631: The Colors Are the Pepperoni

29:46Yep. As well as complaints that she couldn't charge her computer while uploading videos from the camera. Yep. Since the computer only had one port. Having said all that, she loved being one of the only students with a pink MacBook computer, so much that years later, she will still buy the pink iPhone if one is available, regardless of how much better the non-pink iPhone Pro might be for all the videos that she shoots. Anyway, all that is to say, I'm sure my sister's not alone and there are countless other people that will buy a product solely for the color and not the actual performance and functionality of the device.

30:17So two things about this. One, this is another case where Apple's shooting themselves in the foot because people are color motivated and by confining the colors to the cheaper ones, A, Apple's missing out on money because she would have bought the more expensive one with you know higher profit margins and she didn't and b it's giving worse experiences with your products like she basically bought the wrong computer for her because she loved the pink that much and that's not on her so much it's really kind of on apple for just confining the colors to the computers that are inappropriate to her and then the second thing is uh one way this is manifested in my uh at least my daughter's life anyway is that she was the first one to introduce the idea probably because she saw her uh you know peers doing it at school of getting a case for your laptop and i don't mean a case that you put it into when it's inside your backpack because i got one of those as well i mean a case like a phone case that is stuck to your laptop all the time and guess what that opens the door for her laptop has basically been purple for all of high school but apple doesn't sell a purple laptop but hers was purple because it's got these little thin hard plastic shells snapped onto it uh and so you can get a silver one or whatever and you can make it pink by putting a case on it naked robotic laptop then conflictingly andrew cohn writes While I would love a colorful Mac as well, the fact is most people don't.

31:31They may think they do, but they really don't. Let me explain. In a previous job of mine, we would often survey our customers and find out what kind of pizza they would be interested in buying. Overwhelmingly, the customers said they wanted a healthier version, something with more vegetables, better protein, healthier meats, etc. And every time we would introduce one of those, it would be our worst-selling product ever. But when we introduced a pizza with three different kinds of pepperoni on it, it ended up being our best-selling product by a landslide. I think the same is true here. Everybody will say they want colors, but then go look at the cars they drive down the street.

31:59They're all shades of gray, ranging from white to black. Rarely do we see a car with real color, although I admit that trend is slowly changing. I think this is the same phenomenon. Our desires do not match where we are actually willing to spend money. I have no facts to back this up, but I strongly disagree with this. I absolutely— We kind of talked about this exact thing last week. I think maybe I've forgotten that this was upcoming in the next week's follow-up, but the main thing I'll add here, aside from I like the pizza example, is that the difference is that the thing that people do, like the sort of guilty pleasure, give me the one with three different kinds of pepperoni instead of the healthy one, that's colors.

32:35Colors is the three pepperonis. It is the guilty pleasure. You know you shouldn't buy the pink one. You shouldn't buy the pink laptop because it's not appropriate for your video editing needs, but you just love pink so much. You just love pepperoni so much. That's the difference. So that's why I think this example is not apt. Even if it was apt, see last week's episode discussion of you got to make the colorful ones just to get people excited, even if most people are going to buy the gray and they will mostly buy the gray. But anyway, I think the colors of the pepperoni here, uh, people want to indulge in some fun with their laptops.

33:05Uh, and if you put that in front of them, they will take it, even if it's the wrong computer for them, just because they like it so much. Yeah. Because look, there's nothing wrong with like buying or choosing something because you love it. When somebody makes the decision of like, I'm going to buy this pink one because I love it and want it, even though it is in certain technical aspects worse for my needs, that's not necessarily them making a mistake. They could very well know, yes, this other one would be faster, but I don't love it. And that can be enough. When you look at an item that you have and you're like, damn, I love that thing.

33:42Sometimes that's more important to you or to that situation than, well, it would complete this task 20 % faster. like that's and it's a factor that you know nerds like us often don't fully consider or or you know we might forget about it or ignore it or minimize it but when people make that kind of choice they're not necessarily always just doing it out of ignorance of the technical specs they're making a decision that you know what i i care more about the feeling i get when i look at this thing or like it makes me happier like this one makes me happier than this other one that would better fit for many things i mean look i can personally speak to this on a on a slightly different level that like my travel laptop that I use constantly on the train, on the ferry, is a MacBook Air.

34:30For my needs, I've said on the show, the screen not being very bright and not having nanotexture actually really hurts its usability for me. What also hurts its usability for me is the ports only being on one side. And often I run into needing an SD card slot. The MacBook Air doesn't have those. I really probably should use a 14-inch MacBook Pro for that role instead. It has nanotexture. It has the brighter, better screen. It has better speakers when I use those. I also use it for FaceTime workouts, so I use the speakers all the time. It has the ports on both sides. It has the SD card reader. It even has better battery life.

35:08By all accounts, I should be using a 14-inch MacBook Pro, but I still choose the Air. Why? because I love the way it feels when I pick it up. That's it. That's the reason the MacBook Air feels better in my hands. I'm physically strong enough to lift the extra, you know, whatever half pound is the difference like between that and the 14 inch. I can pick up the 14 inch just fine. It's fine. But I choose the Air, even though it is technically substantially worse for my actual needs for that computer because when I pick up a 14-inch MacBook Pro, I don't love it. And when I pick up the Air, I love it.

35:49So these kind of factors matter. That's why the same thing applied to the 12-inch. People love that thing, including Casey. We loved it and we hated it because it felt amazing to pick it up. And it was so small and it was so crappy in so many other ways, but people loved it. And part of it was because it was pink and part of it was because it was super small and thin and it felt great in the hand. And those factors matter a lot. So for Apple to continue to do very well in one area, like the thin and light stuff mattering, they do great in that area. For them to continue to under-deliver or underserve the color market, I think is a missed opportunity because people love colors.

36:31They love computers that have colors. And all of that love that people have for their computer that could be there from it being a fun color, Apple's just leaving that on the table and not serving it. And again, getting back to this analogy, the logical thing of like, you know, you should get the 14 inch because it has the specs that you need. You know what the logical choice is? I should get the food that's healthier for me. I shouldn't eat so much saturated fat. You know, I should get more vegetables on my pizza. The vegetable healthy pizza is the laptop that has the right specs for you. But the one you love is the one with pepperoni.

37:00This is slightly complicated by the fact that, you know, it actually does affect your health badly to get the pizza that you love. Whereas getting a laptop that you love probably won't affect your health. But it's the best I can do with this analogy. Anyway, I think it's basically flipped. We got a couple of anonymous people that wrote in to us with regard to Hydra, H-I-D-R-A, kind of combining their feedback. All Apple SOCs are named after systems on a chip, are named after islands. There's occasionally a subtle reference in the choice of the island, but that's not guaranteed. The processor core names are more varied, although the power and efficiency cores of the same generation often have names that work together.

37:35So some examples. The A14 was Sicily and the M1 was Tonga. The A15 was Ellis. The M2 was Staten. And M2 Pro Max Ultra were Rhodes. A16 was Crete. The M3 was Ibita. And the M3 Pro was Lobos. And the M3 Max Ultra was Palma. When the Pro variant has the same codename as the Max and Ultra variants, the codename gets the CHOP suffix. The Max and Ultra variants get the C-die and 2C-die suffix. But we've already talked about that in past shows. Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page of Apple Codenames. They have a section in the Wikipedia page for the SOCs so you can see it. And we'll, again, put a link that we had in last week as well to that island off the coast of Norway called HIDRA, which I still think sounds like Hydra, but Casey says Hydra.

38:20Well, no, no, you may be right. Now that I know it was unequivocally based on that island, I don't have the faintest idea how to pronounce that word. We don't know this unequivocally. It's just almost certainly. I mean, OK, maybe not unequivocally, but it's based off that island. And so I don't know how that island's name is pronounced. When I was giving you stick about it a couple of weeks ago, it was because I didn't, I thought it was just a alternate spelling of the mythical beast. I didn't realize that there was also the island. So either way, yeah, it sounds like this is, well, I can't say unequivocally, but it is almost certainly.

38:52Almost certainly. Based on the island. And then in front of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr. writes with regard to the M3 and M4 Max and interposers. John, do you want to handle this? Do you want to read this? How do you want to approach it? I can do it. So he, as usual, he provided a giant email, which we cannot include in the show because it's too much information. He provided a bunch of links, most of which are either paywalled or in Japanese. So that kind of hampers our ability to link you to them. We'll put a couple of Japanese ones in there. I tried Google translating on that. But anyway, I'm relying on Jonathan Dietz, a long time contributor to the show to parse these out.

39:23So here are the takeaways. First, and a couple of people wrote about this, a little bit more precision in terms. John wants us to know that the interposer is the piece of silicon that sits between the logic dies and the organic substrate hence the name it is not the name of the interface on the logic dies themselves which is a die to die interface or d numeral 2d d2d for short um i get that uh the reason i always say interposer is just kind of shorthand because it's the thing that the interposer connects to or whatever but yes it is more technically accurate say what we're looking for on these die shots is show me the d2d interface show me the place where the interposer is supposed to connect to this chip because if there isn't one that means this chip isn't wired to connect to an interposer and another chip through it uh so that's what we've been looking for so terminology i'll probably just keep calling the interposer but and maybe i'll be able to switch to d2d we'll see how we go i'll try to during this feedback here anyway uh the next item the m3 max does not have a d2d interface i'll put some links for this uh this is jonathan's interpretation of these links that i either can't see because they're paywall by an expensive thing that i'm going to pay for or they're in japanese uh what in one of the links uh john says all these images show no d2d interface on the m3 max die yet clearly the m3 ultra exists the most likely explanation is that apple made two mask sets one with d2d and one without considering how many fewer ultras they sell ultras they sell their maxes this probably makes sense financially especially considering they committed to volume production on the m3 max very early in the n3 i'm assuming he means m3b uh ramp up so that's the idea the end those rumors were true the m3 max really didn't have a place for an interposer to connect the images weren't just cropped and yet that didn't mean that the m3 ultra wasn't coming because in fact it did arrive although the m3 ultra is actually different in some substantial ways um second item the m4 axe does the m4 max does not have a d2d interface again supported by these articles in japanese that i can't read but i believe it uh now does that mean there'll never be an m4 ultra didn't mean that for the m3 but then again apple said probably every generation will not have an ultra so that's why we're saying no m4 ultra but anyway i guess the uh the practice of looking at the max chip to see if the d2d interface is on the die is not useful so oh well and then finally regarding the reticle limit which is how big a single chip can you make uh given the current process technology uh jonathan said until tsmc starts using the high naeuv there's room for about a 75 area increase beyond the size of the m3 max so on the current process or on the three nanometer process at tsmc we do have a little more room to grow so keep hope alive for those two chips that are bigger than a max stuck together in the M3 or 4 Extreme at WWDC.

