567: macOS Uranus

32:10And that's why Massimo is essentially fighting this tooth and nail, but they feel justified because they feel they have been wronged. It's important to separate out like your concept of not you, John, you, the listener, you, your concept of patents is correct. But, you know, it's important to separate like our conception of patents versus what's actually happened in this story. Obviously, you know, Massimo is trying to paint it a certain way. Apple's trying to paint it a certain way. What seems to have happened based on most of the reporting around this particular dispute is not necessarily, you know, blatant patent infringement.

32:46It's more poaching. You know, so what seems to have happened is Massimo had a bunch of, you know, ability to detect blood oxygen through small gadgets. Apple apparently, you know, went to them and looked around and was like, hmm, pretty cool, huh? And then stole all their people they could. They didn't steal them. They offered them more money to come work for Apple, which is part of how our system works. And in fact, there have been companies that have gotten in trouble for not doing that. When there was the no poaching agreement, I think, between like Apple and Pixar, that's an example of something that shouldn't happen and is unfair because companies say, hey, or whatever it was, I think it was ILM and Pixar or whatever.

33:22Hey, don't offer our employees more money to come work there. We'll all agree that we won't give our employees any raises above these levels. And that way, and we won't, we agree, we won't poach from each other. That is anti-competitive. That is anti-worker. Offering someone to double their salary and give them stock options and they come to work for you. That is the foundation of our competitive system for employees. It's the way workers get more money because their skills are valuable and somebody wants them. Now that said, having someone come work for you and bring with them all the trade secrets and everything from their previous company is, you know, at least frowned upon.

33:53And you can imagine is ethically questionable and in some places not legal. And patents are in the mix there because you could say, OK, well, I know things, but I think I can tell you, Apple, a way that you can do the thing that we did over there at Mossimo, but in a way that doesn't technically violate Mossimo's patents. And that's when you get into this whole thing, which is, from my perspective, becomes less about morals and ethics and more about the legality of a system that i've already said i don't agree with at all so yes you have to work within u.s laws and u.s laws have patents and if you can offer an employee twice the money and they get to work in a cool spaceship and they'll come to your company and they will try to figure out a way to do the same thing mossimo is doing without technically violating their patents which i think are dumb and shouldn't exist anyway i'm mostly fine with that i i to i the other thing i don't think it was clear last time is that I'm not rooting for Apple here.

34:46I don't think Apple is right or Massimo is right. It's just two big companies, as we did last time, two big companies with piles of patents fighting each other to the death in a legal system, all using as the tool of that fighting a thing that I don't think should even exist. Who's right? Who's wrong? It is a question for lawyers. Again, as far as I'm concerned, neither one of them should have any patents because patents shouldn't exist, but they do have them. And that is the law of the land. So they are battling it out. and is apple shady for taking meetings and saying oh we're super interested in your company maybe we'll even acquire you just tell us everything about your company and then they go off and do the same thing yeah that's not great that's basically sherlocking on a company level scale but i have news for you that's what every big company does and it's crappy but it's one of the powers that big companies with a lot of money have think about it next time a big company wants to buy another company of 20 billion dollars making bigger and more powerful companies tends to not make the landscape for competition better because they can come to you and say, let's just have a meeting and you can sign these documents and tell us all about everything you're doing and tell us how you're doing it.

35:49And, you know, and then maybe like, who knows where this will lead? Maybe, you know, who knows? Anyway, they said, well, anyway, thanks for having on the meetings. And they go off and do everything that your company did based on the knowledge you gave them in those meetings. Whereas you thought they were about to acquire you or something that happens all the time and not just in the tech industry. And you could say, oh, the small companies should be smarter. They should have like sign agreements that doesn't let Apple do that or whatever. But then they won't get the meeting, right? Like they want to have that meeting because I think maybe they're going to be acquired.

36:15And then they may be thinking, well, don't worry if they try to copy what we're doing. It's all protected by our patents. And then I have to fight that stupid patent battle. So this is not a battle where there is a righteous party and a wronged party. This is a battle where it's a big company being kind of cruddy to a small company, but the legalities of the whole patent system are so weird that it's not really it's not really easy to tell what will happen because if you think what you think should sensibly happen is rarely what's going to happen uh and as for the stories in the press obviously depending on which side you're hearing from it can sound one side or the other but i think we can all agree that the in general cases with a very large company a smaller company the very large company is almost always kind of a bully and apple does that too and honestly like you know keep in mind we are only hearing the massimo side of the story really like apple's not spreading in the press like their side of what happened well in court apple is giving their side of it i mean again in court apple did invalidate a bunch of their patents but they also lost on a couple other ones so we hear apple side in court but yeah they're not going to the press and trying to you know counter the narrative from massimo but like it never 100 believe everything massimo is telling because what they're describing is common practice in the industry well but keep it like here you know one thing i thought of is like this this paints apple as basically being you know super evil that like they went in there knowing they were going to steal all their stuff and then you know drive them out of business or whatever but that's the problem with patents because apple went in there knowing that they wanted their watches to uh check blood oxygen like that's what apple knew but you're like oh but they're stealing our ideas was your idea to detect blood oxygen with a watch because we want to do that too and are you telling us you you know, obviously that's not what their patents are about, like specifically, but like the whole idea is Apple has a thing they want to do with their products.

38:01And there's pretty much no way for Apple to do it without violating a whole bunch of dumb patents, many of which they then had to go fight to invalidate. So it's not as if they're like, we never would have thought to try to do this. They're already trying to do it, right? And maybe if there's some specific idea that they found out from those meetings that helped them. But like, again, if you're coming from my perspective where no one should have an exclusive right to an idea that is fine it's just kind of questionable like within the the legal system to to have that meeting and to come away from it and just try to do it all on your own and poach all their employees and do all that stuff it doesn't feel good if you're the smaller company because you're in a you're in a position of less power well but also just like the the characterization of apple as like intentionally going in here to like rob them you know let me let me present an alternative uh theory of what might have happened here apple wants to do want to add this feature to their watch they look around the landscape they see this company has the ability to do it and a whole bunch of patents that are related to it so apple meets with them to basically investigate what should we do here maybe we should buy this company maybe we should license their patents maybe we should have some kind of agreement with them.

39:10They go to this meeting and suppose the company has really outrageous demands. And Apple looks around and is like, huh, if they want some absurd price or some absurd terms, and we look around and we're like, you know, upon closer inspection, these patents don't seem that strong. And what if we can just hire these 10 people, you know, because they're the experts in the field. What if we just hire them for way less money than what this company wants us to pay them and just develop our own version that goes around their patents? That to me, if that's how it went down and again we don't know this but if that's how it went down i don't see apple as being the evil bully in this situation it is you know unfortunate on some level it's a little bit of a bully to get the meeting and to have them open up to you about all that stuff because personally they they learn something in this meeting well how much are they opening up i mean the whole point of patents is you're supposed to disclose everything about the invention i know but there's but there's more to it like otherwise what are they even talking about in the meeting like they're not meetings to acquire them no my guess is they were meeting to to basically like look around and see like should we work together like otherwise why why would massimo have taken the meeting haven't they seen pirates of silicon valley yeah no that's what i'm saying like you kind of have to take the meeting because it might lead to some lucrative deal for your company you can't refuse the meeting because you're afraid they're going to go off and do it but yeah like i don't think there was i don't think they were even got to the stage where anyone was demanding any kind of price it's just that apple comes away from it saying i think we can do this without them yeah and what honestly i see nothing wrong with that in the absence of intellectual property that I don't agree with the existence of, like patents, they should be able to do it without them.

40:41But having another company that has done it and has had some success kind of, you know, there is, I mean, how much information are they getting that wasn't public? I don't know. Again, the patents themselves, the whole point is the patents are public, so that's part of the whole patent system, right? But I presume there are things they discussed in that meeting that go beyond what is known from the public patents. But who knows? We weren't in those meetings. Again, they'll hash it out in court, I suppose. i mean honestly if if masam was disclosing secret information to apple in these casual meetings or whatever but just things you learned about like product development what things do you have in development what approaches have you found more promising because keep in mind things that are in patents don't necessarily have to even work true like that it's another thing about patents that's stupid you can patent all sorts of bs you can go find all sorts of patents for things that are nonsensical so just because a patent exists you don't actually know well did you try this and it ended up being like a good idea and economically viable and it actually works the way you said it would or is it just an idea that you have you know again i don't know what went on in those meetings but i in general i don't like the ideas of big companies jerking little companies around and uh you know squashing them or whatever so at this point i like i understand you know the people who have these patents at massimo or whatever like i understand their feeling of righteousness because you subscribe to the ideas of patents it seems like we did the work to figure all this out we published our patent and part of the system is you're not supposed to steal our idea without paying us.

42:02And if they really buy into that system and you agree with it, they should have a feeling of righteousness as they battle it. I don't share that feeling because I don't think they actually have that right, but legally they do. So hash it out with the lawyers. So Mark Hill continues, the description of Massimo just being a patent troll throws them in a bucket of bad actors, which probably underplays the role that Apple played here. I think this Verge article described the situation well, in which Apple behaved in a pretty predatory manner and for some reason has doubled down and sued massimo i am sure there's much more to the story and loads of bad blood but i feel the characterization of quote they are just an evil patent troll quote is a bit unfair i agree but we did not make that characterization yeah i'm pretty sure we didn't make that characterization i i listened back and the worst thing you said marco is you you characterize their patents as being dumb at some point um and that's the closest you you came to claiming that they you know don't that they are a bad actor but patent trolls are just an entirely different beast, which is a company that makes nothing, collects patents, and just shakes people down for money.

42:59That is not Massimo. Indeed. There's also an LA Times article from October, which I don't recall how it landed in the show notes, but I thought it was very interesting. A few quick snippets from that with regard to Massimo's CEO. He wants to stop Apple from delivering what he calls the kiss of death to more vulnerable companies, showing interest, whining and dining them and then stripping them for parts. Then separately, earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal spoke to two dozen executives, inventors, and founders who feel like Apple delivered the same kiss of death. Kiani, the CEO, described the giant giving to Massimo.

43:33And then finally, the LA Times wrote, it requires an extremely powerful suspension of disbelief to not see a pattern here, to ignore how Apple's wielding its power to get what it wants when it wants. Now, admittedly, I think this article had a point of view when it started, but it still was an interesting take on the matter. And yeah, it does not paint Apple in a particularly flattering light. Whether you think it's fair or right or whatnot, it's certainly not a very sporting way of going about it. I mean, that's true of big companies. Big, powerful companies do the small companies all the time.

44:03And again, you may think, why are the small companies taking the meeting? Because you have to, because of the imbalance of power, because the possible upside, right? What are you going to do? Turn down the meeting, say, no, we refuse to talk to you about anything. That's not going to help you. You have to take the chance. And so they do. It's a power imbalance. Whenever there's a power imbalance, even in a situation where the more powerful party is the most benevolent possible, they can accidentally do things that squish you because you're just a tiny ant compared to them, which, again, argues for not allowing unlimited accumulation of power in any market.

44:33Also, how much of this really has to do with the meetings? If Apple can hire away your key talent at massive salaries, it doesn't really matter whether they meet with you or not. If they want to do that and if your key talent can just go to some other company and deliver the same value to them that they were delivering to you, it's unfortunate for the smaller company that can't afford to match those salaries or whatever. But that's just capitalism. That's just the value of good people. I don't see Apple as being a wrongdoer here or some kind of bully or some kind of unscrupulous actor by being willing to pay top talent, top salaries to come work for Apple and develop their stuff there.

45:11And that's not Apple's rep, by the way. Apple does not have a reputation for paying people top salaries. They really don't. The opposite reputation is Apple salaries are actually a little bit lower than their competitors. And I think saying that's just capitalism is not as big a defense as you think it is. But either way, the opposite, like I said before, is companies colluding to not poach from each other. And that is worse for workers. So people should be paid what they're worth. And if you have highly valuable skills that multiple companies want, and you go to the one that gives you the most money, that's good for you.

