584: Daisy Hates Ticketmaster

39:40I gotta tell you I have mixed feelings about what the DOJ has been up to recently but right now they're doing the Lord's work because Ticketmaster's Taylor Swift ticketing fiasco might just have led to a lawsuit from the DOJ if there's a bigger group of assholes that deserve to be sued I cannot find them because holy god I haven't bought anything from Ticketmaster well for myself in a while I bought for some dear friends of ours it was it's complicated but like I think Verizon and was doing a presale and they're like T-Mobile people or whatever. And so they had me buy them two tickets to a Justin Timberlake concert in North Carolina, I believe.

40:15Granted, a lot of this was the cost of ticket, but it was something to the order of$750 for two tickets. And I am still dumbfounded by this. And I think I bought these two months ago. And a lot of that, easily a hundred plus dollars, was bullsh** fees that Ticketmaster charges because they can. So apparently, as per The Verge, the Department of Justice is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit could reportedly come as early as next month and will target the company's alleged monopoly in the live ticketing industry.

40:45Live Nation drew antitrust scrutiny when it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010. But those concerns boiled over in November 2022 when a Ticketmaster crash blocked thousands of Taylor Swift fans from purchasing tickets for the Ares tour due to, quote, unprecedented demand, quote, as if they couldn't see that coming. My God. Anyway, the DOJ opened an investigation into Live Nation shortly after, the New York Times reported again i cannot find a better group to befall the doj's ire like i am so here for this please just just slack them just absolutely destroy them i think it'll be easy to prove monopoly power for like this is just such a slam dunk like ticket master people don't know is a company in the united states that essentially has a stranglehold on buying tickets to live music events they have deals with all the people who run all the stadiums and all the clubs and it's just like it's like a cartel like you read the history of like ticket master and the fact that they merged with their uh largest competitor like they're just they're all powerful i mean if you want to go all the way back to the 90s you can see like pearl jam protesting the pearl jam was way ahead of its time basically saying we are sick of dealing with ticket master it's bad for us it's bad for our hands we hate them so now we're not going to use ticket master and ticket master is like well now you're never going to have any place to play and there was this whole drama surrounding that so yeah go back in the the 90s history and look that up yeah ticket master is as close to pure and my dog is here's some other dogs barking so as prophecy foretold no i i think really it's the you know daisy realizes the ticket master is just awful like look that just shows everybody hates ticket master even dogs right it's that's the thing like you you will not find many causes in the u.s that will get more people behind you than trying to you know kick ticket master in the crotch like everyone hates ticket master everyone who has ever worked with them on from any side of it everyone who's ever bought a ticket to anything from them which is if you've basically if you've attended a concert in the u.s from any major band at any major venue in the last 20 years you've probably bought a ticket from ticket master and when you see those fees on those tickets it's like it it makes the app store look positively generous by comparison like that's true and it's gone up and up and and if you're asking yourself if everybody hates ticketmaster then why does everybody still use them that's the nature of monopoly that's what the doj will be saying about apple and that's what it's so easy to say about ticketmaster everyone hates you and yet they still have to do business with you that's because you have monopoly power because there's no other choice and that's exactly where the doj should step in i commend the doj for finally doing this i don't know what took so long i'm glad they're doing it now thank god i i wish them all the best of luck in succeeding in this case.

43:20Yeah, seriously. I mean, just drag them. Whatever you need to do, I'm here for it because it's so, so bad. And I mean, their website is trash. The entire experience, everything about it is trash. Their fees are absolutely astronomical. It's just out of control. And I cannot begin to overstate how much I hate that company. It's just so, so bad. I don't know. I was trying to find if I could figure out what the fees were for this. So maybe I'll interrupt with some real-time follow-up. And they've just been increasing the fees slowly because they can. Like that's, again, an example of Monopoly power.

43:59Everyone hates you and you can keep raising prices. Yeah, who's going to stop them? Yep. Okay, here we go. I got it. Two tickets. $315 per ticket. There's nothing that has nothing to do with Tickmaster. That's all them so far. So that's, what is that? $630. Then$4.62 for an order processing fee. a$5 facility charge times two, a$3.10 tax times two, but here's the kicker. A$42.70 service fee per ticket. $42.70 a ticket. Why? Why? What have they done? They used to call it a convenience charge. Convenience fee, service fee. And like, just let people out, this is a thing that sells you tickets over the web.

44:46Like, it's not rocket science. It is like an e-commerce site from like Web 1.0 with similar quality in many cases. Apparently, they were surprised that there was a lot of traffic for Taylor Swift tickets. Like it's not an insurmountable problem. It's not rocket science. They're just selling tickets over the internet and they're bad at it. I'm so mad now. All right. Let's calm me down and talk about something that makes me happy. M4 Macs might be coming later this year. Well, that makes me mildly happy because I have an M3 Mac, but you know what I'm saying? And according to MacRumors, all Macs will have an M4 by the end of next year.

45:18And there's apparently going to be no skipping like the iMac, Mac Mini, etc. So here's the launch order according to Mark Gurman. Around the end of 2024, a low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M4, a 24-inch iMac with the M4. Between the end of 24 and early 25, new 14 and 16-inch high-end MacBook Pros with M4 Pro and Macs, a Mac Mini with an M4 and M4 Pro. Spring of 2025, new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs. a Mac Studio with a high-end M4 chip, whatever that means. Then the second half of 2025, a Mac Pro with an M4 Ultra, allegedly. And then Apple is apparently considering allowing its highest-end Mac desktops to support as much as a half terabyte of memory.