42:13And then also John has a spreadsheet that he keeps up to date on Google Sheets if you want to see some facts and figures about Apple Silicon stuff. Then with regard to Apple's multi-OS redesign, John Tatum writes, iOS 7 is a decade old. Oof, gosh, I can't, I can't. Anyway, how long should a theme last on an OS? I'm looking forward to the new look. We can't expect the operating system to be static from a visual standpoint. Also, isn't this a pitch for subscription software? I thought that's why I supported apps in this way so that they could be updated regularly with features, but also with system changes.

42:48Well, so that is part of the reason you need recurring revenue, because there is a certain amount of minimum amount of work you need to do to keep up with the OS upgrade cycle. But it's a question of where you want those resources allocated. You say, I want features, but also want you to keep up with system changes. Well, if a system change is big enough, that could swamp all the features you were going to get. And you may be okay with that, But what usually happens is users think I subscribe to this. So I expect it to be maintained to the level I expect. And then also when there's a system update, that should just come for free.

43:16As in, I still expect the exact same features I always expect. Because from the outside, it doesn't look like updating for the new OS look should be that much work. But it actually is. So it just adds an additional burden. And practically speaking, it can make it, especially for independent developers with small staffs or a single person, make it so you have to halt all feature work and just spend all your time on the system updates before you can resume feature work again yeah and i think also you know first of all i would disagree with the characterization that the theme that we have now is that much like ios 7 because i think it's pretty different you know certainly the the some of the broad strokes are still there so i see why people say this but yeah many if not most of the details are very very different um that being said okay sometimes yes you should redesign things sometimes to keep them fresh but redesigning the os as i mentioned last episode is just incredibly expensive not only on apple but on the entire ecosystem so you have to do you have to enter that very carefully and you have to do it from a position of strength both within apple and into a strong ecosystem and you know as we're going to maybe talk about um do we all think apple has so little else to improve about their software that they can tackle this right now?

44:32And do we trust Apple to do a good job of this right now? I don't know how confident I would be in saying yes to those. And then finally, how do we feel about Apple's position with their developer ecosystem and the ecosystem of iOS apps? When there's a big system redesign, many apps will fall behind. Many apps will take a long time to implement it. And it certainly puts a big burden on those apps, as John was saying, because it is so much work usually to adopt a new system design that whatever features you were hoping that those apps would add this year, they probably won't be able to. Are we doing this at a time when the ecosystem is healthy and robust enough to absorb that burden?

45:13And again, I don't know if I'd confidently say yes to that either. So what we have is this rumored giant redesign from a company that probably should be doing other things with its software engineering resources right now into an ecosystem of developers that are not in the healthiest state, nor is the relationship with Apple in the healthiest state. And the people who would implement such a design at Apple, I'm not sure we have a lot of trust in their taste or abilities to do so, especially on platforms like macOS. That's where the hesitation is coming from here. It's not that we want to hold on to a certain design forever.

45:52It's, you know, changing a design is incredibly expensive and burdensome and risky. and do we trust today's Apple with their priorities and resources to do a good job of this and implement it this year? I don't know. Yeah, it's tough. And obviously what with the developer whole sphere being none too happy with Apple right now, it's a tough time and I don't know how it's going to work out. But I will use this opportunity to plug your podcast with underscore David Smith, where you just had a really good episode about choosing optimism over pessimism, which certainly hit home for me, something that I don't think I do a good job with.

46:37And I think that I need to take Dave's advice to heart for sure. Me too. I was going to say, we know which one of the two hosts of that show that sentiment is coming from. Yeah, and the reality is we're all in this. Like we're all in the Apple ecosystem for most of what most of us do. That is still the overall best choice. In many cases, it's the only choice. So like we're in this no matter what. So I, I hope that this all works out great. I don't want to have to be complaining on our show for the next three years about how the new design broke Mac OS or like, I don't want to be doing that. I want it to be awesome and I'm rooting for it to be awesome.

47:20I'm just concerned that it might not be. And here we are. Like we're in this no matter what. So I hope it works out. All right. As a final follow-up item, macOS Sequoia 15.4 is now, or will have a Mac set up via iPhone. John, you caught this. I think you're the first person I see to catch this, but an excerpt from Apple's press release for the new MacBook Air and also on the Mac Studio, it reads as follows. Next month, macOS Sequoia 15.4 will make it easier than ever to set up the new MacBook Air with iPhone. I hate that it's not the iPhone, but I don't need to open that can of worms again. Anyway, by simply bringing iPhone close to the Mac, oh, it's close to Mac.

48:01God, I hate this so much. Oh my God. Just bring it close to your friend Mac. Right? Users could quickly and conveniently sign into their Apple account to get their files, photos, messages, passwords, and more onto their new MacBook Air. Asterisk requires iOS 18.4 and Mac OS, excuse me, iPad OS 18.4 or later. Yeah, that's an interesting choice. I mean, like so many aspects of the phone setup process are still better than the Mac setup process. And this is kind of like, well, we can kind of help you there. Like, you hate typing in your password. You used to just be able to, you know, use your phone to sign into things.

48:33We can do that. And we kind of need if you could bring your old Mac close to your new Mac and do it. But anyway, baby steps here. I think this will actually improve things a little bit. I wish it was kind of like you would just set up your Mac and it would show you a menu of all your Mac iCloud backups. But, oh, that doesn't exist. So, you know, we'll get there someday. We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place and all on your terms.

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50:56All right, let's talk. There's been a lot of news this last week, and it all started with a post on Daring Fireball. And John Gruber, I guess exclusively, got a statement from Apple with regard to upcoming personalized in Siri Apple intelligence features. And so that post reads, or their comment reads as follows. Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly. And in the past six months, we've made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like typed Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps.

51:40It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate them rolling them out in the coming year. So what this means is all of the stuff that they promised, well, I shouldn't say all, a lot of the stuff they promised at WWDC isn't going to land perhaps this calendar year? What does in the coming year mean? What is year? You want to take bets right now? Ever? I don't know. I mean, the thing about their announcement of Apple Intelligence and all the features that are involved and how they're rolling out in the coming year and stuff like that that they've done that for the past many years with the features and it's just it's real easy to just lose track of which feature that they announced is coming out and which release was that supposed to be in the point one or that one's coming in the point four or like it's just so hard to keep track of that and you just start to kind of just start to forget about it like i think they could actually get away with for a while just like disappearing features like we announced this but we're never going to speak of it again and you'll just forget about it and that would probably work for a lot of this stuff but unfortunately the the main one that they're talking about here in this announcement is like we're going to be later than we thought which is a time that we're not going to define for you but just assume that you whatever you were thinking it was going to be whatever vague thing that we said before whatever you had in your mind about when you were going to get this one flagship feature it's going to be later than that and what is that one flagship feature make siri better that's that's the one they talk about Like there are other things here.

53:09There are other things that they promised that are going to be coming later as well, I'm sure. But it's like the new, more personalized Siri with context awareness. The cool Siri, the better Siri, the improved Siri, the Siri that should have been bundled with the new appearance but wasn't. Right? That thing. That thing that you've been waiting for. Again, we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. Lots of room there for – well, we didn't say they were coming out in the coming year. we said we anticipate rolling them out and rolling them out doesn't mean releasing them it maybe means like doling them rolling them out a piece at a time and the coming year could mean 365 days from the time you got this announcement or it could mean the end of calendar year or it could be the fiscal year could be the lunar year we don't know uh anyway the upshot is uh things are taking longer than they thought uh apple ai and that announcement and that release so that uh to that release of statement to Gruber, uh, triggered a, a crisis of faith in our friend, John Gruber.

54:10And he, uh, he, he had a lot to say about that on his website. He did, uh, the whole post, it is a little bit on the longer side for Gruber, but it is worth it. Every word was really, really good. I mean, Gruber, man, when he, when he is on, he is so freaking on. But anyways, uh, John pulled a couple of quotes from this, uh, one of which I went to poll and then realize that John beat me to it. This is Syracuse, so that is. But anyways, reading from John Gruber, in the two decades I've been in this racket, I've never been angrier myself for missing a story than I am about Apple's announcement on Friday that the more personalized Siri features of Apple intelligence scheduled to appear between now and WWDC would be delayed until the coming year.

54:51I should have my head examined. This announcement dropped as a surprise and certainly took me by surprise to some extent, but it was all there from the start. I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn't see what should have been very clear to me from the start. How I missed this is twofold. First, I'd been lulled into complacency by Apple's track record of consistently shipping pre-announced products and features. Second, I was foolishly distracted by the Apple Intelligence brand umbrella. Apple Intelligence doesn't exist as a single thing or project.

55:23It's a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services. Then later on in the same post, it's easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing we need to show something that only Apple can do. At WWDC last year. But it turns out they announced something that Apple couldn't do. Sick burn. And now they look so far, so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state of the art in AI, but they don't even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven't shipped, but still haven't even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can't be demonstrated because they don't work.