45:39Like that gives a little bit more power to the individual workers so they can get some of the money instead of it entirely being funneled to the people who run these giant companies. Also, like if somebody can come to your company and develop similar technology as they were doing for someone else that evades all the first company's patents, then I would say the first company's patents weren't that strong. Well, sometimes they do things in an even stupider way to avoid the patents. That's why patents are so dumb because it's like everyone wants to do the same thing. And it's like, well, we have to do it in a convoluted way to avoid this stupid patent, but we all want to get the same look.

46:11It's just stupid. But yeah, there's, you know, how valuable are your skills to a particular company at a particular time will ebb and flow. And so take advantage of it while you can. So Apple has said that they are developing a possible software workaround in response to the forthcoming ban. And actually, as of today, I believe it was, they have stopped selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. And I think there's going to soon come a time that they will no longer be able to, or third parties like, you know, Amazon or Best Buy or what have you, won't be able to sell them either. Additionally, apparently they can't, I think Apple either can't import or can't buy or do something related to parts for older Apple Watches.

46:54So older Apple Watches cannot get repaired, which is a bit of a problem. Because the problem is, it isn't just the Series 9 and Ultra 2 that have the allegedly patent infringing hardware. It's every Apple Watch model that has a blood oxygen sensor, which I believe is Series 6, 7, and 8, right? I think that's correct. I'm not 100 % sure, but I think that's right. It's all of the high-end models since either the 6 or the 7. So if you have a Series 7 that you're bringing in for warranty repair, they might not be able to actually give you a replacement for it because they can't legally do that or they can't get their hands on them or whatever.

47:27Yeah, not a good look. Yeah, and by the way, the software workaround is not to disable the blood oxygen sensor. Apple believes that they can work around this in software by somehow doing something with the software that avoids the patents. Massimo does not believe this, to be clear, and I'm sure they'll hash it out in court. Did the change that they make still violate the patent or not? It's all very silly, but this is the system they're working within. So, I mean, yes, worst case, I suppose Apple could disable it, but that would be a giant class action lawsuit for selling a product based on blood oxygen sensor.

47:57and then disabling that feature after the fact. And so, you know, Apple's got to figure out a way to satisfy either the courts or Massimo to make this go away. And like I said last week, I believe they will in not too much time. Like, I really don't think they're going to let this drag out for all of 2024. So sometime after the new year, I expect them to figure this out and issue a press release through gritted teeth that makes it all seem like everybody's happy. Kind of like the Qualcomm thing. It wouldn't, honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if this was resolved before we actually published this episode.

48:30We'll see. We'll see. I mean, yeah, like everyone does plays all the cards they have, but at a certain point, yeah, we have to come to the table again and some money is going to change hands. Indeed. Anonymous writes that I am an embedded controls technical lead at an automaker, specifically on new technologies, a position that essentially requires a lot of interface with the patent system. A big measure of my success is how many patents my name is on. Oof. Figured I'd give this background before I say I agree with essentially everything you said about patents in this week's, really, last week's episode.

49:02I have useless patents, obvious patents, patents on things that don't work, patents on things that have been done since before I was born, and even patents on technologies for cars that would only work on specific non-Earth celestial bodies. I'm not kidding. That is exactly what was written to us. It's fantastic. The anonymous person continues. What I don't have is any patents that feel like true contributions to the state of the art, let alone anything that would be worth actually defending. I once had a dilemma over whether we needed to speak with one of our suppliers about licensing patents on a project we were developing in-house, as we knew they had substantial coverage in the area we were working in.

49:36I spoke with one of our intellectual property lawyers about this and got the following paraphrased response. Quote, we might not provably infringe on any of their patents in our implementation, and even if we did, it would be such a bad idea for them to sue us that we would never do it. Generally speaking, if you ever wonder whether something you want to do is prevented by existing IP, just put that out of your mind and do it anyway. No one will complain, and even if they did, the legal staff will make it go away without you ever hearing about it. End quote. That's all to say that big companies can basically get away with anything.

50:09As you folks said, everyone is constantly infringing on each other's patents, and even if there isn't a business reason to not complain, as in the case of my supplier, any attempt to protect IP against a large company is an invitation for them to rain fire on you for all the things you're plausibly infringing on. That's your patent system at work, everyone. It's a great system. Working as designed, right? Yeah, I mean, that is actually like, you're thinking like, how does anyone get anything done? Like they just ignore it and put their fingers in your ears and go la la la and hope the lawyers make it go away.

50:39And that's why part of the job of these big companies is to amass patent portfolio, defensive patent portfolios, so that they are prepared to do battle with anybody who comes at them for IP infringing. And it really does take a particular instance of someone really feeling like, you know, that they've been wrong, that injustice has been visited upon them for them to burn time and money to do what Massimo is doing. So I feel like the people behind that suit obviously feel really wrong or whatever. But in the whole rest of the industry, everyone is just sort of working within this dumb system as best they can, pretending it doesn't exist, and hoping that they all have their giant stockpiles of IP nukes pointed at each other such that no one will really make a fuss.

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53:24All right, so moving on, we had a fun conversation last week, again, from Ask ATP with regard to EVs that satisfy Rangachari Anand's requirements. Again, I am so sorry. And we had a lot of people write in with feedback. I don't think either of us or any of us had the time to independently verify any of these claims. So if these aren't 100 % accurate, please, it's not our fault, I promise. And to summarize, Rangachari's requirements were mostly about physical controls for things like the HVAC system, having a sunroof that opens. Mostly about physical controls and physical shifter and that kind of stuff.

54:05Indeed. So Rick Gore wrote in the Audi e-tron line, perhaps the GT, which is basically a Porsche Taycan, the Audi Q4 e-tron or Q8 e-tron. All of those would potentially work. Again, I have not personally verified this. Also, all those are quite expensive. I don't have numbers in front of me, but they are very, very expensive. So I don't know if that's even in the ballpark for any normal person. So normally when people are asking for vehicle recommendations, they normally list things like price and form factor that they are looking for. And Rangachari specified neither. so we don't know if they're looking for a motorcycle or a semi-truck like it could be anything at any price point and by the way i put i put all the i put pictures in the show notes for all of these because when we're getting all these different suggestions i was trying to drive home that point it's like look at all these different cars people suggesting but then once i put all the pictures in here i remembered oh yeah every car looks like an suv now yeah that is true except for the e-tron uh the gt rather which by the way i've seen an e-tron gt in person and they actually look very nice, I thought.

55:12Yeah, that's a nice looking car. Yeah, better than the Taycan, if memory serves, but it's been a long time since I've seen that. I don't know. Some parts of it are better. Some parts of it are not as good. As it goes. Daphne Sakula Reides. I'm going to go with that. I'm so sorry. They suggested the Hyundai Kona, which I think is available in the States, but I certainly believe to be available overseas. Doug Spry reiterated my recommendation from last week, which I don't know if Marco cut it or if people didn't listen long enough. He didn't cut it. It was in there. People just sent feedback before they heard you say it.

55:46There, fair enough. The Chevy Bolt, which apparently just stopped production literally in the last week or two, so way to go, Chevy. But again, my parents have one. It's really good. Then the Strategery recommended the Mini Cooper SE. Vivica recommended the Fiat 500E La Prima, the one model in trim level that's available in Australia, so I don't know if that's helpful here or not. Not that she was supposed to say, not the one that's available in the United States. Yeah, exactly. And then a friend of the show, Sam Abuel-Sumid, recommended three. And Sam actually knows what he's talking about because he works in the industry.

56:17Not to imply that you all don't, but we don't. We definitely don't. Anyways, we definitely don't. Sam suggested the Honda Prologue, the Acura ZDX, and I guess much to John's chagrin, the Mercedes EQB. And this is another great thing about the EQ line. You may be thinking to yourself, wait a second. I thought it was like the EQS was like the S-Class and the EQE was like the E-Class and the EQB would be like the B-Class. But this looks like an SUV. They make a car called the EQS and they make it in sedan and SUV versions and they're both called the EQS. Oh my God. It's madness. I don't know what they're doing over there at Mercedes.

56:50And by the way, the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX are actually GM EVs. Don't be fooled. and to be fair like seeing all these responses come in about all these EVs like I thought that that this list of requirements was going to be satisfied by like one or two maybe at most. And no, there's tons. Did we ever find out if heartened is a word? The opposite of disheartened. It is a word. I don't know why you keep doubting it. But I'm going to cut you off there and say that I share your earlier expressed doubt that these things actually fulfill all the requirements. Because we got a lot of feedback of like, this fulfills all the requirements except it's not an EV.

57:25Right. This fulfills all the requirements except it doesn't have a sunroof. People were very willing to say, yeah, but it fulfills the important ones right so i'm still not convinced that every single one of these fulfills all the requirements probably they fulfill all the requirements except for one or two but without any prioritization like well do you really care about the the glass full glass roof or not like uh but yeah like the so some of these we'll get to more of this in a bit but like uh honda in particular has been good about trying to retain physical controls on just its cars in general as people have gone all touchscreen yes honda the leader in evs yeah well i'm saying but like for the for their piece of This trend away from switches and stored screens is across all cars.

58:06It's just more pronounced than EVs, right? So Honda actually has been holding the line. And they've been getting good reviews for years by saying, hey, the new Civic. And it's got physical HVAC controls. No, it's not an EV. But they've been holding the line. But again, these two Hondas, the Honda and the Acura, are actually GM vehicles. And their interior is filled with GM things. It's got GM stocks. It's got a GM steering wheel. Like, it's a GM car on the inside. Because Honda has really dropped the ball on EVs. So they've essentially had to say, GM, can we sort of reskin one of your EVs for two of our brands so we actually have something to offer?

58:37And so they have. But that also means that the interior of these looks like GM interiors and GM interiors have also not entirely gone all screen. So, yeah. And the other ones is like a Fiat 500 and a Mini Cooper are very different from a Mercedes Q8 e-tron in price, size, capacity, everything about them. I know they all look like tiny SUVs of varying sizes, but that is quite a range. So again, I feel like the criteria listed really do not allow anyone to narrow it down to anything sane. Because if you really are cross shopping a Q8 and a Fiat 500, I'm not sure how you're shopping for cars. Anyway, it is very heartening that there are this many options.

59:20Like, you know, in the not too distant past, if you were looking for a fully electric vehicle, you had three or four options in most markets at most. Like you really had very few options. Oftentimes it was like one per size class. So to have this many options that fit what I thought was going to be a very restrictive qualification list really says a lot about the EV market. We have a ton of EVs now. That's wonderful. That is a fantastic thing. Like I said last week, they've essentially gone mainstream in all ways except for price. And it's the stupid cost of the battery that's making that happen.

59:57But, you know, you can find them in all shapes and sizes across all makers, depending on how far along the curve they are. And all the car makers say they're going to go all EV by some unspecified point in the future or they specify the point, but we don't really believe them. Right. So that is definitely happening. But they're all still pretty expensive just because the batteries are really expensive. and thus far especially in the u.s but less so in the rest of the world companies have been reticent to say we will sell you a cheaper one with a smaller battery you've got the nissan leaf and a few other choices in the u.s but in general they're like oh if you're going to sell it in the u.s you better put a massive battery in there otherwise americans are going to be too afraid of it and a massive battery costs large amounts of money so still no bargain basement evs even though technically they could make one put a tiny little battery in it you can make a bargain basement ev that no one will buy because it has 80 miles of range exactly no one in the u.s by the way i know in the rest of the world they sell them and you've got the hondi and stuff like that just it's our own stupid fault america oh uh as an aside did you see i don't think i sent this to you guys but there was a post that went around recently about the um the chevy blazer ev that somebody was testing the same thing as the hunter prologue and the uh the acura zdx there you go well i bring this up because of that the chevy blazer ev was tested by someone i'll put a link in the show notes um They were testing it.

1:01:12They picked it up in like Ohio or something like that. I mean, who would ever enter Ohio on purpose? Am I right, Marco? But anyways, they picked it up in Ohio. Oh God, I'm so sorry. I'm just kidding. They picked it up in Ohio and drove to somewhere in Virginia, somewhere in rural Virginia, which is not Richmond before you two jerks jump on me. But anyway, they drove to somewhere in rural Virginia and the car basically was completely kaput. Now, this might have been at least in part Electrify America's fault, but whatever happened, the tester had it for literally like 28 hours, and then they had to have the Blazer trailered back to Michigan so they could figure out what the hell happened to it.

