669: Ternus, Take the Wheel

So this week, we had something happen in Richmond, which does not typically happen in December. And what we had happen was... Good bagels? Oh, really? This is the energy you're going to bring to the show tonight. Please take note of who's antagonizing you. Yes, I am. You're still on my poo-poo list, but now it's both of you. Both of you are on my poo-poo list, darn it. I mean, how do I not try that?

Well played. Well played. I'm the chief derailer in chief. In any case, we had something very unusual happen. We got snow. And... What is so funny to me, so I haven't lived in Connecticut. I'm sure I've made this speech before on the show and sometime in the last 10, 11 years, whatever. But I haven't lived in Connecticut since I graduated high school in 2000.

Went to Virginia Tech for four years. Briefly went back to Connecticut in the summertime for a couple of months while I was looking for work. And then I was down in central Virginia, a different part of central Virginia after that. So it's been 21 years that I've been in Virginia. Far and away the longest I've ever lived anywhere. And I really do not miss the snow. I'm good not having snow anymore. And if Virginia, or at least Richmond, gets snow...

Typically that happens for whatever reason, like the January, February, maybe March timeframe, but it is very unusual to get it in December. But the thing that makes me laugh so much is that Richmond, for better and for worse, has... approximately, let me do the math, zero ability to deal with snow. So it was, I believe, Sunday night, and they were calling for prepare yourselves, Northeasterners. They were calling for, I believe, three inches of snow. And by 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon.

they had already canceled school for one day. And intellectually, I get why that is, because as I said, we just don't have the plows and the salt and the whatever in order to deal with it. I mean, we have some, but not nearly to the level that, you know.

Massachusetts or New York has or Connecticut but As someone who spent his formative years in Connecticut, where my recollection, probably incorrect, but my recollection was we were under a foot of snow between October and April, it's so funny to me that... there had not been a single snowflake coming out of the sky by 4 p.m. on Sunday. And they had already canceled school for Monday. And then they canceled school for Tuesday. And then today... What? Wait a second.

They canceled school for Tuesday on Sunday or on Monday? Oh, no, I'm sorry. On Monday afternoon. I'm sorry. That was ambiguous of me. My apologies. And what was happening on the ground Monday afternoon that they canceled school for Tuesday? So they just hadn't been able to clear anything. So it was the same three inches of snow?

Yeah, pretty much. Two days off from school? I think that's excessive. I understand you can't get rid of it. We're not going to have time to follow the rules. No, I'm sorry. My timeline's wrong. Wait, my timeline's wrong. It was Friday and Monday. I'm sorry. My timeline is all wrong. I should have taken notes. So it was Friday. They got canceled. I think I have this right now.

So they canceled Thursday into Friday. That was the first batch. And then we got more snow on Monday. That's what it was. We were getting more snow on Monday. So they canceled Monday. So what is time? When the kids don't go to school, what is time? I don't know how you, John, I don't know how you keep track of what day to record because you have no kids there.

to keep you on track. But anyways, so yeah, it's just so funny to me, our inability to deal with snow, or if you believe these two jerks make bagels. But anyway, our inability to deal with snow, it will never stop being funny to me. And honestly...

It is reasonable that they canceled school both of these days, but to do so before there was a flake of snow on the ground, it will never stop making me laugh. I just find it to be the funniest thing in the world. Canceling when there's no snow on the ground is reasonable.

if there's going to be like three feet or something it's going to be like well right that's the thing no three inches john three inches i don't know what the metric conversion is but they don't they don't have like plows and salt there like that's you know the reason why like you know you john up there in the arctic you wouldn't cancel for three like

up there it snows three inches no one even mentions it because you're equipped for it every everything is so commonly covered in snow up there that everyone like that you know the towns are prepared with plows and salt and everything everyone knows how to drive in the snow and you know down you know in the south

in the deep south where Casey lives. Yeah, in the deep, deep, deep south where I am. No one there has ever seen snow before. It's like the way the British people have never realized they need air conditioning. Even though every summer it's obvious that every summer

Everyone in Britain needs air conditioning, but like it's it's not usually like this. And then, of course, every summer they say it's not usually like this. And they obviously need air conditioning. You know, Virginia, like it does snow sometimes. And so you do probably need like.

a plow or two in town. That's what I was saying. Maybe you get the one day, but by that day being off, the one plow that you have should drive over all the roads that are important. You know what I mean? Well, I think part of the problem is in a lot of cases...

It's not the main roads or even like the second tier roads. It's the neighborhood roads that are often either not maybe not impassable, but not great. Well, you know, everyone in America has these gigantic SUVs now, even no matter where they live, I feel.

Like, okay, so your local roads haven't been plowed. I think your giant, you know, gnarly SUV with the big tires and 12 inches of ground clearance can make it over three inches of snow to get onto the highway. No, it can't. Because first of all... They don't have all the good tires and ground clearance. Actually, that's very true. They're large vehicles that have racing slicks and 25-inch rims. They have racing slicks, but okay. They are also often, like most SUVs now, they...

the most common trims sold are not off-road trims. They're like, you know, lower to the ground, lower suspension, bigger wheels, smooth tires, and, you know, they're made to look pretty. Are they more than three inches off the ground? sometimes not um but then you know and then also they are being piloted by people who not only have never driven in any kind of condition, but think that their SUV will allow them to drive however they would like in such conditions. And so it's a combination of...

You know, a lot of confidence in a vehicle that seems like it would be good, but might not be as good as you think. And that oftentimes results in problems. That reminds me, I never gave my daughter her snow driving lesson because we just like the timing didn't line up. Like when my son was getting his license, there was a day when it snowed. I think school was canceled or something. And we raced over to the school parking lot, which was not plowed. And it just had like a.

foot of snow in it and did all sorts of like snow shenanigans to learn how to drive in snow. But. uh my daughter you know we've had a very and you know fingers crossed we've had very light snow here like where it would just be like you know an inch or two and then it just you know sort of settles in and another inch or two it's like Very, very light snow for the past several winters. Not enough to go high school parking lot.

you know skidding in the snow and so she's never i've never gotten a chance to do that with her so maybe maybe when she's home over the holidays we'll uh have a chance to do that but we'll see it's the that's the tricky thing about having plows So you want to teach your kid how to drive in the snow? You have a very narrow window of time where you can get to an unplowed parking lot before the plows come and plow the parking lot.

That's so true. The only thing that this reminds me of, it's not apples to apples, but years ago, again, I'm sure I've told this story before, but years ago, many, many years ago, like 10 plus years ago, I was doing a lot of work in the LA area. And there was one day that we were, it was. evening and we were catching a flight back east, I believe it was Red Eye, and we were driving to LAX and there was rain.

In Los Angeles. And it was, if I'm honest, it was a genuine rain. It wasn't just a little spittle. Like, it was an honest-to-goodness rain. And... If I wasn't there, I would not believe the words that are about to come out of my mouth. But I kid you not, people in Los Angeles don't understand what weather is. I think most of coastal California don't get what weather is. And so anyways, these cars were...

Spinning off the road. Pew, pew, pew. Left and right. And it was rain. Like, just rain. But they never get weather. So they didn't know what to do. And it was... Scary, but also freaking hilarious because nobody understood what to do when the weather wasn't absolutely perfect. It was incredible.

All right, let's do some follow-up. Speaking of the Los Angeles area, if I'm not mistaken, that's where this is all filmed. Apple Fitness Plus, and I would like to state for the record, I did not write this. I believe this was John. From our internal show notes, Apple Fitness Plus is doing better than the Mac Pro.

Kind of wish I came up with that burn. Very well done, John. Very well done. And like I said, I believe that their studio is in Santa Monica. Anyway, there was an announcement a couple of days back that Apple Fitness Plus will be expanding to 28 new markets. reading from the announcement

Apple Today, which was December 8th, announced Apple Fitness Plus is expanding to 28 new markets on December 15th, with Japan launching early next year. As part of the service's latest expansion since it was unveiled five years ago, hundreds of Fitness Plus workouts and meditations will be digitally dubbed with a generated voice.

and Spanish, German, and Japanese, with more dubbed episodes added every week. The dubbed workouts meditations feature a generated voice based on the actual voice of each of the 28 Fitness Plus trainers. Fitness Plus is also introducing a new music genre to the service, K-pop.

I thought that this was interesting for a few reasons. First of all, we just recently had an article, I think from Gurman, saying that basically Fitness Plus was circling the drain. I'm paraphrasing heavily. It was under review. There you go. Seems like I got a pretty good review. Yeah, and on that topic and the reason... The reason I wrote that it's doing better than the Mac Pro.

It might still be under review. This might be like a, you know, an effort to get more, you know, maybe people, maybe we can get more customers because it's all in English. How do we deal with that? I'll use these AI dub voices, blah, blah, blah. Right. It still might be under review. But it's doing better than the Mac Pro because at least they're doing stuff with it. Not that we're better. But anyways, so...

that this whole story is interesting in that regard. But I think the thing that's most interesting to me is the part in, as you just mentioned, John, the part about the voices. Let me read just that quick, that subject one more time. The workouts and meditations will be digitally dubbed with a generated voice in Spanish, German, and Japanese with more dubbed episodes, blah, blah, blah. Uh, the generated voice based on the actual voice of each of the 28 fitness plus trainers.

I think that's fascinating. And if I'm to base how this will go on Workout Buddy, which I don't know if you recall this. I think it was new this year. I don't think it was last year. But the idea is as you're doing a workout with your watch. there will be a workout buddy that will chime in periodically and say something along the lines of great job in your outdoor walk. You've walked three, four, 340 million miles so far this year. You have 28 minutes left in your exercise ring. And now.

Back to Metallica or whatever you're listening to. And the voice that I use is very clearly, if I'm not mistaken, it's Sam, which is one of the trainers on Fitness Plus. They don't name who it is, but that's pretty clear who it is. I'm pretty sure I have that right. But anyways, it's really good.

Again, she, it, whatever, will even announce the music or whatever that you're listening to. I don't think it does anything for podcasts, but for music, when I'm using Apple Music anyway, it'll say, now back to, you know, Metallica. goose or what have you. And it really is, I mean, it's clear that it's not a human.

But as generated voices go, it's really, really, really good. So I presume and assume that they're using similar technology for Workout Buddy as they are for these dubbed episodes. But I just think that's super duper cool and very fascinating.

approach yeah this is uh becoming more popular there was actually a recent controversy in one of the video games that i'm playing now where the voice actors that voice the lines of the various characters in the video game were depending on how you asked forced or railroaded into signing a contract that said you give us the right to essentially generate you know

generate uh speech from your voice like i'm the same way these i'm assuming these fitness trainers did you work as a fitness trainer for apple plus and part of their contract probably says we are allowed to synthesize your voice so that we can you know make you speak German even though you don't speak German or whatever, dub you in a different language.

and people don't like that because people are mad about ai and they're like well that was part of their contract those voice actors or those fitness trainers signed it or like yeah but they were forced into it because you can't get a job in this industry because they all make you sign away your rights to x y and z so

uh anyway people are mad at the video game because the video game you know has lines of dialogue that are generated by you know ai trained on the actual voice actors voices so i don't know how this is going to turn out it seems like another one of those things where like There have to be better contract negotiations, kind of like before the contracts dealt with streaming and everything like that. Better contract negotiations to get a better deal that if you are going to sign away your...

ai voice writes that you are fairly compensated for it in some way so i wonder if the fitness plus trainers are kind of feeling the same way of like hey wait a second did you just kind of replace me like rather than paying me to read all those lines in german and the second thing is okay

So they train it on your voice in English, but there are sounds in other languages that don't exist in English. So... it's interesting like for native speakers of language to say does this person does this sound right you know does this person speaking korean sound correct or are there sounds that are chinese like or are there sounds that sound weird because nothing in the training it included that sound.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how that's going to work out, but I do think it's fascinating one way or the other. And if ATP listener, if you, you know, try one of these in a week or so when it comes out and you have feedback, please, you know, send me a toot on Maston or something. I'd be interested to hear. you think especially if you speak a language if you're listening to a dub in a language that doesn't that has sounds that are not in English

Or just if you're a native speaker of the language dubbed into, let us know how good are these dubs? How does it sound natural? Can you tell it's AI generated? Or how good does it sound basically?