45:58Current Mac Studio and Mac Pro top out at 192 gigs. Yeah, so this is the rumors about the M4 and that, you know, there's this whole AI angle, like, oh, the M4 is going to be AI-optimized as if the M3 and M2 and M1 don't have neural engines to do AI stuff. But whatever. Part of it's marking, part of it is, yes, the neural engine keeps getting bigger and it will continue to do so. But the interesting part of this rumor is, like you said at the start, that every single Mac will have an M4 by the end of next year, which the current situation is kind of like a Motley collection of M3s and things that still have M2s, including the high-end ones.

46:30So, like, you know, skipping, obviously the iMac did skip. The iMac never had an M2, right? So we know that skipped. The Mac Mini hasn't skipped yet, technically, because it had the M1 and it had the M2. It could still have the M3 and not skip. we don't know about the studio and mac pro are they ever going to get an m3 class chip or are they going to wait for their m4 variants and so that that kind of like when we imagine apple taking over control of its chips it's like well now apple doesn't have to wait for intel for things and they can get exactly the chips they want or whatever but a series as we've discussed in the past a series of things have made that difficult like the you know the global pandemic has really hurt everything having to do with parts and supplies and everybody's plans but everything so in the middle there there was definitely uh some time when apple's plans were surely messed up by that uh but what we would like to see happen like what is what happens with the iphone which is obviously the iphone is the more important product but like every year the iphone gets a new chip and sometimes the chip is not as new as we thought it would be like we didn't get the new gpu like the last year or whatever when we thought we would because it wasn't ready yet and and there's always the difficulties of tsmc and whether their process is ready and and m3b and all that stuff right but you would think it's like okay apple has chips they have a letter and a number that goes up in them and they produce new ones every year it'd be nice if every year oh this is the year of the m4 max the next year is the m5 max the next year is the m6 max but instead it's like well these you know these products that apple cares less about like say the ipad and the mac they just kind of come staggering out of apple with a with whatever chips are available at the time and every time we try to find a pattern it's like oh they do the low-end chips than the high-end ones or maybe they do the the middle-end ones and then save the low-end ones for like i don't know what the rhyme or reason is but it is surely very complicated it is obviously not a premeditated strategy about how to roll out chips it's like what chips can we make how many can we make for what price at what time and the the end result is confusion in apple's product line uh not so much about which chip is better than which because the number going up is a clear sign but it's like well you know people keep asking us should i buy computer x now or should i wait until the next cpu is going to get i'm going to say like we don't even know if the mac studio is going to get an m3 if if it's not going to get anything until like next year when it gets an m4 at the end of next year or something then yeah by all means get it but if an m3 mac studio is going to be released to wwc you should wait and we just don't know there's not enough precedent there's not enough of a pattern right so i like that one of my favorite thing about this rumor is with the m4 no more of that every mac will get an m4 like there's no exceptions nobody's skipping a generation there's going to be one for every computer maybe it'll even be one worthy of the mac pro we'll see but that's so much more easy to explain to people that like that all the macs have m4s they're all safe to buy and next year all the macs will have m5s or whatever it is 1.5 years whatever the cadence they want to do it would be so refreshing if this was true and even this like the rollout is a slow rollout for getting but at least at one point there will be a point in time, I will say, now all the Macs have a chip with an M4 in them.

49:30And that will be refreshing. Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to see Apple untethered, for lack of a better way of putting it, like you had said, without having to be beholden to Intel or IBM and Motorola in days of yore. I'm happy for it. I wish we had a more concrete set of examples so we could extrapolate easier, but I'm not complaining. It's just, it's fun actually to kind of be surprised and see, oh, we didn't expect this to happen right now. Like the very MacBook Pro I'm talking to you through right now. I didn't expect to have this in this past fall, but here it is and it's great. Yeah, and this rumored order is kind of back to the old thing where it's like you release the low-end chip first.

50:14So you get the, you know, the plain M4 in the iMac and the low-end MacBook Pros. And then next you get the M4 Pro and Macs in the MacBook Pros and the Mac Mini. and then finally you get the high-end chip and of course the macbook air is being shoved next to the high-end chip one in spring of 2025 it's just a slight oddity but that is a more understandable cadence but on the other hand i did like it when like you said they rolled out the m3 chip and it was like not just the m3 but also the m3 pro and the m3 max all at the same time i'm sure we'll see the m3 ultra soon after and have we sit here waiting there's a a pretty interesting point i think from a user my name is t in the chat regarding our previous topic the ticket master thing.

50:55So my name is T says, I'm no Ticketmaster fan either, but what Casey has demonstrated with the convenience charges was that Ticketmaster charges a smaller percentage for selling tickets than Apple charges for selling apps. They just allow customers to see the itemized price where Apple doesn't. Imagine if the app store showed the convenience fee. Oh, that's so good. What's interesting about this is like, you know, part of what makes the Ticketmaster situation so, you know, abusive and horrible and such a slap in the face is similar to the way hotels and some other things in the US are priced, even just sales tax, that the advertised price to customers does not include pretty substantial fees.

51:31And then you see them at checkout. So we have that with sales tax, we have that with hotel taxes, and there's a few other things in various US dysfunctions that have this. But I think it's interesting. What if apps were structured that way, where the price that it would show on the IAP was the post-commission price that the developer actually received, and then on the checkout screen, it showed Apple convenience fee. That's the kind of thing of course Apple would never do that unless forced, but wouldn't it be cool if they were forced? I don't think it would be cool. I think the price should just be the price.

