676: A Sternly Worded Instruction

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36:44new air tags were announced we have been waiting for this for months uh some perhaps more than others uh but apple's announced new air tags they have a few very cool features there's enhanced range and findability with a second generation ultra wideband chip precision finding works from up to 50 further away than in the previous generation an upgraded bluetooth chip expands the range at which items can be located thus uh for the first time users can use precision finding on Apple Watch Series 9 or later or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later to find their AirTag. And the new AirTag is 50 % louder than the previous generation.

37:17Also, apparently the chime has changed from F to G. And if I knew more about music, I would probably be more impressed. Yeah, follow that link. There's a video of someone playing like the old AirTag versus the new one. It sounds different. I mean, I don't know if they did that on purpose or it's just a side effect of the louder chimey thing that they use to be louder. And it just happened to be a different note. But you will be able to tell the difference between the old ones and the new one. as they chirp. I was waiting for these because we have a couple air tags that are just like for whatever reason just don't hold the charge anymore like you know I have a ton of these little cheap little cheap coin batteries and like this one air tag like every time we put a coin battery in there just eats it.

37:53So like okay that one needs to be retired let's buy a replacement and I said no don't new air tags are coming out that was like six months ago. So I had to tell my wife finally new air tags are out and we can finally buy them and we will. As much as as much as I appreciate the utility of AirTags, it's one of those products like the instant it was released there were obvious problems with it and after now, you know, what, five years was it? They've solved none of them. Like, the most obvious problem with it was there was absolutely no reasonable way to attach it to anything or attach anything to it.

38:34So, the only way that people use air tags is either showing them loose somewhere where they bounce around and fall out or putting them in some kind of accessory but the air tags were not designed to accommodate accessories at all. It's a naked robotic air tag Marco. But even the most like the most simple thing like a loop in it something like some kind of accommodation to recognize people are going to be using these in lots of different physical situations. Let's design it so it accommodates anything because what instead what happens is suppose you want you want to put it somewhere something on something small like you know like on a keychain or in a wallet or something what has to happen is you have to have something that wraps all the way around all of its side just to keep it secure which makes that whole thing bigger and bulkier than it otherwise would need to be so it's a product that like the physical design of it has obvious problems everyone saw this the instant it was released see also the vision pro and the airpods max similar pattern like you apple puts these out there there's obvious problems from day one and then years later they release a new version that addresses none of them god i gotta give apple credit like when they half-ass a product they gloriously half-ass it bravo they probably make more money from the accessories that they sell for air tags than they do on the air tags uh i don't the accessories are definitely obviously very high profit for them i don't know how many they sell i mean other i see other people selling a bunch of air tag accessories yeah i mean there's a million cheap things you can buy on uh you know everywhere for them and speaking of that we have we have an air tag on one set of our keys and we bought whatever they like you know two dollar uh little air tag holder that lets you put it on a keychain from like amazon or something many years ago and it's made of like that rubberized plastic that like gets like sticky and tacky as it gets old yeah you gotta throw that away you know that right yeah you get what's really toxic like yeah that's gross yeah service announcement everybody once plastic starts emitting oil uh you need to throw that away that's not good for you the problem with the apple ones is they're they're they're bigger and bulkier than like the cheap third-party ones these apple ones are very expensive and also very large but anyway i'll be getting new air tags they should have a whole you can find a million youtube videos of people drilling holes in them have you seen all those like that you know there's there's diy ways to do this that i don't recommend this but uh yeah it's a thing you can do yeah i mean so the other thing is like i guess we'll we will learn once we um once we disassemble them there were so obviously like as soon as air tags were launched the other major problem with them is stuff like stalking and apple has done various mitigations over the years to try to make that less of a problem it's still a problem but it's but you know they this entire product category enables a level of stalking and and surveillance that is you know very problematic in a lot of cases and so for this product to exist at all i think apple does a pretty good job with mitigating that um if it's going to exist at all that being said i mean back when it was released we actually had conversations on the show about how like you know maybe maybe this is too much trouble to even be worth apple having this product.

41:45But I guess they decided otherwise. But anyway, some of the rumors about this update before it came out were that maybe they might be making things like disabling the speaker more difficult. I guess we'll find out, like as people get these and start taking them apart and stuff, I guess we'll find out if that actually came to pass. That would actually be a reasonable upgrade to have made. I just don't know the physical realities of how possible that is. Yeah, I don't think it's possible. If someone has physical access to your AirTag, I mean, you can just put hot glue on the thing that moves to make the noise.

42:20Like, there's no stopping someone from – it's not like, you know, like, oh, is it possible to make it turn the camera on without making the green LED come on on your, like, MacBook Pro screen? Like, that is a tractable problem that you can solve in various ways. But, like, I'll give you physical access to this AirTag, but I'll make it so you can't disable the speaker. You can always disable the speaker. Like it'll be very, very difficult to make it so someone with physical access couldn't disable the speaker. But yeah, you know, Apple does what it can and they're always refining the software approach to do.

42:50And the thing is, it's a security convenience thing because, you know, we're using it within our family and we're not stalking each other. But we are constantly running into annoyances that are caused by the stalker mitigation. right so like like in anything anything like this trying to deal with the worst possible actors makes everybody's life more difficult because now you're like unknown air tag moving with you and blah blah blah it's like no it's just me it's just you know you don't know that stuff is there but once again the bad actors in the world make things worse for everybody with regard to the environment 85 recycled plastic in the enclosure 100 recycled rare earth elements and all magnets 100 recycled gold platy and all apple design printed circuit boards the paper packaging is 100 % fiber-based and can be easily recycled and it's maintaining the same form factor as the original with this new AirTag being compatible with all existing AirTag accessories.

43:42They spun it as a positive marker. You know why we didn't change it? The environment. That's why. It's not because we don't care. Yeah, well, and to be clear, like, in the bed they created for themselves, you can make an argument that, like, we shouldn't break accessory compatibility. Like, that is a reasonable argument to make and that does have, you know, a cost to it if you wanted to break it. But, God, think of how much better the AirTag would be if it changed its shape to be a little bit more, to be at all accommodating of the physical reality of how this product was ever actually used. Remember when the very, very first iPad, the iPad 1, did not have any accommodations for a case.

44:20And so the case that went around it was this huge, thick rubber thing that had to go around all sides of the four sides of it just to hold on to it. and it added a huge amount of bulk. And the amazing innovation of the iPad 2, in addition to, you know, shedding a bunch of the thickness and weight and everything, the iPad 2 added magnets to the side and they had that wonderful smart cover that gave you protection where most people needed it, the screen, without having to wrap around the entire iPad and bulk the whole thing up if you didn't want it to. So that was a great example of Apple recognizing the physical realities of how these products need to be used in the real world and designing something to accommodate that in the product itself to make the cases and accessories better see also the apple pencil when it went from the weird you know excited to see you method to the magnet magnet on the side of the ipad that hold it on there it's not perfect but it is it was so much more accommodating of the realities of using the product that like okay we have a pencil we need to like store it somewhere when we're not using it instead of having to like have it like be loose in your bag or wherever let's have a few magnets in the ipad that are designed to accommodate the reality of this and have the pencil stick to it when when people use it you know you can say well the ipad should just be nothing it should be the naked robotic ipad and have no accommodations because what about the people who don't have a pencil those are wasted magnets and that's an argument you can make i think it's a bad argument for a very very common use case of the product like if if it's something that like almost no one needs that's a different story but if it's a very common use case the product should be designed with that in mind and to accommodate that as best as it can and that's why every ipad since the ipad 2 has had magnets to support cases because it makes them a lot better the air tag is the opposite of that the air tag has no accommodation whatsoever for any of the ways it is physically used see also the airpods max i would say the magnets inside the ipod ipad are part of the make a robotic core thing because the idea is we don't put anything on it but we provide places for you to put stuff on because the magnets don't stick out and they're in space that is otherwise unused inside it so it's fine and by the way i feel like they could have if they really wanted to probably at additional cost of the product put a hole in these suckers while still maintaining compatibility with all existing accessories because all people want just a little hole that you can put a little ring through you know what i mean i know it's difficult because it would be really thin they have it in the airpods case yeah you know there's the coin batteries in there it's really close to the edge you need some like very strong like metal ring thing around it so that little piece doesn't break through and blah blah but anyway they chose not to do it and i feel like the next time if if they keep selling this product and they eventually revise it further uh the next time they'll the only way they can move forward is they have to move to a smaller size coin battery and that gives them a whole bunch of options because once you are first of all it would be smaller period and once you're moving to a smaller size with a smaller battery you have more options for attachability instead of trying to put one very small hole with reinforcement around it on the very, very edge of the existing form factor.

47:24All right, price and availability. It is available today for the same price as the AirTag One,$29 for a single AirTag and$99 for a four-pack. You can also get free personalized engraving at apple.com and the Apple Store app. And you should, because you should engrave little emojis on them so you can call them by their names. All right, we are recording on the evening of January 28th, and I'm excited to tell you that we can't talk about new MacBook Pros because they haven't been announced yet, at least not as we sit here today. But apparently there's an event going on for creators yesterday, today, and tomorrow in Los Angeles.

47:59Apple has invited select creators for an Apple experience in Los Angeles, scheduled for January 27th through 29th. Creator Peter Mara shared an image of this, which we will put in the show notes. save the date. Hi Peter, save the date for an Apple experience in such and such time in Los Angeles. Confirm availability is a link and then please confirm or decline by January 9th. So I'm assuming they're all there doing creator things. I mean, everyone thought like this would be a good time to announce the new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros but it seems like they're probably just showing them Creator Studio.

48:32I think the embargo just lifted for that because I saw Jason Snell's review of Creator Studio. I mean, I guess we'll find out. I mean, maybe they could release the MacBook Pros on the 29th and maybe the people who are at this event or already using them right now. We don't know. But yeah, we do feel like sometime early in this year, we will see the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, just not today as we record. Yeah, that definitely seems like the answer here. You know, Apple has a lot of smaller events where they try to promote something to some audience. And it's not, they aren't always hardware releases.

