698: And Do What?

11:02Casey Liss:I think you mean for you and me.

11:04John Siracusa:Did I say you and I? Second correction! Anyways, so John, did you do any further research about this?

11:11Casey Liss:Yeah. I don't know why I didn't see that option. Maybe it's one of those ones where you get to change it for something else. But anyway, I priced it out just to see what it would be like to get a Mac Mini with an 8TB SSD. And it starts at$5 ,400. Cool. That is for a binned M4 Pro that is down two CPU cores and four GPU cores and 24 gigs of RAM and just plain gigabit Ethernet. $5 ,400 Mac Mini. So, yeah.

11:34Marco Arment:What would it take to have a stock Mac Mini, but in a gold

11:37Casey Liss:case you think it would be more or less solid gold or just plated uh solid well it's probably a lot

11:43Marco Arment:of gold gold's pretty expensive solid would be a lot yeah yeah so like the whole idea i was music

11:48Casey Liss:about iMac mini is like if i could get like some kind of arm computer to tide my over or if i don't care about power what can i get but the problem is the ssd ssd is the problem i was doing some more pricing out of things with like various discounts and stuff and in most cases with apple's pricing an eight terabyte ssd costs more than the computer like the upgrade even on a mac studio very often in most configs that aren't ultras the eight terabyte ssd upgrade from whatever the stock is costs more than the whole rest of the computer combined anyway aaron continues

12:16John Siracusa:similarly casey said you have to get the top of the line max chip to get the eight terabytes on the macbook pro which is not technically true on macbook pro eight terabytes is an option with the base m5 max however the base m5 max only supports 36 gigs of ram so if you want any additional ram then you'd have to upgrade to the top of the line max chip i think this is what what got me because if you recall, I was on the air. I was pricing out basically my existing M3 MacBook Pro. But if I were to buy it today and I have 64 gigs of RAM, so I conflated the issue being SSD where it wasn't the issue.

12:50John Siracusa:The issue actually was RAM that caused me to go to the super top of the line M5 Max. So I regret the error.

12:57Casey Liss:That's always been the case with Apple's configs in recent years, where upgrading to some other unrelated thing will be like, whoa, we got to change a bunch of other specs because they're really limiting the amount of configs they'll sell to you and so they're it's like it's getting to be like optioning a car it's like well if you want the entertainment package then you have to get the you know interior you know whatever thing like leather seats or things are connected in weird ways so i mean i don't really blame them given the the difficulties of uh component pricing but it does make configuring these things even trickier than normal

13:28John Siracusa:all right let's go to price increase corner we're going to start with the apple tv uh chris carley wrote in with a point that i think john maybe you intended to make this on the previous episode chris writes a big apple tv price hike makes sense since unlike many other products the apple tv doesn't have other expensive components to mask the changes in price of ram and of storage the apple tv is in terms of cost mostly just an old iphone chip with ram and storage yeah i didn't

13:52Casey Liss:mean to make this point and somehow uh we moved on to another topic before i could but uh but yeah we're complaining of like the apple tv 54 percent increase to the price base price 67 percent increase for the good one it's just brutal but like what what is the apple tv if not a bucket of of uh ram storage like there's not much else in there right it's it's just the soc that has the ram on it and then storage and i guess like the you know whatever wi-fi chip and stuff it's like there's nothing else in there it's the same similar to the point that i did end up making about like when you do when you look at how much the ram upgrade have increased they haven't increased by 20 they've increased by like 70 or 100 because that's it that's the source of the problem it's the ram well i'm not saying the apple tv is not overpriced you know for the power that it has and hasn't always been pretty expensive for what you get but if one product was going to have the highest percentage increase it would be the product that is just basically ram and storage

14:45John Siracusa:in the cheapest possible box right oh all right let's talk steam machine jay peters over at the Verge writes, after months of waiting, Valve has finally announced that the Steam Machine, its new living room friendly PC, will start at$1 ,050 and go on sale beginning actually as we record this today, June 29th. That is not cheap, especially when you're comparing it to like a PlayStation. But I guess, John, it might get worse.

15:08Casey Liss:Yeah, if you, I mean, so it is like a little PC and you can spec it up. And so if you get the maxed out two terabyte model with a controller, because apparently the cheap one doesn't even come with a controller, then it's$1 ,428. dollars uh the steam machine was looking really exciting back when we talked about it many moons ago as like a tiny living room pc that is as friendly as a console or tries to be as friendly as a console and as small and adorable but it plays pc games it's basically the desktop plugged in version of the steam deck it's the you know valve's linux platform where they heroically find ways to play windows games in linux and gets good performance and it's not a big fancy gaming pc but what if you don't want to build a big fancy gaming pc and all what if you also don't want to run handheld get a steam machine it's like a little pc game cube it's so adorable and it's like well no pricing is announced so what do you think it'll be like oh i don't know maybe this will be like as much as the playstation 5 pro like 700 six or 700 maybe even 800 nope it's over a thousand uh and in fact it was delayed because they hadn't announced pricing and then the date came when people expected them to announce pricing they're like uh we're gonna wait to see what's going on with the whole and that was you know that was uh a while ago and now they've announced pricing and the pricing is bad i mean i did see a bunch of youtube videos being like we're gonna build a steam machine competitor by building our own pc and i felt like most of those videos should have focused on how the pc is also more expensive to build now because it's not like right the steam machine is the only thing that is getting hit by this price increase but uh yeah kind of bad timing on uh valve's part uh although i guess they're probably glad they didn't launch the steam machine at like$750 several months ago because anyway, yeah, tough luck.

16:47John Siracusa:Jay Peters continues, while console makers sometimes subsidize their hardware to bring prices down, Valve is choosing not to do that with the Steam Machine. Here's what Valve said in remarks provided to The Verge. While this might seem like an easy solution, it doesn't align with our beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built. If there's anything we are religious about at Valve, it's our belief that open systems are better in the long run for ourselves and our customers. When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage or buy exclusive content for it, they're doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you will want to use.

17:18John Siracusa:We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either. You shouldn't feel like you have to buy Valve hardware. You should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one that makes sense for you. This means you get to decide which device fits your personal trade-offs around things like price performance, form factor, peripheral support, and everything else you care about. That's the strength of the open PC platform, and subsidizing hardware runs counter to it.

17:42Casey Liss:I haven't seen anyone push back on this, because everyone's like, rah, rah, yeah, open is great. But it's like, this answer doesn't make any sense to me. Because, like, all that open stuff, that's not really in Valve's control. Like, they're not, I mean, I suppose they could make, like, a proprietary console, but they're not. They're making a gaming PC. And as influential as Valve is, they don't actually control what constitutes a pc game microsoft with windows still has more control over that even though they're not even running windows like i've talked to this before how they're they're out there basically trying to say we're going to make windows games run on a thing that's not windows and we know we're not in the driver's seat here we are reactive whatever the windows games do we'll try to figure out a way to get them to work on our weird linux adapter layer uh but people aren't writing games at least thus far directly for valve maybe some developers are but like they they want to sell on windows if you make a pc game you want it to run on windows because you're really limiting your market if you can't now why would valve sell at a loss the one way to do is like hey we're gonna we're gonna sell our consoles at a loss so so many people will buy them and then once we get them on our consoles of course our consoles only run you know the playstation only runs playstation games and we'll get exclusive to the playstation all that other stuff um so i get what they're getting at in terms of the closed ecosystem but another reason people subsidize stuff is to get people in the door to people who don't have a gaming pc to buy a gaming pc because if you are able to do that then you can make it up in the games and guess what valve does make money by selling games for this platform they have the biggest pc game store on the internet and so they could sell at a loss and make it up by selling all those damn games hell they make money even when someone buys a game and plays it on their windows pc as long as they buy it from the steam store that's exactly the model now i know it's not a closed ecosystem or whatever but like you know a random company like alienware can't sell gaming pcs at a loss they'll go out of business but valve is one of the few companies in the pc gaming ecosystem that could sell hardware at a loss because they make money in every game sold similarly microsoft with the xbox could sell the xbox at a loss hoping to make it up with the Xbox games that are sold.

19:53Casey Liss:But again, Valve makes money when you buy a game from the Steam store, even if you don't play it on a Steam machine. So I'm not saying they should sell at a loss or whatever, like do whatever they want to do. But like the answer about how we need to keep an open ecosystem when we don't want to lock you in, it's like you selling your thing from low cost doesn't lock me into anything. You still play PC games, games that I can play on my Windows PC if I don't want to buy your Steam machine. So a little bit incoherent. And I'm not going to say disappointing that they're not selling it below cost, but I bet they're selling it close to cost because if you look at what's in the Steam machine, this looks like they're probably not making a lot of money on the hardware.

20:29Casey Liss:And how can they sell this without making a lot of money on hardware? Because they make so much money in that store because the margins on taking a cut of everyone else's PC games is much better than the margins on selling a hardware box.

20:42John Siracusa:Speaking of Xbox, Jay Peters yet again, Microsoft is increasing the prices of Xbox consoles again, starting on August 1st, 512 gig models will be$100 more expensive, while 1TB models will be$150 more expensive. This means that the Xbox Series S will start at$500, the Xbox Series X without a disk drive will start at$750, and the Series X with a disk drive will start at$800. Microsoft also says it will be sunsetting its 2TB Xbox Series X. Microsoft last raised prices in October by$20 to$70 and says it had hoped to avoid further hikes. Quote, unfortunately console storage and memory prices have increased by more than two and a half x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027 big yikes expect another doubling like they just

21:27Casey Liss:dropped the high-end model because they're like we know we we can't sell it we're having enough trouble selling xboxes as it is and the two terabyte model probably cost nine hundred dollars or something so we're not going to try that i think the playstation 5 pro currently costs nine hundred dollars or something close to that so i got a bargain when i bought mine at whatever it originally was sold at but yeah everyone's uh raising prices and for the xbox series x i don't know if these things are sold at a loss although microsoft gives a good example of how they had raised prices by 20 and 70 dollars and then had to raise them again that's definitely a microsoft thing to do whereas the apple thing to do is hold down as long as you can and raise the prices but on almost everything by a huge amount that you hope will stick but we'll say maybe apple uh underestimated how much it had to raise prices too speaking of all these raised prices a micron

22:10John Siracusa:executive suggests that Apple's aggressive purchasing tactics might have helped fuel the memory shortage. Ooh. Rolf Winkler in the Wall Street Journal writes that Tim Cook said there's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. That's Tim's quote. Then Rolf says Micron chief business officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn't make investments during the memory market's last downturn when Micron's gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock bottom prices. Sumit said, we told a couple of the customers who are being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive.

22:48John Siracusa:He said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. Quote, a lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.

22:59Casey Liss:So this is, you know, I mean, go to the press and, you know, passive aggressively subtweet as we used to say, Apple or whatever. But, you know, it's quite a fantasy world to believe that, you know, this company is saying basically like Apple drove a hard bargain. And if they had bought our RAM for more money back when things were okay, then we would have had more profit. And you know what we would have done with that profit? We would have built more factories so we wouldn't be in this problem. Is that what you would have done with the extra profit? You know, if only they would have agreed to pay higher prices, we wouldn't have given ourselves bonuses or done stock buybacks.

23:36Casey Liss:No, no, we would have built factories because we would have said we want to prepare for the future. Now, there probably is some truth to that because obviously the more money you make, the more investments in the future and so on and so forth you make. But this is really kind of like, well, look how the tables have turned because back when Apple was in the driver's seat, they were driving these hard bargains and saying you get nothing. You get one cent per chip and you'll like it because we're buying a bajillion chips and those one cents add up. but like giving them the most razor thin margins or i said making making things go negative and now that they're making huge profits and are richer and like you know apple you should have been nicer to us before which you know whatever business is business but which is probably true but also that would not have solved or avoided this problem at all yeah because like the you know it's the notion that these companies are so like forward thinking and magnanimous and don't take all their money and you know again give it to bonuses to the top executives and do stock buybacks to make people Like, I'm not saying it's 100 % that, but history has shown that when the profits are good, most companies do not use it to do forward-thinking things.

24:39Casey Liss:Maybe Micron is different. Maybe they would have done something different. But anyway, it's kind of like kicking the rest of the industry while they're down.

