590: Buy Your Car an iPhone

33:11So yeah, WWDC is coming up. So we should probably talk about what to expect. And honestly, I'm very surprised, well, maybe not surprised, but impressed with the lack of like concrete leaks. And let me go through a few things here, unless one of you has an opening statement. Let me go through a few things that we haven't really talked about that we can use as jumping off points but by and large i feel like it's pretty pretty well under lock and key what we're going to see on monday why do you think that it's just because the things we've talked about are have been rumored i believe most of the things will come to pass and i think that's what they're going to show but we'll say we'll go through the items we have here we've again we've talked about a lot of things on past episodes that have been rumored wwdc and i don't think many of them have been debunked they're just sitting out there waiting for us, waiting to see if they're true or not.

33:56Yeah. So we'll start. Mark Ehrman has said, read my lips, no new hardware. And so there's apparently not going to be any hardware this year, which I don't think is particularly surprising, but Mark has stated it is definitely not happening. Yeah, that sometimes happens. We have the no hardware WWDC. Sometimes Apple itself kind of leaks it to control expectations. In this case, I don't think there were any particular expectations that Apple needed to leak to tamp down, other than my unrealistic expectations about the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio. But, you know, there's cold water on that. My expectations about Siri not sucking?

34:29Well... Yeah, but no hardware. No hardware, WWDC. And, you know, we just had a bunch of hardware. The only hardware that Apple should be updating right now are the ones they apparently can't update because the chips aren't ready, and that would be the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro. I mean, you know, he was pretty definitive. And when he comes out this close to WWDC and says no hardware, I just have to accept there's going to be no hardware. So I'm sad about it, but perhaps not surprising. You know, let me jump in and go a little off script here. Do you think, John, that this is the year that the forthcoming macOS release, whatever it may be called, do you think that's the year that they start really hammering down or, you know, like taking away stuff for Intel?

35:07Because you aren't missing out on much on your ancient-ass Mac Pro, right? Performance. Well done, Marco. Yeah, but didn't we talk about this? Like what year we thought the Mac OS would stop? I forget what I predicted, but whatever I predicted back then, I stick by because I think that was probably a reasonable prediction. Maybe this year. I don't know. I feel like it's a little bit early, but, you know, we'll see. Half the reason I think it's not going to come this year is because that would require extra work by Apple to deal with that. And they're like, Mac OS. We really don't put that much effort.

35:39Let's do it next year. Fair enough. All right. So speaking of macOS and also iOS, allegedly, according to Mark Gurman, the settings app is getting revamped with a cleaner interface, better organization, and much improved search. And that's both iOS and macOS. Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it insofar as I don't doubt that they've touched and maybe rejiggered some stuff in settings. But I don't know. I am not as offended by settings as most people, but I can absolutely tell you it is a mess. And although I haven't looked at it in a little while, I feel like they've kind of given a hint about this on the Vision Pro because the Vision Pro settings are vastly different than any other platform.

36:18And to my recollection, they do make a modicum of sense in there. So maybe we'll see that getting cribbed and put into iOS and macOS. But one way or another, we're going to get something different. Yeah, this rumor doesn't have enough detail to be that interesting, either because it's just a vague rumor and they don't have details, or because the person conveying this rumor doesn't understand what's wrong with settings. Right. It was revamped to get a cleaner interface. I don't think the complaints were that the interface was not clean. I mean, I don't feel clean using it. Jason had a good article of like, look, you can use hierarchy to arrange information visually and conceptually, and that can make things easier to find.

36:58And we don't want to re-litigate everything that's wrong with settings, but there's no concrete things about what are they fixing. They're like, oh, well, they're just rearranging stuff. Some things, they're putting things in different places and the search will be better. Those are all good. Like improvements are welcome. But I haven't seen anyone say they're totally overhauling it and it's going to be good now. It's just, it's like minor improvements. And, you know, I guess if you do minor improvements many years repeatedly, you'll get better and better and it'll be fine. But I'm still not jazzed about the setting up.

37:27I mean, they just, it's still full of bugs even. And like setting aside the design, which is, I think, still poor, I don't really necessarily need them to massively revamp the design if it's still going to be this buggy. Like I'd rather if they if they only do one thing to improve it, I'd rather they make the current design actually work correctly. But that being said, you know, a new design would also be welcome. But I'm hoping whatever this rumor is, I'm hoping that what they're really saying is it's been worked on a lot. And maybe that will include some bug fixes also. But it still feels like a broken web app version of something that's trying to imitate an iOS setting screen.

38:06It does not feel like anything that would ever have come from Apple if you would have shown people even five or 10 years ago, like, hey, this is current Apple software in the year 2024. They would look at it like, are you serious? Yeah, we're talking about macOS settings, but this rumor is actually primarily about ios settings which you know we all are familiar with and doesn't need as much attention as mac os settings but i think they're rearranging stuff uh splitting out some things that were previously combined ios settings the search has always has had many years of work in it so that's how a lot of us navigate settings because you can't remember exactly where something is but you know in all cases i feel like you know the general philosophy of settings in both mac os and ios is being maintained to be the same they're just like maybe we could arrange things better and i think on ios the design is reasonable on mac os they should have better information organization and hierarchy given the larger size of the screens and the more sophisticated input methods and as for the bugs we've said this before when settings was first redesigned how much of it is the settings app how much of it is swift ui bugs you know i mean i know it's all the same company and they can complain directly to the swift ui people but when stuff like text fields like don't stay editable or lose focus when you're in the middle of typing i worry wonder about that and sometimes they're using like quote unquote standard controls that i think are bad standard controls the settings team didn't define those controls they're using the standard controls as part of this form thing in swift ui and i think i think those controls are bad i think they look bad i think they don't work well uh but this the settings team didn't make those right they're just you know using the os level controls so to the extent that they're buggy i think a lot of it is probably on the frameworks teams and to the extent that those controls are bad that's all on the frameworks team like one of the things that drives me up a wall and i just can't believe this is not i guess it's in settings but you know the passwords pane in settings when you edit like a password and it makes you edit text in like a right aligned uh thing i feel like i'm writing in a right to left uh language or left whatever the opposite of the way english is right to left have you have you done this and seen it it breaks my brain how like backspacing and forward spacing and moving text goes.

40:12You're editing right aligned text for like the password. I don't want any surprises or unexpected behaviors when I'm editing the text of a password in plain text, right? Just that's not a good way to let me edit information. It's name value pairs, username, password, website. Don't make it right aligned in a text field that has no borders. It's the same color as the background that just behaves in bizarre ways. that's the stuff that really needs to be fixed and the settings team well maybe for the right line thing they have control over that but i'm not sure how much control the settings team has over that so well but i mean you know this is this is like maybe not their fault but it is their problem you know they yes they were you know they were building this app on what seems to have been you know definitely a shaky design concept of let's just make it look like ios and then you That didn't go so well.

41:05Building it on top of SwiftUI for Mac, which is not the greatest platform for SwiftUI to date so far. But at the same time, nobody was forcing them to do this. Nobody was, or at least the SwiftUI team doesn't run the company. So the SwiftUI team was not forcing the rest of the company to say, hey, you better rewrite all your stuff in SwiftUI right now. And even if they were, that's not our problem as the customers. This is a self-created problem internally to Apple. so what we see we don't care what it's written in we don't care what team dynamics there were or what they wanted to do on a technical level to make it more idealistic all we see is the settings app is really weird and sucks now like and it you know granted it was not in perfect shape before but it's bad now and it's it looks like they did a whole bunch of work and came out with something that was just still very bad just in new and different ways you know the example you gave with the typing in a right-aligned text field, so much of what I see in the settings app feels like no one has ever used it.

42:10I feel like I'm trying out some code that I just wrote for the first time, and I'm running it in the simulator, and I'm trying it out, and I'm like, oh, this doesn't work. Okay, back to the drawing board. But they shipped it that way. It just seems like it's a design concept that they showed in a meeting one day, and someone hit the wrong button and shipped it. yeah and the thing is the reason i think they're sticking with design it did solve a bunch of the problems they had with like the old fixed layout like if the old fixed layout just wasn't scalable you couldn't add more stuff easily uh everything was sort of hand laid out and it was hand laid out over like a decade and a half by different people so you could sort of see the different one preference pane was different than another was different than another based on when it was made and who made it and what they decided to do what mood they were in and this is uniform and scalable and scrollable and extensible but the building blocks that they use to achieve that they're bad building blocks right the the the individual controls the way it scales the way it looks the way it works that's all bad so they did solve their problem hey now we have a scalable solution for settings in mac os but they've brought on themselves to your point marco many new problems by using these new controls that either weren't ready or a buggy or just bad ideas and that is a shame so we'll see uh again i welcome any kind of improvement but there is no rumor that it's a complete overhaul and that adds information hierarchy and visual hierarchy and restores some of the hand laid out things for the for the most common controls because that's what they should really do like the hand the old hand laid out one like the good ones that the nice preference panes that were hand laid out and beautiful they were nice and easy to use and you could remember what they look like and you could remember where controls were spatially and it was like being in a place in a room with furniture arranged and all my wonderful things that i love but it was just nice right and you can't do that for every single one so you do need a scalable solution for more settings right you got to have that and they should have a better system but for the most commonly used screen like the five most commonly used setting screens and i'm sure apple knows what those are hand lay them out make a bring in an actual good ui designer who remembers what mac user user interfaces are supposed to like hell bring someone who's ever used a web form because i can't remember any time i was asked to like update my passport on a web page and the text field was right aligned in english doesn't it doesn't make any sense who thought of that or the labels were like massively far away from the values just disappointing yeah it's uh it's a it's an adventure in there but we'll see what happens uh vision os 2.0 uh there haven't been very many rumors about this uh somebody pointed out i don't have the toot in front of me but uh somebody pointed out that hey vision os shipped you know in the middle of the software lifecycle for Apple.

44:48And so it would not be surprising if VisionOS 2.0 is really just getting all the low-hanging fruit that didn't ship for 1.0. But one of the things that's been rumored maybe is that some or perhaps even all of Apple's iPad apps that are running in compatibility mode on the Vision Pro, perhaps those will become real honest-to-goodness Vision Pro apps. So things like home, calendar, podcast pages, etc. Which I think is possible, although it would not surprise me if that was issued in favor of uh doing something more whiz bang but we'll see maybe we would be able to rearrange the uh home screen that'd be cool yeah so if these apps if the ipad the things that shipped as ipad apps are native it makes me think that they were already being developed they just weren't ready for launch right because it doesn't i don't feel like they would launch the the vision pro and then say okay now all those things we had to ship as ipad apps let's get teams on those to make them like it seems like they would have to be in progress already and just didn't make the deadline but either way this is embarrassing when you launch a new platform and a whole bunch of your really important apps are the ipad versions but you know apple has done that in the past like with the ipad not getting uh versions of apple's own pro apps for years and years and years sometimes it takes the apple a really long time to get around to doing stuff and it was the the ipad os rumor that's going to get a calculator now it's just they just never got around to it right and so i mean if they do this at least it shows if they have if they're all if all the ipad apps are now native i think that does show some level of commitment that they realized it was embarrassing not to have that and it was just a timing thing and now they're you know fixing that but i agree with you casey that i don't expect vision os 2.0 to be massively different there's just so many obvious things they need to fix and enhance fix bugs add minor features i i don't even expect them to have a big home screen rearranging thing if they're what they do it'll be very rudimentary because this is really just kind of like the uh you know make it what we wish 1.0 could have been if we had an extra six months.

46:45Yeah, because that's really all it's been. Every year you think about these platforms going up by one whole version number and there being a certain kind of minimum amount of improvement. But keep in mind, Vision Pro was a half-year release. And so it really hasn't been that long since 1.0. And from all we've heard, it seems like software was the gating factor of when it could be released, not hardware. so like it's not like they have a bunch of software work saved up for years you know waiting to be released like no you know what we got so far like that's that's what they have so far and so i'm not expecting a lot of movement on the vision pro software side yet it's just it's too soon and that being said like keep in mind too this is a a very like distant forward looking platform for them this is not going to be a big seller for a long time if ever and so I think the level of improvement to expect for Vision OS releases even going forward, even when they have full years to do it, I'm expecting something more like watch OS releases or tv OS releases.

47:50I'm not expecting major new changes and major new features to be coming out every single year. I think it's going to be a slower update pace. I think this is a very long game they're playing with Vision Pro. I think, honestly, I would love to see them step on the gas a lot harder, but what we're seeing so far shows a different strategy, but regardless, I don't expect a lot of movement on this platform every single year. I think it's going to be a very slow burn. You did get that immersive environment for working in Xcode with the wavy neon lines and stuff. Oh yeah, from the developer app. I mean, that's cool.

