568: The Year of Romance

37:45Otherwise, they'll be just LLMs with nothing for them to be trained on except for each other's BS, and that's not an ideal system. Ultimately, there's a question of what should be illegal versus what's ideal for the market or ideal for how we think things should be righteous or best. And those are very different questions. Lots of things are legal that we think are kind of unfortunate. Lots of things are legal that are pretty strong competition for other companies. So, you know, if new technology creates competition for someone else, like that's generally legal and usually for the benefit of the public.

38:22Well, what you want is for laws to guide this because if there are no laws governing it and people think it's a free-for-all, there'll never be a market solution. What you want is there to be enough laws that say these parties need to discuss things with each other because one of them just can't take everything and ignore the other, right? In the absence of any kind of laws or precedents or whatever, it's like, we can do whatever we want. Everything we're doing is 100 % legal. You can't stop us at all. It's better to have some kind of laws governing the bounds of this such that it brings them all to the table and they come to a market solution.

38:52Because the market solution is not going to be you pay New York Times$1 for every article you trained on because that's like billions of dollars, right? That doesn't make any sense. That's not a viable market solution. Then be like, okay, well, I guess we just won't have LLMs and I guess we'll never train in the New York Times, right? if you have enough guidelines the parties will come together and come up with something that is feasible to say well if we don't talk to each other and figure something out there are these laws that say you know again kind of like patents for those the fran stuff where it's like you can have this patent but you have to license it to people under reasonable terms you can't just charge them a bazillion dollars or whatever i would hope that there'd be some kind of laws that make the lm companies figure out a compensation model kind of like the what are the ascap thing or whatever when you want to do like a cover of a song or whatever you can't just cover a song for free but also there is a system in place that has come up with a market value for doing covers such that covers still are allowed to happen but people are still compensated for them and i don't know a lot about that that whole system but that's in my mind that's kind of the ideal of like it's not a free-for-all but it's also not so onerous that no one can ever sing covers anymore and it's also you know people do get paid right so again maybe wishful thinking uh we'll see how this works out in the court case but i do like the idea of there being some kind of value exchange somewhere here and i'm happy to let the market figure out that value exchange but in the absence of any guidelines i'm not happy to let people just say the everything is free and we're taking it all and we'll suck every ounce of value out of it sorry i mean that's capitalism isn't it that's unbridled capitalism with regulations, right?

40:26That's laissez-faire capitalism. Yeah, it tends not to work very well long-term. The tricky part is figuring out what should those guidelines be, and who should they accidentally favor, usually rich people. And everyone has a different answer. Speaking of, let's talk Massimo. So on the 26th of December, the Biden administration said, eh, we're not going to do anything about this. And the Apple Watch sales ban did indeed land in the U.S. Apple had a statement, again, this is 26th of December. Apple says, at Apple, we work tirelessly to create products and services that meaningfully impact users' lives.

41:02It's what drives our teams, clinical design and engineering, to dedicate years to developing scientifically validated health, fitness, and wellness features for Apple Watch. And we are inspired that millions of people around the world have benefited greatly from this product. Hang on, just a moment here. Keep in mind, what you're reading is a statement after the Biden administration said, nah, we're going to let this go through. we've gotten more than halfway through this statement and Apple has said, we're pretty great. It wouldn't be like a statement we were very disappointed with the Biden administration blah blah blah blah blah fully, you know over one half of this statement is like, we just worked so hard on this and we're so wonderful.

41:39Anyway, now what do they say? We strongly disagree with the US ITC decision and resulting exclusion order and are taking all measures to return Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2 to customers in the U.S. as soon as possible. Again, 26 December. I bet they're going to pay Massimo a bunch of money, right? All measures. Let's see what happens next. Surely that's what they'll do. 27 December at 11.55 a.m. Apple Watch ban has been temporarily paused. Woo-hoo! So The Verge reports that one day after the Apple Watch import ban went into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals is instituting a brief pause while it considers a longer pause.

42:12So the answer is, what avenues were still open? Still plenty of things they can do in the courts, and they are. Like, I mean, that's always been Apple's play here, is they're going to exhaust every possibility, asking Biden to help them, appealing. They'll do all those things. We'll see if they get to a termination condition, which involves giving Massimo money. Well, that was the 27th at 11.55 a.m., the 27th at 5.21 p.m. Apple resumes Apple Watch sales after the ban is paused. With the sales and import bans on hold, Apple's resumed sales of Series 9 and Ultra 2. And that's where we stand. We're recording this on, what's today, the 3rd?

42:45uh we we still have apple watch on sale in the united states from apple so all is well right i mean that's pretty amazing considering they they uh halted sales like a couple days after christmas and then one day later they turn them back on i mean again they're still it's still winding its way through the court system but if you had to if apple could have picked this timing i'm not sure they could have picked anything better like we get all our holiday sales we get one or two days where we file paperwork to you know we we have our last ditch effort biden save us he's like nah don't think so uh and then he gets pulled from the stores and then one day later it's back and you know now we wait for the next step yeah i mean it worked out pretty well for apple not so great for massimo but i mean we'll see what happens well this is not over yet so further updates as events transpire ultimately i think they're just gonna have to settle and they're going to have to license this, whatever this patent is.

43:40That's that's like that they can't get past. We are sponsored this episode by trade coffee. Sometimes the smallest changes can make the biggest impact. Trade coffee is a great addition to your new year routine. Trade is a subscription service that sources the best coffee around the country and delivers it right to your doorstep. Here's how this works. Trade has built relationships with over 55 local coffee roasters. So you can enjoy their craft from all over the country from the comfort of your own home. There's multiple ways to experience coffee with Trade. So you can sign up for a subscription or try one of their starter packs today and see how it is.

44:17I use Trade myself and I love it because first of all, it's really great fresh roasted coffee. If you want to make great coffee, you need fresh roasted beans. And Trade delivers them to you on whatever your schedule and volume and needs are. You tell them, hey, I want a pound bag every two weeks or whatever. and they do it. You want to change it or pause it or whatever you need to do. It's super easy to do all that. So you don't need to worry about that. And it is incredibly good coffee. And what I like about Trade is that because it is sourcing it from all these different roasters, I get a huge variety of coffee.

44:49That's something that's very hard to do. And you get a really great variety with Trade. They have all sorts of features and intelligence to make sure that they're delivering flavors and roasts to you that you will like based on your express preferences. And you can give feedback to kind of guide them along. But I got to say their hit rate's really good. Everything I get from them, I love it. It's great. So jumpstart this year by signing up for a Trade subscription. Right now, Trade is offering a free bag with select subscription plans when you visit drinktrade.com slash ATP. That's drinktrade.com slash ATP for a free bag with select subscription plans.

45:25Drinktrade.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Trade Coffee for helping me do everything a little bit faster in 2024 and for sponsoring our show.

45:392024, baby. And we should probably do a little bit of a preview as to what we think is coming in 2024. John, you've been kind enough to put a bunch of items in the show notes for us to discuss. Did you want to do this top to bottom, or are you going to let us just round robin and pick what we think is interesting? No, I mean, you can go through the items. What I put on the list is things, well, it's in our typical show notes fashion. It's things that we more or less know are coming and what we think about them or we're looking forward to them or whatever. And then things start getting question marks after them as we get towards the end of the list where it's like, maybe these are coming.

46:11So we just go one at a time. Vision Pro. It sounds like I don't have links to put in the show notes handy, but it sounds like it is imminent. Probably, if I were to wager, I guess sometime this month will be at least a formal announcement as to like when it'll go on sale and whatnot. So Vision Pro could be any time now. And I am I'm excited for it. I'm curious to see what the response will be. I'm curious to see how one goes to buy a Vision Pro. I mean, I know there's been a lot of talk and chatter, if not official statements, that you'll have to pick it up in store. I understand that, although I have a lot of problems with it, which we can explore if we really want.

46:49But I'm very curious to see how this looks. I'm curious to see what the gray market looks like, because I know that there's a lot of people, including many of our friends that live overseas, that are very keen to have their own Vision Pro. So how does that work? If you're willing to fly yourself to New York or Richmond and want to pick up a Vision Pro, is that something that Apple will sell to you? Or does it work with a non-American Apple ID? How does that look? But all that being said, I'm really excited and really interested to see what this looks like once it's in the market. I'm not excited for the work I need to do to get CallSheet working better on it, which I've done some of but not enough.

47:28But I am excited overall. I don't know. Marco, how do you feel about it? man i i'm gonna have a lot to say about it once i'm allowed to talk about experiences that i will have with it yeah um yeah that going to a lab was amazing as a developer um not so great as a podcaster i'm sorry you're not allowed to characterize your experience marco strike that from the record yes i i went to a lab period um but you know it is kind of unfortunate that like it's hard for me to discuss the Vision Pro and my expectations and thoughts on it because I have some experience with it that I'm not allowed to talk about.

48:06But hopefully that will be over soon. I'm with you, Casey. I think it is probably coming within probably a month. I think it's very close. And I am excited about it. But I also I'm trying to keep my excitement in check. As I figure out what am I doing for Overcast for it um looking at the market for it i think it's going to be a very slow burn like it's going to be a very slow build-up because the volume is just not going to be there for a while you know there was those rumors from the supply chain that the little screens they're using inside they can that like sony can probably only make you know one or two million of those screens in a year and so there is there is some speculation from the supply chain like they might not be able to make and sell more than maybe a million Vision Pros in the first year.

