products aren't very good. So when Apple talks about and when Apple executives talk about how amazing Siri is, like they seem like they might believe it. But do you think like.
Do they know how bad it is? I think they've I think it's like they obviously they know it's worse than they say in public because that's their job. Do they? I'm not sure they know that. Right. I'm pretty sure that's the case. Like. Because who has private conversations with them about only people inside Apple? So they know it's worse than they say in public. But I also think that the pressure of putting a brave face on things.
has slowly convinced them that it's actually not as bad as it really is. So it's like in between. That's what I think. I think, like, if you ask Craig Federighi about the quality of Siri, he would say it's not as good as it should be. But he doesn't have full grasp of exactly how bad it is. I disagree. See, I disagree with you there. And part of the reason I disagree with you is that Siri freaking sucks. It sucks.
I can imagine a scenario like Apple Maps, which to me is the quintessential, the only place in the world that matters is Silicon Valley. And Apple Maps works great in Silicon Valley, so it must work great everywhere. And they knew it sucked.
I'm not so sure they knew it sucked. Steve Jobs made Forrestal sign an apology. Well, I think they knew it sucked for a little bit, but I feel like... even in casual conversation with people that I know inside Apple, and this is not like me digging for information or anything like that, but early on in Maps, maybe not the first year when I think everyone knew it sucked, but like after the first year or two, it started to be real good in Silicon Valley.
but it was still trash everywhere else. And Apple, I feel Silicon Valley broadly, and Apple particularly, are real bad about like, oh, well, it works in my backyard, so it must be the same way everywhere, right? And it's not. Maps got good in Silicon Valley, and then they just assumed it was great everywhere.
And it's not, or it wasn't. That was part of the story then. Like the story was, hey, maps used to not be good, but we've improved it and now it's getting better. And what they wanted, what Apple PR wanted the story to be was.
apple maps is now good enough or apple maps is now as good as google maps like they were pushing that story for years and years afterwards well before it was true because that's what they wanted the story to be to write finally apple max you know do you remember the spade of stories it was like hey you may have
have dismissed apple maps because it always sucked but have you looked at it lately actually i looked at apple maps and it's actually almost as good as google maps and in fact it's better in these ways do you remember those stories oh absolutely that is that is a product of good pr right and but they were trying to push those stories and they were
pushing them well before it was true and that's what you're getting at casey you'd be like why do i hear from all these apple people that actually apple maps is as good as google maps now it's not don't they know it's not and some of them didn't because the story gets pushed so hard both internally and externally that we we're going to reach this goal we're going we know we're bad now we're going to make it better and
That is one of those useful fictions that motivates people. I think that's part of what helped Apple improve Maps by having the people working on it think they were always sort of asymptotically approaching being as good as Google Maps. And it took them, what, you know, a decade or whatever. And I would say they're getting close now. But yeah, like exactly how clear eyed is everybody in the stack about how good things are. In some ways, it doesn't really it's not doesn't matter how good or bad.
the rank and file think it is if they think it's better than it is or worse than it is or whatever it's the decision makers that matter and the decision makers i think like i stand by what i said before like i think decision makers are always going to put a braver face on it in public
what they what they think internally is closer to the truth but there there still is like the sort of the the repetition and optimism that is required by their position can't help but influence in their heart of hearts to skew their perception of it to be slightly less accurate. Like, they don't realize the full extent of how bad it is, but they're closer to it than they would ever seem in their public statements. And I broadly agree with you, but I...
never quite finished my thesis here, which is with Apple Maps, you could be in a bubble where it works great. And Silicon Valley loves to think they're the only bubble that matters and that if it works here, it works everywhere. And that's just not true. But when you're in Silicon Valley and you're using Apple Maps and everything's worked... great you can convince yourself easily that apple maps is great
The difference between that and Siri is that Siri freaking sucks and it sucks everywhere. Maybe it works great in Silicon Valley. No way. I know you're being silly, but no, I can't even acknowledge it. It knows what month it is there. Well, actually, you know. To use a term of art recently, Siri sucks multimodally. Like, it actually sucks in many different ways. Like, it sucks in... Does it suck in agentic ways? Is agentic sucking? Yeah. It really, it figures out new ways to suck all the time.