1:01:51So not a good look. And that's now Honda EVs as well. Hooray! Anyway, so speaking of physical touch controls, this broke in the last, I think this was just in the last few days as well, right? Volkswagen brings back physical buttons for all new cars. The Volkswagen ID2 All, what a terrible name, concept car features a slightly updated interior, with the most notable change being the return of physical buttons below the central touchscreen. According to the brand's interior designer, Darius Wittola, this will be, quote, a new approach for all models, quote, based on recent feedback from customers, especially those in Europe who wanted more physical buttons.

1:02:25This is my people right here. I love this so much. I don't understand a desire to have fewer physical buttons. And there are people out there who have that desire. And I don't understand it. Like, I think for a lot of things, like take a Tesla, for example, I think it makes perfect sense to have things like dog mode on the touchscreen. I don't think you need a physical button for that. but it is bananas to me that things you fiddle with a lot don't have physical controls temperature volume why do you have to have a motor forward or reverse gear the forward or reverse gear yeah why do you why do you have to have why do you have to have motors in the dashboard to point the air at you have a freaking lever yeah i didn't mention that one last time but that was like yeah people just kept doing that it's like you can just grab the little thing and point it at you and it's so much better and that in every possible and that one i have to say even that one they don't save money on that one like i know it's more expensive to have physical switches often but the motorized things have to be more expensive than just putting a little handle on them and so much more complicated too it's just i i don't get it i don't get it i mean yeah we talked about last time you get like there's the futuristic thing and then in many cases it actually is cheaper and as i said last week um i i had hoped that people had gotten this lesson and i was disheartened to see the latest line of cars from a bunch of car makers it's like here's our second round of evs and they make all the same mistakes.

1:03:52And as I said on the show last week, kind of like Apple Silicon with the timelines being like seven years, maybe these were just designed before they took those lessons home. And here is Volkswagen saying, we're going to fix this. But what are they showing? A concept car. And they're saying, in the future, all our new models will do this. But the times to develop cars are so long. Like the feedback loop is so long between sell a bunch of cars, have people tell you that you don't have enough physical controls. that loops all the way back through corporate and then it's like which car is in our pipeline now that we can actually make a change in at this point right it's like well you can't change the models that are coming out next year so maybe the ones after that so that's why we end up with a whole bunch of 2024 models that still have no physical controls and by the way it's every individual company that has to figure this out and you know it's kind of like how long does it take to convince apple that their laptops needed more ports right or that magsafe should come back it is a long cycle when it comes to hardware and especially with cars but i am glad to see things going the other direction, but still not enough and still not fast enough for me.

1:04:53Agreed. Then coming back to Sam of Balsamid, the complaints about touch controls from customers and safety experts. And that's another thing. Safety experts. Like you shouldn't be looking at the f***ing touch screen in order to change where the air is pushing on your face. Like you shouldn't have to do that. That's such a difficult battle, though, because of course the people who make the things say it's not unsafe. And then the people who say it's unsafe have to prove that it's unsafe and then it's like well i don't trust them because they're biased and it's it's not you can't just say like this seems like it's less safe or you do actually have to test it and testing it to the satisfaction of all is very difficult because the people doing the testing have a vested interest in one direction or the other and so do the people who are making the cars and so it is actually difficult to get i mean just think about things like seatbelts how long did it take to figure out seatbelts good right you would think that's a slam dunk because we all believe it now but it wasn't.

1:05:46It took a long time with multiple parties battling over years and generations of people living and dying before we could finally get to the agreement of seatbelts good. And we did it all over again with airbags and anti-lock brakes and anything that costs more on the car and so we're going through that again with touchscreens. Indeed. Anyway, let me repeat what Sam was trying to say before I interrupted him from the past or whatever, however you want to put this. But anyway, Sam says, the complaints about touch controls from customers and safety experts are finally being heard by most automakers, except Tesla, which doesn't actually care about either of those groups.

1:06:18Email Sam, not me, even though he's right. Hyundai, which adopted a touch interface on many vehicles, just launched an updated version of the Tucson that ditches the system in favor of a return to physical controls. Other Hyundai models that use the same interface will probably get updated in the next year or so. The new Santa Fe already has knobs and buttons for climate control and other features. GM's new vehicles all retain physical controls. Even lucid has physical controls for volume and climate control as it should be as it should be yeah that was one of the speaking of honda that was one of the things back when everybody was going all touchscreen apple or apple honda did this thing where they like everything's a touchscreen but they shoved the knob just on the side of their touchscreen and it looks so awkward and weird but it was like some some person with authority and honda was like i'm not letting you can go as far as you want but i'm not letting you get rid of the volume knob and so they said where are we gonna put it there's no place just stick it on the side of the screen so it's like a a big touch screen with just a physical knob just just sticking in the bezel and for years it was like that and i was like you go person in honda just keep holding that line they'll come back around your way and it hopefully it seems like it's going the other direction now so kudos to that person that person and the person who put the sync button and messages for the mac all those years ago plus five internet points for both of you all right john what is the iphone 16 capture button what's going on here talked about this i don't know maybe once when we're doing the exit interview or something or no it was a question about the action button and i had said at that time you know after we discussed the action button like you know the rumors are that apple is going to add another button to the to the next iphone and it's going to be below the power button where the millimeter wave antenna is and i didn't think too much of it because you know i read a lot of rumors or whatever but this rumor has been gaining steam and so here now german has chimed in uh he's calling it the capture button uh this is from mac rumors summarizing a german report german says the iphone 16 models will include a new dedicated button for taking video in the recent look at early look at iphone 16 prototypes the capture button will locate on the bottom right side of the iphone 16 it will replace the millimeter wave antenna and u.s phone models with millimeter wave antenna to be relocated to the left side of the device below the volume and action buttons non-us models do not have a millimeter wave antenna needs to be relocated the capture button will be a capacitive button with haptic feedback rather than a mechanical button and is expected to include a force sensor that can recognize pressure the capture button is coming to all four iphone 16 models so this is a combination of a bunch of rumors because you remember for the iphone 15 there were rumors that the volume buttons would be haptic like not actually move in and out but instead just shake when you hit them and we talked about that rumor for a while but then there was another follow-up rumor that said no they're not doing that so here's the haptic button coming back only not for the volume buttons or maybe it is for them but that's not what this rumor is about but for a capture button with force sensitivity so maybe the return of something like force touch where if you press it it does one thing and if you press it a little bit harder it does a second thing but like the real purpose of this button is what the name says capture button and boy after so many years of apple not really changing anything on the physical outside of the phone to go to new connector lightning replaced with usb c uh ring silent switch replaced with the action button and then the very next year and guess what we added another button i'm not entirely against it but i'm really wondering i mean sorry i'm not wondering okay i'm not wondering why they're doing this i'm wondering if if it is wise to do it the reason they're obviously doing it if you look at the iphone 16 rumors is uh that they they want the capture button to be a faster and easier way for people to capture video including spatial video because all the iphone 16s are going to have two cameras that are lined up for spatial video instead of being on an angle like they did with the the 15 pro hasn't like that but the plane 15 still has them on an angle kitty corner from each other so on the 16 line uh both the the 16 and the 16 pro will have the two cameras lined up you know for good for stereo uh you know vision not any farther apart but at least they'll be aligned and also the rumor is the 16 pro will have a 48 pixel ultra wide so we'll have a 48 megapixel main and a 48 megapixel ultra wide and they'll be lined up all this is to make more better spatial video and then you've got a dedicated button for it which presumably will bring up your the video app immediately without you having to futz with your phone and immediately start capturing that spatial video so you shouldn't capture these precious moments that everyone will watch on their$3 ,500 headset that they just bought right that all like i see the vision there i understand what they're doing but two things here one how many people are going to have a vision pro in 2024 apple's not even going to be able to make that many of them even if they sell every single one that they make they don't even be able to manufacture that many two if apple's really all in on spatial video move the cameras farther apart like it's the stereo the stereo effect is not as impressive when the cameras are literally a centimeter from each other like it's not you know the centers of the cameras anyway move them a little bit farther apart well also i think if you're going to optimize the camera hardware for stereo capture give us two one x lenses like have have that be the stereo yeah i know we talked about that with if you could add a fourth camera but apparently they're not adding a fourth camera so do you want to lose the ultra wide then we talked about that too would you would you like to lose the ultra wide to have two one x's i don't think most people again i would who is the spatial video for you could argue it's future proofing it's like well it looks like normal video to you but eventually when you buy the apple headset three years from now when it only costs a thousand dollars you'll be able to see all that spatial video that you queued off of your kids i kind of get that but but i really like i'm i'm i'm with apple i understand the thing but then when they say okay we're also adding a button and in the rumors it seems to be a pretty big button to the right side of the phone under the power button as a capture button why is the action button not a capture button if people if people value capturing wouldn't they configure the action button to bring up the camera like and the fact that it's force sensitive makes me think there'll be like apple has something in mind with that like i'm not i'm not saying that the iphone doesn't need more buttons in fact i think i said in a past show that it should have more buttons i'm just not sure a really big button uh on the bottom of the phone below the power button dedicated to capture is how i would choose to add the next button to the iphone well first of all i wouldn't read too much into the force sensitivity thing because that's probably just what works in cases you know because you figure anything that's if it's just a like a capacitive button that's going to be a problem with every case if it's on the side of the phone i don't think it would be capacitive i thought it would be like the um the iphone 7 button that wasn't capacitive right it was force sensitive um that's true yeah so so presumably like the force sensitivity is just so they can add a button that doesn't have moving parts that is also workable through cases oh so you think it doesn't mean that it will be able to like they'll use it to distinguish different levels of force like you pressed hard and you press soft nope i think it's literally just the mechanism by which the button works through cases without having moving parts and by the way speaking of that a slight gamer aside i believe it was the playstation 2 i remember when it was announced they said and by the way the controller has um four sensitive buttons now they each register you know a four pressure level from zero to 255 and like no game used that i was not yeah i was gonna say like did any game ever take advantage of that yes i'm sure there were games that did but it did not turn out to be a very important feature of the ps2 let's just say that and i think i think they that continued through the ps3 4 and maybe even 5 i don't i don't know if and when they dropped it but it this is to the threat of like do people like the idea of having something that they can press and then having something different happen when they press harder we talked about force touch uh last episode there are there are proponents of that but it is thus far it has not either caught on or sustained itself in the market in in you know in any product that has a force sensitive thing like you know a tech product like a game console or a phone or computer yeah i mean there are some like certain game controllers um i believe the original xbox did this where like the triggers would be like you know force sensitive so like depending on how much you pull them it was like analog triggers oh yeah no every game every game console has that these days they can tell how far you've put it but it's not how hard right yeah exactly and it makes sense like you know a trigger button has a huge amount of travel so it makes sense you could make that you know easily analog whereas you know the top button of the controller where you just mash it harder or in this case you know the button inside your iphone yeah i don't i don't think that's uh that's an idea that's gonna stick around you should try the ps5 controller marco if you haven't because they uh the ps5 controller has motors that resist i got right here you're pressing of the triggers you have to like did you play the uh what is it called the uh chat room the little game with cute little robot astro's playroom i've never played a ps5 game no but i have a ps5 controller on my desk anyway if you play astro's playroom you'll play certain levels you can feel there are motors inside it that that push back against your fingers when you use the analog triggers which is kind of interesting if you haven't felt it before and kind of fun although again most games don't use it and then you spoke about travel distance it's another thing fun thing that game consoles do especially the fancy controllers like the xbox elite controller i have what they have is a way for you to adjust that travel because in certain games you don't want it like if you're playing a game and you're a sniper and you want to pull the trigger to fire the gun you don't want to have to pull the trigger an entire centimeter so you can adjust it so it's like essentially a hair trigger and you pull it like half a millimeter and it activates and that is a feature of fancy controllers just sort of negating the the uh you know the the supposed feature of having analog travel for like using it as a gas pedal in a racing game or something all right the other thing we need to talk about tonight is that apparently the next gen apple watch is again rumored to break compatibility with existing bands so since the original apple watch came out there was only one real uh break in the cycle and that was when or actually was there ever no i guess that's not true actually i'm thinking of my break in the cycle they changed the sizes of the watches but the strap size has never changed although i will say they cheated a little bit in that various watch straps on various different sizes watches have at various times looked a little awkward in terms of how even just the first party apple bands connect into fit in with and extend from the bodies i've seen some combos that i look at and say technically that fits and you're not forcing it or anything but it looks weird well that's that's usually not a sizing issue that's usually just a bad choice or a metal mismatch i mean i've seen ones where i feel like is that supposed to be like that like it doesn't look like it doesn't it doesn't look i'm not saying it doesn't look flush but it doesn't seem to like just just the part that goes into the little slot i've seen situations with with particular watch bands on particular watch models very often a very old watch band with a very new watch model especially when they sort of change the shape of them a little bit subtly the little airstream trailer change shape it doesn't look like it meshes well like up close i could see i mean johnny i've wouldn't like it he would say that doesn't look right but technically they have all like been compatible across the as long as you get the the size match whatever whatever the what are the band sizes it's like it's like 38 40 41 and then like 42 44 45 right but when you buy the when you buy the bands you buy them in small medium large but that's just the length but some of the watch bands also have to match the 41 versus 45 yeah they do yep and that's what i was that's how i got myself confused when I was introducing this is that I went from the original big size, when all the watches changed to get bigger, I dropped down to the small size.