48:55And if there's any truth to that, if you figure like approximately a year from now, maybe there's a million of these in active use, well, as an app developer, how many of those million people are going to have my app? If I'm lucky, maybe a few hundred? It's going to be a very small number of people. From an app developer's perspective, there is going to be no good reason i think to port your app over to this unless you have a way to capture a huge portion of its users i don't think as a podcast app i don't think i have that you should make an app that looks like when you when you tilt the glasses upward is like you're drinking a beer because that's the type of app but like that's what i'm thinking of with this launch of like you're right there's there because of the supply issues apple is capped in how many of these they can physically make no matter how many people want them and keep in mind they're thirty hundred dollars to start so it's probably not going to be them anyway but like you have to there is the kind of gold rush like well people are going to get their vision pro and they're like well i've got this thing what kind of apps can i get for it and if you have some general purpose app like it looks like we're talking about the iphone app that showed like basically a beer on your phone and use the accelerometer when you tilted your phone the level the beer liquid level would say say level so like you're drinking a beer uh everyone had an iphone got that app because you get an iphone you're like what's available for this thing and it was like seven you know not seven things in the store but relatively speaking there were very few apps in the app store and if you were one of those apps and you were a general purpose kind of like ah i'll try it i just want to try a fun thing for my thing you could get a massive market share of the first batch of people who bought an iphone and make a lot of money and that is probably going to be true on the vision pro but i'm not sure a podcast player is that app that's going to be the impulse purchase that you really want to just try out the vision pro when i think vision pro i don't think podcasts so it's not not particularly a visual medium but someone's going to make that app so i think there is going to be a mini gold rush to try to sell to 50 of the million people who get vision pros and casey to your point about the gray market stuff this has got to be apple's nightmare because apple hates gray market stuff to begin with and the worst thing the thing apple always will tell you they don't want and they really really don't want which is we don't want people to have our product and have a crappy experience because they didn't get it the apple way and nothing could be more problematic when it comes to that situation than a thing that fits on your face that has different size things that different size light shields and the prescription glasses and all like there is no way that the gray market is going to give the buyers of those gray market things what apple thinks the experience should be so you're going to have developers overseas who are using uncomfortable blurry looking headsets because it's the only thing they could get and they pick the prescription wrong and they don't have the right light shield thing and it doesn't fit their face and it's just it's and apple's gonna be like that's not how it's supposed to be we want you to have this experience that's why you have to wait for us to lunch in your country come to the apple store we'll scan your face we'll make sure we find the right you know but it's like well i didn't do that instead i someone got it for me and i bought it on ebay and i just hoped that the fate shield like wasn't too painful after 30 minutes and that's not the experience apple wants you to have i mean they hated gray market iphones they don't like when you use non-official apple parts they don't you know just like this is their worst nightmare because the experience of vision pro can be so much worse like the floor is so low if you get one that doesn't fit right you know and doesn't look right with the you know prescription lenses and so many people need prescriptions like i still think about this not that i'm planning on getting one but it's like when i when i heard case when i heard you talking when you're on the talk show talking about like the prescription lenses and stuff setting aside the price i was like what prescription would i tell apple because gruber's like oh i came to the thing and they just asked what my prescription was because i have two sets of glasses now i haven't moved to bifocals or progressives but i have my computer glasses that i'm wearing now to look at my screen and then i have my tv watching glasses that are my and my driving glasses that are my distance glasses i don't know which prescription i should give them what what distance because my computer glasses are made to be comfortable for me looking at my screen that's like an arm's length right and my driving glasses are basically 2020 at infinity you know like it's for distance stuff what prescription would i even give apple and believe me i'm not the only old person with two different prescriptions for up close and far away there are a lot of us and so that's got to be part of the experience it's not like you're going to go into apple apple store and they're going to say oh what's your prescription because that's not an easy question you have to say what's your prescription when viewing things from x distance and i don't even know what that distance is is it the distance that they typically hang windows by default in front of you is it the distance the screens are from your eyes well i think yes i I mean, remember we talked about that whole convergence effect thing earlier in the fall.

53:36And it does seem like they are optimizing for the equivalent distance of whatever it is, like a few meters in front of you. Like wherever the default spot is, they put windows and kind of like on this axis around you. Meters? How far is that in feet? Yeah, it's something like eight or ten feet in front of you, I think. yeah but like this is all all this is say that getting the the experience apple wants you to have from their vision pro is going to be trickier than any other apple product even more so than the watch and gray market is just going to exacerbate that and i you know that's just part of being an early adopter and people will suffer through it but boy it's got to really eat apple up because they spent so long trying to make this product and get the right set of face shields and and they know how it should work like internally or whatever just to know that like 20 of the basically everyone outside the US who has this thing is having a substandard experience.

54:29You know, what can you do? I think the Vision Pro is going to be the story of the first few months of the year, at least. I'm a little concerned for Apple that the press and like the hype won't stick as much as they want it to because it's going to be such a such like a slow buildup of a market. I think they have put so much into this product, like in terms of, you know, their their time and resources and everything. but when was the last time apple launched a really high profile brand new product that was not expected to be a massive volume hit at the start well it was the iphone yeah it was that's it and that was a long time ago and that was a very different company and you know now like you can say something like oh the mac pro but that that's not nearly the resources that went into the vision pro like it's they haven't launched anything that they're that they're fully behind is like this is a new paradigm like the watch was the closest you could say it's like this is a new way of computing or whatever but like i think this is fine for apple because i think i think they'll weather it fine because it's almost kind of a relief to essentially be supply constrained in the first year give them time to get their feet under them kind of like with the watch like apple has an idea of what they think this thing will be good for but what does the market think and so this will this will be a big story in early 2024 and i think it will settle down and people forget about it and move on and that will give the product time to grow into itself right and because you know either they all sell out or the story is apple couldn't even sell a million of them and it's too expensive blah blah like with that voice too yeah apple's not going to be scared but apple's not going to go oh my god forget it we did so badly we're just going to cancel this product no they're gonna they're gonna ride out 2024 no matter what happens they're gonna learn from what's out there in the market and 2025 they'll regroup and you know continue on so i'm I'm not worried about all the inevitable stories and the low sales due to either supply constraints or lack of demand or whatever.

56:23And even if it's best case and we're like, they sell it instantly and people are spending huge amounts of money for them in the gray market and everybody wants them. And it's just so exciting, but they can't make them. And they make the stories like, oh, Apple should have found another supplier for those screens or whatever. even if the very best happens in that scenario it's still going to be like just a you know a rookie year for the vision pro don't expect it to take over the world the iphone even the iphone didn't take over the world in its first year of sales it was a curiosity it was a thing that people who could tolerate at &t used and it was like i'm not so sure about this like and the iphone is like you know the best slain consumer product ever so do not expect the vision pro to do better than the iPhone in its first year.

57:04And if it does 10 times worse, don't worry about it. I feel like Apple is pretty dedicated to this. Even if it 100 % flops, I think they're going to keep plugging away at this. Well, and I think we're going, like, I don't think Apple's going to have any trouble selling as many as they can make this year. Like, they're going to sell every single one they can make. Because they can't make that many. Right. It's going to be backordered. It's going to be hard to get. Like, it's going to be, they're going to sell them all. That's not going to be the problem. But what I am... envisioning is that people are going to buy it with a set of expectations about what they're going to be able to use it for.

57:42And then that will change because that's what happens with new tech categories. It happens. It happened with the Apple Watch. It happened before that with the iPad. Remember, the iPhone didn't have apps, didn't have an app store when it launched. So talk about changing the way people use the device. The people who had the first iPhone are using it differently than we are because there was no app store. And this is going to go through the same kind of hype curve of like, you know, you're going to have, you know, now before it's actually out, but after it's been announced, you have people saying oh my god this is you know we're gonna have to rethink cities like i'll be able to get all my work done in in this headset i will i'll never have to buy a computer or monitor again and you're gonna have those people go out and buy it it's not gonna fulfill that expectation for some percentage of those people the expectations are gonna crash saying i tried living my entire life in a vision pro for a month and this is what happened and my face is all sweaty and my nose hurts right so then the expectations are gonna crash you're gonna have people like federico who actually will figure out how to get all their work done in it.

58:39It's going to be a whole bunch of complex hacks to make it work for you. And you're going to have people say, actually, I traveled only with this device for this trip, and here's how I did it. So there's going to be this big roller coaster of press for it from people who are kicking the tires, trying it out, tech enthusiasts, people who are trying to live in it and do way too much stuff in it. Then you're going to have all the people saying, i tried this and it was bad for reason x and then all that's gonna crash and then people are gonna try it again and try different things and some new app will come out for it that'll make it better and it's gonna be that kind of roller coaster for a while it's gonna be a fun year in the sense that like that kind of experimentation i always find really fun and entertaining for both myself to try to do it but mostly to listen and watch to what other people are doing with it uh and and experience it vicariously through other people who have more time than I do.

59:32At the end of that roller coaster, I think this product is going to be really great for the market that it finds. That's not going to be a big market for a while for lots of reasons. Price, supply, apps. There's lots of reasons why it's not going to be a huge market yet. I hope that everyone, including Apple, is able to keep perspective that when it comes out and does not set the whole world on fire, that's not necessarily a failure. It's just the early part of its lifetime and the earliest part of this market. But ultimately, I'm very excited for that market. I think there's a lot of good uses for it, but it's going to be a slow start.