49:02And especially when they're doing like creator events. It's usually to try to, you know, It's usually stuff that's less interesting to a podcast like ours. We're going to try to get a bunch of YouTube creators to use our new version of Final Cut or whatever. It's that type of thing. So it would totally make sense now for this one, especially given the timing of the embargoes dropping today for the new Creative Suite or whatever it's called. Creator. That's right. It's totally separate from Adobe Creative Suite. It's a studio. It's definitely ACS. It's a different ACS. It's not Adobe Creative Suite.

49:37It's Apple Creative Studio. totally totally different academic computing system yeah um anyway so yeah it makes sense this was not related and we look we might be getting m5 macbook pros tomorrow for all we know but it's not related to this event all right uh marco you and i can i think buzz off for probably 30 to 45 minutes because john you have some stuff to tell us about we promised this last week but sony's tv business is being taken over by tcl i'm sorry for your loss john all these years i i figured it was pronounced tickle. What a waste. I mean, you can pronounce it that way, I guess. I will set you up, John, by reading from Jess Weatherbed at The Verge.

50:16Sony has announced plans to spin off its TV hardware business, shifting it to a new joint venture with TCL. The two companies have signed a non-binding agreement for Sony's home entertainment business, with TCL set to hold a 51 % stake in the new venture, and Sony holding 49%. Sony and TCL are aiming to finalize binding agreements by the end of March and start operating the new joint company in April 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other partnership conditions. The new company is expected to retain Sony and Bravia branding for its future products and will handle global operations from product development and design to manufacturing sales and logistics for TVs and home audio equipment.

50:49Sony says that the partnership will leverage Sony's picture and audio tech, brand value, supply chain management, and other operational expertise. This will combine with TCL's own display technology, vertical supply chain strength, global market presence, and end-to-end cost efficiency. So based on the headline, everyone's like, oh no if you love sony tvs now they're dead tcl is taking them over and it'll just be tcl tvs but if you read you know two paragraphs into any of the announcements you realize oh sony's still going to be selling sony tvs it's just that they're having this partnership with tcl and yes tcl is 51 and they'll have 49 so tcl will technically be in control but they'll still be sony products with sony's all exists existing sony proprietary stuff going into them um and the reasons behind why they might want this partnership are complex and have to do with manufacturing and stuff and we'll get to some of tcl's announcements from ces in a little bit um but i'm actually not too broken up about this uh it just seems like a sort of a business reality for sony and it's probably a good deal for them because tcl has uh lots of manufacturing capacity and some interesting new technology they're coming out with uh and that's what sony needs apparently uh i mean sony has been contracting out this assembly of its televisions for a long time now they're just changing the arrangement i believe sony's also part also as part of this deal like sony's receivers and stuff are going to be part of this as well uh and the final thing i'll say before i uh do an aside on tv tech is that um this is like a a memorandum of understanding or whatever like many things can go wrong that will make this deal not happen sometime between now and 2027 when they're supposed to start doing business.

52:27So maybe you won't get regulatory approval. Maybe the deal will fall apart. So stay tuned. This is not a thing that has happened yet, but this is just a thing that these two companies say that they want to happen. And I think this is a good time to take a couple steps back and look at where we are in the television technology market to see how this deal might fit into it. And this is from the perspective of like i don't know technology enthusiasts right there's the tv market is huge most people buy inexpensive televisions and like the the sort of enthusiast level of the market does trickle down to that lower end of the market where the action is happening is on the high end right so that's what i'm interested in that's what most tv nerds are interested in um and on the high end for the past many many years the the market has been focused on a you know sort of competition between two different ways of making good tvs uh divided by whether or not you can turn on individual pixels every time someone talks to me about tvs online i i always say uh that i demand per pixel lighting control that is obviously the technically best way to form a nice picture which is you can turn individual pixels on and off and you're thinking doesn't every tv do that doesn't every monitor do that what are you even talking about well lots of televisions and lots of monitors to make a single pixel turn on have to turn on a huge amount of light behind that single pixel studio display turns on the entire backlight if you just want one pixel to be turned on all the other pixels are trying mightily to prevent the backlight from going through but there is just one giant backlight and if you make a black screen with a white pixel in the middle of it the entire backlight is on and the screen is trying to not let you see any of it except for that one white pixel that's very difficult uh and various technologies for stopping you from seeing that entire backlight uh have been tried over the years but they can't stop all the light which is why if you take the studio display put it in a pitch black room and make the studio display show a black screen it will light up your room because that's just the way it is and then as you go down the spectrum okay let's break up the backlight into a bunch of little pieces and then we'll just turn on the little pieces that are behind things so if we have a single white pixel in the middle of a black screen we'll just turn on like a one inch by one inch square behind that pixel but then you get a little glowing region around the one inch pixel people refer to that as bloom it's very difficult again to keep the light the other parts of the monitor don't have any backlight turned on so they're totally black but the little pixel has a little bit of bloom around it so you try to turn the backlight down a little bit and combat bloom and anyway the that's one whole section of televisions which is we cannot turn on individual pixels and make just the pixel emit its own light we always have to turn on some portion of the backlight behind the pixels that we want to show up and those regions have been getting smaller and smaller used to be like oh we divide it up into like five regions six 16 now there are thousands of backlight regions on like modern displays not the studio display but you know the synod apple's uh pro display xdr has what 570 something uh six backlight regions and that's like a six-year-old thing the ones the monitors we were talking about from ces are like 2 000 zones but of course how many pixels are there on a 5k display way more than 2 000 so that's one side of things and the other side of things are the technologies that allow per pixel lighting control and the one that is most commonly used in television these days is oled just like on your phone or on the new ipad pro oled you can turn on a single pixel because the pixels themselves emit their own light there is no light behind them that's shining through them and big chunky thing the individual pixels make their own light um and there are trade-offs between them because oleds can't get as bright as those other ones because when you got the big light behind everything you can crank up the light real high more recently And the battle between these two different kinds of technologies has advanced to the point where it's not just brightness anymore.

56:34used to be okay well OLED has the best picture but uh LCD TVs with backlights can get brighter and the competition is now in something called color volume which is like okay how many colors can you show and it used to be that the fanciest OLEDs were winning that as well because the QD OLED the quantum dot OLED that I've got in my TV and that's in a lot of monitors now had R, G, and B subpixels uh and you could turn the R, the G, and the B on to maximum brightness and you could get a really pure white or you could turn on the r to maximum bright lights get a really pure red so on and so forth whereas those other monitors that had a backlight they had a backlight that they would shine through and then they had to have something that would turn the backlight into other colors some kind of color filter or quantum dots or whatever um and on the oled side there were some oleds that had to add a white sub pixel to increase the brightness and of course that would wash out all their colors anyway qd oled was the champion in color volume as well because it didn't have a white subpixel.

57:31You had per-pixel lighting control. You could turn up the red pixel really, really high. It wasn't as bright as the best LCDs, but that was sort of like the enthusiast thing. All the Sony A95L, Sony A95K, all the Sony monitors and the Samsung monitors with Samsung's QD OLED panels, they were the champions because they had per-pixel lighting control. They could get really bright and they had huge color volume. This is sort of an Empire Strikes Back-like situation where the televisions with the backlights are saying, okay we've got a new idea it's not really that new but sony did it ages ago but anyway in the past few years it's been like instead of having a backlight that is just a white or blue light most of them are blue because you can change the blue until the other colors because it's the shortest wavelength how about we have a backlight broken up into little regions but we'll make the backlight itself like the little lights that are you know behind there the little backlight regions they will be rgb this is like a gamer's dream rgb lights they're behind my tv right and it's really complicated to do that because if you think about it i'm going to show you an image and you have you know 2 000 backlight regions and you know what color every pixel is going to supposed to be but for like the one inch by one inch region or the one centimeter by one centimeter region that's behind this particular set of pixels in this like you know drawing of a landscape or something what color should that rgb backlight be because you just got one r one g and one b for that little tiny region of the backlight what color should we make it well if most of the pixels are blue you can just make the backlight blue and then you get super duper blue and it'll be really bright with lots of color volume because you got a blue backlight going through a blue filter it'll be great but what if there's like tons of different colors in that little one centimeter region on your screen what color should the backlight be now do you average them like anyway that's what That's why it's computationally tricky to do that.

59:17But what it gives these screens is more color volume. Instead of just having a blue backlight with color filters that are imperfect, now we can crank up the color volume with these RGB backlights. In fact, some of them don't just have RGB behind there. They have RGB backlights and some of them add a yellow RGBY or a cyan RGBC backlight regions. Very complicated. The war of words at CES was very hot because some people are like, well if you do that like then you you have your rgb backlight region and you decided this backlight is going to be orange but now you have some pixels that didn't need any orange and then we're getting a little bit of orange bleed through so your colors are all muddied because you're not able to control the colors individual pixels you're just putting this back anyway it's very complicated um sony is out there uh with its own sort of not particularly consistent uh idea of how to make a good tv because for a while they were selling essentially the best tv in the world for years and years but at a certain point somebody decided this is not going to be our flagship tv even though everyone keeps saying it's the best tv in the world how about we make this other tv our best tv because we think it's better to have brighter tvs that are less expensive than there's less bright tv with the oled stuff and they would say yeah we still sell those oleds and they're still pretty good it's the reason the the a95l which was their flagship became the bravi 8 2 which is not their flagship even though it's still their best tv because they wanted to sell lcd tvs with backlight regions on them because they could get brighter and they were cheaper and this is complicated by the fact that the only company in the world i believe that makes qd oled screens is samsung and the other big company in the world that makes oled screens that are not qd oled is lg and now they make the tandem oled screens that don't have white subpixels in them and there's probably other oled makers i'm not sure if they make them at tv size but the point is it's not like silicon chips where it's just tsmc and like a few other companies or whatever but it's the companies that can make tv size panels in any kind of volume are small in number everybody else uses those panels sony uses them panasonic uses them obviously samsung uses them lg uses and tcl is one of those companies tcl makes panels they make lcd panels and they're building factories to make oled ones so sony partnering with them makes some sense because like look we weren't making our own panels anyway and And we're not we're not quite sure how to go forward in this business because just being at the high end is not giving us high enough volume.

