700: A Wet Dishrag Full of Lies

21:05John Siracusa:Apple continues to change how icon files are rendered. This is largely coming off our conversation about the incredible work that Parakeet did from last episode or the episode before. John, tell me, what are they doing?

21:18Casey Liss:I mean, this is the double-edged sword of the system where the.icon files are a bunch of layers and ingredients in a recipe. And the recipes say stuff like specular highlight, amount, 5, angle, 22. And that doesn't really say, OK, but what should the specular highlight look like? And so that leaves Apple free to change how it renders the same recipe. Like, what does amount 5 mean? What does specular highlight mean? Or whatever. And they have been changing it. we mentioned last time that they have changed it between 26 and 27 but even within 27 as each beta of golden gate comes out and presumably also the ios ones i haven't been looking at those they change how the icons render the same icon renders differently in beta 2 and beta 3 uh and as louis was pointing out when he was complaining about this it makes it difficult to be an icon designer because you think like i've done this icon for a client and it's all done and it looks like this and the next beta comes out i was like well now all your icons look different and you didn't change a thing uh now i know the 27s are still in beta so you know you're if you're making an icon against a beta os it's always going to be a moving target but it does make me a little bit concerned i think i mentioned last show that i was hoping that 27 was just a big correction in icon rendering from 26 and that 28 wouldn't continue the trend of essentially changing how icons are rendered over and over again because that makes it very difficult to sort of have any kind of stable identity i i give them some leeway to tweak stuff mostly because i hated how 26 rendered stuff but here's hoping this doesn't continue indefinitely because or at the very least like if you want to change it just add new effects but don't change how the existing effects render because it's just going to change how everyone's icons look so anyway still a little

22:56John Siracusa:bit concerned about that all right with regard to our member special about mac asked mac apps on july 9th a friend of the show steve troughton smith said lol at open ai replacing the native app kit chat GPT app with the Electron Codex app after Gruber's recent post praising it as a good Mac app. Whoopsie doopsies. Gus Mueller, another friend of the show, said, oh, and it went from 158 megs to one and a half gigabytes. Great. Stupendous. And then, of course, our good friend Gruber wrote, today is the day OpenAI effed up the chat GPT Mac app.

23:30Casey Liss:Yeah, I'm glad he had all these podcasts where he was praising it. What a great native Mac app it is how much i love it and compare it's not you know it's a mac s mac apple these other apps aren't he got in all that uh all those podcasts all those posts and all that praise just before they screwed it up incredible incredible work everyone uh with regard to the globe key on

23:49John Siracusa:apple's extended keyboards if you recall i think it was marco and i particularly or maybe it's john one of some one of you and me was lamenting that uh the globe key had moved between the original Touch ID lightning keyboard and my new hotness USB-C Touch ID keyboard. And the globe key used to be in the bottom left, or excuse me, used to be in the area above the inverted T arrows, but now it is up and it is all the way down in the bottom left-hand corner and screwing me up all the time. Well, Philip Hofstetter wrote, the globe key was moved next to control with the USB-C revisions when the OS has started to use the globe key as a modifier key.

24:24John Siracusa:In the Touch versions, the key was still at the old place, just renamed from FN or the FN key.

24:29Marco Arment:FN key. There you go.

24:31John Siracusa:There we go. All right. So Philip writes and continues, here's a launch agent you can put in tilde library launch agents without the show notes to map the globe key next to control back to control and the new menu key to globe restoring the old functionality, which is very clever. And I'm trying to convince myself not to do this because I try very hard to stick with like the vanilla version of Mac OS. I try not to tweak the ever-living snot out of it, but it is quite possible I will fail in this regard because this is very appealing. Then with regard to the good or lightning versions, that model for reference is A2520 Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and numeric keypad, which does come in both white and black, although it only came in white when I bought it.

25:15John Siracusa:And we will put a link in the show notes that John has provided me to that.