One other quick piece on this. Later on, I hadn't read this part yet. There's a quote in reading from the announcement. Through its seamless integration across Apple devices, Fitness Plus has helped inspire users to live a healthier day, said Jay Blahnik, Apple's Vice President of Fitness Technologies.

I call this out. I think it's interesting that they're quoting Jay Blahnik. Not necessarily bad, but certainly interesting. Because if you recall, just a few months back, I think it was like summertime or something like that, there was a big controversy where he was accused of really...

Jay Blahnik, that is, was accused of really toxic workplace culture and mild to severe harassment and so on and so forth. And Apple seemed to just kind of want to sweep this under the rug. And I'm not here to pass judgment as to whether or not any of those accusations were true. usually are, from what I can tell. So anyways, I just thought it was interesting that they actually came out and quoted him specifically, a named quote in the newsroom announcement.

I file this under the same thing as people getting a press release saying how wonderful they are when they get forced out of a company for not doing their job. If you're a high enough level executive and you do terrible things and everybody hates you, they will fly cover for you and allow you to continue to have a job. job and uh sweep that stuff under the carpet and i agree with you casey usually when you when a store like that actually gets out into the public it has to be so bad

that we actually hear about it. There's plenty of bad managers doing bad things in positions where that doesn't get out to the public. When it does, it's really almost always like a weather smoke, there's fire situations. Maybe a little bit more corporate dysfunction at the high levels of Apple.

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Cloudflare. If you recall, there was a Cloudflare outage in mid-November, I believe it was. We talked about it, what was it, last week, I think. And John, you had moved your, or excuse me, not moved, you had put Cloudflare in front of your website to handle certificates and whatnot.

And Jay Ramskov writes, good timing with the switch to automatic SSL certificate updates since they will soon start expiring quite quickly. And we will link to, and Jay Ramskov linked to, TLS certificate lifetimes will officially reduce to 47 days.

And there's a post on DigiCert that talks about this. So Stephen Davidson at DigiCert writes on May 16th of this year, the CA browser forum has officially voted to amend the TLS baseline requirements to set a schedule for shortening both the lifetime of TLS certificates and the reusability of... CA validated.

information in certificates the first user impacts of this ballot takes place in march 2026 the new ballot targets certificate valid validity of 47 days making automation essential and if you read this link and john correct me whenever you're ready but my

My executive summary, as the chief summarizer in chief, is that the current timeline is, I think, something like 400 days. And over the next few years, it's going to shorten and shorten and shorten. And what I found fascinating was the 47-day number wasn't actually arbitrary. It was one, and now I'm sort of reading from the article, one maximum month, which is 31 days, plus half of a 30-day month, which is 15 days.

plus one day of wiggle room. So that's how you get to 47, which I thought was very interesting. But all of this came from Apple. They didn't say it this way, but I kind of read it as Apple railroaded everyone into, look, this should be automated. We should force people to automate it. It's not safe to do it by hand.

Let's make it so incredibly short that it's frustrating not to. And apparently it was Apple that really banged this drum really hard and started this whole process. Yeah, this is an interesting human factors type thing where, I mean, if you've...

been in the web world or worked on server side stuff or even just been a customer for long enough uh i'm sure you've encountered a situation where oops someone forgot to renew their ssl certificate on this very popular website and you're like how can that possibly happen

Like this is an incredibly popular website. It's the yahoo.com, whatever, like some really popular website. That's an incredibly popular website. I'm saying back in time, like back, you know, a long time. You go to a website and like there's some security error and you can't bring it up. You're like.

Don't they have a person on staff whose job it is? And let me tell you, having worked for a lot of big companies that make a lot of money and have a lot of employees, when certificates last for five years, it's really easy.

to miss that five year anniversary renewal time when you have to refresh the certificate and only find out about it when like alarms start going off at like 1am when the certificate expires and nobody noticed because the person who had set up who had done it and then set a counter reminder

years like left the company two and a half years ago and you know no one else was on top of that and then the first time that happens at every company this is big meeting and everyone gets together we're not gonna let this happen again blah blah but the point is when things are done manually i mean there's a long time between them it's easy to forget so i think apple's point here is like

If you make the time short enough, there's no way any sane company you hope is going to do this manually. There are lots of other dangers of doing it manually too, of secrets leaking out and copying and pasting things into the wrong window and crap like that. You want it to be automated.

All that said, I had no idea this was happening. And it is just a happy accident that there's no way I'd want to do the thing that I had to do, like all those sites manually every 47 days. So if I hadn't done the Cloudflare stuff that I'd done, I definitely would have done it once. i learned that they're going to keep shortening the thing until it gets to 47 days so automation is good

Wes Doman writes, John should look into GitHub Pages for a static site. It's free and can be built from Markdown using GitHub Actions and also includes SSL. I've been running my blog site on it for years now and I've seen zero performance or uptime issues, no server costs, no renewals, etc.

I think this is interesting, but you're not a Markdown fan, if I'm not mistaken, right? No, and I wouldn't hitch my wagon to the GitHub star. I mean, it's Microsoft-owned, and they're doing some weird stuff, and they're not primarily a web host. So it's fun for a cute little thing, and it's great that it works, but I wouldn't want to. put my side there.

Fair enough. And then an anonymous Cloudflare employee wrote, you can use Cloudflare workers, pages, or even R2 to host static sites there directly. No need to run your own origin for this, all free. Workers started as a serverless offering, but is now able to host static assets.

too and thus do what pages does so workers are certainly the way to go for new stuff beyond static assets workers can be used to build insanely scalable full stack web applications without issues would have been perfect for the overcast chapter image back in for example the workers plus r2 plus kv which i believe

key value storage plus durable object stack is very powerful and scalable so i actually looked into this um pages it seems like it's kind of deprecated even if it's not really deprecated they're like You know, workers is the new thing. It can do everything the pages did. But pages was very aligned towards letting you make static sites. R2 is just like S3. It's just like a bucket or whatever. But I think R2 has some interesting features in terms of URL rewriting.

like just on the bucket that S3 doesn't have. So you could really serve a static site and not have like .html extensions on all your URLs because I think R2 will do stuff I haven't. Tyler looked into that. But what I did look into was workers. Workers has a way of saying, like, you have static assets and put them in a directory and then.

you know deploy your worker and you can run it locally or you can run it on the cloudflare servers and you point it to a domain and it's real easy and i set that up on my website and then i tried to do my first deployment i was just using a different scratch domain

I tried to do the deployment and it's like, oh, it looks like you have a file that's more than 25 megabytes and assets can't be more than 25 megabytes. I'm like, oh, that really puts a damper on workers. And they're like, well, you know, you can.

you can put the files that are bigger than 25 megabytes in R2. And then you can route you can in your worker config, you can say if a request comes in for this route it to the R2 bucket instead of the secure assets thing but i was like oh i don't want to have to figure out all the 25 meg files that are over here and do all this routing so let me just do pure worker in front of r2 because the worker you get to actually write like node.js code or whatever where you can do any routing you want

and do all your redirects you just write code instead of having to do like a server config um and i got that set up and this is everything i'm describing it took place today so this was i was able to explore a lot of this pretty quickly and i have basically my website up with workers on all backed by R2 using a different domain.

And it seems fine. I might move the real site there. Again, this is all entirely free, which is great. Like you can run code like, you know, the quote unquote code is like. a javascript file that's like a page of code like just you know when a request comes in what should i do with it and

you get to implement all of your routing logic however you want to do it and my routing logic is not complicated i'm basically just move removing .html file extensions i also get to set all my cache expiration headers and do all the stuff that you would do in a typical web server config so i'm pretty impressed by but I haven't decided whether I am going to move, fully move the site there right now. I'm still just putting Cloudflare and it's caching in front of my crappy shared hosting thing.

I may actually just leave the crappy shared hosting to Mulder and move all the actual pages to Cloudflare. Tune in next week for an update. And as for using it for overcast images,

Two reasons why I haven't done this. Number one, when you actually look at the number of images I would have to host. A lot of times, any kind of managed image service is priced per... per source image. And even if you try to like kind of make your own and you look at like what the scale would be for me to do this for every podcast and every podcast's individual episodes of episode art.

We're talking millions of images, the small versions of which you at least get a lot of traffic and the big versions get some traffic. So it's a very large number. And usually the economics of it are way out of whack for what that would be. But secondly.

I also don't like relying on a proprietary service in the hosting world that nothing else can replicate. Right now, I've been with Linode for a while. I just use the basic... you know linode compute instances which used to be called vps's and these are just little linux servers and If Linode goes bad, which it has been, I'm able to move to other hosts, which I'm looking at, that can also host any kind of Linode computing instance.

Everyone can host that. AWS can host that. There's DigitalOcean. There's different other hosts. I'm looking at Hetzner now. Because they're apparently in the US now, which I didn't realize. And so there's, you know, if that host goes bad, whatever host I'm on, I can move without rewriting my entire stack. Now, moving hosts is not fun, but I can do it. When I was using S3.

as I was describing, and then using Leonard object storage. Those are just, that's the same like standard compatible service. It was no big deal to move from S3 to Leonard objects. And then Leonard objects, for some reason, was limited to 50, 500 million, whatever it was, entries. it was no big deal to then move out of Leonard objects into Cloudflare R2, which John was just talking about. Because these are all like plug-in compatible identical functioning services, basically.

When you get into anything that's more specialized, that's more managed by one of these, or a capability that only Cloudflare has, that means if Cloudflare goes bad, I can't move very easily. And the kind of decisions I make for my hosting...

I look at the long term because moving hosts is terrible. Dealing with server code more than you have to is terrible. I don't love dealing with servers at all. I do it to achieve its means to an end. So I want my servers to be as low maintenance as possible. The last thing I want is for anything I choose today to be different or discontinued or merged with something else in three or five years. And you might think, oh, you won't have to worry about it. Well, Overcast is 11 years old.

I do have to worry about things like that. And so I've been burned in the past of, you know, anytime I've relied on some kind of like new managed thing that, oh, you can just, you've run this other cloud service thing by this provider and you automatically get this. this capability that it just managed for you. And yeah, usually within five years, if you're looking at that kind of time span,

A lot of those services are no longer there, or they jack up the prices really high, and they're no longer affordable. Or when you get to overcast scale, they weren't affordable to begin with. So there's all sorts of... of reasons why I do very boring things in the hosting world. Mostly it's because it's a lot cheaper. And at my scale, that matters. And then secondly,

It is because of the longevity concerns. This is a rapidly moving industry and anything too specialized, I don't like to rely on. And on that front with my little dinky static site.

as it turns out doing something like this i mean again r2 is just like an s3 replacement i'm using i'm using s3 compatible commands like uh the r clone command and stuff like you know that's kind of a plugin thing because the s3 api has become the de facto api but The amount of like custom code that I have to essentially port from my Apache config on my crappy shared host to my worker.js file.

It's basically the same. Like there's like a page of code you got to write in Apache for like redirect rules and expires headers or whatever. uh and then there's like a page of javascript you have to write that does the same thing that's around the range of stuff that you want to change no matter you have so i have a static host i can take it a static site i can take it anywhere what if i took it to somewhere that uses nginx

then I would have to write a page of Nginx config somewhere. Probably like you're always, there's, it's impossible to move things without changing anything, anything. Like you're always going to have to do something. But if it's like a page of code and you might think, well, that's just configuration. Now you have to write code.

the like index.js file that i wrote is not any more complicated than having to look up what the directives for nginx or apache are so if you have a static site don't think you're not going to have to do some kind of thing when you move your stuff but it's the difference between like

all right so i ported a one page of config to one page of javascript versus marco's thing where it's like oh you wrote something for workers but now you got to get it to work in aws lambda and all the apis are different because the worker api thing that talks to r2 and everything is nothing like the

api set for you know talking to s3 and lambda or whatever even though r2 and s3 are both compatible the javascript interface to that and to the request response and everything is different i don't think there's a de facto standard for sort of like um

serverless, uh, worker type things, but I might be wrong about that. But anyway, that's the thing to keep in mind. And yes, I kind of agree with Marco's thing of like, look, if you just give me a server with the CPU and memory and disc and let me run software on it, that's probably the most portable thing.