1:01:40So we don't really have a low end story. So TCL, you have huge amounts of manufacturing. You take stuff over for us. So that's that's kind of the shape of things here. It's still per pixel lighting versus not per pixel lighting. It's still companies taking panels made by other companies who are probably their competitors and packaging them into TVs with their own processing and everything. And, you know, Sony's been doing well there. Sony has good processing. But still, in areas like why do Sony televisions still only have like two HDMI 2.1 ports, whereas LG and Samsung have four? Because Sony outsources the chip for handling that, and the company that makes the chip hasn't made one that can do four.

1:02:17And it's just, it's a weird and complicated landscape, and I don't really blame Sony for doing what it's done, which is we need a manufacturing partner who can make huge amounts of TVs cheaply and who looks like they have a good technological roadmap. And speaking of roadmap, it's time to wake Casey up and talk about this next year. What? Hi. All right. So TCL has super quantum dot technology that is landed or been announced, I guess, at CES. There was a video that we will put in the show notes about this. Then from TCL's official Reddit of all places, TCL Super Quantum Dot technology, or SQD, represents a major advance in color performance, delivering up to a 33 % increase in color gamut and a 69 % improvement in quantum dot accuracy compared to previous generation TVs.

1:03:05RGB mini-LED systems can also produce vibrant color and cover a lot of BT-2020, which is a color space, I think. Is that right? It's like P3, but bigger. Right. But because they use separate red, green, and blue LEDs, the blending of light can sometimes cause color crosstalk or color bleed. where colors overlap and reduce accuracy and fine details. We wanted to create a TV that could get this level of color without compromise, and TCL claims that their X11L TV covers 100 % of BT 2020 color. Super Quantum Dot technology avoids this issue entirely. By generating color through quantum dot conversion rather than colored LEDs, SQD delivers cleaner color separation and higher color precision, even in complex or high-contrast scenes.

1:03:47Using a single-chip pure white light source, and SQD using more refined 5 nanometer filter particles down from the standard 60 nanometers to ensure each pixel renders color with extreme precision and no blooming or interference. So this is the next salvo here, and this is an announcement from TCL. They're saying, okay, we don't have per-pixel lighting control, but everyone else is putting colored backlights behind their pixels. That's bad, and let me tell you why it's bad, and we don't have to do that. We're going to stick with a single color backlight like we always had broken up into little regions, but now our quantum dots are better quantum dots are the things that take like the blue backlight and change it into a red green and blue um their quantum dots do that conversion better allowing more of the color through which is how i think this is the first i've ever seen of a quantum dot lcd tv they can do 100 of 2020 bt 2020 like historically i think the only tvs that have come close to that are the um qd oleds uh because they don't have the white subpixel and now maybe the tandem oleds from lg that don't have the white subpixel diluting your colors they're trying to go for you know color volume can we cover this entire volume of this color space and the color spaces are always shown as like a 3d thing because you've got rg and b in the three different dimensions so it's like this 3d shape filled with color and bt220 is very big and inside that is p3 and way inside that is srgb or no rec rec 707 or whatever the t the plain standard ftb one anyway they're saying we got these super quantum dots they're better than your quantum dots we don't have the weird colored backlight thing we don't have to do the processing to figure out what the hell color to make our rgb backlights we don't have the color bleed through we still do have the blooming thing because you know we don't have perfect light control but whatever um and part of the reason this is a big announcement is that tcl uh is i think the only company in the industry that has decided to do this not because it's like i don't think it's like exclusive tech to them but like to do this they basically had to either redo their existing factory or build a new one i'm not sure which they did but like you have to change your entire lcd manufacturing line to do this and everyone else is like our current stuff is fine we don't want to bother with that but tcl decided to make the investment and now i believe they are the only company for now that is going to be putting out these super quantum dot things and these are the tvs most people buy most people buy don't buy oleds most people don't buy certainly don't buy qd oleds those tvs are very expensive people buy plain old LCD TVs because they're cheaper to manufacture and cheaper to buy.

1:06:12Now this X11L TV with the 100 % of BT 2020, not a cheap TV. But you know, in theory, as volumes increase, this technology will trickle down. It is, you know, in theory, it is as cheap to manufacture as LCD screens that they're putting on RAM, right? There are OLED, you know, tiny OLED screens they're putting around. Like it's inexpensive to use this technology. And so Sony is partnering with them. in theory they could have first dibs access to an a lcd non-perpixel lighting control technology that nobody else has meanwhile just the year or two before this sony was like we've got our own rgb backlight look at our backlight we have all different colors here and we have this cool processing to figure out what color to make all the little backlight regions and they they did the thing i think i talked about on the show where they stripped off the layers of the tv so you would just see the backlight and say look you can kind of see what the picture is even just from the backlight it's like that's great sony i just look at it and roll my eyes and i say per pixel lighting control or bust um anyway that's sony and tcl i'm not too broken up about it i don't buy these tvs anyway these are most of the tvs that sony wants to sell they should partner with tcl to make these because they look like really good lcd tvs all i care about is the high end and the high end is lg tandem oled with no white sub pixel and samsung cutie oled with no white sub pixel that's all i care about i will be sad if sony stops making an oled tv but the rumors are not that they're going to do that and in fact tcl is building an oled factory the details of the oleds that they will build in that factory are as yet undetermined but my fingers are crossed that they will not have a white sub pixel and sony can finally stop buying all their panels from samsung how close are we do you think to micro led uh it's like what are you called like car it's always five years in the future yeah like they show those tvs all the time they're they're amazing they cost 50 grand they're the size of your wall because making them small is also expensive like they've been showing those at ces for i don't know like a decade now they are amazing what marco was talking about is hey you want per pixel lighting control how about every pixel has a tiny red green and blue led in it because isn't that like sort of what oled is right not really because oled is kind of like a sandwich with a light emitting layer and stuff it is per pixel but they're not like literally leds like think of like an led that you could buy for a little kit and shrink it real small that's not what oled is it's the organic part of it that makes us susceptible to burn in that's kind of a sandwich right actual micro led where every individual pixel has a red and green and blue light up led those exist you see them in stadiums because it's really easy to make them big because if it's in a stadium the red green and blue uh blue uh um leds are huge like and so you just stick it's like a light bright right from close up it looks terrible but like across the stadium it looks great trying to get that down to a 4k 55 inch tv do the math on how small those leds have to be and the problem is like the manufacturing like you know do you have some way to manufacture that like i don't can do the math on how many pixels there are in a 4k tv but there's a lot uh and if you need to like place them individually and connect wires to them that's not the way you do things you need to be able to essentially print them um that's why they're like japanese companies have these printable oleds where you kind of use like an inkjet printer kind of the same way they print the lcd stuff um so far there's been no manufacturing breakthrough so that technology continues to be a curiosity for extremely rich people uh and it looks real cool at ces but no there's a bunch of other technologies too i like i don't remember the acronyms off the top of my head but there's a bunch of other ways to produce pixels that make light besides OLEDs they're just like in the experimental stage where they'll show like a postage stamp size little experimental thing in a back room at CES and say maybe someday we can make TVs out of this but um if someone actually eventually does it and it becomes manufacturable you'll I'm sure you'll hear about it here from me but for now it's QD OLED and Tandem OLED and honestly Tandem OLED is very exciting that's what Apple's M6 MacBook Pros are going to use sometime later this year the rumors have it so and that's what the uh ipad uses now uh i'm excited about that because it's a really good technology and those screens look great so i'm happy with what we have but yeah micro uh led something and boy the naming i'm rgb mini led lcdt i was like it's ridiculous it's so confusing sqd super quantum just all right Now, what's worse for naming TV display technology or USB standards?

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1:12:57John Ternus is taking over design at Apple. Reading from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Apple has expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to include design work, solidifying his status as a leading contender to eventually succeed chief executive officer Tim Cook. Cook tapped Ternus to manage the company's design teams at the end of last year. People with knowledge of the move said that Cook himself was trying to expose Ternus to more parts of the company's operations. In this case, one that Cook doesn't know anything about. uh hey the role was held by johnny ethics department oh sick burn uh until his departure in 2019 cook oversaw design from 2015 to 2017 when i've temporarily stepped back from the position jeff williams most recently held the job up until his retirement at the end of 2025 turnus is now billed internally as the executive sponsor for all design on cook's management team that entails being a bridge between design staff and apple's top brass he represents the design organization in executive team gatherings and manages the group's leaders.

1:13:54The heads of Apple's design teams continue to report directly to Cook in both internal organizational charts and the company's public disclosures. Having Ternus oversee the design teams while they still technically report to Cook is a strange arrangement, according to Apple employees, but it's a sensitive situation. Changing the reporting structure would affirm Ternus' status as a rising star at a time when the company is still keeping its succession planning under wraps. They're doing a really good job keeping it under wraps. Well, like he's taking over design, but he's not really taking over design.

1:14:23Like no org chart change. It was just like that Cook is essentially parachuting him in and say, just check out the design stuff. And like it's not changing any of the reporting arrangements is so like this is the government saying like, you know, oh, well, it would it would affirm his rising star status. Like that's just government guessing what the reasoning might be. But if it's true that the reporting structure has not changed, but instead he's sort of like being an executive sponsor or whatever it does really seem like just kind of oh i again i'm not sure if i believe that it's like tim cook thinks turnus needs some experience dealing with design but maybe he does but either way as we'll see with some um news later in this section it does seem like that if turnus is the leading contender for to be cook's successor that does i don't know maybe he's wishful thinking that perhaps design is an area that he may want to turn his attention to and that even tim cook can possibly see that at this point i don't know just speculating yeah i think i mean look first of all like yeah this you know apple is not doing a great job hiding the idea that john turnus is seemingly most likely the next uh ceo candidate but um i think this is great um you know the reality is that i think apple's design leadership under tim Tim Cook has been just kind of weak overall because as discussed a million times, Tim Cook seems to equate all design together.

1:15:47And so he's like, oh, Johnny Ive, you are designer. You are good designer. Here, software, design this. It's all the same. And then he put Jeff Williams in charge, who is not a good designer. Right. And all the reports we've heard so far about Jeff Williams' term, you know, kind of serving that role, basically make it seem like he was pretty hands off. but you know he was there like he was at the meetings but like sounds like he was pretty hands-off um and nobody seemed to really have any problem with him yeah i mean it's not that he's not expected to do that but like at a certain point as you go down the org chart you have to get to someone who knows design it's fine for the ceo not to design okay maybe the next person now not to know design but like eventually it's like okay but who who in the company is in charge and also is a designer at least johnny ive was that and alan dye was even that but jeff williams was not that tim cook is definitely not that yeah but so there's a couple of things about this that i think are promising.