1:00:15Marco, do you plan on buying one? Of course, immediately. Because here's the thing, as a developer of these platforms, like my app will be there whether like people will use it now you know like i was looking earlier today like i allow people to run my ipad app on apple silicon max that has now accumulated a very large number of mac users i have more mac users than i have ipad users which i know that's not what i would have guessed but that's that's the reality uh i plan to allow my app to run as long as it doesn't have major problems and i will i will see what kind of usage it gets and i will make decisions from there about like when and whether to make a native version um but i have some ideas for a native version i think are good i'm gonna want to try them i'm gonna try them immediately because you know even though my my likely market of vision pro owners in the first year is probably going to be like you know fewer people than use like the large widget like it's going to be like some you know slice of a slice of a slice it numbers wise relative to my entire product and my entire audience for my app it's going to be nothing but it's important for me to be there for other reasons you know it there's value in in in the the people who are like the influencers and the press there's value in them seeing my app there and using it and knowing it's there there's a certain level of demand there that i want to address from that kind of person there's value to apple and therefore value to me uh indirectly through you know favor with apple uh so there's there's all sorts of reasons why i would probably want to be there anyway numbers are not one of them and i expect the vision pro and the overcast app for it to be a massively money losing operation for me for a while but i absolutely will be buying one the second i can get my hands on one and and i think a a large portion of the early buyers will be developers and companies that are buying it to test their stuff on and to develop for but we'll see i mean that being said like a lot of small developers are super uninterested in paying 3500 for this um hi right like i i think there's it's it's not as much of a slam dunk for every developer out there to buy this as say like the first ipad was because we we had different expectations and it was way cheaper uh this is very expensive and anyone who's like running the numbers like well how much money am i going to make with my software invasion pro and is that going to help pay for the 3500 no no it will not not for a while at least so so that's going that's going to impact the market to some degree um it's not going to be purchased by every ios developer out there like that's not that's not going to happen for lots of reasons but they will be bought by some developers it's and some you know youtubers and influencers and just you know people want to try it business travelers rich people like it's gonna there is a market for it and it's it's going to be really fun and amazing um but it's not going to be the next ipad or apple watch for for a while, if ever.

1:03:30Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what I'm going to do because I don't know that I have an overabundance of interest from a user's perspective, but I do feel, uh, I feel some amount of responsibility as the developer of call sheet. I feel a fairly considerable amount of responsibility as one of the three hosts of this program. And since John doesn't want to take the fall and it's always up to you and me to take care of this, then, uh, I bought this Mac pro, You've got a lot of spending to do. I mean, only a few Vision Pros, though. Yeah, right? Well, then again, he did option that Mac Pro. So we're looking at, like, I don't know, 10 Vision Pros.

1:04:06How much did you spend on that damn thing? Maybe three or four. But anyway, it covers both of your Vision Pros. So go ahead. Oh, I see. I see. Plus, you both have apps that legitimately could be on the platform. It's not like you're just doing it for the show. Honestly, Call Sheet, it probably has a much bigger audience on Vision Pro than Overcast does. Exactly. You're watching a movie. you look to your left and you say some voice thing and says, who is that? And then your app captures the video. No, forget it. You can't do that. Anyway. No, you can't do any of that. I think it was during the talk show that Gruber and I were talking this out.

1:04:38And it occurred to me that I don't think CallSheet can run side by side with a video player because the best of my understanding, a video player is an immersive experience. You know, there's three different experiences. There's the windows, I forget what they call them. volumes volumes spaces that's it thank you but i will i will remind you uh what the early versions of ios and watch os and ipad os look like and what their limitations were and how long those lasted so that's fair yeah don't worry too much about it i feel yes i i know the limitations that they have now but this is like the 1.0-iest of 1.0s and inevitably once this product contact comes in contact with developers and apps and users that is all going to change so fast it even changed on the iPad eventually.

1:05:23So I have much faith that applications like yours will eventually be able to do the same things. But I do agree with you that right now there's probably a bunch of annoying limitations that make it difficult for you to do what you want. And then you should give that feedback to Apple and they'll incorporate that into the next version of the OS. Well, honestly, I think first of all, I think you'll be in the clear. Second of all, if you're not, app switching exists and people figure it out pretty quickly. So, you know, I think you're fine either way, but you know, I think the this is probably going to be a device that gets a lot of like movie and tv watching done on it um so i the market for call sheet is is i think much more direct than the market for people who want an audio only podcast player listening to podcasts while they're working on their spreadsheets and their vision pro they can i mean and that's that's why people use the mac app you know it's hard for me to understand the needs of that market because i'm not a listen to podcasts while working kind of person.

1:06:19So I don't ever use Overcast on my Mac, but I use it constantly on my phone because when I'm out and around doing stuff and walking the dog and washing dishes, that's when I listen to podcasts. But I don't understand how people listen to podcasts while working because my brain doesn't work that way. So I don't know how people are going to use it necessarily in Vision Pro, but it's not like... I can envision... I can envision a situation where you might want an experience in Vision Pro where you're transported to some place. You want to hang out on top of a mountain and maybe just put a podcast on and listen to it.

1:06:55I can envision that being a market. Again, I don't know how big of a market, maybe a few hundred people in the first year. It's not going to be a big market, but I can envision use cases like that. The Vision Pro is a very broad product. It can do a lot of things. We don't really know yet what is going to be its most popular uses, but I can hazard a guess that it's going to be very consumption focused, I think, in practice. Very much like the iPad, where I think there will be people who will do productivity work on it, but I don't think that's going to be the most common case. I think it is much more likely that people will use it more for media consumption and immersive experience consumption than doing your spreadsheets in email.

1:07:47I think, again, you will be able to do your spreadsheets in email, and I don't see that being a huge part of its use case. So then are people going to listen to audio podcasts? I mean, while they watch videos, probably not. But while they sit on a mountaintop, maybe. So again, this all remains to be seen. it is a very clear-cut case for CallSheet because there's going to be, I think, a lot of video watching in this device. Yeah, we'll see. But I am not looking forward to spending$3 ,500-plus on something that its use as a person to me, I'm not entirely convinced yet. But again, you know what? You're going to have one on day one.

1:08:26I think I'm going to have one. I've convinced myself I probably need to. You're going to buy it, and you're going to grumble about the price, and you're going to love it. I am going to buy it. I'm going to grumble about the price. I think I'll say it's extremely cool. The question is, will I pick it up after, you know, completing whatever I need to do with CallSheet? I don't know. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll love it. I don't know. But we'll see. Gosh, I wish I could talk about what happened at the labs. Anyway. I know, me too. I'm dying here. It's killing me. All right, John, tell us about OLED iPads.

1:08:53What do we think is happening there? This is, you know, we both talked about Vision Pro, but OLED iPads are the product that I'm most excited about for 2024 from Apple, believe it or not, because I'm for sure going to buy these if they are OLED iPads because I use my iPad to watch video all the time and an OLED iPad would do a better job of showing video because it would have better black levels I want this so bad uh and uh you know it'll it hasn't been that long since I got my iPad I have an M1 iPad it's not that old but the OLED screen is a reason enough for me to upgrade for the wider market as we've discussed in the past we hope that they're rationalized the ipad line update the pros to have the landscape camera figure out what they're going to do with the pencil after taking the year off essentially 2023 the ipad took that whole year off all we got was the weird pencil uh 2024 is the year of actually releasing ipads some of which we hope are good um and the only reason i highlight this as item number two is because this is the one i'm definitely going to buy you two are going to try to get vision pros if you possibly can if they don't sell out in the first 30 seconds i am absolutely buying an ipad and i think i'll have an easier time getting one and it will be cheaper yeah well that's it's hard to be more expensive well if you got the eight terabyte model maybe it would be the same price we'll see and by the way you know vision pro starting at 3500 we don't know the details of that statement yet all they said was starting at 3500 each individual prescription lens is 1500 there's a porsche option prices i know you're joking but it wouldn't surprise me if they are hilariously expensive yeah blue stitching an extra 400 just hope that you can't adjust the storage at all yeah well but but like what is the storage going to be used for how many people buying it will even know yet like i don't know how much storage i need on my vision pro i have no idea better get the big one i guess well or like do you want to invest that much extra money in like version 1.0 that's going to be obsolete you know first i get the big apple tv it's a little bit less expensive but you know yeah it's like what is it 50 bucks 30 bucks yeah exactly yeah no but so the ipad the iPad I think is going to be I've kind of fallen out of using the iPad for almost anything but I go in phases I go up and down I'm sure when they when they launch some I'm going to be like oh I want that because it's new and shiny and OLED and I'll rationalize myself buying one for some reason especially if it's dual layer OLED screen that some of the rumors interested super bright really amazing quality it would essentially be the best quality screen available on an Apple product because it will surpass the uh the LCD mini LED things on the MacBook Pros and certainly surpass the xdr yeah that that would be great um but yeah like i i'm i'm mostly just curious to see what they do with the ipad pro especially because the ipad pro has not seen a meaningful update redesign uh in since 2018 uh it is pretty long in the tooth now i'm really i really want to know like do they address things like the the pencil um attachment mechanism uh any kind of pencil charging changes because like there's rumors that there's going to be like a new pro pencil as well um what do they do about where the camera is like one of the biggest annoyances of using the ipad pro for me is the camera still on the short side and i i almost 100 using it in the little keyboard flappy thing the not the magic trackpad equipped one the one before that the straight one that craig federighi uses um so i use that one and so the the camera is always right under my left hand i guess when you pick up the ipad it is directly under your where you pick it up by and it warns you about it which is when you have to add a software feature to compensate for hardware thing that's when you know the hardware thing is uh outlived its uh useful life yeah and they they did update one of the lower end ipads to have the camera like on the long edge like a laptop so if you're holding it in landscape it's in the top middle that i think is the clear answer for where it should be on the ipad pro and on probably on all ipads as well uh but it interferes with where the pencil attaches right now in the current ipad pro so that this is a question like where do you put the pencil if you put it on the short side that has other downsides um you can put you can still put it on the long side but like change where the magnets are so you can fit the camera between them or something like there's options yeah that's what everyone assumes they're going to do that's like the whole reason for the new pencil i'm sure the pencil will have new features but the main reason is oh we have to rejigger the internals to make room for the camera that's on the long side and that'll be the apple pencil three or whatever so and i just want to say that if they come out with the new ipad and it has a led screen and they change nothing else about it i'm still getting it because i'm not i'm not gonna be like i'm waiting i'm gonna wait until they have the landscape camera that's not what i'm using the ipad for i do have a pencil and i do use it and it is annoying that my hand covers the facetime camera and everything like that but still no matter what they do if it's just if they do like the you know the the new uh mac pro that uh uh launched this uh very podcast it's exactly the same ipad as we have now the only difference is is a new oled screen i'm still getting it i mean that would still be a huge upgrade but and it would be incredibly disappointing to everybody but me yeah but but i i do hope there's more i mean you know you know as you mentioned 2023 there were literally no new ipads released and the state of the ipad lineup as we discussed previously is really messy right now because it seems like there like halfway through multiple different important transitions things like moving the camera unifying the pencils like stuff like this like there's there's a lot of like half done transitions in the ipad lineup there's way too many ipads the differentiation between them is odd and confusing uh there's lots of like you know little nitpicks of like well you can use this keyboard with this one but not with this very similar one they have three different ipads that are all like within a half inch screen size of each other like it's really it's a weird lineup what I expect and hope from 2024 for the iPad is for us to finally get the answer of like where is the iPad going and give us a coherent lineup that puts us there that I really hope for and I think is likely to actually happen I'm sure they're going to do the thing where they keep around an old model of the cheap one but they already they're already still doing that like so they currently have two you know base models basically like the the more modern design one and the one still has the home button and the forehead and chin and so hopefully they're able to get rid of the home button one finally move the more modern one down to that slot and then give us the new base model you know so there's a lot to do in the ipad lineup it seems like they're slated to do all of it this year basically because i think every ipad approximately is is due for an update so we will see i i hope they do it i hope they do a good job and i hope whatever changes are coming to the iPad Pro were worth the wait from 2018.