What month is it is a new one for me. I hadn't heard that one before. like it's real bad you know it it sucks in you know first of all just outright performance like it it sucks in speed it sucks in reliability it sucks in consistency it sucks in intelligence let me let me jump in real quick apologies for interrupting
but something I've been meaning to whine about on the show for at least a couple months now. I use Siri a lot in the car because I use CarPlay. I'm not even in the car that much, but I feel like almost always when I'm in the car, I'm interacting with Siri. I don't know exactly when this started. I want to say it was definitely during iOS 18, but it might've been a point release. But when I'm using CarPlay...
I will be looking at a list of messages or the people who have sent me messages. And I'll tap on one of those names. Let's say Aaron. And so I'll tap on Aaron's name. And then the animation comes up. Aaron said, it's... What is taking so long? It takes an eternity. And this is what I'm talking about. If you ever interact with Siri, if you ever interact with Siri, you know it's a pile of sheep. I'm sorry. It's just awful. You can't even read a text message on the device.
without a five to ten second delay. It's awful. And that's the difference between Apple Maps and Siri. Apple Maps on occasion is, well, I'm making it sound like I don't like Apple Maps. I actually think it's really excellent. And I almost never use Google Maps or Waze. or anything like that. But in the early days, there was a place where Apple Maps was great in certain pockets and it was trash everywhere else.
Siri is trash everywhere. How could you possibly convince yourself that that's not true? I'd also like to say that Siri is now listening to me and it said, trash everywhere. How could you possibly blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So my phone was in front of me and decided to start listening. Um,
It's garbage. And when I start dictating text messages to people, you know, thankfully it says, you know, sent with Siri or whatever on the receiving end. But then I'll go back after I'm not driving and look at these messages. And they're freaking unintelligible. And some of that is on me because I don't have the best diction and I don't pronounce everything exactly perfectly. But a lot of that is Siri just...
coming out of left field with things that just aren't even close to what I said. And I just, I cannot fathom anyone who ever interacts with Siri thinking it's anything other than a pile of trash. It isn't a pile of trash in simple ways. It's a pile of trash in ever-growing, new, and developing ways. I don't know how much Apple realizes, maybe they do now, but how much they realize, first of all...
how much it holds back their products. And then second of all, the reputation they have squandered by using the term Apple intelligence when and how they did. You know, so first of all, Siri holding back their products. This is like the entire HomePod. OK, that was a hobby, whatever. Maybe they didn't sell that many of them. Oh, well, how about the Vision Pro? They didn't sell many of those either, but.
Division Pro could be a lot easier to navigate if Siri was better. Did you try changing the volume using Siri, by the way, when you were watching the Metallica thing? honestly i never even considered that hey dingus turned the volume up 10 does that work it would have been faster than what i was trying to do with my hand i don't know i was wondering like it didn't even occur to you to try it right well because i have learned over and over and over again
Don't trust Siri. And here's the thing. I use Siri every single day for something. I use it all the time. It's not like I tried it once and never again. I use it all the time. That's part of why it fails for me all the time, because it fails a large percentage of the time, and I use it all the time. I mostly use it for, like, reminders, but it fails so much, and it fails in ever-changing ways.
And this holds back the products. And Apple has a very locked-down ecosystem everywhere so that no one else can make voice assistants that plug into their platforms. But if somebody could... I think it would be better for everyone. I think if there was an API for a voice assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever else to just plug in and take over as your assistant, it would do a better job.
and it would be more consistent, and it would be faster, it would develop faster. This is not Apple's strength. And they have shown over and over again that they... don't have either the will or the talent to make it their strength. So that's a pretty big problem. Now, the Apple intelligence marketing and name, this was their chance to...
start over to say, you know what, we're in a new era now, an LLM-powered era. We have all these great assistants coming out now and great LLM capabilities coming out all across the industry, as we can see from the other ones. And Apple used the term Apple intelligence. Now, I said last summer when they unveiled that, it's a bit of a marketing risk because they have this great term.
They're putting their name right on it. And the last thing they want, like I was saying, it better be good because the last thing they should want is for the term Apple intelligence to come to mean something bad. To have a negative connotation. Because that just looks so bad for them to have used the name Apple Intelligence and then for it to suck.