1:16:37First, just in general, I think reinforcing the idea that John Ternus is the most likely CEO successor and that that process is starting, that I think overall is very promising for Apple's future. Again, even though we don't know what kind of CEO Ternus would be, he seemed to do an extremely good job at his current role as being hardware chief. And he seems very well liked and he seems like he has pretty good personality traits as far as we know we don't know that much about him but like what we do know it seems like he'd be a pretty good uh person for this role and it seems like he is a little bit more product focused than cook um who seem you know cook is much more kind of high level operations focused cook doesn't really have a good product sense at all and he's shown that many times over the years um so he kind of outsources that to people below him but he's not very good at choosing those people sometimes so i think turnus will be better at a lot of those things um so that overall that's a promising part But also, I think this is not unrelated to Alan Dye's departure.

1:17:38I suspect this has kind of been in progress for a while. This kind of thing does not just happen and surprise everyone around it. Like all the top executives and top people, including Alan Dye, probably have known about this transition for longer than we have. And my guess is that part of why Dye left is that some part of Ternus and Dye wasn't going to work together and one or both of them knew it. I'm guessing these are actually related to each other and that once Di saw the tide shifting towards Ternus, somehow they realized this isn't going to work and he started looking around. That's my best guess.

1:18:24Because again, the people up at that level, they know what's going on. They're not idiots. We only hear a drop in the bucket usually after everything has happened. So odds are this was all related. But also having Ternus be the executive sponsor, and we have to kind of figure out what that means. We'll talk about that in a second. But like that, I think, is promising because I'm guessing Ternus was involved in the selection of Stephen. I forgot his last name again. LeMay. Oh, my God. Sorry, Stephen. I've forgotten your last name like four times in four consecutive episodes. I'm guessing Stephen LeMay being elevated to this position was also not unrelated to Ternus' taking over.

1:19:05I'm guessing this all kind of happened in concert with each other. These were all related. And if Ternus was involved in the selection of Stephen LeMay, and by the way, which I guess we'll jump to the gun slightly. Sorry, Casey. Sebastian DeWitt has just announced that he joined the team at Apple. He was the lead designer for Halide. So he and he's been he's been around the scene forever. He's a very, very good UI designer. So it looks like the tide has shifted substantially with the design leadership at Apple on the software side. And it looks like Turnus was probably involved in some level with that.

1:19:42So that's all very promising to me. I think this is really good signs of things to come. Yeah. When even if even if he's not going up to CEO, this kind of dynamic happens frequently in big organizations. And it is one of the skills that is actually important to have when you're a higher up and are like a CEO, which is recognizing maybe too late, but whatever, better late than never. Recognizing what parts of your company are having problems or potentially having problems. Where are we weak? What are we not doing well? What dangers lurk out there? What are the risks, right? And obviously, if you're slow in the draw, it takes you a while to realize this.

1:20:17And sometimes, you know, there are problems, but there's like, you know, I think, for example, with the with the keyboards and laptops with no ports or whatever, I think the company more or less knew there was a problem there. But solving it, you're not going to tell Johnny Ive you can't have a thin keyboard. And then you're not going to tell the engineer organization that they need to stop trying to make the thin keyboard because they're not doing. It's like you kind of stuck where you're like, I don't want to make these people angry because I actually want Johnny to stay because I need him to build Apple Park or whatever the hell.

1:20:46Like it's, it's, it's a difficult situation, but like knowing that you have some weak area, what you do as a CEO or vice president or whatever, is you look down the org chart and you find the person that you think this person knows what they're doing. This is a competent person. I need someone to come in here to this other part of the org and fix this crap. And so they find somebody who's like, you, you are in charge of X and X is doing great. And you did a great job with X. Can you also look at Y? Because Y sucks. and they'll tell that person, in addition to your current responsibilities, take some time and go over there and fix that part of the org.

1:21:24And, you know, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you pick the wrong person or whatever. But again, even if Turnus wasn't going to become CEO, just simply having him say like, you were in charge of this part of our company that's done great. Over here, I'm hearing, years too late, that we're not doing great on design. Broadly speaking. i'm not going to put you in charge of design because you're not a designer but can you go over there and like just fix stuff and fig like just figure it out and just like make it better and we again we don't have privy to you know we don't know what's going inside the company we don't know if he's just started doing this this year or whatever but like as marco said from the outside it sure looks like we're having a lot of issues in design all of a sudden there's a bunch of turnover all of a sudden new things start happening in design we start hearing new names and the things we know about those names make us think that apple will be making different decisions related to design in the future because we know the people that left and we know the people that are coming in and those are people have very different opinions about how to do design now does john turnus know anything about design i don't know but it seems like things are changing in a direction that makes us out here who are dissatisfied with design happier and if that's the result of john turnis parachuting in even though the org chart hasn't changed and just being like i'm your executive sponsor or whatever like representing them in meetings and blah blah yeah okay but like as marco points out was he part of the decision to pick john lemay was he the person who said hey see you keep forgetting his first name yeah everything should be john not a steven steve like was he the one who said uh there's a bunch of great designers out there who love our platform can we go hire some of them maybe like throw money at them like it's like the ai problem except for with what was supposed to be apple's core competency right let's go get some good people everyone and johnny i've seen left to go to open ai right everyone you know who's not good like all these rumors of like just brain drain from apple people either get rich and leave apple and go do something else or they build their skills at apple and decide to go elsewhere or they get more money somewhere like if ever apple is going to overpay people to come back to the company to fix things it would be we're having problems in design let's hire some good designers and you know i mean we have we have steve lemay whose name we can't remember and sebastian dewitt whose name i can't pronounce uh so so it's two people it's two people that we know about but like things seem to be moving in the right direction obviously we won't see the result of any of the stuff for a long time so jury's still out but this is encouraging news and yes marco did hoist up the uh the uh halide developer uh hiring up to the top but there's a little bit more to the story so then uh in a different post mark german writes even with hardware chief john turnus now overseeing the operation there's no single design decision maker at apple during the steve jobs era the company co-founder was firmly in charge.

1:24:23But after his passing, the ultimate design arbiter was Johnny Ive. But it's more recently been a committee. Besides Ternus, software head Greg Federighi and marketing chief Greg Joswiak, and even services boss Eddie Q, to some extent, all have sway. Ternus is the top voice when it comes to hardware design. Federighi is the chief influence on the look and feel of software, and Joswiak is an important voice across the board. Of course, the heads of Apple's design teams, Molly Anderson and now Steve LeMay, have their recommendations as well. Under the new arrangement, they're now managed by Ternus, but continue to officially report to CEO Tim Cook.

1:24:56Yeah, so that's an interesting breakdown of who that is not technically in charge of design has influence. And it makes sense that Ternus, because he's the hardware guy, would be able to give his two cents on any hardware design stuff. And Federighi, being in charge of software, would have his opinions about software. And then Josueak, because he's marketing, would say, I want everything to be teddy bears because people love teddy bears. right it doesn't seem like you know that doesn't sound like him well you know what i mean but anyway it's like a sort of cross-cutting concern so like the the old way this was where the ceo was you know the entire company was run off the taste of the ceo uh there's pluses and minuses to that system obviously the minuses where you get stitched leather but the presses was that steve job had a pretty good batting average and there's one thing steve jobs did not lack which was opinions he knew what he wanted whether he what he wanted was good or not there was no dilly-dallying and no real committees i mean i'm sure there was committees below him but he got presented with stuff and he said yes or no and i think johnny obb was like that as well the stories when he was like had one foot out the door for seemingly years was like he'd just be hanging out at his place in san francisco and he'd you know come to a meeting and he would say show me all the crap that you made and he would say yes no no yes no change this change that you know um but this new system they're describing doesn't really reassure me which is like a whole bunch are people who are not designers offering their opinions on designs offered to them by designers and the designers get to give their opinions as well but like if it's if it's molly anderson and steve lemay arguing with eddie q about design i'm like eddie just like i mean in some respects like can't the designers should have the most sway here you can give your opinions and whatever but like in the end but unfortunately org chart wise everybody on that list is above steve and molly anderson who are the only actual designers and honestly i don't want greg jazwiak eddie q and craig federighi and turnus overriding steve lemay and molly anderson on the other hand when they when they delegated to alan dine let him do what he want he made bad decisions so i'm not sure what to do about this org chart but if if german's reporting here is true it is a very interesting sort of stew of people that makes it very difficult to know who to blame for things that apple does that you don't like design-wise.

1:27:10Much easier when it was just Ive. I think it's standard leadership is like the CEO and the top execs are not going to be specialists in all areas. And so you have to be able to identify and hire good people at every level below you. Like set things up in place that like you hire good execs and they hire good VPs and they hire good men. You know, you hire good people because you're outsourcing that decision-making to them and you can't do everything. Yeah, but all those people shouldn't be in the meeting. Well, right. That's what I'm saying. But then also, part of the process is every part of that stack, as you go up the chain, you need to be able to trust the people who are experts.

1:27:49That's why you hired them. So the CEO needs to be able to trust some of the decision-making to the level below them, and then they need to trust some of the decision-making to the level below them until you get to the actual experts that know what they're talking about. But then the people above, they're responsible for more of an editorial role. So like Steve Jobs didn't know how to, you know, grind the corners down on a computer case to make it round. But he knew like he, you know, somebody at some point brought him the idea of a round a computer case. And he's like, yes, that's great. We're going to do that.

1:28:21We're going to do it with, you know, my ideals and qualities and whatever. That's the role of leadership. Like you don't have to need to know. You don't need to know how to do everything. You need to have people who can do it and you need to trust them and serve as like an editor and a guiding voice. And so as long as the people at the top can do that, and as long as the people below them can work with that dynamic, that can produce great outcomes. It's just a question of, you know, I think we've seen times where that dynamic wasn't working very well. One of the things that we've heard a lot about Tim Cook's leadership style is this repeated thing we've heard over and over again, which is, don't bring me problems.