1:15:32Fair enough. All right. M3 Ultra, maybe in the Mac Studio, perhaps in a new Mac Pro. What do we think about that? I mean, I guess really this could have been inverted, but it shows where my interest lies. You know, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are due to be updated this year. They will presumably get the M3 Ultra, which is a chip that we assume will exist, and it will just be M3 to M3 Maxes stuck together in the usual way. But the thing is the m3 max is amazing and two of them will be twice as amazing so that will be a really good chip and despite the fact that the mac studio will surely come with the m3 max it will also come with the md ultra and that's going to really differentiate it from the rest of the product line don't expect any other i don't expect any other changes to these products other than them just existing and getting the new chip and for the mac studio i think that's fine and for the mac pro it is exactly as disappointing as last year's mac pro no change there um in particular the m3 ultra mac studio i feel like is becoming increasingly essential for apple's supposed ambitions in gaming they have a long way to go there but it is nice to be able to have something that they sell that has more gpu grunt than a laptop right and the mac studio is going to have twice as much gpu grunt as their fastest laptop because it'll have two m3 maxes in there with twice the gpu grunt does that make a difference for the tiny amount of games that this?

1:16:55Well, probably not, but it's, you know, at the very least, again, we'll see how it performs in the benchmarks, but something better than a laptop is kind of one of those like really low bar that Apple needs to clear to start taking itself seriously as a gaming company. And we've discussed this many times as fast. It's great that they've, you know, raised the floor that none of their computers stink anymore. They're all pretty good, but you got to have at least one really good one one pretty okay one you know what i mean and that is the role of the mt ultra it's not the mac pro no one's buying that thing for games but the mac studio is small cheaper than the mac pro and you know it'll it should be you know close to twice as fast uh when running game stuff because it's got twice the gpu so i'm looking forward i'm not planning on buying that i'm still you know again my the clock on my 2019 mac pro is mostly dictated by apple i was thinking over the uh the holiday that like how long would i be willing to keep using this mac pro after apple stops supporting it with the latest version of mac os and i think that is a non-zero amount of time for me because i i do want to wait to buy at the right time you know what i mean i i want i'm impressed by the m3 series especially the m3 max the m3 max is often benchmarking it higher than the m2 ultra in certain tests right so i feel like they're they're pressing on the high end I want to see what an M4 or an M5 looks like if I can hold out that long.

1:18:23So that's all. I look forward to these computers existing and I look forward to seeing the benchmarks and I'm ready to continue to be disappointed by the Mac Pro. So what is the current plan as of the beginning of 2024 when Apple says no more new macOS releases for Intel? Do you immediately buy an Apple Silicon Mac Pro? Do you slum it and buy a studio? No, no. Like I said, I'm willing to be stuck in amber of like, okay, it's not supported anymore. I'm just going to keep using it after the version is released that I can't run anymore. How long will I last in that state? I don't know. If you'd asked me before, I'd say, well, as soon as that happens, I'm going to buy one.

1:19:11So I'm never going to be in that state. Now I'm thinking that I'm willing to be on the previous year's OS that Marco can never remember the name of for a non-zero amount of time. Is that going to be six months? Is that going to be a year? It's going to be like me and buying TVs. Like I want to pick the right time to buy. Ideally, I would like to wait to see them do something more than the current ultra strategy with their top end chip. You know what I mean? even i even if i buy it in a mac studio i would love to see as we discussed in the past a different packaging arrangement or you know something different than we seem to do with m1 through m3 for with respect to the ultra right if i can hold out that long i will if i can't then i'll just get an m4 ultra mac studio like that's my plan essentially like whatever whatever that if when the time comes when i just can't hold that any longer and it's just untenable and you know maybe i need to update it to to do dev work on my apps whatever whatever the situation is when And I get pressed to do it if, assuming the Mac Pro is still like it is, I'm going to end up getting a Mac Studio with whatever the best Ultra is.

1:20:14I know we're going off on a tangent. It's my fault. But what do you feel like your Mac Pro is uniquely good at that the Studio isn't? I know the obvious answer is gaming now, but that's not likely to be the case in any future Mac Pro. So you don't have 340 hard drives in there, do you? I mean, I do have a bunch. i have i have all my storage is internal well except for my windows drive which is external but i do like my i have an internal why is that external if everything else is internal i have an internal time machine drive it internal super duper clone and then i have the regular uh boot disk and i have swapped video cards many times and i know what you're saying like well you're not gonna be able to run pc games because it's not x86 yada yada but i i do want to buy something with gpu grunt that essentially is going to be sitting there idle in the hopes that apple's gaming strategy bears fruit or at the worst case that i can boot into linux and play like steam games that are for the steam deck you know what i mean like i want the gpu grunt to be there speculatively like i don't i it is not as sure a thing as hey i can i can boot this thing into windows and play windows games that is a sure thing right it's easy to know why am i getting why do i want a mac with more gpu grunt that's speculative that's me crossing my fingers and saying boy i hope i can do something gaming related with this extra gpu grunt and you know maybe i'll get burned maybe it'll turns out that uh for the millionth time apple's gaming strategy won't work out and i can't run windows and i can't run linux games with proton and stuff uh but that's the plan why won't you put your windows boot drive in your in the in the machine you feel like it's tainting it don't you uh i mean that's a yes it's mostly because like the windows boot drive yeah it probably should be inside the machine but the tainting is not the reason i did it but it's kind of it goes on one of my crappier ssds because you know it doesn't really matter and i think it's changed a few times and it was such a pain to get it working on the external one that was kind of like a sunk cost fallacy but uh anyway yeah i'm probably i think this thing is probably in its final arrangement of components after many many swaps and stuff where it's it's all solid state it's got that one external oh you know what i mean when i do this when i did the sonoma drive that was also external because that's like a throwaway one that i'm constantly erasing and stuff and i use it a different computer so fair enough all right iphone 16 i don't know too much of what to expect from this obviously we've talked about the um capture button which i think could be very interesting and i'm optimistic about that i'm slightly terrified about dropping the 5x uh tetra prism thing into the regular size phones because I don't know which one I would buy then because I both like and just...

1:22:47What do you mean you don't know? You would come back to the medium side. Yeah. I think I would. I think I would. Especially since the rumor is that the 16 is going to actually be a little bit bigger than the 15. Again? They're doing it again? Yeah. I think the thing that they're doing... Remember that the 15 shrunk because they shrunk the bezels all around it and everything? I think they're essentially not undoing that but making the screen bigger by an old bezels width. just to give themselves more room internally for the tetra prism camera and a bunch of other stuff and honestly i'm fine with that because i'm using a 14 pro now and the 14 pro is bigger than the 15 pro so like 15 pro shrunk a little bit it sounds like a 16 is going to be the same size as my current phone and keep in mind that i am buying the 16 because that's my phone year so from my perspective the 16 will be the same size as my current phone but from your perspective it'll be a little bit bigger than your 15 pro and from casey's perspective it'll be way smaller than that stupid pop socket thing you've got that's true uh no i mean there are some things i like about this phone, but I do miss having a phone that you can legitimately, without worry, without a dongle on the back or, you know, a wart on the back, use one-handed.

1:23:52You know, I don't have Gigantor hands like, you know, Mike Hurley does. And so I really do need some sort of affordance on there. And so I am cautiously, intentively optimistic that maybe I would be able to go back to the, you know, human-sized phone again, which I think would be kind of nice. I'll miss the real estate and almost maybe the battery life, although that hasn't been as night and day as I had expected. But it would be nice to have a phone I could use one handed again. So I don't know, Marco, what are your thoughts on the iPhone 16? We don't know a ton about it yet. But, you know, if the rumors are true that it's going to be, you know, adding capture button and giving me the 5X lens, that's great.

1:24:33I am looking forward to that because the 5X lens I am super envious of. Whenever I have a moment to see TIFFs or to use it, I'm always like, man, I wish I had this on my phone. But I don't wish enough to get the giant phone. So, again, hopefully I get that. And otherwise, I don't really know. I'm very... This is what happens every year. I'm very happy with the iPhone I have now. But, you know, I'm sure they'll find a way to make me want to buy the new. This will have the realigned cameras on both of them, by the way, on both the 16 and the 16 Pro. Like, the realigned cameras are spatial video because they'll both be able to do it.