So coming back to Cloudflare, we spoke about this, I think it was last week, and then shortly after the episode was released, we got some feedback. Tony Denke writes, guys, please don't talk about Cloudflare again, and conveniently included a 500 internal server error. Cloudflare image. And then Landon wrote, the irony of listening to John talk about the next Cloudflare outage and experiencing it at the same time.

So as it turns out, on the 5th of December, there was another Cloudflare outage. Starting at 8.47 universal time, a portion of Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures. The incident was resolved at 9.12, or about 25 minutes of total impact.

all services were fully restored. A subset of customers were impacted, accounting for approximately 28% of all HTTP traffic served by Cloudflare. The issue was triggered by changes being made to our body parsing logic while attempting to detect and mitigate an industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in reality.

server components. Yeah. As I noted last week, my, you know, wrongheaded notion that I said like, oh, Cloudflare. Yeah, I always meant to move to Cloudflare and they just had an outage, right? So they probably won't have another one soon. That's not how it would just work.

I was hoping this one would be caused by them trying to mitigate the problems of the first outage. It just turns out it was caused by something else. But they did mention some of the changes they were making for the other outage. Yeah. Anyway, bad luck, but this one didn't affect every site. In fact, my site stayed up.

entire time so lucky me but uh it was funny that i talked about talked about moving to cloudflare right after they had a big outage and they immediately had another one all right with regard to the dingus and saying one's name jonathan gobranson writes

Regarding whether Siri answers in voice, text, both, et cetera, this is configurable in settings and then Apple intelligence in Siri. And there is a knowledge-based article that we will link. And additionally, an image of this. And it says in Siri responses, spoken responses is the header. And the three options are prefer silent responses, automatic, or prefer spoken responses. And the footer reads, Siri will always speak responses in certain circumstances.

circumstances like when you appear to be driving or or using headphones with the screen off yeah so i did figure that out with the screen off thing i don't know if the automatic is the default but that's what mine was set to and honestly i left it on automatic it's good to know if i ever

want to demand that it say my name out loud i can switch it to prefer spoken responses but i guess automatic normally works fine except for that one time when i really really needed to speak to me and it wouldn't yep

Orin Aydin writes, after hearing episode 668, I tried getting Siri to say my name and it wouldn't work. Then I had the idea of trying with my AirPods while the phone was in my pocket and it actually worked. Siri said my name. As a side note, I also tried getting Siri to call my daughter, but it...

couldn't find her no matter what I did. I added her as my daughter in the contacts app and tried telling Siri her name, but nothing helped. What finally worked was opening her contact page and telling Siri to set this contact as my daughter. Also be grateful that your native language is English. I once tried using Siri in Hebrew, and let's just say it wasn't very pretty.

Wow, is that Apple Intelligence? You can go to a page on the screen and say this and it knows what it is. It's a miracle. That is a miracle. I would never have thought to try that because I would think it was one of those things they hadn't added to Siri yet. Right? Sad. When you say this in the past, you could say things like, remind me about this tomorrow at 1.

What it would do is whatever the like, you know, the current like NS user activity was. So you could actually I don't think it ever worked well in third party apps. I never actually tried it much. But, you know, if there was like a web page that you wanted to be reminded of, you could say, remind me of this tomorrow. If there's a phone call.

And it would actually create a reminder that would link to that thing. That still does work, but I don't know how that will change in the era of Apple intelligence, which is supposed to be a lot more aware of stuff like that.

Then we had a couple of people, a handful of people write in about a little bit of an oops. That was kind of our fault. Sean Santry writes, I was listening to ATP episode 668 via CarPlay. And when you said dingus, say my name, my. Dingus answered. Then, since the podcast had briefly paused, Overcast helpfully rewound exactly to the point where he said, Dingus, say my name. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Reed Sorensen writes, thanks to the handy smart resume feature in Overcast, the Siri discussion in episode 668 threw my phone into a five-second time loop of Dingus, say my name, while I was driving in conditions too snowy to hit the skip button.

Hey Siri, buy Overcast Premium. Confirm, confirm. Lots of people wrote in with this. As I said in the header here, it's kind of a team effort. Me saying it and Marco making an app that will rewind just long enough to make it say that over and over again. And I was like the person who, speaking of snow, Casey.

in richmond who couldn't fix the situation because they were driving in the snow and they had to keep their hands on the wheel good job it's more important to keep your hands on the wheel just you know eventually we'll get through this but yeah it wasn't just like one person this happened to uh we had a bad coincidence of timing and speech that caused a lot of people to go into a loop with overcast that made me every time i saw it i felt bad but i also it every single one of them made me giggle

All right, we have an update from friend of the show, underscore David Smith. We were talking last episode about Alan's departure, Alan Dye's departure, and the reaction to all the 26 OSs. And, John, you had made some passing reference, I think, to underscore.

post about the slower than expected rollout. So building on that, Dave in the 20th of November wrote last year around a week before Thanksgiving was when Apple hit the go wide everyone button for iOS 18 updates, resulting in a rapid uptick in adoption. the following weeks. And we'll include a link to this with the picture in the show notes. This year, we didn't get the big jump in iOS adoption right before Thanksgiving. And again, that's in David's tweet.

And then on the 8th of December, Dave writes, aha, someone at Apple hit the update everyone button over the weekend. So now I'm seeing the more rapid uptick in adoption of iOS 26 that I've been hoping for. We'll probably hit the majority mark in the next couple of days.

Yeah, we got that feedback after we published the episode. When we recorded it, I said that underscore hadn't seen the uptick. But as soon as we published it, people were saying, I'm seeing the iOS 26 getting pushed more aggressively. And sure enough, underscore is like, yep, it's happening.

the line is bending so yeah i don't know why they waited longer this year maybe because the 26.0 was buggier or whatever but uh you know or or caution about people being cranky about the os but it seems like it's happening so uh I guess over the Christmas holidays or the end of year holidays, ask your relatives what they think of iOS 26 and did they enjoy getting it pushed onto their phone?

Fun fact, it's because we brought it up. That's why they flipped the button. They heard ATP and said, oh, we forgot. And so that's why that's why the switch got flipped. You're welcome, everyone. I think there was something up with, I mean, obviously we all know like 26.0 had a lot of bugs. I had an overcast update that I shipped that would crash like on one or two of the early betas of 26.0.

one or two, I forget which point really. I think point one, because point one's out, yeah. So some of the early betas of TwinX is point one, it would crash, because they had added an API that I was calling in the shipping version, but the first two betas didn't have that API.

Anyway, what I learned from feedback emails about that and from digging in with certain people like trying to figure out why it was crashing for them is that it sounded like like their company that manages OS releases and like their IT department that approves. releases for their phones, their company had mandated one of those early beta versions of 26.1. Now, I also heard the same story from at least...

five or six different people about like, oh, their company approved version was this 26.1 beta and that's why they were on it. So it seems like some big company or some, you know, standards and practices followed by some group of companies. actually had their employees install 26.1 beta and like lock them on that until I guess a better version could be approved or whatever.

So that I think is really interesting that like maybe, you know, rumor out there of 26.0 was so bad that they forced their users onto this beta and then just haven't updated it yet. I doubt it was a rumor. It's probably because it didn't work with some part of their like, you know.

intranet or whatever and they basically couldn't use 26.0 so they had to stop people from using 26.0 i mean they could have just stopped them from using any of the 26 os's but maybe it was too late and people who had upgraded so they forced everyone to 26.1 beta to basically stop the bleeding of whatever problem they had with 26.0 but yeah not an ideal situation

It could have even just been as simple as like they're buying new iPhones. They come with 26.0. They got it. They got it. Yeah. Yeah. They can't. They have no choice. They can't downgrade them. But 26.0 like doesn't work with their, you know, corporate VPN or some other has some other bug that they're like, we can't let people run this. We have to mandate.

use 26.1 beta and you know guess what betas are beta yeah although but apparently still maybe better than 26.0 it was although can i can i give a little just a tiny little complaint here i know we're on a roll i just want to

Just a really quick complaint. Tethering is still totally broken on my iPhone 17 Pro.

It's to the point where like, I actually, I'm trying to turn it off and disable it because I'm now just carrying around a standalone 5G hotspot. And sometimes my laptop will... attach a tethering on the phone without me realizing it instead of joining the hotspots wi-fi network and i will you know be on the train and stuff will just slow down and stop working oh that's weird are we in a bad reception area oh no i see the little chain link icon oh i'm on tethering

Why does it keep going to tethering? So I spent all of the last few years trying to get my laptop to please automatically connect to tethering whenever you can. Now, if you get to stop, please stop automatically getting to tethering because it's so bad. It's completely. broken. I have no idea what's up. If it's my phone, if it's AT&T, I've never had this problem with any other phone and I've been on the same AT&T setup for a very long time.

But tethering is completely broken for me and not not in a way that like I could ask for support because, yeah, it'll work for a while. So like it's not like it's not working at all. It works for a bit and then eventually just. connections start failing and timing out and nothing happens. And I don't know what to do about this. I've never had an iPhone that had this problem.

And I did some quick research the other day and I found like some Reddit threads about it. So like I think it might be other people as well, but it didn't seem like a massively widespread thing. So if anybody knows what the heck am I supposed to do about this, please let me know. Thanks.

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All right. So Intel might be making chips for Apple. We talked about this a little bit, but it's more than what we initially thought. And, uh, and also we have some feedback about it. Tambourine man writes one thing. I didn't think you guys emphasized enough on the Intel made. series topic is that intel could still be a potential competitor

Apple will be providing them with state-of-the-art chip schematics, which is stopping Intel from learning a few tricks and implementing them in their x86 offerings. That's something no TSMC customer has to worry about, and it seems like a major competitive advantage that TSMC has.

Yeah, presumably Intel and entering the foundry business cleanly separates the foundry business from their own chip designs. But it is a thing that you should worry about. And also, like, obviously, you know, you can you can learn a lot about your competitors chips without them giving you the designs just by chopping. the top off of them and examining them and stuff. But yes, the schematics probably help as well. That's I think a lot of companies do walk that line. I mean, Apple itself.

you know how well it does like apple has its own apps and yet it also accepts third-party apps now granted it doesn't get the source code to them but it is an advantage to know what third parties are doing because you can see their apps in development or whatever and

Lots of other companies do this. Microsoft has their own first party games, as do other console developers and stuff. And yet they also solicit third party games. So I don't think this is an impossible thing for Intel to deal with, but it is a much cleaner relationship with TSMC. It doesn't have any chips of it. its own and you don't have to worry about them making them, at least right now. Didn't Samsung manufacture Apple's chips for a little while? Yeah, for a long time. Next item.

Yeah, there you go. David Beck writes, Apple split the manufacturing for the A8 between Samsung and TSMC before switching entirely to TSMC. Oh, there's a graph I meant to put in here. Maybe I'll put it in next week or whatever, showing the... The number of manufacturers for a particular transistor process node or whatever, starting way back in the day of like, you know, I don't know, it's like 90 nanometers. And, you know, they were much larger than now.

And the number of companies who manufacture the different process node sizes goes down dramatically from like 15 to 20. And we're currently at like... two maybe three and that is tsmc samsung and then on the graph intel was in gray like it was grayed out it's like well technically they might kind of sort of be doing it but uh yeah so samsung is is one of the last fabs standing Still a little bit behind TSMC and Intel is maybe in the race, but there used to be so many more.

Um, even though there was a big lead, the other ones would eventually get on board and, you know, they weren't on at all at the same time, but the graphs are showing who has ever made a 90 nanometer chip and had a huge list who has ever made a three nanometer chip way smaller list. Gafrito Marocci writes, didn't Apple's chip boss talk about packaging being the thing to watch out for? And.

That is something we talked about in the past. We talked about it in episode 562, and this was based on Johnny Sruji and an interview that he had. And John has been kind enough to find a timestamp link for the video on YouTube. So thank you, John. So why are we talking about packaging in the first place? Because on November 18th...

And Alexander Kay in TechPowerUp writes, Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm are considering Intel Foundry for its advanced packaging technologies, which could allow Intel to significantly increase its Foundry revenue without manufacturing the actual silicon. Job listings from Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm Qualcomm highlight Intel's Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge, or EMIB, as a key requirement for packaging engineer positions. Qualcomm's CEO recently stated that Intel is not an option today.