1:29:01That's apparently a big thing for Tim Cook. Don't bring me problems. And he seems, from what we've heard, to lead by kind of like sheer force of will, just kind of like an ice cold. This is what we are doing. What are you still doing here? That kind of like very like cold, stern, like strict and unwavering way. Well, does the combination of that and don't bring me problems, does that sound like a kind of environment that creates good collaboration and decision making when things aren't obvious what to do? or in areas that he doesn't care that much about. I don't think that is great for that. And so one of the things that we have also heard is that by pushing problems down in the stack, you create more dysfunction in other ways.

1:29:52So by bringing problems up into the leadership roles, by letting the leaders better engage with that kind of stuff and by maybe having a new CEO coming that might have a different style of dealing with that kind of thing could be better. It could result in better work coming out. It could result in less weird infighting and divisional problems. Maybe the whole thing with Apple intelligence and John G. Andrea's group versus Craig Federighi's group, maybe that wouldn't have happened that way if the CEO was less about don't bring me problems and more about, hey, let's look at this thing holistically and figure it out.

1:30:25So I'm actually very excited about a lot of these changes coming up probably, including stuff like that that we will never even hear about at least not for years of just very basic differences in like how turnus operates almost anything versus how tim cook operates almost anything they're they're going to be very different people very different leaders and that's again this is part of why i'm excited about cook's hopefully soon departure and in particular it sounds like turnus is a pretty good candidate to replace him but we'll see how this all goes this could go a very different way because we don't we don't yet know what kind of leader turnus will be given that that kind of escalation and responsibilities but um i think we we can look at a lot of the dynamics that we've seen in apple during the cook tenure some of which have been great you know he's made a lot of money good for him um and some of which have been you know problematic or inefficient or have had you know other non-ideal outcomes and some of that's due to cook style and that's going to change and that i'm really looking forward to that yeah it's difficult to tell from the outside whether steve lemay was not steve my turnus was deployed you finally got his name we finally got it and we weren't even talking about it i was just reading it from that screen that's why whether turnus was deployed by cook to solve a problem or whether turnus was lobbying it was lobbying up the management chain and saying we've got a design problem let me go fix it right because you know that's yes part of being leadership is knowing how to hire and delegate or whatever but also part of leadership is setting direction and inspiring people and a lot of the times especially even in job steve jobs case like you said it'll be that Like people are bringing thing, presenting things to higher ups all the time.

1:31:59Steve Jobs had a good ability to when presented with the 75 things that people in his organization were doing, he would see one of them and Darth Vader style say, that's it. The rebels are there. Like he would say, this is it. This is what we're doing. He sees, you know, he sees the gumdrop computer in Johnny Ives lab along 8000 other things. Johnny Ives showed him and said, this is it. We're doing this. We're making this computer. This is the whole the whole company's focus on this. giant giant like okay like i showed you 25 things but you figure that's it we're doing this now and because you know being able to detect whether it's like this is a thing that i think people will like it will make a good product it's technically feasible like the whole big formula of like identifying that versus cook where i think cook was like glasses it's going to be the future but like he didn't it didn't have the right combination of can we do this now do are you sure this will be a good product are you right it will be a good product how much will it like all the things have to come together the iMac was possible the iPhone was barely possible but possible the glasses that Tim seemed to be one of Tim Cook's babies not currently possible in the way that Tim Cook wants to make them and he's going to be gone before probably anything comes to fruition in that right so with Ternus it's like okay well if Cook just sick Ternus on this to say we've got a design problem go solve it and Ternus is competent at doing it that's great I would love it even more if Ternus was telling everybody who would listen to him, we've got a design problem.

1:33:22We need to fix it. And then the people said to him, oh, OK, well, if you think we have a design problem, you go fix it. And he's like, fine, I will. And that's how you move up the chain. Of course, every executive doesn't want their underlings to bring them problems. It's not a unique thing to Tim Cook. That's just part of being management. The whole point is the people below you should be solving their problem. Anyway. No, but I see. OK, I will disagree with that. your job as the ceo is to solve the difficult problems that like the the most difficult problems come to you and that's your job yeah but he's just saying he doesn't want to be a referee for a bunch of infighting below them like there's a balance and then when they say don't bring me problems it's kind of like look it's your job to work this out like don't don't involve don't constantly run to daddy when you have any kind of conflict because that's exhausting for me and it's not you people doing your job obviously there's a balance obviously things do bubble up and there's decision making atop.

1:34:12But like that attitude is trying to discourage the anti-pattern, which is anytime there's any kind of issue and people can't agree, they immediately run up the org chart and say, well, fine, our boss will decide for both of us. And it's like, that's not a scalable system either. So I don't know what you've heard about the don't bring me problems thing, but I feel like that is mostly a healthy dynamic within companies. And it's not saying never bring me problems. It's not saying I'll never make any opinion. It's just saying part of being at this level of management is taking responsibility and working things out amongst yourself which is you know why like the forestall thing and everything it's like we can't have this thing where every time anything comes up you two fight tooth and nail and immediately run to me and say decide which one of us do you love more like with every decision that's not tenable and maybe that's for the era where that that river came from but but yeah i hope turnus is i hope turnus is able to recognize problems before tim cook which is not hard but still uh and i hope he has been lobbying to like you know i know i'm not in that part of the org but like like i hope like you know we say tim cook reading the room or having his finger on the pulse like i really hope this is for the one thing i hope for turnus is that he is better able to accurately assess at any given time how is apple doing that's really hard to do when you're high up in the org because it's kind of part of your job is to be like rah rah apple or whatever but like you have to have a clear-eyed view steve jobs is really good at that probably because he hated everything right so whatever apple was doing is like this is crap we could do better right uh tim cook at various times seems to be distracted by his various money making schemes and other things uh and not really keeping his eye on the ball like how are we actually doing what about our like why do people buy our products and are we selling products that fulfill that promise and you know like uh take his eye off the ball with the mac for such a long time taking his eye off the ball and design like just not understanding how developers attitude towards apple i think to his grave he will go to his grave not understanding how much developers uh dislike apple because of the decisions he's made for the most of his tenure uh that he's got blind spot so i'm hoping turnus uh it wasn't simply a fixer called in pulp fictions is it pulp fiction yeah pulp fiction style or is it reservoir dogs or is the fixer i thought it was pulp fiction um what is it called uh what's that guy's name mr white the short guy oh harvey kytel yeah harvey The Wolf.

1:36:30That's Paul Fletcher. Oh, Wolf. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. Yeah. I hope he's not just like we called in the Wolf to fix things. I hope instead he has been telling everyone who would listen to him that we need to do something about design. And by the way, we should get rid of Alan Dye. Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is slightly ham-fisted insofar as everyone knows what's going on here. So why don't we just embrace it? And I know it's not quite that simple because, you know, once they start really embracing it and really properly announcing who's next that gets the sec involved there's a lot more to it than even i'm aware of but it is kind of funny this like cloak and dagger thing that they're trying to pull off even though everyone seems to know what direction the wind is blowing but this still can go anyway you know like things change all the time and like i said just because he's being tapped to do this it may just be oh he's he's the most competent lieutenant uh being asked to do this but of course we're gonna ask this other person to be ceo which it seems unlikely but you never know.

1:37:25It's like the Sony TCL deal. Like it'll probably happen, but nothing signed yet. That's true. And then with regard to Cook's departure, CEO, Apple told shareholders this month, writes Mark Gurman, that its current chairman, Art Levinson, would remain in his role past the company's February shareholder meeting, despite the fact that he's now 75, the usual retirement age for directors. That implies a chairman transition won't happen until at least 2027. Sorry, Marco. Hey, look, I'm just happy this is, you know, that there's obvious signs that this is in motion. Now, whether or not Art Levinson is there for another year or another six months, who knows?

1:38:04I don't think this really says either way. All this says is that he is not being forced to retire by their original rules. Because again, Apple makes the rules, they can change them whenever they want. So they're kind of holding Art Levinson over a little bit longer. I still think the most likely outcome here is sometime soon, Tim Cook replaces Art Levinson as chairman of the board and John Turner's become CEO. That seems like still the obvious path. But as I said a few weeks ago, Tim Cook and Apple are very patient. They are happy to wait what seems like an eternity to us to move on something or to resolve an issue, to issue an update to a product, whatever it is.

1:38:49They do things on their timeline, and they don't like having anyone else influence their timeline. So whatever Cook's plan is for the succession, he's going to take his time, and he's going to do it the way he wants to do it. And given the gravity of that situation, I think that's the right move. You know I will not say good things about Tim Cook when they're not warranted. But in this particular way, he is a very efficient leader or a very effective leader in terms of like when he has a plan on his timeline, he will stick to it. He has almost certainly planned this very carefully, in a very considered way.

1:39:30and I'm sure it seems like from everything so far with the various executive retirements and different transitions and everything it seems like he is executing on a plan that has been carefully considered and it's going to be on his timeline and it didn't seem like he was going to leave in January the way the original rumors said about because of the chairman of the board age requirement they had that seemed a little fast I still think it could happen in this calendar year or it could happen next year. They can, you know, it's the board is totally under Apple's control. They can do whatever they want.

1:40:05They don't need to wait until a one year anniversary of this extension for Art Levinson or anything like that. Like they can do whatever they want. So whatever their plan is, they're going to keep doing it. I still think it's, you know, this month was aggressive, but it could still be this year or next year. It doesn't matter. I think one of Tim Cook's strengths is the sort of bird's eye view of the sort of macro economic picture and where apple fits into it which is why he's been so successful at making money and all that other stuff and it's also part of his blind spots with china because it just makes so much sense in an economic sense and it's like well the downsides he was he was not seeing the where this could lead it's just that the money was too good as they say um but like this transition is all about like i'm sure he has in his own mind uh you know ideally this is when i with the transition would happen in terms of in terms of stuff i probably would understand in terms of commodity deals and the way the market is moving and how Apple is positioned and minimizing the impact to the company's economics.