56:05Yeah, so this big post, which has gotten a lot of attention, it is framed like that. The first passage you read, I believe, is the very start of the post. It is framed as, and I think substantially is, mostly a post about John Gruber's personal disillusionment and uh and kicking himself for missing the signs that were there that um he should have expected that they weren't going to deliver what they were said going to deliver based on everything that he had seen about them and as he said like how did he miss it he was just like well they always say they're going to do stuff in the coming year and they always do so why wouldn't they do it this time and then like i said before apple intelligence well they just amount so much stuff and like some stuff shipped with the point oh and then some stuff was coming later and eventually you just kind of lose track of like which things were supposed to be coming when and are they late or are they early and which things do they demonstrate for real he does a lot of things thing in the post about talking about things that they demo uh things that are in the video things that they demo where an apple person holds a device and shows someone from the press and then things where the press gets to touch it and things where the public gets to touch like the different levels of like doneness and when the software is released so um i think the post is worth reading to get an idea of kind of the nuts and bolts of how things are judged in this way uh now i did read it thinking a lot that this post really was a lot more about gruber than it was say about uh the three of us or a lot of other people who are i think constitutionally more skeptical and grumpy about apple than gruber is let's say i i mean if you are an atp listener you probably heard lots of skepticism about all things ai including apple intelligence and maybe less so if you if you have been reading uh daring fireball because he seemed to believe these were coming uh more they're more likely to be coming but there's one one angle on this that i haven't heard mentioned that i'm kind of glad no one brought up uh so i now since this was what put out like last week sometime now it's time to talk about an atp and that's this it's another one of my hobby horses so you might not be surprised to hear me talk about it but lots of times apple will announce a feature and then like sometimes it's not in the first beta back before they got into the habit of saying this will be this will be released in the coming year remember when just the features weren't in the first wwc build like there was many years of that where it's like huh weird like the feature they demonstrate it's not actually in this build but they tell me in a future build it'll be in it so you're at wwc you're doing stuff you're like i'd really love to use that feature but i guess it's not in this build but it'll you know when we all go home the next build it'll have the feature and then it was then we entered the it was a couple years where that happened then we entered a couple years where it was like um this will be coming out in the coming years it's not even going to be in the 0.0 and then of course this thing where it's like it's not going to be it's just not going to make the year period uh but i think there's a a specific difference between apple intelligence at all of the past things and it doesn't have to do with something being rotten and cupertino and like the whole thing of like who who inside apple said uh that we should announce this and other people said we shouldn't it's not ready and someone insisted on it and stuff like that because i think again i don't know for sure but i think from the outside that I know multiple decades at Apple, they have had someone in a position of power saying, we're going to announce this, even though it's not ready.

59:17And things have been just super not ready. Just, you know, some of them didn't exist at all. Some of them barely existed. Just like that is not a new phenomenon. It is not as if suddenly Apple of today has, uh, has done something that has never done before they used to be so good about making sure that they wouldn't announce a product unless they sure it was going to ship um for in the software realm and i don't think that's the case i think this is the case that they would always do that they would always aggressively announce things that absolutely were not ready but they were saved by the fact that it most of the time you could you know burn out your employees and and work them real hard and get it to the point where you could ship something and very often that something it would ship super broken but they would fix it afterwards that happened a lot where a feature would be announced and we didn't unbeknownst to us it was just so massively far behind inside apple and we would kind of get a feel of that because you're like wow this is super broken in the beta did you notice this doesn't work at all in the beta like i mean whatever maybe you know obviously the beta is we get her behind what apple does so it's probably better inside there but it turns out no it was a disaster inside apple too and even though our beta was older their current ones inside the company were still broken and they'd be broken right up to 0.0 release day and sometimes they'd be broken in 0.0 and then we get fixed and we would just forget about it and all goes fine but that only works this is the difference that only works if you're working on a piece of software that you can fix by having programmers find and fix bugs in it let me just think of like what is the one that marco regrets putting on his thing when they had notification center for like ios 5 or something yep me too how super broken that was ios 5 beta 1 i'll never live it down nope it was a mess there have been mac os 10 releases where like the release of wwc was just super broken in lots of different ways uh back in the mac os 10 days even in mac os days right the difference all those is you can imagine a team just going heads down and being like all right it's broken but you know smop simple matter of programming by putting in too long hours and working ourselves too hard and regretting all of our poor planning and regretting the aggressive deadline set impossible deadline set to us set for us by our bosses especially back in the Steve Jobs day when he'd be like just do it it's got to be ready for WWDC right they would make it happen with Apple intelligence here's the difference they can't do that with LLM type stuff this is what I was saying snarkily when and I'm surprised more people didn't call me on it because technically you can think that it's not entirely accurate if interpreted in a certain way remember when I said when they got the bad notification summaries I was like why don't they just fix it because their announcement was like oh we'll disable it or whatever and we'll work on this why don't they just fix it.

1:01:58It's a bug. Why don't you fix it? Because they can't fix it. And I didn't mean they can't as it will never be better, or it's impossible to fix. I meant they can't fix that as in you can't have the team come in and work over the weekend and get, you know, notification summaries to stop making mistakes. In the same way, you can't tell everybody, well, just work harder on it and make the LLM not make mistakes anymore. Because nobody knows how to do that. And it's like the LLM is a bucket of numbers and it takes time and energy to train it and your iteration cycle is long and it takes huge amounts of money and they're using other people's foundation models or they're using their foundation models that were made a long time ago it's not a simple matter of programming you can't just go find the bugs fix the bugs you know trim off the features that you're not going to you can't treat it like regular software developing lm powered systems is like trying to introduce you know a dragon so use more dragon analogies into your tech stack it's like well it you can't really tell it what to do and it's hard to understand and there's lots of weird stuff going on inside there but it's super important and powerful that's why i think they missed on apple intelligence it's not because they made a judgment call that was worse than previous ones they had made it was a bad judgment call and but they've made bad ones before it's because they did not have the ability to recover from or rise to the challenge of a typical uh aggressive timeline because that's not how development with llms work like think if you were on that team they told you well the llm keeps making mistakes fix it and you're like but um yeah like i'm i'm on the team that makes the ui for siri and or like i just i don't i can't the lm does what do we have should we train a new model like has is anyone else have an error rate that we would find acceptable like there's an article about this it says like uh the the uh what do you call the pep talk that they were giving to the siri team and everything and the rumors that the error rate was like it was getting 80 things correct and 20 wrong it's like well just you know just come in on weekends and fix that 20 no one knows how to do that it's you cannot program your way out of this hole and that that i think is at the the foundation of the whole llm powered product scenario and how it has just slammed head-on into apple's need to ship something that they think is satisfactory combined with their typical decades-long habit of setting incredibly aggressive goals and then trying to rise to meet them.

1:04:20In this case, they simply could not and cannot for a technical reason. So what do they do about it? Do they just bail entirely? Do they just delay, delay, delay? What do you suggest they do? I think if there was kind of a strategic error here is not recognizing that this difference exists. Thinking like just in the same way that we just set aggressive goals in the notification center and people come in on weekends and they fix it, we'll just do that again. Not realizing that nobody has figured out how to make the thing you want to make to the level that you want to make it. You want Siri to be smarter and do all this stuff, but you also want it to not tell people to put glue on their pizza and not make mistakes and do this and do that.

1:04:55And it's like, okay, well, has anyone else done that? And the answer is no. The people, other people ship products where that is acceptable or like an expectation. When you talk to ChatGPT, you know it's going to have BS information. You know it's going to be wrong or whatever. But Apple's like, we're going to use it to enhance our voice assistant and it'll be able to do all these amazing things and control your apps and nowhere in they they say oh and don't worry 20 of the time they'll do the wrong thing with your app but i'm sure it'll be fine like they're just like when we do it it will be better somehow but they didn't have a way to do it so they should have recognized that how do they you know what could they have done differently they should have said like this technology lm based technology we have to deploy it in ways where its current capabilities are fit for the need and there are ones like we said this always said this you can enhance siri a lot with existing llm capabilities the example i always give back in the the day when we're talking about this is have the llm figure out what the heck the user is trying to say and have it translated into the stilted fixed limited syntax that that siri requires behind the scenes so that at the very least you can do simple things like the one i just saw fly by before we started recording is uh hey dingus what month is it and siri blows this so bad like you can phrase it seven different ways and it just doesn't know there's probably a right way to ask it have the lm sit in front figure out when people are asking what month it is translate it into siri speak and how you know like there are ways you can use the technology to enhance your products i think they use it they use the lm type stuff uh what they then called transformer models for to improve autocomplete and granted people still have complaints about how it works but it was way worse before they added the transformer model they need they needed to like everyone else in the industry needed to deploy this new technology according to what it can do not what people say they think it might someday be able to do like have a clear-eyed view of what can this actually do in particular have a clear-eyed view of given its capabilities if you if it makes mistakes or you want to improve it what does it take to do that do you have to spend 100 million dollars to retrain a model are you going are you trying to you telling your people your your understaffed team to do something that literally no one else in the entire world has ever been able to do, which is make an LLM that doesn't make mistakes.

1:07:06So I think they were kind of set up for failure here. And in the end, it is on leadership, like the team can't help with this or whatever. But that's why I think they missed this. It makes Gruber feel any better. I would say it's the same mistake leadership always makes with respect of setting too aggressive deadlines. The mistake they made was industry wide. I think everyone in the industry just looks at LLMs and just like closes their eye to the limitations and just says, it'll do like they they take the uh what is it like uh instagram is other people's highlight reel right and you're comparing it to your whole life lots of people are comparing their product ambitions to llm's highlight reel the highlight reel for ellums is real great but that's not the whole story yeah it's it's tough i mean i i feel i feel especially for the rank and file because obviously i think it's pretty clear they're doing everything they can they're trying their hardest and everyone, including the three of us, is kind of pooping all over it.