1:17:54And that's why for a second there, I thought that the watch bands had changed. It's not that at all. It's just that I had previously been getting the bigger size connector. And for the last several or a couple of watches, at least, I've been getting the small size connector. But how does Apple characterize those, by the way, when they say the big size? Because again, the big size one, the big size watches have changed. They say 38, 40, 41, and 42, 44, 45. Those are the two trios of sizes. Maybe that's what I was seeing. Maybe I was seeing a ban made for the smaller big watch used with the bigger big watch.

1:18:24Probably, yes, because that would create a gap. You would notice that. But still, that's the correct ban for it. If you look on the box, it says this fits these models, and you have one of these models, and it does actually fit. It just looks weird. I don't know. I mean, to me, honestly, if I was going to tweak the Apple Watch band sizing, to me, the biggest sin of watch band sizing that they make is that on the smaller size watch, the sport band is too wide. Like the actual band part of it, after it tapers down from the lugs, the actual width of the band is way too wide for a watch that size.

1:18:58You mean you think it doesn't look good? Yes. It's a mismatch aesthetically. Well, one way or another, it's been reported 9 to 5 Mac. Apple is once again said to be prepping for a big Apple Watch change. According to a new rumor this week, the band connection system for the next generation Apple Watch has been completely redesigned. This means that all existing Apple Watch bands will be incompatible with the next generation Apple Watch. The rumor comes from Kosutami on social media, who has previously reported accurate information about Apple's plans for future accessories. For example, the account shared several details about Apple's switch from leather to fine-woven accessories ahead of time.

1:19:32bloomberg first reported on apple's plans to debut a major new apple watch 10 design or is it x who knows uh a few months ago in that report mark german explained that apple was exploring a change to the way the bands are attached to the apple watch the current system reportedly takes up a considerable amount of space inside the apple watch which apple engineers believe could be better utilized by a bigger battery or other components german has described the new apple watch band design as featuring a magnetic attachment system that sounds horrifying to me until I tell you that I have been carrying my gigantic phone via a magnet-only pop socket for, what, two months now?

1:20:08And so far, so good. All right, well, how big are the magnets on your pop socket? That's fair, too. That's fair, too. They're quite a bit bigger than they would be on a watch. But my point is you could potentially make it work. I mean, also, keep in mind, magnets hold very strong in the, like, as we previously discussed, like the sandwich direction. They're bad at the sliding across themselves direction. connection so depending on how it's engineered it actually could be strong enough to you know to account for most problems i do worry a little bit about the you know the lateral movement possibilities you know dislodging them pretty easily well i mean but that's the easy thing to fix in a connector because they just have like prongs or teeth or other things that sort of like uh you know go in there like when i'm when i'm when i'm thinking of these rumors i'm not thinking of magsafe right because magsafe does not have any of those things although even magsafe has a recess in it that like if you were to try to actually push it exactly sideways it would hit the lips of the recess but keep in mind like imagine yeah like imagine if if the mag safe connector if you couldn't move it up and down to take it off like if it if you if it had like a little channel that it fit into that was deeper if it couldn't move up and down it would actually be a lot harder to disconnect it i mean it does have a little bit of channel again it is recess like but i'm thinking of like prongs or teeth or even things that could like clip into like little slots with little nubbins on them like like that it wouldn't entirely be the magnets the magnets would be there as like maybe 50 of the attachment solution but i'm not entirely sure what to make of these things but i do the things that make me think something like this is probably coming are a few one i agree with the idea that the current system takes up room in the watch if you don't think that then look at the little naked watch body when you pull it out of the box and you realize oh there's giant channels hollowed out here where there's nothing in the watch that is every every square millimeter is precious on these things so i think an attachment system that doesn't do that if they can find one would be beneficial and that is something that apple would pursue and two kind of like lightning and other things that apple changes every once in a while the current watch straps apple has maintained them and the basic design of the watch for what will be next year about nine years and a decade or so i think is a good run for a watch attachment mechanism what you hope is that the follow-up attachment mechanism is even better and not a terrible mistake or something but i think this is a reasonable time to be thinking about in the next year or two if we can do something better now is it a reasonable time to do it because we were all nervous when the apple watch was developed like oh the new one come out is it going to invalidate all our bands and they kept those bands around for close to a decade and if they can come up with a way to do it without gigantic channels carved out of the thing with the help of magnets and whatever other clever mechanism they have to attach i think it could work now one thing i will say about the existing mechanism is what it has going for it is very straightforward mechanical sturdiness in this case the you know the yanking on on the watch straps if you took a watch strap and like just pull the two ends that is where this thing does very well because it's a fat thing inside a little channel but the other direction that's the way you slide them in sideways the tiniest most delicate mechanisms i've talked about this in videos before how precise apple has to be to make this that little mechanism that makes this sort of click in when you slide that you have to press your little finger there on the little button to get it out that is the only thing stopping it from sliding side to side that and this sort of static friction of being in that very tight channel and it just goes to show that as far as that attachment mechanism is concerned the yanking on the straps thing very very strong straightforward nothing delicate or complicated about it and the other direction the finest piece of machinery you could possibly ever imagine the tiniest little most delicate thing has been sufficient so i seem like that the direction that they have to worry about is the yanking on the on the thing's direction and the side to side direction they can do almost anything and it will be fine yeah that's the existing one is so strong in that direction because it is a fat thing shoved into a skinny channel it is the most brain dead thing you know it's like you slide it in from the side like it is it's like wood joinery like it's just it's straightforward there's you can look at it with your eye and understand how it works and and think of have you heard any stories about apple watches flying off people's wrists and the straps failing or whatever like if straps do fail i imagine they're not failing at the at the attachment to the watch point that maybe they're failing someplace else due to like you know you know some some sort of problem with the strap but like that's this strap design has been a home run they the straps the apple sells have been really good even the the third party straps that are presumably made to a less precise uh manner have been pretty good like we've had a lot of years of the apple watch and no one is saying apple strap attachment mechanism sucks and it falls apart and the risk of making a new one especially with magnets or anything that's going to have scare stories on it you know like oh you know we tried the new apple watch magnetic strap mechanism in this you know nasa g4 simulator and it came off right get ready for those like so i I feel for Apple if this is what they're doing, but I'm also kind of excited about the idea of getting rid of those slots and maybe either putting in more battery or maybe making the watch slimmer.

1:25:09I think the, I mean, so first of all, I need to preface this rumor. This rumor has been circulating for something like three years that there's some major Apple Watch redesign coming next year or coming this year. And that's been happening now for so long, it's almost like the year of Linux on the desktop. Well, are you counting the flat side one that we think might have just been the Ultra rumor? Maybe, but if so, I mean, the Ultra is nothing like that. So anyway, so the point is, there's been a bunch of rumors about substantial Apple Watch redesigns coming, and they've seemingly gone nowhere so far.

1:25:42So either the Apple Watch rumor mill is comically inaccurate, which has been the case so far, or they really have been working on something, and it will be arriving soon. You know, like maybe they got the timing wrong or whatever, but either way either the apple watch room is terrible or this you know there's finally enough smoke behind this fire that maybe it'll actually happen but there's a third option right either they got all the rumors wrong or they're actually right but the third option i think is just as likely as all of those is they're totally wrong about everything but inevitably the apple watch will get a major redesign and when that happens they can try to claim that they're right because that's the nature of all products like especially things like the apple watch and the phone or whatever apple is conservative about changing them but they do change them eventually so after a decade like that it's going to happen right if the apple watch continues as a product long enough it will get a major redesign it is inevitable and you can't then retroactively claim see all those rumors we had we were right i mean maybe you were and maybe you weren't but like you know it's it's like predicting you know new max will be released and then they release like see i told you like yeah they keep getting released until they cancel the line like that's the nature of the product so So, but again, with the 10-year time horizon, in the beginning of the Apple Watch, we're all like, well, the next one looked totally different.

1:26:53Eventually, we're like, no, they're not going to look different. They're going to look, it's not like they didn't change them. They did, but they all kind of look like, you know, the rounded little lozenges or whatever until the Ultra. And so the Ultra is a new shape for the Apple Watch. I think that will happen to the regular. I think there will be a new shape for the Apple Watch that will happen. And if you're going to make a new shape for the watch, that's the time to rethink the strap. it could be kind of like various things that they've tried to do that they they look into alternate strap designs they've been researching it for six years and they just can't get anything that's better and say you know what we tried we tried well let's regroup think of a new idea but in the meantime when we have the redesigned apple watch same strap mechanism that is a possibility as well because i truly believe that apple has been researching better straps in fact i think they were researching better straps before they shipped the first apple watch they shipped the best strap that they came up with it's been a hit everyone loves it but they're always looking for a way to do it better it's just not like from the outside especially it's not like there's some obvious thing that they should do to make it better it's going to be difficult and so with anything difficult i am willing to believe that it's taking them multiple years i'm also willing to believe that it takes multiple years and they say you know we couldn't figure it out regroup again in a few more years i mean the thing is like for them to to make all existing straps incompatible that is that's a big risk that they're taking it there's a big cost to that on lots of levels and so if they're actually going to do that i trust that they probably have really good reasons um so we'll see i mean i i would i'm not looking forward to that because i have a large collection of apple watch straps i've accumulated over the years and i don't i don't want to have them all be obsoleted very quickly um but at the same time i am a little bit excited to see like well if they're going to go through that they again they probably have good reasons they probably were able to improve things significantly like one one other area besides the sport strap being too wide in the smaller watch that i would love to love to see aesthetically is that right now the combos that look good on apple watches are partly restricted by the design of the current lug system where you can see a lot of the strap like inside the watch from the sides like the part of it that sticks into the watch, you see the color, whatever color the strap is, you see that running into the watch body for that, you know, whatever few millimeters that is.

1:29:11That kind of restricts what combinations look good and I think it looks a little bit inelegant. If they could design a strap system where you don't see the strap enter the watch anywhere except like the boundary of the case, that would look nicer. Now, that might have other downsides, like you wouldn't have the lateral removal process so maybe that's what the magnets are for who knows but uh if they can get rid of that side view of the of the side of the strap inside the watch body that would open up more aesthetic possibilities but also maybe they just need to change the system as part of a larger redesign to help the basic apple watch look fresh again because you know the current the current non-ultra line of apple watches i think it looks good overall like in in totally absolute terms it looks good but it is starting to look dated now Now, watch fashion changes very slowly over time.

1:30:05And they can keep selling exactly this for a while and be fine. But they're also in the tech business. And the tech business likes when things look new. See the iPhone and how we seem to demand case redesigns every roughly two to three years just to keep it looking fresh. The Apple Watch certainly suffers from some of that. People want their jewelry to look fresh and new sometimes and whatever. So I think the current line, the regular Apple Watch line could use a redesign just to keep it fresh. Not to say there's any massive problems with the current design because I don't think there are really.

1:30:40Everything I mentioned so far has been small problems, not big problems. But there is some need for them to keep this fresh in the long term. And so even just change for change's sake, we hate to say it as nerds because this shouldn't be the case. But the reality is people like new looking things sometimes. And just having like a new watch style is something they should do every so often. And one other thing they could improve with the new strap attachment, aside from being able to the side thing, is sort of the departure angle of the strap is kind of dictated by the angle of the slots because the slots themselves have a direction to them.