52:07In the EU, I believe they even have sales tax put into prices to let people know what the bottom line is. Most civilized places don't have the crazy rip-off all of a sudden at the end fees that we have here. In general, like you don't it's i think it's unreasonable to ask to essentially see people's business model exposed like when you buy a box of cereal do you get to see what portion of that goes to the manufacturer versus which portion goes to the store that's the problem that's why like in practice this would never happen and it probably shouldn't happen but wouldn't it be cool if it yeah i mean the other problem is that if you took a survey and asked how many people think that when you buy an app you're buying it from apple like that they think every app is made by apple everyone thinks this everyone every regular person who's not a tech podcast listener thinks that yeah or they understand that develop even if they understand that developers make the app that they essentially think the developers work for apple and as i i forgot i probably tweeted it or whatever but like one of the most profound uh moments that i can remember like the you know tectonic shift in the landscape of the tech world that i'm in was when um apple announced the app store and uh and had like a you know look how much money we paid for developers or even it was like essentially developers who had previously been selling their applications to customers would receive money from customers and as soon as apple announced the app store and it became popular and apple started bragging about it was so clear that the world has changed developers previously you'd receive money from your customers now you will never receive money from your customers your checks will be signed by apple so even though we don't actually work for apple as developers or whatever the bottom line is hey uh when you get money where does it come from who signs those checks the answer is apple apple gives you your money they're not your customers they're apple customers apple gives you the money like you don't and i know it's just like well you know cheerios general mills gets money from like you know the the supermarket or whatever but like still it's just such a profound difference where you know there's a new middle party that came in there that uh they deal with the customer they keep the customer they have total control and they give you whatever money they feel like giving you and again that might just seem like uh not profound that's just the way that retail works but it was such a fundamental shift in the particularly the mac developer community to no longer be getting money from your customers and i feel like the ticket master thing like obviously yes they want to advertise the lower price as it come on or whatever but the thing to understand about ticket master is their monopoly power grew over time so in the beginning it was just ticket master would take whatever their cut is and that was built into the price right but then they started doing things online and then you could add the tech on that little online convenience fee because online is special somehow and the ticket master as it amassed power slowly just turn the dial on those fees to the point where they're so significant they're like well why is that not included because if we see it's a convenience fee of like a dollar fifty we all hate it and it's stupid you're like whatever but when it's forty dollars right when the percentage starts going up it's like how did this happen how did this this cancerous tumor of fees grow it's like well it used to be small and that's why they would tack it on at the end but now it's a significant portion of the price because they just keep increasing it and what are you going to do you can't buy tickets anywhere else and everyone has to deal with Ticketmaster.

55:08But it is interesting, though. Why aren't ticket prices just advertised with this fee built in? And why do customers even have to see this? Yeah. I mean, I guess it's probably to give Ticketmaster flexibility. There's probably laws about advertised price versus whatever and itemization. I mean, there's another law going through Congress, I forget if it passed or whatever, about broadband and how broadband does a similar thing where they advertise you pay this number of dollars a month for this speed or whatever, then they tack on fees at the end. and the new law is essentially what are they calling it like stupid analogies that our legislature loves the nutrition labels for broadband there'll be essentially requirements where you have to show what all the fees will be up front and so you can't advertise a 50 dollar thing and then when the people get their first bill they see 20 you know fees stuck onto the end that double the price you have you can still have those fees and they can still be as big as you want but you at least need to show the customer what all those fees are going to be and And so I think that law just passed or is winding its way through.

56:04So that's progress at least. I think it's fine to have all these fees as long as there is transparency about it. All you need is actual competition in the market. Imagine. Because then Ticketmaster's ability to add$40 to your ticket price would be impaired if there was another company that would also sell you tickets online that only added$30. I hate Ticketmaster so much. You know, Michaela, who's six, has been in a kick of, I hate this, I hate that. And she's normally a very happy, agreeable child. But, you know, she's really emphatic when she doesn't like something. I've been trying to break her of, I hate.

56:41I don't love phrasing things that way. It's not very tasteful and it's a bit dramatic. Would you say you hate it? You wouldn't be the first parent in the world to try to get your kid not to say hate. Hate's a strong word. Exactly. Exactly. Are you going to have her say, A.G. double hockey sticks? but i will tell you right now i f***ing hate ticket master god do i hate them so much setting a good example for your children i mean do you think is there is there any like like what what companies in america do you think are more hated than ticket like maybe like monsanto like what it like it it takes a lot like the tobacco companies maybe like how haliburton used to be yeah maybe comcast comcast at various times oh that's a good one yeah although i feel like comcast has gotten better excuse me it's a xfinity now so it's totally different yeah i know well that's it you know when a company has to change its name because people hate it so much that it's a bad sign intellectual ventures yeah there are more hated companies that are obscure like intellectual ventures is probably more hated but nobody knows they exist right so for big companies like ticketmaster and comcast and if you don't see live music you don't probably think about ticketmaster either but oh yeah it makes me so mad all right moving on uh it looks like the iPhone 16.

57:54We are definitely getting into rumor season. iPhone 16, 16 plus rumored to feature increased eight gigabytes of RAM. This is coming from Mac rumors from actually a few months ago now. The iPhone 15, the 15 that is available today has six gigs, 15 plus six gigs, 15 pro and pro max eight gigs. The rumored iPhone 16 will have eight gigs across the board, 16, 16 plus 16 pro and 16 pro max. So that's a difference from 15 and 15 plus to 16 and 16 plus of six to eight gigs. And I don't, I don't have too much to say about this. I think John, you wanted to say something about it, but I will note very quickly that I have noticed, particularly on my 15 pro max and the fact that it's a max is irrelevant in this context.

58:37I see evictions due to, due to memory. Almost never. What I mean by that is I will go back to an app that I haven't run in possibly 48 hours. And it comes up so fast, like either, maybe it's been, what's the word I'm looking for, where it's like been charged up in the background, not charged up, you know what I'm, hydrated, hydrated, that's what I'm looking for. It's been hydrated in the background. And so maybe that's what I'm seeing. And I'm just, and I'm attributing this to an overabundance of RAM. And really, it's just iOS being good at, you know, pre-hydrating and getting things ready in the background.