24:46John Siracusa:Steve Trout and Smith, friend of the show, weighed in on this and wrote, Apple starved the silicon supply chain for years. It was widely discussed back when GPU prices started to skyrocket. Famously, Palm blamed Apple for not being able to source components for its webOS devices. And then we have a Wayback Machine link to The Verge, where Chris Ziegler wrote, citing an anonymous source, quote, We told HP we needed better displays for the Pre 3. They'd come back and say, Apple bought them all. Our suppliers tell us we need to build them a factory if we want the displays. And they weren't willing to put the billion dollars up front to do that.

25:22Casey Liss:Yeah, at various times, Apple has cornered the market on certain commodities. But the other thing Apple has done, as we know from the Apple and China book, spend billions of dollars to make people make factories. So it's it's tough to be competing with Apple for components. And Apple, you know, Apple cornered the market on flash memory for the Nano for a long time. Apple likes that situation where it's the one screwing over everybody else. And now Apple's getting screwed over along with everybody else. So what goes around comes around, I guess. But yeah, I would I would hope that this entire industry can eventually get its feet under it again and try to get things more in balance and have capacity that more closely matches demand without any one customer screwing everybody over, whether that be Apple or Nvidia or who else.

26:06Marco Arment:Well, I think this also like, you know, a this is a good use of Apple's cash hoard now, because like if they want to front the money to build another factory for somebody in exchange for, you know, all of its output for a number of years, that's that's something they've done before. It's right out of their playbook. They do it actually, I think, all the time. And this is a good time to be doing that kind of thing. but that being said i think another angle of this is that apple when they were dictating all those terms um and this is again this is a great reason to read that apple and china book uh it goes into a lot of this we never really talked about on the show it's a very good book um it really is really really really is yeah i i strongly recommend i don't read a lot of books that was one um and it was really good you know when you had you know back in the day you had like tony blevins going around like dictating terms to people and tim cook being his ice cold you know dictator self Like that's Tim Cook leads by edict.

27:01Marco Arment:Like, just do it like ice cold. Do it. And Apple's able to negotiate that kind of way, which is not really negotiation when they are in positions of power. And we've seen this over and over again. Apple is really only able to work out good deals for itself when it has all of the power. They don't really show a lot of strength in negotiation when they are not able to just dictate terms. So that is one area where I am curious to see how this situation plays out today, because part of the reason Apple is in this situation is that for the last couple of decades, they've done so well that they've been able to dictate terms to all of their suppliers and have the suppliers basically say, OK, well, we have to basically play ball because they're our biggest customer or they're going to give us the highest price or they're going to buy all of our output for X years or whatever.

27:52Marco Arment:Whereas now with AI chip demand, Apple is no longer a lot of these suppliers' biggest customers. You know, NVIDIA, for instance, is probably going to, I don't know, I don't know what the numbers are off the top of my head, but like, if you look at between NVIDIA and Apple, like who has more sway over, say, TSMC?

28:10Casey Liss:Yeah, NVIDIA is TSMC's biggest customer.

28:13Marco Arment:Yeah, like, and that's, that's gotta irritate Apple. And it definitely hurts their negotiating position when it comes to getting access to the highest end nodes, getting like allocation of the supply, that's, you know, how much of their supply are they willing to give Apple and at what prices and on what terms. Apple hasn't been in the position to need to really negotiate that rather than dictate for a very long time. And I don't think anybody who's there right now has that skill, at least certainly the people who have been dealing with supplier relations, you know, for the last couple of decades i don't think any of them have had a lot of chances to exercise that

28:51Casey Liss:skill it's very much like they're a relationship with developers oh it's exactly like their relationship with developers it's like like oh we're developing we've been working together with developers we're one big happy family but imagine i mean this hasn't actually happened but imagine if the tables ever did turn and suddenly developers had power apple would be like why are they why are they so mad at us we've been working together so great for all these years it's like no the whole time we've been hating this like the suppliers who have been under apple's thumb apple thinks like this is great you know we've worked together for so long why don't they have any loyalty at us it's like they've hated it because you've treated them so badly and yet they've been nice to your face because you give them billions of dollars but like the second they don't have to do what you say anymore like apple is shocked like i thought all this time we were friends like no no no no um and on that topic of like uh who's gonna you know give money to to make a new factory in exchange for all its output uh the ram makers now are gonna be like we're not gonna take that deal either because we make so much more profit selling high bandwidth memory that the ai people make than we would making like the whatever lpddr or whatever apple needs like the ram that apple uses in its products has lower margins than the ram that the ai people want and so these companies are like if we're going to build another factory we're going to be building high bandwidth memory in it because we make more money for every one of those and apple i know you don't want any of this but like we would rather not take your money to build a factory and then have to use that factory to make like memory for iphones we'd rather build it ourselves and sell the memory to all the people making ai servers because we make more from like that's the main problem with this is that the ai you know people making ai servers both the the silicon like the nvidia silicon and like all the ram and everything goes into it those customers will pay more for their stuff that like that enterprise data center stuff has higher margins than selling ram for macs and iphones that's a lower margin business so that's that's part of the problem um maybe not so much with tsmc but definitely with the ram maker so hopefully this will work itself out like in the end money solves everything and apple may have to throw more money than they're used to at various things and you know and and apple could play this well like try to you know if they can correctly predict how things are going to go maybe that maybe they can get in a situation where there's a glut and an oversupply and the price goes down and they're they're feeling like they're back in the driver's seat but uh for now they have other strategies that they're trying all right and that brings us

31:07John Siracusa:to Apple is asking the Trump administration to approve Chinese RAM. Zach Hall at 9to5Mac writes, the Financial Times reports that Apple is seeking a clearance from the Trump administration to purchase memory chips from a banned Chinese company. So looking at the Financial Times post, Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has put on a ban list because of alleged connections to the People's Liberation Army, according to six people familiar with the matter. The PLA, People's Liberation Army is the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party and the primary armed forces of the People's Republic of China.

31:44John Siracusa:The iPhone maker has waged a lobbying campaign to get the blessing from the White House to help ease the financial pressure on the company from the rise in memory chip prices. Apple is not barred from buying chips from CXMT or YMTC, another Chinese memory chip maker. But the Pentagon has put both companies on its Chinese military company ban list. the so-called 1260h list contains dozens of chinese groups with alleged ties to the pla that undermine u.s national security the commerce department last year added cxmt to a package of chinese groups that it intended to place on a trade ban list called the entity list but the white house told it to hold off on new export controls because the administration was in the middle of a tough in the middle of tough negotiations with china to try to reach a truce in the trade war.

32:31John Siracusa:But most of the people familiar with the matter said it was unclear if Apple would get any guarantee from the administration, especially a promise that the U.S. would not later put CXMT on the entity list.

32:39Casey Liss:So this is a little bit weird in that apparently they could buy from them, but it seems like the government's saying, we're probably not going to let you. And so Apple is sort of preemptively going to the government, to their wonderful friends in the government and saying, hey, we really want to buy this RAM from the Chinese companies because, you know, we need RAM and they have RAM and forbidding us to buy from them is really going to make things bad. And I know you're thinking about not letting us buy from them, but could you pretty please change your mind on that? And we'll see how that negotiation goes.

33:07Casey Liss:This actually is, you know, as much as we constantly complain about corruption and everything in the Trump administration, this type of thing where companies lobby the government to allow them to do business with other international companies that they want to do business with happens all the time and is a actual somewhat normal function of government. What's not normal is how the decision will actually be made uh unlike decisions that are made based on facts and evidence and what's best for the country this will be made on let's say other criteria but the actual situation is not that foreign so to speak um so we'll see how that works out for apple like i mean they'll they'll try anything they'll you know try anything to get their uh to get their ramp chips for less money uh and this type of thing of like look you're not going to build a factory overnight but what we can do overnight is start buying from a new customer that previously we were staying away from because it was, you know, they were supposedly going to be banned.

33:56Casey Liss:So we'll see how it goes.

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35:58John Siracusa:There was a very interesting report from Mark Gurman on June 25th, which reads Apple plans to debut a base M6 processor as early as this year. But in a first, the company will skip higher-end versions of that chip. Apple instead aims to introduce the next Pro and Max chips with the more advanced computing and graphics power in 2027 as part of a new M7 generation. Apple's taking this unusual step in order to fast-track technologies that it originally planned to release later. The change should help meet growing demand for on-device AI capabilities and more graphics-intensive software. Apple plans to introduce the base M7, codenamed Delos, which is apparently an island off Greece, as early as the first half of next year.

36:41John Siracusa:Apple is also planning higher-end M7 Pro, M7 Max, and M7 Ultra chips, all dubbed Andros internally. The M7 Pro and M7 Max are scheduled for as early as the end of 2027, while the M7 Ultra is on track for 2028. The M7 line is designed primarily around major advancements to on-device AI processing. The base version is slated to support about 240 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth. And John took the liberty of looking it up. and the m5 has 153 gigs a second and the m6 will have 200 gigs a second according to german and i will repeat the m7 is will allegedly have 240 gigabytes per second the m5 ultra chip codename sotra d will have around 36 cpu cores and 80 gpu cores apple has also tested support for up to 768 gigabytes of memory in the m in the m5 ultra max studio though the component constraints could complicate its debut.

37:36Casey Liss:Or make it cost$80 ,000. You think? Right.

37:39John Siracusa:Then the following day, on the 26th of June, German writes, Apple's first ever touchscreen laptop will rely on the company's current high-end M5 chips rather than the next generation silicon, though the company is working on a follow-up model with future M7 processors. The M7 laptop models are planned for as early as the end of 2027.

37:56Casey Liss:So here we go. Total destruction of the rumored plans that we've been talking about for a year, which is like, you believe they're going to, I know the M5 Pro and Macs MacBook Pros came out this year, but supposedly the rumor is they're going to come out with the M6 ones this year, too. And those are going to be the ones that are redesigned and they have OLED screens and they have touch screens and they're going to have the M6 line and maybe they're going to be called MacBook Ultra. And yeah, that plan is now like the stuff. I guess the stuff you care about, like OLED still rumored, touchscreen still rumored, redesigned still rumored, M6 no more.

38:27Casey Liss:Just the same M5 Pro and Macs that are in the current laptops will be in the new ones, which is somewhat disappointing but on the other hand it is a second macbook pro release within the same calendar year and the thing most people are excited about of those laptops is the oled screen the redesign and to a lesser extent the touch screens so it's not that disappointing but i do wonder if these end up being called ultra or if they are price like ultras it might feel kind of bad it's like it's an ultra that's exactly the same speed as the existing it's not gonna be any faster like unless they come up with better cooling or something it's going to be exactly the same speed as a macbook pro you could have bought months and months ago it just it's going to have a nicer screen and a touchscreen and all that other stuff uh and i'm not sure what they're going to put the base m6s in that we just talked about the base m6 seems great and everything but like the fact they're not even going to do an m6 max pro max or ultra that it'll just be the no suffix m6 uh like that's kind of disappointing that the m6 generation will not get any of those other chips it does make some sense based on the the rumors that german has talked about here of like up you know apparently whatever was planned for the m7 generation these things whatever things on the chip that make on device ai better apple's like look we have limited resources limited time why don't we fast track the m7 stuff and just because the m6s maybe they're just like well they're you know a couple percent better than the m5s but like we we want to get to that next step as soon as possible so rather than clogging up the supply lines of tsmc the limited capacity that we get in tsmc or maybe not tsmc stay tuned um why don't we just go right to the m7 and why don't we just start getting those out the door asap because apparently the design is done and they're ready to go and they are a bigger leak over the m5 so yeah it seems like the m5 is going to have a fairly long life as the top of the range in apple's products with you know the m7 ones coming out sometime next year and the m7 ultra in 2028 geez louise so does that mean you're not getting a new computer until 2028 john no no people have asked about that i can't wait though are you kidding i needed that new computer yesterday i cannot wait i'm sure the m7 ultra will be great no way in hell i'm waiting until 2028 i i'd be perfectly happy with m5 max you know i've i've been fighting my hard drive capacity trying to offload more things i'll have more on that on a future episode probably because uh there's some excitement going on there but anyway oh jeez oh great i'm not wait i'm not waiting uh i'll buy as soon as i can now and i'm not interested in the laptop so it's not disappointed to me personally but i do wonder if this throws a monkey wrench into their branding like if the whole plan was actually to call these a macbook ultra are they less ultra if they have the same chip that you could have got months ago i think i think they are less ultra they're still cool they're still this will be you know nice laptops, but yeah, another casualty of a Ramageddon.