48:24I guess I actually haven't tried this out yet, but that's a thing, which is neat. But yeah, I don't know. I would love to see, even before I see a lot of software motion on vision os i really would prefer to just see content more than anything else like that's what i feel like i want and we're just not getting it right now which is too bad but you know it is what it is um i will say though i was briefly using the vision pro uh in using the mac virtual display mode with the developer strap on with a high-speed usb cable plugged into my mac And I do really like that. I mean, I was at home, so I only needed it for a minute or two because I was working on something.

49:04But it is pretty cool when it works, particularly when it's done via a cable, because then latency is much, much lower. And I feel like the crispness of the display is also considerably better, which I enjoy. way um but yeah i mean i just want content give me more content because i'm not using this thing for work a whole heck of a lot i'm not sure anyone really is so uh i would really just love more content yeah and and that would also i think significantly drive sales too like that's what we need first because you're right like it's going to be a long time before there's meaningful software on here um if ever so again like apple tv like this when when when we had gone to the thing in November that we can't talk about.

49:51The one thing I was dying to talk about in the intervening months between that and release was it was very obvious to me, even from some past time, it was very obvious to me that this feels like computing on a virtual Apple TV with an infinitely sized screen. And it does kind of physically feel like you are kind of manipulating these giant apps in your giant space with these kind of indirect mechanisms of like your eyes and pinching and flinging things around and stuff like that and it it kind of like it felt a lot like computing on an apple tv but just in a much bigger way and obviously better in some ways worse than others but like for the most part it felt it felt like it was closer to that than using a laptop or an iPad or something like that.

50:38And so I think what I would expect here is I think it's going to end up being a lot like the Apple TV as an app platform, which is most apps will not find much reason to be there and most users won't want to use most apps there. But with the right content and with the right specialized apps, this could be something people use frequently. It just needs that content to be there. Like I never even think about making an Apple TV app, but I use my Apple TV almost every day. What do I use on my Apple TV? Like four apps, but I use them almost every day. So the Vision Pro, I think, could be there. I think it could reach that point where people are using it for mostly content consumption and maybe occasional specialized uses or like very kind of narrow productivity uses for certain people.

51:26I see that being possible, but I think to get there first, we need the install base to grow and the only thing that's really going to meaningfully grow it, I think at this point, is content. So that's what I'm really watching for is like, where are the content deals? Where's the content coming from? How much can there be? How quickly? That's what will actually move these things. And then we can talk about computing possibilities down the road. But I tell you what, if you are traveling and want a huge-ass screen that doesn't take a whole lot of space, it is without peers. So there are some uses as few and far between as they may be.

52:03open ai according to mark german apple picked open ai as its inaugural ai partner for a few reasons it got better business terms than google was offering and apple believes that open ai's technology is the best available on the market apple is expected to offer its new ai features as an opt-in service according to people familiar with the matter so yeah i think everyone's expecting the ai dust to be sprinkled all over the place it's yet to be seen if somebody in in the C-suite got a burr up their butt to put AI on everything. Or if Apple will take what I hope, if Apple does what I hope they'll do, which is take a more mature approach and ask, where are we actually helping?

52:40You know, let's not do this just because we can. Let's do it because we should. And honestly, I think that there's far fewer places that AI should be used than where AI can be used. And we'll see what happens. But I'm hopeful they're going to be mature about it i was looking at this german article i'm doing the search for like the bloomberg style guide says when you're attributing uh anonymous sources you have to say the people said right so you just search for the people that string because that'll find you the tidbits that are that he's saying are sourced my sources say this and these everything you read there was one of those the people said things like i removed that text from the uh some of the snippets because it's awkward anyway the the reasons for picking it was they were talking to google and other partners or whatever the apple thinks that they're the best that they're the market leader and that they gave better business terms to google which kind of makes sense because open ai is younger and hungrier you know what i mean um and uh the open ai thing is interesting because everything you said about the ai features right we assume that there'll be a bunch of those like oh you can now do a useful thing and yeah we'll say it's ai or whatever it's the same stuff we used to say that was ml right but the chatbot style hey you talk to an llm as if it's like a little person back and forth all the open ai rumors like that's what open ai would be providing because apple has an internal one that they're working on they have their own kind of llm chat bot named ajax or whatever but it's not ready and open ai's things are better so let's do a deal with them but i still like the fact that it would be opt-in like what does that mean does that mean that when you're setting up your computer and says, oh, and by the way, we have a partnership with OpenAI.

54:19Do you want to enable feature that puts like an icon in your menu bar that you can click on that props up a text box and now you're talking to ChatGPT or something? Like what is opting into this? How does a chatbot fit into the OS? We can see how all the other stuff fits in. And like I said last week, the rumors that come down from on high that's telling every single team, find a place to put AI into your product. That's bad. And that's, you know, kind of the worst of corporate like, oh, it's a buzzword. Let's just find a place to shoehorn this into our product. But I, to some degree, I trust the product teams to think, what can we do with AI that is useful in the Notes app, in pages, in the Finder?

54:54Like, I don't think any of them are going to be like, I know how we can use AI on our app. Let's put a text box up and they'll send the message to chat to EBT. Like, they'll think of something better, right? It's bad that they're asking all the teams to do that because maybe it doesn't make sense to some teams to add AI features. But the mandate, we keep seeing this rumor that the mandate came down from on high. Every team, you better find some way to add AI because this is the AI year, right? but that is entirely separate from this open ai deal which is like oh you can opt in somehow in mac os or in ios to like on ios does it just install the chat gpt app like what does this mean this is the thing that that is i'm looking for the most in this presentation that they're going to be on stage they're going to say we've partnered with open ai or maybe they won't say that and somehow some way they're going to say in our operating systems that we're shipping there's a way for you to start talking to the chat gpt and having a little conversation in a little window somewhere i don't even think that's that useful feature there's already a gpt app for there's a mac one with swift ui there's a native ios one you can use it on the web like what what what is this i don't get it and this is the thing that's baffling me because as we said i think this is the highest potential for badness because it is such a non-apple non-controlled non-careful just like wild west talk to chat gpt good luck it's not our thing right how is that a selling point how are you going to promote that as like a new feature of your operating systems non-hardware wwdc i don't think there's probably going to be a developer story unless apple is going to like pay for your api tokens and now you can write an ios or a mac app and use their framework and get free access to chat gpt because apple did some multi-million dollar deal with them or something this baffles me that's why i added this thing of the whole opt-in like what does that mean what are we opting into what are you providing ending.

56:39I have red flags all over this. yeah i i don't know i i'm so turned off by sam altman and open ai i don't know it's it's funny the dude who we all snickered about wearing you know the two popped collar polo shirts it wasn't at wwdc like forever and a day ago a long time ago yeah yeah and we all laughed and had a good you know laugh at his expense and you know look at this silicon valley bro just being the world's bro-iest bro. And fast forward five, ten years, and it seems like, same as it ever was, nothing's ever really changed. Like, it's, you know, move fast, break things, and have no consequences, and I don't know.

57:22Like, again, we'll see what happens. Like, I am cautiously optimistic, and again, I like to think of Apple as generally one of the more mature and adult organizations in the Valley. I'm sure there's exceptions. I'm sure that's not always true, but broadly, I think that to be the case and i don't know i feel i hope and i i i so desperately want apple to be deliberate be considered be mature and not just put the ai dust on everything they see but hey we'll see i mean i like i don't i find chat tv useful i i use in my rotation of things that i do i do i all the chat bots i do google searches like it's it's i get useful things out of it there is used to be had there but i'm doing that already like i don't need apple to add any features to mac os for me to do this i can have a free account on open ai i can have a paid one i can use google gemini i can do it on ios i can do it on mac like all of that is already there i don't think i need any kind of os integration to make that experience better i can open a web page i can have it you know let's be honest it's already opening a tab somewhere right it's like like you know maybe it's not on my phone or whatever like i guess they could use voice thing like it integrates with siri and you talk to siri and it sends it out like i'm not saying there's no room for os integration there is but i just there just seems such an uneasy partnership but also because you know like the the sources in this essentially seem to indicate some of the sources are not inside the apple sometimes they're ex-apple people whatever like this is a stopgap apple doesn't have anything chat gtp caliber they don't have anything google gemini caliber they want to have something like that they want to have a story for that for wwc therefore they have to partner we talked about this before but they are working on stuff apple does have its own internal lm it does have its own internal chat bot that that its own employees have been using it's just not up to snuff yet which makes sense because they got a late start right but they're doing research in that area so presumably if this turns out to be useful apple would want to pull a google maps here and say yeah we'll partner with this other company because they're the market leader but eventually we'll roll out our own thing and eventually our own thing will be if not better than good enough right and hopefully they'll do it better than they did with maps roll out but you know we'll see how it goes but still like i this is what i'm looking at the most like how what's the picture how is it integrated how is this presented if it's opt-in like what does that look like like it's so weird to sort of if this ends up being a tentpole feature and not just like an off to the side because i can imagine just being like oh and by the way we partner with them and blah blah and that's all they say about it it's like quick right but if this is a tentpole feature usually tentpole features aren't like and we're so confident in it that it's not on by default to kind of like the windows recall thing right that's a sign of something like we think it might be okay but there is some danger here so if you just hit you know okay okay okay during setup whatever we're doing you won't be exposed to right uh but if you opt into it somehow then then you know again when you talk to siri and it can't figure out the answer instead of telling you to check the web it'll ask chat gpt or something yeah yeah i don't know uh we'll see what happens.

1:00:27I mean, that's all the items that we had in the show notes. I just, I really don't know what to expect. And I am so very, very interested to see what the AI story is. It seems that Apple's previous dedication to ML or machine learning, as we've talked about in many other shows and blogs have talked about, you know, they finally embraced AI as a term. And so we'll see what happens. I think it's tough because, you know, Apple is a publicly held company and publicly traded company. And, you know, I think investors and, you know, rank and file shareholders are going to expect them to have that AI dust sprinkled everywhere, you know, like a graffiti cannon of, or not graffiti, a glitter cannon of AI dust just shooting all over, you know, everything WWDC touches.

1:01:12But I don't know that that's appropriate or reasonable. So we'll see what happens. And I'm just curious to see, you know, now that we've got a whole new platform. I'm so excited to see what Vision OS 2 is. If history tells us anything, it will be disappointing. Do you think Vision OS will have AI dust sprinkled on it at all? Anywhere? I'd be surprised if iPad OS even has it. Keep in mind, again, we're still dealing with Apple's hierarchy of platform importance. iOS is going to get all the cool stuff first. I would be surprised if we see it anywhere else. I think it's going to be iOS certainly first, and then maybe they'll put some of the basics into ipad and mac well the cross-platform stuff will get it like the whole like removing people from the background of photos that's just going to be everywhere because it's a common framework you know what i mean yes of course yeah but but like you know in terms of like features like specific to say like the vision pro or the watch or like i would be surprised to see anything like that uh this soon and speaking of like sprinkling ai sparkles everywhere and everyone expects it to do it at this point though and this is what everyone expects but at this point it's true that the only way for apple to really make news is to do something different than everyone else does i mean they can make news by saying we're not doing any ai stuff and that would be news but that's obviously not what they're doing right but they're not going to do what every other company did which is like ai everywhere sprinkle sprinkle sprinkle sprinkle like you know and because that'll just like everyone else did that like you know throwing spaghetti against the wall right like windows did anything we could think of we're just going to do the only way apple can actually make news is by saying we're doing ai but we're doing it the Apple way where everything is useful and blah, blah, blah.

1:02:51Like they have to present it that way. That is a marketing decision. We already know they're already doing that. We talked about that last week. There's tons of features that they used to call ML that are just features of our phone, right? If they do that this year and they present it as we're not doing AI like everyone else, we're not throwing speed against it. So we don't have a thing where you draw a picture and AI draws along with you because we didn't think that was that useful yet. So we didn't put it in, right? That's the story. That's the Apple story. And the news would be Apple, WWDC, rolls out a bunch of AI features, but unlike other people's AI features, they only introduce the ones that are useful and also a challenge.

1:03:22Right? Because that's the wild card. I don't understand that, right? That is the way to make news. Otherwise, the story will be Apple catches up with everyone else and does what everyone else has already done, which is, you know, I guess better than the bad story, which is Apple doesn't do any AI stuff and they're doomed, right? Well, I mean, I think that's the most likely. I think by far the most likely reaction by the overall press and, you know, business and Wall Street communities is going to be they didn't do enough. Now, as actual Apple users, for me, like what you were saying earlier, I would rather they do things that are useful to me.