Well, guess where we are right now. I think right now that the Apple intelligence is associated with a image playground and Genmoji features that people use once and thought it was dumb. And the text summarization features with most people don't use, but work OK. Like, oh, I disagree.
agree very strongly i don't think but here's the thing by not releasing the better siri uh i think they have staved off the whole apple intelligence is dumb right now people are just saying siri is dumb but they've been saying that for ages i i don't like
I don't think Apple intelligence has made that much of an impact, despite Apple trying to claim that it drives sales in the places where it's available and blah, blah, blah. Just because the features that have actually shipped to customers' hands...
are so slight and don't really make a difference in people's lives. Like my kids, I have Apple Intelligence. My kids have Apple Intelligence. My wife does. I've never seen any of them use any of the features. So as far as they're aware, it doesn't exist. But I really think that what most people associate with Apple intelligence now is just the iPhone 16 with the new Siri animation and the summarized notifications that suck.
That's what most people see. Some people like the summarize. Gruber likes the summarize. I do. I like them. Gruber likes the summarize notifications. I like them sometimes, but not like a lot. They do screw up a lot. I agree that it has not buffed the brand. It has not been like, oh, Apple.
is the thing that everybody loves. I think it is slightly negative, slightly on the negative side of neutral, but it is not as disastrous as it would have been if they had rolled out an LLM series that was... touted as the new smart siri but was even dumber and the thing is siri's in such a hole it's going to be difficult to to roll out something that is actually worse
But really, I think because – look, if people – they see the ads that have been spreading the term Apple intelligence for months. They go – they have a new iPhone. They get an iPhone 16. They see the new Siri animation. which is not new Siri, but they see a new Siri animation, and this phone has Apple Intelligence, allegedly, and they see some of those notifications. So to them, that looks like, okay, this is it. This is Apple Intelligence.
It's just not impressive to them. It seems about the same. And they're right. It is about the same. And Apple blew it. They blew that marketing term. They're blowing their credibility even more. This is such a flub. How did this happen? Like I said, they had the pressure to announce something, say they weren't falling behind in AI, yada, yada. It's a confluence of events. But yeah, if anything good has come of this, it has...
Perhaps made Gruber more skeptical going forward about Apple's claims and not just assume they will continue to execute because they always have. Past performance is not an indicator of future results, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.
All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP. And Aaron Bushnell writes, when you place your phone on a surface, is it face up or face down? I typically place mine face down because the edges of the case lifts the screen away from the surface, and I'm worried going face up doesn't lift the case. camera lens is far enough off to prevent scratches what do you all do
Uh, typically I go face down, um, this year for this phone, I'm sure we talked about this one. It was new. Uh, I still haven't found a case that I love for it and I mostly stopped looking. And so I've gone caseless, Casey lists for this phone and haven't. yet shattered it, knock on wood. And so I did this year, and I'm pretty sure we did talk about this, get a, I think it was a Belkin screen protector. I got one that Apple applied and it...
slightly shattered damn near instantly. I'm sure it was my fault, but I don't know what I did to it. I got a replacement for free. Had Apple apply the replacement that.
Slightly shattered, damn near instantly. What did you do? Have you ever broken a screen that way, though? No, right? You have really tight jeans. Super tight. No, I have no idea how I'm doing it. Again, I'm sure it's my fault. I'm not trying to say it's not my fault, but there was no, like, clear... instance where I was like oh yep that was why
But then the third time, I'm now on my third screen protector, Belkin was sold out of the ones that Apple applies. And I guess there's a slight difference either in the screen protector itself or whether or not they include the application. frame thing that you stick your phone in to apply it, but they didn't have one for the third screen protector.
They said, look, you can either wait a couple of months or we can give you the one you apply yourself. So I was like, all right, fine. I'll take the one I apply myself. And the application process was fairly easy. It took a little while to get bubbles out from under it. Like that was kind of a pain in the butt. But that being said.