41:21John Siracusa:So if you wanted to try to get to the front of the line in one of these fabs, what could you do? Well, a user on Twitter called Jukan writes from the GFHK monthly call, Apple and Intel already signed an agreement in December, 2025. The M7 chip will use Intel 18A hyphen P and is expected to enter production by the end of 2027, while the smartphone chip will use Intel 14a and is expected to enter production by the end of 2028. John, what's GFHK?

41:53Casey Liss:I tried mightily to find out by Googling it. There's a lot of things with those initials that could be plausible. The closest I get was GF Holdings Hong Kong, but the GF stand for some other words that I couldn't pronounce. And there's lots of GF companies with those same two words. Anyway, I think it's some big financial institution somewhere near Hong Kong, maybe. Yeah, the sourcing on this, I don't know anything about this user or what they're saying, but like, anyway, you can keep reading. Like there's a little bit more smoke around these rumors.

42:24John Siracusa:Gavin Bonshore, who formerly was a senior editor at Anantek, who is now at Bontek Labs, writes, Intel's 18A process is the company's 1.8 nanometer class node, the one that Panther Lake is currently manufactured on. It combines ribbon-fet gate all-around transistors with power via backside power delivery, and this delivers up to 25 % higher performance or 36 % lower power consumption compared to Intel's previous Intel 3 process with around 30 % improved transistor density. The 18AP variant, which is what the M7 is reportedly targeting, is essentially a refined version of the base 18A node. For the M7, Apple may require some of Intel's advanced packaging techniques to hit its performance targets, potentially involving combinations from the Foveros family, which is a 3D chip stacking technology, alongside EMIB, or Embedded Multi-Di Interconnect Bridge.

43:17John Siracusa:The first mobile candidate for Intel's fab may not be the A21 for the iPhone 19 in 2027. Current reports instead point toward an unnamed SoC, targeting mass production on Intel's 14A node by late 2028, which suggests Apple will continue relying on TSMC for smartphone chips for the immediate future, at least for the higher-end models. Apple's one of the most demanding chip customers in the world, and winning any Apple production gives Intel Foundry a proof point that other potential customers, including Amazon, Qualcomm, and Broadcom, will pay close attention to. Every M7 that meets Apple's performance targets is essentially a data point for every other company.

43:56John Siracusa:Evaluating Intel Foundry is an alternative to TSMC. TSMC has effectively held a monopoly on the world's most advanced consumer chip manufacturing for several years, if Apple begins splitting its most advanced chip production between TSMC and Intel, it changes the competitive dynamics of the foundry business in a way that matters well beyond these two specific companies.

44:14Casey Liss:So we did talk about the super vague rumors about Apple working with Intel on something something, and now they suddenly got a lot more concrete with the rumor that that M7, that Apple is going to try to get out ASAP, that they're skipping the M6 Pro Max and Ultra to get to the M7 faster, they're going to make Intel fab that. And the rumor being that they're still use TSMC for their phone chips because you know it's more important in bigger capacity but it is true that their biggest chips obviously like physically biggest most power hungry most complicated most transistor chips are the big giant ones they put in max not the phone chips and so going to Intel for those is would be quite a feather in Intel's cap if they can pull it off as we talked about Intel is taking some slightly different paths with its chip technology they have some things that are that they got to first or at least touted more strongly like the backside power delivery where you route the things that give power to the chips from the bottom instead of the top because when you send it through the top you got to weave it through all the logic and everything uh they have some interesting technologies the question always was can they actually get them working and shipping and get the yields right and intel is actually shipping some chips of its own on a earlier variant of this supposed 1.8 nanometer class node um so it's not like it's a complete unknown i'm if this ends up being true and like that m7 ultra in 2028 is fab by intel wow what a world yeah tsmc probably doesn't care because they'd still be doing all the phone chips but this is the whole point of like apple doing any kind of deal with intel investing it's like it's to apple's advantage for tsmc not to be the only source for a billion reasons and it's probably to the the world's benefit for there to be other competitors to tsmc just so there's a more competitive marketplace so i was this this is kind of actually an exciting rumor for for intel uh unless they totally blow it and then it's not going to be exciting for them but uh this is future news but boy what what a world we're living in where there's going to be a mac chip from intel again but not x86 yeah this is really wild i mean that being said though like

46:18Marco Arment:intel has shown a remarkable ability to screw things up in recent years that was the old intel

46:23Casey Liss:it's not the new intel is it like i i don't think they've proven that yet well they they did ship their own chip panther lake is shipping on the 18a process so it's not as like i mean maybe and panther lake has bad yields but you know like they're shipping something so it's not like they they can't make this right they're shipping a chip on and the 18 ap is the refined version of that so i have some faith that they will ship something but panther lake is a far cry from an

46:49Marco Arment:m7 ultra that's the thing like i i think ultimately intel is too important to u.s national security for anyone to let them fail and that's wonderful for the u.s um it doesn't necessarily mean that intel is going to be able to become a foundry you know for other manufacturers have all of the expertise and trust and processes that somebody like tsmc would have to make cutting-edge chips for somebody else yet we that all stands to be seen like maybe that'll that'll happen i don't think they've shown any of that really so far uh at least not that that kind of scale like it'll

47:33Casey Liss:it'll be worse it'll be it'll be harder to work apple when apple works with intel on this it'll be harder for apple it'll be harder for intel there'll be more conflicts everything will be worse but but the thing is both parties are highly motivated to just you know slog through the worseness because they're like intel is obviously motivated because they're like we want to stay in business right so their foundry thing is like this we totally want to do chips for you apple right so they're highly motivated and apple's highly motivated because like tsmc has a new boyfriend nvidia nvidia this nvidia that so they're both motivated to deal with all that crap that you just said which is totally true like intel is not going to be as good as the tsmc that everything's going to be worse the yields are going to be lower there's going to be more problems but like it's good that they're both motivated to deal with it they're like look we're in this together you want to do it because you want to survive we want to do it because we need these chips and tsmc is not returning our calls like they used to and so i think i think they'll make it work like assuming this rumor is true i think they will mostly make it work it's and it's still still your point stands, which is like, okay, so they do make it work.

48:38Casey Liss:What if the chips suck? What if it's like the Intel, whatever the Intel cell mode where everyone didn't want to get the Intel one, they wanted the Qualcomm one because the Intel one was worse. That could still happen too. So absolutely. Fingers crossed here, right?

48:49Marco Arment:I mean, I look for lots of reasons, like, I do think, you know, anybody paying any attention to global politics or the chip business should be a little concerned how little of a contingency plan that we have if there is a conflict over Taiwan. That's a pretty significant risk to the world these days, and especially to the chip business. And so we all want there to be a strong Intel. We want there to be strong, you know, non-Taiwanese chip manufacturing around the world, especially in our own country. That would be great. But that's a really difficult thing to set up. And it takes decades of investment and prioritization and just huge amounts of change and infrastructure that, you know, we've, I think, started to do some of that.

49:42Marco Arment:But I think it's going to be a very long time before we could even be remotely competitive with TSMC in Taiwan. on so how like how do we get from here to there i i don't know um but you know anything that that steps on the gas a little bit in that area i think is a very good thing um because it's a very hard problem but also a very important one but it's it's kind of unfortunate that our best hope is intel because they they have not really shown a ton of of uh of capability in in that kind of area

50:16Casey Liss:yeah i do think intel's process like there's got two things going for it one they're not trying to do literally exactly the same thing as tsmc it is a little bit different so it's good to have some kind of differentiator and two it's within shouting distance like it's not you can quibble and say well tsmc is better for x reasons x y but they're not in a different ballpark like they used to be like not even close now i'm not saying intel has caught up to tsmc but they are now plausibly in the conversation the thing they have running against them is not so much like oh you're terrible at fabbing things and so on and so forth because again they've done a lot of work to close that gap significantly and intel has been making chips for a long time so they're not starting from zero it's not like a situation where like why don't you just make a new ram fab or you know make a new chip fab like intel has been in this business right they lost their lead they still won't have it back but they're still in the conversation their problem is what is very new to intel is being a foundry for other people's chips and that's where they suck ass compared to tsmc has been a foundry tsmc has been a foundry for other people's chips for ages and they're used to working with customers and all their tools and everything like that is the problem that intel has because even though they've been fabbing chips forever they have not been a customer oriented service company that says we will fab chips for anybody and that was the whole transformation they made where they split off the part that makes like you know the actual intel chips from the part that fabs them and the part that fabs them says we're just going to be a fab to the world you've got a chip you want it fab we can do it and we had a story uh many shows ago where intel was like if we can't get a customer we're we we can't build these factories like we're trying to build the factories for our future processes or whatever but we literally can't we we're not going to build them unless someone signs up to buy the chips they're going to come out of them um and they were very blunt about it like you know our our attempt to be a fab depends on somebody signing on the dotted line and saying, we will buy chips from the factory you will make.

52:11Casey Liss:If nobody does that, then our fab business is just going to fail and we're just going to fab all our chips at TSMC like everybody else. Maybe Apple has stepped in and prevented that from happening. I don't know. It's not like they were naming names or announcing deals back then. But that's the situation of their fab. It's so new, such a new business to them that they don't even know if it's a viable business. And everyone who has worked with them said, yeah, TSMC is better at this. They're so much easier to work with. They've been doing it forever. they know how to fab chips for other people and intel you've only been fabbing chips for yourself for so long that you suck at it um so that's that's one of the main risk parts here but again if both parties if apple and intel they're both highly motivated to make this work and i think they'll just suffer through it they'll suffer through it and best case scenario for intel this is a learning opportunity for them they'll get better at it best case for apple they get you know they can finally be like the most important customer again because i would presume they they will become intel's most important customer uh for its fab if only because like you know hey you couldn't have even built this factory if it wasn't for our orders for our mac chips but on the other hand the mac chips are such low volume compared to the phone chips like they do say they have a chip off in like 2028 or whatever like the rumor is they're going to have a phone chip at some point but i bet that's contention on a lot of other stuff going well before that so oh yeah exciting times for intel exciting times for apple not so exciting times for people interested in high-end Mac chips, it's going to be M5 season for a long time.

53:35Marco Arment:Do you think maybe Apple can convince Intel to do it for free for exposure? Yeah, right.

53:42John Siracusa:You never know. All right, let's talk new Siri. John, you put this in the show notes as most things end up in the show notes. What do you want to talk about here?

53:52Marco Arment:All things end up in the show notes. Thank you, Marco.

53:55John Siracusa:Sorry, sorry, sorry, my bad. I contributed some things to follow up, but that doesn't

53:59Casey Liss:count does it no it counts but i also contribute things to the show notes but that doesn't count so uh the new siri uh change all your jokes after the fact to make them funnier i punch it up for you um the first thing i wanted to put in about the new siri i'm assuming you've all well i know marco's installed golden gate casey have you installed golden gate anywhere no i do have

54:21John Siracusa:the beta running on my ipad and i did install it on the vision pro but i don't think i've actually

54:26Marco Arment:used it since installing it the vision pro story yeah i tried it i'm not using it of course yeah

54:33Casey Liss:well so you've got it on the ipad at least like i think this is everywhere this is the mac icon we're looking at in the show notes we'll put a link to this image but i'm pretty sure this is the branding they use everywhere it's probably also the icon for like the little conversation app on the ipad where you can go look at past conversations with siri ai and stuff right and this like series look and brand has changed a lot uh over the years recently it's been leaning pretty heavily into the like i don't know you'd say like red and blue rainbow swirl thing going on but in the 27 releases they've gone with they have a new sort of mostly monochrome logo this one has some rainbow tinges on it to remind you of the old silly but siri but it's like a circle with like a wavy line in the middle it's not the yin yang symbol whatever that's called but it looks a little bit like that but it's like horizontal instead of vertical um And everyone thinks it looks like a Pepsi logo.