59:10Or what it feels like anyway, is just that I really have a ton of RAM in this phone, and I don't personally ever hit a scenario where evictions are happening, where the phone is saying, oh, well, you haven't run, you know, Ivory, which, of course, I'm running constantly, but for the sake of discussion, you have run Ivory in, you know, 16 hours. We're just going to punt that from memory because we need that memory for something else. I feel like I'm seeing that very rarely these days. Yeah, so the reason I put this in here way back in January, I was working and I hoisted it up, is simply to note that we are at the moment where every current model iPhone, the iPhone 16 or whatever, will come with as much base RAM as the low-end Macs?

59:50Oh, my God. Oh, that's so bad. How soon before every new iPhone you can buy has more base RAM than, say, a MacBook Air? Oh, my God. Because apparently, Apple will increase the RAM inside its iPhones, but they will not increase the RAM inside the Macs. And like you mentioned about, you know, going taking an app that hasn't been running in two days and seeing that it's basically still in ram or still able to come back online real fast uh the thing is the phones because of the way they're designed and you know the size of the screen are we don't ask them to do as much as we ask a mac simply because on the mac when you have multiple apps running at the same time they can all be on the screen at the same time you can have five apps on the screen at the same time which you expect to update their display or whatever like the display is bigger the winding system lets you do that and if these two things if apple thinks eight gigs of ram is appropriate for the lowest end iphone 16 which you can only see one or two or maybe three apps on the screen at the same time depending on the dynamic island and picture and picture and so on and so forth whereas a macbook air with a much bigger screen where you could see five apps on screen six apps eight apps like depending on what portion of windows are visible like the mac should have more ram not because it's physically bigger or but but because you can do more things at the same time with it like its multitasking model is different than the phone uh and i think it should be different the phone i wouldn't to be clear i don't want the mac to go to the phone's multitasking model where it kills apps in the background and restores them transparently and all that although apple has tried to do a bunch of technologies that help the mac be more like that all i'm gonna say is eight gigs of ram it's time for apple to bump that do they need to bump it to 16 of course i would love that but something more than eight apparently the phone is going onesie twosie going from six to eight maybe they'll go to 10 uh next year or the year after right but it's time like there's there's that graph that uh i think we talked about on past shows that somebody said it was like how much ram is in the base uh apple laptop over time and it's like the slope that goes up and as soon as tim cook become ceo at flatline and it's not just like oh well he made the ram stop or whatever like there are arguments we made that like there's a point of diminishing returns tim cook stopped the ram you're able to do more in the eight gigs of ram or eight gigs was sufficient for the things that most people do with their laptops and nothing new has come along to force the change in that like local ai or something that hasn't really right like i don't expect the slope to continue at the same angle forever but i also don't expect it to be flat for 15 years or whatever like this the phone certainly haven't been right the the phones have been creeping up in the amount of ram and those are portable mobile devices that generally cost less than the macbooks that people buy as well by the way it's apple needs to increase the ram in the max i don't know when it's gonna happen but yeah this is we're at a we're at a possible inflection point here where the phones will have more ram than the base model max Thanks.

1:02:52Hey, but you know, there's good news. Installing Rogue Amoeba apps is now a lot easier. This is wildly unrelated, of course, but we use the wonderful Audio Hijack to record our audio. We were using Piezo, or I was using Piezo many, many years ago. I use Fission for some things from every now and again. And one of the only crummy things about using Audio Hijack, which generally gets my highest recommendation, we are friends with several Rogamiba people, but truly, it's incredible. It is an amazing app, but up until very recently, the dance you had to go through, particularly on Apple Silicon, but it was true of even Intel models, the dance you had to go through in order to install their audio capture engine, which is the thing that lets you capture audio, it was bananas.

1:03:37You had to reboot not once, not twice, but I think thrice in order to do it. It was absolutely out of control. And as of very, very recently, in fact, sometime this month, reading from their own blog, Audio Hijack has now been updated to provide our new installer-free setup on macOS 14.4 and up. Just as we showed off last month with our recent Piezo update, you can now get started using Audio Hijack nearly instantly. There's no need to restart your Mac, use recovery mode, or even enter a password. I have to assume that Apple provided some new APIs or something, or maybe gave them some sort of entitlement or something like that, but this is excellent, because it was ornerous and just user-hostile.

1:04:13And it wasn't Rogamiba's fault, as far as anyone could tell. It was Apple's fault. No, they were doing the best they could with what the system threw at them. Yep. So I'm very happy for this. Yeah, you can see the explanation they put on their website, but it's not just like, oh, you only have to do one restart, or you just have to do, you go into accessibility or permissions and system settings or whatever it's like you don't have to do anything it has gone from the most complicated install that you can imagine that was scary and technical and require you to change security settings and reboot seven times whatever to oh there's just none of that anymore just load the app and i think that's great because surely that required some cooperation from apple because if roguemite could have done it before or was using some weird hack that like you know exploited a security flaw in the operating system we would hear about it and it would be closed by now so whatever has gone on here is it is such a change from like the worst install experience to like the same experience as text edit so it it's an amazing update and i it gives me some faith that if you wait long enough like five to ten years uh that maybe apple will actually give you apis that you need and we've talked about this about ios and ipad s forever what audio hijack does sort of be able to be like a switching station slash recorder for audio that happens on the system is such a useful function and so essential for people who work with audio on their devices like we do uh that it makes the mac so much more powerful than the other device and like why aren't there apis like this on ios and ipad os and it was difficult to have optimism because back when it's like well you can do it on a mac but man look at what rogue amoeba has to do do you make that happen on the mac it used to be easy to do on the mac because it was less secure and it was more open to things like this and you're on kernel extensions yada yada yada but it just got harder and harder like this is going in the wrong direction we want these apis to be on ipad and ios but on the mac where we have them it's getting harder and harder for them to even exist there and this is a welcome turn in the other direction which is like you know now it is way easier to do on the mac and also more secure than it was in the past thanks to presumably cooperation from Apple.