This one has lasted, again, knocking on wood, this one has lasted for a couple of months now, which the other ones were like a month apiece, I feel like, or maybe two tops. So I've been actually fairly happy with that. Also, the edge of this one is a little...
bit rounded as compared to the ones that apple applied because i think i did talk about how it was like a cliff on the edge of my phone which i hated every time i swiped up um but all that's to say that even though i don't have a case i do have a screen protector and i personally think that the respect
thing to do is to put your phone face down. Doubly so if you use the always on display, but just in general, put your phone face down if you can get away with it. So that's my opinion. Marco. Oh my God. You guys are monsters. All right. Here's, listen, the camera lenses. are made of sapphire. The front glass of your phone...
is basically made of marshmallows. It scratches so easily. That is true. That is very true. Sapphire does not scratch very easily at all. So if you are worried about scratching... the screen will scratch way more easily than the camera lenses. So yes, maybe you have a case that has like a lip around it that offsets the screen if you put it face down.
But are you sure that every time you put it face down, there's going to be nothing on that surface that sticks up slightly? That is a big risk that you're taking. Whereas if you put the phone screen facing up whenever you put it down on a surface. You are merely resting a very small amount of surface area, possibly even just an edge if you're in an angle, of a sapphire camera lens or two or three.
on that surface. You are so much less likely to cause a scratch on that camera lens in that context than you are to scratch the screen during the lifetime of your phone. So the correct answer is when you put your phone on a surface. It is face up. Now, I will also add that if possible, if your clothing or bag or jacket or whatever allows for it, When you sit down to a table where there's people with you...
You should not put your phone face down or up on the table. You should keep your phone stowed away safely because you should be there present for the people who are in front of you. So if you're at your desk or whatever, fine, you do whatever you want. But if you're like...
Going out to lunch or dinner with somebody or hanging out with people around a table or something, leave your phone in your pocket. Be there with the people that you're with. But if you are going to put your phone on the table, it should probably be face up.
John. This is actually one of the questions that we get asked frequently, and I can't remember the last time we answered it, maybe more than three years ago. So I don't actually remember if any of our answers have changed. Do you two recall if you're doing the same thing now that you did the last time we answered this? Definitely.
Pretty sure, yeah. I'm pretty sure it was pretty much Always Faced Down. Just checking. Anyway, yeah, I put mine with the screen facing up. Part of the modification to that is I don't use the Always On Screen.
I tried it for a while. I didn't like it back when they introduced it. I just don't use the always on screen. So when my phone is face up on the table, it's not as if it's blaring stuff in my face. But most of the time this comes up at my desk right now. My phone is sitting on my desk face up next to me. That's the main place my phone sits. I don't have like a dock or a charger or whatever. I just put, when I sit down in front of my computer, I put my phone on my desk with the screen facing up.
I tend not to put it on the table otherwise, but if I ever do put it on the table, it's always screen facing up. That's mostly so. If I put it on the table, it's because I'm like watching for something. I'm expecting a text message from a kid to pick up or something like that. And I don't, I've known from experience not to trust. that I'm going to feel the vibration, especially if it's in my winter coat pocket or something. I just won't.
feel that so i need to have it on the table with the screen face up and because i don't use the always on screen it's totally black until notification comes in and then if my phone suddenly lights up my eyes will be drawn to it and i'll see they have to go pick somebody up so yeah face up for me
Joe O'Connor writes, regarding software version numbering schemes, for example, call sheet 2025.2, I see lots of patterns from the typical 15.3.1 to 2025.2 to V1000 or whatever versions Firefox and Chrome are currently on. on why choose one scheme over another uh for me and with 2025.2 that means it was the second release in 2025 um i pulled this i think from marco and if i remember marco you got this from curtis of slopes is that right or i get did i get some of that
backwards i for it might have been slopes i forget where i pulled it from i've been seeing a lot of people do it over the last few years yeah so one way or another um it's basically year dot release number uh i and the theory there for me was that i feel like And I think, again, I'm stealing this from both Marco and Curtis, that 1.0 versus 1.1 versus 1.1.1, I don't have a lot of interest in making those distinctions. And a release is just a release. And I don't really...
have a lot of, I don't hold a lot of value in keeping around or running old versions of most of my software, if not all of it. So, you know, I don't want to imply by there being a 1.0 and a 2.0 that there's a lot of worth in the 1.0 you know once once 2.0 ships 1.1.0 is dead to me and so i think just having a date based or date and release number based thing
It fits my model of how my software should be treated better. And that's why I stick with it. I have nothing against semantic versioning, which is, you know, the X dot Y dot Z thing. Um, it's probably the writer answer to be honest. And what John is probably going to say to me in a minute, but.
