615: A Mildly Brisk Walk

35:24That's a great format. And that kind of thing would also, I think, be a good inspiration of like, what can music look like in VR? That, give us that. Make it seem like we are there listening to that. That would be wonderful as well if you want to have something that's, you know, a little bit closer than a full, you know, concert arena. but there's so much potential here for just take events that are literally already happening and just put us there bring us there through through a through a fixed camera please more yeah yeah i would i would love tiny desk concerts in this format and and yeah i think that's i don't know why i didn't bring it up because i i adore tiny desk concerts and they are i think the modern version of mtv unplugged i mean they're not literally unplugged all the times but i think this is the spiritual successor to MTV Unplugged.

36:10And coincidentally, Ray has a Tiny Desk, which I actually preferred the songs that she performed in concert for one, but it's still very good. So you can check that out if you wanted to get a taste for her music. But yeah, I really, really dig this idea. I don't think they've perfected it, but it's off to a great start. It's almost like I think what I'm hoping for, what we are seeing so far with what Apple's producing content-wise is it kind of has, I would say, the same problem that Apple's keynote videos now have where they're just kind of dripping with too much money. You know what I mean? Like production-wise, it's like everything is like too amped up.

36:57It's too perfect. It's too high budget. it. It's too corporate. I don't know if they have the capability to pull back from that a little bit or to give it a little bit. I'm not saying like spend less money. I'm saying make it look like it wasn't so corporate. It seems almost synthetic at a point. Yes. And as opposed to just, you know, natural for lack of a better way of describing it. And I would I would call it overproduced, especially like it doesn't it starts losing its humanity and or kind of organicness. And when you're talking about what the specs of the new iPhone are, fine, you can do that.

37:33But when you're trying to show a performance of music, there should be some humanity still left in there. And I feel like Apple's current style, it squeezes a lot of that out. It makes it very high polish, very high production, very high budget, very corporate feeling. And part of why I love live music is because that's how studio albums sound. Like the studio album sound now, very high budget, very production, you know, all that. But live music usually is much more human. That's part of why I like it. And again, like this is such a great format to make you feel like you are really there. That's what this is great at.

38:14You feel like you're really there. And I think what I want to feel like is I am really in a little bit more human environment and a little bit less produced environment. Yeah, you don't want to be in Johnny Ives' white world. No. Oh, that's right. That's the bad place. We are sponsored this week by Aura Frames. So here's the thing. In the past, you have surely gotten or perhaps purchased a quote-unquote smart photo frame that was a piece of trash that you needed to connect via an ancient USB cable, or maybe you needed to provide your own SD card or something like that, and it was not very intuitive to use, and it looked like garbage.

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39:26My mom uses it all the time to upload photos of her grandkids. I can upload photos of her grandkids to her frame from here. It really, really is great. And if you're giving this as a gift, most of their frames, as far as I know, you can actually get them most of the way set up without opening the box. It's very, very clever and very well done. And that honestly is indicative of these products as a whole. They're very pretty. The screen resolution is really great. They support live photos. You can tap on a little pad and you can see where pictures were taken for some of their frames. Genuinely, these things are really, really great.

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40:28John, welcome back to the show. Can you tell me about using large external drives with macOS, please? we've been talking about this topic since discussing storage prices and the new mac minis and the fact that unlike the laptops it's not incredibly inconvenient to use external storage but oh how do you deal with that how do you divide up your stuff between your internal drive and your external drive and what are the limitations one of the things that came up on past episodes was what about my photo library that's big uh and we discussed it in vague terms because none of us had personal experience with moving the photo library to an external drive uh it turns out apple has a support document on it which we will link uh in the show notes uh as apple says to save storage space on your mac you can move your photos library to a different storage device uh but there are some caveats so there's much more in the document but just a little taste you can't store your library on a storage device used for time machine backups and to avoid possible data loss don't store your library on a removable storage device like an sd card or usb flash drive or on a device shared over your network or the internet including over a cloud-based storage service so as always there are caveats but apple says it officially supported and they can explain to you how but mark wickens wrote in with some personal experiences that show even though it's officially supported there are other things that might thwart you mark says i have my photos library and a cheap external ssd it's great except occasionally the ssd will randomly unmount itself and i'll have to kill the photos cloud sync process to get syncing working again after remounting or i could just reboot but it happens about once a month so it's bearable and worth it to keep my faster internal ssd reserved for day-to-day work i can say that one drive did not like syncing to its folder in an external ssd it coincided with various sleep issues and stuck processes that was over a year ago now so it might be fixed but i haven't risked trying it this is part of the experience of having stuff in external drives everything should be fine especially if they say it's officially supported but you kind of have to make sure that external drive stays mounted all the time just like your internal drive would and some programs inexplicably get angry about having their stuff over there and so you kind of have to go on a case-by-case basis to see which ones like it i still continue to think that booting from the external drive quote-unquote booting from the external drive see past episodes about what's really happening but anyway booting from an external drive simplifies things greatly because at least your stuff is on the boot drive um but speaking of that uh when i was experimenting with apple intelligence in the beta versions of mac os i was using an external drive on my wife's mac studio to boot that thing uh to boot from that beta os uh but it wouldn't let me use apple intelligence i got through all the waiting lists or whatever and it said sorry apple intelligence doesn't work on an external drive and i was booting from that external drive and i hope that was just a beta thing remember we discussed it in the showcase i don't know if you were there nope i guess not yeah but anyway um i hope that was just like a beta thing or whatever i didn't really pay much attention to it but since we've been having this discussion many many people have said i would consider booting from an external drive except if i do that i don't get apple intelligence so apparently that's still a thing in the released versions of mac os why i don't know it seems like a weird limitation to me uh but that's a thing so if you care about apple intelligence apparently you're booting from that internal drive until apple changes that so keep that in mind and finally on this topic uh there's another thing that came up frequently that i think we alluded to vaguely in past episodes if we have more concrete details uh to try to save space on whatever ssd you're booted from like if you're booted from the internal one but you want to put stuff somewhere else uh in 15.1 in mac os 15.1 there is an option in the mac app store if you just go to settings there's a checkbox that says download and install large apps to a separate disc and the subtext is apps larger than one gigabyte will download and install to the disc that you choose then you can pick a disc it's kind of weird they don't let you put all the apps over there just the big ones and you don't get to pick that threshold size but if you've got some really big apps like i can imagine maybe games have a lot of content or i don't know other big creative apps um yeah try that uh setting in the app store uh to see if you can get your files over and i think that's for downloading like for future downloads i don't think it moves any of your existing applications over but i guess you could just try copying them there or just deleting them and re-downloading them if you wanted although if they're large that might be kind of onerous but yeah part of dealing with an external drive uh even if you were booted from it is working out all of these issues honestly like these this sounds like a lot of scary limitations you're like oh i don't want to do that i guess i'll just pay the apple price for have the big internal thing that does simplify stuff but as someone who has had a series of tower mac computers where they have had multiple drives installed in them i know they're not external drives technically they're internal but from the os's perspective i wonder i haven't actually tried this because i can't use apple intelligence on my intel mac anyway but someday when i get an arm-based mac if i get one that supports internal storage i'll see what it thinks about booting from uh an internal drive that's connected to some ancillary bus like sata or something you know some slow internal bus is it considered does apple intelligence run you know would it say sorry you can't run apple intelligence when you're booted from an external disk and i'd be like but it's not external it's in the box does that count uh lots of weird caveats but anyway and all my experience of having many drives inside of my big tower Macs, I've been able to freely boot for many of them and it has not made any difference in my life.