1:03:55I don't need them to do the most stupid things with AI because other companies will gladly do the most stupid things with AI. Apple doesn't need to do that. They are, as you were saying, they are the more grown-up company. I don't think that is their style to be the spaghetti against the wall, cutting edge, let's do a bunch of stupid stuff. That's not Apple's style. Apple is very conservative in that kind of approach. And to some degree, that's kind of just in their DNA. To another degree, they need to be because they have much more scrutiny on them and their moves have – they make bigger waves.

1:04:29And their brand – it's not that they're Disney, but their brand is very kind of like let's not do – let's not be hasty and do the radical stuff just because everyone else is doing it. And I honestly think if they market this well, the story won't be Apple didn't do enough. the story will be what Apple wants it to be is that Apple took a more considered approach. Everyone else has just been like, yeah, and Apple, you know, it's made all their features useful. Here are the things that it does. It only does things that are provably useful, right? Kind of like they did last year and the year before and the year before, like, oh, OS wide, you can OCR text.

1:05:03Like that's an AI feature, but it's useful. Like, and it's not, if that is the story Apple presents, I think most of the stories from outlets that don't have it in for Apple will be apple decides to take a different approach to ai unlike its competitors apple says that it's only rolling out features that are provably useful they're not going to use that term because that's not a good marketing term but you know some marketing person will come up with a two or three word phrase that distinguishes apple's approach to ai which again is going to be no different than what they did last year the only difference is the magic of marketing right and i you know you're right that there will be some stories like apple's not doing enough they're falling behind uh microsoft has 40 lms running in the background and windows 11 right but i feel Like when the whole windows, the copilot PC thing is just so wrapped up in the recall disaster that no one is even talking about the draw along or whatever, or the OS wide like translation, which I think actually is useful.

1:05:53So door is open for Apple to do something smart here. And again, the wild card is what the hell is open AI? Because open AI is not that open AI and chat GPT. That is not, we only did the things that we are sure are useful and safe because, you know, for, for all the uses that chat GPT has, it's not conservative it's basically the floodgates it's like type anything you want hope it works fingers crossed yeah like that i i would be very happy with take most of the basics that we already know that quote ai stuff can do even take a lot of the stuff the phones already do and just make it better make it more reliable give it better results as we were saying last episode like basic you know dictation like text or speech to text kind of apis um you know like like i believe is it all android phones or just the pixel phones that that have supported like system-wide closed captioning you can just have like constant transcription showing on screen of whatever audio is playing on the phone like we added to windows right like why is it why haven't iphones been able to do that yet like that's that's that's such low hanging fruit for apple like that should be a feature of course it should be a feature and that's again things like removing people from photos that shouldn't be there or you know like that kind of stuff this is these are not cutting edge new ideas.

1:07:10These are features that the rest of the industry has done. And yes, Apple will be playing, quote, catch up. But that's fine as long as they do a good job of it. The reason why some of these features stand out to us as things Apple should do is because they are good ideas. We are not saying Apple should do everything everyone else has done. Most of the other things people have done with, quote, AI are weird and useless and creepy or something but there are a few really cool killer features that it would be nice if apple had good versions of and then beyond that what we've already talked about things like obviously the big one is make siri better like that is the big one please for the love of god make siri better makes it makes it's interesting make siri better but don't turn siri into chat gpt you know there's a line there because you want siri to be better it's like all the things that siri's supposed to do now imagine if it did them reliably and with lots of flexibility and sophistication and maybe you could do one or two new things but that is very different than hey guess what now you can just ask siri anything and it will do something that's not what we want right because that is this throwing spaghetti against the wall because you can get yourself into trouble real fast with just especially since siri has essentially control over your phone and when it gets wrong there are consequences bad consequences so that is something i mean there's no rumor that like you know the siri suddenly it become chat gpt right apple needs to it's kind of like what you were saying things that the phone already does just make it do them better that but that is different than uh siri is now an all-knowing wizard that you can ask anything and cross your fingers yeah like like i don't i don't need siri to become a chatbot i don't need siri to generate images that don't exist already for me like like many of the things that we think of as modern ai apps i don't need siri to do those things what we need Siri to do is what the promise of Siri has always been promising and it has just never reliably delivered on that promise that's what we want to do and I think you know looking at modern AI techniques and models I think this gives them the ability to tackle what really is a pretty old set of problems in a new way that should theoretically be substantially better so that's what I'm most looking for and everything else that we've talked about like you know being able to control apps without configuration and stuff like that that would all that's all going to be great down the road whenever that comes together i don't even need that right now i just want siri to work that'd be great and and maybe you know give me give me a good captioning model on the phone that i can use and otherwise like that's i think that could be enough for us it's not going to be enough for the press it's not going to be enough for the analysts it's not going to be enough for wall street but i think that would be enough for apple's actual customers i have an addendum to an earlier statement i meant to correct myself immediately and then the time passed and i couldn't but uh talk about when they're dropping uh intel support i forgot about all the ai stuff the whole requirement to have an npu like that's why rewind doesn't work on my computer that may push the schedule forward i mean that wasn't really a glimmer in anyone's eye when back when we were talking about this years ago uh but now the whole like you know the co-pilot plus pc is requiring a 40 tops npu blah blah blah uh you know my my cpu doesn't have an npu in there right and so every single one of these quote-unquote ai if they if they bothered to add quote-unquote ai features yeah they could just make them not work on intel but they could all just not make mac os also just not make mac os working so i feel like that nudges the possibility that this is the year my mac isn't supported nudges it a little bit i don't think it makes it a slam dunk i'm thinking the sure thing i still think i'll probably be supported and just won't have features as visible but the llm stuff is a problem for me can you reprogram the afterburner card to be an mpu it would still be so bad right they're not they're not spending any time optimizing any of this stuff it's like well it runs in the neural engine and also someone did an implementation for like the simd instructions on the xeon nope not happening yeah it's not sorry you're out of luck on that one yeah so it's really just i mean okay what mac has going for it is like apple probably doesn't care that much oh sorry intel mac users you don't get these new features right just be glad mac os still we still ship it for your your uh cpu um and that i feel like that has a likelihood because apple's like yeah it's just mac it'll be fine right but if they really it was the old apple where it's like everyone on the same page they'd be like no we're cutting them off this year because we got so many of the ai features and they all require the neural processor and intel doesn't have that so tough luck we'll see like i i the the worst case scenario for me it's like i was gonna ask you to what you're most looking forward to wwc but the thing i'm fearing the most is that i won't be able to run this version of mac os or the feature that i want in mac os doesn't run on my thing so for example the photos features that use quote-unquote ai to do cool photos stuff granted there's ways i can use other ai tools to edit my photos i don't need this to be built in but if i can't even access those features like if the if the person removal thing is built into the photos app like this is great saves me a lot of time it's right built in i don't have to edit in an external editor i have to go to a web page oh but not on intel that's a big fear for me because even though i would still it's like look macOS still supports your system no problem i'd be like oh but i really want to use the new ai powered photo editing features on my mac and now i'm sitting at my wife's computer to do photo editing and she's complaining that i'm hogging her computer and that hastens the timeline for me getting a new Mac.

1:12:38Which Apple hasn't shipped yet, like an M4-based Mac Studio or something. But anyway, I want to throw that. Anyway, so what things are you most looking forward to? Marco, you already said Siri, but is there anything else? Speaking of developer stuff, like developer tools, Xcode, Swift, what big thing are you looking forward to at WWDC assuming there's no hardware? So, I mean, for me, I really want to see, kind of what I was talking about last episode, I want there to be good models that developers can use on the phone for free with no limits. That's what I really want. Give us built-in AI SDKs that we can just use the same way we can use almost every other API on the phone.

1:13:18That would be game-changing in so many ways. That's the big thing I want in terms of capability. Now, in smaller ways, there's other developer tool type stuff. xcode is has had a lot of bugs for me this past couple of years a lot of like issues that don't clear that i've actually cleared um a lot of having to do clean uh in clean builds just to clear weird compiler bugs um my rewrite of overcast i use a couple of packages that i do locally and every time i change anything in the package i have to go like resolve package caches because otherwise it just won't pick up the change. There's all sorts of weird, straight up bugs in Xcode, or at least behaviors that sure seem like bugs that I think Xcode really could use some help in that area.

1:14:08I don't think they're going to be working on that. I suspect that... I think they are working on that. It's just a question of whether they'll fix more bugs than they introduce them. Yeah, because I'm sure that whatever they're doing with AI stuff, I'm sure there's obviously been massive demand for integration into Xcode of some kind of AI-based tooling, whether it's like an AI-based autocomplete, like the old version of what Microsoft called Copilot, or other stuff. There's obviously a lot of demand for that in recent years. And there's rumors for it. We haven't mentioned it in the past, but yeah, basically like, oh, Xcode will help you write your code for you using AI.

1:14:41I'm assuming that's going to be there. Like, can Xcode write around its own bugs using AI, maybe? Like, can it automatically clear the issues for me so I don't have to do it? When Xcode makes SwiftUI view, the preview also won't work. Right, exactly. Like, there's a lot in Xcode, a lot of the basics that I think could use some attention. But otherwise, like, in terms of the actual, like, you know, the APIs and the language, this is going to be a big year for Swift concurrency safety. This is the year of, like, Sendable really getting its moment because I presume they're going to introduce Swift 6.

1:15:16And that brings with it a whole bunch of strict concurrency checks. and theoretically some language enhancements that make complying with strict concurrency easier. Like right now, as I've been writing the Overcast rewrite and as I wrote Blackbird, I have tried to make them comply with the strict concurrency checks as they've existed in the pre-6 Swift languages. So you've been able to opt in to these warnings that will tell you like, hey, this thing that you're doing over here with this mutable state in this object, this will be an error in Swift 6. So there are... I've been trying to comply with the requirements before it's even out.

1:15:58And it's pretty hard. And there are certain things where this object here clearly is not being mutable state. And it's losing its state right here before this is even returning from its init or whatever. There's all sorts of things like that. And there have been various proposals in Swift Evolution to make some of that stuff automatic and detect it so you don't have to jump through hoops to go around it. I haven't followed in detail of whether those things are actually in Swift 6 or whether they will be. A bunch of them are. Yeah, I'm sure a bunch of them are. And so what I want to know is right now, all the stuff that will be an error in Swift 6 concurrency checking mode, a lot of that's pretty hard to work around.

1:16:40And so what I want to see is, have they made it easier to work with for the actual release of Swift 6? Because that's what most of these proposals were aiming to do. So let's see it. That's what I want to know is, like, as we go into this new era of Swift concurrency and Swift, you know, strictness, how easy is it to do the right thing? I've seen a lot of languages over time that make it hard to do the right thing. So far, Swift has been pretty good about it. So let's see. And then beyond that, as I've been writing this whole rewrite using SwiftUI and using Swift Async Modern Concurrency wherever possible.

1:17:21And there are still a lot of system APIs that do not play well with Swift Concurrency. I'm still having to write callbacks here and there. I'm still having to shell out to task to do something in a function. There are still areas in the system frameworks that have not been updated yet for Swift concurrency. I would love to just see more of that, please. Give me as much more as you can. Whatever you've gotten done this year, every year it gets better. So I just want to see, like, make all... Have everyone work on the frameworks throughout the year as they have time. And here and there, I get updates that make things easier for me as a Swift async programmer.

1:18:03So that kind of stuff is mostly what I'm looking forward to. most of like the boring tooling and API stuff. But that's what actually improves our lives as developers day to day in the following year. It's not like this one new hotness that we must use. It's like some cool new API or something like, no, usually it's just like a bunch of small life improvements that they made to the rest of the system and the rest of the tooling and the rest of the APIs. That's what I'm looking forward to mostly. But also, yeah, give me some of that cool transcription model, please. Thank you. you know i i'm glad you brought up swift stuff uh because that sitting here today that's what i think i'm most excited for is what is the new hotness within swift and swift can get on my nerves from time to time but by and large 10 years on because the announcement was you know 10 years and a few days ago 10 years on it is a really really great language it is not without problems, it's not without faults, but it is a really great language.

1:19:00And I do think it is mostly moving in a positive direction. And I feel like now that there's big and exciting things happening, like Swift concurrency, I feel like a lot of the, what is the term or phrase, like bike shedding, is that what I'm looking for, that was going on in the Swift 234 era, where we were worrying about really, really useless and dumb arguments that were happening all the time. And And I don't know, John, you're more plugged in. But yes, there was some sort of you do have to hash that stuff out and it is important to get it right. So it might have seemed like a lot of kind of like, well, who cares what that keyword is called?