55:27Casey Liss:So Brad Ellis posted, I don't know if you recognize this, but he posted a bunch of images from a classic Internet meme, which was a real thing. It was the Pepsi logo redesign brand manual from 2008. We'll put a link to that in the show notes, put a link to the PDF. The PDF is a real thing, kids. In 2008, this was not a joke. This was not a parody. This was a, as far as I know, an actual real thing from the Pepsi rebranding, from the whatever company that came up with the rebrand of the Pepsi logo saying, here's what it means. And it had some of the most ridiculous things you will ever see in your life.

56:07Casey Liss:You're like, they cannot be serious. I think apparently they were. Anyway, they just put the new Siri logo into this document. And it fits in perfectly because it looks kind of like the rebranded Pepsi symbol that nobody liked. And so now there's a Pepsi logo on all of our Macs. And I don't know. like i didn't really like the rainbow colored one and i kind of like this will fit in better in the menu bar with the monochrome stuff but it does look a little pepsi-ish and then it didn't take long for people to you know take this and run with it joanna stern in one of her uh videos i used it as the head as like a mr siri see the images we'll put a link to her youtube video you can watch it but like it's like a it's like a person with a with a giant uh pizza flopped over their head like pizza dough or something like the the two eyes in the mouth are in the bottom part of the pepsi logo and the top part of the pepsi logo is just a big floppy thing on their head it's a sad looking mr siri and i don't know i i know it's just like a tangent to go off about like the siri branding but i do think this is the most significant siri like visual identity branding that change that has happened in a long time and i think it's a little weird oh it's it's

57:14Marco Arment:not good i mean like from from what everyone has said the new series is generally so far excellent for people um i haven't actually really had enough time with it to say um my my one minor irritation is that doing things like creating reminders via siri now seems slower oh yeah

57:34Casey Liss:everything's gonna be slower because yeah yeah whether it does it on device or not it is doing a lot more processing than it used to i'm sure that's the case yeah which that that part is not

57:42Marco Arment:amazing but if it is really as smart as everyone says it is when asking more complicated things you know maybe maybe overall the upgrade will i'm sure it'll overall prove to be worthwhile

57:52Casey Liss:you know we'll fix that for you marco buy a new iphone i'm sure it'll be very affordable

57:57Marco Arment:oh yeah definitely yeah so anyway it's um other than that uh it does seem like uh people seem to like it a lot but that logo like as i'm seeing it on my laptop i i don't i don't love it i mean i'll get used to it i didn't love the weird rainbow blob that we had before this this that was in the menu bar all the time either uh but both in the menu bar and in the dock i i do not

58:23Casey Liss:prefer this new logo it really does look like a pepsi logo though i think the problem with it is

58:30Marco Arment:i mean yes first of all that the pepsi logo thing like that was incredible and all the memes around that were incredible um i think the problem with it is that it's actually there's not enough logo there like it it's it basically just looks like a circle with a squiggle in it like there's not anything else there i think it needs to be like a little bit more of a symbol a little bit more recognizable because right now when you see it like in the dock it just looks it almost looks like a placeholder icon and in the menu bar it's just this circle with a squiggle like it

59:05Casey Liss:it needs something else yeah color would help but then in the menu bar i can't really have color so they're kind of trapped by their own decision to make everything monochrome in the menu bar i mean

59:13Marco Arment:not not color just like more like the symbol needs to be a little bit more a little bit more detailed have like one other element have some kind of a little more to it it seems like it's been like smoothed away through maybe committee or something like it's like this has had too much sanded off of it it needs it needs a little bit more well see the siri never had a corporeal

59:35Casey Liss:body like it was always it was always defined by those by a by clouds of color and so once you take away the color it's like what's left then now you've just got a cloudy blur like it has never had a i don't know if never maybe there was early on there was one back before apple bought the siri company but like yeah they didn't it never really had like a strong logo identity nor has it had like a i mean if you look at your menu bar now like there's not a brand identity for like the sound thing in the menu bar right or the the time machine thing or the clock or the even spotlight just being a magnifying glass there's nothing like that for ai agents right now apple could i mean i guess this is it but like come up with a logo that says instead of saying this is for controlling your displays this is for controlling your sound this is for controlling bluetooth this is for wi-fi this is for ai agent and i guess this is their symbol for that i mean obviously it's the branded for siri but like if there you know if there was a generic symbol we haven't come upon it all if we did i think what we would say i think the industry has decided that sparkle is the thing that means ai agent gemini leaned into this by by actually having a branded single sparkle but for a while apps started sprouting sparkles all over the place sparkles in the toolbar sparkles on edges of buttons sparkles in your face and it's like sparkle means ai agent apple has gone with pepsi logo means our specific ai agent well but also like the like the other ai

1:00:58Marco Arment:products out there all have logos you know chat gpt has that weird kind of like flower thing claude

1:01:03Casey Liss:has the splat gemini has the diamond what what wait what does claude have i have no idea what the claude logo is it's like a like an asterisk oh they're like the hand-drawn asterisk yeah i

1:01:13John Siracusa:think i know it's a very splatty asterisk yeah have you seen have you seen it speaking of the

1:01:17Casey Liss:things that wouldn't look good in the menu bar apple does have its um i think it's like their apple intelligence thing it looks like um two rings twisted around each other do you know that one uh i don't think so it's like it's like two strands going in a circle and the strands are

1:01:31Marco Arment:twisted around each other oh i think they even animate it so they like they weave in and out of

1:01:36Casey Liss:each other and straighten and twist the problem with that one is those two strands that make up the circle are so fine that it doesn't read it doesn't read as a uh at menu bar sizes it's too small you can't see the lines anymore so that's just like their apple intelligence thing and if you'll get wwc sessions i think they have an animated version of it with the lines weave in and out each other like two snakes and become straight or whatever like they do have some other branding about this but yeah i think they think they're in a little bit of a bind not that the branding matters too much because it's mostly faceless i think their biggest problem aesthetically i didn't don't have anything in the notes here about it but like um those stupid black gradient windows at least on the mac because now that's the look of quote-unquote spotlight as well so you do command space and it's just like this giant uh sort of web 2.0 looking gradient black hole that fades to gray and all the ciai things are in that little black hole i don't like it

1:02:23John Siracusa:i mean i think this logo is fine like it doesn't offend me as it appears to offend many but i don't think it's particularly great either like it's fine it's very middle of the road oh the other

1:02:34Marco Arment:thing i'll complain about visually with the new series so far is that um when i am just pulling down to use i guess what used to be called spotlight to to launch an app if i want you know you pull down you start typing the app name on the iphone that is slower and it's i think it's trying to be a little too smart a little too quickly on that now because it's like what are you trying to launch like what are you trying to do are you trying to like start a long request i'm just i'm literally typing the name of an app on my phone and i want to just tap the icon and launch it but that that is now a little bit slower too i mean it's the same thing on the mac like the

1:03:08Casey Liss:if you used to just command space to launch an app that command space window can now do so much more and is uglier and so yeah there's the fight between oh you're just typing the first three letters of an app versus are you asking me some question that i'm going to send off to a server and do like it's the same box it's i mean we went through this with the address bar and browsers years ago or it used to be a place where you typed a url then it became a place where you google and now it's a place where like we'll do all sorts of crap well you type stuff we'll autocomplete to bookmarks and sites that you've gone before and like just so here we are again there's there's a word for this from back in the day what is it like um i don't remember there's a term for like a universal box where you type text and you do everything from one box instead of separating it and i don't remember what it was but uh there those are everywhere and now we have one more of them omnibar or something like that there you go you got it something oh see look at me all right

1:03:57John Siracusa:well continuing on with the new siri uh friend of the show gee rambo writes i'm doing an experiment where every time i use chat gpt to help me search for something i'm also asking the same question in the siri app so far my experience has been that the siri app typically responds with the same information but more quickly and with better formatting and source citations impressive yeah

1:04:14Casey Liss:but i i've tried it a little bit and we'll get to that in a second but most of the people who have tried to say are you wondering you know did siri i quote unquote fix siri and the answer is it behaves like the other ai agents which is high praise for everyone you're talking about an apple thing because that's like kind of like intel we just wanted apple to be in the conversation no is saying like is is siri i better than chat gpt or worse or whatever it's like we just want it to be in the ballpark like we want it to not not suck terribly and so people have been trying it's like yeah you can quibble sometimes one's better sometimes the other but at least now it's in the conversation at least now it it seems to do the same things that the other agents do maybe not as well maybe not as thoroughly maybe i like the formatting better or worse you know maybe it's faster or slower but at least it's in the conversation so thumbs up on that meanwhile

1:05:01John Siracusa:Well, another friend of the show, Dan Morin, asked Siri, make a keyboard shortcut to open clipboard history in a single keystroke, to which Siri replied, the keyboard shortcut to open clipboard history on Windows is Windows TV. This shortcut opens a panel that displays a list of recently copied items, allowing you to select and paste an older item instead of the most recent one.

1:05:19Casey Liss:Now, he's asking us on a Mac. For those of you not familiar, Apple had a clipboard history to Spotlight in the previous release or maybe one released before. I forget. I know it was in Tahoe, right? but people are annoyed that it's a two keystroke sequence you got to do like command space and then like four command four or something to get to the keyboard history so uh dan's trying out the new series and saying make me a keyboard shortcut that gets me to clipboard history in one keystroke and you notice that prompt that message doesn't say anything about a platform but he is asking it on a mac i think i can't tell maybe this is on on a uh it's got to be on a mac right anyway why in the world would it come up with an answer that tells you how to do clipboard history on windows because that's how these things work sometimes and i'm not saying this shows that serie ai is worse or better i'm saying it works like all the other agents where sometimes it just does the wrong thing and honestly i don't even know if windows key plus v is the correct answer for this who knows didn't check it but uh yeah maybe not the uh the answer that he wanted so it's not as that you know the old serie used to make fun of i ask some question it gives a comically wrong answer at least now it's failing more interestingly and you know and can succeed at some other things and so my experience with it like this this the next part here is just me my very first experience with here because i had just seen some videos i just installed golden gate and i just seen some videos of like people doing stuff with it by like selecting files in the finder and then asking it to do things with the selected files i'm like oh that seems handy because like i figured what that tool is that i haven't sold i'm sorry to the developer of this every time i can never remember the name of this app but there's there's various tools that will let should do that now even on an ancient old mac os 15 that i'm running select multiple files bring up an llm prompt and and have it do something like you know pull the text out of these images or scale them or whatever like you know but you're basically just talking to an agent somewhere you know whatever it is an open ai agent or whatever and having it do stuff but with with things that you select and so siri can do this now as well so i wanted to try that out so i selected a file that It was on my desktop.