45:50But of course, I'm still in the Intel world. So things are definitely different when it comes to booting on Apple Silicon. And by the time I finally go over to Apple Silicon, hopefully they'll have some of these limitations worked out, but we'll see. Do you honestly think that your first Apple Silicon Mac is going to have internal drive bays? Who knows? Who knows? What if they come out with an M4 Extreme and it comes in the big tower case and i somehow decided to buy it the odds are against it but you know could happen this is the time where anything could happen it would be like eight thousand dollars do you remember what he spent on his current one is as much as a damn civic or was anyway now it's worth as much as a yugo but that's right i was looking someone sent us some some feedback about uh someone was benchmarking one of the dual gpu cards that you could get for my mac pro and how amazingly fast it was even compared to like modern video cards or whatever and they were like oh and i you know i bought this on ebay or whatever so i did an ebay search to see how much these go for it's like the what is it 6800 x duo it's got two radeon 6800 gpus on a single card and you could put two of those cards inside my computer they still go for like three thousand dollars on ebay for each card so gracious yeah so you would think like you would think the stuff the price would be dropping rapidly because you know who wants this it's old it's obviously like why would you you know someone might need it i guess but like still through the original retail price was 5 000 and you can find them on ebay for 4 000 3 000 in that range and yeah that's not uh that's that's well above the threshold of me wanting to buy one to experiment with it it's only i think it's only like almost as fast as an nvidia 4090 although if you got two of them you'd be faster than a 4090 but anyway uh yeah don't recommend but uh there's there's a lot of cool technology and for whatever reason it's still not dirt cheap i one other ebay search i have by the way is for the you know the bent piece of metal i have holding my internal drives it was like it was like 400 400 because they made you buy a hard drive with it or whatever i i have an ebay search on that just to see surely the bent piece of metal that has no electronics in it surely the price of that will come down from a few hundred bucks and the answer is no still if you find it on ebay they're selling they're they're being sold for not just being listed for but being you know sold for multiple hundreds of dollars for a bent piece of metal.

48:05It's a wild world out there. By the way, for the record, my estimate of$8 ,000 is definitely wrong because right now the current Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra is$7 ,000 if you want some of the GPU cores disabled or if you actually want the entire GPU power of the M2 Ultra. It's $8 ,000 for the machine. So there is no way that if they did an Extreme with two Ultras next to each other no way that's less than 12 grand like there's at least and possibly more than that maybe 15 grand to start like it would be ridiculous odds are against it but we'll see i can't i can't i i am genuinely very curious and excited to see what is the final straw that breaks the camel's back that gets you to to buy a new mac because i feel like i'm not even convinced that being locked out of new versions of mac os is going to be enough to get you to upgrade no the real the real question is what will be the straw that breaks us back to get him to buy a gaming pc that's the real question that's true that's true just bought a ps5 pro i'm not gonna get a gaming pc my ps5 pro is great uh alesh hudek writes regarding the speculated quote-unquote low price of 299 for apple's home device with a screen well a brand new ipad is only 50 more right now I bought one a few years ago and stuck it to my fridge.

49:29It's always on with an all widget homepage that shows photos, slideshows, calendar, weather, and has some home controls. It also controls the multi-room Sonos system. That's Apple's competition. You know, if they're going to make a home thing that's kind of like an iPad but is much more limited, doesn't have an app store. Hopefully it won't cost as much as the low-end iPad. That would be a weird, I mean, not that Apple hasn't sometimes had really weird pricing arrangements. where you're like, why would anyone buy this when they can get this other better thing from a product line for less money?

50:00They've done that sometimes, but I feel like it really does put a ceiling on the potential sane price for a home thing with a screen, unless it has features that Apple's iPad doesn't like. For example, if it comes with very fancy high-fidelity speakers that are better than the ones that come with a$350 iPad. But we'll see. they keep lowering the price of the bottom end iPad. And I can't imagine that the hardware in their home device is going to be much more powerful than the low end iPad. So hopefully that's put the ceiling on their price. So a few weeks ago, I think it was, there were some very, very funny Apple intelligence notification summaries that I think John had collected.

50:44And we will put links to these in the show notes, but we wanted to take a quick nickel tour of all of them. A friend of the show, Steve Trouton Smith wrote, wrote, sometimes the summary is less helpful than the subject line. So the summary reads, Netflix is sending an email to remind you about a new movie coming out on Wednesday. And what was summarized? The subject is coming Wednesday, November 13th, hot frosty. So the subject actually specified the movie, but the summary did not. Well done. That's a problem with summaries. Like people don't always, we talked about this before, about subject lines versus summaries and how subject lines can lie to you and be incomplete and people don't write good subjects.

51:18but in the case where there is information in the summary in the subject line the summary is trying to summarize not just the subject line but the entire email and it has missed out on the thing you might want to know about if you're going to give me one line description about a movie that's coming out soon and they name the movie name the movie right but there's it's not a person doing this it's just a you know a big bucket of numbers and it didn't come up with the useful thing and so in this case it would have been better just to show the subject line but it didn't and this by the way this is like speaking of apple intelligence doesn't work on external drives doesn't work on my intel mac all this other stuff i would be more bummed about that if i was more jazzed about the apple intelligence features like i've tried them on my wife's mac i tried them on my phone and my ipad right now for me personally the apple intelligence features are mostly a technical curiosity and a thing i'm interested in looking at for the purposes of this show but in my day-to-day life, they're not exactly wowing me.

52:13So I don't think so far the lack of Apple intelligence is going to be a thing that drags me to a new Mac sooner. I actually think that the notification summaries, this whole follow-up topic, notwithstanding, I think they're generally pretty good. They definitely miss from time to time, but by and large, I've actually been pretty pleased with them. But with that said, Chris Hancock had tooted, tweeted, whatever, poor summary of the fight, Siri. So the summary is there are apparently 44 notifications from the New York Times, which were summarized to be Mike Tyson defeated Jake Paul, Israeli aides under investigation for leaks and record doctoring.

52:48The three most recent notifications that it appears that Apple Intelligence summarized read as follows. October 7 leak investigation. Aides to Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are being investigated over accusations of leaks and record doctoring related to the Hamas war. From the Atlantic, Jake Paul defeated Mike Tyson, not the other way around, via unanimous decision in Netflix's high-profile boxing showcase. And then finally, from the Atlantic, Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight champion, will soon fight Jake Paul, the YouTuber turned boxer. Follow along live. That's exactly what I was talking about with sports results.

53:19They can't get much simpler than a fight. Two people, one of them is the winner. And it got it wrong. And if you read that summary, you could be forgiven for swiping it away because you're not that into it. And just the next day when talking with friends, like I can't believe Mike Tyson beat Jake Paul. They're like, what are you talking about? because you didn't watch it. You didn't care. You just read the notification. That's a pretty important thing to get right. Don't trust notification summaries. If you see that little icon, which looks like two little lines and then like a little arrow swooping down and you actually care about what it says, tap through.

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55:40The Department of Justice says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly. So reading from The Verge, there's kind of a lot here, but forgive me because I think it's all fairly important. The Department of Justice says that Google must divest the Chrome web browser to restore competition to the online search market. and it left the door open to requiring the company to spin out Android 2. The initial proposed final judgment refines the DOJ's earlier high-level outline of remedies after Judge Amit Mehta found Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search and in search text advertising.

56:15The filing includes a broad range of requirements the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google, from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to more broadly breaking the company up. The DOJ's latest proposal doubles down on its request to spin out Google's Chrome browser, which the government views as a key access point to searching the web. While the government isn't going so far as to demand Google spin out the Android business, it's leaving the option open. The government says a spin out could also be mandated should those other solutions prove ineffective. At restoring competition to the market, the DOJ says Google might even choose divestiture itself if the company doesn't want to comply with some of the other rules the government is proposing against self-preferencing Google search in Android.

56:57Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties, including Apple and other phone makers, to make Google's search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting search competitors. It also wants to ban Google from preferencing its search engine on any owned and operated platform like YouTube or Gemini, mandate it let rivals access its search index at, quote, marginal cost and on an ongoing basis, quote, and require Google to syndicate its search results, ranking signals, and U.S.-originated query data for 10 years.

57:28The DOJ is also asking that Google let websites opt out of its AI overviews without being penalized in search results. In response, Google published a blog post saying the DOJ's proposed remedies go, quote, way overboard, quote. The post attributed to Alphabet's chief legal officer, Kent Walker, says the DOJ is, quote, pushing a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America's global technology leadership. That blog post response, it's spicy. They are not happy. And it is it's on the one side. It's like the old man in me is kind of like, wow, that's a little inappropriate to talk like that.

58:03On the other side, I'm like, yeah, let's just let's just call it like we see it. Now, I'm not entirely sure I agree with how they see it. But nevertheless, I appreciate the fact that, you know, they're just letting it all hang out. So that's pretty good stuff. And to be clear, this is just the DOJ saying, this is what we think should happen. There's no official decision yet, but the DOJ won the case, and they're saying, here are the remedies that we are proposing. And it's going to be months and months until something actually happens. But this is the time for Google to say, the DOJ's proposed remedies are terrible, and they're going to cause the end of the world.