1:19:37It's not that important. Just do stuff that actually is kind of important because you get stuck with that stuff. So I don't have many complaints about the process. But either way, like, you know, spending a whole bunch of time bickering about whether pre and post increment, you know, the plus plus operator should or should not be in the language like whatever, y 'all just move on. But anyways, that being said, you guys. really messed up substrings. Oh, substrings are such a pain. Well, you know, because there's some lousy things, but the thing is, if they come up with better ones, you can just abandon the lousy ones and never use them.

1:20:07You know what I mean? They've not painted themselves into a corner, which is really what you want to avoid with language design. Yeah, everything they've done with substrings and various array index stuff, oh my God. I still, every time I have to manipulate an index or a string, I have to look up code examples. like i cannot figure out how the heck do i do this i just want sub strings are not strings yep it drives me nuts but i mean it makes sense if you know why they're doing it for like for implementation efficiency but it's like i don't want to have to see that but just pretend it's not like that yeah yeah right exactly but we're getting we're getting off on a tangent so what all a lot of that bike us no way a lot of that bike shedding and yak shaving and whatever the turn of phrase you want to use is i feel like that used to bubble up into my world insofar as like, I don't pay attention to Swift evolution, even though maybe I should.

1:20:54But a lot of that navel gazing was bubbling out into my world. And I haven't seen much of that recently in at least a couple of years, which I think is a good thing. Because that means whatever is happening, instead of people going, ah, look at this ridiculous argument. Instead, legitimate arguments are happening, good ones. And so I'm excited to see what Swift 6 brings. I am petrified. I cannot begin to tell you how scared I am of turning on the warnings for Swift, for strict concurrency checks because I'm sure it's going to be a mess. I'm not knowingly doing anything wrong, but I bet you I'm doing a lot wrong.

1:21:27You got to try it. You got to see. It's not necessarily wrong. It's just like, I mean, I've made several runs of this and I'm sure we'll talk about it more after WWC and following episodes. But like in the absence of concurrency before it existed, we all did our own things using the technologies that Apple did offer at the time. Grand Central Dispatch, you know, callbacks, async await. Like that's all kind of like creepy. It's not quite precursors to the big strict concurrency checks, right? So if you have an application that's already written, it's like, okay, but I already did a thing to deal with concurrency.

1:22:02Maybe it's not as good, but then you turn on the strict concurrency checks and it's like everything you're doing is a violation of strict concurrency. It's like, yeah, this is what I had to do before you existed to do things concurrently. And so it's like, yeah, that approach, you should use a different approach to do that. our approach is safer but you end up having to like rethink stuff it's not like i'll just add an annotation here and it'll fix it it's like i mean this sounds dumb but like the swift concurrency strict checking thing wants you to use swift concurrency features right it doesn't want you to use grand central dispatch and queues right you can you can like satisfy it if you're but but it's like if you just use these our features like use strict concurrency use what we want you to use use actors right that's why they exist and it's like but but i already did it a different way and it's like well you're gonna have real problems trying to make me the compiler satisfied about that so i'm sure there will be much discussion about that i mean the good thing about swift the swith illusion process it happens in public swift is open source it's like there should be no for the most part there should be no secrets revealed to apple about the swift language right about what they're doing with it that'll be revealed like because you know if you looked at like all the swift language things and it was like and then swift ui appeared swift ui wasn't developed in public but swift was right so you know we'll see what kind of surprises apple has for us but the swift features they're adding they know the pain people have trying to you know comply with swift concurrency and they're trying to make it easier but fundamentally i think the problem they have is that they want people to use actors and swift concurrency as a way to manage concurrent processes and that supersedes and replaces a bunch of things that people had used in the past and figuring out how to do that without like changing your approach to concurrency like casey i know you love to use the what is it the the publisher thing with the source and syncs and the events what is that which i don't it's combined i don't use that much of it in call sheet i do use some but it compared to just a couple of years ago i use very very little and i only use it in a handful of places where it makes the most sense generally speaking the concurrency and stuff that I'm doing is Async Await, which is good insofar as it's new, but it's bad insofar as I'm probably doing a rudimentary version.

1:24:13Your stuff is not sendable, I'm sure. Yeah, for the most part. Nor should you make it sendable. I mean, I can tell you that I use a lot of Combine and Async Await in the rewrite. There's places for both of it, and I think they actually play somewhat nicely with each other if you don't do two you know ridiculous things with them um but they those things do solve different problems yeah and like the solution is not like oh i'm going to take all my data and i'm going to make everything sendable because that's not how to fix this problem you can't like you you have to have mutable state somewhere it should be protected by actors but like very often you're sending very often you're sending os objects back and forth and those aren't sendable and you don't have a way to change that because you don't define that class nor can you make it sendable or lie about it being sendable and it's just anyway i'm sure we're going off on a big tangent here because we're developers and we've all struggled with this but like i think the way apple presents this story is interesting down to like the idea of you know the the warning marco mentioned this will be an error in swift 6 does that mean you can't use swift 6 unless you have strict concurrency compliance or is there a mode in the swift 6 compiler that lets you run swift five code and do you lose out on any features in swift six if you decide that like that's that's a story that apple will tell like and has been has been telling in the open but they'll see how marketing presents that like swift currency it's great but if you're not ready for it don't worry you can still use swift six you just won't turn on the strict concurrency thing kind of like it is in swift five now yeah and i think that's the case i could swear and i'm probably getting the details wrong here especially because well and my my uh my memory is john makes fun of me justifiably is very bad, but I could swear that Ben Cohen or someone on the Swift team has publicly stated, hey, Swift 6, it's going to be opt-in for the concurrency checks.

1:26:03And you still will be able to do the rest. This is what you just said, John. You'll still be able to do the rest of the Swift 6 hotness without going all in on the strict concurrency checks. Yeah, because you can just download the Swift 6 compiler right now and try it. And you can see how these features work or whatever. But doing it at open source and having the developers talk about it is kind of separate than from how apple will present it how apple marketing will present this when it shows the new version of xcode you know what i mean like how it manifests in xcode what the defaults are for a new project in xcode these are things that aren't actually strictly related to the swift open source project but have huge effects on how this change is perceived by the people who are not following swift evolution which is most developers right you know kind of like when they do new project like does it default to swift ui that is kind of like an important political thing does it default to strict concurrency does it default to adding tests marco the defaults matter in in xcode and policy changes like that so that is that is you know for developers i mean it is a developer conference it's more esoteric and you're not going to see big news stories about it but the swift six story um is going to be interesting and you know like you said for most people it's entirely new to them it's public information they could have been looking at it all since last year, but most people, that's not their hobby to keep up with language evolution.

1:27:21They just wait until the beta we see and see what Apple has to offer them, even though you could go download it right now and try it. Exactly. And so for me, that's what I think I'm most interested in right now. Of course, I think I'm interested, you know, when the iOS changes and, you know, oh yeah, iPadOS is still a, you know, an operating system in our lineup. I'm very curious to see what the, you know, we'll get a second data point for VisionOS so we can start to draw a line between the two data points. But more than anything else, I'm very curious what my development life will look like for the next year plus.

1:27:55And I think some of that will probably be me ripping all my hair out trying to get this concurrency stuff working properly. But I think some of it should be fun and exciting. And, you know, as much as I will in one breath whine about SwiftUI and tell you that it neuters me here and there and, you There's nothing you can do to put a search bar anywhere but in a navigation bar and things of that nature that it makes it very, very stodgy and difficult and unwavering. But I'll also tell you that it's just such a joy to work with and so, so much nicer and so much faster than UIKit. And so I'd love to see what new SwiftUI stuff is happening.

1:28:31It certainly seems like Apple internally is spending more and more time and putting more and more energy into consuming SwiftUI, which makes me think they're doing the same within SwiftUI itself. The best way for Apple to make a good API for developers is for them to dogfood it, and they seem to be doing that more and more, so I'm excited for that. I don't know. I'm really excited, leaving aside the fact that I'm going to see you two, leaving aside that I'm going to be there, that I'm going to be at Apple Park. All of that is, of course, incredibly exciting. We covered that last week. But I'm just really excited to see what's coming because there's so little that has leaked out, like we said.

1:29:07And what's leaked out is more of a, oh, there's AI dust coming. There's a dust storm a-brewing, and that's about it. I still think the leaks have covered a lot. I don't expect to see tons of stuff that wasn't leaked. It's just that the stuff that's leaked is, I don't know, obvious or not shocking. You know what I mean? It's also a bit vague, particularly around the AI stuff. Yeah, I mean, it is vague, but we won't get the details. but i don't think well we'll see will there be something that was like totally not rumored that is shocking i think it'll just be in you know in the details how things work and by the way speaking of testing i forget i think there's a bunch of open source projects that do this and i kind of hope apple like adopts one of them or takes one under its wing or makes it official but uh the xc test framework which casey may be familiar with um it's not great it's kind of stodgy and old and if you've ever used if you've used a modern testing framework and like a language like node or whatever you kind of or even i mean obviously all my testing experience comes from pearl the great great great grandfather of good testing and programming languages um just the fundamental stuff that you expect from a test framework is either doesn't exist or is very awkward in xc test because it's old and so what does the swift ui for testing look like and there are a bunch of open source projects that try to do this like make a sort of swifty type api that looks kind of like the you know the popular testing packages for node or you know like just a nicer testing framework i would love apple to bless one of those and adopt it or to come out with its own i mean this kind of falls into the category of a market was saying it's like hey we've got a bunch of old apis some of them aren't really swifty right they don't they don't match the language well they don't take advantage of the features they look kind of old they're kind of awkward to use we know better ways to do things now uh test framework is one of those things i think that would be a big quality life improvement for people.

1:30:54Of course, they have to keep supporting the old one basically forever because people use it and make huge test suites. But Swifty testing, again, there's been enormous rumors about that. I've just been looking at a lot of the open source ones. I'm like, these are all good ideas. Pick one, Apple, and do it. I miss fluent assertions is one that I used in my.NET days. I'm looking at the About page trying to remind myself how it works. Basically, say you have a string that's an account number is the example they use. and the code you write is account number should be you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and so it's written almost like plain English and it's not too dissimilar from...

1:31:31Are there dots between every word? Yeah, yeah, account number dot should preen preen dot be preen... I hate that. That's a little bit, that's a very popular trend. I know, it's awful. It's code that looks great on slides and examples and it's totally unwriteable. Well, it's not terrible and that is a common thing but really what you're looking for is the convenience of being able to essentially you know to just give one example and i know xc test has ways of doing this but it's awkward and weird you have a bunch of nested data structures and objects and you want to diff them right i don't want to have to do that manually i just wanted to be able to use reflection to traverse them and to give me like a really cool looking diff of where they differ you know what i mean right as opposed to comparing properties manually one at a time at each level and having messages so you know which part differed or whatever every modern testing framework has a way to say there's this thing like that thing and they're both kind of deeply nested structures and the good ones say oh and by the way i don't care about these differences and ignore these properties and i don't care about white space and like just just it's all just convenient it's like oh that's just convenience method you can do that all yourself yeah you can it's just annoying as hell right so it's not so much the whole it looks like english this should be that and has this and does this and whatever i just want like especially in a you know a language like swift that's so you know really on board with static checking and so you really just can't just chuck these two things over the fence they look like they're the same it's like swift's like whoa whoa these are totally different classes i can't compare these two things what are you talking about i don't have those kind of reflection it's like you really need convenient support from the framework to satisfy the swift compiler to allow you to just say is this thing like that expect this and it'd be like that.

1:33:09That's going to be like this. You know, it's, that stuff is tedious in testing. It makes people not want to write tests. Like Marco. Well, that's not why. But if you did write tests, you would say, boy, it sure is tedious comparing these deeply nested object trees to each other. And then, you know, and if you get lazy, when the test fails, you're like, why did it fail? What was the problem? And you got to basically got to step through it in the debugger because there's no like, you know, automatic diffing of object trees to tell you exactly where it failed. Yeah. anything else you're looking forward to john i am kind of i mean i mentioned the photos feature because that's what i'm thinking about a lot like again when i edit photos i have many tools i purchased many other external editors i have all i have photoshop i have photomator pixelmator i have raw power i have access to web tools or whatever but there's something to be said for having stuff built in and photos does have stuff built in but it's so outdated now like the quote healing brush in the apple photos app is just barbaric compared to what the good apps can do but i don't always want to edit an external editor i certainly don't want to export and edit it on the web and bring it back or whatever so to the extent that apple can catch up and add those features to photos itself and i can actually run them on my intel mac that will have be a big quality of life change for me i will really appreciate that not this year but next year when you know for my long island beach vacation pictures i want it to be in the photos app i want the photos app to get better this is not the year it seems like if there's something about apple's platforms that you wanted to get better that doesn't have to do with ai this is not the year all the bugs that report in the finder all those things that are annoying you the apps that you feel like are neglected and haven't had any attention paid to them this is not the year they're going to fix that i mean you know usually it's never the year that they're going to fix that but definitely not this year what they're going to do those teams spent time adding ai features or whatever and so i will appreciate those when i have them but like you know we're all still hoping for that year when the the bug that's been in your favorite operating system for 10 years finally gets fixed but it just does not seem like this is the year for that and it wasn't last year and it wasn't the year before that it wasn't the year before that and it wasn't the year before that and it's a big systemic problem that we've discussed in the show but definitely not this year because everyone's been off doing ai stuff so that's kind of a shame but yeah i i if i had a wish list it would be like oh they fixed all my long-standing bugs that's not going to happen I'm looking forward to the photos editing features.