1:25:05And the rumor is also that they'll both have the capture button like it won't be a pro only feature so and there are some i mean we talked about this a million uh times when we were talking about the socs like what are they going to do is the is there going to be a18 pro and an a18 are they going to be unified are they going to be divert split is there going to be uh one that's like last year's model but with gpu things that we don't know what they're going to do with the socs but it seems like from the physical feature sets they're both going to have the aligned cameras and they're both going to have the capture button i still at this early stage i still feel like the capture button is kind of like a solid state volume buttons and it's the type of thing that we could be hearing plans from back in time and really that decision was reversed and we won't know about it until the next round of rumors comes out you know what i mean and maybe there just won't be a capture button and we'll wait till next year but from what i've heard it sounds like the 16 line will be more unified and coherent than the 15 one was but we'll see it's it's a long ways off but you know the iphone is especially with no rumors about anything radical it's just like oh it's a it's a year where they're consolidating gains from the previous phones and you know it's not every year the iphone is good i don't think there's any chance of it being terrible but there's i don't think there's much chance either of it being something like an iphone 10 type uh revelation yeah yeah actually and i'm glad you brought up the special video thing john because that i think would be a huge motivator if it can take spatial video better than 1080p 30 which is very restrictive yeah that might that might be a differentiation around on the pro like they'll both have the aligned cameras for spatial video and the rumor is that they're the ultra wide that is aligned with it is going to be 48 megapixel and maybe only on the pro you'll get you know better frame rates better resolution whatever and look i know this decision's already made you know 15 years ago but if you have to raise either the frame rate or the resolution and you can't do both give me the frame rate please like 30 fps is tough i think with the vision pro i think the resolution may have more bang for the buck because it's so big in your field of vision you know what i mean i'm not allowed to tell you whether i know what you mean uh okay anyway yes i mean casey gruber discussed it with like it's not as big as panoramas panoramas is where it suffers the most according to gruber but the the spatial video is apparently smaller but still it's pretty big i definitely can't tell you any of that however i can tell you i really want more resolution out of my cameras now more frame rate do you mean both well i would suggest for panoramas um you would probably want a lot of resolution yeah like one of the things that i am really looking forward to in the vision pro uh merlin introduced me to this this polycam app uh where it basically it's it's one of these apps that uses like the lidar and the cameras and everything and you can you can make like a 3d you can 3d capture and make a floor plan or a whole like 3d map of a room as long as your room is not filled with junk i know from experience right yeah but you know but like that's a really cool thing.

1:27:56I'm looking forward to just like, I don't know if you can even do this yet on the Vision Pro, but I'm sure it will come fairly soon if you can't. Like, whatever standard, you know, USDZ scene formats that these kind of things can output, I want to be able to capture a place with my iPhone using something like Polycam, and then be able to like be in it in the Vision Pro at a later time. Like, oh, what was it like to be, you know, in my room in this one apartment that I captured, you know, And then I don't live there anymore. That kind of thing. That would be so cool to me. What was it like on this vacation?

1:28:28What was our hotel room like? What was my kid's room like when he was this age? I would love to be able to capture that kind of stuff and then kind of just experience it in the Vision Pro. And I think one thing that you will probably want, if we see that, is the most resolution possible on those captures. because what you are seeing in the Vision Pro, the field of view it is simulating is massive compared to a phone or a computer screen. So the pictures that we take today on our little iPhone camera sensors or whatever, a single picture, yeah, that looks great on your phone. If you're lucky, it might look okay on your laptop screen, but when you put it onto a 50-foot tall virtual screen or something, that's a different experience.

1:29:16that's also when people uh complain that i'm nitpicking when i say well iphone photos are fine unless you're pixel quote-unquote pixel peeping well guess what everyone inside division pro is pixel peeping everything is so much bigger so it could be the side of a of a billboard and suddenly you see i mean we talked about last time with the picture of you uh towing your car on the beach and what a mess it made of your face because it was low light yeah that's not you're not gonna need to pixel peep to see that when it's 50 feet tall in front of you yeah but like so i i think the the rise of these you know headsets whether it's the vision pro or the quest series or whatever like the rise of these headsets i think is going to increase the demand for much higher resolution phone cameras basically that can actually capture a lot more detail of our surroundings and our experiences that we go through in life and you know and and maybe even big cameras might have a small resurgence because they're so much higher resolution, but I think ultimately it has to go on the phones.

1:30:15This has to be... And maybe they'll just do it with a bunch of combination capture. Like, okay, we'll take this... Yeah, even big cameras do that. Speaking of big cameras, cameras with huge sensors, with big mirrorless cameras with 60 megapixel sensors also have a mode where they will take 75 pictures and stitch them together for massive resolution. And the phones should... I mean, that's what panorama is it's taking a bunch of captures and stitching them together uh that that kind of technology like you're not you can't just keep adding megapixels it's not going to work especially with the phone but what you can do is get more and more intelligent modes of taking a whole bunch of 48 megapixel captures and weaving them together into something that looks better and better inside vision pro yeah and you know talking about like you know as as the vision pro market very slowly grows over time that will give the iphone a chance to have its cameras grow too because if the Vision Pro takes off and if it sticks around for the long haul and becomes something that a lot of us really want and enjoy, you're going to want the highest resolution captures possible.

1:31:17Current phone stuff, again, looks great on the phone, but when you blow it up, most phone pictures don't even look that good on my Pro Display XDR. And that is, in the scale of what the Vision Pro is giving us, the XDR is like a relatively tiny app window for the Vision Pro. So, you know, it's a very different scale that we're talking about of experiencing our media, and there's going to be just demand for infinitely higher resolution. That's why as a consumption device is another thing in its favor, because in the beginning, you know, professional companies that can take very expensive, huge cameras and actually capture massive resolution, they're the only, that's the only content that's going to be available that can truly take advantage of the you know the vision pro with all the resolution that's available as you turn your head around and regular people won't be able to make that certainly not with their iphones and most people aren't going to buy like the weird 360 camera rigs that stitch together these high megapixel images but some companies will be able to like apple and other companies who can essentially ship an app that is the equivalent of the single app ebook remember those days on the on the right it's just like what is this it's an app that just shows you a bunch of places but we captured them with our camera equipment that costs as much as your house yeah it's 60 gigs yeah you can't capture this but we captured it and it looks amazing and you're just going to want to sit here and listen to podcasts and marco's app maybe i should do that maybe that maybe that's my app maybe it's like i create an immersive experience that i you know i like film some mountain somewhere with some crazy camera it gives you an excuse to buy another two hundred thousand dollars worth of uh 3d video capture equipment and then go on top of a mountain I definitely have not recently purchased a very high resolution camera.

1:33:01Oh, gosh. All right. After show. Apple Watch 10. I'm excited to see. I got to imagine they're going to make this look different. And I'm excited to see what that looks like. I mean, some people keep saying with the Roman numeral X10, right? It's like, oh, it'll be like the iPhone 10 or Mac OS 10. It'll be the time they change the form factor. But what if they're not ready to change the form factor? Then it's just going to be Apple Watch 10 with a one and a zero. And we'll worry about it next year. Like this would be a convenient time, but sometimes convenient times don't always line up. I hope it is a new form factor.

1:33:32It is a reasonable time for it to be one. But there's no there's no like pressing need like they have to do it or whatever. And if it doesn't line up, it doesn't line up. Hey, look, look what they did with the iPhone. They were ready early. And so they just skipped nine. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's true. But I don't know. I just have a gut feeling that's going to happen. It'll be cool. It'll be cool if they use the X, too. I think we're ready for it. And I'm honestly like, I'm a little scared because, you know, the Apple watch is what I wear most days. And I'm a huge, you know, watch snob. And I'm currently like, I'm happy with the Apple watch.

1:34:07I don't super love it. I don't super hate anything about it. We're in a nice stable place. And I'm a little worried if they're going to like take some big moves. I'm a little worried they might, you know, mess some stuff up. Like, I got to say, I still don't love watch OS X. but that's a story for another day, I guess. So, you know, we'll see what they do with the hardware. So I'm a little nervous, but their track record with the Apple Watch hardware is really good. With the exception of, you know, the first one just being so darn slow and everything, but that wasn't really their fault. Recent generations of the Apple Watch hardware have really just been amazing.

1:34:44It's been a little boring, you know, with the exception of the Ultra, which was a huge hit. But like, you know, the regular series Apple Watch, it doesn't change much in recent years, but every year bring some kind of like little incremental changes that over time add up and so the recent Apple watches are great uh but as I said last time this came up like I I would like to see some refreshing and variety happen in the Apple watch lineup just because it is still jewelry um so you know some some updates and refreshing over time are a nice thing to have uh I'm looking forward to that the the whole strap attachment rumor things has me a little nervous yeah but again you look at apple's track record on making straps they're amazing like apple has the best watch straps in the watch industry by a huge margin generally speaking like yeah one or two nice ones from other vendors exist but like apple watch straps on the whole and and i'm really mostly are only talking about the ones by apple not by third parties which are largely garbage but Apple's own Apple Watch straps not only are amazing today but have been amazing for the entire run of the Apple Watch like even the very first ones they launched with the very first Apple Watch those straps were all amazing like they were super good straps so they're really good at this and I if they're going to redo the strap mechanism I trust that they're probably going to come out with some really nice straps to go with it too.

1:36:15So I'm looking forward to this rumor of this big Apple Watch revamp. I think it's time, and I trust that they will probably do a really good job with it. I feel like this strap rumor is the one that I'm most willing to believe. Ah, they couldn't get that one done. Like, you know, if I had to rank them, like, new shape redesign for 10 is higher ranked for me than new shape and also new strap, because, you know, as a previous discussion, maybe they couldn't figure out something better, And so it goes in the back burner for a few more years or whatever. But having them both would be great. That would really be an Apple Watch 10.