58:33And it's time for the DOJ to ask for everything that it wants. Split it all, Chrome, split it all, whatever. I don't know if you want to read Ben's take before we talk about ours. So a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, had what I thought was a really good take on this. Ben writes, and I'm picking and choosing a couple of things here, but Ben writes, Chrome, meanwhile, is an excellent input for a data factory. Owning the browser is a bit like owning an operating system when it comes to the web. The browser has to handle every single piece of data that comes and goes, including decrypting encrypted data.

59:01It's one of the pieces of software you as a user have to give absolute trust to. It's unclear exactly what data Google harvests from this or how it builds proxies of your browsing habits so it has plausible deniability in terms of harvesting information. But there's no question that Chrome is a major asset for Google's business. At a minimum, it ensures that Google searches front and center without having to pay any traffic acquisition costs. That, more than anything, is what rubs me the wrong way about these remedies. At a very high level, the core issue in this case is that Google has been effectively paying off Apple, the one company with the resources and motivation to build a competitive search engine, to ensure that they don't compete with them.

59:34To that end, the remedy seems obvious. Make Google stop. Stop paying Apple, that is. I think that Google would dominate those search services regardless. The crime was in paying off a competitor and demanding that Google give away the result of nearly three decades of development and innovation instead of simply addressing the problem at hand is too much. so when i look at this i kind of think that the uh the eu approach is as problematic as their like solutions have been their approach to deciding what the problem is is refreshing compared to the u.s version so in the u.s version you have to prove that uh the company violated some existing u.s law and so the doj makes its cases based on what it thinks it can prove that you did wrong but very often and i think in this case the thing that you that a company did that's illegal and then the remedies that would come from that don't actually solve what we think the underlying problem is the eu just says there's insufficient competition in market x because we think there is uh and therefore here's a bunch of remedies that we think will rescore our competition and we can debate the remedies but they basically decide there's not enough competition here there's too few companies that have too much power but you can't just go into court in the u.s and say i think there's too few companies that have too much power and they should be knocked down a peg it's like oh what law did they violate like there's not such like broad regulatory control where you can just sort of talk about it for a while and decide we've all voted and we think that there's not enough competition in this market right um and so they have to say like oh they did this illegal thing and that according to this rule and these antitrust laws that are really old and the remedies they come up with just like i mean what ben's getting at is like look if the thing that ben thinks they did the most wrong is this and he wishes they would just not do that and everyone looking at the case will say i think the thing google did most wrong was this and therefore they should do that but the thing the government actually proved is that google did x and then the government gets to pick what they think the remedies are and this is where these cases always seem to fall down in my lifetime anyway where the doj will win some kind of antitrust case against a tech company and say and the solution is this and you look at the solution you're like wait how is that gonna fix things so in this case you gotta break off chrome because you having chrome is not fair because you get to favor yourself and you get to observe everyone's activity and yada yada right so that's got to be a separate company uh so many problems with that first of all who would want chrome i guess the obvious answer is microsoft because they've been trying to they've been trying to you know have they have their own web browser edge the ie was so damaged by being terrible for so many years that they had to come up with a new name and edge uses the chromium engine and chrome is the world's most popular browser just like i used to be so microsoft should buy it or whatever but the thing is chrome as a standalone business doesn't make any sense and it's difficult to run just ask like mozilla yeah i mean the entire business model for web browsers for the last like decade or more has been get google to pay you to be the default like that's how everyone makes their money in browsers yeah like it's it costs this thing it costs such a huge amount of money to maintain a modern web browser because the web is complicated and evolving so you need some pretty big source of funding to fund that development web browsers are not simple and they're not static i guess people take them for granted they're like oh i just browse the web but from a technical perspective the things that underlie web browsers are incredibly complicated and change all the time there's security problems there's new standards It is a huge Herculean effort.

1:03:09And by the way, that effort is made a million times worse if you are not the leader. So one of the benefits Google gets to owning Chrome is that Chrome has massive market share. It is dominant. And that means Google, which has tons of web apps like the Google web apps, not just Google Search, but all of Google web apps are a very important part of Google's whole value proposition. it's much easier now for google to ensure that all of its web apps work with the world's most popular web browser because they own that too back in the bad old days google would try to make web apps and half the world was on ie and they would have to make their web apps work with a browser owned by a company that's their competitor and that was difficult because sometimes that browser didn't do the things they wanted and google said oh we can make this cool thing in our web app if only the browsers did x y and z and they'd have to beg them please can you add this feature to ie please can you retire ie6 like just all these like it was it made google's life more difficult chrome is the most valuable you know chrome is most valuable to google by a huge margin not just because it's the world's biggest web browser ever but because of the nature of google's business and its advertising business or whatever like it is so valuable to google and google made it from nothing it wasn't popular when it started they made their own web browser they stuck with it which is strange for google uh and they just kept developing it they just kept developing it and it got to where it is and now the in the u.s they're saying there's not enough competition for search advertising which i basically agree with that's true uh and the fix is you have to get rid of chrome home.

1:04:45and like like can i don't think it's almost unprecedented like the most popular very important application web browsers are very important application and the most popular one in the world they're saying the one company that uh developed it and can support it and it can can develop it the one company that this is most valuable to you have to spin it off there's no way it can survive as an independent company because they'd have no way to make money they'd have to start get into weird crypto stuff or they'd have to be even worse than what google was doing i mean again look at mozilla trying to be an independent uh web browser and figuring out that business model right and the other option is okay well it gets an it's an independent company then microsoft tries to snap it up is the doj not going to let microsoft buy it because they're saying oh now we've just transferred chrome from one company one giant company to another and then we have to have another trial against them like i don't see how google getting rid of chrome solves anything and it creates a whole bunch of problems for the entire worldwide web which is an important platform that i care about not that chrome is perfect and that google should be able you know like things that google does with chrome are bad but as ben says my perspective tell them not to do those things don't say oh you've got to split chrome into another company that'll solve the problem i don't think it will solve the problem i think it will make a whole bunch of new problems and i think it will make the chrome browser worse and i think it will make everyone's experience on the web worse and yeah it will hurt google a little bit but like the goal is not just to do something mean that google doesn't like like it's not you know you're bad so you get punished like we're supposed to be trying to like solve the underlying problem which is you know not enough competition in search and there are a bunch of things in the remedy that go to that like you can't pay people to have privileged thing you can't you know you have to let people opt out of ai without uh you know downranking them like things that recognize the power that google search has and saying you can't wield that power uh in a way that stifles competition yada yada right those are all good but splitting out and splitting out android is similar splitting on android splitting out google like splitting out android but then saying android can't preference google services what is android if not an operating system for phones that is tightly integrated with google services it just has to be you know an operating system that just doesn't have any services or lets you pick from google services and what's the alternative i don't think apple's going to be vending a lot of its iCloud services to android phones so it's just a mishmash of like uh one drive and dropbox and whatever third-party photos apps are out there like just if any of these remedies go through in the form that they are proposed these big ones about taking pieces of google and chopping them off and throwing them out into the wilderness i don't think it's going to solve the problem and i think it's going to make things a real mess for a long time yeah i mean i'm not an expert in this kind of stuff but when i look at what google has done over the years They're obviously anti-competitive in a few pretty big ways.

1:07:40At the same time, and I look at Chrome, and I think Google's ownership over Chrome is a huge problem. It really is. They have used it in abusive ways. There is tons more abuse potential to be had. It is very uncomfortable how much they control about the entire web via Chrome. It's a little off. Like it's a little risky and it's not a great place for the web to be. All that being said, I don't see how splitting up the company this way would really meaningfully help a lot of that. I think it would fail spectacularly. And the fact is like when you split up monopolies like that, what can very easily happen over time is as the regulatory environment changes, they can eventually kind of reform like what AT &T largely did.

1:08:37And so I think a more pragmatic solution here that's more likely to actually work is to regulate the kind of behavior Google can do but keep the company intact. Keep Android. Keep Chrome. Because, again, like John, I don't see any plausible path for them to be split off in a way that would actually achieve the goals that the DOJ probably wants. And speaking of AT &T, like splitting off AT &T, when you split off, you take one big phone company and split into a bunch of little ones, those individual little phone companies are still profitable sound businesses. They're just smaller. It's only the, you know, they sell phone service to people in a smaller geographic area.