1:06:21So this gives me some more hope that maybe they'll realize that some of the other operating systems they have, like say an iPad is going to ship with an M4 in it, maybe that should be able to do similar things. It'd be great to see that functionality appear on non-Mac platforms. All right, let's do some Ask ATP and let's start with Scott McCauley who writes, as someone who is about to buy an M3 MacBook Air to replace a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro, I noticed the latest german leak about the ai enabled m4 that's kind of tangential to what we were just talking about i know new tech is always around the corner and i usually don't worry so much about future proofing but in this case i'm wondering if there's possibly something more qualitatively meaningful about this next gen release that should cause me to hold off another year my two cents especially if you're coming from intel hell no you upgrade and you upgrade now the best i could do is meet you in the middle and say wait for wwdc just in case something happens but i doubt it will If it were me, I would upgrade immediately.

1:07:20Marco, what do you think? You know, when we hear things like this will be made for AI or this will support AI or this will be a big upgrade for AI, that kind of thing doesn't usually happen within the same product line in one year. It's generally speaking that's marketing focus. When you look at what does it mean for a computer to support AI or to be good at AI, I mean, these days, it mostly means it has a web browser because most important AI developments are happening now remotely on servers. And so any laptop with a web browser can access things like ChatGPT and all the fun models like that.

1:07:57If you're talking about running models locally, what you're generally talking about is having custom acceleration hardware that is good at running models. That can be the neural engine. That can be the GPUs. In some cases, it can be both. It depends on the model, depends on the AI. But what we're probably looking at here, like what, you know, if somebody says, you know, the focus on the M4 is going to be more AI capability, what that probably means is more cores in the neural engine or more advancements in the GPU. But when you're looking at like M3 versus M4, you're still talking about the same, probably the same process size in terms of manufacturing or at least a very similar process to manufacture it.

1:08:38you're still talking about probably the same like rough physical chip size so you're not there's not really a ton of room on the chip to make massively more gpu cores massively more neural engine space and neural engine cores this is the best time for all this pounding to be happening behind me this is the most i've said the whole show and this is when they're pounding stuff into the wall i thought i heard you're like mic stand jostling so i'm kind of glad you acknowledged it anyway So M3 to M4, you're talking about the same process roughly, if not exactly the same. You're talking about the same approximate size and power usage of the chip.

1:09:16So you're not going to have massive differences that the M3 just can't do something really important that the M4 can do. Or the M4 is not going to be three times as fast for AI. It's not going to be that level of difference. The M4 will probably have more of everything. More CPU power, more GPU power, more neural engine capacity. Yes, it'll have all those things and they will, I'm sure, market it as a big AI thing. And it will be good at running local AI models relative to like PC hardware and the same, you know, performance and wattage class, I'm sure. But relative, you know, between the M3 and the M4, this is not a like you must wait for this kind of boundary probably.