1:31:18And that angle, I mean, the thing is, there is no one perfect angle. given a watch size given a strap given a person wrist size there is too many variables that that can dictate how good something looks and if they could come up with a strap attachment mechanism that was more flexible about the angle of departure from the watch it would help it look better on a wider variety of wrists that's true yeah it's that's hard but it's but it's possible i mean like you know regular watches with spring bars do that like but exactly like there is there you know for for regular watches that don't have extremely easily removable swappable straps there are lots of it's like oh just put it on a hinge and then it can depart at any angle that it wants but that's not the system apple has for their watches because their straps are very easily changeable and so yeah although to be fair to the watch world quick release spring bar bands are actually not really any harder to swap than apple watch bands really i mean i've never done it so i couldn't say it but like i just the apple watch ones are so easy you can do with the fingernail you know yeah so so there's there's a type called quick release spring bars that like they have basically like a little peg that sticks out straight down from the lug it kind of in like like the three quarters across the way of the watch band and you just like slide that little peg over with your fingernail and the whole thing pops out so it still uses a spring bar to poke through the two holes in your side but that little peg lets you pop it out really quickly and easily it is almost apple watch easy no magnets though no no magnets well you don't generally speaking you don't want to introduce magnets unnecessarily to mechanical watches they don't like that usually They should use quartz crystals.

1:32:48They're way more accurate. Oh, my God. Also, vinyl sounds better. Anyway, let's do some... No, quartz crystals actually are more accurate. They actually are. In this case, yeah. Quartz crystals are like the CD of the watch world. By a lot. You know, I should have just kept my mouth shut. We're just making the wrong analogy with the vinyl. All right. Anyways, it sounds more warm, I tell you. All right, so let's do some Ask ATP. Amar writes, Do NVIDIA and Apple mean different things when they say cores? an m3 max has 40 gpu cores while an rtx 4080 has 9728 cuda cores i have no freaking clue john what's the deal ammar what do you think the answer is yes they do mean different things when they say cores they mean very different things and i think you've amply demonstrated that 40 cores versus 9728 boy that 48 must be way faster and yes it is way faster but not that much faster um yeah so What you call a core and a GPU, it's up to, part of it has to do with the architecture, but a lot of it is also marketing and what you decide counts as a core.

1:33:45And the way NVIDIA and Apple count is very different. And the things that NVIDIA is counting as cores are smaller and simpler than the things that Apple is counting as cores. That's it. Ryan McDonough writes, with the rumor of Apple creating their own LLM to build a better Siri, do you think this functionality will come to the existing HomePod mini range, or will this be a differentiator for the next release? I mean, it should go everywhere, but I think they'll absolutely use it to get you to upgrade. Although, why would you do that? That would mean they would have to make a new HomePod, though.

1:34:14Also true. This is why I think this is an interesting question because it's like, well, okay, is the thing versus Apple making you upgrade versus not? And the other part of it, I think, is are they doing inference on the hardware device? because apple has a lot of there recently was apple paper that they published about how they found a way to do efficient uh inference and large language models on their own hardware even when it doesn't fit in ram stuff like that but the the hardware inside home pods is extremely wimpy like power wise like it's it's watch hardware you know or it's or it's older socs and it's like all this combines in the whole plot of saying and also apple really doesn't like updating that line particularly often so i don't know how to it's like if it's all server side they don't need technically to update the hardware but would it be all server side because apple's big thing seems to be everyone assumes their thing is going to be oh we do a lot of stuff on device because we have amazing hardware but homepods do not have amazing hardware and by the way if homepods did have to send it to a server to get answers it's not going to make them any faster like sending siri quest to a server makes it seem slow as well so i'm if i had to bet on this i would i would say new HomePod because the old ones don't have beefy enough hardware.

1:35:24Not because Apple wants to make you buy a new one, although of course they do, but new HomePod because they want it to be done in hardware and that would mean Apple will be forced to actually make a new HomePod, which may mean that this is not coming to HomePods at all until they can do that. And even then, I can't see Apple launching this new alleged Siri that's LLM-based doing inference server-side. I just can't see because we know a couple of things. Number one, Apple's cheap, except when hiring people away from Massimo. Otherwise, they're cheap. Number two, they're not great at the existing server side infrastructure of Siri.

1:36:04And they're not super keen to run massive AI stuff server side. They run services, but their services tend to do simpler things in the large, massive scale that they need to do them. Most of the hard computing crunching tasks are done device side. We also know that device side, they are, as John mentioned, investing heavily in the AI side of device side inference. And also, they make really great device processors to do that. So all of that suggests to me that the vast majority, if not all, of Apple's efforts with these new AI techniques are most likely going to be running device side. and if they were to do all siri requests through this kind of thing server side the scale of that would be so immense that not only would they probably not do it for just practicality and cost reasons but also we probably don't want them trying that because i don't think they would do a very good job to be honest well so here's a question i don't necessarily know the answer to um i well i don't think any of us do is because i think there are certain things that you can do with large language models.

1:37:14They require more computing resources that exist on any of Apple's devices. Now, that doesn't mean that Apple is going to do those things with its LLMs. It could be that they have their LLMs, they train them up to do tasks that are simpler, that can run device side. Again, those are the rumors. We know Apple has strengths in this area. We know they have papers on this topic. We assume that they're going to leverage their strategic advantage, which is they have literally billions of SOCs with neural engines in them out there in the world. that's what they should do but that does mean that they can't do certain things like i think there's some stuff you can like type in the chat gpt or whatever that it responding to your query the amount of computing resources that are briefly marshalled to answer your answer your question is larger than exists on your phone and so if your phone was forced to do it it would take an unacceptably long amount of time i don't know what you would consider unacceptable but it would take longer it would take longer than it does when it runs server side and so i'm not sure how that's going to shake out because we don't know what apple's plans are with its llms uh i would assume they're going to start conservative and i maybe they're going i mean what we all wish is just say look just make it do everything siri does but actually work this time but that siri does a large number of things but i hope everything that siri does is simple enough that an llm could tap tackle it or again as we uh discussed in the past if you just put an llm in front of the stupid siri and had it figure out how to make siri do what you actually asked for that would be useful um but yeah but home pods have many things going against them they do have weak hardware apple doesn't like to update them and apple's dedication to that entire product line has at various times been highly in question so yeah ryan my guess is you're probably gonna have to buy a new home pod if they even make one that does this i mean keep in mind too like whatever apple's going to do with siri they're going to have also these different levels of quote siri what does siri mean because many of Apple's products have lower specced processors than the phones.

1:39:11The phones have these cutting edge and the Macs, of course, you know, the phones and iPads and Macs, they have these massively performing cutting edge processors, these huge neural engines that can run really advanced models and stuff. They also sell Apple watches and Apple TVs and HomePods, all of which have Siri functionality. Now we saw in the series nine, may it rest in peace until it's for sale again but we see in the series 9 and ultra 2 they finally changed the soc from a million years ago and one of the things that you get with the new soc is it does more siri request processing on device previous apple watches seem to do basically no siri operations on device it's part of the reason why siri and the watch before was so bad and had such a high failure rate and was so slow because it was doing everything by going to the server current apple watch models at the high end are able to do some of that processing on device.

1:40:08iPhones have been doing a lot of on-device Siri work for a while now. But the Apple Watch, you can look at the HomePod and you can say, well, they're going to have to put a higher end processor in there to be able to do that. And maybe they'll increase their costs. Okay. They might at some point do that. I don't think they will, but they might. But the watch is not a monetary problem. The watch is like, there's no cost they can apply here to to build in iphone class llm execution into the apple watch of of any similar year because it just it's a way smaller power envelope and everything like that so they're always going to have to have tiers of siri of like all right we're going to do the full-blown llm smart thing all on device on the phone but then what do they do on the watch what do they do on the Apple TV?

1:40:58Whatever the answer to that is, that's probably the same thing that the HomePods will end up doing if they're ever updated for this. So I know I said a second ago that they're going to probably do everything on device, but it is kind of weird to think like, well, they can't do it on device on these much smaller processor products. So maybe they will have to have some version of it that runs on servers as well. But if they take every iPhone out of the picture and have the iPhones do everything or almost everything LLM based locally on the hardware that might make it a much more scalable service on the back end to serve only the smaller devices this is a tug of war between uh their desire not to make a new home pod and their desire to have the LLM power series on the home pod because if you want it on the home pod like they would wreck you to buy a new one but that means they would have to make a new one yeah so maybe like maybe what went out is like you know what we're not making new home pod just send it all to the server.

1:41:53I know it will be slow, but tough luck. It's got to be that way. It's the least of the HomePod's problems. Right. Alright, and then the final item for AskATP is from listener John. Listener John, what do you got? It's not actually from me, but I wanted to hide the question from you two. I think now you need to hide all your browser windows so you don't cheat. Alright, hiding. This is a question from Jim Callen who says... Wait, do I have to hide Slack and other things that are just web views? No, just no cheating. no looking things up on the internet okay you and your wits okay all right now so jim callen writes can you name all the mac os version names in chronological order oh i saw this and i immediately noped right out of it well as long as you didn't research it you're fine so here's now before you you can be thinking while i'm saying this but before you say this i'm gonna say that i tried to do this straight up no cheating and could not uh i almost did it but i did not so i'm gonna be honest and say that i did not succeed so i'm gonna assume neither one of you is going to two unless you cheat oh god no but we'll see how you do and if you want you can collaborate with each other to try to come up a list together or you could try to do it individually but before that i'm going to say my first question is how many have there been major releases only not counting betas not counting dev things not counting point releases how many major releases of mac os 10 have there been 13 probably something like 17 or 18 i don't know are we gonna do like prices right rules like close yes price is right rules uh marco marco wins 20 oh my gosh all right i'm already off to a bad start to believe all right so now let's just go from the top maybe you could do it together what's the first one i'm gonna and i'm going to demand version numbers and and names because this just asks for version names so i know i know john has said in the past that it was kind of ironic that the first one had a fast cat name because it was so slow so i'm gonna it was it like puma or cheetah was that one of the first ones jaguar no that i think that was the third one 10.0 you see for people who don't know marco and casey did not come to the mac until after the error they're trying to remember so that they're at a disadvantage yeah my my first mac had uh whatever was before tiger was it panther oh man all right so i'm gonna say there's like cheetah jaguar panther i think was 10.3 you're going too fast let's just start with 10.0 what's your guess for 10.0 jeez i'll call that one cheetah you are right casey did you have any idea on that one No, I was going to agree with Marco, but I don't know if I would have come up with that prior to Marco having said so.

1:44:16And yes, it is the most hilarious name because it was the slowest version ever, and they called it Chiba. They burned that name real fast. Hilarious. 10.1. Puma? Was that one of them? Yeah, because we're not at Tiger yet. That was like three or four, maybe? Tiger was four. Yeah, that sounds right to me. So I'll go with Puma. Yeah. Very good. You're working together. 10.1 was indeed Puma. All right, see, 10.2. I know 10.3 was Panther. I don't know what 10.2 was. Because we're not... Okay, yeah. Casey, 10.2? And we're not in the leopard and snow leopard era. No, that's all later. There's no lion that I recall.

1:44:55That's later, too. What other big cats are there? Lions 5. Ocelot? Is that a hat? I don't even know. I'll give you a hint. It would be something that we would have fun making fun of the pronunciation of. I don't know. Yeah, I've got nothing. Was it called X? does the mispronounced word jaguar mean anything to you oh of course jaguar yeah it's like a jag but with a wire in it right yeah instead of saying the word jaguar apparently on the west coast people say jagwire like it says w-i-r-e at the end of it but anyway steve jobs said jagwire it was called jaguar so that's 10.2 all right 10.3 panther you're so sure of that one why is that because it was on the mac that you got yes is that correct all right yep that is that is correct all right 10.4 tiger yeah i think that's you're sure the tiger again because that's one of the ones that was on machines that you bought yes i had upgraded to tiger yeah so 10.4 tiger 10.5 was lion there was there was a lion 10.5 was not lion no i don't crap was there a lion yes it comes then and then mountain lion but oh right right right leopard leopard leopard yes 10.5 was leopard because then snow leopard i knew snow leopard was 10.6 all right yeah that's right There you go.