1:09:21But phone service itself is still profitable to sell. People want it. It is a good product. android and google are both effectively subsidized because what they do is serve the needs of google's other business which is search advertising and selling you know like selling advertising right android if it was an independent business would not be uh as free or cheap as it is to all the different vendors because right now it's like oh android is open source is free and you can port it or whatever but hey if you want to put it on your phone you have to use the google play services and so on and so forth if not you got to do a bunch of development yourself yada yada android is a standalone business now it's got to start charging people is like well how do we pay for all these engineers who work on android it like subsidized businesses that serve the larger needs of a bigger company a bigger abusive monopoly you can't just break them off like you could with the baby bells and say android you're free go on your own now we'll have competition android's going to be like but how how do we make money again like you have to raise their prices and then we go back to the battle world where cell cell phone makers are all developing their own os's because they don't want to pay what turns out to be a sustainable price for android or they just everyone forks it and it's like they leave android behind because there's no reason to use the google version if it's not doesn't privilege google services and google's not forcing them to anymore hey maybe that's the goal to say android it's like linux linux it's free to the world it's open source let a million different android clones bloom no longer will google be forcing you to use their services because they can't anymore but like it basically just makes it dissolve and the same thing with chrome how are you going to pay for the development of chrome who's going to pay all those engineers to keep working on chrome if it's not subsidized because of how important it is to google's other business it just it's not the same as breaking up the baby bells those were it's like well now you've just got a smaller phone company it would be like breaking google up into a bunch of smaller googles where there was like a search engine for the left half of the united states and the right half but they still had all the pieces together i just i i don't honestly like and i'm not against like i understand there would be more competition briefly but i'm like we're at we're at a stable equilibrium right now where the monopolies are abusing their power we would like them to stop abusing their power but i'm not sure the solution to that is put a stick of dynamite into the monopolies and just blow their pieces all over the world and then say problem solved and just walk away because i don't think that's the solution again the simpler version make them not do the worst of the anti-competitive things that they're doing uh that's not perfect they'll always find a way around it or whatever but i that there's less i feel like there's less collateral damage to just saying you can't pay apple off you can't privilege your products and other products and so on and so forth but leaving intact the idea of you can continue to put tons of money into developing chrome because it is valuable to your business and in google's case you know all like the the eu type things is like oh you gotta have a you know a choice screen you can't default to anything yada yada google is still good enough that most people will pick them as the default because they have brand recognition and a legacy of being a brand that people like.

1:12:18So I don't think Google should fear that type of competition. They should say, bring it on. None of our services are privileged. None of our search engine is privileged. User choice for every single thing. Now it is entirely open to competition. Competition is free to form. Maybe Apple will field a competitor. Maybe Bing will get more leverage or whatever. But Google shouldn't shy away from that. It would motivate them to make their search engine better and friendlier, I think. You can do all that without breaking these pieces up and saying, Android and Chrome, you have to sink or swim on your own as an independent business.

1:12:48Yeah, I just, I'm very curious to see how this is, how this lands, because it doesn't seem like it's tenable right now. And even though I think the Google response was a bit, you know, petulant, whiny child, which I kind of get, they're kind of making a point, like, of course, they're being exceedingly dramatic about it, but they're still making a decent point. And like you and like Ben have said i don't i don't feel like this is the right solution and safari by the way you know is a competitive browser that's the there's no i mean there's bing i guess but you know there's apple that hasn't made a competitive search engine which is ben is always saying that google is essentially paying apple off to prevent them from ever trying to make a search engine which honestly i don't think google should be afraid of because apple would not do a good job but whatever you never know apple sometimes surprises you like they have apple silicon was a surprise to everybody turns out apple does a really good job on that not so much on uh cars or video games or a bunch of other stuff but anyway uh safari exists and apple uh subsidizes its development because it's important for them to have a web browser that they control that's not owned by one of their competitors and it costs a lot of money to develop safari and that money is not you know as if safari was an independent company they couldn't afford that how would safari make money i guess from the google search deal but that's going to soon soon be illegal anyway so like it's it turns out giving away a web browser for free one of the most complicated pieces of software to develop and maintain that has to be compatible with the entire World Wide Web, that costs a lot of money.

1:14:15It needs to be funded somehow. And we all agree that having more web browsers is better than having fewer. But all of those web browsers, if they're going to be competitive and useful, need to have a source of funding. And I think Apple funding Safari and Google funding Chrome is a reasonable funding model to make two competitive web browsers for the world wide web i don't think there can be 75 competitive world web browsers because there's not enough different funding models to fund 75 of them maybe two is too few but throwing chrome out into the woods and letting it wither ending up with just safari i keep leaving out edge i'm sorry microsoft but like or just leaving it open source chromium or whatever like i'm i'm not saying there couldn't be a future with more competition there certainly can be but how to get there from here without tremendous disruption is the difficult problem and of all the things that google dominates and makes too little competition at the very least chrome actually does have some competition in safari and i guess edge and firefox and opera you know all the arc people have already written us so arc is but i mean those are a lot of the chromium-based browsers show that google would say hey look we give away the main engine open source there can be lots of browser competition but in the end all that matters is like how many people use this browser and if you look at the you know the the market share ratios it's like it doesn't matter what those browsers do they basically have to do what chrome does just like back in the the old days you just had to deal with ie because as much as you may hate it so many people use it that it's a fact of life right so and the fact that it used to be the same engine under both safari and chrome but they sort of divorced into blink and webkit ages ago is uh you know another potential increase in competition you know so of all the areas that where google's causing problems uh this is one where there actually is competition and we would like there to be more and i don't think uh injuring chrome is going to uh in increase the competition that other stuff they propose will increase competition you can't favor the search engine you can't pay apple off you can't you know punish people in google search results you can't spy on people through chrome like stop them from doing all that data collection stuff uh one way to stop them is say it's a whole different company and They won't share the data with you, but that seems pretty heavyweight.

1:16:29Mark Gurman had a report a few days ago now about allegedly a new Siri. So reading from Mark in Bloomberg, the new Siri, details of which haven't been reported, uses more advanced large language models or LLMs to allow for back and forth conversations. The system also can handle more sophisticated requests in a quicker fashion. The new voice assistant, which will eventually be added to Apple intelligence, is dubbed LLM Siri by those working on it. The company is planning to announce the overhaul soon as 2025 as part of the upcoming iOS 19 and macOS 16 software updates, which are internally named Luck and Cheer.

1:17:04Like Apple Intelligence this fall, the new features won't immediately be included in next year's crop of hardware devices. Instead, Apple is currently planning to release a new Siri to consumers as early as spring 2026, about a year and a half from now. Holy freaking crap. That's a long time away. the revamped Siri will rely on new Apple AI models to interact more like a human and handle tasks in a way that's closer to chat GPT and Google's Gemini it also will make expanded use of app intents which allow for more precise control of third-party apps Siri will get additional tweaks in the coming months as part of iOS 18 the iPhone's current operating system the software will be able to draw on customer data to provide context for commands and take action using the information on a user's screen the iOS 18 version relies on a first-generation Apple LLM to determine if requests should use the existing Siri infrastructure or be routed to a second LLM that can handle more complex queries and tap into third-party apps.

1:17:57So buried at the very end of that summary is, oh, and by the way, you're not totally for, you know, forgetting this, but like, yeah, iOS 18 also has promised and will have a version of Siri that's LLM powered that is better. You know, the Siri we were promised back at WWDC, hey, Siri will be better thanks to Apple intelligence is not coming immediately but you know eventually in the ios 18 timeline you'll get a siri with llm which makes me wonder how this ios 19 one as is dubbed llm siri by the people working on it well that's llm siri what the hell is the ios 18 thing that uses llms with siri is that sort of llm siri or half llm siri or llm siri light it's a it's been a long time where it's like apple intelligence is going to make siri better but not when they updated the graphics which mark uh marco uh you know uh complained about a few episodes ago and he's totally right you updated the graphics but you left the same old dumb siri back there answering the questions and so there goes your opportunity to dazzle people with your new uh you know voice assistant and accompanying new appearance instead you just get the accompanying new appearance but same old thing and so at some point in the ios 18 timeline there'll be a slightly better one that uses LLMs, but now we have to hear about, oh no, the real one where Siri's actually going to be good.

1:19:18That's iOS 19, but not launching with iOS 19. You know, halfway through iOS 19's lifetime, so maybe mid-2026. Come on. This is so stupid. Siri, it's like, we got them this time. Siri is always going to get better in a couple of years. Look, we have yet to see the quote-unquote good Siri with iOS 18. It has not shipped yet. So maybe once that ships, that will remove a lot of the pent-up demand for Siri to get better. But honestly, I don't trust them. Siri has zero credibility to me. Apple has promised so many times that Siri is getting better, it's smarter than ever, it's better than ever. and it is still so disappointing to so many people so often.