For me, I kind of like year.releaseNumber, and it's been working pretty well for me. Marco, thoughts? Version numbers... used to be more important to communicate marketing messages yes um you know it used to be like you you know you had like your beta period 0.7 0.8 whatever and then like you released your 1.0 that was your big first non-beta release and then if you had like
Some, you know, kind of minor feature additions, 1.1. Little bug fix, 1.0.1. You know, like there's this kind of standard of semantic version numbers. You know, if you had like a really big update, you would save up. For your 2.0. And maybe you would charge an upgrade price. For your 2.0. Because it's a new major version. Well in a lot of software today.
It's being updated through app stores and stuff where no one's ever even going to see the version number because it just auto-updates in the background. It is oftentimes kind of a continuous release cycle, so you're not saving stuff up forever and then... pushing it all out later to try to get an upgrade price. You are largely...
releasing things as you can, as they are done, because you are subscription-based or ad-based. So there are a lot of situations today where your business and your pricing and your marketing... don't really need a big 2.0, 3.0 kind of versioning. It is a choice you can make to switch to one of these other schemes that doesn't have that kind of baggage. Now...
You might want that baggage because if you want to make big splashes with your marketing or have an upgrade price, then you probably do want 1.0, 2.0, that kind of thing. If you are going for a more continuous update cycle, which most software these days, I think, is, then you can just do one of these regular sequential numbers. Now, as to which one you do...
I switched to the year dot number, 2025 dot two, whatever. I switched to that. It is a question of whether that's a good idea. I have found...
I kind of wish I didn't switch to that. I kind of wish I just did like 1000, 1001, 1002, like that kind of thing. Because when you date it, people start getting antsy when they see the date is... like two or three months ago or more like that's when they start getting really antsy and yes they can just go see like you know your version history to see the age of the app or whatever but people like it looks good when it's a high number
It looks bad when it's a low number. And then secondly, whatever the point after the year is, 2025.2, does that mean February? Or does that mean the second update in 2025? Well, if it happens to be February, maybe people will assume it's... If it happens to be April, maybe they'll assume it's a three-month-old version when you actually just released it last week. People's expectations about that second number are not consistent. So what I usually do...
I will skip numbers. I haven't done a release yet in the last couple of months, but when I do release an update soon, suppose my update comes out in the month of April. I'm going to call it 2025.4, even though there wasn't a 2025.3 or .2. Because if I release something in April called 2025.2, people are going to think it's old.
So it's not a great like even that is not a great scheme. That scheme has problems. Also, what if you release something in April and then a week later while it's still April? You want to release another version. Is that 2025.4.1? No, I just go to 2025.5. Because I know I'm probably going to skip a month here or there, so I know, okay, that'll be fine. Even that is not a great scheme. It has those kind of flaws. Secondly...
In App Store Connect, if you're using Apple's distribution, once you have uploaded a version 2025.1, you can never again, for that app, upload something that is like 15.3. Because Apple enforces that whatever you upload has to be like version compare greater than the last thing you uploaded. So whatever is before the first decimal point.
has to be a larger number than what was before the first decimal point for the last one or whatever like you know however you compare it you know point point point like you compare each part separately but like once you have 2025.2 you can never have 16.1 because it's less than 2025 so for me like now i i just said i would love to go to like you know 1000 1001 i can't i would have to go to like 10 000
So I could have version 10,001, 10,125. I could do that. Those numbers start to look a little stupid. So I don't love that either. So no matter what you pick, it's not an amazing system. I would suggest if I was starting new today, what I would do is I would just call the first version like 100. Just have the number mean nothing but be small enough not to look stupid. John, what's the right answer? You whippersnappers.
So, I mean, I think I tried to warn you both off the year thing or other. Maybe I didn't and just thought it because. No, I think you did. Margaret had already done it. It was too late. But yeah, for all these reasons. So.