1:07:17Casey Liss:And my prompt was, what is this file? And the first answer was amazingly good. I had selected a Perl script. Of course you did. It was on my desktop. Of course it was. Here's the answer. CRI said, this is a Perl script named thrash.pl designed to stress test an application by repeatedly launching and terminating it. The script forks multiple child processes to open the accessorize.app, monitors them, and automatically kills them after a random duration up to five seconds before launching a new instance to maintain continuous load how it works process management the script uses sig child handler to asynchronously clean up the exited child process without blocking the main loop continuous load it starts by launching 10 instances of the target application whenever the number of active children drops below five or fewer it automatically spawns five more to keep the system under pressure target application currently configured to execute a local development build of accessorize that app located on your desktop this is all correct it doesn't actually know the context uh because it's not i guess scanning my whole system this was a thing i was using to stress test switch glass the accessorize that app is not the interesting app here that is just an app i made in xcode that does some particular stuff while it's running like it fiddles with its state in a way that switch glass can detect and i wanted i was basically torture testing switch glass to say is there some kind of crash when there's like massive amounts of activity of like tons of apps uh launching and quitting all at random and inside the accessorize app fiddling the things that switch class and note about them or whatever so i'm like just you know and it's configurable to do more than 10 or whatever um so it didn't just say this is a perl script it read all the code in it and you know again we're surprised to know on on this podcast these agents are good at understanding code and it explained to me the and this is this is like this is like i don't know less less than half a page of perl code it's not a complicated script but this is a more or less accurate description of what's in there and i was like wow that's you know and it's not like oh siri is amazing i would expect that from any of the modern ai agents i would never have expected that from siri in the past yeah and now it can do that so i'm like that's awesome uh and then me being me come back to my computer later that day i select the same file i say what is this file question mark exactly the same prompt here's what siri i said then based on the dot pl extension thrash.pl is likely a Perl script these are plain text files containing code written in the Perl programming language often used for text processing system administration and web development the end like what happened what happened to your AI that's I mean true you got that right it is in fact a Perl script and you're right about Perl what happened what happened to all the stuff about telling me about what's in there and what it does or whatever and this variability is one of those things that is i feel like a hallmark of syria i and some other products as well which is um especially like a various chat gpt things and like their default mode like we'll figure out which model to use based on stuff criteria i don't know time of day how much load our servers are under what plan you're on this that the other thing it seems pretty clear to me that in the second answer syria i chose to use a less powerful model maybe it used a local model for that one and you use the server model for the first one um but either way very different answer to the exact same prompt on the exact same day about the exact same file which has not changed and that also makes me think huh siri ai you're just like the other one you never know what you're gonna get and unlike like the fancier models where you can be like always use the big super mega ultra model super thinking all the time i don't think you have that option in siri ai uh you'll look more likely to get a better model if you have like an m4 or better whatever the specs are that makes you use the more advanced local one but this variability in answer really makes it difficult to i'm not going to say rely on but just to like to get consistent results because imagine that i hadn't asked about the i hadn't had the exact same letter for letter prompt about the exact same file imagine instead that i made two separate requests you may come away thinking well it's really good at that first request but when i ask it about the other kind of thing it's bad at it and that's not true at all maybe maybe it's just that the first time i went to a server and the second time it did local and so as with all things related to lms it's very difficult to form uh concrete judgments based on what they do because what they do is often not what you think they're doing like this is the problem that they they seem like they're doing something that they're not so in this case it seems like it's good at question x and bad at question y question x was about sports and question why was about uh knitting you'd be like oh they're great at sports but bad at knitting but that's the wrong conclusion because you don't know what's going on behind the scenes it's not like they're telling you i did this one to the server and this one to a local thing and so you end up drawing the wrong conclusions and you never ask any knitting questions and really that's not the problem at all so i don't know what to think of this i'm not you know i mean kind of like the vision pro that you upgrade and then never use i did play with this for a little while and then i you know went back to mostly basically ignoring it um although i was also playing with the new version of xcode and it's built-in functions for doing agentic coding stuff or whatever to see how those work compared to how they were in xcode 26 and when i set that up i'm like oh yeah you have to configure like you know one of the third-party agents in xcode because i'm pretty sure there's it doesn't use like you can't configure siri ai as far as i can tell as an x1 27 agent maybe that's not true and if so i'll follow up next episode someone can tell me but apple seems like apple's not competing in that realm like that's not what siri ai does and so i couldn't you know i i would have liked to have seen what it could do now i did see i've been watching wwc sessions still about this and one of them talked about how the um what what's in xcode 27 they like they provide stuff for the agents that integrate with it for example they have a um agent friendly uh incarnation of all their documentation i don't know the details it's like vectorized or somewhere or some way made with like embedding so that the agents can be more easily digested rather than just feeding it the text or whatever i i don't know the details but the point is apple has supposedly done work in xcode 27 so that agents that are running in xcode 27 have in theory a leg up on agents that are just like browsing the web and here's where casey says as well it doesn't matter if it's a you know a special vectorized version of it or the web version if the documentation is not there it doesn't really matter right but but like it shows that that that it's not you know if you say why would i ever use an agent inside xcode why wouldn't i just go use the agent of my choice outside xcode to buy code stuff apple's answer is well if the ones that are actually used from inside xcode they have more direct access to xcode functionality they have more direct access to resources i mentioned on an earlier episode that they made a bunch of um essentially skills for agents that teach it about their technologies and you can export them and use them with third-party agents but any agent that you use within xcode gets access to them automatically with no extra work from you so i guess siri ai is not in that but like i hope someday apple does you know at least maybe take a third-party agent and train it up on all their internal stuff like because that's what we want we want an agent you know agents can train on stuff and stack overflow and all sorts of open store stuff that they've taken without permission and blah blah blah but as i said in the past episode apple can train models on its own proprietary source code that no one has access to maybe they don't want to do that because like a lot of these agents you can make them spit back like the new york times suing to say hey we can make we can make this agent spit back verbatim passages from new york times article if they trained an agent on their own source code and let the public have access to it could we get it to spit out like the source code to app kit by uh you know cajoling it in the right way maybe that's why they're afraid of it but that's what i want apple to do it's like you have the source code to all your frameworks and we don't have the source code to all your frameworks so please train a model on that source code and make that be the model that i get to use for xcode but anyway all this to say is that i think siri ai is uh not terrible it is again it is in the conversation with the other agents it does things that those agents do it is night and day difference from the old siri uh and uh that's something at least yeah i mean it it does seem

1:15:48Marco Arment:like they've really finally done it they've like they've really launched siri that is smart and and has the intelligence side handled and so now i think what we need to see is you know what remains to be seen first of all is like scale speed and reliability because you know all the parts that are not locally running have to depend on a lot of infrastructure that has significant scaling challenges ahead of them. That's always kind of been one of Siri's weakest points has been, how does it actually perform for everyone, everywhere, all the time? And so far, they have not done well at that. But this is a whole different architecture with probably all different infrastructure also, because it's such different requirements to run all these modern LLM flagship level things.

1:16:34Marco Arment:So this is going to be totally different than whatever Siri was running on before. So that's promising in the sense that they have another chance to get it right. Maybe they will this time. And then the other part is app support. That's still a huge open question. I don't think we yet have great tooling as developers yet to know, like, are we plugging in correctly to the new Siri system with our app intents? Is it reading them? Is it indexing them? like i think that's still a little bit early in the current betas but i haven't actually tried it so i could be wrong about that but that's kind of what i'm hearing but we you know we have that challenge of like are apps going to be able to really get in there and adopt this like is that going to be ready this fall and then secondly from that will developers do it as i was saying last time like you know do developers have the right like the incentive to do this or do developers want to not be like this intermediated and to not have siri you know be the face of their app to their customers would developers rather have customers go into their apps to do what they want to do and i think for most big companies the answer is definitely the latter on that for most small developers like like us we want to do things right by the platform because we're nerds and we're apple fans so we'll probably do it but that all remains to be seen i think it's going to be a very interesting fall and winter uh just seeing like which big companies adopt this at all and how does all of this scale as everyone gets it i think i'm i'm mainly watching for as

1:18:08Casey Liss:this rolls out in addition to things that you mentioned is what does their iteration look like because every other big competitor in this space changes all the time there's new versions coming out all the time minus the government stopping them from coming out which is currently a problem but you know that's there they don't wait an entire year to make any change in their agents they're always tweaking them a little bit even if it's not like oh gpt 5.4 5.5 5.6 even in between there there are little tweaks here and there that they make apple's not has never been on that type of cycle certainly it's never done that take a cycle with siri before now that they are using this third party stuff will they have like an interim release like i don't know like a 27 by 27.3 or 27.4 it's like now actually we've swapped in all new models because we've got slightly better ones that would be great but that hasn't really been the way there if they have been doing it at the siri it hasn't made any kind of noticeable change for the better it's just me the lateral mover made things worse so i hope they keep up with this i don't i don't know the nature of the google deal and it's still not clear exactly how those models came to be but you can be sure that google is continuing to make new and better models new and better gemini models for itself hopefully apple's deal has something that it's not just like a one-time thing it's like we get access to these models which are you know we're probably like maybe they were new when the deal was signed or newish when the deal was signed but over the course of the next year if those just stay the same the rest of the industry is going to keep moving forward and apple's going to be using you know late 2025 early 2026 models when everyone else is uh you know moving along so i hope i hope they have at least a plan to continue to develop that the whole rest of the stack also obviously needs to be developed and debugged and improved and made better but underneath it all in the end are the models um one thing they could iterate on and i hope they'll iterate on is their world knowledge thing that we talked about in an earlier episode where they're not doing google searches for facts but they have their own sort of world knowledge index apple's got to keep that up to date apple's got to make sure good info is in there and fix mistakes and keep adding new stuff because world knowledge the world changes every day and so that world knowledge thing needs to keep up with sports scores and holidays and national events and celebrities who are alive and dead and taking stuff from call sheet right yeah like it just they can't just like we'd have a world knowledge thing and we'll just leave it until next wwdc nope you can't do that either so yeah uh here's hoping but like these mentioned these things because they historically have not been apple strength to say the least uh but apple strengths can change.

1:20:35Casey Liss:So hopefully they're with, with the new leadership, hopefully they realize it's not enough to have this big coming out party at WWDC 2026. And we're all at these betas and say, now we're done until next year, because you're not.

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1:22:42John Siracusa:All right, let's do at least a touch of Ask ATP. And Amar writes, One of the expectations from Apple after they moved to M series chips was that they would have complete control over release cadence. However, it turns out this cadence is even more haphazard than the Intel era. We currently have a situation where the M5 was released first on an iPad of all products, while the desktops are languishing on M4 or even M3 chips. I should note that this has been in the show notes for at least a couple of months now. But still relevant somehow.

1:23:07Marco Arment:Can I also just interrupt here for a minute? This is not more haphazard than the Intel era was. We were there. Trust me.

1:23:16John Siracusa:I lived it, man. Anyway, MR continues, to make matters worse, it seems as if the Mac Studio may not even get M5. We're eight months into the M5 life cycle. It makes no sense to bring M5 to the Mac Studio now. If you're in the market for the absolute balls-to-the-wall desktop that would last you seven or eight years, John Syracuse, you have nothing because investing in a M3 Ultra makes zero sense. None of this is because of the RAM crisis. Apple still ships tons of products with RAM. is this really by design? I'd be shocked if it is. Or has something gone really, really wrong?

1:23:48Casey Liss:Well, the premise of this is that they would have complete control over release cadence. They would have more control. But complete control they can never have because they don't fab their chips and they don't control the world. So they are a sideswipe by the RAM crisis. They are sideswiped by NVIDIA becoming TSMC's best customer. Like, stuff happens. And I don't know how old this was in the notes, but like everything in it it's slightly outdated because of the news we just read but like it the we kind of got spoiled by the m1 m2 m3 cycle where it seemed at least somewhat predictable and under control and i bet if apple did have complete control they would continue a orderly progression like that but they don't and they have to be reactive and so the current chaos that you're seeing where it's like m6 never mind we're not even doing those m6s oh the ultra is going to get we're not going to do an ultra for the m4 we'll just put the m3 ultra in there but much too late and then m5 and the mac studio that's going to be later too and actually it's going to be the only thing and because we're skipping all the m6s and we're going to do the m7 and intel might fab it like that's the world that's the world we're living in right now and intel wasn't more chaotic but it was worse in that there were long periods where we had nothing and then when we did get something it wasn't good and so at least at least now it's like there's this menu of things that we think are going to be awesome and sometimes the things get taken off our menu or pushed out into the future but every one of those m things speaking of the m chicks in particular every one of those m things was tailor made to apple specifications for specific product needs and maybe some of them don't ship and get delayed or whatever but when we get them it's a thing that apple very intentionally made that works really well whereas apple and intel their relationship was basically apple trying to cajole and coerce and beg intel to make the kinds of chips they wanted and intel saying well i guess we'll put a really big integrated gpu because you need it for your laptops and so we'll put this in one of our chips and just is this what you wanted and apple's like i mean kind of but like it was just it was never you know intel apple was an important customer to intel but they apple wanted very specific things and intel would give them a little bit of what they wanted based on the chips they had and the things they could add for them and i bet intel thought it was bending over backwards like can you believe we're doing this custom integrated gpu just for apple this one customer can you believe we're doing this and apple's like but we would change a lot of stuff about that chip not just the gpu um and so yeah and apple gets to make its own chip so i do think things are better than intel but the current situation with the you know the rumored m6 pro max and ultra cancellation the already passed lack of an m4 ultra the studio waiting forever for an m5 and still doesn't have it i think when the person was writing this they maybe didn't expect this to be the case but it still doesn't have it and i'm gonna be happy to get an m5 max in like december so yeah it's a tough old world that we

1:26:48Marco Arment:live in but it's still better than intel yeah like i i think the the reality is that the that what Apple Silicon brings us is Apple gets to design exactly the chips they want. Unfortunately, the chips they want need to be manufactured by somebody. And that is both incredibly complicated and difficult. And there's lots of different variables and conditions that go into that. And also, as mentioned earlier, Apple is no longer TSMC's biggest customer or a most important customer necessarily. And so they have to compete for other vendors for that manufacturer's time and for the yield on those high-end lines.