1:20:13It's still so unreliable and inconsistent so often. Siri has no credibility. And Apple's claims about Siri, Apple's demos about Siri, Apple's stated features of what Siri can do all have no credibility to me because I have been burned. I have gotten my hopes up so many times. And Apple has said, now it's better. And then I go try it, and it is the same old, inconsistent, dumb mess. So maybe the iOS 18 one that still hasn't actually shown itself, maybe that really will be better. Maybe this alleged iOS 19.5 one will be even better than that. I'll believe it when I see it. I think we're all excited by it because of the promise of LMs.

1:21:03That was the whole Apple intelligence announcement at WWDC. It's like, I know we've been saying for years and years that Siri is going to get better. And it totally hasn't. And it's been disappointing. But now there's an actual concrete technology that you see in other competing products. Everyone else is using it. You can see their demos. You can use their products right now as we're on stage announcing our thing. You can go and talk to ChatGPT and do it like this is, you know, LLMs. There's real promise. It's not just like vague. Oh, we're working on Siri and it's going to be better or whatever.

1:21:30There's a concrete technology that you can look at and say, yeah, put that in Siri because that is like what siri does but better and apple says yes we are totally going to put that into siri and it's coming in ios 18 just not immediately in ios but eventually in ios 18 it's coming and so i think that's why we're all we have our hopes up more than usual because it's not just vague promises it's like we put it this way i feel like out here that apple could make siri better with this i'm like i see the ingredients put them together mix it up like i it seems to me like this should work i you know i didn't know how the old siri worked but i've used lots of lm power products i'm like yes use that and we're just waiting for them to use it right we haven't seen what they have in ios 18 we've just seen a bunch of canned demos and who knows what that's representative of but a story now that ios 18's thing is called lm siri like does that just mean that even inside apple they're like the ios or the ios 19 thing is called lm siri does that mean inside apple the ios 18 thing is already like we know this is not going to be that great we're just doing it because we said we were going to do it but practically speaking we really need to be working on the real lm series for ios 19 and we're so far behind on that that it's not going to even come out when ios 19 comes out and that's that's disappointing right we will have had the new fancy graphics for like an entire year before the ios 19 one comes out that put backs those fancy graphics with an engine that's better now we'll see well maybe the ios 18 better serial only better apple has a little bit of a branding problem here because like i'm one of the things i collect is in merlin collects them too but i don't know i see when i send it to merlin these just ridiculous uh uh spoken or typed query and then uh replies from apple's various things where you'll see the text that it understood so it's not like it misunderstood your voice or whatever and you'll see the most nonsensical ridiculous reply for apple's voices isn't and they often come on apple tv right uh and the question for all this is like what is siri when i talk to my home pod is that siri when i talk to my apple tv remote is that siri when i talk to my phone is that siri when i talk to my mac is that siri some of those things are some of those things aren't which of those things will be getting better in ios 18 or ios 19 i have a feeling the home pod's not going to get better will the apple tv get better i don't know presumably the phone will possess their flagship platform and probably the mac because you can do better things there because there's lots of ram but like apple's got this problem that they have a lot of things that you can talk to that currently do nonsensical stuff when you talk to them and only some of them eventually might get better but the others probably won't but apple just has one brand and they say it's siri siri is everything when you talk to apple stuff and that is not the way things are so yeah i mean at this point they just really need the the apple intelligence announcement was like they have a good idea they uh you know the way they're approaching it makes sense if you go listen to when we talked about apple intelligence i think their their approach to using LLM technology to enhance their products makes sense.

1:24:41They just need to do it. And now we're just waiting around for them to do it. And the things they released so far, like I said, are not super compelling to me. I mean, it's not that they're bad. Like they do what they're more or less supposed to do the way we expect them to do them. But they're not particularly compelling. But I talk to my devices all the time. And when they don't listen to me or do something that I think is not correct, I think to myself, this could be better. And that would be a material improvement. So I am waiting patiently to see what this is like. But meanwhile, just like we were talking about iPhone 17 while we were waiting for the iPhone 16 to come out, apparently now we're just talking about iOS 19's LLM Siri while we're waiting for the 18 one to come out.

1:25:20It's so bad. You know, I really – I don't love when one of us, and it could be any of us, calls for, you know, like a firing or something like that. I'm not saying anyone should be fired. Who would do that? Who would do that? Who would do that? No. But nobody would. Certainly not. Definitely not. Um, but I, and I'm not saying that somebody should be fired, but I am saying something is fundamentally broken. Either Apple is just incapable of this, which I don't think is the case. I really don't. Or there's some political infighting that has prevented forward progress, but like Apple keeps trying to make Siri happen and it hasn't happened yet.

1:26:01I mean, it was 2011 when Siri debuted. That's two years before ATP. That's three years before Declan. Like it has been a long time and they still can't get it right. They still can't get it right. And I just, I don't understand. I just don't understand. It is getting better in a little, little bit here, a little bit there, but it sure seems like everything around it is now, to your collective points, is now getting better in leaps and bounds. And where all the other assistants are running, Siri is at best at a mildly brisk walk. And it hasn't been enough for at least five years, probably 10, but it's certainly not enough now.

1:26:51and to say, oh, we got you in 18 months? Come on. Figure out a better way. Figure out a better way. I don't care if it's acquisition. I don't care if you have to fire the whole damn team. That's not actually what I'm advocating, but I'm fired up about it. It's just do something, Apple, and do something and do it so that we can see. Don't promise something. Don't open the Komodo and tell us, oh, it's going to get better. Just frigging do something. Do something. So let me, for the first time ever, be the voice of reason on this topic. Please. Yes, please. This is a fun change of roles for you and me.

1:27:26I know, right? All right. So I think Tim Cook should keep his job. No, I don't. Not for this, though. So we heard like rumblings here and there. There's been like, you know, reports from the information and from Mark Gurman and stuff like that over the last couple of years that basically there was this project to remake Siri with a whole different approach to how they were doing. language processing possibly with lms i think but i think this actually predates the lm um craze and apparently the story was that the group that had like the new rebuilt siri they like lost the battle internally and that they instead decided to like keep the old one going and just keep working on it instead and wasn't the reasoning by the way wasn't the reasoning kind of like a um iMovie 8 or final cut pro 10 kind of reasoning which is basically like the new stuff looks great but you would be drop it because the new stuff is new it doesn't have all the same features as the old one so we'd have to explain to our customers that you know for the past x years you've been able to ask siri to do these things but now you can't anymore because we replaced it with a new and improved one that doesn't have all the features of the old one i seem to recall that being part of the decision making which is always the way it is like inside a company when someone's got a new idea for a technology or whatever it's very often difficult to sell it if it doesn't do literally everything that the old one did and apple has gone against that a few times in the past like with final cut pro 10 or whatever the version of iMovie that they replaced the old one with and remember they shipped the both the old and the new version of iMovie for a while to avoid this problem to say we have a new structure for how we think iMovie should work it doesn't do all the things the old one did but we still think it's such a good idea that we're going to ship the new one and the old one so you can keep using the old one and in the meantime we will try to build the new one up to match the feature set uh or they can just do what they did with photos on the mac which is make a new version that doesn't have the features the old one and say tough luck the old features are gone uh but in the case of siri the rumor was i think that the the new folks said we have a new approach to siri and it's better but it doesn't do literally every single thing the old one did and that's enough for the people who are against it to kill it and say well Do we want to explain to our customers why our voice assessment just got less capable?

1:29:38Yeah, and to be fair, I don't know if we actually had that level of information on it. But I believe that was part of the gist of the rumors that we were hearing. Anyway, so there was that pretty firm rumor a couple years back that basically Siri was going to be rewritten. The project lost the battle internally, and they kept the existing one. Now, separately from that, Apple intelligence happens, seemingly. And that seemed to be unrelated to the reporting on that whole Siri drama, which seemed to precede it. So it's possible that maybe they, for this kind of first iteration of Apple intelligence that is this year, maybe they figured out some quick ways to bolt the LLMs onto the old Siri.