1:08:04But it's bad. It's not good. I mean, Siri's been not good for a long time. And I feel like we've given the benefit of the doubt to Siri to a degree for, what, 10, 12 years? When was it? Was it the iPhone 4 or something like that? 2011. Yeah. I mean, it's longer than Declan's been alive. I mean, it's been a long time. And Siri should have gotten better by now. And it just hasn't. Oh, I know. I talked about it as an upgrade, too. but it's worth uh re-mentioning here is i just think i just saw someone mentioned in the chat they were complaining about uh gruber's conclusion let me just scroll and to make sure they're complaining about the thing they think they're complaining about um yeah so this i yeah jason and i talked about this the there are the leak of the meeting with the siri team it was like one of the one of the managers of the siri team not the big wigs or whatever one of the people talking to the team and trying to reassure them and say we've done some great things we work real hard it's a shame that has to be delayed yada yada and i gruber brought up the same thing that i think i brought up a couple weeks ago just because we have the same set of experiences and cliches in our head about apple i think it was in the context of siri maybe you too well i'm asking why am i asking casey when i brought up the mobile me thing wasn't like two or three shows ago where i was like remember the mobile me meeting where steve jobs asks like what is mobile be supposed to do and then the person answers and says why the f doesn't it do this um gruber is all for like he was upset that there was this meeting this all hands meeting where they were trying to console the team and tell them we've done amazing things we just need to work harder blah blah blah he feels like that what should have happened in that meeting is you should have had a steve jobs like figure up there saying oh the why the f doesn't siri do what it's supposed to do like you that they you know that it wasn't appropriate to try to puff up or encourage the siri team they need to be yelled at uh and jason and i both agreed having worked in large companies much more than gruber has that that's not how you that's not how you lead a team uh you don't want to go in there and yell at people.

1:09:53Steve Jobs is a jerk. That is not the best way to lead people. It's not to say that you should like tell them that everything's great and say you did a great job and everyone is wrong to say things are bad. You have to be clear eyed and say we all know we are not not working up the potential. We know we have not met our own standards for excellence here. But you don't yell at them. You don't say why the F doesn't do that. You're a bunch of losers. You should be ashamed of yourself and you should they already feel bad. Believe me, everyone on the series teams already feels bad like they know what's out there and they know that what siri is like there is a balance to be struck between being honest and clear-eyed with your employees and just yelling at them i think in an upgrade i compared it to uh when a puppy makes a poop in the house and you shove the dog's nose in it that is a bad way to treat a dog that is a bad way to train a dog and that's a bad way to treat a human and that's not leadership uh so i also disagree with that final paragraph it may be from the outside it may be cathartic for us to imagine the people who are screwing up the technology that we care about get yelled at or something but that's not that's not the way to treat people and that's not that's not even the best way to lead it's not like we should do it because it would be mean to them it produces subpar results it's better to be a leader and to rally them to do better next time while being honest about how far they are behind right don't sugarcoat it but don't be mean i mean yeah and i think that's there is kind of a cultural challenge there sometimes where like you can give honest feedback to people you can say like hey this isn't this isn't working this isn't good enough like you can say that without being a jerk without yelling at them without berating them and you can make drastic changes too like don't just say oh it's business as usual like by all means uh fire people who are in charge change the structure of the organization do something radically different we're not saying just keep doing what you're doing yeah exactly and and i think it is very important you know we we have seen over the last, I don't know, at least five years, we've seen very much a kind of like support the troops attitude coming out of Apple.

1:11:51What that results in is Apple excusing itself for things being really hard or the team having worked really hard on something and using that as an excuse that we should not talk about it's not good enough and i think that's a bs excuse that is like and i think you can you can see that as being bs while also not wanting to yell at people and berate them and be a jerk to them i think those are different things yeah like that's one of the good things that steve jobs was good at in that this is a thing you won't see modern apple do and i think it was a good manifestation of his jerkiness uh and i think it was brought up in the same article here was like he shouldn't be in there yelling at people and being mean to them right but he also when he like for example when he rolled out iCloud what he said on stage is like iCloud you're saying this is from the team that brought us mobile me why should I trust them like why should I trust there's these are the losers who brought us mobile me and modern apple would never denigrate one of its past things even if everybody in the world knows it was sucky that despite that it's still coming from a position of Steve Jobs being mean, being honest about your own past failings to the public is also an important part of building trust and leadership because Apple is so allergic to ever implying that anything they have ever done in the past is less than wonderful.

1:13:16They'll always say the new thing, we love the new thing, but they'll never, they'll never even just admit, like, it's like, everybody knows Siri sucks. You not saying that to us and not acknowledging it to us in public, acknowledging that you know that we know that you're behind on this you don't have to do it in a mean way but by not doing it all it really gives the impression like just you said that it was just like nope everything's fine right we don't know what goes on inside the company i'm sure that people are yelling at each other in big boardrooms and stuff right because that's just the way it is in any company but the inability to be honest with your public about your past mistakes does not build trust like it's that that is the take it's taking press uh you know uh public relations too far to say we just need to be disciplined we never need to denigrate our best products whatever sometimes you have to admit yeah old series sucked uh and we think the new one is great and here it is well and i think it's hard for us to trust recently first of all that apple stuff will work the way they say it will because of things like this like look how many things have they demoed in a keynote in the last five years that looked really cool and like it was going to really solve a problem, people, and then you get the real thing and you're like, well, never really panned out all the way or it's not as useful as they said or it doesn't work as well as they said it would.

1:14:32This is not the first example. This is just probably the biggest and most egregious one. But we can look at recent, and I don't mean just this past year, like the last 10 years, look at Apple over a recent period. They do seem to be able to fix things very, very, very slowly. And it seems like the feedback loop, for whatever reason, between Apple putting something out there that is broken or doesn't land well or is poorly received and them fixing it is very long. It's like retraining an LLM. Maybe Apple's one giant LLM. They can never get it exactly right, but they will eventually improve things.

1:15:13It just takes so long to retrain and hundreds of millions of dollars of us buying iPhones. Yeah. Yeah. And like they do have substantial cultural problems. We can see just the surface level of like there is a culture in this company of such arrogance and such hubris that they not only misread the room a lot and with increasing frequency. And I put that right on Tim Cook. They misread the room constantly. But then when they do ship something that is not very good or poorly received or doesn't work, it seems to take a very long time to fix that. That is a problem. And so I think this is kind of – the Siri delay is kind of a culmination of an example of that.

1:16:03In terms of what it will look like in the public, how much will it damage Apple? I think it's not going to end the company or anything. however i do think they have a false advertising class action lawsuit probably coming their way yeah that was another thing that we didn't mention is like that the apple pulled the ads uh they had ads advertising features that they now know are going to ship even later than they thought so first of all they ran the ads before the features were released that has also happened in the past but usually when apple thinks those things are imminent so that was another bad call on their part but just like gruber i think inside apple they were like yeah but this always happens it's always it's always a shambles and we always just work real hard and it comes out so run the ads uh and again they think the mistake here was this time you can't just go in there and fix the bugs and it will work you're you don't have a path to your destination you don't know how to get there you can't just have people work harder on it and that came back to bite so they literally pulled the ads they ran the ads for what how long how many months months we've been seeing these ads about apple intelligence features that don't exist and haven't been released and instead of saying well we'll just keep running the ads till it release now they just stop running the ads and yeah if someone complains hey i bought an iphone because of xyz they'll probably just say oh there was a fine print at the ad that says features not year release blah blah blah professional driver closed course but like literally even that that is false advertising if you advertise you know this is what the iphone 16 can do go buy one and then you go buy one and it doesn't do that that's false advertising coming soon to the iphone 16 maybe uh yeah it depends on the yeah well i'm sure someone will file it so apple is never at a loss for class action lawsuits yeah and i mean this i mean look they get a lot of class actions that are bs i don't think this would be bs i think this would be warranted that we are going to get like 31 checks like with the keyboards that ad should never have aired there's multiple it wasn't just one ad it's more than yes the entire ad campaign for the iphone 16 line has been all about apple intelligence mostly about features that aren't really there.

1:18:04This is a big problem for them. Why is it that they chose to run these ads that are pretty false advertising? I think they thought they would be done. It would be a little late, but they'd work hard and they'd come out. But then how did that it is inexcusable. This is the one time that they didn't realize they were dealing with a different beast. That it is not just a bunch of Objective-C and Swift code that controls UI and so on and so forth. That's not what it is. It's a fundamental old technological problem that literally no one in the world has solved which is how can we make this lm stop being stupid yeah but and that no no amount of extra weekends would fix it and that's the problem like certainly like somewhere there was a series of massive failures inside the company for that to not be communicated or heard by the top people or realize that's what i think a lot of people really i mean maybe not the at the rank and file but as you go up the levels, I think a lot of people, a lot of people in this whole industry really believe in their guts that, yeah, LMS make some mistakes, but hand wave, hand wave, it's probably mostly fine, right?

1:19:07Like I see it all the time where people will talk about them as if these are not problems or as if the problems are so trivial that surely they'll be solved by tomorrow. And tomorrow keeps coming and coming and coming and they're not solving. People keep talking about them like these problems don't exist. And I bet a lot of levels inside the company have gotten that picked up that that sort of overall like consensus within the industry that lms are always on the verge of not having these silly problems of course we'll solve this problem real soon glue on pizza haha that was last year but we don't have that problem anymore you still do yeah but there seems to be a bigger problem than that like i think you're right that is a problem with lms that like we we i think the entire industry is still battling with however what was the problem inside of apple that led them to advertise, to demo a feature that seems like it was probably a totally faked demo, to advertise a whole new iPhone line based on this feature, to run TV commercials based on a feature that seems like it probably doesn't exist or at least is nowhere near shippable and might never be shippable.