He noted that Intel's current Foundry node, likely 18A, is not suitable for their mobile chips. The main focus of the 18A node is not on mobile low-power SoCs, but rather on mid-range and high-power solutions. However, the 18A node is seemingly not what is attracting customers like Qualcomm.

packaging that intel offers last year broadcom tested the 18a node but expressed disappointment however now intel's advanced packaging is emerging as a promising alternative to tsmc's c-o-w-o-s and other packaging types intel's boundary advanced packaging portfolio enables designers to utilize 2d 2.5d and 3d building blocks to optimize cost power and bandwidth emib is a substrate embedded silicon bridge that offers localized high density die-to-die routing without the cost and area drop

backs of a full-size silicon interposer. So this is an interesting twist on the rumor of like, oh, Intel is going to make chips. So this is a November story. And like, oh, actually, people are interested in Intel, not because of 18A, which some customers are...

at least two customers here are saying yeah we didn't like it it's not great 18a is not what we need for mobile chips or for low power chips but they have their own packaging things sort of like you know i know we've talked about these weird abbreviations that tsmc has like c-o-w-o-s and all the other ones

basically a way of taking a bunch of smaller dies and putting them together in an efficient manner. It's easier to make a bunch of small dies because you have a higher chance of a small die coming out with no defects than a bigger one, right? So if you can make a bunch of small ones and connect them, AMD has been doing that with its chiplets or whatever.

and the soic is the thing that tsmc is supposedly using for the m5 pro and m5 max we'll see when those are released early next year uh intel has its emib thing which is a way of stacking a bunch of dyes together so maybe Apple is going to fab the silicon for the M6 or M7 at TSMC and then give those little dies.

to Intel for it to package with the EMI bay thing. And maybe that's the source of the rumor of saying, oh, Intel is going to be fabbing the M series chips for Apple. Maybe they're not going to be fabbing them. Maybe they're going to be.

packaging them uh lots of rumors swirling around this but i can you know i don't i'm not sure which way this will go but like having both qualcomm and broadcom say 18a fast but not good for low power doesn't make me think oh that means that you know is apple going to make a the base m series ship on a on a

a process that's not good for low power or are they just not interested in 18a it's really going to be 14a if apple if intel ever even builds those things so keep an eye on that packaging as surgery says it's the place of an it's interesting i mean

The real packaging thing is like the SOIC is a packaging innovation that I'm assuming Apple will tout when the new M series chips comes out. We'll see if they tout that. But everybody's trying to do something with packaging. And this is Intel's take on it.

All right. And then finally, reading from MacRumors from a few days back and Joe Rosignol over at MacRumors. In a research note with the investment firm GF Securities this week obtained by MacRumors, analyst Jeff Poo said he and his colleagues now expect Intel to reach a supply. deal with Apple for at least some non-pro iPhone chips starting in 2028.

The non-pro iPhone chips would be manufactured with Intel's future 14a process, according to Poo. The research note did not provide any other details about these potential plans, but based on the standard time frame, Intel could start supplying Apple with the A22 chip. for devices like the iPhone 20 and the iPhone 20 E in around three years from now.

More rumors, not for Mac chips. Now for phone chips, which are even smaller and even lower power, but this is about 14A and not 18A. So I guess all these rumors only take place at Apple. I keep saying Apple. Intel actually builds and ramps up 14A and 18A. to actually be able to manufacture chips. But I would keep an eye on this. It's pretty interesting that Apple is supposedly in talks for not just Mac stuff, which are way lower volume than the phone, but like...

I guess it's not the pro chips, not the flagship flagship, but even the non-pro phones, they sell a lot of those. So to be talking to Intel about that is something.

All right. And finally, for follow up today, we had a fascinating article, actually a couple of articles from our good friend, John Gruber. One of them is entitled Bad Die Job, which is very good. I'm going to read a fair bit of it because a lot of it is pertinent. But it is worth, if you are not driving or whatever, it is worth having a read of this entire article.

It's a little bit on the longer side for Gruber's stuff, but it is very, very good and absolutely fascinating. Yeah, and the reason I'm reading, put these long passages in here, because like you just summarize it like, Gruber, not a fan of Alan Dye. Like that would be the quick summary. Why do we need to have all this stuff? I thought it was notable. And again, Casey will read some excerpts here so you get a feel for it. So you don't have to read the whole thing. Exactly how.

much ripper trashes alan die like he's he's not above like calling it like he sees it or whatever and being blunt but he spent a long time saying a lot of terrible things about alan die i mean we'll talk about it when you finish reading things but just I mean, I think in some places maybe he's a little bit unfair, but either way, this is sort of the most, I don't know, the most angry, the most vitriol I've seen from Gruber in a long time.

Right. So again, this isn't the whole article, but it gives you the general gist. Everyone I've spoken to at Apple is happy, if not downright giddy, at the news that Stephen LeMay is replacing Di.

LeMay is well-liked personally and deeply respected talent-wise. Said one source in a position to know the choices, quote, I don't think there was a better choice than LeMay, quote. The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today's news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Di would ever get...

squeezed out, and no one expected that he'd just up and leave on his own. If you care about design, there's nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious. Alan Dye doesn't actually care about design. Shots fired. I see the construction. there in the snark i'm sure he does care about design he's just bad at it or maybe maybe the kind of design that he is better at is not software ui design like you know maybe like uh you know laying out uh ads in magazines

I mean, look, he rose to a high level at Apple when he was doing the print and packaging and marketing. He rose to a high level for a reason. He probably is a good designer in certain ways, and maybe he's a good designer in different ways. different types of design. Maybe he's a good designer when working in different teams or with different people around him or above him maybe. But he got to a point in Apple where he was not a good designer.

I don't necessarily blame him personally for that. I blame Apple for putting him in that position that he shouldn't have had. So continuing with Gruber, the oddest thing... about Alan Dye's stint-leading software design is that there are effectively zero design critics who've been on his side.

The debate regarding Apple's software design over the last decade isn't between those on Dye's side and those against. It's only a matter of debating how bad it's been and how far it's fallen from its previous remarkable heights. It's rather extraordinary in today's hyper-partisan world that there's nearly universal agreement amongst...

actual practitioners of user interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. I'm sorry. I'm trying to get through this with a straight face. It was a big problem inside the company, too. I'm aware of dozens of designers who've left Apple out of frustration over the company's direction. From the stories I'm aware of, the theme is identical. These designers are driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, doing great work was no longer the guiding principle at Apple.

to work at Apple to do the best work in the industry. That has stopped being true under Alan Dye. The most talented designers I know are the harshest critics of Dye's body of work and the direction in which it's been heading. Yeah, this also echoes what we've heard elsewhere. And we've seen some people like Louis Mantia, a great designer. He's been blogging about it, but there's also people who don't want to speak out publicly because it's bad for.

career moves for a lot of people. But we've heard from a lot of people that this is the case, that it seemed... During the Dai era at Apple, which did not seem like it was going to end anytime soon, it seemed like there was not a place there anymore for people who cared about user interface design the way that we all... New Apple 4.

Years ago, why do we all come to the Mac? Why do we all love these products so much? And why do we stick around through some of the more difficult times? Let's be honest, it isn't all roses. And it's because of... details and priorities and values that Alan Dye's design in user interface just didn't really practice or outright had disregard for or outright despised, it seemed.

And this is why, like, you know, yeah, Gruber is being pretty harsh here. What got under Gruber's skin probably is all the years of Allen Dive's software organization or software design organization. doing things that were pretty antithetical to the reason why we all love this platform, these platforms, especially the Mac.

There's very few people besides John Syracuse maybe who love the Mac as much as John Kruber. And to Alan Dye's design style on the Mac was really rough and outright dismissive. kind of you know just going through with a wrecking ball and not understanding any of it and not caring and just plowing through so yeah Gruber got fired up and yeah some of this I think some of this is a little a little harsh but I was reading it

With popcorn, honestly. I'm not incredibly proud of that, but I just – I loved this. It felt like – An amazing expression of a lot of the frustration that I've been feeling for years. So I was very happy to see all of this.

Oh, goodness. All right. So continuing with the other post, Alan Dye was in Tim Cook's blind spot. I'd have thrown open AI in that list of companies where it would have been surprising but not shocking for Dye to leave Apple for. But that simply wasn't possible given Johnny Ives' relationship. with sam altman love from's collaboration with open ai with the io project and ive's utter disdain for abdai's talent leadership and personality uh citation needed but woof

Yeah, I believe this is the first we are hearing about this. I believe I'd never heard before that, you know, what Gruber is saying that I guess he's heard that Johnny Ive really does not like Alan Dye or his work, which is surprising because it seems from what we were.

I think from what we were told or what was reported, it seems like Johnny Ive is the person who put Di in that role. Maybe that's not true, or maybe Ive used to like him and didn't like where he went with the job. Who knows? But that's... That's interesting news, and that would be certainly the first time I've seen it. Like I said, the reason I think this post is notable is first, Gruber does have connections to people.

inside apple um so i'm not he tends not to cite his sources or do the people said like they do in bloomberg and other things or whatever but suffice it to say that he does know people at apple people at apple do talk to him so i take seriously when he's stating as fact that like everybody he's heard from has

said they didn't like die and absolutely right and it's not just like the five people like he talks to on his podcast but like i'm sure he's getting sources there like no defenders are coming

from apple there and the johnny ive thing is another example of just dropping that in there as if it's a fact with no sourcing but presumably he's not basing that he's not pulling that out of thin air that's coming from somewhere and i can imagine i you know i was kind of having his foot out the door for a while at apple and trying to leave and tim was making him

day and at a certain point you don't really get to pick who succeeds you you're on your way out the door you can give your opinion but the fact is you're leaving and so once he's gone maybe he didn't want died to be a successor but once you leave the company you don't get to have a your opinion doesn't matter anymore you're at

you're out of there they get to pick who replaces you so maybe he's always been mad about that um the other reason i think this is interesting is because i felt like i've been sort of internally flipping out as with a couple other selected people who i follow on mastodon

about how about the poor choices in the 26 os it's not that they're terrible as i've always said in the show like they're you they're fine you'll get through it it's not the worst thing in the world it could have gone much worse right but the things that are bad about them are so

Like they're like, you know, the canary in the coal mine. So such glaring mistakes for no good reason that are indefensible that, yeah, they don't ruin the whole ass. It doesn't make it super terrible. But like if you if you the more you know about user interface design, the more you say.

someone who could have done that, someone who made this decision here. No, it doesn't ruin the OS, but it shows that they have no idea what they're doing. And I've been just flipping out about it. And everyone else I've seen, including Gruber, has been like, oh, the 26 OSs are out there here. They're not that bad. It's a whatever.

And I'm like, maybe I'm the only one. Maybe it's just me and those two other people I follow on Mastodon who just cannot believe what they've done with these OSs. Again, not because it's so hard, terrible, it makes them unusable, but just because like. These mistakes are indicative of just a complete lack of understanding of what good user interface design is. And they're just lucky that they've been made in areas that doesn't really impact the usability as much as it could.

Like, and I wondered why I wouldn't see more stuff from Gruber saying, I can't believe that they made these mistakes, but I guess he was saving it all up because I mean, some of the stuff we cut out here is like his opinion of it, you know, in particular Tahoe.

and that design is just as harsh as mine and the other people he just hasn't been saying it and if you're thinking like what does this alan die everyone all of a sudden hates him but i never heard anything about him well i'm gonna say if you've listened to atp over the last like several years

You've heard the name Alan Dye a lot. Usually Marco saying he hates his guts and me saying, well, we don't know if Alan Dye is responsible for this. I'm not that mean. I don't, because look, I don't, I don't know the guy personally. I don't like his work.

I know, but you were using it as a placeholder of Alan Dye's design or whatever. And I was like, well, it's Apple's design. How much is Alan Dye responsible for? But now that he's left, people are coming out of the woodwork and saying, yeah, it was totally him.