1:30:24but that maybe the much better approach that they're working on for a year and a half from now or whatever is that is a new Siri so I think it that that narrative if true I think is very plausible and would would kind of explain the timeline now the second aspect of that though is that the whole reason they have all this time and they can take their sweet ass time and they can ship Siri that sucks for so long is because they don't allow competition on a technical level on iOS for the voice assistant. Like, this is what happened. Like, this is the downside. You know, what we've seen for a very long time is that when Apple has a lot of strong competition, they get their act together usually and compete well.

1:31:15They can do amazing things. When they can somehow preclude competition from happening, they get complacent, and they don't do that well. What they put out might not be the best in class. And I think what we see now is on iOS, it's so locked down, it's so impossible for anybody to compete with them in certain areas, and the voice assistant is one of those. As ChatGPT and all these other ones have been coming up over the last couple of years, if there was an API for them to replace Siri, they would have destroyed Siri by now. We wouldn't even be talking about Siri anymore because none of us would be using it for anything because there would be some kind of plug-in architecture.

1:32:01Instead, they did the no money changes hands deal where a chat GPT is integrated into the existing voice assistant as a stopgap. And I know you're talking about competition on iOS, which is actually very relevant. But of course, there is actually competition on Android with its voice assistants, which tend to be doing better than Apple's. but Google is doing exactly the same thing and trying to keep as much competition away from their built-in voice assistant as well. But yeah, Apple at least felt enough pressure to say, and we're partnering with ChatGPT, and if our thing craps out, you can say, give up and chuck at the ChatGPT, which is not a great solution.

1:32:36Right, but because nobody can compete, like because ChatGPT couldn't make an app to officially replace Siri, look at how many of our nerds and our power user friends have used the action button on our iPhone 15s and 16s to just open ChatGPT? Like, how many times have you asked ChatGPT a question that it would have been nicer if you could have just, you know, used a voice hail command, you know, freely on your phone or held down a button or whatever to do it? Like, there's a reason we do that because ChatGPT for a lot of things is simply better. And if it had the ability to integrate with things the way Apple Intelligence and Siri do, it could be even better.

1:33:16And I have no doubt that Apple would have its butt handed to it and Siri would be even more marginalized among power users as Safari is because we know it from Chrome users. But instead, Apple does not have to compete in this area. They have technically foreclosed competition. Yeah, Apple dictates the terms that you're going to access ChatGPT on their system. It's a third party app or when you integrate it with Apple's own thing, Apple's thing comes first and then ChatGPT only with a warning dialogue after and yada yada. And as a result, Apple does not have to compete very well in the area of voice assistants.

1:33:50And I don't know if it's directly because of that, but the reality of that and effect of that is that because they don't have to compete, they don't compete very well. They are taking their sweet time. They totally missed the LLM revolution. They're coming to it late and they're coming to it on, you know, kind of a slow timeline, kind of dipping their feet in slowly. And it does seem like that is giving them some advantages in the sense that they're able to do things in like a more thought out way. They're able to be a little bit more careful with how they do it. They're doing certain things in a more privacy focused way than everyone else is doing.

1:34:25But the reality is they don't really have a fire lit under their butts because they don't have to compete. And whereas if iOS was not as locked down as it was, they would actually have real competition here and they would work harder and faster and probably produce better output. So this is one of those areas where it is actually better for both Apple and Apple's customers for them to be less locked down because that creates fewer areas that they will foreclose competition and get complacent and lazy and deliver half-assed products. And Siri, for its entire lifetime, calling it half-assed would be a generous compliment.

1:35:06It is quarter-assed at best and way less than that in reality. It has been a really rough, unreliable, untrustworthy product for its entire lifespan. And maybe if there was easier competition in that area, maybe they would actually make it better faster. Sounds like there's a great job opening for you and the European Commission because I think they agree with you. every part of the operating system that apple has integrated would benefit from competition you should be able to replace the photos app the voice assistant the web browser all that stuff should not default to apple and should be pluggable and the european commission is trying very hard to make that happen across not just apple's platforms but facebook's platform google's platform and all those platforms so yeah they've got the same idea we'll see if their remedies end up uh going in that direction or not um but yeah in the meantime like the the half uh series solution that you Apple doesn't give technical details about when they promised LLM.

1:36:00They promised a better Siri and iOS 18.4, whatever their target was back when they talked about it at WWDC. And we all just assume, Apple Intelligence, better Siri. We read between the lines and we say, LLM. I don't know if Apple said it explicitly. LLM, it's perfect. And as we discussed before even Apple Intelligence was released, the idea of having an LLM, you speak to something, the LLM interprets what you say, and the LLM has been trained on the 75 things that Siri can do and the precise way you have to word it to make them work. And that's what your LLM does. It takes whatever BS you say, translates it to a command that Siri will understand and makes it do it.

1:36:42And that would make Siri way better because Siri can actually do a lot of things, but it's incredibly frustrating when you talk to it and it's like, oh, it's not as bad as a text adventure where it's like it doesn't understand your sentence entirely, but it thinks it understands it and it does something totally off the wall. Like here's the example I just sent to Merlin most recently. It's an Apple TV one. The Apple TV ones are usually the best and it shows the text that it understood from the user. And the text was, let's watch Family Guy. Perfectly valid sentence. You can see what it understood.

1:37:11There's no like it didn't mishear a word or pick a word that sounds the same, but it's spelled differently. Let's watch Family Guy. They're talking to their television set. The response from the thing on Apple TV, which uses the Siri logo, which may or may not actually be quote-unquote real siri uh this is what apple tv said if you think it could be serious ask me to call emergency services or someone you trust that was the response to let's watch family guy and i looked at let's watch family guy i'm like what how like it doesn't even make any sense like is there it's not just i don't i don't know i don't know let's watch family guy do you want me to call emergency services i mean maybe i don't am i having a stroke i don't know this that's this is where an llm could help i know the apple tv knows how to find a show based on an even capitalized family a capital life capital g it knows it's a proper noun i bet it can find that as a tv show somewhere and start playing it because it's a tv and that's what it does and instead it offers to call families so emergency services so yeah a half l an lm in front of siri treating siri as like like a lot of the lms treat like calculators or other sort of things that would be great uh a full-fledged lm siri might be a disaster because it could start doing even more ridiculous things and apple has less of a way to control it but we're just all out here using the plain old dumb siri uh that we don't even know if this is the same siri everywhere and we're just looking for relief and this is kind of unfair to be like oh rumors about a future thing are making me feel worse that i don't have the current thing but it's a little bit of osborne effect and it's a little bit i mean there's always going to be a better version of everything right but i for me maybe i'm getting hung up on this but like the fact that the thing is called lm siri internally maybe that's what the ios 18 one is called too german is never precise in these rumors but it really does make me sad to think that the thing i've been waiting so patiently for somewhere around the midpoint of the life of ios 18 it seems like Apple itself already doesn't have that much confidence that it is the thing that we all hope it's going to be.

1:39:20But we'll see. I mean, I'm willing to keep an open mind and try it when it comes out. But in the meantime, I'll just enjoy those snazzy graphics. We are brought to you this episode by Masterclass. This holiday season, don't just give people stuff if they don't really need it. Give them something they want to be. With Masterclass, they can finally become a better cook, better writer, an entrepreneur, or an artist like they've always wanted. That's the gift of Masterclass. It's always on time and it lasts a lifetime. You cannot do better than Masterclass as a gift for your loved ones. They can learn from the best to become their best.