1:20:14It seems like this is the result of so many cultural problems of the company in this era. And look, I don't know if it's a Tim Cook thing specifically, but it's the Tim Cook era of Apple. This is an era of huge growth of the company, lots of levels of management and bigger expansion and big departments and everything. There is a problem there. There is a significant cultural problem there that the people at the top seem to not have a good feedback mechanism for when things are ready, for what will be ready, for how things are advertised, how things are shown and setting expectations to the public and even maybe to themselves.

1:20:51It seems like the deepest problem here is that the people at the top of Apple today don't seem, and this goes right back to Siri, they don't seem to have a good idea of what sucks about what they ship or about what they are doing. Which is very common in all big companies and used to be less common in Apple. They were an anomaly in that regard. The quote I was trying to remember on Upgrade, which I just looked up now, is the Upton Sinclair clode uh it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him his not understanding uh slightly gendered there but uh anyway um the idea that if you're in it if you're in charge of the software you know group or whatever it behooves you to sort of manage upward and make sure that the people above you think that everything's going okay in the group that you manage because things if things aren't going okay well then you're not doing a good job and just repeat that for every single level in an org chart and it takes a lot of effort to combat that to be honest to be willing to say asap uh you know this is not working and you know we've had you know since since 2011 the entire pre-llm series and evidence of like this is not working but that information was not getting up to the highest level to reprioritize it and we talked about that last week but with lms in particular like the other factor that i bet people have already sent us feedback about if they're listening to this now you should always wait till you hear the end of the episode is that uh lms and the ai revolution put an extra amount of pressure on apple like like we said last week with like the uh you know is this the time to do an os redesign when there's this ai disaster but like apple felt the heat oh ai stuff is happening and it's kind of happening without us and whatever three years ago that craig fitterie to his credit noted that it was happening and got apple to scramble you know the the best time to figure that out craig was you know three years earlier than you did but the second best time was then i've kind of mangled that one but anyway he figured it out late but he did say oh we got to get on top of this and he pivoted everybody the whole company pivoted to ai everything and they did it late but that added extra pressure and that is another contributing factor like why run these ads why do this thing why did you feel like you had to do this like like i said i don't think it's that far out of bounds they do that all the time but also why did you feel the extra pressure so maybe the feedback did come up that was like you know this actually is different it's not the same as just whipping together some widgets and some buttons and making it work this is actually different by nature and the countervailing force was yeah but but ai like it's we're going to look like we're we're behind the times if we don't make a big splash wwc 2024 with apple intelligence and so all those factors combined to make it so that they were highly motivated to announce things that weren't ready which again they've done many times in the past but also against the advice of people who i'm sure said from below this is different this time not only is it not ready it's not going to be ready next week or next month or actually we have no idea how to do this and they said ship it anyway and yeah that's that's part of the uh problem of uh leadership and it is one of the weaknesses of tim cook as somebody who necessarily and i think wisely given his skill set delegates a lot of this stuff to his subordinates uh in the steve jobs thing he always considered himself the arbiter of like look i'll tell you what when it's good or it's bad right uh you know he'll look at it let me let me see the stuff we were supposed to be announcing a few months before nope that's no good go back to the drawing board like he had no problem being decisive when when he fixed his gaze upon something to decide is this up to apple quality or not tim cook should not do that because he can't do that because that's not where his skills lie so he has wisely delegated that to his subordinates but unfortunately his subordinates are motivated to make it look like they're not screwing up so which is a big problem um yeah and it's true of every company like they understand this i'm saying it's like oh they don't know how to like everybody in every company knows this it's just it's just so hard to fight against it and apple does probably one of the best jobs of any large company in fighting against this but sometimes it's just not enough like you're you're you're battling the tide here like you know you don't want to make it seem like you're not doing a good job at your job but part of your job is also being honest but like and because tim cook is never going to and shouldn't like override his subordinates and say uh you think you've told me this is good enough but i disagree like maybe he does that occasionally when it's really clear but i think he'd be mad at that subordinate like it's not where his skills lie so at least he knows enough to not be to not be like the pretendee steve jobs and be making product decisions at every level of the org chart has reached steve jobs just reach down to the lowest level of the org chart and tell someone to change a button or whatever because that's what he could do all the way up to the highest level of this is no good like i think when gruber was talking about this on one of his shows like that uh that mobile me was terrible and steve jobs maybe just didn't even pay attention to it because he thought like this will be fine but as soon as it was released and it was bad suddenly he paid attention to it it got better real fast because he would say this is not good enough and we're going to do better and the next thing we release is not going to be released until i say it's good enough um unfortunately he was dying at that point but you know even then uh anyway i it's it's a difficult situation like this all these things everything that has happened in the past let's say three or four years has really slowly swayed me to the opinion that uh certain features certain features of the leadership of apple have probably like been there too long and we need some fresh blood in here because a lot of the decisions that just seem unchangeable that seem to not be moving over time you just got to get some new opinions in there at the highest level because i feel like the the same old team they have the same old strengths they always did but they also have the same old weaknesses and i would like to like to see some turnover there yeah i think i think we have gotten all the value we're going to get out of a lot of the upper leadership and it's time for a generational turnover like yeah and they're all they're all so wealthy go on vacation like retire like you have you can live i know it's hard like when you are an important person at an important company doing work that you love like i'm not saying like you should just retire and just do nothing at a beach all the time because they love their jobs like i get that um but yeah sometimes sometimes you just need some fresh ideas like there's a reason why when a company is in trouble they bring in new people they don't just ask the existing people to do different things and if you really want to see something really different like a different attitude towards developers a different attitude toward third-party integration a different attitude towards regulations in the eu i'm sorry if you're expecting us to talk about this stuff but we'll probably get to it next week or something um or a different you know being on top of industry trends instead of following them or knowing what to do with AI, sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes.

1:27:23It doesn't mean everybody needs to leave or people need to be fired or whatever, but it does mean you need people, new people need to have a seat at the table. Yeah. I want to slightly disagree with something you had said earlier. I think that the Siri team knows full well that Siri's a pile of garbage. I really do. There is a lot of stuff that - I said that, didn't I? I thought you said that they were not so convinced, but - No, I said the Siri team knows it sucks. But anyway, continue. I agree with you. Do you think the leadership knows it sucks? Honest question. Because like it's like, I mean, look, I'm sure a huge part of this is just marketing.

1:27:57You know, Apple's never going to say their products aren't very good. So when Apple talks about and when Apple executives talk about how amazing Siri is, like they seem like they might believe it. But do you think like do they know how bad it is? I think they've I think it's like they obviously they know it's worse than they say in public because that's their job. Do they? I'm not sure they know that. Right. I'm pretty sure that's the case. like because who has private conversations with them about only people inside apple so they know it's worse than they say in public but i also think that the pressure of putting a brave face on things has slowly convinced them that it's actually not as bad as it really is so it's like in between like it's that's what i think i think like if you ask craig federee about the quality of siri he said he would say it's not as good as it should be uh but he doesn't have full grasp of exactly how bad it is i disagree and see i disagree with you there and part of the reason I disagree with you is that Siri freaking sucks.

1:28:50It sucks. Like there's you, I can imagine a scenario like Apple maps, which to me is the quintessential, the only place in the world that matters is Silicon Valley and Apple maps works great in Silicon Valley. So it must work great everywhere. And they knew it sucked. I'm not so sure they knew it. Steve jobs made a forestall sign an apology for a little bit, but I feel like, uh, even in casual conversation with people that I know inside Apple. And this is not like me digging for information or anything like that. But early on in Maps, maybe not the first year when I think everyone knew it sucked, but like after the first year or two, it started to be real good in Silicon Valley, but it was still trash everywhere else.

1:29:32And Apple, I feel Silicon Valley broadly and Apple particularly are real bad about like, oh, well, it works in my backyard, so it must be the same way everywhere, right? And it's not. And so it, so maps got good in Silicon Valley and then they just assumed it was great everywhere. And it's not, or it wasn't. That was, that was part of the story then. Like the, the, the story was, Hey, maps used to not be good, but we're, we've improved it and now it's getting better. And what they wanted this, what Apple PR wanted the story to be was Apple maps is now good enough or Apple maps is now as good as Google maps.

1:30:04Like they were pushing that story for years and years afterwards, well before it was true, because that's what they wanted the story to be to write finally apple max you know do you remember the spate of stories it was like hey you may have dismissed apple maps because it always sucked but have you looked at it lately actually i looked at apple maps and it's actually almost as good as google maps and in fact it's better in these ways do you remember those stories oh absolutely that is that is a product of good pr right and but they were trying to push those stories and they were pushing them well before it was true and that's what you're getting at casey you'd be like why do i hear from all these apple people that actually apple maps is as good as google maps now it's not don't they know it's not and some of them didn't because the story gets pushed so hard both internally and externally that we we're going to reach this goal we're going we know we're bad now we're going to make it better and that is one of sort of those useful fictions that motivates people i think that's part of what helped apple improve maps by having the people working on it think they were always sort of asymptotically approaching uh being as good as google maps and it took them like you know a decade or whatever and i would say they're getting close now um but yeah like exactly how clear-eyed or is everybody in the stack about how good things are in some ways it doesn't really it's not doesn't matter how good or bad the rank and file think it is if they think it's better than it is or worse than it is or whatever it's the decision makers that matter and the decision makers i think like i stand by what i said before like i think decision makers are always going to put a braver face on it in public what they what they think internally is closer to the truth but there there still is like the sort of the the repetition and optimism that is required by their position can't help but influence in their heart of hearts to skew their perception of it to be slightly less accurate.