First of all, a clarification. Because you're youngsters and think that the number dot number dot number is semantic versioning, semantic versioning is a very recent thing that is specifically designed for libraries where it's important for the consumer to know what they expect from the API, where a major version...
api minor version adds functionality and the the patch version fixes bugs that's semantic versioning it has no bearing on applications because applications in general don't vend apis the same way libraries do just because semantic versioning has three numbers separated by dots mean they're the same thing anyway that aside uh my i do have extremely uh
strongly held cultural beliefs surrounding version numbers based entirely on my experience in adolescence and young adulthood and the software that I used. To me, the The cultural meaning of 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0. Those numbers all mean so much to me and selecting which version number to use, which like version number like that to use for my applications is one of the parts of.
writing software that I treasure and enjoy the most. And it is totally a factor of when I grew up and the software that I used. That's why all of my apps have been developed like that. And speaking of having multiple releases in February, I released... hyperspace in february it is now march i've done seven releases three in february and four in march uh we mentioned uh switch glass or whatever the last thing we were talking about or maybe it was my other two apps in five years i did 75 releases
Just the idea of being constrained by having one release a month is madness to me. And it means like, if you look at my version history, like I just went to 1.1, that's just... freighted with meaning from my perspective like that's why i choose the number version numbers i do and by the way it's 1.0 not 1.0.0 why but then i go the next one is 1.0.1 what happened to the first zero
I'm glad Apple's versioning comparison allows me to do this. It's probably not a coincidence because my entire cultural understanding of version numbers comes from Apple software. And old Mac software, although I've had to abandon the whole use of letter D's and B's and stuff. Although I think you might still be able to do that, but I don't do it.
But anyway, that's how I use versions because they are meaningful. They are culturally meaningful to me. And they and I am communicating probably to other people my age with similar experiences, something with those version numbers. But in the grand scheme of things, they don't matter too much. The one other.
pattern i will note is that even if you're using them for marketing purposes and you're going to like do upgrade pricing because you're not selling on the mac app store or whatever and you want like 2.0 to be a significant thing to be able to charge a big upgrade or whatever the one thing i cannot stand is when it's like new frobinator 4 and the version number is 7.0 don't do that don't don't like it's bad enough that apple does it with ios and socs and the numbers like
When you prominently feature in your marketing like a 2 or a 4 or an X-Major version, but the actual version number itself is off by a couple in either direction, it's just making everybody sad. But anyway, which one should you use? I would suggest you use the one that fits how you expect to release it and that makes you happy because...
Honestly, I don't think it matters that much from other people's perspectives. Everything you said about the year ones and people looking at it and thinking about it, that is all true. But if you really love year version numbers because you grew up with Windows 2000 and your values are warped, You can go for it if it makes you happy. But I would humbly suggest.
uh that the plain old 1.0 2.0 three numbers separated by dots two numbers separated by dots is a tried and true system that has a lot of tradition behind it and that could be molded into something that is meaningful to you All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace and Mack Weldon. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
This weekend over time, members will hear us discuss Apple News Plus food and recipe management in general. So this is a new thing happening in the Apple News land. We're going to talk about that. So if you want to hear us talk about that and many other things. atv.fm slash join thank you everybody and we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin
Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at... T-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T. Marco Armin. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental
Marco, how did my birthday go at the restaurant? Yeah, so this was kind of our soft opening where we did Saturday and Sunday of mostly just the bar being open and then some free food that we were giving away as tradition, corned beef and cabbage. which is what the restaurant has always done around St. Patrick's Day. So it was basically two days of being open, and then we'll open again fully next month. It went great. This was the first big test of...
Everything we've done, all the cleanup, the updates, the wiring. I replaced the camera system. As you know, I deployed Dante for the audio transmission between different parts. We had a DJ, so I got to test. that. Everything worked. It was great. There were a couple of minor tweaks I had to make when the DJ got there. I had one of the volumes was set too low, so I increased it. It was fine. It was incredibly fulfilling.
to see all this come together. First of all, the staff was incredible. They were so good. I am not qualified to do almost anything in the restaurant. So as a result... I wasn't that necessary. It was amazing. The staff came in, they knew what they had to do, and they did it. They did a great job. I really see myself as...
being in a supporting role to the staff. I can't run this place myself. I need other people to do it. So I will do the best job that I can to create an environment that supports them, that gets out of their way. and that continues to attract and retain the best staff, because that's how this continues. And for me, being normally a sole proprietor and a control freak, That's very new. That's a very new feeling to me. So that's going to be an evolving thing over time.
as i figure out like how to manage the staff and what they need and what they want and how you know how to balance everything but so far that part went great um My kid helped busing during the service. Oh, nice. And he was awesome. He like never stopped moving. He was on his feet. People were giving him tips. I was a busser for two years.