1:09:58It's much more likely to be a nice incremental boundary like we've had on the other M chips going from M1 to M2 to M3. each one of those had like a 15 %-ish you know kind of you know roughly you know this is better but it's not like you don't have to hold off your entire life to get it there will always be the next M chip coming out next year like that that will always be the case so buy the laptop when you need it it'll be a even the M3 today is a massive upgrade over your 2019 Intel MacBook Pro and so enjoy it and just you know buy it if you need it now buy it now and have it for the next year and when the m4 comes out if i am totally wrong and somehow they've defeated physics and they've managed to make the m4 be amazing at some kind of ai thing the m3 cannot do then you will hear me do some follow-up and i will leave my words and you can be right but i'm pretty sure i'm gonna be right on this so in the meantime just buy the stupid m3 macbook air it's an amazing computer you're gonna love it and it will be able to do everything you need to do yeah because this person's coming from intel it's it's a no-brainer if they had an m2 and we're asking it would be a different conversation but coming from intel by now especially since the rumor is that the m4 macbook air is towards the end of next year so forget it but by now but that said i think it is entirely plausible for the m4 to be three to four times as fast in some ai task as the m3 not because they've suddenly found more room in the die or whatever but for typical apple reasons which is basically uh you know the m4 will have whatever silicon uh is slightly more advantageous to do like modern local on on device ai stuff than the m3 but then also that has library support where apple will you know have optimized versions of whatever algorithms that it's using for whatever ai features that it's going to roll out at wwdc and those libraries will take advantage of the different neural engine or whatever they're going to end up rebranding as if they do inside the m4 and the m3 and m2 and m1 and maybe even intel will still be able to do all this stuff although maybe not intel but i'll still be able to do all this stuff but will the will the library uh for that you know be optimized as much as the one that's for the new silicon that's the way these things tend to happen where apple says that you know and on the m4 it's four times as fast as the m3 at this task yeah because they optimized it in their library for the specific neural engine that's in the m4 and the m3 just gets like the old code path that they had before that is you know it was what it was before right it doesn't mean that the m4 has like four times more space on the die dedicated to it it simply means that apple is going to optimize for whatever new thing they're rolling out in silicon assuming these rumors are true right in a similar way to when apple rolled out the neural engine they the first chips that had the neural engine on the mac is like look how much faster it is than whatever intel thing that doesn't have a neural engine it's not because the intel thing couldn't potentially do that it's just that apple didn't spend time optimizing it for you know or spend any new time optimizing it for the intel chips and the neural engine was specifically designed by apple to run whatever exact library that they built like it's the it's the hardware and software built together whereas intel they just have to take what you know apple had to take what intel had available to them and then make a library that works with it right so that's always going to be the case when new silicon comes out but apple's not going to have a big ai splash wwc and say and this is only for m4 max which none of you own yet of course it's going to run on the m3 max and it'll run the m2 max and i'll run the m1 max maybe not at intel but but it'll just be slower a little bit slower uh and what you should be really asking yourself is in in the coming year how much do i care that whatever ai features that i don't even know about yet that apple's going to roll out will run slightly slower on my mac you probably don't care that much like no matter how great the features are if they run at all which they will on your m3 mac it'll be fine is it like oh i have to throw this mac into the ocean because this new feature that i didn't even have before but now that i have it it's the only thing i care about that's not going to happen like the first wave of ai features that apple has as amazing as they are you it's not like you're going to buy your entire machine focused around them because that we're not at that state in this technology right so you'll be fine you'll wait for the m5 the m5 will be even faster than the m4 on these tasks and it'll be fine and moving on joe bezdek writes the recent discussion about 64-bit versus 128-bit registers reminds me of something i'd long wondered about given the power of the m-series chips and the impressive performance of emulators like rosetta 2 why aren't there emulators that allow 32-bit software to run on 64-bit chips is it technically impossible i have some old mac games that i'd love to play again what do you think john so uh here's the thing about running your old 32-bit games your old 32-bit software it's like oh can't they just emulate that can't just translate the instructions from 64-bit instructions to you know from 32-bit instructions to 64-bit instructions uh yeah i'm pretty sure they can do that uh but here's the thing you need all the 32-bit libraries that came with a 32-bit version of the operating system that that 32-bit game ran on apple doesn't ship those anymore in in their operating system so now you're like okay i'm not just emulating a thing now i need essentially a vm that's going to run an old version of mac os inside a vm where i can run my 32-bit game um i'm not sure if that is uh exists anywhere or as possible it's conceivable that something about aren't the arm 64 chips apple uses makes it more difficult to do this or puts a barrier in the way which would explain why even like vms don't do or whatever but it's not going to be as simple as like rosetta where you just have an intel app and you double click it and it runs uh that only works uh because that's also a 64-bit intel app and you know they have the 64-bit libraries or whatever you think you need the whole stack because apple just sort of excised 32-bit from their entire thing so there's a bunch of files that aren't part of that application that you need to run that 32-bit game that said i really wish i mean we just talked about you know rogamiba and apple actually you know doing the right thing and making apis that make uh useful apps even better and safer for everybody after years of uh dealing with that it would be great if apple continued down the path that it's kind of like tiptoeing on uh to try to make it so that virtualization of apple os's on apple hardware is more of a thing used to be apple was just totally out of the game they like run vmware run parallels were not in the thing and now they have the hypervisor framework which makes it way easier to make those type of emulators you know such that like individual developers can do it by just saying i'm just going to use apple's hypervisor framework and build a gui around it right what mac developers want is kind of like what ios has with simulators where you can just pick a device pick an os version and run your thing and xcode in a simulator yada yada on the mac that's if you're doing a mac development that's so much harder you got to use vms you got to use old macs the vms can't log into your apple ids right if apple truly embraced virtualization of mac os and hell virtualization of all its platforms that would be a huge developer boon uh and they would have to like fully support it like so you can run old versions of mac os in a vm but like i said you can't log into your apple id in those vms for like weird security reasons only apple can really fix that due to the whole security chain there that would be so great if they enabled that as a side effect maybe it would allow you to run your 32-bit games right but i just think it's the thing apple should do to make their platform more flexible and to you know to make lives for developers easier and preserving your past legacy like like nintendo does by selling you the original super mario brothers and all those nes games and snes games and all that stuff uh i know apple doesn't like to do that but maybe you could appeal to tim cook's desire to sell the same ipad for 17 years look if people are willing to buy like classic 32-bit ios games and maybe not an ios because running virtualization your phone might be too resource intensive although they have as much ram as low and max now but like if there may eventually be a market for running old max software on max for running old ios software on phones and if apple already has the infrastructure to do that from because it's good for developers it would be easy to roll out a consumer-facing version of that so i don't know if there's a solution to this today.

1:18:16I don't think there are any technical barriers to it, but you're going to need more files than just your game executable. Anonymous writes, once John has gotten the upcoming OLED iPad Pro, I'd like to ask, does it work well as a secondary HDR screen for a Mac if the primary screen is an SDR screen? This is bold to ask what the state is of something that hasn't been released, but let's go with it. I'm contemplating upgrading from an 11-inch iPad Pro second gen so that in addition to normal iPad use, I could see HDR photos and HDR in Lightroom Classic when my primary screen is a studio display. Yes, I know that the Pro Display XDR is the proper solution, but I bought the studio display for 2 ,200 pounds in, or excuse me, not pounds, euros in September before I knew that HDR support in Lightroom Classic would launch in October.