1:27:30Marco Arment:And so we like to think like, oh, just when you go to the next chip, like every year, you just make another one and make it better. Okay. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you can do that, but what does it mean to make it better? Well, you might be redesigning something that might take a lot of time. It might be really complicated you might be you know trying to figure out how do you how do you squeeze more performance out of the same you know feature size you know so without without being able to you know shrink down the process yet and then when you do shrink the process down but what if the new process works a little bit differently than the old one like how how did they shrink it and what does that mean for all the different little tiny gates and stuff that are that are in the chip and sometimes things need to be built a little bit differently or things need to be designed a little bit differently when you change the process uh it's it's a very complicated like implementation of the idea of make a new chip every two years or every year like that sounds so simple but the reality of that is incredibly complicated and if there is any little bump in the road when tackling any of those challenges that can push data out or or that can make that can make a whole type of chip maybe not worth making or impractical to make or it would make the yield so low that it would be way too expensive and you You know, it wouldn't really sell at those prices.

1:28:44Marco Arment:Or you can actually design something thinking it'll work. You can start manufacturing it thinking it'll work. And then the yields might just suck for a while or forever. Maybe on that whole process, like back when they made the N4P or N4E, whatever that was.

1:28:58Casey Liss:Like B was the one that only Apple ever bought.

1:29:00Marco Arment:Right. Because it turned out that was just super expensive and not amazing yields forever. It just has kind of the nature of the process. All of those things are really complicated. So by Apple bringing in the design, that helps a lot, but it doesn't avoid the inherent complexity of the rest of that system. So Apple does a really good job generally in lots of ways of hiding the reality of the complexity of their supply chain and design process from the customers. that's part of the reason why the recent price changes were kind of were so surprising because apple like apple went through all of covid without really ever being out of stock of anything for very long and without really being short supplied on components and without really changing any prices they were the only ones everyone else had massive supply chain problems during those years for again for very good reasons but apple didn't now i'm sure behind the scenes they were putting out fires constantly.

1:30:02Marco Arment:But they hid all that from us. They masked it all with just execution and competence and buffers and whatever else they were doing. We never felt that from the outside. Apple presents the impression of simplicity. We've gone from the M4 to the M5. It is 15 % faster in this way. It is 30 % faster in this way. Everything kind of costs the same, and here you go. But behind the scenes, that's really complicated and they're hiding a lot from us. So sometimes they're able to, most of the time, they're able to hide that complexity. Sometimes they're not. So in a case like when you have the really huge ultra chips, that's kind of an edge case.

1:30:45Marco Arment:Those are the hardest ones to make in certain ways. They are probably the lowest volume sellers. They probably have the lowest yields. uh it that's a complicated chip to make and things that work for for for a chip generation for all the other chips they make might not work for the ultra chip or whatever it is like so i am not surprised to see bumps like that to see oh sometimes the the big studio is going to skip a generation or whatever that happened before with intel and intel had their good reasons and it's happening now with apple and apple has also good reasons that is that is just inherently uh inevitable when you're when you're doing things with this complexity if these uh m6 rumors are

1:31:32Casey Liss:actually true it will be interesting sometime in the future to find out did apple actually design an m6 pro and m6 max and an m6 ultra and basically just had to throw in all that work because like because if the rumor is that like this is motivated by multiple crises one the difficulty of getting manufacturing but two the idea that like ai doing local ai is super important and apparently the m7 design has some kind of advancement that is significant advantage for on-device ai and so i can see apple saying i know i know like the m6 pro max ultra they're great chips you all did a great job and it's going to be a shame to throw it away but like uh if we can get the m7 six months sooner by just not doing the m6 we should do that because it's more important like and and i i honestly i think that's a reasonable call like if the m7 actually is better i would rather have that six months early and just skip the m6s but if you if you just paid all your employees to to design those things maybe they've been test fab like it's just it's just such a shame to say yeah we spent teams spent you know years working on these chips and we just have to go sorry that's i mean it's like you know people who make a movie that never gets released like the movie is finished and done the studio kills it for a tax write-off i feel bad if that's the case now maybe this rumor is not true and those m6s are going to come out and maybe they just literally never designed them although i don't think that's the case because the design timelines on these are long enough that they have to have been working on them or maybe they made the decision three years ago and it has nothing to do with the ram crisis we don't know because again they're just rumors but there are many plausible scenarios that are just a damn shame you know like especially if you're on that team and like and i bet like m6 like what they've done with the the m series has shown you know there are good years and bad years but none of them have been stinkers like they've always sometimes they're interesting in weird ways or whatever but like all the m chips are good you know and they've all made advancements in some way for certain applications um and again i think we were spoiled by like they're going to come out with an m series it's going to have a number on the end and there's going to be a non-suffix one a pro a max and an ultra and the ultra is going to be two maxes together and they're just going to increment that number every year and it's going to be smooth sailing and that family just disintegrated like it's like that that cadence is apparently not plausible in the current world because if you map it out and you see the release cadence and how they've kind of spread and distributed and holes have been formed where certain chips just never arrive and we're getting more holes and more delays and more like you know as as uh amara points out like it seemed really weird when like a new m chip would debut on an ipad or does it was the m stand for my pad like it's it's supposed to be a mac chip and it comes out on an ipad first that's just the way it worked out and yeah so i'm i'm still happier in this error i'm even as disappointed as i'm with the lack of high-end chips and i do i do remember okay someone's gonna write in about this way back at the beginning of the m series or maybe somewhere in the middle like there was some rumor from someone saying uh yeah all the all those quad chips like the m the rumored m1 that was going to be like four maxes stuck together that chip was canned we couldn't do it and uh at some point there was a rumor or something that was saying like and by the way don't keep your hopes up for any other sort of like quad type chip because the roadmap has been laid out and the earliest there could even possibly be a monster chip like that is the m7 generation and that was that was years ago when i came out and all they were saying was i've seen the roadmap for m1 through m6 and it's not on there so they weren't saying that the m7 one was going to be that they were saying that it's not m1 through m6 and i think we were on like m2 or three and you're like oh really not until m7 m7 is the future that's so far away well here we are the m7 may arrive and i mean back then they weren't saying that the m7 generation was going to concentrate on on-device ai because that wasn't really a thing back then uh but now it is so again i don't expect a quad type thing for the m7 i would still love to see an ultra that's not too max is stuck together but doesn't seem like that's in the cards either so uh yeah like i said i'm not waiting for the m7 but i am excited that i'm excited that this rumor says that apple is so excited about the m7 that they're willing to sacrifice you know what three quarters i can't do fractions most of their m6 line all of their m6 line except for the presumably single die, no suffix M6, that they're going to sacrifice all of those just so the world can get the M7 a little bit sooner.

1:35:58And I say, go for it, Apple.

1:36:01John Siracusa:All right, let's continue with Matthew Southworth, who writes, I enjoyed the discussion about languages in the overtime segment of episode 696, including Apple's assertion that Swift can be used as a replacement for languages from C to Perl. It occurs to me that if code is being developed agentically, the choice between a lower or higher level language might differ. If no human is going to review the code, shutter, maybe the bots should work closer to the metal for more efficient code. Conversely, maybe the wealth of available libraries for open source frameworks would make sticking to those frameworks more effective.

1:36:31John Siracusa:I understand what Matthew's going for here, and I'm curious to hear what you two think. But the thing that struck me about this is that, and maybe it's just that I haven't seen it, but I got to imagine there's not a lot of like ARM or x86 assembly code posted online. I shouldn't say not a lot. nowhere near as much assembly code, for example, posted online as there is C, C++, Swift, Perl, PHP, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're relying on a thing that needs a whole corpus of data to train upon, I would think you would want that thing to be the language that it has the most data about, something like a C++ or perhaps Perl or whatever, where the LLM knows so much about whatever the language is and it's seen so much code from whatever the language is that it's going to it's it's more likely to do a good job as opposed to like assembly which i got to imagine there's not near as much assembly floating around the world as there is pearl i feel like matthew's

1:37:32Casey Liss:question here is then you know again one of one of the many traps that the lms lead us toward which is it's so easy to map onto them the things that we uh have been exposed to in like science fiction media and that well yeah we have these high level languages for us but computers are computers and so we don't they don't need to they're they're unlike us and and they're unlike us in the ways that i have seen computers be unlike us in the movies which is things that are nonsensical to us computers can understand so why bother with these high level languages when computers can just understand the the binary language of moisture evaporators it's a reference marco and casey um they they'll they can just understand the machine code so they don't need and in some respects like they're on the right track and that computers aren't like us and they have different strengths than we do but the other respect is they're like lms are not movie computers like oh computers understand binary things therefore they should need to use high level languages but as you just pointed out casey lms how lms how this specific technology works is training data is the thing that determines like their training determines what they are and you need lots of data to train them and if you're looking for lots of data there's lots of c code man there is less assembly and you can say well the c code turns into assembly when you compile it so why don't they just learn from that and that gets to my second point which is computers also benefit from all the same things that humans benefit with high level languages in that there are they don't have to think about certain details when they're using a higher level language and then there can be certain assumptions they can make about how the high level languages work because languages like c and other languages provide some guarantees about how things work uh not that you know exactly what assembly will be created by the compiler but there are certain that's what a high level language provides it provides certain behaviors above and beyond the behaviors defined by assembly itself you do lots of things in assembly but from c there's a subset of those things these structures will always give these guarantees so on and so forth and obviously there's undefined behavior and all sorts of stuff and see but i'm just saying like the benefits of high level languages those benefits also benefit llms it makes them able to write code without worrying about the low level concerns the same way it does to us uh even though we operate differently those that combination of things i feel like can't be overcome the massively larger amount of training data and the fact that they can work better in high level language then i'll add a third one which is if you're paying per token you want to use a higher level language because this bottom line is there's fewer characters produced there's just fewer at the minimum there's fewer output tokens but probably there's also fewer input tokens because if you're feeding it some source code and say what's wrong with this i'd rather feed it a paragraph of c instead of a much longer several paragraphs of assembly uh because yeah it takes more instructions like that's that's the nature of high level language so i i know what matthew's getting at but i just think it's like it's about barking up the wrong tree like they're they're not movie computers they're not magic they they don't they don't you know speak in binary and you know wouldn't they be more comfortable in binary because they're computers or robots like they're large language models they deal with text pieces of text they don't deal with them the way humans do exactly like they don't even go a letter at a time those tokens aren't necessarily single letters it's like how can how can it make sense of things when it's doing like pairs of letters or three like doesn't make any sense it's like yeah so they're not exactly like humans but they are in fact large language models and they turn a lot of stuff into numbers and build these giant anyway but i should we should have eternal links to those uh three brown one blue video yeah i know what you're thinking of uh yeah the way they work is not like the way humans work but in the end you should at least consider how they work which is they get trained on data and yeah there's a lot more c code than assembly

1:41:20Marco Arment:Yeah, I think the, I kind of mused a couple of months back, like, have we developed the last programming language? In the sense that, or at least like the last widely used programming language. in this and what i mean by that is like do we have any reason to make new languages now really for for mass use because what my thinking on that was like llms have now been trained on all the languages that we have you know like that that people publish code for in large volumes they are not surprisingly really good at javascript because there's a lot of javascript out there right now they're pretty good at Swift they're pretty good at C as you kind of get down the less commonly published languages on the web these days they're okay at PHP I'm sure they're okay at Ruby and Perl and Python you keep going down a little bit lower in the usage list I'm sure they've seen a lot of Java maybe they've seen a little bit of Objective-C maybe they've seen a little bit of regular C probably a lot of C++ but maybe not so much Rust.

1:42:34Marco Arment:You start to get the lesser used languages. If you're doing LLM-based development based on what they've been trained on, as John was saying, probably they're going to be best at the languages that they have seen the most. My thinking generally on that is we probably want LLMs to be writing whatever is the most popular language that can be used to develop the type of app or on the platform that they're building. So if you're making a web app, you probably want it to be making JavaScript on the back end and the front end for that. If you're making an iPhone app, you probably want to be using Swift, that kind of thing.