1:35:27I am kind of looking forward to the better Siri. Like I rarely use Siri, but the things I use it for, I find useful. The, you know, remind me to do whatever, use that all the time, almost daily, right? Because I know how to do it. I know the syntax it wants. I know how it works for the most part. It could be better, but it just shows the utility. If you can give me something that I can, that works enough for me to use it it has a big effect on my life so if they just take something that siri has supposedly been able to do for 10 years and they make it good enough for me to want to use it that will could potentially have a big impact so i'm kind of looking forward to that as well and i was looking forward to hardware but um that's not doesn't seem like it's going to happen so yeah and the swift stick stuff like i'm mostly looking forward to how apple presents the stuff that i've already been reading about in swift evolution for an entire year like what is the pitch what is the what are the ergonomics of it how does it manifest in xcode how do they present it to the world because there is a potential for uh pushback let's say right you know for everyone who has tried it it's it's an obscure flag that you have to know about like oh strict concurrency all caps blah blah equals whatever and you're built like it's not it's not obvious how to do it in the existing xcode but the people who try it they're like oh 50 000 warnings i'm like wow i reduced that to 100 after just changing two lines of code.

1:36:50And then they spend a week trying to get that 100 down to 10. And then they spend a month trying to get that 10 down to zero, right? Depending on how much of their app they're willing to rewrite. That's a tough story to pitch to people. And I'm, you know, setting aside the technology and the actual features, how do you present that to a room full of developers and make them excited about and not dreading it? Like, you know what I mean? And that is going to be a challenge this year, I think. summertime is here and the living's easy and now it's even easier thanks to factor factor ships no prep no mess meals straight to your doorstep you can choose between calorie smart protein plus keto and more there's a total of six different menu preferences to help you manage calories maximize protein intake avoid meat or just have well-balanced meals the fresh never frozen meals are dietician approved, and they take two minutes to make.

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1:39:19All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP. It's been a little while since we've done it. And let's start with James, who writes, Any chance that the now expected late 2024 M4 MacBook Pro gets upgraded to Thunderbolt 5? And my question to James is, why do we care? Not to say that we shouldn't. I'm not saying that the question is unreasonable. But I genuinely don't even know what Thunderbolt 5 brings. So, John. Faster speed. That's what we talked about on the show in the past. Unlike Thunderbolt 3 to 4, which didn't increase the speed at all, Thunderbolt 5 does. You know, is there a chance?

1:39:52Yes, there is a chance. I think there is. I don't know enough about the M4 and the iPad if anyone has examined it and see if there's any vestiges of Thunderbolt 5 or whatever, but you know, there's always a chance. It's not a good chance. Apple has not really been known for being on the, we talked about this when we were talking about the Copilot Plus PCs and how they just all have the latest versions of every standard, latest version of Bluetooth, latest version of Wi-Fi, like the latest version of Thunderbolt, right? Apple doesn't really do that. When they do, it's notable. Apple's current line of stuff have one back from the latest version of most of this stuff is that's just the way apple tends to roll so i don't think it's highly likely but absolutely it is possible keep hope alive for those m4 macbook pros with thunderbolt 5 david martin writes do you think apple will finally ship 16 gigs of ram in the macbook air when the m4 gets put into it i don't but i hope we i mean you can hope now's the time you can have this hope i don't think so um just they should they 100 should but i don't think so i mean do they even is the macbook pro start at 16 i forget i think the pros do even the low-end one that's like barely a pro i don't know it wouldn't surprise me either way i mean they're going to keep shipping the for the macbook air that is a computer that that is extremely important for it to hit a price point for its sales and apple will not sacrifice its margins so they're going to get their you know whatever 38%, whatever their margin is, they're going to get their margin somewhere.

1:41:19And so if they make more money on average by skimping on the RAM on that base model, they're going to keep doing that. They're going to keep doing it as long as they possibly can. See, on the MacBook Air, though, I think that is, I mean, of all the computers Apple sells, I feel like the MacBook Air is probably the least likely to have its specs bumped, because people just want the cheapest laptop they can get. And so, like, on the MacBook Pros, like, what percentage of MacBook Pros are purchased with the base RAM versus the percentage of MacBook Air? The MacBook Air has got to be so much bigger than the MacBook Pros.

1:41:55I don't know, because in both cases, huge amounts of them are purchased by businesses and schools and stuff like that. And I think usually when you're talking about those big bulk buys, it's very, very frequently it is either the base model or, like, the next stocked up config that is normally stocked, like, not a custom build. um so but there's tons of base model sales sold in any case so i bet it is a pretty high ratio for both the air and the pro although i think you're right it probably is higher for the air well anyway like they can't stay at eight forever just like they couldn't stay at four forever do they have to double do they have to go from eight to 16 i mean the ipads apparently come with 12 they're only using eight of it like you can go up you don't have to double it every time like it'd be nice they'd be catching up i think it would be a good idea but like 16 seems too generous for their lowest end laptop it's not the m4 version of their lowest end laptop it's 20 absolutely sure because that the 16 versus the 8 costs them like five extra bucks the only way would hurt the margins is why marco was mentioning it is it will stop people from buying the more expensive model where they charge you a bazillion dollars for that ram right that's how it hurts margins not because like oh that's not hurting margins that extra ram cost them nothing that's true but it stops you from buying the one where they overcharged for the ram upgrade and that that is the that is the problem that apple's trying to but yeah they they need to bump their ram if they if they're going to do this thing where they just only will only ever double it and will wait until it is incredibly embarrassing before they do the doubling that's not a good dynamic and i hope they should fix it but um yeah yeah like i think they will upgrade the macbook air ram once the whatever type of ram chip the macbook air uses is no longer available in 8 gig chips that's when they will finally update it i mean like it was in the ipad maybe they you know maybe they those ones aren't available i don't think they're ever not going to be available like but it's just when is the someone had a similar question i think i cut it out of this is like which do you think will happen first the macbook air gets 16 gigs of ram or some other highly unlikely thing and it was like you know a rock and a hard place two things that apple just does not want to do but you know they they can't hold the line on ram forever they will have to bump it eventually it's just maybe not this year winnie lewis writes could apple's reluctance to put cellular on the mac be due to their failure to produce an in-house modem considering apple's reluctant dependence on qualcomm and the exorbitant rates qualcomm charges i can understand why apple is holding off on adding cellular to high price devices like the mac this argument is undercut somewhat with the iPad Pro costing the same as a MacBook Air, but MacBook Pros can still greatly increase in price over an iPad Pro.

1:44:31And if customers have waited this long, what's the harm in making them wait longer? Yeah, that's fair. I feel like we've talked about this a couple of times in the past. Well, yeah, we need to debunk this again because we've talked, we've mentioned this years ago and then we corrected ourselves and some people are still going with the outdated information. The idea that Qualcomm charges you a percentage of the purchase price of the product and because Macs can be so much more expensive that Apple would be charged a ton more, that's not how it works based on our most recent looking into this like there is a cap and apple is already at the cap like qualcomm whatever they'll charge you a percentage up to whatever the amount is and basically every mac is already at that maximum cap so apple is not avoiding cellular and macs because uh it would be too expensive relative to putting cellular in ipads and other devices they could be doing it for whatever their reasons are that's not it like It's like, oh, they can't do it because you can buy a$5 ,000 Mac and then a Qualcomm will get$500 of that.

1:45:23That's not how it works. At least, you know, it used to be. And then we were corrected and then we entered the correction. And I think it is still the case that there is a monetary cap for this. Every possible argument people put up for why cellular maybe is being held back from the laptops for some kind of weird business reason. It's in every iPad. Like it's even OK. It's in the$350 base model. You have to pay a little more for the cellular. But it's been available on every iPad ever since 2010. So every iPad model has had cellular as an option that has cost between usually$130 and$200 extra.

1:46:04And it is great. It just works. And the only thing I can think of is in some various forms of their deals with carriers or their pricing with Qualcomm, I'm sure there are differences in how the devices are categorized. I'm sure they have different agreements and different rates if something's considered a phone or a wearable or a tablet or a PC. I'm sure those are different categories for some kind of licensing deals or whatever. But again, cellular laptops have existed in the PC world for a very long time now. So obviously, this is not something that's that difficult to navigate with the carriers and the royalty holders like Qualcomm.

1:46:47This isn't a difficult problem, and this isn't a problem that no one has solved. This is a choice that they've made. They just don't care. And I'm sure if an Apple person was here, I'm sure we'd get a wonderful PR answer of how important it is to serve our customers and what we show, blah, blah, blah. But look, actions speak louder than words. Apple does not care about cellular on the Mac. They have not prioritized it. they seem to have no path to get there from where like they seem to be in no rush to do it and we are so far past the point where like it can't be just like oh they're working on it but it's not done yet no we're so far past that point they don't care i mean ipad pro being so expensive being some you can make an ipad pro more expensive than a mac pretty easily by configuring it it's the same you know they're using the same socs all apple silicon like every excuse has fallen away when he's question here is though is actually vaguely plausible is that apple has been planning to bring cellular to the mac just as soon as they're done with their in-house modems and unfortunately they pinned that feature to the timeline of a product that is terminally behind right that apple's been trying to they bought the modem uh business from intel and they've been trying to make cell modems and they wanted this for their phones obviously but like maybe they said we're not even thinking about cellular in the mac until we get our modem stuff and the modem stuff should be ready by 2022 right guys and you know it hasn't has worked out even that theory like why it's literally been in every single ipad that's that's totally an apple thing to do though it's totally an apple thing to do but why how different is the hardware in a macbook air versus the hardware in an ipad i know well that's but this this is definitely a business thing if you worked in big companies someone will say uh we're gonna do this it's been a long-standing thing that people want and we're gonna tie it to this other thing and then the other thing gets delayed and then the people will say can we just untie these two things now and just do you know like you said just just do what we do in the ipads can we just stick a qualcomm thing and and there's just a tremendous institutional sort of resistance to untying two things that have been tied to each other especially when it comes to a product line that is not the top priority like if you tie something on the phone and it turns out oh you know now one thing is delaying another untying that is easier because the phone is so important but on the mac i'm sure it's like no we've already started down this path we're working on the modems let's just wait until they're done i think they're gonna be done this year and they're not done and then the next year you have the same conversation and with the same result.

1:49:07That is plausible. It is a common dysfunction of businesses. But us out here as customers, we don't care what the reason is. We just want it. And I think Apple's answer would be like, well, you may want that, but you're in the minority, so have luck. Eh, it is what it is. But how many iPad owners choose it? How many Apple Watch owners choose it? Well, we feel like iPad owners prioritize it differently. When we survey Mac users, a very small percentage seem to want it. And our tethering solution is so amazing and blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what they would say. not that there's any reason that they're not doing it but that it's like well we have to prioritize and even though you super duper want it uh not everybody is like you i think that's what they'd say and again if tethering is the answer why do ipads have it why does every ipad forever have it and why is tethering so bad you know that too yeah but that's like it's no no argument against it holds any water once you say well then why is it available in every single ipad they've ever made like that it just makes no sense when you consider that like why like i just oh god like as much as i'm kind of glad that the ipad mania is passing now with from from the ipad pro because like i just i'm so annoyed at the thought like how amazing would it be if the macbook air was released with an oled screen and cellular we would be flipping our minds oled screen whoa whoa whoa that is a pro product marco people with ipad airs cannot handle faster than 60 hertz refresh because that is also a pro product and they cannot handle oled screens don't even talk about that for at least five more years like why why is that i'm just i shouldn't get all mad why does the ipad pro in even an 11 inch form factor have an m4 a great oled screen cellular in a really small package that costs around a little over a thousand bucks if you put the keyboard on it and stuff and the macbook air with most of those same guts at about the same price is not only does it not have those features at those price but those features are not attainable at any price on that product why it's so it's so frustrating i mean part of that is that the ipad you were describing is the most expensive ipad and the laptop you were describing is the least expensive and apple wants to segment its product line but yeah i mean you can't even get the same people are looking at both of those products i know you can't even get the oleds on the macbook pro so it really hurts that argument for now but we'll see how it goes but yeah i mean look the oled oh that's brand new like i understand that that's going to be a process of like you know bring it to everything slowly sure cellular is not yeah oh my it's so not new like i was using a cellular modem to tether my laptop in 2006.