1:18:59And 8 ,000 euros for the XDR with stand and nano grooves is a lot, even knowing that I have a hobby use case. Well, there's a lot easier way to get a smallish hdr screen that works with mac os and is not buying the 8 000 euro xdr uh all the macbook pros come with pretty amazing hdr capable screens you get a whole computer with them too uh and and some of them might cost as much as a high-end ipad so having having ipad as a secondary screen like there are hdr ipads you can buy now like the the mini led 12.9 inch whatever i use my ipad as secondary screen when i'm doing uh multi-screen development work on switch glass that is my second screen this is another example of mac os's support for ipads as a second screen is good enough for me to use that as a way for me to test multi-screen scenarios like the mat the operating system just sees it as a screen there's nothing particularly weird about it uh it works as expected and so that has given me a lot of time to use an ipad as a second screen and granted my main screen also has hdr but i think if you had an ipad especially like a 12.9 inch ipad with the big screen the mini led back right and hdr i think you could use that as a way to see what the pictures will look like in hdr because the problem if you have an sdr screen is you just like it'll display them okay but you just like what you if you want you want to know what does this look like an hdr and there's just no way to know without an hdr screen so if you already have an ipad and you just want to see what a photo looks like in hdr yeah i think it works fine bring the photo over there full screen it on the ipad screen there's not going to be as many pixels if it's a high megapixel image and you have a small ipad like it's it's a compromise or whatever but there's that if you don't already have an old ipad pro but you want to just have a second screen or you want you basically you want an hdr screen for photo previewing consider buying a macbook pro as your next computer use the desktop laptop lifestyle that marco uses only actually open the lid on your computer because the macbook pro screens are really good like this every time someone asks should i buy a macbook air or macbook pro the main reason i tell people to buy a macbook pro is not for the cpu performance not for the gpu performance it's for that screen and it's gonna kill me how long we're gonna have to wait for the macbook air to have an hdr screen long after like every iphone already has an hdr screen every they're gonna be everywhere it's be like but the macbook air just like it couldn't get retina for like a decade and a half he's not gonna be allowed to get hdr which is stupid because hdr should just be table stakes given that all of our devices take HDR photos.

1:21:25But anyway, yeah, think about a MacBook Pro as potentially your next computer and you can hook up your same external monitor to it and just use the MacBook Pro's internal display as your HDR preview display. Thanks to our sponsor this week, SwiftCraft. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us atp.fm slash join. In this week's ATP Overtime, our member exclusive bonus segment, we'll be discussing the Humane Pin Rabbit R1, but with more Apple influence because Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are apparently seeking funding for a personal AI device. And then also, Apple's apparently teaching an AI system to use apps, maybe as part of Advanced Siri, kind of like the Rabbit R1 is doing its large action model.

1:22:09So we'll be covering that in ATP Overtime as well. Join as a member to listen now, atp.fm slash join. Thank you very much, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:22:22is 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. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long So we were talking about Ticketmaster earlier, and I am going to Las Vegas to see the Phish shows at The Sphere, to see the last two of them.

1:23:30I'm leaving tomorrow. And I had to buy those tickets secondhand on the various constellation of things like StubHub and all those other – and even I think Ticketmaster even has their own secondhand market built in Ticketmaster now. Of course they do. Of course. Talk about ripoffs. So when you buy the tickets up front, directly you pay whatever it is, the$40 in your convenience charge and whatever that stuff is. When you buy tickets from a reseller service like the StubHub and these other things, it's amazing. So I have both bought and sold tickets on these platforms before. They charge both ends, and they charge a lot.

1:24:11So when you buy it, suppose you go to StubHub. I don't have the percentage just in front of me, so forgive me. But when you go to StubHub, if you buy a ticket, you on the buyer side, you pay something like a 30 % or 40 % surcharge. Well, the seller, out of the fee that is the base price for the buyer, the seller also pays a large surcharge on that order. So the vast majority of the money is being taken by the platform. It's kind of amazing. like the the amount of ripping off happening here on all sides oh it's it's so gross that's another thing that ticky master is says that it tries to prevent but probably is making half-hearted efforts is the whole idea of like stopping scalpers essentially from buying up all the tickets and just reselling them oh no they just want to be the scalper themselves yeah right exactly well they you know ticket master is some unmotivated to do that because ticket master is like we want to make those exorbitant profits we don't want a bunch of scalpers buying it so ticketmaster does make some efforts to limit who can buy or whatever but i mean people just hire people to be humans to buy the tickets like it's it's kind of uh you know it's a cat and mouse game there but yeah ticketmaster's motivations are not pure and also as noted before ticketmaster is bad at their jobs so what happens with tailship of concerts the the site crashes because they're bad at their job uh huge amounts of tickets are sold by scalpers because they're bad at their job and then those tickets go on those scalping sites uh for more huge profits for more middle parties i mean the secondary market is always going to be a ripoff like but at least that is actually somewhat competitive because there's not just stub hub there's like what i forget what the other ones are i used to know what all the names are because i was trying to get taylor swift tickets um at least there's some competition in that area but the main problem is like why are you know how are these scalpers all getting tickets and like i said the the ultimate hack is well you just pay people a small amount of money to buy the tickets for you use human power right kind of like the uh amazon just walk out store where they had humans monitoring on cameras to make up for the errors that the uh the supposed uh you know computer vision things were making so for the sphere thing in vegas like it doesn't seem like a fish friendly venue to me like i would expect well i don't know like sort of outdoors more sprawling not so much about the laser light show like as fish no way it's the world's biggest hot box it's perfect i was gonna say you're worried about the smoke collecting at the top i know i get that but it's like i just feel like it's more sort of hippy dippy and also like fish like they're up there and they play their instruments They're not about big productions, right?

1:26:40But the sphere is all about the biggest production, like the biggest screens you've ever seen. Wait, so what are you saying about U2 then? Oh, U2 is all about the big production. Are you kidding? Ever since after the Joshua Tree Tour, the whole Zouropa Tour and the Pop Tour, that's just spectacle on spectacle on spectacle. It's a perfect U2 venue. I mean, that's part of why I fought so hard to get myself in to see this, because I think I don't really know what to expect. Like I've been to something like five fish shows so far, something like that. And, you know, they have a certain formula. They have a certain format.