25:18Casey Liss:It comes in several colors, not just white and black. You're talking about the keycap color. Yes, it does come in with black and white keycaps, but it also comes in actual colors as in, I guess, like dyed to match the iMacs or whatever. Oh, the iMac keyboards, right. You can find lots of varieties of these. But anyway, the version that I have or that my wife has in front of her M1 Mac Studio, we'll put the model number in the show notes, but it's MMMR3LL slash A. Again, this is the A2520 keyboard, but there's specific model numbers. that's the one that is silver the silver aluminum with black keys uh and i based on the last show where we're talking about the globe key that i had i think i had seen the globe key over there but not on the i just assumed they hadn't messed with the extended one but they did and now i knew about it or my memory is refreshed so i immediately went on ebay and bought one of these so now i have a new inbox uh silver with black keys touch id extended keyboard with a full size complete control key in the lower left corner and i will use that with my new mac if and when i get it

26:20John Siracusa:but lightning absolutely well here's the thing about lightning it's lightning where it plugs

26:26Casey Liss:into the keyboard it's usbc on the other end so i don't care what it looks like that plugs into the keyboard i you know it's us it's a usbc keyboard it's just the end that plugs in is lightning i don't care about that at all so yeah and otherwise it has all the same features it has touch id blah blah i don't care about the globe key i don't care about the menu key uh i was very happy to find this, especially finding a new in-box one. I didn't open it because it is sealed, but I do wonder if someone resealed it. So if I open it up and it's filled with a bunch of rocks, we'll find out when I get my Mac Studio, hopefully sometime later this year.

26:57John Siracusa:This is our continuing and depressing price increase corner where Brian Nehring writes, you guys haven't mentioned the studio display. If the Vision Pro gets a price increase, then shouldn't the display with RAM and storage in it get one too?

27:10Casey Liss:I think the margins are higher on the studio display percentage-wise than they are on the Vision Pro. I honestly do because the stuff in the vision provision bro costs a lot of money, but it's filled with super expensive stuff. The studio display costs a ton of money and it's filled with not quite that expensive stuff. So I think the studio display could just absorb it. But hey, don't give them any ideas just because they haven't increased the price yet doesn't mean they're not going to. So shh.

27:33John Siracusa:Right. I have been reflecting on my decision not to purchase a studio display XDR or even three of them. And I stand by it, but I really want one. anyway uh we have a little bit of anonymous feedback with regard to the decision to skip m6 pro max and ultra this anonymous individual writes roadmaps for chips are decided anywhere between three to five years in advance so any rumors suggesting roadmap changes a year before release is just not true they were decided way before the rumor mill knew about it some last minute changes and delays do happen but the apple silicon team still has the most aggressive and reliable execution timeline when compared to the rest of the industry and the decision to skip all of those processor chips was based on multiple factors including the use of new packaging technology to build separate cpu and gpu chiplets available resources design complexity etc yeah

28:21Casey Liss:that's the problem with all these rumors is they will very often uh get the news whenever they get it and decide some i guess they'll just decide uh either this just happened or it happened recently but as we've discussed many times with these uh chip roadmaps they're usually made very far in advance just because it takes so long to design chips that's why i was asking last episode like do you think they designed these chips and had to discard them or did they just they were never going to make these and we were just finding out about it now so this anonymous person says no this was decided a long time ago there are no m6 pro max ultra chips that they had to throw away

28:52John Siracusa:finally also with regard to ultra chips uh mark german wrote uh when was this this was a few days ago as we record apple plans to soon deploy a more powerful server based on the m5 ultra under the internal codename j246 but engineers are already developing another new server chip for launch by 2029 that's built around the n7 ultras capabilities the new ultra is designed to support as much as one and a half terabytes of memory roughly double the capacity plan for the m5 ultra though whether apple ultimately offers that configuration will depend on the state of the industry that i think a chip with one and a half terabytes of memory on it might cost as much as a