1:46:06You're back solving. Good job. Okay. Alright, so 10.7 was Lion. That's it. Because Snow Leopard was so great and Lion was so bad. Alright, then 10.8 was Mountain Lion. Now here, 10. Okay, what the heck was after Mountain Lion? They were still big cat names, I think. What you should also do, and I found this was helping me as well. I didn't actually need help until I got past the ones that I'd written reviews of, obviously. But eventually when I did need help, what I started trying to think of was WWDC posters. Yeah, no, I think that doesn't help me at all. I think 10.9 was when was when they switched to california names and i think the first california name might have been monterey casey do you remember not even close oh geez all right what are we still in cats oh is it catalina are we still in cats john i can tell you where you left off where you left off was 10.8 mountain lion and now you are flailing yeah no there was stuff yeah because i forget when they switched to california names no we're not yet not yet but i don't give you a hand and say this is when they switch to california names okay so what was the first california name they try to think back to wwdc posters mavericks no that wasn't the first one it was one of the first ones i don't know the first one almost made sense and there was very like if you're going to choose that's what matt because mavericks was has the weird plural that no one knew about except for californians oh no wasn't it the one where they went on they went out to get high in the volkswagen bus that's just all of california forever you're thinking of keynotes now instead of wwc posters yeah i was doing the same thing about weed remember weed yeah uh no marco was right 10.9 mavericks don't you remember the big poster with the wave that we were at the wwc the first one was maverick yeah because that it's it threw everyone off because it was not a cat and it had a weird plural thing all right so mavericks and then so now we're at 10.10 and i believe that was catalina i was gonna say that but then i thought no that's too soon oh no so you're having the same problem that i did so when i named these i did obviously much better than you but well yeah i did have this hole in my memory and you're in the hole now you're in my what was my memory hole what the hell was after mavericks oh man was that monterey i'll give you a hint on this one give you a hint on this one it was the last mac os 10 review i wrote that well yeah that matters a lot to you i don't remember that exactly we talked about on the show when i stopped writing it and also the version number what version are we on 10 10 right so that's a good stopping point for me but what was that and we're in the california name so that narrows it down what was 10 10 i'm i'm gonna say catalina no i don't think that it's not catalina yet no but i can't come up with what it is though all right i'll give you another hint uh it was another name that had a pair big sir how what is the pair with that oh no i thought you meant a pair of words previous names previous names had pairs do you remember oh yeah there was like you know Tahoe and Suburban or whatever.

1:48:55I don't know. No, you just, you named, you named previous names with pairs earlier. Yeah, I know, I know. Oh my gosh. So, okay. What were the previous names with pairs? Just so I know that you understand what I'm saying. You know, leopard, snow leopard, that kind of thing. Yes, exactly. So here's a set, the next two coming up are pairs. I do not give a crap about Californian geography. And so they all just washed right over me. There was, wasn't it like the park and then the mountain, Yosemite, Yosemite, that's it. Yosemite. That's right. And then there was, and then. then was yosemite oh and then uh and then wasn't big sir inside of yosemite isn't that a mountain in yosemite big sir it's not no no you're right though it's the little it's the moon yosemite i don't know no no no i think you're right it's the uh the big peak it was snow yosemite right yes yes no it's that big peak inside yosemite you're right i thought the big peak was big sir no it's don't you remember the screen like the desktop oh it has some name like a like a butt gosh i can't think of what it was called i don't know oh the californians gonna be so angry 10 10 is yosemite here is a pair what's another thing what is yosemite it's national park right what's in that park some geysers and stuff the thing the big the big mountain peak what is that what called i don't know if i would have told you well can you name a mac os 10 version that might have been something that's like a mountain name yeah big sir isn't that surf isn't that where you surf is it i don't know i thought big sir was where you surf i'm from ohio we didn't learn these things in school uh no i can't think i can picture the backdrop i can picture it i can't think of the name of it i'll give you a hint it's two or it's two words and the first one it looks kind of spanish el capitan yeah i would never have gotten yeah yosemite and what version number was that yosemite was 10.10 what was that's 10 11 okay what's next all right 10 12 i think existed 10 12 existed yeah because they didn't catalina i think they started using the numbers with 13 so 10 12 oh jesus when do we get to catalina i mean you live you have these on your max like We're not in some obscure era that you don't like.

1:51:06It's recent. Yeah, but the thing is, I don't care about Californian geography. I just don't. And so it meant nothing to me. And by this point, too, at this point, we are well into the iOS era, where iOS just has numbers, every version. It makes a lot of sense. And they're coming out every single year. It was one thing, when I had my first Mac, I could remember Leopard and Tiger and everything and Panther because those were only like every 18 months. It was more spaced out. There was less other stuff that I was tracking in the world because there weren't 17 platforms. All right. So I'll give you a hint on this next one.

1:51:45LCAP 1011 was your previous one, right? The next one is the first of a pair. Oh, jeez. The pair should be easy because it helps you group them together. what's what's the next pair name and you you said the version was 10 12 10 12 was what i love that you think that the version number will somehow remind me what this is like i knew i knew snow leper was 10 6 and you know tiger i knew the early ones but again if you are a mac os dev you would probably be more familiar with these version numbers because you'd have to be doing the if availables on them yeah that's true yeah and every man i as as a writer of frequent if available statements i wish apple would align all the numbers just like just skip them all so like next year is everything 18 like make it mac os 18 make it watch os 18 tv os 18 like just line it all up that would be great uh but anyway yeah i don't know what's a pair what's a mac os version named pair i think this is the last is it the last pair i don't know i don't think i think i think after this they went over to just numbers no but they're still was it because we have sonoma yes and there's been sure somewhere in there and your current mac we got to get up to the current versions if you know what that is but anyway we're still stuck on we use monterey already what's a oh that's true monterey name the previous pairs monterey and then aquarium maybe no name the previous pair there's leopard snow leopard right lion mountain lion right yosemite el cap right and i'm going to tell you that this pair is more like the first two pairs right where it's like a it's a different word sir and big sir yeah good guess casey and that wrong but good guess that's what i'm getting at big and big sir um think of the desktop backgrounds maybe the default desktop backgrounds you might have used i got nothing i'm i'm tapped out well catalina's an island was there another island you're doing so well marco i can't believe you can't dig this one out you gotta liz miles this what does that even mean that's more stuff i don't know it's a scottish lady who can talk her way into knowing the answer to questions that she seemingly didn't know the answer to it is a amazing phenomenon.

1:53:48Listen to The Incomparable to hear it. Yeah, I don't have that. Whatever talent she has, I don't have it. Hold on. What do we have left? We have Sonoma left. I know that's not this one, but we have it left. We have Ventura. Ventura. Shoot, what I just had at the island. Catalina. We haven't done Catalina. We still didn't do Big Sur. There is a Big Sur, right? There is a Big Sur. Wait, I gotta write this down. I'm already losing track. A lot of these things are within the length of the show. Monterey? Do we do Monterey? Yeah. You have not gotten any. Those are all names that you have said, but they are not.

1:54:19Yeah, we didn't do Monterey. So is it like Monterey and Catalina? Because aren't those related? I don't know. They're all California. No, that is not. Oh, I was with you on that. That's too bad. Would you like to give me a hint? Yes, please. The pairing is word and then modifier word. Yeah, I know that already. All right, just want to. Okay. Your hints are terrible. Light Catalina and dark Catalina. I'll give you another hint. This is a bigger one. The word starts with an S. snow catalina no not the modifier the word it's word and then modify no no we did that right yeah we just know we're not well we haven't gone oh man it's i got nothing i yeah there's been so many we were running the show during these years we talked about these os releases at length on this very podcast using their names the whole time see this is where your memory hole is i did have a memory hole yours is worse than mine yeah at least i could name these but i couldn't like put them in the right order or whatever anyway but you're the mac guy like i you know i'm i'm just a mac guy but we all talked about on the show okay so i'll give you the final hint here the modifier how can i say this without giving you the actual word the modifier uh i just have to give you the word the modifier i'll give you a letter the modifier begins with the letter h so the word begins with an s and then it is h s snow hadalina no stop h s h doesn't the snow doesn't begin with an h all right well i'm gonna tell you the modifier and you're gonna sierra and high sierra yeah oh well done well sierra and high sierra and by the way what version was high sierra i believe wasn't that when they made it because okay so see that's tricky doesn't it where we were at 10.11 before yeah 10.11 is lcap 10 10 12 is sierra yeah and then i think they said mac os 13 but you're wrong that would have made sense but it was 14 of course it wouldn't they wouldn't do that.

1:56:08Yes, that would totally make sense. That's not what they did. Oh my god. Oh, it was Mac OS 11. They called it Mac OS 11. They did not. This is so embarrassing. I'm an iOS developer. I don't know these things. Do you feel for Mac developers writing the availables now? I mean, I feel for Mac developers on lots of fronts, but as an iOS developer, I have things very, very, very easy compared to most Mac developers. This is so bad. Sierra was 1012 and High Sierra was 1012. Was it 11.0? God, I don't know. 10.13. Well, if it's that, why are you making a big deal? 10.12 and 10.13. All right, so we've done 10.12 Sierra, 10.13 High Sierra.

1:56:51Okay. What's the next one? Jeez. Now are we... Wait, was this Monterey? Because wasn't Monterey when they redesigned everything? Was that... No. It was an M when they redesigned everything, and I hated the toolbar design, but I forget which M. you mean like the look of the the ui you've gone through many different looks of the ui or maybe that maybe that was big sir oh god i don't okay so we haven't used catalina let's start with the version number what came after 1013 mac os 14 10 14 i think no or mac os 11.0 mac os did you say mac os 14 i did what version are we on now mark i don't know i think it's 13 is it 13 all right we'll set that aside for now all right it was not 14 was 11.0 no god in that case i'm gonna say 10.14 that's right 10.14 and what was 10.14 called was that i think we're at catalina now yeah i agree but you're wrong oh my god are we a big sir i'll give you a hint i believe it was cfed up on stage when he announced this name it's always cfed all right i'll give you another hint obviously we're going through california things um i have to look this up to see if this hint is accurate hang on oh my god this is so bad and you've done so much better than me and i'm embarrassed for both of us i'm imagining all the listeners just yelling at us right now that just i mean i have to say that the listeners if they're honest with themselves if you're not a mac developer there's no way you know these version numbers either because unless you're like a kid and live through it okay i'm gonna say all right here's my hint on this one uh this name it's a california name like we're still in the california zone here it is more inland than some of the other names like it's more inland than mavericks for sure what's the wine place that was sonoma that's sonoma we're there now right what is i don't even i can't even tell you the current version that's how overwhelming these names always are to me this is not the current version oh my god all right uh where do they make wine and stuff and they have farms i don't sonoma i don't know i'll give you another hint uh think of the color tan beijoma i don't i don't know what kind of geography is tan deserts can you name a desert in california oh mojave that's right oh good job good job i was gonna say in all fairness all of california is tan but yeah but yes okay mojave 10.14 mojave with a j i forgot about mojave Remember with the big desert slide?

1:59:27Remember the desert background? Yeah, I mean, now that you're saying it, I had totally forgotten that we had ever used that name. All right, what comes after 10.14 Mojave? Okay, then are we at Catalina? what version number do you think comes next 11. point oh nope i'm gonna keep guessing eventually it would be right numbers you always think that's when they changed to no but no they didn't they did not they just would not change oh my god all right 10.13 would have been a great time to go to 13 and maybe the version numbers would be synced up now but they didn't do that they did 10.14 mojave 10.10.15 and what is 10.15 called is that Catalina.

2:00:06Are we there? Yeah, I think we're in Catalina now. It is Catalina. You're right. Now, I mean, this is like, it's like five years ago. 10.15 Catalina. Then I think we had 11.0 Big Sur. Yay. Now we're coming into your memory. Your memory palace is working. 11.0 Big Sur, which is not in Yosemite. Okay. I look, I'm sorry, California. You don't know every detail about New York. It's fine. It's a big world. Alright, so I'm going to say then we have macOS 12. Wait, we got Big Sur. That was 12, right? 11 was Big Sur. 11 Big Sur. Okay, so was 12 Catalina? No, you already did Catalina. 10.15 was Catalina.