1:43:15Marco Arment:And now that we've had all these languages out there and training the LLMs, willingly or not, does it make sense to invent a new language now that would be kind of from scratch from the LLMs perspective? you know, if we're going to use LLMs to help us write code or to write it for us most of the time in the future, which does not seem that remote of a possibility, shouldn't we use a language they've been trained on? Which kind of means why would we ever make another language again? But that being said, LLMs are also getting really sophisticated all the time. And that keeps getting more and more the case.

1:43:58Marco Arment:As they get smarter, they have more training, they have more parameters, they have more sophistication in their harnesses and their prompting and everything else. What we are seeing, I think, is that over time, LLMs will actually not even care what the languages they're asked to generate because they're thinking kind of higher level. They're seeing higher level patterns and they will have just as easy of a time generating one language as any other language because they're just kind of outputting patterns and the training data was more about like building those mental patterns than the specifics of it must be this language you know printed out this way so i think ultimately right now the answer is if you're going to have an lm write code make it a popular language but i bet in the fairly near future the answer will just be who cares it doesn't matter let the lm write whatever it wants to

1:44:49Casey Liss:write i don't know if there's anything in the way lms uh currently work that will help it and not care about the language because in the end it has to make it has to know the syntax and output it and very much will parrot back uh code structured to similar what it's seen so i don't think it's becoming language independent but to your earlier question i think it's important to ask like why do we make new languages forget about lms why why why do we ever make new programming language why don't we aren't we in the same situation of like well all these programmers were trained in languages that exist and we should just keep using them why bother making a new language at all because when you make a new language people don't have experience with it they haven't seen it before they don't know it now they have to learn it and it's just it's a big hassle um but the reason we do it is because the new languages offer some benefit that the other language didn't just look at apple with objective c and with my uh copeland 2010 articles where i was saying hey apple needs a modern language the everyone was loving objective c in 2010 and i was like no they have a they have a looming language crisis they need another language so objective c is too low level they need a modern language and there was pushback from objective c developers saying objective c is great i don't see why you think we need something different uh we've all been using it all the frameworks are written in it all the apps are written in it all like why do you need another language it's just it's going to be worse in every way like people are going to suddenly start with zero years experience with this new language uh they weren't lms but they have the same issue which is like well we're already trained so to speak on objective c and everything's written in objective c so what the hell are you doing and the answer was existing languages have problems it's difficult to write correct bug-free secure code in these languages because they have undefined behavior they have pointers like uh you know manual retain release before the days of arc all that other stuff like we've shown that it's really difficult to write this correctly lms are no different they will make more mistakes in a language that allows them to make more mistakes they'll make more security problems they'll make more bugs if it is more possible in the language that's why a memory safe language will humans will make fewer memory bugs in a memory safe language and so will llms and that's why we keep making new languages that's why we made c instead of doing everything in assembly that's why i made all these higher level languages is because they provide a way for a thing of some skill whether that's a person or an llm to write fewer lines of code which is fewer tokens for lms but it's less work for humans and to make fewer mistakes because of the design of the language and i don't think that will change um because like it's not as if swift is going to be the end all be all it you know it just seems like c is going to be the end all be all when everyone moves on to c but then you know c plus loss and objective c come along it's like well i guess that's a little bit better and then the memory safe languages why is rust popular why Why is everyone rewriting all their C++ and Rust?

1:47:31Casey Liss:Because human LLM, either way, fewer security bugs, fewer, you know, memory bugs. You're like, just, it's just safer, right? And for all the benefits that we see in Swift, all the things that the Swift compiler does and the Swift language does are so focused on trying to make certain kinds of bugs, if not impossible, then either really hard to do, or a lot of Swift design is like, we have to allow you to do this but every time you do it we're going to put something in the code so it's easy for both the human and lm defined for example if you search your swift code for the word unsafe u-n-s-a-f-e that should point you to a lot of places where you're doing a thing that bypasses some protection uh and that's easy that's easy to grip for it's easy to rg for for recursive grip and these agents um and so there will be some language after swift that is better than swift in the ways that Swift was better than Objective-C and humans will want to use it and so will all the agents.

1:48:31Casey Liss:If we get to the point where humans don't want to make a new language because they can't imagine a way that a language can be better, then we'll be at the end of history and we don't need to know any more programming languages. But that's not going to happen in my lifetime for sure. I mean, I don't know how long Swift is going to go, but Swift does still let you do a bunch of unsafe stuff. And 200 years from now, someone's going to think it's barbaric that all the unsafe stuff that we can do in Swift is like, why did they even allow that in a language? like well they had to because it was trying to replace c code and the certain things you can't do and blah blah blah and there are 200 years in the future it's like our languages don't allow that at all like we are we have we have so much safety guarantees and mathematically provable correctness and impossibility of uh you know security flaws in these five realms and we're fighting these other realms that you hadn't even thought of for quantum computers and stuff like that but of course we got all those basics solved so yeah i think we'll continue to have new languages and i think uh everyone will benefit from them language models and human alike finally

1:49:27John Siracusa:phil kim writes do you collect vintage computers if not which three vintage computers would you like to have in your collection uh i do not uh i will say this is not an official answer of mine but i will say i happen to hold the macbook adorable earlier today and i keep thinking about like the Intel CPU conversation from earlier. And I held this thing and it just is so amazing. And I know we've talked about this a hundred times, make it 101 now. A modern cut of that with Apple Silicon on the inside would be so amazing. But anyway, to actually answer Phil's question, I grew up on ThinkPad, so that's what I'd want.

1:50:03John Siracusa:I would want a ThinkPad 701C, which is what you would know as the one with the butterfly keyboard. Kids, look at Wikipedia, we'll put a link in the show notes. And I would also want a ThinkPad T30, which was, I think, I'm pretty sure that was my college computer. I freaking love that thing. It was incredible at the time. I would probably ask for two Thinkpads. John, you would want the entirety of every Mac that has ever been made. So Marco, I think your answer will be much more interesting. What would you want?

1:50:30Marco Arment:Honestly, I don't think I would really use one. I think that the answer... Oh, I'd never use it. Yeah. Yeah, the answer is like, I really shouldn't go buy vintage computers because I just won't use them. whenever i've bought you know like i bought my palm pilot like that i talked about like i bought i bought a palm 5x a couple years back off v-bay because you can you can get one like brand new condition for like 25 bucks and it's it was fun playing with it for like you know an evening but as it turns out modern computing devices are way better than old ones who knew you know if i was gonna have if we were gonna do a video show and i wanted to have a background that looked cool on video right i get you know i get like a trash can mac pro and put it on a shelf you know stuff like that like i you know i would have that that kind of fun vintage computer stuff basically as scenery behind me in a video which many people do for this reason but to actually use them to actually try to like keep them running and use them one of the problems you quickly face which is something that you don't really face with game consoles is that computers really rely a lot more on their ecosystem around them.

1:51:39Marco Arment:You know, especially once computers became mainly internet terminals. Well, how, if you have a vintage computing device of some kind, first of all, what kind of Wi-Fi radio does it have? Does it even have a Wi-Fi radio? Does it have networking? If not, how are you going to get any software onto it? What is it going to do? And then, if you can get it to actually, like, connect to the internet, if it's that kind of device, will it support any modern tls protocol to be able to connect to any server today probably not if it is say an old ios device will it have like the right code signing support server side still running to let it do any you know install any software you know run any app like you start running into problems like that with a lot of kind of mid-vintage computer equipment now if you go back far enough to stuff that didn't really use the internet for anything or didn't need the internet for anything at least you start having more options of like what you can get running and do something with uh but then you know it is more of a novelty it's like okay well i can i can you know boot up classic mac os and do what like what what am i gonna do with it right all i did my whole childhood was boot up classic mac os and do what there was no internet right right like and that's i mean that is how i used my entire first computer for much of the time that i had it was like yeah i i would you know have a couple of games i would have q basic and i would turn it on and do what like for hours like sure but to do that today i don't know i again i i'm never bored so i'm never looking for something like that like i always have a million things i want to be doing so i i don't think i don't think that kind of hobby is for me but i it's the kind of thing that i like watching like when other people on the internet do cool stuff with vintage computers i like watching to see what they do with it um it's a fun thing to kind of see breeze through like a social feed or a blog post or a youtube video uh but that's not for me i find it

1:53:48Casey Liss:fascinating this question about uh collecting vintage computers marco goes to what are you going to use them for and i will point out much like uh collecting books collecting books is a different hobby than reading books sometimes they're combined but not always so the idea that you would actually have to use these computers you collect it's like no sometimes collecting is the end product and it's not the using of computers and on your second point about what are you going to do with them i think it shows the bifurcation in your in your not both your knowledge of the scene and also in sadly the technology uh you're very familiar with old ios devices uh and one of the shames about them is if they don't have a good jailbreak available for you uh it's sometimes difficult to get those more locked down ios devices to you know do interesting things uh because like again if you don't have access to a good jailbreak uh you're limited to what they used to do and if like the servers aren't up or the software doesn't work or as you said the tls blah blah but in the realm before closed down platforms man people are adding wi-fi to mac pluses okay like there there are web browsers written for classic mac os with modern tls people are writing them today today they're writing them they're writing them in like people they're so i think someone just is writing a bunch of apps in swift steve trotten smith was just reporting his apps in swift to uh classic mac os so it can run like a 128k mac and stuff like this for the computers that are not locked down people just write stuff or have lms write stuff um so yeah none of the old web browsers work fine they write a new one if they write a new web browser to run on a machine with 128 kilobytes of ram that had never seen the internet um and you know they have a little for wi-fi hardware they have like uh you know little peripherals that you can buy and plug into your mac se and now your mac se is on wi-fi and it doesn't even know what tcpip is but it's like there's like an apple talk interface to it and just the stuff out there for vintage computers that's a whole separate hobby there's collecting them then there's i have them and i'm going to like make them work in the modern engine i think someone make it wrote a slack client for it someone recently was showing a markdown editor on a classic mac like this is stuff it looks so weird to see like on a nine inch monochrome black and white screen on a computer from the 80s and someone's writing markdown and they you know like do two asterisks around something or one or whatever it is a markdown and then the text slants and becomes italic it's just people have weird hobbies um for me um i do collect vintage computers uh i don't collect them to use them mostly because i don't have time and space and place to use them so it's more of just a collecting collecting thing but the other thing is i only for the most part collect things that i use like i already did this i lived it i had these computers as my one and only main computer that i used for years and years and years or I had similar computers.

1:56:39Casey Liss:Like, for example, I have a Mac 2 FX because I always wanted one. I never had a Mac 2 FX because it cost so much as a car, but I bought mine for 20 bucks. Many, many, many years later, I just always wanted to own one because it was such a cool computer, but I had its peers. I had computers of similar power within a few years of that or, you know, whatever. And like Marco, I don't particularly have any desire to use older, worse computers. A, I already did that. I used them when they were older or worse. and b i like new computers that are better but i do like collecting them as little art objects and sentimental things that's why i have a next cube and a next slab that hardware is so gorgeous and i did in fact use them when they were contemporary and in college uh and thought it wouldn't be cool to have one of these someday and i bought those for like 20 or 30 bucks at the mit swap um so i have so many things which three vintage computers would i like to have i think i have basically everything that I want for a while I wanted to get an e-mate I always wanted on the lookout for one but I didn't really want one one like I'm not super into them it's just as a shame I never found one so e-mates kind of in there but honestly the e-mates kind of ugly um I don't have a Newton 2000 or 2100 or whatever um but I mean I think I saw one of those and it's just too much I'm fine with that not having that um because I never actually used that one at the time I don't know I don't think there's, I do have a trash can Mac pro.

1:58:04Casey Liss:Um, I've got all the big Mac pros that I want. It's kind of sad that my, um, my 2008 Mac pro, the front of it was dented by a vacuum cleaner. It's tough. It was back when it was on the floor. It's one of the reasons my, uh, 2019 Mac pro is elevated up off the floor. No danger to vacuums. Maybe I'd like wheels for it. I just have the one wheel instead of the four wheels. I don't know. I'm sure I could think of something, but here, I mean, my wife's listening to this and saying, you do not need Norvins computers. And she's right. I need to get rid of, I need to get rid of tons of computers before I think about even getting another one of them.