Like, it makes sense. He was in charge of it. But like, it's, you know, again, it's difficult to know what's going on inside the company. But like, I feel like this is people who would now feel free to speak, essentially, that everyone sort of had this opinion and.

maybe Marco was free with his opinion in the past several years, but other people were more kind of like saying, oh, you know, maybe, you know, it's just, we don't know what goes inside Apple. I know Alan Dye is in charge, so on and so forth. But for me, it was when he was, you know, at WWDC introducing liquid glass.

stuff it's like well he's the face of he's the public face of it now so he's fair game and shortly after he just leaves the company and then everybody comes out of the woodwork and is like no i totally hated that guy and everything he did it was like you know it's it's just shocking to me like granted this is a tiny little inside baseball world and the regular public uh thus far has not had a very strong reaction but as as gruber point on the articles i've said in the past

The more you know about this, the more you know about what makes good user interface design, the more concerning the recent changes have been. Not because they have destroyed the products, but because they reveal the decision making to be... flawed in a way that is embarrassing for a company with the history and reputation of Apple. And so hopefully that will change.

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And speaking of departures, moving out of follow-up and into topics, Apple has announced more executive transitions. This is the season. Tis the season to be lonely. Apple today on December 12th announced that Jennifer Newstead will become Apple's general counsel on March 1, 2026, following a transition of duties from Kate Adams, who has served as Apple's general counsel since 2017. She will join Apple's senior vice president. Present in January reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

In addition, Lisa Jackson, vice president for environment policy and social initiatives, will retire in late January 2026. The government affairs organization will transition to Adams, who will oversee the team until her retirement late next year, after which will be.

led by Newstead. Newstead's title will become Senior Vice President, General Counsel in Government Affairs, reflecting the combining of the two organizations. The Environment and Social Initiatives teams will report to Apple Chief Operating Officer Sabi Khan.

Newstead was most recently the chief legal officer of Meta, whoops, and previously served as legal advisor of the U.S. Department of State, where she led the legal team responsible for advising the Secretary of State on legal issues affecting the conduct of U.S. foreign relations. She held a range of other positions. Thank you.

She also spent a dozen years at some law firm where she advised global corporations on a wide variety of issues. She got her undergraduate at Harvard and her law degree at Yale. So not a dummy.

uh german writes jennifer newstead helped oversee meta's successful antitrust battle with the u.s federal trade commission experience that's likely to prove useful in apple's own legal fight with the justice department over alleged anti-competitive practices

Anonymous writes, Apple's corporate values were supposedly the environment and privacy. Today, Apple eliminated the VP of Environment Precision and hired as SVP someone who not only worked at Facebook, but also helped write the U.S. Patriot Act. which is one of the most egregious violations of privacy among other civil rights in U S history. Cool. So, so this,

This change here. All right. So more people leaving Lisa Jackson. You've seen her in videos increasingly as her career went on at Apple. She was on the roof. Was she on the roof of the building? I forget. Anyway.

She's her face has been in keynotes more and more as her career has gone on. And she's the the environment person leading that whole initiative. She is retiring, not leaving for another company. And she's having someone else take over her position. But then that person is going to retire. And then all that.

environmental stuff is getting sort of wrapped up and split up and then the general council's general newstead is taking over from the um as the new general council in this new combined position blah blah jennifer newstead is making a lot of people angry because

She worked on the Patriot Act, which people don't follow U.S. politics is some panic legislation that our legislature passed when everyone was scared of terrorists to say the government should be allowed to look at all your crap. Terrorists.

It's either terrorists are like children or in danger. Anyway, incredibly why it's relevant to Apple is it's a privacy type thing. Like the Patriot Act. It's named. It's right out of a movie. The Patriot Act. Eagle Screech. You know, it's got a name that who can. who can be against the patriot act where the government gets to you know pry into all your information and crap it was it was the perfect george w bush era law name yeah um and so anyway

She was part of that. She's worked for the Trump administration. She worked for Meta for a long time. She defended Meta in the FTC case, successfully defended antitrust against the FTC. So people are like, do we want to be, why is Apple hiring someone for Meta?

apple hates who worked for uh these republican administrations who worked on legislature that was privacy invasive that apple would would not like you know because apple is usually fighting the government when they ask for information um and

And Lisa Jackson, everybody loved Lisa Jackson and she's doing environment stuff. And now they're like essentially eliminated that position. Now they don't have an environment person. It's just all going to be like put those responsibilities pushed elsewhere. And we'll talk about more about that in overtime.

My take on this is like... general counselor like the big lawyer at a hojillion dollar company like apple i should just say trillion it's a big enough number and it's actually real correct it's a real thing multi-trillion dollar company like apple um I do think that her relevant experience defending giant companies against government action and succeeding...

She overrides any of Apple's concerns about her having worked for Meta or Republican administrations or worked on the Patriot Act. Because if you're looking for the general counsel, the big lawyer at your company. to provide moral clarity, you're probably looking in the wrong place. People hire lawyers because they...

have experienced knowledge and win cases. You kind of want, it's like everyone, everyone hates everyone else's lawyer, but everyone's their lawyer to be the biggest, you know, jerk in the entire world because, you know, that's. And that's true of people, but it's doubly true of corporations. Do you know the issues involved? Can you win these cases? And Apple has.

plenty of cases where governments are trying to apply regulations on them and fining them and suing them like for what you for however much you might hate meta or whatever apple i mean maybe it's just we talk about them so much in the show like every government in the world is on their case for a lot of legitimate reasons and maybe some less ones or whatever. So I kind of think, yeah, if there's one person you're going to hire in your company where you don't really care, like...

what kind of other bad things they worked for. I mean, you can say Facebook is, you know, I don't know. She worked for like the first Trump administration, but not the second, I think. I don't know. She worked for George W. Bush. It's on the Patriot. Like, I get why people are mad.

We would prefer a lawyer who is a wonderful person who, you know, helps small children and the elderly and also wins cases against the government when they sue big companies. But I think this is just the nature of the beast that...

For employees that you're hiring, this particular role, the biggest, baddest lawyer in your company, it seems like you would have to sort of... look aside of the fact of the fact they worked at meta versus for example let me hire uh you know a new head designer and let me get it from one of gruber's favorite punching bags amazon which i think it is arguably described as a company that has no interest in design whatsoever like if apple

brought in a new head of design and brought and pulled them from amazon we'd be saying why are you pulling a new designer from there but apple pulling a new general counsel from uh meta meh that's my take Yeah, I mean, I don't really have strong feelings about it. I don't have strong feelings about the lawyer rejiggering. I have somewhat strong feelings about Lisa Jackson retiring. I don't.

like that we're just kind of letting that role fizzle i get it i get it yeah maybe it's like that because there's no one else who can do what she's done like that's such a weird position i think she was so uniquely suited for it i don't know i mean it is it is weird and concerning though and again we'll talk about this more in overtime but like

because we're gonna talk about apple in the environment but that's another thing people are upset about yeah because wasn't the position created for her like wasn't she the first person yes exactly it was basically to get her to work at apple you're going to be this new thing and now when she's leaving the position is going with her so we'll see how that turns out

Yeah. I mean, you know, people are trying to, you know, ascribe it to, you know, in Trump era America that, you know, Apple's trying to get rid of environmental stuff. I don't think this says that. And, you know, like I'd be the first person to. throw Tim Cook under the bus for that kind of thing. But I don't think this means that. But we'll see. What I suspect is that she wanted to retire for whatever her reasons were.

you can guess. There's plenty of reasons why somebody who works for, you know, works on environmental issues in a prominent role in America right now might say, you know what, enough is enough and just retire. But... I think there's enough of environmental care built into Apple that like I'm not that worried about this indicating anything either way.

Yeah. So, all right, that's not the only news. On December 6th, reading from Mark Gurman, Johnny Sruji, the Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies and one of Apple's most respected...

respected executives recently told tim cook that he is seriously considering leaving in the near future according to people with knowledge of the matter sruji the architect of apple's prized in-house chips effort has informed colleagues that he intends to join another company if he ultimately departs cook has been working aggressively

to retain him an effort that included a substantial pay package and the potential more responsibility down the road one scenario floated internally by some executives involves elevating him into the role of chief technology officer But that change would likely require John Ternus to be promoted CEO, a step the company may not be ready to take. And some people within Apple have said that Saruji would prefer not to work under a different CEO.

even with an expanded title. If Sruji does depart, the company would likely tap one of his two top lieutenants to replace him. Then, two days later, on December 8th, a new article. A chip chief tells staff he's not leaving anytime soon.

Johnny Sruji told staff on Monday that he'll stay at the iPhone maker for now. Quote, I know you've been reading all kinds of rumors and speculations about my future at Apple, and I feel that you need to hear from me directly, he said in a memo to his division. I love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I don't plan on leaving anytime soon.

That's also Gerber, by the way. So Gerber, not Gerber, Gurman. Gurman on December 6th says, oh, Suruji might be leaving. And then on December 8th, Gurman also then follows up and says, never mind. You know, Suruji sent this memo and said that he's not leaving. Good on Gurman for correcting himself quickly. Although, again, I'm not necessarily sure this is a correction because I don't think these stories are contradictory. When you get information like this, it may be about the past.

It may be that Suruji did express a potential desire lead and Cook did work aggressively to retain him and succeeded in retaining him. And then when the story breaks, this is all in the past. And Suruji writes a memo and says, I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying here. I love you all. Everything's great. Because it is. It's true. Because Tim Cook retained him by giving, you know, convincing him to stay.

Tim Cook reportedly convinced Johnny Ive to stay way longer than we all wish he did. And so maybe that's the thing that he's good at. And maybe that's the thing that happened. I. I, I, what I've heard is that everyone's saying, Oh, German was the first person to break this Johnny surgery might be leaving story. And I, I seem to recall seeing it multiple times, probably also from German. So this may have been a thing that was sort of, you know,

i think maybe we talked about it on the show and i was like oh if he's gonna oh no it was in a slack channel somewhere i'm sorry anyway um sorry my online world is uh mixed together uh very much these days um the idea was like oh suruji might be leaving uh

But if he left, would he really go to another company or wouldn't he just retire? Because again, all these people at a high level at Apple who've been there for years, they're all fabulously wealthy because the salaries are high at that level and they have Apple stock and Apple stock has been going up. So all these people can retire easily.

And Suruji is of the age, you're like, oh, you probably want to retire, right? You got your money, enjoy, you know, you don't have to wait until you're like super duper old to retire. Why would he go work at another company? And as Gruber pointed out in the recent episode of Dithering.

Where would he go that's more exciting in terms of chip design than Apple? Because Apple is one of the leaders in the kind of chip design that he's doing. Unless he wants to do a different kind of chip design that Apple doesn't do. And everyone keeps saying, you know, this is he's talking about someone who's successful. Part of the Apple, part of the company, part of Apple that's been doing really well is the chip design. And he's the head of that. So.

Uh, he's been knocking it out of the park. Why would he, you know, is he leaving at top? Where would he go where he thinks he's going to top himself? And to that, I would say, yeah, Apple's chip design has absolutely been knocking it out of the park. Uh, I think Gruber said, no one would have anything bad about to say about his work. And I was like, well. There is one area where the Johnny Surugi regime has failed to produce. Oh, no. And it was a thing that they were trying to do.

When they switched from Intel to Apple Silicon, they had plans to replace all the Intel chips with even better ones made with Apple Silicon. And they did that for every chip except for the ones in the Mac Pro. And they had planned it.

There was rumors, there was designs, there was diagrams, they were going to do it, and they've just never, ever, ever done it. Nobody cares about that. I get it. I get nobody cares. And yes, Johnny Suri G is a... champion of the world and he's done some amazing things for the chips that actually matter to apple so he gets an a plus first place

gold medal. I give it to him, but it is not true to say that there is nothing bad you can say about Johnny Surugi's time at Apple. There is one tiny little thing that I personally can say. You are the only human that has anything. I mean, here's the thing. They plan to do it, right? It's not just like me on the.

outside wishing a thing. It's a thing that was on their roadmap and they just never did it. So it's not like they decided we're not going to do this. They wanted to do it. They tried to do it. They have not been able to do it. So in that way, it is one of those very, very minor sort of internal failures.

Kind of like making their own modem chips, which they wanted to do for a long time and for a long time they failed to do and it took them, they took them a while, but they eventually did do it. It's a thing they wanted to do. I think Apple still potentially.

wants to do something like this to make a higher power chip or whatever but like and you know again the rumors were that it's not anywhere on the roadmap until like the m7 or something which we are rapidly approaching because time passes um So that's why I think it's fair to put a tiny little ding on the otherwise sterling record to say, this is a thing you were actually tasked with, that the company wanted to do, that...

it makes sense for you to want to do because you're transitioning from one set of chips to a new one and you want to have replacements that are better than all the ones you had before in all possible ways. And this one little area that doesn't even matter, I know, is an area where it failed. But anyway.

i would have expected him to retire that like why would you go to another company where are you going to go what have you got left to prove um you could same thing for it could be said of johnny i but some people just want to keep working right and so i mean who knows if that rumor is true but the rumor was he was going to leave apple and go somewhere else and i just i just can't imagine where he would have gone but apparently

According to his intended to be leaked memo, he loves everything there. He's staying in Apple. He has no plans to leave. But of course, plans change every day. So we'll keep an eye out.