1:36:46New design, new strap, new everything. It would be very much like the iPhone 10. Well, but the thing is, according to the rumor that one of the reasons they were looking at a new strap attachment mechanism is because the current one takes up a lot of space in the case, which is true. It might be that in order to get a new case-shaped design, they had to change the strap mechanism to get that extra space out. If they tied them together, then yeah, then either both of them pushed off or neither one. But it's so hard to tell from these rumors because, you know, see previous Apple Watch rumors, they have not been entirely reliable about form factor changes.

1:37:18No, they've been comically unreliable. But, you know, if you think about what Apple could do with more interior space of an Apple Watch, the answer is very obvious. Add more battery and therefore give the watch more capabilities and make it, you know, raise the specs basically. and or make it thinner both of which would be wonderfully welcome for the apple watch i would actually say that they've come far enough in the in the thinness department in recent minor revisions i actually don't think it needs to be that much thinner i i'm happy with it where it is a little bit thinner would be like a little more elegant but it doesn't it doesn't it's not screaming for being thinner but it is screaming for resources i think you still have to fight the thinness one because i think we would all agree an apple watch that's one quarter the thickness could be amazing that opens up a whole new design possibility it's like a really thin one but we know we just can't do that with current technology i feel like we need to keep much more so than the phone because it's not something that you hold in your hand thin watches exist and are at a good look and are cool and apple should pursue that it is now it is still thicker than if you said apple we have a magic battery that can be any size and give you the same amount of energy they wouldn't choose to make it this big it is thicker than apple would choose to design it's thicker than anyone would choose to design we just know it has to be that big so i get what you're saying that it's not so big that it's an impediment but watches unlike phones as we know them today can tolerate being a lot thinner than these things are yes but it like it doesn't look like a thick watch it looks like a a kind of regular range of a watch thickness it doesn't need it you're right that it would be nice if it's thinner but like if they're going to gain a decent chunk of internal volume to use for something like to spend somehow oh yeah i'm not saying this year i'm saying like 20 years from now apple shouldn't stop pursuing thinness because we're never going to get to the 20 years from now really thin watch if they don't continue to pursue it and and the flip side of that is there is obviously the style on the watch industry of like it is ridiculously thick because that is the style well that's a style it's not universal well i mean the ultra the the ultra fulfills that but there are very thin watches and they're also very thick ones and the thick ones are not thick because they need to be that thick it is a style and i feel like the ultra that's where the ultra lives right now and i'm happy with that one but for the regular watch i would love to see it be thinner in a decade rather than the same size ultimately what i want to see for the watch is anything that can raise its limits like there it's it is such a the entire watch software platform is so extremely limited by its need to conserve power very aggressively you know to in order to have you know useful battery life and if they can give it you know 20 more battery space you know whatever it would be if that would then allow them to let the watch loose a little bit more with its own resource usage that opens up much more software potential that opens up potentially like more responsiveness for the user you know more on-device features like it it makes the entire watch experience potentially much better if they can lift some of those limits So that could pay off in a much bigger way than making it a millimeter thinner, in my opinion.

1:40:49document. You can find that marketing campaign proposal you're looking for. You can dig up a long lost link all in seconds with Notion AI. It can give you instant answers to your questions using information from all across your wiki, projects, docs, and meeting notes all in Notion. So if you have an urgent question that you'd normally maybe turn to a coworker to ask them and interrupt them, just ask Notion's Q &A instead. It'll search through thousands of documents in seconds, answer your question in clear language, no matter how large or complex your workspace is. You can ask Q &A questions from anywhere in Notion.

1:41:23So whatever you're in, the document or presentation or whatever, you can stay in that document and stay focused on what's important and quickly get information you want out of Q &A. And you can trust that your data is secure and private. Notion AI is designed to protect your information. No AI models are trained with your data. The data is always encrypted and answers will never use information from pages that you shouldn't have access to. so when you use notion ai it is a great way and it's easier than ever to do your most meaningful work you can try notion ai for free when you go to notion.com slash atp that's all lowercase letters notion.com slash atp to try the powerful easy to use notion ai today and when you use that link you're supporting our show once again notion.com slash atp all lowercase thank you so much to Notion for sponsoring our show.

1:42:22AirPods 4. I don't have too much to say about this. We have in the show notes that they're supposed to be getting a new design, an updated case, and potentially even active noise cancellation, which I think would be great for non-AirPods Pro things. Apparently the case will have speakers for Find My Alerts, it'll have USB-C, obviously, and then apparently a higher-end version of the AirPods 4, not the pro but the airpods 4 will have anc like i said airpods 4 plus yeah right it's our 4 max um no i i think airpods 4 that's sounds good i mean i don't have any particularly strong thoughts about this i i think i'll probably stick with the airpods pro forevermore because they are so freaking good um but i i think more of that tech flowing downhill to you know regular stuff i'm I'm here for it.

1:43:11Sounds good to me. 2024 is the year of stuff for me. OLED iPads that no one's really interested in, AirPods 4 that no one's really interested, but I am, and it's also my iPhone year. I'm a little bit confused by the AirPods 4 rumor with there being two versions, one of which has noise canceling or whatever. Only confused because they haven't come right out and said, oh, by the way, the one that has noise canceling will be shoved into your ear canal, which is not what I want. The reason I use AirPods 3 is I don't want things shoved into my ear canal. if they have two versions of the AirPods 4 surely one of them will not be shoved into my ear canal I don't know what the word is for this that I keep saying but anyway you know what I mean the little soft squishy tips that go into the hole in your ear I don't want that so if there are two of them one of them's gotta be not like that but are they also trying to say that the other AirPods 4 will also not go in your ear but have a noise canceling you could do noise canceling like do the same thing but not be shoved into your canal but it's not going to work as well at all right just for many many reasons but you know the rumors are still vague anyway uh if there are new airpods i will probably get them unless both of them go into your canals in which case i'll just ride these out and i'm willing to believe that i can be converted if apple just stops selling the ones that don't go into your canals i'll just have to get used to it i'll probably survive but it's not what i prefer again my wife has airpods pro now she's had two pairs of them uh and i've them and i know what they're like and it's not like i can't do it i just don't prefer it i could get used to it if i had to and i'm sure if i did get used to it i'd be like wow noise canceling is great isn't this wonderful yeah you know all the things everyone else already knows i just still prefer the other one so i'm hoping the airpods 4 with two different models one or both of them still don't go into your canal and that'll be the one for me as i watch my olid ipad it's a big year for john yeah all the boring products airpods max 2 potentially i mean i've question mark time yeah i i've never i've never tried the airpods max so i don't have any thoughts on this other than i mean what do they what they do they make a usbc model do they actually revise it so they're changed in some way do they fix the condensation issue for people with sweaty ears do they make them more comfortable i i found that i find them i'm not granted i've only worn them in apple stores or whatever but i do not find them comfortable the top of it hurts the top of my head with that stupid mesh thing and it's not what i prefer yeah the the airpods max are really great in certain ways but they could really use a revision like they could really use a version 2 tackling of this problem they definitely need to get rid of lightning of course we know that they need the updated processor to have all the newest features of the airpods pro especially at their price and i what i would hope is what john was alluding to i would hope they would address comfort a little bit better the current ones as talked about many times in the show um they're very heavy because they they use a ton of metal and almost no plastic anywhere in them and that that makes it very difficult to achieve good comfort with headphones like you can have comfortable heavy headphones but you probably won't it's it makes it much harder you really need to spread what you'd have to do with heavy headphones you have to spread the weight over a large area and that looks clunky and it also means there's more crap in contact with your head, which is hotter and sweatier.

1:46:24Right. And so it is much easier to make comfortable headphones when they are lightweight, and it is much easier to make lightweight headphones when they use a lot less steel and aluminum than Apple used on theirs. And generally, that means plastic. That's why when you look at the other... If you look at the competitors to the AirPods Max, the main competitors are the Sony and Bose noise-canceling headphones, both of which use large amounts of plastic in their construction. in part yes you can say oh because it's cheaper no the real reason is because it's better for headphones to be plastic because it's much lighter and that makes them much more comfortable also of course the airpods max have that terrible case uh they don't have a power button they're like there's all sorts of little other things that i think a revision to this product would be very needed and very welcome because the other thing about the airpods max is that they sound incredible.

1:47:15They sound really good. Their noise cancellation is also really good. They compete well on those factors. It's just all the physical design factors that they really need a lot of help with. So I hope Apple's willing and able to do the kind of update that the product deserves because again, they sound so good that it's kind of a shame right now that they are held back in these other factors to a lot of people because sound-wise, they're amazing. can we try to speed run these last four especially since we're in the question marks here home pod don't care apple tv yes please ella llm powered stuff and apple os is sure why not inside loading in the eu we'll see what happens done a little bit faster than i expected but yeah so for the home pod and apple tv i think that's just a collective shrug like i mostly agree with what casey said with the llm stuff and apple os is this probably should have been hoisted up farther because 2024 could be the year that apple rolls out some of the stuff that it's doing we mentioned at the top of follow-up they are doing llm stuff we know they're doing it is this the year some of it comes out we all hope so because series crappy and we think the llm stuff could make it better for all the problems with the llm stuff anything is better than current series like like really constrain it like have it only help out in certain scenarios We just want it to work and be smarter than it is.

1:48:38We're so tolerant of Siri's disloyalty, I don't know, betrayal, non-functionality, that all of the problems that we know are inherent with LMs will still not be as bad as what Siri does. So I really hope that this is the year that, and it doesn't have to be just Siri. That's why I say LLM-powered stuff in Apple S. There's tons of stuff they could do with it. It could help out with autocorrect. It could try to summarize things for you. And I say on all Apple OSes, they can roll it on the Mac, on the iPad. Like I'm willing to, I'm ready for Apple to roll out something interesting using LLM technology on all of its platforms.