2:00:5011 was Big Sur. Did we do Monterey yet? No. You have not done Monterey yet. Alright, so I'm going to say next is Monterey. That's right. 12.0 Monterey and now 13 is Sonoma, right? Wasn't there a V something? What are we on right now? Are we on 13? Mac OS 13 Viola? I don't know. Come on, guys. It was last year. I know. It was last year. Because I don't... Oh, gosh. It was the operating system on your computer last year. I told you, Mac OS 13 Viola is not Viola. What? Snow Sonoma. That's it. big catalina huge catalina wow i did not predict this i thought for sure that you wouldn't know the old ones and then when you got up to recent times you'd be like yeah i can remember that was that was uh oh wait was it a v though do i have the v right you do have the v right what the heck was it with a v hold on the v mac os vanilla i don't oh man mac os vienna mac os bclempt uh no i don't know god i don't know it was last year i know that's that's why this is so embarrassing and frustrating it's when it's when my window dragon bug started what version was that again these are things that you know very are you doing ventura ventura ventura it's been i talked about it so much on the show i said it's ventura just listen to me good grief i finally got one on my own like an adult all right um and now what comes after ventura sonoma what version number is that 14 and we're on present day you did it that was incredibly painful i cannot believe we please for for the love of all that is good and holy can we cut the sound of the release no no this is this is everyone's holiday gift from us i cannot believe that like so i can tell you when i did it obviously zero through ten i know it was there reviews of right and then i had this hole around mojave catalina like and big sir it was just emptiness and i knew those names i'm like when the hell did they come and then i pick back up again with monterey aventura and sonoma so i found it very difficult and then the numbering i got tripped up the same way you did marco was like when did they stop from the 10 point or whatever and they just kept it on way longer than you think they did yeah and yeah it was ridiculous anyway i thought that would be a fun thing to do and it It just goes to show how little attention people pay to these names anymore.

2:03:26But I think, Craig, if you're listening, keep going with the names because I love them. They're fanciful. If you want to come up with a new scheme instead of California Place names, I'm all on bar with it. It's one of the many things that makes macOS better than iOS. If you're going to come up with a new scheme, align the numbers. That's it. Or at least give us some way that we can align them in the if available statements. Because the thing is, you always have to write the same pairings because the APIs across other platforms change in the same way each year. So, like, watchOS 10 matches up with iOS 17 and tvOS whatever and macOS 14.

2:04:04And so you always have to write the same sequence. So there could be some way of, like, OS 2023s. Like, give us all the 2023 OSs. Like, if available, 2023 OS platforms. Then this function can run. As you know or should know from web development, you should really be checking for capabilities and not version numbers. Yeah, but that's a lot harder in Swift. Like, that's much harder. You can do it, you know, but it's a lot harder and doesn't have as granular of control with a lot of this stuff. Anyway, that was long-ass ATP. But now you'll never forget these numbers again. I've already forgotten them.

2:04:36To hear the names. I already forgot all of them. Yeah, me too. Just like that. It's Cheetah Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Cap. sorry, I always say it that way. Sierra High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, and Sonoma. And they switched to the 11 numbering after 10, 15. Oh my God. If we were the triumvirate or whatever, I'm probably using that word wrong, to come up with the naming scheme for future versions of macOS, what would we choose? What would be our naming scheme? 18, 19, 20. No, no, no. Okay, yes, yes, yes.

2:05:11I get that. The marketing names, not the... The marketing names. 18, 19. What would you do? 19, 20. Boo, that's so boring. That is so boring. They do it for all of their other OSs. It's fine. Can you play in the space with me, please? Come on. Here's what I would do, Casey. I will play in the space with you because I'm not a sports player like Marco. I would do animals. I liked the big cat names, but obviously when you pick something limiting like big cats, there were more big cats, by the way. They just showed us not to use them. But I like the animal names, and I would be more expansive than saying it has to be cats or even just mammals or whatever because there are so many cool animals.

2:05:44Animals that look cool in marking materials and animals with names that sound cool. I would go back to animals. I don't know what I would do. What would I do? What about like elements that are related to like computing? So silicon is the obvious example, but you know, other elements. Titanium. Yeah, or something like that. You know, macOS titanium, that has a cool ring to it. I think macOS silicon is cool. Yeah, but then they get to like Einsteinium and stuff and it's really like, hmm. I mean, you don't have to choose that one, John. Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of cool element names, but you run out of them real quick, I think.

2:06:17Or what about celestial bodies that are easily named? I don't know. Oh, everyone's waiting for Mac OS Uranus.

2:06:27Can that be the title, please, Dad? Please, Dad, please, please, please, please, please.

2:06:33I don't know. I'm just curious if we had any good ideas. Marco, do you have anything you'd like to share? I'm surprised neither of you said some sort of BS New York geography or something like that, like all the islands that are or are not Long Island. I think it's only a California thing that they think their place names are so awesome. All our place names are sort of Anglicized, mangled Native American names anyway. I'm not holding out for Mac OS Hophog, although they did make the Hophog win TV card, so who knows? There is some precedent. Those were the best TV tuners, and I owned, I think, one or two of them in my college years, and I always said Hoppage in my head because I had no idea.

2:07:12Same, same. But I lived in Hophog, so I didn't have that problem. And over my back fence when I lived in Hophog was what we called the Hophog Industrial Park, and I would go through the dumpsters of the companies like the company that eventually would make Hophog win TV and dig out all sorts of electronics like big speakers and stuff and printed circuit boards and wires. the best thing about the hoppage tv tuners is that they as part of their name had an exclamation point at the end like yahoo so it was hoppage like so you i always felt like i really had to announce it not hoppage just say that you just say the name right well i'm at the time you know 17 or 18 year old me said hoppage although it kind of amazes me that a they would pick a name like that that they knew would be difficult to pronounce but b if i had a company name that i knew was difficult to pronounce and i really wanted it because it had some meaning to me the most prominent thing on the homepage of every piece of literature I put out would be a pronunciation guide and yet they didn't so now this is what happens.

2:08:02You get hoppage. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week for sitting through that. They probably, the sponsors, I can't imagine they would have gotten through that. Anyway, but they're wonderful anyway. Squarespace and Green Chef. And thank you to our members who support us directly and maybe who also got through that somehow and if you're listening to our show. You can join us at atp.fm slash join And we will talk to you next week.

2:08:53And you can find the show notes deep in Santa's beard. And follow them on Twitter for Holiday Funtime Cheer. At C A S E Y L I S S K C L S M A R C O A R M E N T. Monco Amen. S I R A C. USA Syracuse. It's an accidental accidental snowball fight. It's an accidental, accidental holiday tech podcast so long. So I had a bit of an adventure earlier this evening that I feel like you're going to want to know about. Oh, no. I don't like where this is going at all. So I was driving back onto the beach tonight. I really don't like where this is going at all. and as I approach the cut in the dune that you drive through to get from the beach to the side streets, I see there's a giant chain across it, and it says no vehicular traffic.

2:10:16If only there was an app you could have checked for this. Yeah, right. So I had to turn around and go back to the previous cut and cut in there earlier and drive on more of the interior roads. So I turn around and promptly got stuck. How did you do that? Well, turning around on a less trafficked part of the beach, like a closed cuts on ramp, there's a lot of powdery loose sand at that point. Had you come to a stop? Had you come to a complete stop at the chain? And then did you reverse three-point turn? What is the maneuver you're performing here? I did a three-point turn. because at that point, the beak's just pretty skinny.

2:11:00It wasn't quite enough room to do a big loop around, especially without stopping. So I had to do a three-point turn, and I did a really bad job of it and got myself extremely stuck in the sand. At what point in the turn did you get stuck? I guess the third point, like as I'm pulling in the other direction. I think I was going to make another California joke, but I think people in other parts of the country might also call this a K-turn. oh i guess that makes sense all right anyway so so when i first got my sand permit the other people who have lived here for years they said everyone gets stuck and i said i'm gonna see if i could never get stuck like i and i really thought like this is i'm gonna you know get get the greatest vehicles that can do this i'm gonna have all my gear in i had all my gear in the front I have the Max Trax Pro traction boards.

2:11:54I have all these different like ropes and stuff. Well, wait a second. Once you're using those, aren't you already stuck? Yes. But I haven't. I've used them only three or two times so far to help out other people who were stuck. And they actually work pretty well. If you're not too, too stuck, they actually work quite nicely. But so here I am. I do my three-point turn. And on the last point of it, I'm not going anywhere. and I made a critical mistake. I hit the gas harder. Press harder on the gas, yeah. And then I realized, oh no. And by the way, on the topic of you like, I'm not going to get stuck and everyone gets stuck.

2:12:33I'm pretty sure there is no vehicle in existence that will not get stuck in enough, loose enough sand. I say this, the only thing I can think of is maybe, you know that dump truck you always see in the books for kids that like the size of a seven story building, like at Mines, you know that one? maybe that one what it's not possible for it to get stuck in sand but i think like an abrams tank could get stuck in sand like there is no like a monster truck could get stuck i don't think there's any vehicle with wheels that is of a reasonable size that cannot get stuck in sand under the right conditions because that is the nature of sand so don't don't don't because it moves out of the way and allows your vehicle to sink maybe i'm wrong maybe someone knows that like actually this vehicle there's there is a vehicle of a reasonable size that literally can never get stuck in sand but i immediately went to like military vehicles with like tank targets and stuff no they can get stuck in sand too so i mean if there is one that exists there have to be something kind of like a tank or i guess how our graphs don't count um so don't don't feel too bad because i don't i think you are like you know it's gonna happen i mean obviously driving skill and choices can help you a lot here but uh your number was up yeah and this is why too like i i mean i do definitely blame my myself in the fact that i i've gotten too cocky with the rivian because it has proven to be so insanely capable off-road in all other ways.

2:13:54And look, as before, the Land Rover Defender was an amazing off-road vehicle overall. The Rivian's even better. It is fantastically good off-road. It is an amazing off-road vehicle, in addition to being an amazing vehicle in pretty much every other way as well. I'm very happy with the Rivian. But it is, in particular, as a sand-driving vehicle, it is fantastic. I'm very happy with it. And so I've gotten accustomed to being able to basically drive however I want on the sand and it'll work itself out. You know, I don't, you know, take crazy risks or anything. You know, I'm not like driving into the water or anything.

2:14:31But I've learned that I've gotten into the habit of not really not really avoiding any sections of the beach sand because I figure, oh, yeah, I'll just drive through it. It's fine. And that was my mistake in this case, because this was a very, very soft, powdery, deep section. We had a bunch of storms recently, so everything's all messed up. So this was like a kind of newly soft and newly squishy section that was the wrong time to turn around. So anyway, I got myself really stuck. And I thought, okay, I've prepared for this. I've watched all the videos from all the Australian off-roaders telling me how to do things.

2:15:09I have all this gear. I know what to do. Let me try to do it. So first thing I try to do is just try like, you know, very slow backing out because reverse seemed like the easier way to get out of what I was in. So I tried, you know, very slowly trying to make the wheels really crawl. Let me tell you, the Rivian is not good at this. Like, you know, other off-roaders have like a crawl mode or some kind of like sand creep mode. There's not an electronic mode that changes the throttle response to the pedal and is essentially the equivalent of crawl mode i could not find one they so there is a soft sand drive mode which is what i use when i'm on the sand um but it does not seem to do that uh so there is there is i couldn't find anything that was like i am stuck get me out um whereas other offer orders will have various techniques to do that some of them will like use the suspension like a like a trampoline almost like kind of try to bounce you out some of them will have these these creep modes that will try to slowly creep with you all the wheels and slowly crawl you out as far as i can Intel Rivian doesn't have that.

2:16:11They could add it in software, I think, but they don't. So I tried just like, you know, slowly crawling the wheels out, no dice. I tried then lowering the tire pressure on all the wheels even further. I was about to ask. Yeah, because, you know, I've heard like you can basically just lower the tire pressure and probably just drive out carefully. And I also had the MaxTrax boards. So I tried, you know, digging out. I mean, I was, the problem was like, it was deep. I was like, well, and unfortunately, Casey, I did not take a picture because it was, It was dark. And it was... I was going to say, we talked about this when you first were talking about having a sand thing.