1:51:50This is not new. I hear you and I agree. But if we continue this any further, it will turn this entire show into a Marco and Casey whine about cellular Macs power hour. I feel like at this point we should probably call it, even though I would like to agree with all your grumbling and whining because I am right there with you. You're just making so many people write in to say how little they care about cellular on their Macs and it's a useless feature and Apple should never edit. Please don't. And if it's so useless, why is it on every iPad? Thank you so much to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace and Factor.

1:52:26And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. Members get an exclusive after show topic every week called Overtime. This is an extra bonus topic that we do every week now. Members exclusive. You can hear it for yourself by joining atp.fm slash join. This week on Overtime, we are talking about an update on Apple's car integrations, things like the latest CarPlay and things like that. So that's going to be an update on Apple and cars in Overtime this episode for members. Join atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much to everybody for listening, and we will talk to you live from California next week.

1:53:13Accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. 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, R-M-N, S-I-R-A-C, USA, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast, so long. All right. So we're going to do a little post-show neutral today. And we're going to talk about our member special.

1:54:15This is the most recent member specials we are recording right now, which was talking about cars and car related things. And so, John, I guess you would like to revise your statement with regard to buying cars for your kid. I just have updates like I threw at the end of our discussion. The discussion was like, if you had to buy a new car now, what would you buy? And we had all the sorts of conditions and caveats and whatever. And we got increasingly ridiculous. At the very end, I said, what about buying a car for a kid? which you know neither one of your children are driving age but mine are so i'm like maybe this will come up anyway um and we talked about it and it's a difficult problem and yada yada but the problem has continued to exist in my household we have four licensed drivers and two cars and that is a difficult situation and it's made more difficult honest by me because i don't want my children to drive my car right so now we have four licensed drivers and two of them can only drive one of the cars so it's kind of like the whole you know bring in the the goat and the chickens and the wolf across the river or whatever of like okay well if this person wants the car on this day then because i will let my wife use my car right so that means she'd have to take my car when she goes to work so her car is here for the kids to use and then it's just it's a pain right and we're talking about on the show is if you had to buy a car for your kid what would you buy?

1:55:32uh and i'm because i'm faced with that problem we were considering trying to get a kid car not a car for a kid they could buy their own car eventually and maybe one of these cars eventually will be given to slash sold to the kid when they graduate college and move out of the house but we just wanted to have a car that the kids can drive that like if they bang it up or hit a curb or get into a fender bender we don't care about it and they're not driving our cars and we know how to do this car shuffle thing and i've been working on this problem since we recorded that member special and as again as you can imagine i make it so much more difficult for myself because of what i want out of this so here's here's the difficulty okay let me let me guess the end of this discussion is you have bought or will buy either an accord which is my guess or a civic because i cannot fathom you owning any other car manufacturers product other than honda well so here's here's i'm looking for cars and getting frustrated here's here's the frustration first one let me find a crap box although i'm trying to use the kind word for that right let's find a kid car like it's like it's like a two thousand dollar thing like it's junky you don't care you know what i mean like the old volvo box yeah and i was even looking at old volvos was like trying to find a volvo or whatever and i was looking at like the safety ratings and stuff and not that volvos aren't safe they are but like the safety rating information available to us is not granular enough for me to distinguish how much better a volvo is than like some other car of similar vintage you know what i mean like because everyone games the system like they all want to get five star crash rating or whatever and so two five star cars they're not the same they both got five stars but one of them is probably better than the other but how much better and how can i tell but anyway i'm looking for crap boxes uh and there's a lot of them available but they're crappy hence the name right i mean they have like 200 000 miles in them they're filled with rust because it's new england right like any car that you can buy for a very small amount of money it has huge amount of miles this is going to be rusted out it's going to have so many mechanical problems i don't want to leave my kids stranded i do want it to be safe but any car that's that's like two thousand dollars is going to be old and older cars are less safe they have less safety equipment they weren't they're safe in crash testing you know what i mean and it's like do i want my kid to be in an unreliable car that's going to cost me like a thousand dollars in repairs once i bring it home and realize that like the engine is dead or it needs a new water pump or all the brakes are shot or whatever did you get yourself a new car that's exactly what i was wondering is are we pulling a marco and buying ourselves a new car well we're just talking about the crap boxes now right it's like oh my god he did you're always hoping to find like the car that was just driven like to church on sunday every day and kept in a in a air-conditioned garage and you know like it has a small number of miles on it but that it just doesn't exist and then so i'm looking for used cars like that and then i go up okay well what if i say it's not a crap box what if i look for a decent used car then what happens with my philosophy is like i go right from crap box on craigslist or whatever right i go from that i immediately go to a what's so i don't want a crap box i don't want to worry that this car is unreliable i want a car that doesn't have a lot of miles that's probably pretty reliable and you get into the whole land of like certified pre-owned with warranty from dealer type things.

1:58:51And guess what? Those cars cost as much as a new car. I was like, what the hell? And you're going to say, is there nothing in between? Yeah, there are things in between, but I don't want what's in between. I either want a crap box that costs me nothing or a very reliable car. And guess what? If you want a very reliable car with not a lot of miles, it's basically the price of a new car. Now, wait, hold on. I don't really disagree with anything you've said, although I have not gone car shopping in like six years now. You're always going car shopping. Come on. Well, yes and no. But anyways, I haven't done serious car shopping.

1:59:22I've done no more than kick some tires. But anyways, first of all, just leave this be because we'll get on a huge tangent. But you should be buying a lightly used electric car for your kids because it doesn't have a lot of rain. A lightly used electric car? Just point me to those. Yeah, get like a Leaf or something or even like an old Model 3 at this point. There's so many out there now. So I'm not going to buy a Tesla. So we can just take that off the table right away. and a nissan leafs i did look at them but they don't have like conditioned batteries so all their batteries and again in new england are so hosed it's not even funny like the used ones you know what i mean because they don't even do like your own fault for living somewhere with weather i mean what do you expect and a nissan leaf is it's not an unsafe car but i just i'm not sure there are options and the thing is even a lightly used electric car they're expensive they're very they're not you can't buy there's no such thing as a crap box version of that and then all of a sudden you're getting into new car territory prices right it's like oh you buy lightly use nissan leaf for 22 000 that's new car territory okay that's fair okay so the other thing i was going to say is there is an in-between that i'm sure you will thumb your nose at for some reason or another and maybe it's that you just don't have these where you are but you know it's local hero carmax which i think i've mentioned many times it's been a long time on their website it's headquartered here in richmond and um and they to the best of my reflection recollection not only do they typically sell decent used cars and it's always a crapshoot i'm not saying they're guaranteed to be perfect but they're usually pretty decent but a they do have like a one week return policy on freaking automobiles which is pretty cool but secondly you can you can choose to buy into their like extended warranty and so you can basically like create your own cpo situation granted it does cost extra money it's not free but you can basically create your own cpo situation by giving them some money up front and then they will do a bumper to bumper warranty on this used car which might be the best of both worlds for you although i suspect that they're probably still more expensive than you would want to spend yeah i spend a lot of time on carmax auto trader auto tempest cars and bids even where i've had saved searches for months on cars and bids just out of my own curiosity um cars and bids is more of like an enthusiast site and i have like saved searches for like uh the last stick shift accord or whatever no of course no actually to go to go back a step I'm embarrassed I forgot about this because my parents have one DTemp from the chat brings up why not a used Chevy Bolt they weren't that expensive new they can't be but so expensive used the used EV things like a lot of things keep me away from the used EVs like you can't get them cheap they have old cruddy batteries the NCAS thing is out there too and it's like do I want to buy an electric car with a connector I know is not going to be the connector I want it to have and wire my house up for that kind of oh it's so easy i know the adapters aren't that big but it's like there's the main thing is there's no electric cars that i like like at this point that i can afford right there's no it's not for you it's for your kids and chevy bolt is the answer but that's the thing it's not it's not it's a kid car but it's not for the kid it's like what the title is going to be in our name it's not going to be the child's car that doesn't matter who's driving this i know that the one's driving but like the thing is if If I'm going to spend like five digits, five digits at$10 ,000 to$20 ,000 or whatever dollars on a thing, I want it to be a car that I like.

2:02:39Maybe that's just a me thing. I don't know. It's not for you. You're being ridiculous. It's just, you know, it's a kid car. I can't buy a car I don't like. On the plus side, now I understand why you give me so much shit about me driving an automatic even though I drive Aaron's car maybe 100 miles a year. But now I get it. Aaron's car is Aaron's car. Yes, it is our car legally speaking. But I almost never drive that thing. It's her car. If she wanted something that I really disagreed with, I would have a conversation with her about it. But she's your wife, not your child. Well, even still, I don't understand why you're hanging your hat so much.

2:03:14It needs to be something John approved. Who freaking cares? As long as it's not an absolute disaster, it's not for you. It has to be me approved. It has to be me approved. There's no electric cars that I like. They're very expensive. I'm worried about the battery life and the battery health. There's not a lot of good cheap ones. Well, half the Bolt batteries have been replaced under warranty. Like most of them have. You really are doing yourself a disservice. The Bolt is probably the best contender in that category because, like I said, the Leaf doesn't have the conditioned batteries. The Bolt did have that battery problem and they've been replaced.

2:03:44They are still kind of expensive, but that is actually a good possibility. But there's a lot of unknowns there with having it be our first electric car and having it be for the kids and everything like that. So anyway. you're coming up with excuses darling but whatever you need to do it's like it's not it's like i said it's not the shape of the market that's forcing these two polar things it's my desires that are forcing them that it either has to be a crap box or a reliable car and the crap boxes are too crappy and the reliable ones are too expensive and evs are too expensive or i don't like them or i think it's not the right time to be an ev especially for kids right so that got me into that situation and you know i i feel like there are options that will solve this problem which It is well within your right to say, I don't care and they're not for me.

2:04:30But I do think there are options out there for you that would work. But carry on. What car did you buy yourself? Yeah. Well, so that's the – it's not me that's the problem here. Oh, it's not you? I assure you it's you. It is 100 % you, John. With respect to like getting the car. Once my wife got wind of the idea that I was looking for a third car for the kids to drive, you know what happened. She's the Marco in this situation. she's like oh you're looking at cars does she want a new car you know my car is kind of old she is right isn't you no no no hers is newer than yours it's 2017 it's not that right okay okay but she gets the seven-year itch literally the seven-year itch better here than other places john i'm not looking for a car for you you already have a car i'm trying to get the kids out of your car so they won't wreck it and give them a car and she's like why not just let them continue to wreck it and get her a new one But you're looking at cars.

2:05:25I like cars. Oh, gosh. No, wait. Before you say anything, I'm going to wager. I don't know how this is going to turn out. I really don't. But I'm going to wager that Tina has decided she would like something new and thus will need to want something that only has two pedals. Not necessarily because she prefers that, but because there's no other choice at this point. And now you have a marital issue as to whether or not Tina will have a two pedal car. That's what I'm going to guess. I'll go even further. I'm going to say Tina wants an EV. Well, you don't know her driving taste, apparently. That's the thing I forgot to mention before, is that all our cars are stick shift.

2:06:01My kids both learned on stick shift. They're not stick shift enthusiasts. My daughter, in particular, had real hatred for stick shift. And she's like, when are you going to get a good car? Oh, that hurts me deep down inside. Well, other kids, whatever. That's their taste, right? Like, all my friends have good cars with just two pedals in them or whatever. She's come around a little bit on it since getting more comfortable with it. But my son, he can drive stick fine, but he's also just not into it. They're not into it, at the very least. so the whole idea with the kid car is we would get an automatic the kid car would be automatic right because they both don't like it and the whole point is that they would drive it and whatever right because i mean they if they're not enthusiasts stick shifts will have no place in their future life right you know what i mean it's it's just this is what we had they had to learn on it whatever but you know anyway i see but in my recollection of tina was of her preferences was that she actually legitimately does prefer three-pedal cars, but I feel like she is more willing to give on that issue than you and probably I are.