1:49:14Even if it's a small thing. Because we know that technology has uses. Like it is, it doesn't solve the world's problems. It's not a quote unquote AI. It can't even do everything that Siri can do. Like it's not even ready to step into those shoes. But can it help out a little with autocorrect or search and photos? yes i think it can do that and so whatever those little areas are especially you know again for something like photos they could roll that out across all their platforms that photos exists on and it wouldn't replace the photos app it would just be an existing feature of the photos app like search that suddenly works a little bit better than it used to thanks to llm technology that runs locally on your mac that's what i'm looking forward to and then the sideloading in the eu stuff uh i if nothing comes of that then we just whatever but if something comes from it it could be potentially very interesting because we've speculated about what would happen if there was ever sideloading the iPhone and actually seeing it happen even if it's not in our country that's time to get some popcorn and honestly what's what's interesting about the sideloading is I bet it's not going to be that big of a deal like it'll be a big deal for like you know the podcast and the press and legally it'll be a big deal for that for talking about it but the actual market for like who's going to actually do it I think it's good I think Apple it's going to be much like the you know the whole like you know netherlands dating app thing yeah but i was thinking of that scenario and i think there's a big difference between like the dating app scenario where it's like well you just have to charge money apple will just charge you anyway i think again i don't know the details but i think this is a scenario where once the side loading door is open like granted you have to go through it the way apple says you have to but i don't think apple can extract any money from side loading so it's not going to be like netherland dating app it's going to be it's going to be constrained by what apple does like whatever hoops they make you jump through but once you've jumped through those hoops apple doesn't get a cut of anything apple doesn't like it's all sidestepping apple entirely if that's not true then you're right it's just gonna be like no lens didn't happen okay but if but yeah do we know that do we know whether that's true like whether they're allowed to charge a commission or whatever i don't think see we'll see i don't i don't know the details but i i would imagine that the whole point of this is sideloading is different than using a different payment method when you're selling an app through apple's own app store this is like no i'm not even using apple's own app store the whole point of this is people want to have their own app stores right which by the way as a developer i really don't want this to happen i know how can having your own app store make any sense if apple is allowed to take a cut so i have to think that once you jump through whatever hurdles that apple is going to surely put in your path to sideload anything that apple is out of that thing and if that is true the reason this is interesting is let's see what happens when the iphone is open to all the very hungry, sometimes unscrupulous, but sometimes just plain, like people who are boxed out of the iPhone before.

1:51:58Is there some market need that Apple has not been addressing that will quickly be addressed besides porn, right? But even if it's just porn, like even if it's just a giant flood of porn coming in the side loading door on the iPhone, that'll still be interesting because we haven't seen this platform exposed to the actual market. It's always been mediated through Apple severely. So we don't actually know what's out there and what might come in through the side loading door. I'm kind of glad it would be happening in the EU and not here in case, you know, bad things happen. But I, I'm actually interested in something coming of that.

1:52:34And who knows with these things, you don't know how long they're going to wind on or whether Apple thinks they're already in compliance and all sorts of other shenanigans. So it's hard to make any hard and fast predictions. But when I was thinking about this, I immediately thought of like, oh, Apple's just going to take their cut. And I'm like, well, wait a second. What if they can't? what if that's the whole point of this red this thing that everyone's going to be allowed to have an app store like maybe steam will be on there or at the epic app store maybe like what will gaming be like on the ipad if you don't have to go through apple to launch your game maybe that's the maybe that's the only way that apple actually you know gets a hold in triple a gaming instead of just their existing mobile gaming is through the side door of uh you know steam the steam store and epic game store sideloaded for eu people only we'll say my doomsday scenario that i really don't want to happen is if there's no restrictions for side-loaded stuff and if you can have side-loaded app stores then i'm afraid that you know some major must-have app provider like facebook would say you know what instagram which we know you're all going to install is no longer on the app store you have to you have to download the facebook app store and let it like root your phone basically like that and and you know have to only go through them they have no more protections from apple's rules and they only have technical protections which are much weaker than technical and policy protections like so like and then me as a developer do i have to put my stuff in the facebook store like it's only if you want to sell to people in the eu that's the whole thing about this being limited i know but so i i hope that outcome doesn't happen and what will what will help keep that from happening is if this stays as small as possible and maybe it'll just be like you know i'm sure apple will if they do this i'm sure they're going to do it in the most reluctant way possible they're going to only do the bare minimum to satisfy whatever regulation is forcing it they are going to challenge it at every step they you know they might as you said like they might say we're already in compliance with some like little piddly crap and they've they're still taking a 27 commission or whatever else and then the eu might like you know sue them or whatever they have to work work through all that like so this could be a huge fight for a long time i don't for a second believe that apple is going to give any ground that they are not forced to give so for instance i would not expect that they would allow sideloading anywhere else besides the eu like if they don't have to they won't do it and whatever the eu mandate is for sideloading they're going to do the bare minimum to qualify for that, and they're going to make it as hostile as possible for people to actually do it to ensure no one does it.

1:55:16Whether it's the customer side of scary warnings, or whether it's the legal developer side of you've got to give us 27%, or both, they're going to make it so it's really unpleasant for everybody. And there is that Google case that they lost against Epic that actually is in the U.S., So there are other legal precedents potentially rumbling towards Apple, maybe not next year, but maybe the year after that. So this being confined to the EU for now does not mean it's going to be that way forever. Yeah, but I'm hoping that sideloading on iOS ends up being as much of a nothing burger as sideloading on Android has been.

1:55:52And, you know, yeah, maybe we'll get a flood of porn. Maybe we'll get like we can probably we can finally get emulators, maybe. well but the sideloading on on android has been uh not a big deal partially for the reasons that google just lost that case right true is that it wasn't naturally that way google sort of put its thumb on the scale to ensure that oh you can sideload but you really don't want to do that do you that's why they lost okay so uh things may change in the future and as for the home pod uh i finally reached casey level don't care there it is i'm slowly replacing my home pods with sonos gear and I am much happier for it.

1:56:28They work a lot better. The HomePod is smaller and looks nicer and in some situations sounds better. but it has broken my heart too many times. the Sonos gear is really reliable the Alexa assistant on it is rock solid fast and reliable I hadn't used Alexa in a while because I threw away my last echo the ball one that kept dying and being weird and Amazon's own devices have ratcheted up the annoyance level over time so much it's like by the way did you know I can annoy you in new and interesting ways if you say this that most of that seems to be absent on the Sonos version of it it seems to be like a more limited version of Alexa, which in those ways I think is a feature on a bug.

1:57:15I have been extremely impressed with the Alexa assistant's ability to answer general knowledge questions. Questions that I think are somewhat difficult for a voice assistant to answer. Knowledge, one of the recent things was from Adventure Time, we couldn't remember Marceline's dad's name. and so I asked it from across the room what is the name of Marceline the Vampire Queen's father and it got it. It didn't waffle it didn't say well on the web I found this thing that might be it. No it just gave me the answer it was directly correct. The other day I asked something like what was the outcome oh my son was asking about Michael Jackson because one of his songs was on and it was asking like how did he die and we mentioned oh there he had this drug thing and his doctor was put on trial and i asked i asked uh first of all how old was michael jackson when he died if it got that instantly you know gave me the straight answer perfect and then as adam was asking about um you know what happened with his with his death um i asked something along the lines of like what was the outcome of the trial for michael jackson's doctor figuring like that's a pretty tricky question for it to parse like it got it it was perfect and i was thinking like man asking siri this kind of question Siri can't even reliably play music when I ask it to play music whereas Alexa for all of its faults of, by the way, did you know, it as a voice assistant is really solid it is fast, it is reliable and it is surprisingly good at general knowledge questions, not to mention the fact that it kicks butt on timers and all that other stuff too so while it feels kind of gross to like Alexa right now because I find a lot of the other stuff they do with it kind of distasteful with their own products as as the voice assistant on the sonos devices i'm fine with it i'm totally fine with it and you know airplay is so much better on sonos the sound quality is really great the the sync the multi-room stuff is rock solid like i am super happy with the sonos gear so sorry homepod you i gave you lots of chances you blew them all and i'm done with you see this is what you get for using cereal this time i've always been telling you that both alexa and the google thing are so much better I think Google is the best one.

1:59:31Alexa is clearly second and Siri is so far distant. Third is not even funny. And I still do it. It's the game we still play. I still ask all three. And it's just, we always ask Siri for comic relief. Let's see what Siri does with this. And it's always hilarious. And Alexa and Google depends on what you're asking. I think Alexa having the IMDB database probably helps a lot with those kind of specific questions that it can answer more directly. But the Google Home, I mean, essentially, even if it's all it's doing is essentially running the Google search and reading you that aforementioned top summary thing that is often close to being the answer although as both of these things start to get llm powered now i start to go it would be nice uh you know amazon uh thing if you told me whether you used llm to come up with that michael jackson age of death because i would prefer if you didn't because i'm sure you could give me a plausible age but now i have to go to the wikipedia page to check what the actual age was you know what i mean like i don't want to not i don't want to not trust it because it's llm stuff as llm can give you a plausible answer to all sorts of stuff but i want to know is this an answer that comes from it's not even i can't even characterize it it's like in the days before llm the only way you could give that answer is by pulling it off some well-known web page or a database that you have but now llms can give you that answer with zero knowledge they don't have to know it and if they do know it they don't have to give it to you they just produce something that is plausible statistically plausible and lots of answers could be statistically plausible and you as the user are like oh great it gave us the exact age the whole point is you didn't know the age that's why you asked so you haven't unless it tells you like 2 or 97 if it's within a plausible range you're going to be like i guess that's the answer and pretty soon that's not going to be as true as it is today which is kind of sad i i think we are we are lucky in that i think running llm inference is still much more expensive than running like a search index like look up so like whatever they've already built that didn't use llms is probably so much cheaper to run queries against yeah no if you ask something about like uh movies or tv or whatever doing a reasonable search of the the internet movie database database and giving you the answer that way with a little bit of intelligence is so much better than saying we threw a bunch of crap into this llm and stuff comes out sometimes isn't that cool just just do the database look up all right thanks to our sponsors this week, Notion and Trade Coffee.