29:28Casey Liss:small country at this point well for server stuff these things you know the nvidia chips already cost like 50 grand or whatever even more so it kind of makes sense in that context but this is relevant to the earlier uh discussions we had about apple using nvidia gpus in google data centers and it's like do you think they'll still keep trying to develop their own servers using mchips german says yes german says they are not abandoning this effort in fact they have new models with newer chips that are coming out and a roadmap that includes not just the m5 ultra base servers but also eventually the m7 ultra base servers in 2028 with tons and tons of ram so i mean assuming this is these these plans haven't changed it seems like apple is still dedicated to the idea that they are going to run their own servers with their own chips running their own models and not entirely rely on google's data centers and nvd gpus there's another story that just came out today that didn't quite get in here was uh maybe it'll be in a future show for there's more details other than what i'm about to say which is that apple is supposedly looking at ai chip companies for acquisition targets i don't know if it named any individual company but the fact that they're looking out there hey someone is there some kind of chip team i think the article described as like is there the ai chip equivalent of pa semi like some team that has some really good people and really good ideas and some innovative uh technology specifically for ai chips in data centers the fact that they're looking you know again if that rumor and this rumor to be believed seems like all systems go on apple silicon powered servers and it seems like apple is expressing in these rumors again if they are true they do not want to be beholden to nvidia or google to run any of their models i mean and i think looking at that again the various reports of that tech talk they gave at wwdc i think the only things that are running the google data centers are like they're really big beefy models i think the dinky ones are still running on those m2 ultra servers the apple silicon ones so yeah i'm kind of surprised by this i figured they had just given up on this and this was like a uh a vestige of the old regime of the uh uh pre you know JG departure regime and it was like those that whole double silicon servers and the M2 Ultra and everything those are all under the JG era and I thought well he's out and maybe that's out as well but it seems no so keep an eye on this for the future I do think though that like

31:43Marco Arment:this this one bit from Gurman I don't think it necessarily says as much as it kind of seems like it says because what this actually sounds like is Apple is developing an M5 Ultra and also a couple years later an m7 ultra okay well that is good news in the sense that they put those in a product it's called the mac studio and it's their highest end desktop and they're pushing it as like a great solution for local ai inference awesome okay so it's good that they're developing ultra chips because that that way that they can keep that product going and they can have you know high memory ceilings and high I.O.

32:24Marco Arment:ceilings that those really big chips allow. That's great. Now whether that will go into servers that they will use, I think that's actually a separate question and whether the servers will be running a different chip or a different variety of the chip compared to what chips in the Mac Studio, that's also a different question and it doesn't sound like Gurman has a lot of information on that part of the question. He's got a codename for it. yeah but that's just that could that's could just be the m5 ultra no that's the it says apple plans

32:56Casey Liss:to soon deploy a more powerful server based on the m5 ultra under under the internal codename j246 that's the server codename it doesn't mean they're gonna ship it or that this rumor is right but that's the info in this that they not just that the m5 ultra exists and they're gonna stick in a max studio but they're also planning on sticking in a server and here's the codename of the server maybe it'll never happen again it's rumors we'll see how it goes and apple tends not to be particularly forthcoming with this setting aside the wall street journal video that we saw over there like hey here's all our servers uh i'm not sure when we'll see that again if and when this does happen i'm not sure apple will even announce it but this rumor is the first positive sign i've seen in the post jg era that anyone has said oh yeah apple's still doing that whole apple silicon server thing which is surprising to me but we'll say oh and as for the 1.5 terabytes of memory everyone's making a big deal about like m7 in 2028 they'll finally reach parity with the 2019 mac pro in terms of ram again assuming you can even get 1.5 terabytes of ram uh that is interesting but it is also the case that giant gobs of memory and servers has been a thing for ages and in the realm of servers 1.5 terabytes of memory is not that unusual and hasn't been for decades and ai loves tons of memory so uh good on apple for apparently setting up a roadmap where at least if you have infinite money you can have enough ram to run some big models yeah and do you think it would