All right, going back to his December 6th, so the first post. The recent shifts are already reshaping Apple's power structure. More authority is now flowing to a quartet of executives. Ternus serves as chief at EQ, software head Craig Federighi.

and new CEO of Sabi Khan. Apple's AI efforts have been redistributed across its leadership, with Federighi becoming the company's de facto AI chief. Ternus is also poised to take a starring role next year in the celebration of Apple's 50th anniversary, further raising his profile.

Even more responsibility over robotics and smart glasses, two areas seen as future growth drivers. Further reorganization is likely. Deirdre O'Brien, head of retail and human resources, has been with Apple for more than 35 years, while marketing chief Greg Joswiak has spent four decades at the company.

Apple has elevated the key lieutenants under both executives, preparing for their eventual retirements. Yeah, this is kind of the story this week. Continuing executive exodus and reshuffling at Apple. which I agree with what everyone else has said. I don't find this as a concerning thing. As Gruber said, many people are giddy about some of the departures. But it's like, it's just an age-based turnover, and it makes sense for them to sort of, you know, kind of all...

transition around the same time you know with tim cook being the big departure which will eventually happen you know whenever um people get old people want to retire people want to move on people have been in the company for decades it's a changing of the guard and I think it's all good. Like I, as I've written about, I think there needs to be turnover both at the top and everybody else underneath them. I think it's healthy for that to happen. It's been great to have the continuity of like.

The old school Apple folks sort of keeping that culture alive. But we've seen how that can fail in terms of maybe blind spots for newer technologies and not making the right moves on AI. But also. at how like those old school people who have been to the company for decades.

being unable to stop something like alan dyer ruining the user interface to all their products right so like what is the point of like oh it's great we have these people we have this continuity of leadership we have this leadership team that like this page hasn't changed in a real long time it's very stable these people have been with the company they really know the spirit of apple

The spirit of Apple doesn't do anybody any good unless it manifests in preventing the company from doing things that are clearly against the spirit of Apple. And in many, many ways recently, that has not been happening.

That's when you say, OK, your spirit of Apple, you know, sort of reason for you being in your job 40 years that no longer flies. So. probably you should retire because you kind of retirement age and let someone else have a chance and let's let's see a changing of the guard let's see some apple turnover haha and it's happening i mean even when people like lisa jackson leave that everybody loved like you know again people move on get old retire

you know good luck to them i'm happy to see a lot of turnover turnover and you know as great as johnny surugi is it's you know if he left i don't think it would be the end of the world i think what's much more concerning are the those rumors that we talked about you know many months ago about apple silicon team under him those people leaving to go work for other companies that's way more concerning than the head of of that thing because i think that organization is very functional and i think

You know, if he were ever to leave, there were probably people under him who could take over his role. And perhaps his biggest expertise was sort of like, we're going to make all our own chips now.

get that effort rolling from zero you know from you know buying pa semi and like getting him to sort of take all those people and you know go to the apple silicon era keeping that machine running is easier than starting it up from zero so i'm not I wouldn't be as concerned if he left or retired or went somewhere else, but I have been concerned with sort of the brain drain from...

the rumored brain drain from under him and the same thing with what gruber talked about which again i'm assuming is sourced even though he's not like pinpointing the sources or telling you how many people said this of designers who left Apple to go elsewhere because they didn't like the direction Alan Dye was doing things.

like we know designers left like when johnny i've left basically the whole team who was loyal to him left with him and went to work with him at love from or working with him on the open ai stuff or whatever and a lot of times you can look at that and say Those are just his friends. They wanted to go where he's going. It's fine. But here's Gruber saying.

Another factor in that is they didn't want to stay at Apple with someone leading them who doesn't know what they're doing and is telling them to do things that they disagree with. So that is way more concerning than... the people at the top leaving so i think the people at the top need to rotate uh and hopefully new people at the top will

be more proactive about preventing bad things from happening in the company so if john turnis becomes ceo he can make a lot of decisions that could change stuff there if john turnis was ceo would he have allowed alan dye to fester as long as he did or would he have done something differently that's I'm definitely optimistic about the turnover right now. Again, it can go bad. Things could be worse than they are now instead of better, but it's time for some new folks to have a shot at this.

Yeah, I mean, anytime that you change leadership, a lot of stuff gets shaken up and you are rolling the dice. You know, we don't know. pick whoever the theory is. It seems like there's a lot of smoke behind the Ternus fire here. So we don't know what kind of CEO John Ternus would be. And we don't know what kind of challenges he would face during his tenure at Apple. Just like Tim Cook. Tim Cook has had to deal with a lot of conditions and events and dynamics that...

He probably could not have predicted when he first got on the job and that Steve Jobs predicted. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, like, you know, Steve Jobs, when, you know, when basically recommending Tim Cook for the job. He couldn't have known all the stuff that Tim Cook was going to face either. And so, you know, you are you're rolling the dice with anybody. And we don't know how it's going to be. But I've said for a long time, like John, I've said that.

I'm ready for some fresh blood in a lot of these high up ranks for lots of reasons. Not all of them are bad. Some of them are just generational turnover. Obviously, you know, I'm not a huge fan of Tim Cook by any means. There was that report or that part of the German report that, you know, Tim Cook has like an unexplained tremor in his hands and people have noticed. I wouldn't read too much into that.

If it's even true. I don't think is the dexterity of his right hand is essential to his job at CEO. He's not a professional athlete. Yeah. So I wouldn't read too much into that. If he does have a health problem, you know, I'm not going to take joy in that. But I. I do want Apple to have new leadership. I don't want it to be that way, but I want Apple to have new leadership.

I'm very much looking forward to what the next generation could do. Because there was a great segment on Upgrade about this, the last two episodes of Upgrade, where especially Jason was going in deep about how when you are...

rising up the ranks if there's nowhere for you to go above a certain level you tend to often just leave to a different company or go, you know, go do something else because you, you hit a ceiling. And if the person above you is, is not going to retire for a long time, then you kind of have nowhere to go. So there is a lot of that, you know, mid-level and upper level talent. that shuffles around or departs for a different company. And that's...

Maybe that's what happened with Alan Dye. It just happened to benefit us. And on that front, though, it's not just like the person behind you is never going to leave because you'll never get their position. The other part of that is... Maybe the people above you are never going to promote you.

like maybe there's places for you to be promoted too but the people above you are have got a vendetta against you or disagree with you fundamentally about something or whatever and you feel trapped in the company not because you need someone to leave so you can take their job up because

They don't like you and won't promote you. So you leave to go out. Like that's the real danger in brain drain companies is not that the super important people on your leadership page leave. It's that the sort of mid-level and low-level people will leave for all the reasons that they leave. And one of those reasons could.

be there's some bad manager that the the manager two or three levels above should have gotten rid of the company ages ago but hasn't like you know for example someone who has creating a toxic work environment and higher level executives run cover for them because they're part of the boys club you know what i mean like that's that causes hundreds of people many levels below to say maybe i should go look elsewhere uh and that leadership is

not allowing that to happen. So yes, sometimes it's because you hit the ceiling and you can't get promoted anymore, but sometimes it's because you can't even get promoted from level one to level two because you have a bad manager above you that you can't get rid of in the company.

Yeah. And so what I'm looking forward to is the shuffling up, because what tends to happen, like, you know, one thing that like Jason mentioned, I believe, on Upgrade this week, that like when Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs. Like the very first day he brought back Apple's charitable giving matching program that like Steve Jobs just hated that kind of thing and would never allow it. Tim Cook had a list on day one of stuff to change, and it was it seemed like pretty good stuff.

Every time somebody really high up turns over, you have a chance for someone to be elevated into that role. who has one of those to-do lists that for whatever reason, the previous leader just wouldn't do it or you couldn't convince them to do it, and you know it's the right idea. Sometimes it's not, but a lot of times it is. And so whenever there is this kind of turnover...

You, you know, you get rid of like personalities or dynamics or politics that were blocking some good ideas from happening. So it tends to be positive. Now, there's also, you know, there's learning curves. There's mistakes that are made along the way.

typically responsibly done turnover when you have a good bench behind you typically result in some pretty good stuff happening um there is a lot of smoke behind the fire now of this being you know near the end of the tim cook era And when you have a CEO transition in particular, then that tends to cycle out a lot of the people around the CEO and right below the CEO. So anybody who does not get the job, who maybe wanted the job.

They're very likely to retire maybe a little bit earlier than planned or quit or leave or whatever. Anybody who doesn't get along with the new dynamic created might get forced all out of the company. There might be people.

people who just don't want to work for the new CEO. And John was saying how when Johnny Ive left, a lot of people went with him. When Alan Dye left, some people went with him. Sometimes you just want to stay with the person you've been working with because you work well together or whatever. When the CEO leaves, there tends to be a lot of shifting around of things below them. So I think there's enough smoke to this fire. I think Tim Cook is going to leave soon. And, you know, I guess leave.

in terms of the CEO role in particular. If he's made chairman of the board or whatever, that's a different story, but it does seem like he's going to leave the CEO role in the near future. This sounds very, very likely. There's a lot of smoke now behind this from pretty good sources. So probably he's out soon as CEO for whatever reason.

And so I think we're about to see a lot of this turnover. We're already seeing it like in the last few weeks. I think this is a very exciting time for Apple. And, you know, this whole generation now, like look at the leadership page now. How many of them are going to be here in five years on that leadership page? Their government report is that the quartet of executives that are gaining power now, Ternus, Eddie Q, Craig Federighi, and Sabi Khan. Well...

Craig Federighi is 57. Eddie Q is 61. I don't know how old to be Connors off the top of my head. But like, so even though, like Turner's I think is about 50. But even of those four people. Eddie Q and Craig Federighi and probably Savi Khan, all three of those will probably be retired within 10 years, maybe five. So there's a lot of turnover about to happen. And I think it's time. This era of executives has done very well. They've made a lot of great stuff happen.

And it's time for the next generation to start filtering in. So I'm looking forward to this. I think this will be exciting. And even if it's a little bit bumpy at times, you know, again, people make mistakes in their new roles here and there. Even if it's a little bit bumpy, I'm excited for all of those, like...

initial ideas that have been held back for whatever reason to start being implemented and so some of those changes to start shifting and i'm not expecting things to change overnight again this is a huge company with huge operations and like just things don't turn on a dime but progress will be made

And it'll add up over time and it'll be pretty meaningful, I bet. So I'm very much looking forward to this transition. I think we also need some young people to cycle back into Apple, which is the thing that happens. Lots of people go to work for Apple, then they leave Apple, then they come back later.

Um, certainly that happened in like the, the run-up to near bankruptcy in the late nineties. And then people came back once they realized Apple was ascendant again. And that has happened at various times in the jobs era where they, this job second era where they, uh, were very successful and people left the company.

company with their stock options uh thinking they sold at the peak and went and did something else but then they came back at apple because they realized apple was still growing and their startup that they went to failed or whatever uh the thing about

people hanging around for a long time is that it does encourage people to go elsewhere because it seems sort of like the leadership structure is sort of ossified. And like I said, the idea is that those longtime employees are sort of carrying the spirit of Apple forward, you know.

that they've been around here for a long time they really know what makes apple apple uh and it's important for them to stay with the company because they're keeping that spirit alive well that spirit again that spirit's only good if it prevents bad things from happening but if all those people leave one of the dangers of lots of turnover is now you get a bunch of young people who have no idea what apple should be

right because they've grown up with an apple that has had deteriorating user interface design for example and so they don't see that as a hallmark of apple's strength they just think it's like oh they have cool shiny phones or something and they have no idea about like apple's traditional strengths in human-centered design because that's not the apple that they've seen from the outside or the inside and so the all the old people leave and you do need some people around her like hey

Back in the day, we used to carefully design interfaces with these things in mind. We didn't just wing it. We're not the same as Samsung. We have a different ethos. What are you talking about? All phones are the same. We just make shiny ones. We're Apple. It's like, no, there is something deeper. So I hope... Some people who left Apple, some people left Apple in disgust, let's say, cycle back in because we need people.

who know what Apple should be, and some of those people are no longer at Apple. So yes, new leadership, new ideas. And again, the new leadership, like Ternus has been with the company a long time. It's not like he's a Rano from outside. Like that's why no one is even assuming that Apple's new leader would come from outside the company.