2:01:48And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco arment S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech podcast So long Do you do any kind of New Year's resolution or Cortex-style themes?

2:03:04No. Nope. Definitely not. Well, I mean, I listen to the show where they talk about them. Does that count as a second? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that counts a little bit, yeah. I listen and think, boy, how unlike me that they are. They're very regimented. I've often felt like I frequently align with Gray's theme. So for listeners, if for some reason you don't listen to Cortex, the gist of what we're talking about is that it's a thing Cortex does every year where rather than like a New Year's resolution, and our friend Merlin has very successfully argued against new resolutions over time of being like fairly dysfunctional and generally you know considered harmful in the sense that resolutions are usually setting yourself up to fail pretty pretty effectively and pretty shortly and then you just feel bad about yourself as opposed to what what you know gray mic and cortex do is like more setting a theme for the year to kind of guide your your thinking and work over the year as opposed to a resolution that like i'm going to you know and so as an example like instead of saying like i'm gonna lose 20 pounds by june you know like that's that's a specific goal you can call it a resolution um but that's the kind of thing that's like it's very it's very easy for that kind of thing to fail you also tend to know early on in the year how much you failed at it and you might then like fall off the wagon and go back to your old habits or whatever whereas a theme could be more like health like i'm going to make this the year of improving my health that is something that it's hard to distinctly fail at i mean unless you die i guess but like you know like it's hard sorry like it's it's hard to like outright fail to the point where you're discouraged from continuing and it's more like i'm going to make decisions throughout the year thinking of this as a guiding principle um and so it's it seems to be much more effective and my apologies to the cortex podcast if i have any of this wrong or if i'm mischaracterizing it but i think it's the gist of it there's a youtube video that explains it pretty well we can find that for the notes we'll put it in but if not just search youtube for uh cortex yearly themes yeah and i think it's a really nice system it's really nice reframing of this kind of thing that we do like getting away from the resolution thing because again it's resolutions are so likely to fail did you did you two ever do resolutions um i've done them here and there and i usually forget like by the second week of january i even forget what it was you forget or you failed them or like or you lose interest like all people generally both all three but yeah it's uh i i like the idea of the themes and uh and i oftentimes line up with gray's themes but but do you do your own thing you like the idea of them and you when you hear gray's themes you're like oh that seems like a good idea but do you actually ever like say this is going to be my theme for the year even even if you're saying i'm going to adopt gray's theme and i'm going to do that this year too generally for the last few years generally yes i have kind of set a theme but sometimes sometimes i forget what it is and i it might change it like six months later you're gonna write it down that's a great thing but uh but but generally speaking like i like you know last year um i kind of had the guiding principle of like closing open projects um because i my life was full of open projects yeah it's not anymore though right right yeah i know it's the problem yeah like moving house renovation like all that stuff like it just was so there was so much going on and it was very overwhelming um this year i'm making it the year of overcast uh because overcast has really suffered the last couple of years in that I've had all this other life stuff going on.

2:06:39I have not been able to give it a lot of time. I actually have turned that around substantially in the last few months. I'm giving Overcast way more time in the last few months. And not only am I making good progress on the big rewrite, but I'm also just much happier. It had been so long since I really had a lot of good programming work done. So I'm much happier doing this now. so I'm really making this year the year of Overcast I'm going to get the rewrite out this year it's going to be a ton of work there's still a ton to do I can't tell you when this year it's coming out because I am no better at estimating software timing than anyone else that's the thing about themes the theme doesn't say that it's the year I'm going to ship the new version of Overcast it just says year of Overcast and I would say based on listening to all the theme episodes over the years that that's probably a little bit too specific for a theme but still it not being so specific to say the year i launched the rewrite of overcast it is more general than that but i bet you could go one level more general if you needed to but since you're not this is not an official cortex brand theme this is just a marco's adoption and by the way a knockoff thing now you have you have recorded it in a place you haven't written it down in a theme system journal or even a notes document but you do have recorded it on this podcast and casey will forget about it but i won't that's correct themes the theme system journal looks like a really nice product that i would not use because i don't use paper it looks really nice though yeah we have computers people who like paper like paper but every time i see those things it's like this is the whole reason i like computers i don't have to do things on paper i wish i liked paper and pens it looks so cool like the whole world looks so cool and you got all these nice notebooks to see my own handwriting that's not cool yeah that's i guess that's the problem like every time i hand write anything now like god this sucks i just want to type things you're writing everything in graffiti i know it's terrible yeah nice pull my palm 5x is already broken by the way why do your a's not have crosses on them i don't know how to write anymore graffiti i write all the letters in the same spot on top of each other and then i can't read it later oh my gosh no but but you know with like setting the goal as or setting the theme as overcast i'm intentionally being a little too specific with that because that's that's the level of focus it needs this year if i if i would instead say something like the year of work that is a valid thing i think that was gray's last year one no that was a year of new decades dawn sequel whatever so like it wasn't actually this is an insider their theme the titles of their themes have had varying quality over the years yes uh but you know in certain years you might want to like you know open new opportunities in certain years you might want to focus on you know closing opportunities or focus on the ones you have like there can be more broad themes for me this year the theme needs to be overcast like it it is a huge part of of my income it is like my main business is also my main product that i craft like it is it is the only it's the main thing i work on as a programmer because you know i don't work on the cms so right so uh so like you know it's very important to me and it has been neglected like i have neglected it because i have been spending too much time doing other work or other needs in my life and this year is when i I need to get back to it.

2:09:49And it makes me confident that I can do it, that I've already been swinging back to it for like a month and it's been going very well. A month that you've been doing, I think you've been swinging back to it for a while now. Although this theme, like obviously Cortex is about productivity and people's work lives or whatever, but themes don't necessarily have to be focused on work life, which is another reason that Overcast is maybe a little bit too specific. And you will hear themes from the two of them that are not absolutely confined to one of the many things they do as part of their work obviously health would be an example of that because that's you know not work related and it's you know something you're focusing on yourself but i'm always waiting for like a yearly theme that has nothing to do with any of their jobs right like year of romance you could apply that to some of their work as well but like always the themes are like a thing that applies to one of my businesses and also my life and i guess health is the closest they've come but like you know anyway uh this is not not going to be the year of romance for me any more than any previous years were because i don't do themes but i would suggest that for people someone someone should pick that up your romance it's out there who's going to be brave enough to pick it up and i i all kidding aside i really like the idea of a yearly theme but i don't i don't feel like i have ever ever ever landed on one that that i can really grab onto and say, yes, this was what I want for this year.

2:11:11And that's not their fault. That's my fault. But I just, I can't, I can't get there. And I'm also not disciplined enough. So let's say that this year was the year of work. And then I decide that I just want to get distracted by, I don't know, wiring the house for ethernet and fiber and whatnot. Well, there goes year of work. You could, you could have had past themes like that again, themes that are not focused on work. You could have had year of reproduction. You could have had multiple years of reproduction. yes well in that sense i have had yeah i think you did i think you did have multiple years of reproduction we had probably what like five years of reproduction not all yearly themes i mean it is aspirational and that is it is a thing that you went through that is difficult that would guided all your decisions for a long period of time you just didn't write it down in a little book i mean i guess that's true but i i don't i view even though i agree with everything you're saying that the yearly theme by no means has to be work-related.

2:12:03I do view it as it should be work involved, even if it's not specifically for work. And I don't know, I don't feel like I am good enough and disciplined enough to stick with it. And I think that if they were here to argue with us, they would say, well, it's not about discipline. It's just about guiding your actions and guiding your thoughts. And that's fair. Yeah, it's what you make of it, I think, largely. And that's by design. And I don't know. I feel like if this year was the year of, I don't know, perfecting Kalshi, which is again too specific. I don't know. I can't even think of a good example because I just, I can't, I can't think of anything.

2:12:41The year of living dangerously. There's one for you. Yeah, well, how would you live dangerously, John Syracuse? Would you leave the house every once in a while? Coke instead of spray? I'm leaving the house all the time. Yeah, but you won't come to New York when two-thirds of the podcast are there. I'm still grumpy. Still grumpy, John. you were there for a reason to have to run and get stuck in the sand. You know what you could have been there? You know what your reason could have been? To see some of your great friends that you haven't seen in five friggin' years. Four. Whatever. Just wait until we all get invited to an Apple event.

2:13:10Okay. Like you would go anyway. Like you would go anyway. There's no chance. I would go. I'm ready. Apple. I'm out here. I'm ready to go to Apple events. So if they have a big Vision Pro event and invite all of us, which I guarantee you is not going to happen, but if that for some reason happened, would you go? Yeah, no. ever since i've been uh out of my jobby job i've been prepared to go to things that i get invited to by apple and the the one time it happened i had to demure because i had my son's high school graduation and then since then i've never been invited so i'm just out here waiting and i'm sorry i wanted to go to my son's high school graduation so sue me it's like and if my daughter is going to graduate soon too and not this year but next year i'm going to go to that graduation to apple so don't invite me on the day that she's gonna have her high school graduation but barring that i'm ready to go to apple events i still haven't even been to apple park i still want to go oh it's really cool i'm sure it is if only someone would invite me