1:41:06This is always going to be some hit during the transition because there's uncertainty and everything like that. He's got this idea in his head of here's the best time to make this move. And it's something that he's probably one of the only people, maybe with Jeff Williams, in the world who even understands, who holds the entirety of Apple's economic engine in their mind and the whole world market and all the political stuff or whatever and deciding when can we do this switcheroo but in the end it's like you know there's no perfect time like he's going to do the best he can he's patient you know whatever but like there's always going to be uncertainty during transition uh he's certainly not going to rush it but like kind of like the the blind spot with china it's like yeah everything's great you're right about a lot of the things there but if you don't pay attention to the downsides one day you're going to wake up and it's going to be a big deal and it's like if he takes too long and it's like i just want it to be just right or whatever it's like at a certain point various crises the company might be having should take precedence over his desire to make a smooth transition because obviously if there are any other crises that come up as if you know alan die leaving and the designed thing and apple as if we don't have enough already but like anytime something like that happens it's like okay i guess well the transition will have to wait a little bit because we have to sort this out it's like they'll never be a perfect time right and a certain point which i think we're long past you staying is the biggest problem so you do have to eventually do it and i hope you know he's a sensible person i hope he's probably some kind of deadline he's like whatever his deadline in his head and it's like i'll try to find the perfect time but honestly it's definitely going to happen within the next you know x number of years or months and uh fingers crossed that uh he finds a time where he feels like it's the right time and he makes it happen him because he needs to go.

1:42:45Yeah. I mean, if you would have if you would have asked me, you know, maybe six months ago before any of the rumors started, you know, when do when do I think Tim Cook might retire if it's going to be sometime soon? I would say it would he would wait until the Trump administration's over. Yeah. And honestly, that would make a lot of sense. But like, I think he sees now that that's not the right move. I'm a little curious why he sees that's not the right move. I mean, that and that, you know, maybe he just doesn't want to do it that long because that's you know unfortunately we still have probably three more years of that um so um so you know that's that's a while in terms of you know this timeline so i don't think that's the plan now because i don't think we'd be hearing all this all this shuffling around and all these moves if it was that far off i don't i don't think it's three years off um but certainly if the you know the the the apple defenders and the tim cook defenders with all this trump stuff they point to some kind of role that tim cook is like heroically taking the heat so that you know it shields the rest of the company or maybe you know he takes the heat and then he leaves you know at the right time or whatever if that is true uh which i i honestly don't think that's the whole story if it's even any of the story um but if that is true that timeline's too long for this that that doesn't fit what's what seems to be happening here and i do wonder like what's going to happen with that side of that of the job that's why i said i don't want him to be chairman of the board because i do get it how can you how can you this day you sit in the ceo seat and say okay tim i'm going to do everything the opposite of you did i know you're still chairman of the board what do you think of that well but you know in in terms of politics like i i think tim staying as chairman of the board for a few years that could he maybe the plan is he stays on as chairman of the board he keeps politicking with trump and that kind of leaves turn us out of it yeah trump will still think he's ceo so it's fine that's probably true he'll still be tim apple to trump for the for forever so it's like the fact that he's no longer ceo is immaterial because trump won't know or care about that that's probably true and like and that you know from if if cook wanted to isolate apple from at more of that heat than it needs um maybe that's what what he's thinking.

1:44:59Because again, Cook is a very considered person. He's good at playing the politics game when he needs to. And so, it would not surprise me if that was his plan. But I think the CEO transition seems to be happening way sooner than that. So, if his plan is to be like the hate sink, so to speak, it's going to have to at least include some of his time as chairman of the board. Lately, I can't wait for it to happen. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Delete Me and Squarespace. And 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, which tends to be approximately 21 minutes of bonus topics every week.

1:45:47This week in Overtime, it's going to be, we're going to be talking about the new ownership of TikTok in the US and all of that whole thing. So if you want to hear that, join us atp.fm slash join. Thanks for listening, 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. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse, it's accidental.

1:46:55They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. All right. I don't want to belabor this, but it would be remiss of us not to at least acknowledge that what's going on in Minnesota and what's going on with ICE and not the ice I was dealing with, but the national ice, it's terrible. It's disgusting. We, all three of us, absolutely stand in unison with the people of Minnesota that we are disgusted by what our government has become. Marco was tweeting a day or two ago about how it seems bananas that anyone would travel to our country these days. And I echo what Marco says. It's awful. It's really, really bad.

1:47:47And Tim Cook is not making things a whole lot better. Now, granted, he's not actually affecting things as far as we can tell, but it's certainly really gross to go from the second or third shooting in as many weeks to, hey, let's watch this movie about Melania. It's just gross and disgusting. And again, I don't want to belabor it too much. It seems like there's a lot of Apple employees who don't like it either. We'll put a link about that in the show notes. Tim wrote an extremely mealy-mouthed memo about it. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's just... It's gross, especially when you compare to his letter after George Floyd was killed, which was much, much, much better.

1:48:27It's all gross top to bottom. I'm going to stop talking and let Marco and John take a turn. But again, we're going to try to make this quick, not because it's not important, but because we're trying to not be total Debbie Downers over here. We will have an actual after show on a cheerier topic, but it's hard not to talk about this like u.s citizens being murdered by the government and then the government refusing to even have an investigation i have an independent investigation of that and smearing the victims saying they're just terrible things are happening here and it is it's not a good situation and it's affecting everybody even if you're not where this is happening because it could happen to you and apparently there's no recourse if it does and so we're all feeling kind of crappy about it and the tim the tim cook milania thing like i'm sure he's loving this because it's like you know how long has this movie premiere thing been uh been scheduled and then like the government's got to murder people just like exactly around and not that it matters it's bad either way but like it looks even worse uh it's part it's you know tim cook's strategy about this has not changed and it continues to be a terrible strategy and continues to make him and apple look terrible and you know this this story from the intercept about apple employees being cranky about it like you know it's not just people outside apple that can't handle this people inside apple feel that way too which is another reason that the sooner tim cook can leave the better chance the next ceo has to you know keep these employees from leaving the company right you don't want your employees being this angry at your ceo because they'll leave and you you need them because they do the work yeah and again yeah i have very strong feelings about this um i will point you to two posts by John Gruber over the last day or so that were excellent about Tim Cook's ridiculous statement about being heartbroken prayers and deepest sympathies this is a time for de-escalation like what a bunch of bullshit from Tim Cook like such bullshit gotta make sure you don't say anything to make Trump angry non-committal not say it's it's both sides it's oh both sides have good people.

1:50:28That's what this is. It's so despicable. And I know why he's doing it. I know, look, part of it is he's trying to protect Apple in the Trump era and this, and you kind of have to just suck up a lot to do that. I get that. Also, Apple gets tariff exceptions. Apple has the government do things like block competition from like Huawei and stuff from being used. Apple has the Justice Department now kind of just disappearing things from being looked at, Apple benefits a lot from government stuff that is giving them advantages, unfair advantages or illegal advantages sometimes, but it's giving them advantages.

1:51:05So it isn't just about defending Apple's business from having retribution. Tim Cook is getting a lot of favors from the government that help Apple continue doing things that are kind of despicable. It's not all roses. He's not this wonderful leader who's throwing himself under the bus out of the grace of his heart. No, he's a bullshitter. he is a ceo who extracts advantages from the government by trading favors and gold trinkets and bs like that we know exactly who tim cook is he's going to keep showing us that over and over again i can't wait for the tim cook era to end uh and that's that's all i got for tonight john anything to add about that specifically no but i have a much cheerier actual tech related after show that we should move on to freaking please don't have to think about ice anymore um at least until we get off the air and see whatever horror has happened.

1:51:51Anyway, let's go back to me and my friend, my new friend, Claude Code. I had a past-keyes ATP, did a bunch of stuff talked about last time. I've still been hanging out with Claude Code. Claude Code is a little bit of a needy friend, and he did get money out of me. Oh, you are, I think you and I wrestle for who is more frugal, and I think you usually win, but it's a toss-up. I am stunned. But in terms of value for the money, there's a few things in the tech business that many of us agree are great values. I think one of those is paying for the no ads thing on YouTube, whatever they call it this year.

1:52:33That is obviously a great buy. And I think number two thing is whatever your AI of choice is, buy whatever their 20-ish bucks a month plan is that gets you access to the good models and removes restrictions and stuff. Oh my God. Honestly, I haven't actually used CloudCode yet. I've used Cloud, but I haven't used CloudCode. But I'm trying Gemini for certain things. I'm still a very heavy ChatGPT user. Earlier today, I got a statement for a retirement account that I have. And I wanted to understand better some of the acronyms and numbers that were on it. And so I scanned it and I took a screenshot without any of my account numbers, just the middle of the paper that shows this table of values and headings and stuff.

1:53:23And I pasted it into ChatGPT and I said, can you explain this to me and tell me what this means for this year and what this number means over here? And it gave me this entire breakdown of what every single term means and how these numbers work out over time and what the different aspects, pros and cons of different things are. And I'm like, this is amazing. As far as you know. Again, Again, I know this is not about my experience with AI this week, but my experiences with AI continue to be extremely positive. And I cannot tell you the difference it is making in my life. The more I – like the walls are coming down in terms of figuring information out.

1:54:03And even though it isn't always 100 % right, it's right a lot and it's amazing a lot. But you don't know. It's like the ads. Half the money we spend on ads is wasted, but we don't know which half. Well, some percentage of your answers are wrong, but you don't know which ones. But it's right so often. I mean, look, no matter who I ask for information, like I actually I asked a financial advisor recently a couple of questions and it turned out later that part of what he said was wrong. And that, you know, is that is that error rate different from. I would say chat has a worse error rate than a financial advisor.

1:54:39Yes, but you'd be surprised. like setting aside the real the real trick with all these things is obviously you need a way to tell like whether the answer is right like i think i talked about this maybe it was on rectives about you know kind of like in the cryptography thing where it's like it's really hard to derive the answer but it should be really fast to check it that's the ideal but for everything in life you need that how can i tell whether this answer is right you don't you know you have to you have to have some way to tell and that's why i always say whether it's you're asking a person or asking a financial advisor asking anybody any kind of professional like or hiring somebody or whatever if you hire someone to fix your fridge and they fix your fridge you'll know real fast whether you fix it does it get cold or does it not get cold did they fix it or did they not fix it right now there's varying degrees like maybe it breaks next year because they did something badly or whatever but at the very least if you ask someone a question or hire someone to do a thing you can tell whether they did it if it's the type of thing where it's like this is broken and i need you to fix it and same thing with chat gpt this is broken i need you to fix it did you fix it yes no good uh with other stuff that's more abstract it gets a little bit loosey-goosey because you're like well if i just believe everything you say and continue along that path for a year maybe it will lead me down a path where we went astray two months ago and i didn't realize it because it's totally an area that i don't understand but this is a side track this is a side track what i'm trying to talk about cloud code i'm i'm glad that you're continuing to have your friend that you talk with that gives you plausible answers marco and a lot of the time you can just immediately check whether it's right and that is helping you and i get that and that's exactly the same thing with cloud code like as i'm using it to do stuff like the reason i paid more i already had the $20 a month thing, but we were getting it for free as part of a pass code sponsorship thing.