At the sort of as you go down the org chart, there are lots of people there. I wonder, like, do they know what Apple is supposed to be? If all of the people who have been at Apple for decades leave and just Apple is left for the new people, I think Apple has been doing weird stuff for such. a long time that there's there's probably not a lot of universal agreement about what apple should be again it seems like there is in our circles because we just talk to other old apple people right

But the younger people, right? How do they feel about app store policy? Do they just accept it as the way things are? Because that's the way the internet has been their entire life, right? They don't remember an error when people were selling software over the internet, not through the app store because they...

weren't alive for that or weren't weren't old enough to use computers when that happened so there are some concerns about just like let the young people run this but again turnus is 50 he's not young Uh, but he'll, he could 50 becoming CEO at 50 still gives you a lot of runway to do lots of stuff. And then the other folks, so like, you know, for all we, we love Phil Schiller and jobs. We act like.

I kind of hope those people kind of stay around, continuing to just be the sort of cranky old people who keep the spirit of Apple alive. who wants to work for new people decades younger than you, right? And I think there was one of the Suruji rumors that he didn't want to work under a different CEO. Who knows why he loves Tim Cook so much? I mean, they made a good team or whatever, but like...

When you reach a certain age, it's kind of galling to have some kid come and be your new boss, right? And that makes people retire. So there is some danger in this transition, but... I do hope like if you're out there and you're listening and you used to work at Apple and you know what the heck you're doing, wait for the dust to settle and consider maybe going back to Apple, not just because you may be able to rise through the ranks, but also because this company might need your help. Yeah.

I wouldn't worry too much about that with this transition because, I mean, the reality is, like, when you think about, like, you know, what is Apple? Well, what would the answer to that be in, you know, say... 2002 or 2004 versus 2007 versus 2008. It changes over time. And I know to you, you're like, that's decades after the company started. But that's when it started to me.

You know, there's a reason why Steve Jobs said, you know, don't do what I would do, do what's right. Like that's that sentiment, even though I don't think Tim Cook did a very good job of that. I think that sentiment was right. Apple is a set of core values, but the specifics. of how those are implemented and deployed and what the products are, what they're like, what's important to them, how they address markets. The specifics of those shift over time.

as they have to. It's a tech company. Tech is constantly moving, constantly changing. So Apple has changed over time, even like during whatever period of Apple you view as like the good old days, you out there, I'm sure we all have different periods of that. But whatever period that is, that period was one of many, and they shifted around. They changed. And even today, even when – you know I have a lot of problems with some of the decisions that the current administration has made.

But I still love most of their products and I still use most of their products constantly and they're better than they've ever been in most ways. Yeah, we have nitpicks about software design and stuff, but like most of the products are amazing and have never been better. And so I'm not, I wouldn't trade my laptop of today for anything that from, you know, six years ago. You got Johnny Surigi to thank for that one.

Yeah. I think the danger is the core values that you're talking about. It's not any specific decision, but one of the core values is user interface design. And it manifests in different ways because user interface design means something different when it's an iPod click wheel versus when it's the original Macintosh user interface versus.

when it's the iPhone, right? But all those things were informed by those core values. And Apple has held on to a lot of its core values. But when we see, it's kind of like an inside out for people who've seen that movie. When those pillars start to crumble, you're like, oh, wait, like...

This is not just, oh, you made a bad decision or something or whatever. This is like one of those core value pillars. Like again, like Apple making a car, that's very different than what Apple used to be or making a phone for that matter or anything. Like it's fine for the company to change and become something different, but.

The thing that makes Apple Apple, the thing that makes them successful, the thing that makes us attracted to their products are those core values. And that's what you're worried about crumbling. Like, again, with the App Store stuff, I think a lot of that stuff they've done with the App Store is against some of the core values of Apple, although others would argue it is a line.

for the core values of Apple screwing developers. But anyway, for young people who have grown up in a world with much more powerful corporations having their thumb on every creator, right? But that's just normal to them. It's good to have... some of the ethos from like the apple 2 era or whatever when you know

when the company had a different attitude towards developers you can argue about what is has it ever been apple's core value when did it change which core values do you like but i think user entry design and attention to detail are two that people would agree with that

should be universal through the history of Apple, which manifests in different ways. But when we see those pillars crumbling inside-out style, it's when I get a little panicked. I just want to make sure that whoever is in the new regime... understands that their job is to restore those pillars, not to ignore them and pretend they never existed. Yeah, I think this is a very interesting and...

I'll even go so far as to say exciting time to be someone that's intrigued by Apple as a company. As you both have said, I think, you know, getting some new blood up at the top is. probably healthy, and maybe it won't be. Maybe everything will take a terrible, terrible turn, and next thing you know will be the Accidental Android Podcast. I doubt it, but you never know.

But I'm tentatively and cautiously optimistic that 2026 is going to bring a lot of really interesting and really exciting and really positive changes. Yeah. One of the other reasons I'm optimistic is I look at sort of like.

to use a car analogy the car they've made like the car they have there the pieces the pieces of the puzzle or whatever like the ingredients i'm pick your metaphor the stuff that apple has right now you look at it from an outside perspective as a tech enthusiast who loves apple and you're like You've got all the pieces here. You can do great things. The only thing stopping you is yourself from making dumb like.

It's not like in the age of like, oh, I don't know what they don't have a good operating system story. They don't have a modern operating system and they don't know what to do with their CPUs. And the power PC can't get to the clock speeds that they promised. And, you know, like.

all the pieces are there. Like you're, you're so close. Like that's why, that's why to Marco's point, all their products are so good now. It's just that they're, they just need to make a couple of decisions differently. It's not as if there's some fundamental problem where it's like, again, like the operating system where it's like,

What is this company going to do? They're still basically a computer company and everyone else is moving on to have modern operating systems and they cannot get their act together. That was a really concerning time. Whereas now we see like this amazing vehicle that has been created, the Apple of today, this giant company. like you've you've got it just just you know whatever turn us take the wheel all right thanks to our sponsors this week

Factor, Lisa, and Aura Frames. And thanks for our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is... Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every single episode has bonus content, usually another extra like 15 to 20 minutes or so, and it's one topic extra, and that's called Overtime. This week on Overtime, we'll be talking about how the Apple... Thanks, everybody. 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. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L. I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse, it's accidental.

They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So I have a software.

problem that like, it's kind of like Margo's problem with tethering. It's like, what are you going to do about it? It's not the type of thing. I mean, I guess someone can write in and tell me what I can do about it, but it's this. messages which i use to communicate with my family has done a thing that i've heard other people talk about and i got to ignore them when it wasn't happening to me but now it's happened to me i have for example i have a message a

group message thread whatever a message group that's me my wife and my daughter where she talks to her two parents about stuff that she needs us to do for her while she's at college mostly or ask for pictures of the dog or whatever that's that's the group me my wife and my daughter the group has existed i don't know since since she got an iphone basically um

where the three of us talk about stuff it recently the apple has added the features where you can put like a background image on it and you've always been able to name the group and so she has fun renaming it uh like anyway it's a group And then I think maybe about a month ago, my wife was complaining that now she has two message threads that are me, her and my daughter.

and they look identical and sometimes when she sends a message it goes into one group and sometimes it goes into the other one and i'm like oh that's crappy she's like how do i fix this i said i don't know then it happened to me

Now I have two message groups with these three people in them that have the same name and the same stuff or whatever, but they are separate. And so every time I want to send a message, I got to make sure I'm sending a message to the group that has most recently had activity in it and not the other one, which hasn't, which means that if I'm ever.

in another app and i want to share the message thread since the groups are named the same like i don't know and i don't know which one is the one that's had activity now if you look at the groups i look at them and i think okay from a computer person perspective I kind of see the, like this one, if I look at who's in the group, it shows Apple IDs and the other one shows phone numbers, right? That's the problem. Right. But, but here's the thing. Nailed it. Here's the thing.

In the contacts app. I know it doesn't matter. Those phone numbers and Apple IDs are associated with the same person. What is the function of the contacts database if not to let you know that all of these things refer to this one person?

Therefore, if there is a message thread with those three people, it shouldn't matter if it's a phone number, an Apple ID, a phone number, a phone number, a phone number, a phone number, Apple ID, Apple ID, Apple ID. And the second question is, how did this ever happen?

Because it's not like we intentionally made a new group with those three people in it. And I know we didn't make a new group because if we did, we wouldn't have made like all of the attributes of the group exactly match the old one. But they do. So it's like the group splintered at some point when we were all away from Wi-Fi.

or something and we can only use our phone numbers and now it's bifurcated? Why doesn't messages merge them? Why can't I force messages to merge them? This seems like just... messages not working. My mental model of how messages should work and how the context database should function is obviously not the actual model. And it's maddening. And I'm sure there's some reason they do this with like phone numbers and SMS and whatever. But like, we're all on iPhone.

It's all blue bubbles. Like it seems to me that at least there should be an option or a preference somewhere that says, look, just when you're recruiting groups of people. It's that person, whether it's coming from their Apple ID, their phone number, or whatever the hell other information is in there. Back in the day, their AIM address or whatever. It's that person. That's why all those things are in their contact cards. I'm very frustrated by it. If anyone knows...

The solution to this, this does not involve deleting one of the conversations, which is, you know, we don't want to do because now there's history in both of them. I would just love for them to be merged or to appear in one place. But I think that's not possible.

Hmm. I wonder if there's, if it's, if it has to do with like, if, okay, so if you have the, if you have a contact card that has somebody's. It has somebody's Apple ID and phone number on the same contact. But if someone else in the conversation has a different combination, if they have just the name. And not the Apple ID. Maybe, but that's not the case. So maybe the system is designed to be this strict because if it wasn't, it could introduce weird either disclosures of private data.

accidentally or it could have like this weird fractional thing of like what if if the different people in the conversation have different spotty contacts for each other maybe that could create some kind of weird condition that that would break in some way or would leak data.

I feel like if that's the case where you have different contact info on different sides, it just, I mean, that is the case when you're talking, not with my family, but with strangers, where someone is on one person's phone, they show up with their face and their contact info on your phone. They just show up as a phone number because you don't have any contact info on them.

But it's still the same conversation. Your view into it is different because you don't have that person's contact information. All you know is their own phone number, whereas the two other participants have contact information. The same way we see different pictures for our contacts, because my daughter has a different picture for me than my...

wife has a for me right so they see different me's in the conversation but it's still me yeah i don't know i don't know it seems like either way it seems like there should be a way to merge the conversations i should be able to like drag them on top of each other or select them both and say please merge these

for the purposes of history or whatever, in the case where all three of us have all the contact info and all the, you know, we, we all have our own Apple IDs and our phone numbers and they're all in all of our contacts. I have made sure of that. I would also suggest, um,

A killer feature that I wish iMessage had, and maybe they can add this, I often will get added to group conversations where there's some random phone number in it that I don't know. It's a bad experience for all around if there's some random in a conversation that you don't have their contacts. And then you have to message like, oh, hey, who's number 1234 at the end? Who is this? I don't have your contact. It's...

It's clumsy and annoying when you're trying to form groups. So what I would love to see is some feature that addresses that. Maybe the way to do it is like when you are in a group conversation, if you send a message to the group. And anyone else in the group doesn't have your contact. Maybe iMessage prompts you to share your contact with the people who don't have it. I think it already does that for your image, but only for your image, right?