And I think I got a total of three tips from customers. He got, I think, five or six tips in one shift. Nice. And I wasn't a bad buster. He's just a better one. And I think... Drunk Long Islanders are more generous than randos in Ohio. Anyway, so it was just a great time. Everything went off that a hitch. One thing that I think really meant a lot to me.
is everything we did, someone noticed. People didn't all notice the same things, but all the improvements we made, the upgrades we made, the cleanups that we did, everything that we did...
someone pointed it out and someone noticed. And the DJ even noticed that I had EQ'd the speakers. Which like... i mean look i know he's a dj but like i didn't i thought that was a pretty subtle thing and i thought like who else is gonna care but me who else is gonna ever know that i eq them to sound better he knew he could tell immediately like
I installed lighting under the pass in the kitchen. The staff noticed that. They love it. There's all sorts of things that we did. We cleaned up a lot of stuff. Tiff did a lot of staining of wood in the dining room to make it look better. There was so much stuff that we did. that people noticed and appreciated. And so that was very satisfying. And then the greatest thing, like Tiff and I, we were just kind of watching from the back. We were watching just like, you know, this dining room full.
of people having a really good time and being so happy to be back in their bar again after all winter. And we looked around and we're like, we enabled this. Us buying this place. maintaining it and not changing the spirit of it. We are now enabling these people to have this kind of fun and to have a good time and to be in their bar. And that was really satisfying.
We really enjoyed it. Saturday was super busy. Sunday, of course, being a Sunday, was less busy. It was interesting. Sunday, it was less busy, and there was no DJ on Sunday. I basically had nothing to do. I Sunday, I was mostly just getting in the way. And so I mostly just kind of sat back. I had some time. A friend came and I had I had time to just like sit with him at a booth and just hang out with my friend for like 15 minutes.
because I wasn't necessary for anything like that was that was great and that was because we have a great staff and we are empowering them and we are letting them do their jobs and getting out of their way and it all went great I even Like on Sunday, because of the ferry schedule and because of school being the next day, Tiff stayed behind and I went home with our kid on the afternoon ferry, on the last ferry of the day.
The restaurant was still open. So I left while it was still open and Tiff and the staff closed it down, cleaned it up, shut everything down. So I wasn't even there for the last like two hours of the work. And it was fine. Everyone did a great job and it was done. So what this has shown me, first of all, it felt so good to do all this and to enable all this as I was saying. So it has definitely shown me.
So far, at least, I know this is not like totally in the weeds yet, but so far, this was the right decision. And we feel very good about it. But also, it has shown me like, this is not going to... take over slash end my life like i'm going to be able to keep doing other things and it will be fine because the staff is good and as long as i keep the staff good and
And they mostly just manage themselves. And that's a hard thing for me to – it's a hard position for me to be in, being the control freak, being fiercely independent. I think a component of fierce independence is fear that, like, if everyone quit tomorrow, I wouldn't know what to do. I'd be screwed. And so a huge part of like, I don't want to let go of control. I think a huge part of that is because I'm afraid if I can't do everything, I'm afraid it will all come crumbling down.
Well, the restaurant, I'm stuck. I can't do everything. So this is just how this has to run. And I just have to hope the entire staff doesn't all leave at once. But you know what? Almost every company works that way. If everyone walked out of Apple, Tim Cook's not going to be sitting there like, hmm, how do I, you know, what button do I push to keep the servers running? Like, no, that doesn't really happen. That's not how business works. And it's fine.
So I think it will, this is all very much a, like a growth thing for me for sure. Um, but it's all going very well. And so far it seems like we've made the right. decisions we've made the right environment we have the right people uh so it's going pretty well everyone likes my coffee and you know i was i i know it's ridiculous but We were joking back weeks, months ago about how little my skills were relevant to running a restaurant. And I think that's actually wrong.