1:58:38Casey Liss:I did, I did bring the trash can in because it's small and I did want one of those. So I got a trash can. But yeah, my, I think the main thing is which 30 computers are you going to get rid of? Not which three would you like to have in your collection?

1:58:51Marco Arment:Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Factor and Quince. And thanks to our membership supporters directly who can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the Ubiquiti Enterprise NAS, a new offering from Ubiquiti. You know we love Ubiquiti and we love NASes. So we're going to be talking about that in Overtime, atp.fm slash join, if you want to hear that and hear so much other stuff. Thank you so much to everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

2:00:16Marco Arment:www.mastodon.com

2:00:23All right.

2:00:25John Siracusa:So I have a weird technical support question and I bet I have done something wrong, but I can't figure out what the heck it is. So I have four, I generally have my devices in a, in a focus mode that only lets through like a handful of contacts. And I had, I didn't think about it until just this moment that I should have tested this issue outside of that focus mode to see if that focus mode might be part of the problem, but let's assume it isn't. But the issue that I have is particularly on my watch, this is most egregious on my watch, I will feel the tap tap when those people that are blessed through that focus mode text me.

2:01:07John Siracusa:I'll feel the tap tap when I'm not in the focus mode, which is not common, but it happens when I'm not in the focus mode and I'll feel a tap tap when people text me that are, you know, just regular people or people that are not special enough to be in my, you know, almost all the time focus mode. However, I am almost positive that I never get a haptic notification when Aaron texts me, which is crappy because the one person I want to always get a tap tap from is my wife.

2:01:37Casey Liss:Is this an elaborate setup here for you to try to, for us to try to like excuse you from something? Partially yes. No, no, it's not that I'm not answering your texts. They never tap on my phone. Listen to the next ATP and I'll explain it.

2:01:54John Siracusa:Yeah, I mean, that is a little bit of this, but like she, we haven't had any particular conversation about this in a fair bit of time now. But there are times that she wants a semi-urgent response from me and very understandably gets a little perturbed when I'm like, I didn't even see your text. Now, I will note that I had way back when set up a custom like haptic notification on the phone for when she calls. Like you can, there's a way, I think it's an accessibility. There's a way to set up a custom buzz basically when she calls. And since my phone is always silent, my watch is always silent insofar as it doesn't make verbal or not verbal, but it doesn't make audible noise.

2:02:34John Siracusa:But there's got to be something I have done wrong that that is causing me to not receive the tap tap when she sends me a text on my watch. And for the life of me, I can't figure it out. I did look, and in the Contacts app, there are a bunch of different toggles that you can do. And one of them is silence notifications. I'm sorry, that's not in Contacts. That's in the Messages app. One of them is silence notifications. I'm looking at my phone when I say this. Now, maybe this exists on the watch, and I've somehow turned it on, and I don't know it. But on my phone, I see, I'm sorry, it's hide alerts, which is off.

2:03:14John Siracusa:and then I generally don't send read receipts, read receipts, whatever you pronounce it, but I have those on for her. I have show and shared with you turned on. I have share focus status turned on, which I also don't typically turn on for most people. So she is like as special as I can make her be in iMessage on my phone. And for whatever reason, I cannot figure out why my watch does not do a tap tap when she sends me a text. Oh, actually that's mostly true. interesting wrinkle. It seems to be when she, it's only when she sends me a text in the conversation between only she and I, we're on a zillion different group chats where she will break through, like for example, in focus mode, which is what I want for the record.

2:03:58John Siracusa:She will break through in a group chat where none of the other people in the group chat are blessed in this particular focus mode. And she'll break through in the group chat messages. But if she sends me a private message, so to speak, I don't get it. Both in the sense that I don't receive it So this is a call for help. This is one of the advantages of being on the show, is that you can ask for help and crowdsource this. What have I done wrong? It's got to be something I've done. What have I done wrong? Please help me.

2:04:27Marco Arment:I would love to know, because I have exactly the same problem.

2:04:31Casey Liss:Are you serious? A lot of husbands seem to have a technical reason why they're not answering their wife's texts in a timely manner. Interesting.

2:04:36Marco Arment:And this is not good for spousal relations.

2:04:40John Siracusa:It is not, Marco. Let me tell you. I can confirm.

2:04:43Marco Arment:It is really not. And I would, please, if you figure out the answer, let me, so okay, my theory, so I wear an Apple Watch, and I'm usually, when I am like not getting these messages, it is almost always when I'm at my computer. Now, I'm always at my computer, so that might not be anything. but but i yeah i i don't know what it is but there is something about like me being at my computer where i my theory is that like one of the devices is kind of saying i got this i'm currently being used i'll alert the user and then the other ones don't i don't know my another theory is you know if i'm in the middle of doing something in the middle of my tremendous monitor if a notification comes up in the corner maybe i just don't see it like maybe it if i'm really focused on something sorry honey it was too far away yeah i mean like truly this happens to me a

2:05:45John Siracusa:lot because remember i'm going three up and if i'm looking at the leftmost monitor and the notification is is actually on the upper right hand corner of my center but don't you have it

2:05:53Casey Liss:blessed to like make sound for her too you don't have sound notifications come on just just for the

2:05:58John Siracusa:one person on your mac i mean i would love to do that if such a thing is possible i thought i did

2:06:03Marco Arment:do that actually but maybe the answer is maybe on the mac so you can set notifications to show momentarily or to stay there until you interact with them or dismiss them maybe the answer is just to turn message notifications on in the way that they just stay there yeah i think i did that

2:06:21Casey Liss:for her yeah you say that until you have stacked up 8 000 notifications anyway so i am genuinely

2:06:26John Siracusa:gobsmacked that you also have this problem marco and i wish i could tell you like yes there have been some issues between she and I from time to time when she really needs a response and I just don't give it to her. And she's right. Like, I'm not trying to paint myself as correct. I am not. She is correct.

2:06:40Casey Liss:What does she do with it? Does she call you in that case?

2:06:43John Siracusa:Well, sometimes we're in the same house. That's the other thing that's hilarious. She can call you in the same house. Well, she'll just scream my name instead of home. That works too. But, you know, something I want to talk about in a future episode of ATP is just how ridiculous and hilarious it is that when you have a couple that works from home how much of our conversation during the day is done via text message we're in the same freaking house like it's so not necessary our house is not that big my son will call me from his bedroom i'll be downstairs

2:07:10Casey Liss:and he will call me a phone call from his bedroom yep i mean this is we we don't live in big houses

2:07:15John Siracusa:this is a regular size house but yeah this is what yeah he could just yell i would hear him Yep. Anyways, but I've got to imagine that I have been apparently we, Marco and I, have set something wrong, but I will be damned if I know what. And it stinks.

2:07:30Casey Liss:Let me give you my third data point here that might help you. I have this problem, but in reverse. My wife tells me, oh, I didn't see your text because my phone didn't vibrate or my watch didn't vibrate rather. Interesting. and i what i think is i think marco was on the right track with like we know apple devices in theory coordinate with each other so they don't all have notifications so one of them's got to say i've got this and the other data point is i don't wear a while apple watch but my wife does i don't have a problem of not seeing her messages she doesn't see mine she's wearing an apple watch now my question for all of you is like when you're wearing the watch okay maybe the watch doesn't vibrate and you expected it to but does the notification show on your phone yes does your

2:08:16John Siracusa:phone vibrate or no it doesn't because it is the the watch has handled it right well i mean obviously

2:08:22Casey Liss:the watch hasn't handled it because you're saying your watch isn't vibrating but like i do wonder if adding the watch to the mix is the thing that that it exposes whatever apple bug i'm first of all i'm saying i'm calling this an apple bug because so many people i like my wife and everyone else is always asked me questions exactly like you just phrased it which is like i expect to get a notification and i don't and very very rarely it is a question of settings much more likely it is you've got a dozen apple devices and honestly i don't even know what's supposed to happen here but we can demo it we could be two feet from each other and my wife will say send me a text message i'll send it and she's like nope no vibration no notification you know and but then the next time i'll do it it will or whatever so i think it's apple bugs plus apple watch that causes this problem and the solution is i'll get rid of your apple watches i don't wanna i know the other thing I would say, Casey, is I'm very suspicious of your focus mode as well.

2:09:11Casey Liss:So I would do some experimentation without the focus mode. Just turn everything off. Turn like, I am open to the entire world because honestly, who's trying to text you during the day? It's fine. Just leave yourself open to the world and see how bad it actually is.

2:09:22John Siracusa:If I recall correctly, so my general, I haven't messed with this in literally years, but my general focus node like routine is that when I sit down to work at about 8 in the morning, I go into a work focus mode and you two knuckleheads can break through. Mike can break through. There's a couple other people that break through, but generally speaking, it's one of those situations where I will see it when I will see a message when I go to the messages app. You know what I mean? Like it's not going to notify me. Um, if, if, if some random schmo sends me a text and then in the, once the kids are home from school, granted it's summer now, but once the kids are home from school, I go into this, this kind of universal focus mode.

2:10:00John Siracusa:I call it personal. What that basically means is family can break through and basically no one else. Um, I actually genuinely don't remember if I have you guys and Mike on there or not, but, um, for the most part in the personal focus mode, which is what I live on basically from the time the kids get off the bus until their bedtime, then it's pretty much only family that can break through. And then in the evenings, typically I'm pretty sure they all get turned off and I'm in like wide open, no, no focus mode, wide open mode. And I think you're right. I do need to experiment with this. I think it's worth experimenting with my custom vibration, even though that is only for phone calls, if I'm not mistaken, but I should experiment with that.

2:10:40John Siracusa:But I just don't understand why she, the one person I always freaking want to get texts from or notifications from, is the only person I consistently don't get them from. And specifically in the conversation with just the two of us, Cause like I said, she will poke through on group chats. Like a group chat will be popping off when I'm in the personal focus mode and I will see only her messages, which is chef's kiss. That's exactly what I want because whatever it is she's saying, wherever she's saying it, I want to know what I want to know immediately. But for whatever reason, when she sends something in our private channel message, whatever you want to call it, a conversation, I guess, then it won't, then it won't notify me and it's driving me freaking crazy.

2:11:20Casey Liss:I mean, you're highlighting the fact that she's special and that she has different settings than everybody else. So maybe unspecial her and make her have the same settings as everyone else. Also do some experiments with her two feet away. At least at the very least, this will give you more plausible cover when she thinks you're ignoring her messages and you say you don't, because if you do that experiment for a while until she's sick of like, send me a text. Like when she's like literally sitting next to you, help put your watch on her wrist and say, send a text. Right. Of course, if it backfires on you and it constantly vibrates every time she does it, she's going to give you quite a look, but I'm taking all you at face value here and say, this is not elaborate cover for your past sins, but is in fact an actual technical problem, which I have no problem believing because Apple's notification system is very buggy.

2:11:59Casey Liss:And like I said, I'm on the other end of it. I'm on the one who's the watch-wearing wife is telling me, oh, it just never vibrated. I don't know why.

2:12:06John Siracusa:All right, so let me ask you. So I'm looking at my personal focus and I'm looking at my iPhone and I have turned on intelligent breakthrough and silencing, which I don't think that's really relevant because of anything that would make them come through, not to come through. Anyways, so in the people category, I have, you know, you guys, Mike, Aaron, and a couple other people, basically like a couple of family members and like basically the school trunk line. So then I also have some apps that can break through, although not many. And below the people in apps section, there's an options thing or navigation link basically where it says notification options.

2:12:41John Siracusa:And it appears to me that everything on the screen is under the auspice of silence notifications. So there are four different options. Show on lock screen, on or off. I have it off. hide notification badges. I have it off silence notifications. I have as always. And, and then I'm sorry, a different section is appearance dim lock screen, which I also have off. So it's, so if I'm reading this right, silence notifications is show on lock screen off hide notification badges off silence notifications always. But again, that's for the silence notifications. And then additionally, there's an option for appearance dim lock screen, which I also have off.

2:13:18John Siracusa:So I don't think that's it either. It's got to be something I've set up wrong, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what.

2:13:23Casey Liss:Do you only want answers from spouses or are you taking them from single people as well? I will take it from anyone. Truly.

2:13:30John Siracusa:I know you're kidding, but I'll take it from anyone. If you have an answer, I'd love to hear it.