1:31:42Like that it's not, they don't realize the full extent of how bad it is, but they're closer to it than they would ever seem in their public statements. And I broadly agree with you, but I never quite finished my thesis here, which is with Apple Maps, you could be in a bubble where it works great. And Silicon Valley loves to think they're the only bubble that matters and that everything, you know, if it works here, it works everywhere. And that's just not true. But when you're in Silicon Valley and you're using Apple Maps and everything's working great, you can convince yourself easily that Apple Maps is great.

1:32:10The difference between that and Siri is that Siri freaking sucks and it sucks everywhere. Maybe it works great in Silicon Valley. No way. I know you're being silly, but no. I can't even acknowledge that. It knows what month it is there. Well, actually, to use a term of art recently, Siri sucks multimodally. It actually sucks in many different ways. like it sucks in this is suck in agentic ways this is agentic sucking yeah it really it figures out new ways to suck all the time i mean what what month is it is a new one for me i hadn't heard that one before like it's real bad you know it sucks in you know first of all just outright performance like it it sucks in speed it sucks in reliability it sucks in consistency it sucks in intelligence let me let me jump in real quick apologies for interrupting but something i've been meaning to whine about on the show for at least a couple months now.

1:33:01I use Siri a lot in the car because I use CarPlay. I'm not even in the car that much, but I feel like almost always when I'm in the car, I'm interacting with Siri. I don't know exactly when this started. I want to say it was definitely during iOS 18, but it might've been a point release. But when I'm using CarPlay, I will be looking at a list of messages or the people who have sent me messages, and I'll tap on one of those names. Let's say Aaron. And so I'll tap on Aaron's name. And then the animation comes up. Aaron said, it's what is taking so long? It takes an eternity. And this is what I'm talking about.

1:33:38If you ever interact with Siri, if you ever interact with Siri, you know, it's a pile of sheep. It's I'm sorry. It's just, it's awful. You can't even read a text message on the device without a five to 10 second delay. It's awful. And that's the difference between Apple Maps and Siri. Apple Maps on occasion is, well, I'm making it sound like I don't like Apple Maps. I actually think it's really excellent. And I almost never use Google Maps or Waze or anything like that. But in the early days, there was a place where Apple Maps was great in certain pockets and it was trash everywhere else. Siri is trash everywhere.

1:34:16How could you possibly convince yourself that that's not true? I'd also like to say that Siri is now listening to me and it said serious trash everywhere. How could you possibly blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So my phone is in front of me and decided to start listening. It's garbage. And when I start dictating text messages to people, you know, thankfully it says, you know, sent with Siri or whatever on the receiving end. But then I'll go back after I'm not driving and look at these messages and they're freaking unintelligible. And some of that is on me because I don't have the best diction and I don't pronounce everything exactly perfectly.

1:34:49but a lot of that is Siri just coming out of left field with things that just aren't even close to what I said and I just I cannot fathom anyone who ever interacts with Siri thinking it's anything other than a pile of trash it isn't a pile of trash in simple ways it's a pile of trash and ever growing new and developing ways and it really like I don't know how much Apple realizes maybe they do now but how much they realize like first of all how much it holds back their products And then second of all, the reputation they have squandered by using the term Apple intelligence when and how they did.

1:35:28So first of all, Siri holding back their products. The entire HomePod, okay, that was a hobby, whatever. Maybe they didn't sell that many of them. Oh, well. How about the Vision Pro? They didn't sell many of those either. But the Vision Pro could be a lot easier to navigate if Siri was better. Did you try changing the volume using Siri, by the way, when you were watching the Metallica thing? Honestly, I never even considered that. They didn't just turn the volume up 10%. Does that work? It would have been faster than what I was trying to do with my hand. I don't know. I was just wondering. It didn't even occur to you to try it.

1:35:59Right. Well, because I have learned over and over and over again, don't trust Siri. And here's the thing. I use Siri every single day for something. I use it all the time. It's not like I tried it once and never again. I use it all the time. that's part of why it fails for me all the time because it fails a large percentage of the time and I use it all the time I mostly use it for like reminders but it fails so much and it fails in ever-changing ways and this holds back the products and Apple has a very locked down ecosystem everywhere so that no one else can make voice assistants that plug into their platforms but if somebody could I think it would be better for everyone I think if there was an API for a voice assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever else to just plug in and take over as your assistant, it would do a better job and it would be more consistent and it would be faster.

1:36:55It would develop faster. This is not Apple's strength. And they have shown over and over again that they don't have either the will or the talent to make it their strength. So that's a pretty big problem. Now, the Apple intelligence marketing and name, this was their chance to start over, to say, you know what, we're in a new era now, an LLM powered era. We have all these great assistants coming out now and great LLM capabilities coming out all across the industry, as we can see from the other ones. And Apple used the term Apple intelligence. Now, I said last summer when they unveiled that it's a bit of a marketing risk because they're putting they have this great term they're putting their name right on it and the last thing they want like i was i was saying it better be good because the last thing they should want is for the term apple intelligence to come to mean something bad to have a negative connotation because that just looks so bad for them to have used the name Apple Intelligence and then for it to suck.

1:38:03Well, guess where we are right now. I think right now that the Apple Intelligence is associated with an image playground and Genmoji features that people used once and thought it was dumb and the text summarization features which most people don't use but work okay. Oh, I disagree very strongly. I don't think, but here's the thing, by not releasing the better Siri, I think they have staved off the whole Apple Intelligence is dumb. Right now people are just saying Siri is dumb, but they've been saying that for ages i i don't like i don't think apple intelligence has made that much of an impact despite apple trying to claim that it drives sales in the places where it's available and blah blah blah uh just because the features that have actually shipped to customers hands are so slight and don't really make a difference in people's lives like like my kids i i have apple intelligence my kids have apple intelligence my wife does i've never seen any of them use any of the features so as far as they're aware it doesn't exist but i really think that what most people associate with apple intelligence now is just the iphone 16 with the new siri animation and the summarize notifications that suck that's what most people see some some people like the group group like i do i like a group like the summarize notifications i like them sometimes but not like a lot they do screw up a lot i i agree that it has not it has not buffed the brand It's just not like, oh, Apple intelligence is a thing that everybody loves.

1:39:27I think it is slightly negative, slightly on the negative side of neutral. But it is not as disastrous as it would have been if they had rolled out an LM Siri that was touted as the new smart Siri but was even dumber. And the thing is, Siri is in such a hole, it's going to be difficult to roll out something that is actually worse. but but really like i think because look if people they see the ads that have been spreading the term apple intelligence for months they go they have a new iphone they get an iphone 16 they see the new siri animation which is not new siri but they see a new siri animation and this phone has apple intelligence allegedly and they see some notifications so to them that looks like okay this is it this is apple intelligence it's just not it's just not impressive to them like yeah it seems about the same when they're right it is about the same that's and apple blew it they blew that marketing term they're blowing their credibility even more like it's this is such a flub like how did this happen like i said they had the pressure to uh announce something say they weren't falling behind in a yada yada like it's just it's it's a confluence of events but uh yeah i'm if something good has come of this it has uh perhaps made gruber more skeptical uh going forward about apple's claims and not just assume they will continue to execute because they always have.

1:40:43Past performance is not an indicator of future results, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP. And Aaron Bushnell writes, when you place your phone on a surface, is it face up or face down? I typically place mine face down because the edges of the case lifts the screen away from the surface, and I'm worried going face up doesn't lift the camera lens as far enough off to prevent scratches. What do you all do? Typically, I go face down. This year for this phone, I'm sure we talked about this one. it was new. I still haven't found a case that I love for it and I mostly stopped looking.

1:41:16And so I've gone caseless, casey lists for this phone and haven't yet shattered it, knock on wood. And so I did this year, and I'm pretty sure we did talk about this, get a, I think it was a Belkin screen protector. I got one that Apple applied and it slightly shattered damn near instantly. I'm sure it was my fault, but I don't know what I did to it. I got a replacement for free, had Apple apply the replacement that slightly shattered damn near instantly. What did you do? Have you ever broken a screen that way though? No, right? You have really tight jeans. Super tight. No, I have no idea how I'm doing it.

1:41:53Again, I'm sure it's my fault. I'm not trying to say it's not my fault, but there was no like clear instance where I was like, oh, yep, that was why. But then the third time, I'm now on my third screen protector, Belkin was sold out of the ones that Apple applies. And I guess there's a slight difference either in the screen protector itself or, you know, whether or not they include the application frame thing that you stick your phone in to apply it. But they didn't have one for the third screen protector. And they said, look, you can either wait a couple of months or we can give you the one you apply yourself.

1:42:25So I was like, all right, fine. I'll take the one I apply myself. And the application process was fairly easy. It took a little while to get bubbles out from under it. Like that was kind of a pain in the butt. But that being said, this one has lasted, again, knocking on wood, this one has lasted for a couple of months now, which the other ones were like a month apiece, I feel like, or maybe two tops. So I've been actually fairly happy with that. Also, the edge of this one is a little bit rounded as compared to the ones that Apple applied, because I think I did talk about how it was like a cliff on the edge of my phone, which I hated every time I swiped up.

1:42:59But all that's to say that even though I don't have a case, I do have a screen protector. And I personally think that the respectful thing to do is to put your phone face down. Doubly so if you use the always on display, but just in general, put your phone face down if you can get away with it. So that's my opinion. Marco. Oh my God. You guys are monsters. All right. Here's, listen, the camera lenses are made of sapphire. The front glass of your phone is basically made of marshmallows. It scratches so easily. That is true. That is very true. Sapphire does not scratch very easily at all. So if you are worried about scratching, the screen will scratch way more easily than the camera lenses.