1:56:13But I stopped. That trial was going to end anyway. And so I paid for the$100 thing. Oh! The$20 thing, I was running out of tokens too much with the$20 thing. And I tell myself, I'm going to do the$100 thing, but just for one month. That's what I tell myself. Tune in next month. But anyway, I did it. I wondered if this is a$200 plan too. and that is the$100 gives you five times what you get for the$20 and the$200 gives you 10 times, I think. But anyway, it turns out five times is plenty for me. And what am I, what am I doing with this? Right. Cause like, I, you know, I did the, the pass keys thing.

1:56:48Uh, I did my status board thing that I talked about. Um, I had an idea for another project. uh but before i had that idea like i guess it was kind of simultaneous my status board thing that i talked about see i'm not going to go into again see past episode where i talked about the i made a web version of panic status board um that's just a website for me and i don't want it to be accessible to the public so i just had a http basic auth on it do you guys remember http basic yeah username at password colon rest of it yeah it just it brings up a little dialogue browsers still support it it brings up a little dialogue you put in a username and password and if it's not https it sends them in clear text it's it's great yeah you know what also still uses that podcast feed sometimes yeah yeah i mean anyway it's very primitive but i said like and that's that's fine but like it just bothered me it's like it was the 1990s i'm using hdb basic auth in 2025 i just felt wrong and i had just added pass keys to atp.fm honestly basic auth okay for whatever it's worth sorry basic auth over https is not that bad i know i know i know i'm just saying anyway okay sorry what why don't i add a passkey based account system to my status board website i've already like i've claude code has already shown me that it can do it in php no less it should be easy to do it in node because that's like an actual implementation but like real libraries and stuff should be a snap like there's a million examples it's like it's this this is the thing claude code should knock out of the park and then i had to decide like okay well how how should an account system work on like a personal tool website that's only supposed to be accessible to me and i had to go through like it's like really weird so first of all you know status board its persistence layer is essentially it's r2 essentially s3 everything is in json files in s3 that there's no database it's just you know because the data volumes are minuscule nothing ever like that's it that's its data storage same thing with the account system like okay well it's fine i could but there's going to be like one or two accounts on this thing ever i'll just put everything in json files um and pass keys are great because you don't have to store anything the server stores nothing there's no hashed password you store a public key that's the great thing about passkey one of the one of the many great things about passkey is if there's like a data breach or whatever all they get is public keys thing information that is literally public there's nothing in there there's no password hashish on the crack there's certainly no plain text anything that's the beauty of passkey so i'm like i have no problem putting you know public key passkey stuff in a json file and r2 not that anyone cares um but then it was like okay but how like how do i make the first account you know what i mean like if it's if it's a website that doesn't let anybody in but there's no accounts on it how do i make the first account like well i guess i need like a bootstrap mode where like when there's zero accounts you get an account creation screen but as soon as there's non-zero number of accounts you get a login screen like php bb yeah exactly there's that so you know it's old technology um and then i was like well what if i wanted like what if other people in my family want to uh make an account on this thing they can't make one because once i had the first account they would just get a login screen there's no like sign up process because why would there be it's not a public website because if there was a sign up thing then anybody could go there and sign up for an account but i don't want that but i just want the people who i want to allow to sign up and i could create the account for them but i can't create a passkey for them because if i carry an account for them the passkey will go into my icloud keychain and not in theirs right that's the thing you could do with passwords you can make them an account and with a temporary password and tell them what the password is and then have to change it when they logged in the old ways but with passkeys that doesn't work and i was like there's gonna be no passwords it's just gonna be passkeys only it's just all modern it's my website so then i came up with this like token based system where you can create a token with a fixed number of accounts that can be created from the token it's just a basically like a secure you know a secret url security through obscurity go to this big long url once you go there it burns the token you can create an account right and then i would just give that url to whoever wanted an account then they could create an account or whatever if i wanted to give you two accounts i would make a token with two things give the url to both of you you'd both go in create your account put your pass keys in your thing anyway i spent a while doing this passkey based account system and then i did eventually have the ability to add a password right because i'm like well maybe if you want a password you can add one if you really want to and yes there would be a hash password in there whatever i spent a while doing this it's like a little miniature account system that supports pass keys that's in front of my status board site to let you in to do the status board stuff and around while i was doing this i'm like i have another idea for a different project but i'm in the middle of doing this pass key thing i'm like you know what for this other project it's the same type of deal it's on like a little personal web app just for me but i don't want anyone else to have access to it i'm probably going to want to use this whole passkey account system that i just made for the status board thing i'm probably going to want to use that in this new thing too so i should have looked up the xkcd comic with the passing the salt please casey find this for me um so like you know what i need i need to factor out this whole password account system into a framework that can be used by the status board site and also the new site oh my god because once because if you're a programmer once you have two things to use the same thing it's like oh now it's got to be factored out oh yeah yep it's just got to be by the way i wish that's a thing claude code could understand i'm i've heard from a lot of people who are like here is the the the tutelage that i put claude code under and it felt like giant giant essays that i write it about how to be a good programmer but i feel like in the training day there should be something that says you know what i don't want to open up a source code file and see that the same seven lines of code are repeated a hundred times have you heard of functions cloud code factor that stuff out you can't do that like machines especially when you're a human you're like i would never do that it's too much typing i would never update it in all the places well guess what apparently cloud code has no problem updating the same seven lines of code in a thousand places because it's a machine and it's like i'm never gonna miss it i'm not gonna make a copy and paste type i'm never gonna make a mistake it will but anyway like i don't know what's making you do this but the code it writes just my name makes you pull my hair out and i just like i have to spend some quality time refactoring and saying you're doing this same thing in a hundred places making a function put it in a library look see see how much eventually i just went and did a bunch of stuff by hand because it wasn't getting and there's no sense arguing with the machine when i can just factor it out myself but anyway got to factor out this functionality into a library i'm kind of playing it like a video game where it's like yeah i could just do this myself but the video game is don't do it yourself the video game is type in little essays to make the machine do it for you and so i'm trying to get it understand it's like no here's the thing here's here's the guidelines i bull pointed it out for it i made this big essay in a claude that md and it's like when i change things in the framework those changes should be reflected immediately in everything that uses the framework like there's no like you know i don't know if you remember mfc where like generate source code for you and then you would modify the source code well guess what if a new version of msc comes out and it generates different source code that doesn't help you if you just generated it for your giant project three years ago you don't get the benefit from those changes that's what a library is you know and with node packages and stuff it was just like oh just generate this and blah blah now you're fine like no i'm not fine because if i go back into the framework and i change this character here that's not reflected in the other products that's not how a framework works i spent so long arguing with the stupid machine i'm like nothing can be like it has to all stay in the framework you can't copy the files into the other anyway i made a framework i fought clawed code i made it make a framework for the account system uh and the second uh little app that i wanted to make it was actually something that uh someone suggested to me uh while i after i had already made it they said hey you know what you should make you should make this thing and i felt like replying but i didn't want to spoil this episode i already did uh can you guess what it is uh i have no idea single website just for me not public something to do with like membership tracking but that's the that's the status board thing you're right it's a tier list website oh of course of course i hate tier maker.com every time we do a tier list i have to go like with the the chrome dev tools and like hide and delete nodes i turn on my ad blocker and then i go in there and manually edit the dom to get all of the ads and crap out and you can't delete all the nodes because javascript will just bring them back so you have to hide some of them and then i have to arrange it so so like as we do the tier list thing like the like the stupid buttons and copyright notice don't scroll up into view so i have to hide like it takes so long to arrange this window just so and i always do like a few days ahead of time and then i come back and see chrome has taken that tab out of memory and it reloads the page and everything is gone.

2:05:44And I'm so sick of that. And that the tier, oh, and by the way, when we make the video of it, I have to arrange my window and I use Xscope to make the window the right proportions. And then I use the screen capture within the, you know, carefully drag out the outline and we're, I'm going to be doing quick time screen capturing. And then make sure that after I drag all the little tiles up, that the board looks clean and no weird stuff is coming into it. Right. But make sure you can see all the, you know, all the, the one, as I fill the tiers, everything is still visible. I'm like, I need to make a tier list app myself.