1:27:11And so I kind of know what to expect at most Phish shows. This, I think, is going to be really weird and really interesting. And so that's why I want to see it. Like, it's actually going to be different from what they almost always have done. You know, I know Train of States, who gave an interview that I watched earlier, basically saying, you know, like that they've had to, you know, re-architect entire things about how they do you know because you know the sphere doesn't seem to really have like a traditional lighting rig even um and so you have these these giant you know this like spherical projection video screen to put something on and there's there's you know little to no traditional lighting it seems and then they have on the stage like he was saying that you know when you look at like how you too had to stage it there was almost nothing on the stage The stage actually looks fairly small if you look at pictures and video.

1:28:08You'd be blocking the screen. Right. And normally Fish has tons of stuff on the stage. There's all sorts of, obviously, instruments and drums and various amps and monitor speakers and different plugins and pedals and all this other stuff they use. And so I'm just really curious to see how do they stage it? What's in the background? Normally they have this guy, Chris Carota. he's a famous lighting designer and he does like live lighting cues with the band because like you know one thing like most most big touring bands for each tour they basically develop a show and then play that show over and over again in every state they go to that's not how fish tours with fish like everything is kind of riffed off the cuff like there's some advanced planning but not a ton of advanced planning for each show and every show is different that's part of why people like me like it so much.

1:29:01This actually breaks that format in the sense that I assume that they that they have to kind of pre sets a lot of what they're doing with the visuals and things that but I don't know. I don't know how it's going to work. And that's why it's interesting. And it might be awesome. It might suck. That's part of the excitement of going like I kind of want to see it because whatever it is, they're probably not going to do it very often like this. This might be a one off like these are four shows they're doing. They might never do any any other shows at this venue or maybe they'll come back every year and do it i don't know but i think it's going to be interesting and risky and that's that's going to be fun i think you really do need to it's kind of like making a music video because it's it's a screen right you can do essentially lighting with the screen but there's all sorts of and it's not just a screen but like it's so environmental that like normally what you might put up on the screen behind a band is different than what you put in the sphere so if you give an example of the u2 stuff like there's a lot of like sort of mood and environmental stuff that you put up there for like a slower song or whatever instead of having the equivalent of you know let's see close-ups of the people in the band or let's see some flashy graphics or whatever it's more like let's just put something on the screen to be atmospheric to change the mood in the entire sphere and that's the thing you can do when you've got a screen that's so huge and wraps around the audience like that and so i think it really is a an entirely separate skill from like traditional lighting or even like what youtube has done in the past by having giant screens in their concert venues uh and i saw some parts of the u2 one it seemed fine like it is definitely a different vibe than a show like i feel like especially like a rock show traditional lighting and yes even like you know 80s metal hairband like the little sparker things you know those things like little explosions and sparks that go out and smoke and colored lights and flashing lights that is kind of part of the genre but you're not going to get that in the atmosphere not the least of which because it's indoors but also because yeah you'd be blocking the screen it's it's all about what's on the screen so i think it'll definitely be a a different vibe than uh watching them on the beach oh yeah totally and again that's why i think it'll be interesting to see and and i and i honestly i think i'd be surprised if they did it again but we'll see what it ends up being but that's kind of why like again like i think this might be a one-off which is why it's interesting to go see it now they're gonna have a residency yeah right well but that's they can't do a residency because they play a different show every night.

1:31:17Like, you know, most things in Vegas, it's one show that the act performs every single night for months or years until, you know, it goes off and they move on. That's not how Phish performs. So, like, that's why it's... But they could still do it the same way they always do it. Like, so, residencies don't have to be every single... I don't know what the deal is with the sphere or whatever, but I was just thinking of the Billy Joel one. Billy Joel has had a residency in Madison Square Garden, but he does one show a month. He just did his 100th. I'll see if I can find a link to the show notes. So, I don't know.

1:31:45Casey had can find a good link for us somewhere it was the 100th billy joel madison square garden residency and i think i have to find that that link that i think we put in before of uh the story in the new yorker or the atlantic or wherever it was billy joel lives on long island and he takes a helicopter to madison square garden because he doesn't want to fight the traffic so once a month he leaves his mansion on the beach gets in a helicopter flies to madison square garden plays one show gets paid multiple millions of dollars for that one show and then flies back that's amazing i mean i think he's earned that yeah for sure that's what i'm saying like a fish residency doesn't have to be like other people's residencies it could be they do one show a month and every single one of those shows are different yeah it could be but yeah we'll see i'm very excited i i think it's going to be really cool to see because i i think the band will be a little bit outside of their own comfort zone too which will be like something interesting to see and i'm kind of curious to see how they handle that i think they'll handle it well but it'll be fun to see um And then I had just no clue what they're going to do for the visuals.

1:32:43I assume it's going to be kind of like an iTunes visualizer from the early 2000s. That's kind of what I'm – and I assume whatever it is, I think it's going to be designed for a class of drugs that I don't use but that many of the people there will be using. And so that will also have an interesting thing to experience. Apparently Billy Joel is not taking a helicopter anymore. I was going to say, yeah, I love classic rock.com is a good article about this. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I got a little freaked out, confessed Joel, admitting the occasional turbulence put him off the chopper rides. Now he's traded the sky for the rails.

1:33:18The train lets you get up right there. So he takes the Long Island Railroad or it continues. But the helicopter and train weren't the only modes of transport Joel had tried. He even admitted to taking a Greyhound bus on what, John? The Hudson River line. Very good. Very good. Yeah, it's certainly not going to be driving himself. he's uh too old and too rich to be sitting in traffic like that