1:43:40So yes, maybe you have a case that has like a lip around it that offsets the screen if you put it face down. But are you sure that every time you put it face down, there's going to be nothing on that surface that sticks up slightly? That is a big risk that you're taking. whereas if you put the phone screen facing up whenever you put it down on a surface you are merely resting a very small amount of surface area possibly even just an edge if you're in an angle of a sapphire camera lens or two or three on that surface you are so much less likely to cause a scratch on that camera lens in that context than you are to scratch the screen during the lifetime of your phone.

1:44:19So the correct answer is when you put your phone on a surface, it is face up. Now, I will also add that if possible, if your clothing or bag or jacket or whatever allows for it, when you sit down to a table where there's people with you, you should not put your phone face down or up on the table. You should keep your phone stowed away safely because you should be there present for the people who are in front of you. So if you're at your desk or whatever, fine. Do whatever you want. But if you're going out to lunch or dinner with somebody or hanging out with people around a table or something, leave your phone in your pocket.

1:44:58Be there with the people that you're with. But if you are going to put your phone on the table, it should probably be face up. John? This is actually one of the questions that we get asked frequently and I can't remember the last time we answered it. Maybe more than three years ago. So I don't actually remember if any of our answers have changed. Do you two recall if you're doing the same thing now that you did last time we answered this definitely i pretty sure yeah i'm pretty sure i was pretty much always facedown just checking um anyway um yeah i'm i put mine with the screen facing up uh part of the modification to that is uh i don't use the always on screen i tried it for a while i didn't like it back when they introduced it i just don't use the always on screen so when my phone is face up on the table it's not as if it's blaring stuff in my face but most of the time this comes up at my desk right now my phone is sitting on my desk face up next to me that's the main place my phone says i don't have like a dock or a charger or whatever i just put when i sit down in front of my computer i put my phone on my desk with the screen facing up i tend not to put it on the table otherwise but if i ever do put it on the table it's always screen facing up that's mostly so if i put it on the table it's because i'm like watching for something i'm expecting a text message from a kid to pick up or something like that and i don't i've known from experience not to trust that i'm going to feel the vibration especially if it's in like up in my you know winter coat pocket or something i just won't feel that so i need to have it on the table with the screen face up and because i don't use the always on screen it's totally black until a notification comes in and then if my phone suddenly lights up my eyes will be drawn to it and i'll see they have to go pick somebody up so yeah face up for me joe o 'connor writes regarding software version numbering schemes for example call sheet 2025.2, I see lots of patterns from the typical 15.3.1 to 2025.2 to v1000 or whatever versions Firefox and Chrome are currently on.

1:46:44Why choose one scheme over another? For me, and with 2025.2, that means it was the second release in 2025. I pulled this, I think, from Marco. And if I remember, Marco, you got this from Curtis of Slopes. Is that right? Or did I get some of that backwards? It might have been Slopes. I forget where I pulled it from. I've been seeing a lot of people do it over the last few years. Yeah. So one way or another, it's basically year dot release number. And the theory there for me was that I feel like, and I think, again, I'm stealing this from both Marco and Curtis, that 1.0 versus 1.1 versus 1.1.1, I don't have a lot of interest in making those distinctions.

1:47:23And a release is just a release. And I don't really have a lot of, I don't hold a lot of value in keeping around or running old versions of most of my software, if not all of it. So, you know, I don't want to imply by there being a 1.0 and a 2.0 that there's a lot of worth in the 1.0. You know, once 2.0 ships, 1.0 is dead to me. And so I think just having a date-based or date and release number-based thing, it fits my model of how my software should be treated better. And that's why I stick with it. I have nothing against semantic versioning, which is, you know, the x.y.z thing. It's probably the writer answer to be honest and what john is probably going to say to me in a minute but for me i kind of like a year dot release number and it's been working pretty well for me marco thoughts version numbers used to be more important to communicate marketing messages yes um you know it used to be like you you know you had like your beta period 0.7 0.8 whatever and then like you released your 1.0 that was your big first non-beta release and then if you had like some you know kind of minor feature additions you 1.1 little bug fix 1.0.1 you know like there's you know this kind of standard of semantic version numbers you know if you had like a really big update you would save up for your 2.0 and then you would and maybe you would charge an upgrade price for your 2.0 because it's a it's a new major version well in a lot of software today it's being updated through app stores and stuff where no one's ever even going to see the version number because it just auto updates in the background um it is oftentimes you know kind of a continuous release cycle so you're not like saving stuff up forever and then pushing it all out at you know later to try to get an upgrade price uh you are largely releasing things as you can as they are done because you are subscription based or ad based so that there are a lot of situations today where like your business and your pricing and your marketing don't really need a big 2.0, 3.0 kind of versioning.

1:49:28It is a choice you can make to switch to one of these other schemes that doesn't have that kind of baggage. Now, you might want that baggage because if you want to make big splashes with your marketing or have an upgrade price, then you probably do want 1.0, 2.0, that kind of thing. but if you are going for a more continuous update cycle which most software these days I think is then you can just do one of these regular sequential numbers now as to which one you do I switched to the year dot number 2025 dot 2 or whatever I switched to that it is a question of whether that's a good idea I have found I kind of wish I didn't switch to that I kind of wish I just did like 1000 thousand one thousand one one thousand two like that kind of thing because when you date it people start getting antsy when they see the date is like two or three months ago or more like that's when they start getting really antsy and yes they can just go see like you know your version history to see the age of the app or whatever but people like it looks good when it's a high number it looks bad when it's a low number and then secondly whatever the point after the year is 2025.2 does that mean February or does that mean the second update in 2025 well if it happens to be February maybe people will assume it's just the February update if it happens to be April maybe they'll assume it's a three-month-old version when you actually just released it last week so it actually like people's expectations about that second number are not consistent so it you're kind of so what I usually do I I will skip numbers like I haven't done a release yet in the last couple of months but when I do release an update soon, suppose my update comes out in the month of April, I'm going to call it 2025.4, even though there wasn't a 2025.3 or.2.

1:51:29Because if I release something in April called 2025.2, people are going to think it's old. So it's not a great, like even that is not a great scheme. That scheme has problems. Also, what if you release something in April and then a week later, while it's still April, you want to release another version? is that 2025.4.1 no i just go to 2025.5 like because i know like i'm probably going to skip a month here or there so i know like okay that's that'll be fine even that is not a great scheme it has those those kind of flaws secondly in apple's uh in app store connect if you're using apple's distribution you it once you have uploaded a version 2025.1 you can never again for that app upload something that is like 15.3 because Apple enforces that whatever you upload has to be like version compare greater than the last thing you uploaded so whatever is before the first decimal point has to be a larger number than what was before the first decimal point for the last one or whatever like you know however you compare it you know point point point like you compare each part separately but like once you have 2025.2 you can never have 16 point one because it's less than 2025.

1:52:48So for me, like now I just said, I would love to go to like, you know, 1000, 1001. I can't, I would have to go to like 10 ,000. So I could have like version 10 ,001, 10 ,125. Like I could do that. Those numbers start to look a little stupid. So I don't love that either. So it, no matter what you pick, it's not an amazing system. I would suggest if I was starting new today what i would do is i would just call the first version like 100 like just have the number mean nothing but be small enough not to look stupid john what's the right answer you whippersnappers so i mean i i think i tried to warn you both off the year thing or there maybe i didn't and just thought it because no i think you did margaret already done it it was too late but yeah for all these reasons so first of all a clarification you uh because you're youngsters and think that the number dot number dot number is semantic versioning semantic versioning is a very recent thing that is specifically designed for libraries where it's important for the consumer to know what they expect from the api where a major version breaks api minor version adds functionality and the patch version fixes bugs that's semantic versioning it has no bearing on applications because applications in general don't vend apis the same way libraries do just because semantic versioning has three numbers separated by dots doesn't mean they're the same thing.

1:54:03Anyway, that aside, uh, my, I do have extremely, uh, strongly held cultural beliefs surrounding version numbers based entirely on my experience in adolescence and young adulthood and the software that I used to me, the, the, the, uh, the meat, the cultural meaning of 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0. Those numbers all mean so much to me and selecting which version number to use, which like version number like that to use for my applications is one of the parts of writing software that I treasure and enjoy the most. And it is totally a factor of when I grew up in the software that I used. That's why all of my apps have been developed like that.

1:54:45And speaking of having multiple releases in February, I released Hyperspace in February. It is now March. I've done seven releases, three in February and four in March. We mentioned Switchglass or whatever the last thing we were talking about it or maybe it was my other two apps in five years i did 75 releases just the idea of being constrained by having one release a month is madness to me and it means like if you look at my version history like i just went to 1.1 that's just freighted with meaning from my perspective like that's why i choose the version numbers i do and by the way it's 1.0 not 1.0.0 why but then i go the next one is 1.0.1 what happened to the first zero i'm glad apple's versioning uh comparison allows me to do this it's probably not a coincidence because my entire cultural understanding of version numbers comes from apple software uh and old mac software although i've had to abandon the whole use of letter d's and b's and stuff although i think you might still be able to do that but i don't do it but anyway that's how i use versions because they are meaningful they are culturally meaningful to me and they and i am communicating probably to other people my age with similar experiences something with those version numbers but in the grand scheme of things they don't matter too much the one other anti-pattern i will note is that even if you're using them for marketing purposes and you're going to like do upgrade pricing because you're not selling on the mac app store or whatever and you want like 2.0 to be a significant thing to be able to charge a big upgrade or whatever the one thing i cannot stand is when it's like new frobinator 4 and the version number is 7.0 don't do that don't don't like it's bad enough that apple does it with ios and socs and the numbers like when the when you prominently feature in your marketing like a two or a four or an extra major version but the actual version number itself is off by a couple in either direction it's just making everybody sad but anyway what which one should you use i would suggest you use the one that fits how you expect to release it and that makes you happy because honestly i don't think it matters that much from other people's perspectives everything you said about the year ones and people looking at it and thinking about it's bad that that is all true but if you really love year version numbers because you grew up and with windows 2000 and your values are warped uh then go for it if it makes you happy but uh i would i would humbly suggest uh that the plain old 1.0 2.0 three numbers separated by dots two numbers separated by dots is a tried and true system uh that has a lot of tradition behind it and that could be molded into something that is meaningful to you all right thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace and Mac Weldon.