What I have found over the last couple of months of setting things up and going through stuff is that I actually have a lot of extremely valuable skills to running a restaurant. I just, you know, I'm at a different... I'm in a different role than the chefs, the bartenders, the servers. I'm not in one of those roles. But you know what it has taken to get this restaurant set up and running? A ton of administrative work.
A ton of wiring, a ton of paperwork, a ton of like minor repairs and cleanup and maintenance of stuff around the restaurant. I'm good at all those things. Like I've done business before. I know how to get a sales tax certificate in New York. Because... tiff sold things with sales tax before so we've done that already i know what accounts receivable on an invoice means i know like that you know like oh the the reason why this dollar amount is different from what we were quoted was that they were
estimating the sales tax based on where they're located but it's different from where we're located and that's why it's like 0.1% off. I've seen this stuff before. I know about... What the accountant needs to do our tax stuff. I know about like federal EINs and all like I know what vendors want when they ask for credit check materials and things. I, you know, one of the things we have to deal with was, you know, we have all these credit card slips like when you.
When you sign a credit card receipt and you put in the tip and you do the math and you add it up, well, it's possible for people to later dispute that, to say, like, I didn't write, I didn't total that up, I didn't tip that much, or I did the math wrong or whatever. they dispute that with a credit card company. So the restaurant has to keep those on file. Well, the previous filing system was like a big stack of receipts and some rubber bands. My filing system is a scan snap and files.
that get backed up and organized. I know how to do that. How do I organize the stuff on this computer? How do I automatically classify documents that are scanned into their vendors? We know how to do that already. That's skills I have. When the coffee sucked, I knew how to fix the coffee. And now everyone likes my coffee. There actually is a lot of that. There's a huge amount of work that...
I actually know how to do. So that's actually been very encouraging as well. That being said, I didn't get enough singles. You banked wrong. Yeah, I still banked wrong. But now, I went to the bank today. I got a bunch more. We're good. Well, I'm glad to hear that it's gone very well. And it sounds like the biggest challenge for you might be just staying the hell away from it. And I mean that.
I mean that in a good way, but your natural inclination, as you said, is to get involved and to be in control, which is fair. That's all you've known for 20-ish years now. But now it sounds like you need to just sit back and let the machine do its thing. And that's a great problem to have. Yeah, largely, yes. And, you know, one thing I will be doing a lot of is just like observing and listening. Like if I see somebody is doing some really inefficient task, like so.
On the first day, the Saturday, Tiff had me come count one of the register drawers. I counted one register drawer and ordered a bill counter. so i'm like hey those those flippy things at the bank how much do those cost and it turns out not that much and so like let me get one okay i got like a more basic one like let me get one of those because the very first drawer i counted
I was off by like $62. Oh, gracious. And I'm like, okay. And then, of course, Tiff counted it and it was exactly right. I'm like, well, okay, it's a me problem. I can view this task and it's like, you know, counting... A big stack of singles out of a cash register drawer takes a long time, is not a good use of somebody's time, and is error prone. Here's an opportunity where like, yeah, you know what? If I can spend 200 bucks and make this way faster and better.
I will choose to do that. And there's all sorts of, you know, little opportunities for that. Like, you know, if I see like, oh, somebody is spending, you know, they're spending a half hour a day doing this tedious task. Can technology help that? Yes, it usually can. It might not be worth it. If it comes down to custom software development, maybe that's not worth it. There's all sorts of stuff about business that's just like...
Dealing with files, dealing with documents, dealing with data. Like one of the things we have to do, I am now food safety certified. When a restaurant gets shellfish, at least in my county, I don't know how it is everywhere else. shellfish comes with tags that identify the vendor and the sourcing and everything and you have to keep those tags on file for 90 days well again here's another filing system well what if we just scan them
I'll keep them for the whole year. Once they're scanned, who cares? Keep them for the year. It doesn't matter. I'm not filling up a filing cabinet here. So there's all sorts of opportunities for... You know, just somebody who is a tech expert to be able to look at any business and say, this little thing over here that I can save you 20 minutes a week with something pretty simple on that. You know, and there's a lot of those. And when you add those up, it's actually pretty useful.
I'm very glad it worked out nicely. And here's hoping that when you open properly that you have the same experience. Thank you.