2:16:44When you do get stuck, you need to document it. And you didn't. I know. Because it was dark and it's freezing. It's December. I know. That's the best part. We wanted to see the suffering. Wow. Just like, look how terrible this condition is. And by the way, I think when you were envisioning getting stuck, maybe you weren't envisioning doing it with a 7 ,000 pound vehicle. Possibly. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly the weight of the Rivian is not... That is the one downside of it being... It's not helping you, especially when you're trying to wedge things under the wheels. Right. Exactly. But it was just it was so deep and it was it was deep enough that the Rivian itself was also complaining that there was something under it.

2:17:18Like it starts showing these alert messages like caution, there's something under your vehicle. Right. And it's like, yeah, I know there's a lot of small things under under the vehicle, actually. But anyway, so what the Rivian will do if you if it is like if it thinks that you are like hitting something, it just stops the vehicle and puts it in park. so I'd be able to like you know creep the wheels a little bit or spin them a little bit and then it would just beep park and stop me like that's even when it's in the off-road sand mode so I'm like okay that's that's not great that that's actively fighting against me in addition to the lack of any kind of you know easy creep mode and so the anyway some a driver comes by another driver comes by and they're like the guy rolls in the way he's like hey I he's like I I can't help you but do you want me to call for help someone else to help you because you're gonna need help getting out of that and of course i was like thank you but i actually let me try first you know because i don't want to like call someone have them come all the way out here let me see if i can get out first the guy's like all right cool and he he leaves okay great are you still on the beach now podcasting for your car let me just try refuse help i think i can do it i have a new idea that would be so amazing like i don't want that for you and yet i want it for the show all right so next thing i try is i'm going to do the full-blown max track experience and and by the as you say at this point like the my my efforts to get myself out have only made the problem worse and now the bottom of the vehicle is resting on sand so that's really bad no that that is not good that's like that's as bad as it gets yeah like that that you really don't want so i i had the great idea hey i was in the like standard ride height mode the sand mode normally has a higher ride height so like let me try lifting the suspension yeah the 19 mile an hour one yeah so i hit the button to raise the suspension and it says highest and it blinks for a little while and it's like and then it's then it's claims to be done and i look down i'm like i don't think it looks any different in fact i look pretty close to the sand still uh so i'm like i don't think that worked um anyway so we start digging out tiff gets the shovel tiff and adam are in the car my whole family's in the car oh great yeah of course that of course they would be yeah of course and they didn't take any pictures I got one at the end you'll see so Tiff gets out she starts shoveling under one wheel I'm like trying all my tricks of like I'm going to wedge it under the wheel in this one way so this is why if you had more experience on the beach making sandcastles this is where that would come in handy if you build those giant trenches to let the ocean come in if you tried to build the moat to keep the ocean out digging in sand suddenly those skills a lifetime of skills a childhood spent on the beach now it's time for those skills to shine i know right and and so if i had a lot of time and a lot of patience from my family and a lot of shovel ability and it wasn't so freezing because it's again it's december uh it's cold so like tiff and i are digging out and like our hands are frozen like tiff like tore through her gloves like it was there's sand everywhere like it was a disaster um fortunately soon enough after that the mayor drove by just coincidentally he was going home and he's like ah rookies he knows instantly like yeah we're gonna need to get pulled out so he turns his giant um i think he i think it's a suburban or something he turns that whole thing around uh i i pull out my my toe rope and my shackles and all that stuff.

2:20:52I got loops in the front. So tie it up and he yanks me out and it took two seconds. I'm like, yeah, okay. I guess I need help sometimes. I need to ask for help sometimes. And it turns out he pulled me out in three minutes of total time, whereas I was freezing my butt off and freezing tiff's hands off trying to shovel myself out so i think if again like if i had a lot more time if i had like if no one had come by and i had to get myself out i think with enough time and digging i could have you could just build a dig a tunnel to your house and then drive the car but it was i'm very glad i didn't have to and certainly you know taking help from somebody driving by was the way to do it and this this kind of doubles my commitment to be i'm very happy that i am equipped to be that person if if i encounter someone else who's stuff like i have enough gear that even if i encounter somebody who has no gear no rope nothing like i can probably pull them out and so i i like the idea that we all help each other out here that's it's wonderful it's one of the best things about this community um but anyway so got pulled out and so anyway so as i'm driving back uh the the car is still saying you know mile an hour limit and so i could be it's in the high suspension mode so i try lowering the suspension back to the regular standard height so i can go faster because it's kind of you know it's kind of difficult to drive on the beach with that speed limit without you know being stuck where like in the ruts you're already in as casey was describing two weeks ago and so i tap the button to lower the suspension and just it just doesn't respond like it just it does nothing the suspension stays at the high state i stay 20 miles an hour state whatever i'm like okay well i'm sure i'm sure all the crazy you know warnings about stuff being under the car and everything i'm sure i have to like you know let the car recover maybe i have to like spray some sand out of somewhere with the hose or something so i i get back to the house in turtle mode and 20 mile an hour mode very slowly and every time i turn i hear like rubbing i'm like oh god it's like sand and sand is somewhere bad and like as ever as i'm turning it's like chunking it off probably and is there a max track stuck in your wheel well.

2:23:04No, I got them all back. My frunk is now full of sand. But anyway, I got back to the house, and I get out of the car, and I notice, hmm, I am much closer to the sidewalk than I usually am getting out of my car. The car thought it was in the highest suspension setting. Oh, no. But you get out of it, and it looked like a lowrider. The rubbing I was hearing was the tire rubbing against the wheel arch on turns. Oh, no. Oh, that is not desirable. know and so i'm like uh this is not good so i you know park the car in front of my house i go get the hose i hose everything out of all the wheels and wheel wells and and there is just massive quantities of sand like stuck in all the wheels like the the sidewalk looks hilarious after i moved the car because like it's just covered in sand from having fallen off my car i finally get everything out and you know during this process i'm out of the car you know hosting stuff out so the car is in park and is like turning itself on and off as i approach and go away with the proximity phone feature eventually i get back in the car to go move it to its driveway i tried tapping the suspension button to to you know put it back and it says you know check for objections under the vehicle are there you know is it clear of obstructions now and i said yes and it said it was lowering the ride height and i thought hmm oh i don't think i want it to go any lower right because that would be crashing into itself like there's nowhere else for it to go lower so i was a little scared uh but fortunately it raised it back to standard height so it seems to have worked it seems to have been some kind of weird software detection of the sand below it where I guess it like disabled the suspension in some way to make it sink all the way down.

2:24:58I don't know. Does it have air suspension? Yes. I think there is some way that this could be maybe a bug or unintended behavior because like seeing how it drove off the beach in totally flat low rider mode, no wonder I couldn't get out. If that's how it got itself, like when I tried to lift it and it didn't look like it was lifting, that's because it wasn't lifting. had i been able to lift the suspension all the way up maybe it would have been easier to get it out or maybe you just would have dug yourself down another foot i mean it's possible look i'm not going to say i have the best technique in the world this is the first time i ever got stuck i'm not very good at it yet um but but i will say yeah based on all of this and we'll see you know tomorrow if i'm able to drive off the beach normally i probably it seems like it was reset to normal condition again and of course i'm going to bring it to a car wash tomorrow and have everything really blasted out.

2:25:46But I think the Rivian is so far proving to be an amazing vehicle to drive on the sand, but it was actually a pretty awful vehicle to get stuck in the sand with. And that seems to be something they could probably improve with software. Although I have to say, if the air suspension was, the bladders were fully compressed, I would still not expect the front wheels to be scraping against the wheel wells. It surprised me that the suspension geometry is such that in fully compressed mode that it could have have that kind of failure mode where the wheels are rubbing although i'm not entirely sure where they're rubbing i would look at that and say have i done damage to the inside of my wheel wells with my wheels yeah i mean and i mean and you know it wasn't a ton of rubbing and it was at very low speeds for only a small number of turns so i don't think it would have damaged anything permanently but uh but yeah it was concerning to me that like wow it looks like it looks like the car is broken basically but not like once i you know reinflated it afterwards it seems to be normal now but yeah so we'll see uh but yeah overall i i got myself stuck for the very first time in the sand i was not able to easily get myself out i had to rely on a wonderful tow from the mayor which took two seconds and it made me instantly realize it is so much easier to have someone else help you than to try to do it yourself um and finally the rivian is a terrible vehicle when it gets stuck in the sand.

2:27:13But as long as it's not getting stuck in the sand, it's an amazing vehicle. Well, you don't have anything to compare it to because you didn't get stuck with the other vehicles. You know what I mean? That's true. But I think it's the computerized features of it. Yeah, the fact that it was going into park and stuff like that. Yeah, it kept going into park and the suspension obviously did not behave correctly. So something went wrong there where it's really not made, it really was not designed to get yourself out of that kind of thing very easily. and sure probably i would have needed help anyway you know or at least it would have taken me a very long time to help myself out uh but it could like they could if they made a few tweaks to the software this could be a lot less crappy i know this probably wouldn't have helped you in your situation especially looking at the pictures and knowing the geography you're dealing with but if you had a winch and something to attach it to you could pull yourself out but you didn't have a winch and you wouldn't have anything to attach to anyway that's yeah i i thought about like when i when i was first equipping myself for off-road stuff i i thought about getting a winch but first of all they are very expensive and very large aren't they an option on the rivian could you get it from the factory i don't think so no um there was one for the defender actually there was an option for that but um but the other thing is like in for most places where you're getting stuck anything you'd attack to would be too far away like you're looking at like it's for the forest where you have trees yeah exactly you know here it might be like 200 feet away to the nearest thing you could attach to so it probably wouldn't be sturdy enough to pull a 7 000 pound truck out of the sand also true what are you going to attach it to there you attach it to some some beach grass now they do well they do have stuff you can like stick into the sand and then attach a winks to it to perform some kind of anchor but i don't know i mean again like you're getting pretty esoteric at this point and you know if i got stuck once in two years that's not that crazy the tow rope worked fantastically i'm glad you survived so in the span of december because it was december 1st that I almost destroyed your car, I believe.

2:29:06So this December has not, it has been a December to remember for the Rivian, for sure. Or a December it wants to forget. I mean, in all fairness, though, once we got off the beach with your experiment, and then once I got off the beach with my stuff and the car had a chance to reset itself, it did go back totally to normal. But yeah, I think, you know, when I spoke to somebody at Rivian who advised, like, maybe I should just bring it in, just get everything checked out at some point, just to make sure nothing's wrong i think i'm going to probably do that after the holidays i think i'm going to bring it in just like that i would suggest that yeah it's the time for you to give them the feedback of the software changes they can make like not having the thing put itself into park when it's afraid that you know that's that's the thing that dumb uh older dumber vehicles is like well they'll let you flog them until you break them and this one is trying to protect itself but in the process sort of like not letting you you know do what you want it's kind of like uh the the first bad versions of traction control that essentially made it impossible to go up hills in the winter yeah because because the break it would apply the brakes and you would like i'm getting some progress up the hill and be like whoa i feel a wheel slightly sweeping let me apply the brakes and it would just come to a stop yeah exactly well i'm glad you survived all of you tell you what man i was cold i was very cold it's like if i say my kids did you not have appropriate uh clothing for the weather and what my kids would say is i'm not going to be outside it doesn't matter and i bet that's what you were thinking when you were driving home but look you were outside No, I always carry appropriate clothing for the weather in the car because I always think if I get stuck, I'm going to have to be outside for a while.

2:30:36I better have like a hat and gloves and a good jacket. I had all those things. I was wearing none of them because at every single point I thought I was only going to be there for a minute. You had the stuff and you didn't put it on? Yep. As I see you in the picture, not wearing a coat, not wearing a hat, not wearing gloves. That's correct. Because at every single point I thought, all right, I'm stuck. Your moments from freedom. but yeah but i'm it'll just be a second and i'll just do this one thing and i'll be able to get out when you took out the max tracks that would be the time to put on the coat and the hat yeah probably because it's not going to take you a second at that point yeah and when you get the shovels out and you're like one more second just probably this shovel full will do it