1:57:20And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, members will hear us discuss Apple News Plus food and recipe management in general. So this is a new thing happening in the Apple News land. We're going to talk about that. So if you want to hear us talk about that and many other things, atv.fm slash join. Thank you, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.

1:58:00John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E -N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E. Tech Podcast so long. Marco, how did my birthday go at the restaurant? Yeah, so this was kind of our soft opening where we did Saturday and Sunday of mostly just the bar being open and then some free food that we were giving away as tradition, corned beef and cabbage, which is what the restaurant has always done around St.

1:59:08Patrick's Day. So it was basically two days of being open and then we'll open again fully next month. It went great. Good. This was the first big test of everything we've done. All the cleanup, the updates, the wiring. I replaced the camera system. As you know, I deployed Dante for the audio transmission between different parts. We had a DJ, so I got to test that. Everything worked. It was great. There were a couple of minor tweaks I had to make when the DJ got there. I had one of the volumes was set too low, so I increased it. It was fine. It was incredibly fulfilling to see all this come together.

1:59:52First of all, the staff was incredible. They were so good. I am not qualified to do almost anything in the restaurant. So as a result, I wasn't that necessary. It was amazing. The staff came in. They knew what they had to do, and they did it. They did a great job. um you know i i really see myself as being in a supporting role to the staff i can't run this place myself i need other people to to do it so i will do the best job that i can to create an environment that supports them that gets out of their way and that continues to attract and retain the best staff because that's how this continues.

2:00:41And for me, being normally a sole proprietor and a control freak, that's very new. That's a very new feeling to me. So that's going to be an evolving thing over time as I figure out how to manage the staff and what they need and what they want and how to balance everything. But so far, that part went great. my kid helped bussing during the service oh nice and he was awesome he like never stopped moving he was on his feet people were giving him tips i was a busser for two years and i think i got a total of three tips from customers he got i think five or six tips in one shift so he and i wasn't a bad busser he's just a better one um so and i think drunk long islanders are more generous than uh randos in ohio um anyway so it it was just a great time everything went off that a hitch one thing that that i think really meant a lot to me is everything we did someone noticed like like people didn't all notice the same things but like all the all like the the improvements we made the upgrades we made the cleanups that we did everything that we did someone pointed out and someone noticed like and the dj even noticed that i had eq'd the speakers which like i i mean look i know he's a dj but like i didn't i thought that was a pretty subtle thing and i thought like who else is going to care but me who else is going to ever know that i eq'd them to sound better he knew he could tell immediately like every like i installed lighting under the pass in the kitchen the staff noticed that they love it like you know there's there's all sorts of like things that we did we cleaned up a lot of stuff tiff did like some a lot of like you know staining of wood in the dining room to make it look better like there's just there was so much stuff that we did that people noticed and appreciated and so that was very satisfying and then the greatest thing like tiff and i we were just kind of watching from the back we're watching just like you know this this dining room full of people having a really good time and being so happy to be back in their bar again after all winter.

2:02:57And we looked around and we're like, we enabled this. Us buying this place and maintaining it and not changing the spirit of it, we are now enabling these people to have this kind of fun and to have a good time and to be in their bar. And that was really satisfying. We really enjoyed it. And Saturday was super busy. Sunday, of course, being a Sunday was less busy. and it was interesting so Sunday it was less busy and there was no DJ on Sunday

2:03:57I basically had nothing to do It all went great. I even like on Sunday because of the ferry schedule and because of school being the next day, Tiff stayed behind and I went home with with our kid on the afternoon ferry on the last ferry of the day. The restaurant was still open. So I left while it was still open and Tiff and the staff closed it down, cleaned it up, shut everything down. so I wasn't even there for the last like two hours of the work and it was fine everyone did a great job and it was done so what this has shown me first of all it felt so good to do all this and to enable all this as I was saying so it has definitely shown me so far at least I know this is not like totally in the weeds yet but so far this was the right decision and we feel very good about it but also it has shown me like this is not going to take over slash end my life like i'm going to be able to keep doing other things and it will be fine because the staff is good and as long as i keep the staff good and you know which and they mostly just manage themselves like and that's a hard thing for me to it's a hard position for me to be in being the control freak being you know fiercely independent i i think a a component of fierce independence is fear that like if everyone quit tomorrow i wouldn't know what to do i'd be screwed that and so a huge part of like i don't want to let go of control i think a huge part of that is because I'm afraid if I can't do everything, I'm afraid it will all come crumbling down.

2:05:48Well, the restaurant, I'm stuck. I can't do everything. So this is just how this has to run and I just have to hope the entire staff doesn't all leave at once. But you know what? Almost every company works that way. If everyone walked out of Apple, Tim Cook's not going to be sitting there like, hmm, how do I, you know, what button do I push to keep the servers running? Like, no, that doesn't really happen. That's not how business works. And it's fine. So I think it will – this is all very much a growth thing for me for sure. But it's all going very well. And so far it seems like we've made the right decisions.

2:06:30We've made the right environment. We have the right people. So it's going pretty well. Everyone likes my coffee. And, you know, I was – I know it's ridiculous, but, you know, we were joking back weeks, months ago about how little my skills were relevant to running a restaurant. And I think that's actually wrong. What I have found over the last couple of months of setting things up and going through stuff is that I actually have a lot of extremely valuable skills to running a restaurant. I just, you know, I'm at a different, I'm in a different role than the chefs, the bartenders, the servers. Like, I'm not in one of those roles.

2:07:18But, like, you know what it has taken to run, to get this restaurant set up and running? A ton of administrative work. A ton of wiring. A ton of paperwork. A ton of, like, minor repairs and cleanup and maintenance of stuff around the restaurant. I'm good at all those things. like i've done business before i know like how to get a sales tax certificate in new york because tiff sold things with sales tax before so we've done that already i know what accounts receivable on an invoice means i know like that you know like oh the reason why this dollar amount is different from what we were quoted was that they were estimating the sales tax based on where they're where they're located but it's different from where we're located and that's why it's like 0.1 % off or like all that's like I've seen this stuff before I know about how what the accountant needs to do our tax stuff I know about like federal EINs and all like I know what vendors want when they ask for credit check materials and things I you know one of the things we have to deal with was you know we have all these credit card slips like when you when you sign a credit card receipt and you put in the tip and you do the math and you add it up well it's possible for people to later dispute that to say like i didn't write i didn't total that up i didn't tip that much or i did the math wrong or whatever they dispute that with a credit card company so the restaurant has to keep those on file well the previous filing system was like a big stack of receipts and some rubber bands my filing system is a scan snap and files that get backed up and organized like it's like i know how to do that i know like how do i how do i organize the stuff on this computer?

2:08:57How do I automatically classify documents that are scanned into their vendors? We know how to do that already. That's skills I have. When the coffee sucked, I knew how to fix the coffee, and now everyone likes my coffee. There actually is a lot of that. There's a huge amount of work that I actually know how to do. So that's actually been very encouraging as well. That being said, I didn't get enough singles. You banked wrong. Yep, I still banked wrong. But now I went to the bench today. I got a bunch more. We're good. Well, I'm glad to hear that it's gone very well. And it sounds like the biggest challenge for you might be just staying the hell away from it.

2:09:38And I mean that in a good way. But, you know, your natural inclination, as you said, is to get involved and to be in control, which is fair. That's all you've known for 20-ish years now. But now it sounds like you need to just sit back and let the restaurant, you know, let the machine do its thing. And that's a great problem to have. Yeah, largely, yes. And, you know, one thing I will be doing a lot of is just like observing and listening. Like if I see somebody is doing some really inefficient task, like so on the first day, the Saturday, Tiff had me come count one of the register drawers. I counted one register drawer and ordered a bill counter.

2:10:18So I'm like, hey, those those flippy things at the bank, how much do those cost? And it turns out not that much. and so like let me get one okay i got like a more basic one like let me get one of those because the very first drawer i counted i was off by like 62 oh gracious and i'm like okay and then of course tip counted and it was exactly right like well okay it's it's a me problem but like this is like i can i can view this task and it's like you know counting a big stack of singles out of a cash register drawer takes a long time, is not a good use of somebody's time, and is error prone. Here's an opportunity where like, yeah, you know what?

2:10:56If I can spend 200 bucks and make this way faster and better, I will choose to do that. And there's all sorts of little opportunities for that. Like if I see like, oh, somebody is spending, they're spending a half hour a day doing this tedious task. Can technology help that? Yes, it usually can. It might not be worth it. Like if, you know, if it comes down to like custom software development, maybe that's, maybe that's not worth it. But there's all sorts of stuff about this, about business. That's just like dealing with files, dealing with documents, dealing with data. Like one of the things we have to do, I am now food safety certified.

2:11:34When a restaurant gets shellfish, at least in, in my County, I don't know how it is everywhere else. Shellfish comes with tags that identify the vendor and the sourcing and everything. And you have to keep those tags on file for 90 days. Well, again, here's another filing system. Well, what if we just scan them? I'll keep them for the whole year. Once they're scanned, who cares? Keep them for the year. It doesn't matter. I'm not filling up a filing cabinet here. So there's all sorts of opportunities for just somebody who is a tech expert to be able to look at any business and say, hmm, this little thing over here, that I can save you 20 minutes a week with something pretty simple on that.

2:12:12And there's a lot of those. And when you add those up, it's actually pretty useful. I'm very glad it worked out nicely. And here's hoping that when you open properly that you have the same experience. Thank you.