2:06:14And I made it look pretty much exactly like tier maker because tier maker is sort of the canonical thing. And for historical continuity purposes, purposes with ATP. But anyway, now I have a tier list website that has configurable aspect ratios, auto zooming to make sure that all the tiles are always visible at all times. And that, that you can always see at least some of the things you're dragging into the thing, but also, uh, when you were done, the thing will be the maximum size it can be. um have things to hide the scroll bars so they don't show up in the little scrolly region i even made it work on the phone because of course i would i made the status board thing work on the phone as well and the ipad which is a pain in the butt for claude to do because yeah that's another thing with like it saved me a lot of time on this too because like to make a status board takes you two seconds like yeah i'm the person who sent in the thing i made this status board you can make it in two seconds but the thing you make in two seconds is garbage like there are so many things that can go wrong it's like i was thinking when you program something yourself like say you're doing drag and drop of images and like a tier list type thing if you haven't done that recently maybe you're not familiar with the modern apis for doing drag and drop and like html5 and stuff like that so if you were a human programmer doing it you're like okay i'm going to start simple i'm going to make a thing i'm going to make just one thing and i'm going to have the ability to drag it okay now i have one thing i have the ability to drag it i'm going to drop it somewhere like you'd build up in a piece at a time that's how you do programming right like when you're a human you're like one thing at a time piece by piece each step of the way i'm like i've got something draggable i've got a place where i can drag it and each time you work out the things okay now i need multiple ones now they need to move out of the way when they're like you would build it up a piece at a time cloud code because it's a machine and goes real fast it's like i've done everything it's all done and then you try to use it and like nothing works oh you can't drag this one anywhere you can't drag this from the top row to the bottom row when you drag this the image doubles now it triples now it leaves a ghost image over here doesn't work at all on the phone it's like it's just no human would ever say here you go i'm done and like nothing works and so you go back and forth and be like this didn't work and it's like you're filing you're filing tickets into your you gotta make this work this doesn't do anything like this why don't we try a different strategy like then you peek in the source code you're like what are you doing now like reconsider this and then you're thinking would it be faster if i did it myself that's the game you're playing so i spent a long time with cloud code working on drag and drop uh and scrolling and hover effects and double touch thing and scrolling in touch and apparently the phone doesn't support html direct html5 drag and drop stuff you have to use entirely different api uh but anyway it's done uh i have a tier list app i have a i needed a framework because once you got two apps you need to factor it out into a framework and i did and now it's real easy for me to make future apps i don't currently have any future app ideas but i'll probably polish up my tier list and the next time we do a tier list as an atp member special which won't be next month because we just did one but at some point in the future we will do another tier list we will get to try out my fancy new tier list uh website and i will say the one thing i stopped myself from doing was and i maybe i'll revisit this but i probably shouldn't was i thought you know what what if i did this as a multi-user thing where all three of you could be uh you know all three of us could be on at the same time and we could all be dragging things at the same time and nice why don't you have us vote on what the rank should be john well that's what we do verbally it's like it's a it's an audio podcast like we talk through the things but i was like i don't want to do that mostly because i don't want to uh upgrade to a different thing a storage thing and trying to do it with json files you could do it but there'd be all sorts of things where it's like oh that person started their drag first so that person dropped it first so that invalidates yours and you drop it and it goes back to its original position or goes to a different position it would it would be confusing so i didn't do that um yeah that's that's a lot of scope creep on that yeah i i held off because because honestly i feel like that the cloud code would do a good job of that because there's so many examples of like the conflict-free data whatever thing that are out there crdts yeah but but with json backing it's a little bit tricky i mean i i did basic mutual exclusion with the json thing because you can do um conditional puts that basically say uh don't accept this put unless the content is exactly how it was when i did the get uh which is the world's dumbest way to not corrupt your data uh but i did at the very least i did that but this is a single user system with a single account but it looks real good i've been using the 91 car logos as my test case for it and uh it's shaping up pretty nice so i'm having a good time with cloud code it is a i wouldn't call it productive like it has done it has helped me a little bit but honestly i'm thinking mostly like uh playing arc raiders Like this is this is essentially a thing I am doing for entertainment.

2:10:46I mean, I guess it's for the show where I talk about it as well. But it is very much like playing a video game. And the video game is, can you make this other thing do a thing? That's the game. And it's kind of fun, especially if you're a programmer and you know how you would do it yourself trying to make something else do it. That's not a human. It is a pretty fun video game. And I recommend everyone give it a try. Well, this is like the power of AI coding. Like it lowers the bar significantly for new programmers and for existing programmers looking stuff up. But also by lowering the bar so far in all the all this like, you know, kind of like grunt work for a lot of these these things.

2:11:26What it does is it makes it it makes it worthwhile to create things that previously were just not worth the time to create. Or wouldn't have been fun. Like I didn't do paski as an ATP FM because it wouldn't have been fun. I hate doing authentication and web stuff I did in my whole career it would not have been fun but using cloud code made it fun yeah that's extremely cool so sitting here now do you plan to fall back to either the $20 a month or free plan after the end of your$100 month yeah I think so like I think I've learned how to use it more efficiently and I don't have any other big projects and honestly like it's been a big learning curve for me of like when to say uncle and dive in like for example i spent literally hours today i believe it was three hours fixing this cloud code css because the css it made oh my god it's just like like it like brute forces css it's like whatever i'll just i i know how to make a css rule and i know how to make it apply to a thing that's all i need i was like no no there is there is a design philosophy of not making a bazillion randomly named styles connected to a bazillion randomly named stuff especially when you have like a base framework i consolidated i don't know i should have counted how many selectors it was but like just pages and pages and pages of selectors and i spent three hours manually consolidating them down into one sane css file that like it's like one 90th the length it's like i yeah you can write a new selector for everything you want to style and yes you can keep the same color up to date in 500 places because you're a computer but i can't stand it and so i spent three hours fixing it and now i'm like am i actually saving time with cloud code because i've spent three hours editing consolidating three css files into one css file on the framework and carefully doing it and changing the markup so that the appearance stays exactly the same because it made it look the way i would say make this look like this make this look like that and it would do it and then you look under the covers it's like oh my god what are you doing i know i said to make that look like that and it does but this is not it's it's it's madness and i did i have tried gemini as well and uh claude code is kicking gemini's butt i haven't tried codex yet but uh yeah yeah by all accounts it seems like the one for code generation is claude by far like that it seems like they're way ahead on that some good things on codex oh and by the way one remember i said that claude erased my entire directory or i suspect yeah yeah i erased my entire directory last time i can't conclusively blame that but i have something that i can conclusively blame on claude which is we were working together on the tier list thing and at a certain point despite me literally never having said anything that even remotely suggests that it should do this it deployed my code to claude i'm like and then i put i put a sternly worded instruction and all the cloud.md file said never deploy i will do that manually but it wasn't a big deal because it's a private website whatever mike are you kidding me because i saw it running an npm run deploy like what in that it was too late it deployed it so you gotta watch it you gotta keep your eye on these things even if they're sandbox if they have network access don't deploy your code they don't care bananas uh yeah yeah that's extremely cool yeah i've been fiddling with CloudCodeSum, I had it check over my entire CallSheet code base and it found some minor stuff that I was happy for it to find.

2:14:59I've had it code a couple of minor things, and what I've decided to do, this is probably, I'm surely not the first person that's done this, but instead of working on the folder, the directory that I typically do my work in, you know, when I open Xcode, I'm pointed to such and such a directory, I've created a second clone of the repo somewhere else so that it's off in its own little world, and it's doing its own thing over there. And then I have it make whatever modifications it wants to make to the files in that folder. And then I'll typically go and do a manual diff deliberately, you know, as a check to make sure, okay, yeah, I see what it's doing here.

2:15:34And that makes sense. And that's worked out pretty well for me, but it's all been minor, minor, minor stuff. I haven't really had it do anything larger yet. And I'm sure with time, as I get used to Claude Code and get used to, you know, working with my new little buddy, I'll get better at doing larger in offering it larger and bigger efforts. But so far, I've been pretty impressed. And I think I've been impressed enough that I would probably pony up for, like Marco was saying, the$20 a month plan. I can't imagine ponying up for the$100 a month plan unless I'm doing something, you know, like a one-off, like you were describing, John.

2:16:08But you never know. I just put a screenshot of it if you want to see what it looks like. It should look very familiar because I was basically saying this has to look pixel for pixel like TearMaker.com because that is the canonical tier list website. And I made some slight changes, but it's essentially the same. I don't love the way it looks, but it does look like the tier list. I did that by the way. Like I've had varying success with various AI things where you send them a screenshot and say, make a thing that looks like this. It utterly failed. Like I gave it a screenshot. I carefully composed these screenshots and what it made look absolutely nothing like the screenshot.

2:16:43I was like, well, we got our work cut out for us. Let's dive in and fix this. But yeah, it looks like the thing is, it's all not, but I can control the aspect ratio. I can turn on an outline that shows me exactly where I need to do the screenshot capture. It auto scales everything to make sure everything fits in the thing. It's glorious. I never have to right click and inspect on that stupid tier maker website ever again. That's very cool. That's very, very cool. And I'm glad you did it. And I hope it works. I don't mean that in a snarky way. I mean that in a, you know, hey, this is something that we're all three of us going to use.

2:17:14And I hope it works out. the way you expect. It certainly sounds like you've tested it. No, this is really, really cool. And I know, I don't think the listeners know, but Marco and I know the amount of pain, and I know John went through this a minute ago, but truly he goes through an immense amount of pain to get these tier lists to work. And I love him for it because I do love the tier list member specials. I think they're becoming my favorites. But it is such a pain for John, and I'm so glad that hopefully, knock on wood, it will be a lot better now. I mean, it's fun, too. i enjoy making them and finding the things and coming up with the ideas and now it'll be even more fun because i'll get to use my own app to do it and not that terrible app that's there i mean this says i can also like i gotta add an image export that's my last feature i need to add but like uh so i don't have to do a screenshot i like this export an image of the final tier list which is what we want and it looks beautiful because i don't have to worry about composing the screenshot everything will be in it um but yeah like this this is gonna make my life a heck of a lot easier you can do individual play sessions with save sessions so we can i can name the sessions after of the episode and we'll always have the final state of the tier list saved in the thing oh that's cool yeah that's right um i actually i had one more feature was i want to make publicly accessible ones so if i wanted everyone to share to your list so these are all it's all uh private data you can't get this unless you're signed in but i do probably want to make a way to have publicly accessible url so someone can look at the tier list it would be cool to deploy this you know under the atp domain some way somehow be that you know some subdomain or you know some path that's referred to this.

2:18:40I don't know. I'm not trying to make a product here. No, no, no, I know, but I mean, it relates to ATP and it would be cool to list it there. Just the image of the final thing is fine, but yeah. True. That's cool. I really dig it. I can also see it being fun, actually. I'm not trying to scope creepy here, despite what it sounds, but I could see it fun leaving it possible to generate your own tier list. So like, you know, if I'm a listener, I could take the same source material generate my own and then generate an image from that that i could share you know on social media or something like that if i made this accessible and people could make accounts on it anyone can make their own tier list and it would work fine but i'm not doing that although it does like the tier maker website is so junked up with crap and i did this in like two days like obviously their website is more than just this but like if i replace these json files with a real database like it's not hard to compete with a lot of these popular websites they're just popular because they got a good domain and they and everybody knows about how to get there but they're so junked up with ads and the functionality is so janky and like you know in two days i can make a thing that has more features than there it's substantially more features than theirs including ones that are specifically aimed towards a weird use case of doing screen recordings for a podcast but no one's ever going to make that product so you kind of have to make it yourself but even even setting that aside like even the people who just made their little toy things and sent me them or whatever those are better than the tier maker website too just because it's your micro website is so terrible yep i totally buy it that's super cool john and uh definitely a much happier thing to talk about this so i appreciate it