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1:41:21All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And Andrew Hodgson writes, is there a way to get the performance cores to spin up when doing normal activities like file management, spreadsheets, internet browsing, etc? On the M4 Pro Mac Mini, I can never seem to get them going, and I didn't know if there was a way to tell the system to make use of them rather than just stick with the efficiency cores. Otherwise, it seems a bit of a waste of those extra cores. I did wonder if the high power, low power options and settings energy might have an impact or if there was some other setting that could be tweaked. Maybe the answer is that the M4 Pro chip is simply overkill for these types of tasks i think that is the answer but i don't know tell me i'm wrong i mean so some of the tasks especially things like file management you're going to be spending most of your time waiting for io so having a faster cpu is not going to impact things because that's not the uh the bottleneck um the high power mode is interesting it's a feature that i was introduced a couple years ago i think and it's spreading to more macs i think the mac mini he's got it as well uh but i believe all that basically is is a different fan curve which is a way of saying like uh at a given for a given set of inputs from temperature sensors what should the output fan speeds to be beyond all the fans and it's you could graph it on a curve in an old school simple scenario where there was one thing that had a temperature and one thing and one fan obviously modern max are more complicated than that although some of them still only have one fan uh but anyway uh high power mode my understanding is it just makes the fans go higher rpm sooner so it makes your mac noisier it blows more air through it and the theory is that it will allow your the things that get hot to sustain their maximum throughput for a longer period of time because you're not waiting for them to get hot you're sort of preemptively cooling them by blowing more and more air on them that's the idea with high power mode doesn't change as far as i know anything having to do with what's scheduled on what kind of core is inside your mac that's another thing you don't control we've talked about it before when trying to speed up jobs um uh like file compression and stuff uh when software runs whatever job is going to run there are tools that it has to indicate what it thinks the priority should be is this is this a high priority thing that the computer should do asap or is it a low priority thing that it should do just whenever it gets around to it a lot of that prioritization affects what cores things will be scheduled on background processes said at a low priority will run on the efficiency cores foreground processes that need lots of fancy computing that are said to be the highest possible priority may run on the performance cores but my question for Andrew is are you waiting around for your computer to do things like what thing are you waiting for when you're doing file management and spreadsheets and internet browsing are you twiddling your thumbs and saying come on come on page load if that's happening it almost certainly isn't because you are cpu bound it's probably your network connection or it's io with the file system or something else like you it would take some pretty sophisticated performance analysis to figure out what is the bottleneck that is making you wait for something if you're staring at your istat menus thing and you're annoyed because the power cores aren't being used but you're not waiting for anything don't be annoyed it's using the appropriate resources for you it's saving your battery life it's reducing your power usage it's reducing the heat uh it's you know just because it's not using the power cores it's not a reason to complain about now if you have something that you're waiting for and you're sure it's cpu pound and it's not using the power cores i would talk to the developer of that program but that's not something that you as the user have control over um i don't think there's any tool out there where you can say like shuttle everything to the power cores and ignore the efficiency cores and honestly i don't think you'd want to do that because it would produce more heat it would probably go slower because you have lots of things running in parallel and you want to use as a efficiency cores and apple's efficiency cores are they're more efficient than the power cores but they're good cores too so don't don't worry about it too much they're good cores brent and keep in mind also so one thing that you might see um if you if you're watching a tool like iStatMenuser if you're watching an activity monitor, if you're watching your CPU usage between the cores, you might notice that one or two of the efficiency cores might be maxed out all the time, doing something like photo indexing or spotlight indexing or whatever else.

1:45:37That is not a sign that you need to somehow convince those tasks to run on the performance cores. basically mac os has been seemingly tweaked since the apple silicon era to to let certain background tasks basically do whatever they want as long as they do them on the efficiency cores because the efficiency cores are so much less power consuming than the performance cores that you can basically run a couple of them like for free almost all the time and not even notice a hit to battery life or an increase in heat. Like, they're so power efficient that macOS therefore lets things like photoindexing or whatever just max out one of them forever, as long as it wants to.

1:46:22And if you ever actually, you know, need that power for something else, usually these things are prioritized such that other processes can take priority if they all of a sudden need a burst of everything you've got. But for the most part, if you see efficiency cores maxing themselves out for a long time, that's normal don't you don't and you don't have to worry about and speaking of photo stuff it's you know like i said it's a software problem if you think there's something you're waiting for and you wish it would use the power cores talk to the developer which is why i've tried to talk to apple through my podcast and say apple give me a giant button in photos that says do photo analysis now using all my resources apple has not provided that instead they're using background jobs that you know run whenever they feel like it when the system thinks that the resources are available and they run on the efficiency cores and they don't use all the resources and i hate it that is a software problem is apple's photos application could uh or their photos demon could have a giant button that says do face recognition now do it just on this individual single photo use all the resources in the system that button doesn't exist but it's not the fault of mac os mac os is just doing what it's told by the applications and the applications are saying do follow-up analysis on the background on an efficiency core.

1:47:34It's fine. And most of the time, that's what you want. But sometimes you just want to do it now, and I really hope they provide that button someday. It's my money, and I need it now. All right. James Wilby writes, why are apps seemingly ballooning in size? I've looked at a few app update sizes recently, and it's not uncommon to find apps that are between 300 and 500 megabytes or even beyond. Tesla and the Unify Network app are my examples. Why is this? is it just a load of assets or is it just a load of baggage along for the ride uh it could be either but generally speaking isn't it like analytics frameworks and stuff like that like crashlytics i think is huge and um i'm trying to think of some of the other ones or firebase maybe like aren't those typically quite large i mean the actual code is not that large now code keep in mind that the modern code culture is if you need one thing, like one little function or one, you know, piece of functionality from a piece of code, you import an entire library, an entire framework, possibly an entire services built in frameworks, and you don't even look at what it does to your project.

1:48:44That is the modern coding culture in every way, in web programming, and application programming, mobile, everything. Everyone has this kind of framework-itis and library-itis of just like, I need, you know, like that joke of like the, you know, is even function in JavaScript. Like, yeah, I'll import an entire library for that. Like, rather than see if I can just have that function by itself. That applies at every scale. So you have, you do have huge amounts of code. You have duplication within code, especially for larger companies. You might have like, you know, a large company's app. suppose they need a library to like you know parse urls out of strings or whatever their app might have 10 different functions that do that because just out of sheer scale like that they have hundreds of people working on the app and at different times different people have added different versions of that same thing in different ways so code size is bigger these days by a lot and a lot of that is just just due to this this kind of culture of anything you need just import some framework or library and don't even look at how big it is.

1:49:49Don't even care. And definitely don't try to write it yourself or copy out just that function. No. So anyway, there's that. But also, the assets tend to be way bigger than you might think. Because again, like if you are, you know, suppose you're, you're writing a library that offers some kind of, you know, some kind of UI. Well, if you have any images in that UI, then that library is going to include every single image that might ever be displayed on that screen. It's going to include it in possibly different designs, different resolutions, different color schemes, light and dark mode. There's so many different versions of all those things.

1:50:23And yes, you can if you try to keep things small and simple. You can use some basic vectors or have a SVG or PDF version of your icon that you just render in different colors or different contexts. You can do that. But ultimately, the reason why nobody does that, except people like me who waste their time doing it, the reason why no one else does it is because there is no incentive whatsoever to make apps small these days none i can tell you this as somebody who has a very small app no one cares and nobody is going to pick your small app over your competitors 300 megabyte app no because that's that isn't how people choose apps these days so it is possible to make smaller apps but there is no incentive to so everyone just kind of gets sloppy and lazy and doesn't really care and obviously for things like games the assets are a problem uh you know they just the the amount of textures you have and all the various 3d data and everything else like it just it adds up real fast uh and the general approach is like you said to package up everything that your app is going to need apple tv prevents that and it's one of the reasons game developers dislike it because people just want to package up everything all the images all the different things all the things that you know and you know demo videos sound like stuff that could potentially be downloaded like just package it all in the app so the code size is bigger the asset size is bigger and the the motivation is to just package it all in there and sometimes there's even repetition of assets depending on how you're you know folding things in you might have the same asset in there multiple times and having something that deduplicates assets across different frameworks is a big pain and yeah just the sizes just keep going up um i was i was in uh messing with windows when i was trying to do that icloud stuff and one of the things i mess with when i'm in there is i download the latest version of unreal engine and i like to look at their little demos to see how the engine is advancing 5.5 just came out it has a bunch of new features i was like i want to you know let me find some of the cool demos my old 5.0 demo no longer worked it's fine i'll download the 5.5 version of that it's just like a demo showing you their various uh you know features for texturing large landscapes and dynamic lighting and stuff like that uh and the demo was 100 gigabytes oh my word yeah it's pretty big unreal engine itself you know it seems small in comparison right few hundred megs uh gig even or whatever and the the file and this is not this is not a game this is just a demo thing showing a bunch of features of the engine uh then i updated the i didn't update to the latest version of flight simulator which actually improves this but i have a old microsoft flight simulator 2020 i think it is that itself is 100 uh over 100 gigabytes um and when it needed to update it it needed to re-download a substantial portion of that uh things are big that's one of the advances of the new version of flight simulator 2024 is that it dynamically streams a bunch of so the download can be smaller uh it's still very large but uh they're making progress there so i think there is a breaking point uh but ios apps are not 100 gigabytes each unless they're a really really big game uh but yeah they're just them apps individual apps being 500 megabytes it's one of the reasons that apple rolled out that feature years ago that says like do you want us to basically remove apps that you haven't used in a long time we'll leave the icons on your screen but they get like a cloud icon or whatever next to them right we'll leave the icon there if you ever want to launch it or redownload it but just like i don't know if you know this but like you know a couple dozen 500 megabyte apps like here and there it starts to add up real fast and all of a sudden a lot of your phone storage is taken up with apps that you never launch that wouldn't matter if every single app was 20 megs but if they're in the hundreds of megabytes each and you've got 11 pages of those apps plus folders yeah that can be taking up a lot of room so yeah i mean it's kind of an uphill battle things get bigger over time that's generally one of the reasons we make better computers i don't think there's any sense in trying to hold the line on application size because we do want better fancier assets better fancier libraries now with llms with people having models inside their applications or even if they're dynamically downloaded even apple itself does it for the first time use the cleanup feature it will say downloading cleanup it's downloading a model and that model is big and they didn't want to make it part of the ios 18 distribution for whatever reason they wanted to be a separate download maybe so they can update it independently but anyway it's big uh every one of these model things is big they take up lots of memory and they take up lots of disk space and if every app has two or three different models plus the os has its models it's just making the apps bigger so yeah um the margaret point stands if developers care they can do a lot to make things smaller but in general over the entire history of computing the apps just get bigger and we'll continue to do so.