2:06:59Well, when she started saying, you're looking at cars, I would like a car. I think she also eliminated EVs along with me because they're just very expensive, especially if she's looking for a car for herself. And I don't think there's any EVs that she really likes either. So there's nothing out there that she's like pining for, desires or whatever. And when it comes to non-EVs, she wants a stick which i mean i mean yeah i love that i love that but good luck i mean this is the reason i'm not forcing her to buy stick cars every car we've owned has been stick because that's what she wants she's driven automatic she drives rental cars we're have we're watching our friend's car now and they ask us to drive every once in a while she drives it she wants a stick and you know she knows they're being rare and she knows eventually we won't have one and we'll have an ev or whatever but you know she's out there saying i you know and she doesn't know what's available what's out there but i do golf r and golf gti or maybe the gti already folded but the golf r is briefly still available we were like we went from let's buy a kid car and have it be automatic to let's not do that and let's get a third stick car which would make my children's head explode it's like what you got another car and it's also stick and it's like i have news for you about the cars we've purchased and we can't drive it uh anyway i know it's out there with stick obviously accord doesn't have stick anymore so that is eliminated my wife does know that i've told her about it so she could begin her morning period many years ago right but many other cars do have stick shifts in them but since getting her 2017 she has a 2017 the corvette stick shift she has some new requirements that have been added to the i i want a new car can you guess what her new requirements are car play that's one of them right and by the way how did she get that requirement none of our cars have carplay we've never owned a car with carplay how does she get that because she knows it exists and she's used it yeah exactly seeing the forbidden fruit and so she and not only does she want car play she wants wireless wireless car oh good freaking luck you're either getting like a kia which there's nothing wrong with that or a bmw that's your choice i have personally never used carplay by the way i can tell i can tell you tina the latency really sucks on wireless carplay it is convenient though like tiff's car has it you know her in her i3 um it it is convenient but the latency never stops being annoying uh it's it's not great but i don't personally get as offended by it as you do but i mean you're not entirely wrong all right but only we're getting sidetracked so i was trying to picture i would say like wireless like i have to say i have to preface by saying i never used it but in my my like you know i have suspicion that maybe you would actually prefer wired just because of the reliability and you know latency or whatever but whatever right there's that and what is what is the other there's one other thing that she wanted well hold on for the record uh because i know tina is or will listen to this is listening or will listen uh wireless car play if you do the kind of driving that i do which maybe she does not so take this with the appropriate amount of caveats and salt and whatnot i tend to be in the car 10 maybe 15 minutes at a time.

2:10:06It is very unusual. I'm in the car for more than about 15 minutes. And so it's a lot of shorter trips. And because of that, it's, I realize how entitled I sound right now, but it's very burdensome to take my phone out of my pocket or in her case, purse, perhaps, and plug it in and then take, you know, unplug it, put it back in the pocket slash purse, whatever. I find if you're doing a lot of short trips, like I am, I personally think that even with the higher latency, that juice is worth the squeeze. And furthermore, these little boxes like the one I have, they're not phenomenal, but they work just fine.

2:10:38It is more than sufficient if you're not a complete snob about it, that it will get the job done and you can retrofit wireless into a wired only car. So I wouldn't go too bananas on insisting wireless, but I don't think on the surface there's anything necessarily wrong with it i would just i would cave on wireless car play long before i would cave on many of the other things that i'm sure are requirements yeah and i will say too like what you said about like your driving pattern of like frequent frequent short trips wireless car play is very good for that like it is very convenient for that as long as you don't actually really like interact with the screen that much because the interaction is like the latency will annoy you but it is nicer than the alternative of just like bluetooth controls like it's nicer than that at least so in most cases so yeah that i i get that so what is the other feature she wants other than a stick shift uh i don't think you guys do a lot of highways are new features like so obviously it's six shifter but this is the thing the request that she's never had for any previous car that she suddenly has car wireless carplay is one she's because it didn't exist last time she bought a car and most of the cool new like you know adaptive cruise features most of those are not available on sticks uh you say that but my my car has radar cruise and it won't come to a complete stop, but it will slow down.

2:11:55So that's actually exactly what I was going to say. I was going to say some sort of radar, or I forget the industry standard term for it, but basically... Adaptive cruise control? There you go. Thank you. Adaptive cruise control. That was going to be my guess. Yeah, that's a great feature. That's something you want if you don't have it. Yeah, well, she's never had it. And unlike CarPlay, apparently she hasn't experienced it enough to want to know. The thing that she demands that is a Hard requirement. Now, because she's had it once, heated seats. Oh, I didn't even think about that. Of course. I know that sounds boring to you people who get fancy cars all the time.

2:12:29No. Not at all. We've never purchased a car per more than$25 ,000. We have the very first car we have ever owned with heated seats is her current car, which is a 2017 Honda Accord. Oh, no. A hundred percent, it is a requirement. By the way, don't stop there. Get the heated wheel, too. Trust me. I was going to say the same thing. So my car does not have a heated wheel. Erin's car does. And every time I get in her car in the winter, it annoys the crap out of me because even in our pretend winter's John, it is still delightful to have a heated steering wheel. So, again, I wouldn't make that a requirement in the same way I wouldn't require wireless car play, but I would strongly, strongly encourage it.

2:13:05So the things I've outlined to you, stick shift heated seats, wireless CarPlay, and given both of our tastes in cars, you will not be shocked to learn that, I mean, if I just said manual transmission alone, like if you go like CarMax or Auto Tempest or something, it just eliminates every car in the country. You could check that check. You go to transmission, like we found 80 ,000 matches. Check the manual transmission checkbox, two matches. That's before you do wireless CarPlay and heated seats and then before you consider our taste in cars well and the problem that you're having is i don't think a brand new car is necessarily going to fix your problem it might but it won't necessarily fix your problem because oh i'm not shopping brand new cars at this point those things will search used cars let's i like yeah you know what i mean like i'm i'm not being like oh you have to i'm going to these search sites to try to find like the big mega ultimate meta search try car max try auto tempest try cars and bids try like just everything and if some the best thing is if you do any search terms first if you put anything in first like heated seats it just removes the manual transmission option from the menu because they know there's zero matches once you've selected that stuff yeah yeah so i mean that's the thing is that i don't think even going new would help you and going used uh i mean again i'm tunnel visioned on it because it's sitting below me in the garage, but a GTI or a Golf R, that would do the trick.

2:14:33I'm trying to think of others, like a handful of year old BMW. She's listening now and she's trying to claim that she never actually required wireless car play, but I contest this. Honestly, I'm team T on this one. Your contesting is noted. Your contesting is noted and ignored. I would say a several year old BMW, you'd be insane to do it, but you could do that. So here's an example of a car that exists that would fulfill her, most of her requirements, especially if you let go of the wireless car play. The very last stick shift Honda Accord you could get with these features on it. Right. That was like the 2022, like the previous generation, like there are like four of them in the country.

2:15:13Right. So here's the problem. There's a lot of those cars, but the only ones that have, I don't know if she demanded leather, but she wanted leather, but the only one that has leather heated seats and a stick shift at the end of every accord generation for many years now they they do the accord special edition so they'll have like you know whatever generation accord it'll be the 20 20 18 19 20 21 22 only the 22 model year the very last model year where they even offer a special edition right so the only accord that you can get with a stick shift with leather heated seats is the accord sports special edition in 2022 that car does not exist that's just like everyone doesn't exist for sale people the people who bought them are keeping them there don't come up on any searches cars and bids maybe one will pop up every once in a while and get snatched up for some ridiculous price forget about that car nowhere nowhere in the entire continent you want to get shipped from new mexico sorry it doesn't exist anywhere and you know how large the radius would you like to search 3 000 miles sure zero matches so that eliminated that so i was looking for stuff i'm like is there any car that satisfies these things can i find and it just it narrowed down so much to this tiny aperture of acceptable makes models and trim levels oh and by the way i often have a requirement about cars that i've mentioned uh that you've heard me talk about no sunroof you've heard that one right oh you are you are the worst not because i'm against sunroofs but because i'm for having i'm for having headroom and most of my height is in my neck my upper body and when i sit in the car i don't want my head to hit the headliner you're losing all your hair anyway don't worry about it it is true i'm losing a lot of it's enough of it there that when my head hits the headliner it is not right yeah i feel really bad for you try adding that into the mix leather heated seats stick shift wireless car play no sunroof yeah get out of here with the slick top you're gonna have to cave on the slick top again the accord sport special edition 2022 i believe fulfills these requirements minus maybe the wireless car play but that car doesn't exist and so like i you know i'm doing all the research i'm bringing it back to her saying yeah well you know this that the other thing whatever i had to bring her i said look a car exists that fulfills a lot of your requirements but it's got a sunroof and she's like great buy that okay i said but this but the sunroof and my head and she's like i don't care it's my car what do you care i'm like but i don't even if i never drive your car i passage in your car and my head will be hitting the ceiling is that a verb yeah i'm making it one right now and so i went to the car dealer we went we went shopping ourselves and went to some car dealers.

2:18:00One of them was closed on Sunday, which I didn't understand. Yeah, that drives me. Service department closed on Sunday, fine. The showroom? People shop for cars on weekends. Anyway, I'm like, look, I'll sit in the car. I'll sit because, you know, you can say, oh, sunroof takes up headroom or whatever, blah, blah, blah. And by the way, one of the cars we looked at, not that we were going to buy us, but we looked at the Integra. Oh, that is a good answer. That's such a good answer. Why didn't I think of that? Well, it's expensive, but it's such a good answer. It's a$50 ,000 car. We're not getting that.