Image and name, if I'm not mistaken. Okay, so maybe this is already covered. In the gaming world, they do it kind of the reverse, where it's like... you can offer to share your real name with people or not and people can make a request for you or they want to see your real name or they want to become close friends instead of just friends but like in the game world it's very much like standoffish where nothing happens unless there's a two-way handshake

about an agreement that you want to share this information which does make it a little bit annoying but it's it's very cautious i think apple is less cautious like sharing their offering to share images and stuff especially since people just tap through that stuff like it pops up you're like yeah yeah whatever they don't even know what they're doing they don't know they're sending their image to other people or whatever um but again i've just like

Whatever the policy is, fine. You know, you've got this policy that's very protective or whatever. There should be a way to manually, you know. To your point, like just like you said, Marco, the way this manifests is who is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now you're reading someone's phone number out, which maybe, you know, I guarantee everyone could look up because they're in the same group chat, but a lot of people won't know.

It would be much better if there was a verb that people could use, like, let's all share our info. like like some kind of verb that everyone knew how to do in messages where you just press one button and say yes i've agreed to share all my info with everybody if there was a word behind that there was an action if there was a proper noun if there was something if there was some kind of vocabulary to talk about this instead of

individually having to say who is one two three four five who's this number who's that number i don't have you this you don't have that's what i'm saying like like messages should should basically prompt the people whose numbers are not known to someone to say hey

This person in the group doesn't have your contact. Do you want to, you know... reveal yourself or something but even that is like onesie twosie like you could just have someone in the group says we should all super share and there'd be a super share button and we push super share and everyone in the group gets everyone else's info and like everyone has to turn your key sir and they all have to put super share but once everybody presses super share

Everybody gets shared with everybody else, right? As opposed to going onesie twosie to individual people and sending contacts and doing all that stuff. Because believe me, like we know how to send a contact card to somebody. I send contact cards to my family all the time and they just stare at it in their messages. They have no idea.

Like, am I supposed to do something like this? Like, yes, you are supposed to do something with that. I'm sending you the entire contact information. You just have to tap it. You just have to do literally anything with it. And it will open in contacts. And then maybe you'll ask if you want to merge with existing. But they just look at it and be like, is that.

did that do something like no you gotta at least on the mac you have to do stuff with it maybe ios it automatically adds it but anyway no i just this this seems like it should be better and and you know

apple has made some progress here with the with the photo sharing stuff or whatever although that mostly all i've heard from my family with the photo sharing is their annoyance because they all want their like my daughter has a i don't think it's ai generated but i forget some picture of me it's like um

I think it's a picture of me from middle school, but then someone has added like a handlebar mustache and a beard. We need to see this picture. We need to see this immediately. I think you've seen it before. I think I've showed it to you. But anyway, she insists on keeping that as her.

contact picture for me but of course apple being helpful is constantly offering my my picture to her and she's like no no stop offering i'm like i'm not offering it to you like ios or whatever like i'm not pressing a button to make that happen it's just unavoidable and same thing on my side i have I have my own pictures of a lot of my contacts.

and then people are constantly sending like i think like a gruber's contact uh that he's always offering is like the daring fireball logo but i've got an actual picture of him or no he's like a cartoon face or whatever like no no i don't want the cartoon i don't want your corporate logo i want this picture i took of you and

So I have to constantly have to fend off that thing. And if I accidentally tap it or click the wrong thing one day, I got it. That's why I saved a little folder of like, here are the contact pictures that I want for these people. And even if somehow your finger slips and it gets overwritten by the thing that they want, tough luck. I want this person to look like that. And that is a little bit of a battle. So there's...

The system could be improved in many respects. Yeah, I feel like setting custom contact pictures for people you know is one of life's great pleasures, and they should not be interfering more than necessary with that. And it is funny, too. Whenever I get this update, update this person's photo from them, question mark, people who work for Apple are always Memojis.

Yes. And no one else ever is. I've noticed this. I've never had anyone who didn't work at Apple have a Memoji as their avatar. I have had that. I have had regular people use Memojis, but... I swear to you, I don't know if it was an edict or what, but I have noticed this as well. I don't know a whole bunch of people that work at Apple, but...

Golly, I don't think it's 100% for me, but it's darn near 100%. Maybe it was fun to use it when it was first being developed and you were inside Apple, but when it essentially went wide inside Apple, or especially if you were in the people who got to see it ahead of time. As I've complained about Memojis before, they are the opposite of a likeness because every Memojis' head is shaped the same.

And that's not true of people. That's why Memojis never look like the person. Because like a caricature that you get at a carnival or any kind of cartoon thing will emphasize the thing that make you look like you do. And Memojis never do that. Mii's, unlike the Nintendo Wii.

would let you make a long skinny head if you got a long skinny head make a short one make a big nose make a small nose like like but emojis everybody is a spherical generic thing and they look i mean other than the fact that you can say oh i guess that person has brown hair and so does your emoji and i guess their glasses look like yours they never look like the people which is fine if you don't want it to be a likeness you just want it to be like a generic avatar but like

you know why not just i don't know i just i i'm not a fan of emoji i don't think they serve a purpose because if i see him to your point about talking with apple people if i see him emoji and like as an icon i have no idea who that person is Like even if they use the same emoji all the time, they just all look the same. They all look generic. And I can't recognize people based on an emoji.

It's one of the indicators that somebody does work at Apple. In the same way, when you go to somebody's Mastodon profile, there would be a couple of indicators sometimes, like people who... live in as their location in mastodon they put like some suburb near cupertino or something and they don't say their company or they'll say like fruit company or so you know there'll be like all these like kind of coded things indicate yeah you work for apple you just don't want to get in trouble you know

And the Memoji is definitely a tell. Now, also, while we are working on the contacts database in our fantasy here, archived contacts. Please make a concept. of archived contacts, where you can put people who you don't want to contact without some kind of warning, or you don't want to show up in searches. So things like estranged family members, ex-partners.

People who have died. You don't want to delete their contact because you might someday want it again. Or in the case of somebody who has died, you don't want all the past messages with that person to just be like... unassociated with a name anymore like you know so but have a concept of an archived contact because think about what this can do first of all people who have like you know a name conflict where like you're

Your spouse is named Bob, and you have a Bob in your contacts that you talk to once every five years, and Siri will often offer you that one instead of your spouse. So many of these things could be resolved. You know, let me just let me archive a whole bunch of contacts that I probably that I don't need in frequent day to day or present day use, but I don't want to delete.

Because I might someday need them or I don't want to lose association. I actually want this. I've always wanted this within a single contact. I've been battling with this for the entire time I've had contacts even back in like the Claire's email and Entourage days. Within a contact. Often my contact, but often other people's. I have a massive history of email addresses. Most of them don't exist or work for me anymore. But why would I want to keep them in my contact?

Because like you said, when there's any kind of thing in the world, like an email or a message thread or whatever, I want to know that it was from me. Back when I worked at company XYZ because it's associated with that email address, which I don't want to be in my contact or ever in any autocomplete or whatever, but when someone sees me at somecompany.com, that company long since has gone under and that domain name is gone, but there's some email and some email.

archive that i'm browsing or some message thread and something that i'm looking at i still wanted to know that was me but i do not want that email address to be anywhere and i wish within a contact i could say Yeah, I used to have these email addresses. Same thing with addresses in some respects. I used to live at these addresses, but I don't anymore. But anyway.

yeah please at least at least an archive contact like people who like you don't want to show up in Siri you don't want to like because like so often you are like you do something in the OS like you do a spotlight search and so often you're like One tap.

would call this person right now. And it's the last thing. It's like a minefield. And sometimes you accidentally do like, oh my God, I just called this person I haven't worked with in eight years. Or the autocomplete when sending an email, you don't notice it. Tab completes the wrong thing. You send the email, it's exactly the wrong person. Like you said, my grandfather, my deceased grandfather and my nephew have exactly the same first and last name.

that is difficult it's difficult in for example in photos that's a really difficult one because like in photos i do want to identify old pictures of my grandfather and new pictures of my nephew and they have the same name and yeah you can get cute with like giving them nicknames and stuff like that or whatever but like Merci.

if one of those contacts was archived when they come in the pop-up the archive one could be like grayed out or a little skull and crossbones next to it i don't know like wow whatever whatever you want to do but it's like seriously like my long dead grandfather and my

Just entering a high school nephew. There shouldn't be as much confusion in life as there is just because they have the same name. Yeah. Or just, you know, like an ex-girlfriend or something or like, you know, you don't want to like accidentally. call certain people or text certain and like yes you mentioned autocomplete with email what about autocomplete in message threads that's another one where it's like you know

As you're just typing in names, oh, send this to Casey and John. Well, what if there were some other Casey in my past I really didn't want to talk to? He was really bad at Transport Tycoon back in the day or something. I'm right here, Marco. I'm right here. What if there were other people named John? Can you imagine that? I'm sure you never have this problem.

Now, I completely agree with both of you. I have had occurrences and occasions where I've wanted exactly what each of you describes. So, yes, you have my vote. This might be the thing. One of the three of us, you know, people always ask us, you know, if you could be... Take Federighi for a day. What would you go and force everyone to do and then quit right after? This might be it for me. Also, look, Apple. Hey, take this as a little suggestion.

If German's right that you're looking for like a Snow Leopard kind of bug fixing kind of release, and I know all the problems with that reference that Snow Leopard actually did have new features, but whatever. Anyway, if you're looking for a kind of... A quality assurance, low excitement kind of release. And you need some features to jazz people up about it. Archive contacts.

is such a good feature that it's not a ton of work. I know there's a lot of places where contacts show up and you'd have to account for this. So it's not no work. It isn't like an afternoon. I was going to say, it is kind of actually a fairly heavyweight feature because it gets its tendrils into everything.

thing but they just added password history to password so we know they can do it yeah like it it's not a small lift but it's not a big lift it's not like a major tentpole thing but it's one of those little like quality of life features that would breeze by in the wwc keynote and you get a huge applause because that solves problems people actually have like no

I don't want to call the weird uncle I haven't spoken to in 10 years or my ex who, if I call him, that could bring up some weird feelings or this person who died 10 years ago. no, I don't want to call these people with one tap accidentally, or I don't want to accidentally add them to a message thread, but I don't want to, you know, delete the contact either. Like, so it's such, it's such a big high value win if you can get it.

I feel like fixing the messaging merging thing is much more targeted and easier to do. So if someone's wanting to join Apple and fix one bug, do the message merging thing. You can get in and out faster. I bet mine's easier. No, because you only have to work on the messages app code base to implement my thing.

You're thinking you've got to work on a million apps. Honestly, I don't think you do. All the pop-up contact autocomplete things now have to understand the concept of an archive contact and have to display it differently? No, I think by default, anything that's archived...

doesn't show up through that api but you can't have that because photos needs to show dead people right you need to identify dead people in photos so photos needs to the very least you got it you got to do the integration with photos like it's it's a long it's yours is a bigger lift It's definitely bigger. No, I don't think so. You're talking about merging iMessage threads? No way. That's crazy. Well, how about just not letting them bifurcate ever?

Just going forward. I'll take that. You don't have to fix the damage done in the past. Just going forward. When people are talking in a conversation, look up which contact is associated with that thing and say, here.

This is just, it's so frustrating. Like, what is the point of having a contact with lots of different information if it doesn't treat all that information as corresponding to that contact? It's like, it's only a one-way relationship. It's like one to many and then many to many in the other direction. I mean...

You're not wrong, but as soon as you said, oh, my group chats have split, that is almost certainly, I mean, you nailed the problem. Some of the chats are with emails, some are with phone numbers, some are a mixture of both. And I agree with you. It's infuriating that we have this.

technology to fix this problem i don't know why it's not already fixed and the other thing is the interface of like there is so little visibility and awareness of people who initiate conversations are you initiating it with a phone number or an apple id

almost nowhere do they make that super duper clear people don't even know that they can set it you know you can set the default by default start conversations with this but the default can be different on different platforms because they just see a name in an autocomplete it's the thing that infuriates me about uh

uh facetime on apple tv which i used to talk to my family like we on the actual apple tv and i use like continuity camera with my phone facetime on apple tv it's like start a conversation with and then you'll tap on a contact and it'll be like my dad's name and it'll say underneath it, home, home, home, home, mobile, mobile, home, home.

Which one of those is a phone number? Which one of those is an Apple ID? Who knows? Just they don't tell you because there's no room on my 65 inch screen to indicate which one is a phone number, which was an Apple ID. And the consequences of getting it wrong is they get rung on their iPad when they were trying to use their.

phone or they're not near their ipad or they're not on wi-fi or like it's it's but they got out of the way of your content john yeah just there's no room for any word except for home and mobile good luck