1:55:11Thank you to our sponsors this week, Aura Frames, Uncommon Goods, and Masterclass. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of being an ATP member is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week, Overtime will be about services on macOS. You're going to get to hear John Syracuse talk about services on macOS. and me and Casey say, oh yeah, that exists. You can join atv.fm slash join to hear whatever that's going to be and many other things. Thank you so much and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.

1:55:59Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T-Marco

1:56:52Oh, Thanksgiving driving is going to happen. I'm not looking forward to this. Yeah, there are a lot of advantages to living on Long Island. Many things are easy. way easier than the beach and even easier than many other places I've lived. Everything is an easy drive away. All the roads here are wide and the parking lots are huge. It's American suburbia done to the max, but certain things are still walkable and small. It's pretty great overall. The one problem about living on Long Island, it's similar to a problem living in Brooklyn, is that it's great as long as you never have to leave. But leaving Long Island is unpleasant.

1:57:35Not because, like, you know, you just miss it so badly. No. Because you have to go through the New York City surrounding metro area to get out of Long Island. Wow, is that unpleasant. So I'm, in a couple of days, I'm going to have something like a six-hour drive, the first two and a half of which will be going, like, 40 miles. Oh, no, thank you. You could just have a helicopter. Or you've got to get your relatives to move north and east so you can take a boat off the island, which is less traffic. There are many things that I joke about I will never want to buy or own. And then I end up buying them and owning them.

1:58:17And you make fun of me and that's fair. I still have had zero temptation to own a boat. You're not supposed to get your own boat. You're supposed to take a ferry where you can drive your car onto it. But it doesn't help you because your relatives are not in Connecticut or Rhode Island or Massachusetts. Right. So you're going the wrong way. Yeah, it's not going to be fun. You know, I've probably shared this numerous times, but my very limited memory of driving on Long Island was leaving. I know it's LaGuardia Long Island. No, that's JFK. They're both on Long Island. OK, there's plenty of room. I don't know why they wouldn't put them both there.

1:58:52Yeah, right. Well, so leaving LaGuardia, I remember I don't remember the specifics, but I remember you needed to follow signage. This was 20 years ago now, but you had to follow signage that seemed like it was heading deeper into Long Island in order to actually exit Long Island the way I wanted to, to get to Western Connecticut. And so I needed to like, I'm making this up, but I needed to go like eastbound for like, for the first road or two in order to actually end up going northbound or something like that. It was ridiculous. And then I remember, and I've told the story many times on the show, I remember going to Jones Beach to see a concert, and that was the most utterly bananas set of roads that I needed to take to get from Western Connecticut to Jones Beach, including popping off the interstate and or highway, popping off the highway, and then going through like a freaking neighborhood to get on the next highway.

1:59:40It was insanity. And that apparently, my understanding is that's just Long Island. Yeah. Well, luckily, there's easy public transportation to both airports, so there's no problems. You can just take that and you won't have to drive. Thanks, RM. You really did us dirty on that one. But I don't envy you. So how many charging stops are you expecting to make? 13? Ideally, zero. You can make it the whole way? Yes, but I can't make it there and back. But I can usually charge at my in-law's place just overnight, like out of a circular saw outlet they have in their barn. So I run a giant 30-amp extension cable out there barn.

2:00:20Which weighs like 50 pounds. Oh, yeah. It's thicker than a garden hose. It's a whole thing. But I've done that for years. Back when I had the Tesla, I did it then too. And it does work. It can charge a whole EV roughly overnight, which is fine. It's a lot of driving. I don't miss that part of my parents being in Connecticut. Like, cause they've been down here in Virginia since just before Declan was born. And generally speaking, that's very convenient and I, and I prefer it. Um, I don't, I don't love that. I no longer have an excuse to go to the New York Metro area. I don't like that. You know, we don't have a cheap as, which is to say free place to stay, you know, one Metro North ride away from Manhattan.

2:01:05Um, but nevertheless, not having to drive eight, eight to 10 hours to get to and from Connecticut for holidays. I, I'm, I'm not complaining about not having to do that. We will wake up on, well, I think we're going to go Wednesday afternoon and we will drive a sum total of maybe 50 minutes if there's traffic to get to my parents. It'll be glorious. John, what are you doing for the holiday? When do you two think you're going to start hosting your own Thanksgiving, sir? Is that just never going to happen? It does from time to time with us, but it's not common. Coincidentally, I think Erin's going to be cooking most of Thanksgiving at my parents because my mom, for all of her wonderful qualities, is not a stellar cook, and Erin is.

2:01:47So she's been conscripted, enlisted, whatever word I'm looking for, in order to do a lot of the cooking at mom and dad's. But we've done Thanksgiving at our house from time to time, but it is not common. yeah no i'll just be at home uh yeah i don't like traveling i don't like traveling at all in the window or definitely don't like traveling for thanksgiving uh it's such a bad holiday especially with like the school schedules because schools don't give kids that much time off so if you're if you're trying to like oh well we'll just you know we'll travel for thanksgiving but we'll try to travel on odd days you basically end up having to pull your kids out of school or have them miss days on either side otherwise you're just traveling when the whole rest of the world is traveling and it's miserable so and whether you're driving or flying or doing anything it's just miserable so yeah thanksgiving at home in new england that's what we're doing i envy that so much you envy that until you have to cook and clean up everything because that is the part that comes along with that is you don't just get to show up somewhere and then someone feeds you well for honestly we so i actually did host thanksgiving years ago um this was before atv this is like 2006 or so i had messed up my back and so i i'd been advised by a doctor not to take long car rides for a little while as i like as i slowly fixed my back and um and so my family all came to me and i hosted thanksgiving in a little like 500 square foot apartment like a one-bedroom apartment i hosted my entire family on my little like you know that like that rectangular wooden ikea table that everyone had because it came as a set with a table and four chairs for 100 bucks i i hosted thanksgiving on that little table like we just made it work you know we like had some people sit like at the counter and stuff like it.

2:03:30It was fine. And honestly, that was one of the best Thanksgivings we ever had. It was great. It's funny because I think my best holiday travel experience of all time, I don't remember what year it was. It was also before ATP. But for whatever reason, Aaron and I traveled on Christmas morning, which was very unusual for us. And typically we would tell our families like, you know, if my side has Thanksgiving, then her side has Christmas. And that's that. and this was when mom and dad were still in Connecticut and we left Richmond on Christmas morning relatively early but not absurdly so and it is not like what Marco's dealing with.

2:04:06I'm not saying my troubles were as bad as Marco's are getting off of Long Island but for us to get to Western Connecticut we basically took 95 the whole way up including through every major city on the eastern seaboard from here to there. So you would go through D.C. which is always a nightmare. You would go through Baltimore, which was usually okay, Philadelphia, the whole of New Jersey, Manhattan, et cetera, et cetera. And on Christmas morning that year, I think we might have made what is typically between an eight and 10 hour drive in like six, six and a half hours or something like that, because nobody was on the road and it was amazing.

2:04:46It worked so well. And I think we would genuinely think about doing that all the time if we still had to make those runs to Connecticut. it it was so great uh man that was the best