2:18:27But anyway, uh but like since it's basically not worth it to you i think since it's basically a civic i'm like well let me check this for headroom head was hitting hard in the integra with the just it's not made for me with the sunroof or whatever but that's not you know whatever so like i'll get this there's one model and one trim level that fulfills your requirement it's got a sunroof i will go sit in it i went by myself to a car dealer to sit in a car to see if it fit my head and this i don't like car dealers no one likes car dealers i was what i was hoping is you know you go in they got a bunch of cars like indoors and you can just like wander around and like open the door and sit in them that's what i wanted to happen because then i can get in and out in five minutes that didn't happen i there was the the car that i wanted was parked out front wanted to sit in i went in and i asked the receptionist and i said can i just go sit like someone that wasn't one of the inside ones was out so can i just can i just go to that car out there can i just go sit in it i was like yeah sure go ahead i don't know if it'll be on lock though i go of course it's locked i come back in i said oh it turns out it was locked and she says to me i'm gonna have to get a salesperson and she says it with that look like she knows what happens when you get a salesperson because now you've got a car salesperson and it's like i just want to so because they come and they attached you like a leech and they want to sell you a car it's their job i get it right they get she gets a salesperson salesperson come over opens the door for me i sit in it headroom's not great better than the integra though but the headroom's not great i try the passenger seat i lean the seat back a little bit you know what i mean you try to do all the tricks like of course the passenger seat does not go up and down at all right um the driver's seat does go up and down but it doesn't go down that far but i'm like whatever so i go i spent way too long with the salesperson they did not sell me a car they tried real hard though i went back and i said to my wife i said i think i can live with the sunroof since it's your car it's not as bad as the integra i will suffer with my head hitting the headliner this is what you want and she said yes it was and i did the search uh how many cars with these features in the color that we wanted exist within let's say 500 miles well with the color that you want i mean at this point you're looking for a needle in a haystack and then you're going to say i want a blue or whatever red needle yeah right color matters again if i'm spending new car money i want a car that i like wait did you tell us what card is did i miss this not yet we're getting to it okay all right all right uh and how many existed two five hundred mile two okay stop right there please please john for the love that of everything that is good and holy if that car is anywhere near or even better on the other side of Virginia I will give you all of my money if we can road trip that bad boy back to Boston I will do anything to be on that trip like the you know you would assume that if it's far away that you could do some kind of dealer trade with a local dealer or whatever but anyway two cars so I'm like all right so I we're just noodling we're just thinking just like well whatever I'm not buying a car we were visiting car dealers I'm sitting in them we're not buying a car I'm just looking around but then there's like two and so I send emails to people I contact them through their various websites or whatever and i say hey i've got vin numbers now right i say hey do you actually have this car that's question number one yeah that's good yeah fair fair uh and and you may be shocked to learn that car dealers are anxious to get back to you about cars they get back to me say yeah i have this car i ask them a second question which is can you just tell me what color it is because i don't want to give them the answer you know what i mean i want them to tell me yeah we have i want them to go and look at it right and they tell me the correct answer and they're all like this is the big thing with car dealers this wasn't last time they were like when should we schedule a test drive when you want to schedule a test drive let's schedule a test drive when are you going to come and look at this i'm like i'm just asking questions over email person chill out right they're being chill right and then i forget what day this was this was like monday of this week i was like there's two of these cars i really don't like any of the other colors she really seems to want a car we've already given up and giving the kids what they want so one of the dealers the one that's closer to her work i say i i call her at work and i say don't come home rather than going home do you want to just go to the car dealer just know your work and look at this car oh my god did you impulse buy a car john sir i wouldn't call this impulse buying if you based on the amount of research i'd done up to this point but anyway fair fair we but like i'm at the point now where i know this too so we go we drive i drive up there to her we both drive together to the dealer which is you know further up uh from where her work is we look at this car um she test drives it she likes it you know the headroom is better than the integra i can live with it we go back and i'm like well i think we should get this car oh my word because like look i spent like a month on this like we know when we recorded the member special i was already looking into this then which is why i brought up the question and i was like like i don't have any other answers this is the best answer to this problem and if we don't get this car and so like here i am in a situation where i'm going to negotiate the price of a new car with a salesperson trying not to let them know that according to my searches two of these exist within 500 miles yeah like you're buying this car no matter what they make you pay for it part of my research was like i'd mentioned that um the like a person who asked about new cars and i mentioned that car edge service i had signed up for that a little while ago and one of the things they'll give you is there's a lot of services just like you know what is like the the invoice price what would be a fair price for this car you know that type of thing and so i had before i went to this deal like this would be a fair price for the car minus any kind of like incentives or whatever it's like it gives them a little bit of profit to the dealership they'll probably accept this but you're not getting ripped off i have that price in my mind went into that negotiation i'm very proud of myself i got with a hundred dollars of that price well done right hundred dollars within a hundred dollars of the quote-unquote fair price for the thing part of it was by saying well i have two other cars that tell the dealers i can go to and i listed the one in the color that i didn't like because of course i never told them i didn't like the color don't tell the dealer what colors you like right i was you know it was a blue one i was like you know well there's a blue one and another white one and the dealer was pushing back a white car just happened to you oh my god oh my god this is getting more and more delicious and he was like well is that other car are you sure that's not the same car as this because we got a call from a dealer about this car and they wanted to take it from us or whatever i'm like no no these are other cars i can show you the emails i'm like here's whatever like to basically let him think there are other there are other places where i could go for this car even though i would never buy the blue one right oh my god and so anyway i got within a hundred dollars of the price oh my god he's very proud of myself he's going through the thing okay we agreed on this price and then you know obviously tax title and blah blah blah like that's you know that's the thing about the car each thing they don't include tax title or whatever in the fair price right we agree on the price and then he says and then of course 129 for the locking wheel nuts i'm sorry what no absolutely not wheel nuts and i said i don't want locking wheel nuts he's like well they're already on the car well take them off i said yeah well why don't you take them off i was like well but they're already on the car i was like i'm sorry no we and i was like everything was going so smoothly and i basically got into a shouting match with this guy's like look when we agreed upon this price we agreed like this is gonna be the price before tax title and fees it was the price for the car that's sitting out there whatever's on that car that was what we were negotiating this number we weren't negotiating this number plus other things and he takes me out to the car he's like on the sticker it has like 129 locking wheel nuts as a separate line item it's like i don't care we were negotiating for that car everything that that car is not parts of that car not partial that car and that was this number and then we would add tax titles and fees and so like i'd never gotten so angry at a car in my entire life anyway he went back to his manager and took the 120 29 off damn right he did good for you and he made some big excuse of like uh you know we can't take it off the price but we'll just subtract it also i don't care what you subtracted dude just right oh and then by the way uh the incentives of like is there any incentives can we do any blah blah blah the one incentive that we were eligible for was the honda loyalty program thing and yes now you're revealing everything about it guess what we are loyal honda honda customers and i got another 500 off just because i already own a honda oh good for you so as you as you as you should have already guessed by now what is the only car this could possibly be it is the honda civic in the most expensive trim level the honda civic is offered in because that is the only one that has wireless carplay leather seats and heated seats oh my god and a stick shift and a sunroof i cannot believe you just bought yourself a white well bought tina a white civic i i i this this line in the show in our internal show notes kid car revisited that is sat there for like two weeks if i had known that this was the direction this conversation was going we wouldn't have even done this happened this week we should have done an emergency episode damn it i picked up the car today oh wait so is it a civic si or a civic civic no we looked at the si but it wasn't the specs the requirements that i just gave you are not available in the si and also the si is more expensive we could have saved five thousand dollars if she didn't want heated seats we could have got the sport trim and put the heated five thousand dollars five thousand dollar heated seats especially like you live in new england like winter is a big part of your life my car doesn't have heated seats i think it's fine but she wants them so she does after after this she deserves the heated seats damn it anyway oh and this is a turbocharged car i don't think you've owned a turbocharged car i mean they're all turbos now you know yeah yeah i'm just saying we got a white honda civic hatchback a hatch you got a hatch the hatchback and sedan looks so similar in the civic and i wanted a hatchback because we don't have a hatchback and as you know as marco knows hatchbacks have a lot of utility i'm sorry i didn't am i making this up didn't you give me boatloads of crap for not having a car shaped car i don't want a volkswagen rabbit or a golf i don't want that kind of hatchback look at the car it looks exactly like the sedan it's just like it's barely different in profile it looks like a sedan that's why this looks a lot like jesse's car and why did i pick white it's white it's the best color for this car well absolutely the si also the the not the si the the civic type r also looks best in white i don't even see white as an option here oh no there i do never mind sorry i have the uh what is it noir or whatever it is that darkens uh that synthetically darkens websites and so i had that on and the the white paint swatch was colored black because dark mode by mistake this doesn't look bad this looks nice but i mean Yeah, so people wondering, you know, our recommendations for buying cars and the services we offer and the advice we have.

2:29:31I just followed all that, and this is what I ended up with. So can't say we don't put our money where our mouth is. So a white hatchback happened to you. I wanted the hatchback. I absolutely wanted it because it's useful to have something with a hatch for, like, taller items. Yes. Especially since this is obviously smaller than the Accord, right? And so I'm going to get a small, like, if the sedan version of this, the trunk is very confined. The opening is confined. It is very confined. The hatch really helps with that. It gives you way more space than you get with the sedan version. And it looks almost like the sedan.

2:30:04So all my, you know, hatred of hatchbacks that look like a Volkswagen Rabbit doesn't apply to this car. Who knows if I ever get to drive it anyway. It's my wife's car. So anyway, the kids are driving her old car as they have always been. They have always been driving that car and they will continue to drive it. And now we have three stick shift cars. And just to review, my history of car purchases go like this. Civic, Civic, Accord, Accord, Accord, Accord, Civic. All stick shift. You're pretty consistent at least. You are consistent, which is funny because I have never bought more than one car from the same company.

2:30:41And I have never bought cars from any other company except for Honda. Did you even look at like a GTI or anything like that? We like Hondas. We like them. Yeah, but it doesn't mean that there's not other better things, John. We looked at other things. It's just, I mean, we're a Honda family, and we got$500 off for being a Honda family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they are good cars. Like, I'll give you that. Even the things like they haven't screwed themselves up. Like, they haven't gone like all touchscreen or done anything weird. The interior is, I think, my favorite mix of physical and touchscreen-type controls.

2:31:12Yeah. The real question is, are you going to, for your future car purchases, convert to hatchback once you realize how good it is? No. Hopefully, I'm going to convert to EV. That's what's going to happen to me, but not anytime soon. But you just crapped all over every EV on the market. I know, but eventually, all the EVs will change to NACS, and there'll be EV sedans that I like. This is going to be years in the future. yeah this is uh congratulations to really tina for forgetting what she wanted because i cannot imagine the amount of bickering and grief that you gave her over heated seats and most especially a sunroof no i just tried to convince her and she didn't want to be convinced so there was no there was no heated arguments i just needed to sit in it and be able to say i can tolerate this i can i can passage and not die it's a glowing review yeah because like the integral i was really surprised the integra was worse it did feel like they're basically the same car like that that's why i was part of the reason i was showing her the integra she's like why can't i get a fancy car like integra i'm like a the good one is fifty thousand dollars and b this is just a civic when you see the civic you'd be like oh like you sit inside them they're very very similar and by the way finding stick shift integra is talking to the dealer who was there is also very difficult the packaging is better on the civic civic is just a better better car than the integra unless you get the type s and those are very expensive and don't exist the integra type pass you mean or the oh yeah they're very hard very hard to come by and they're very expensive much more than we wanted to spend well i'm very curious well again congratulations uh you you've done this well you've done it right i'm proud of you for sticking to your guns about the the locking wheel wheel lug nut whatever things you know it's funny when we bought the um the volvo i'm sure i've told the story but when we bought the volvo i told the dealer i do not want any stickers on that car i do not want a plate um surround i totally forgot i do that same thing And I totally after we came home from the dealer after negotiating the price and say we're going to buy it.

2:33:04I'm like, oh, I forgot to tell them all those things you just said. No, you know, sticker, no plaque. Yeah. No dealer branding. Yep. Whatever. I was like, oh, like stupid me. Like I buy a car once every seven to ten years. So, you know, but like I totally forgot. I was so mad at myself. Yeah. Well, so when we bought the Volvo, which was seven years ago in like a week or something like that, it was I think it was July. So a few weeks, July of 2017. Anyways, I vividly remember going to the car and saying, oh, the sticker's there. And the salesperson looked at me like, yeah, we're not going to buy this car.

2:33:39And he's, what? I told you, I will not have this sticker on this car. And he rolled his eyes so hard that I think they fell out of his damn head. But then he had like a mechanic or who knows, or detail or whatever, come over with like a heat gun and pull the sticker off the car. And I was not going to sign any paperwork until he did. And I stand by it and I will stand by it forever. That's pretty nice of him considering you'd already agreed to buy that car and signed all the paperwork for it. No, I don't think I had signed it at that point. If you hadn't signed it, then yes, you have the power there.

2:34:07But yeah, but the good news is because even though I totally forgot about this, this deal was great. not only did they not put anything on this car he pointed out to me i noticed this already but he pointed out to my salesperson pointed out to me i didn't even put a license plate surround on here for you nice like that thank you that's good stuff it's just literally like no i've never seen this everyone always does license it's easy to take that off you just unscrew it or whatever but he didn't even put that on and he pointed it out to me because he could tell based on me yelling about the lug nuts that i didn't want that i was like thank you i appreciate that he was is Is Massachusetts a barbaric commonwealth like we are?

2:34:40Yeah, front plate states. Yeah. It is. It's the worst. It's fine. I hate it. I hate it so much. Virginia is a front plate barbaric commonwealth. I don't think it's barbaric. I think it's fine. But we've got the front plates. Well, congratulations to Tina. I'm glad she stuck to her guns and got what she wanted. See, she did the negotiation with you, so you would do the negotiation with the dealer. Yeah, she doesn't deal with the dealer. She just watches me do it. I think she was a little bit upset when I was yelling. And by the way, all of our cars have locking lug nuts. It's just that I'd never want to pay for them because I didn't ask for them.

2:35:09So if you're going to put them on there, I'm getting them for free. I have to concede. I am a little upset at Tina because I would have given infinite dollars to have a video recording of you yelling at this dealer and would have given nearly infinite dollars for a voice memos recording of you yelling at the dealer. As listeners to this podcast would know, it's not angry yelling. It's incredulous yelling. Like when you hear me on the podcast talking about some bad soccer feature, it's like, no. I was like, we just negotiated the price for that. I was literally pointing for that car. That's the number we agreed on.

2:35:42Remember the whole thing where we were talking about the numbers and you're going to ask your manager or whatever, and we agreed on a number. We said, yes, this is a number we can both agree. It was for that car. Everything that's in that car, that's the number we agreed on. It was just, I was incredulous. I'm like, are you kidding me? You can't add, you can't say, and also, other parts of that car we're now going to itemize and add to the price. And so I was, I mean, would I have not bought the car with the 100? At that point, I probably would have. oh here's the here's the final kicker right when i came home and and like reloaded one of my tabs that had that search in it oh no zero matches so guess what that car that was listed twice there was one of these cars oh 500 miles and i just bought it because you can say impulse bought it after a month of research i saw that it was available i saw it had been on the market for 29 days and i found the one that was i was lucky we picked we i they both said they had the car but but only one of them really had the car.

2:36:34And we randomly picked that one because it was close to my wife's work. That's incredible. And so when I bought that car, it disappeared. Now there's zero of these cars within 500 miles. That's incredible. I'm a little sad that we didn't get to do a road trip together, but ultimately I'm glad that a white car in a white hatchback happened to you. I was ready to ship a car from New Mexico in CarMax, but, you know, because I was like, oh, rest free, it'll be great.