34:17Marco Arment:actually cost more when they released this in 2029 than it cost for the 2019 mac pro so the 2019 mac pro if you if you configure it to 1.5 terabytes of ram was something like 25 000 oh it's got it's

34:33Casey Liss:got to be more because i don't yeah right it has to be more yeah by 2028 first of all this ram is going to be so much faster than that 2019 mac browser it's not the same ram it's way faster ram and second the ram crisis will probably not be over by 2028 right exactly or you know well that

34:47Marco Arment:what does what this rumor said is 2029 for well which new ultra does he say supports 1.5 terabytes

34:54Casey Liss:the m5 or the m7 trying to say the m7 one does his writing is so unclear but if you parse it out it's roughly double the capacity of the planned m5 so that means it's the m7 if he just wrote

35:03Marco Arment:wrote clear leads would be a lot easier to parse so what so if if he's right then the 2029 release of the m7 ultra and presumably a max studio around that um would have 1.5 terabytes so in 2029 will 1.5 terabytes of ram cost more than inflation adjusted 25 000 from 2019 i'm i'm saying at least like it's probably going to be triple that much like that that really could be like you know a $75 ,000 option.

35:30Casey Liss:Yeah, and as for your question about whether these will be different than the ones they ship in the Mac Studio, I say no. It's hard enough to make a single one of these ships. I don't think there's going to be a special server variant. They've never made one before, a special server variant. That isn't rumored here, and I just don't think it's going to be the case. The only thing I could possibly imagine is that maybe the Mac Studio won't support 1.5 terabytes of RAM, and that would be a server-only thing, but the chip will be the same.

35:53Marco Arment:I mean, honestly, it would be really weird if they would limit the Mac Studio that way. Like, I think they're going to design the chip to have certain resource limits, and that's going to be a chip design limit, not a, you know, logic board limit, I'm sure. And it's going to be dependent on components that are available at that time. And, you know, can they get, you know, whatever the memory chips of that, you know, of those sizes are. Can they get them in volume? Can they get them for less than$75 ,000? Like, you know, there is going to be a lot of uncertainty around that. but the chip will be designed and probably already is being designed with a certain target in mind i hope that whatever the mac studio or whatever the whatever the theoretical servers can do with the you know m7 ultra alleged chip here i really hope and i expect that the mac studio will probably have the same resource limits and this actually this bodes very well for the future of the Mac Studio.

36:53Marco Arment:I am a little curious if they can do all that without redesigning the Mac Studio case.

37:00Casey Liss:Well, the rumor is that they weren't going to redesign the case, but they were going to totally redesign the cooling on the inside. And so I'm not sure how that will work. I mean, they're already using, I think, copper in the Ultra one. So maybe they go to that special metal that is even better than copper. But there was a rumor that, oh, no, there's no Mac Studio redesign in the next three years or whatever, but they are going to change all the internals

37:20Marco Arment:for heating and cooling so we'll see well the next three years just means the m5 ultra generation they that that could be true and then they could three years from now when the m7 generation comes out they could have a redesign then yeah well we'll see we'll be able to tell when the m5 ultra

37:35Casey Liss:one comes out when someone cracks it open does it have the same cooling or not which generation that rumor is supposedly about the other thing about 125 terabytes of ram is that when you get up to that amount it does start to physically take up more room because it's just it's just more chips right so and like obviously they generate heat although it's not that much heat so i don't think it's that big but like i guess you'd have to squint at the mac studio logic board and say if you had to put 1.5 terabytes of ram could you squeeze it in there i mean they probably can we'll

38:02Marco Arment:see now all right bear with me if they redesign the case in three years to be a little bit bigger and to be able to have 1.5 terabytes of ram and a really fast chip why don't they just call it the Mac Pro at that point.

38:16Casey Liss:They've just recreated the Mac Pro. Well, I mean, the thing about the Mac Pro is that it would need to dissipate significantly more heat as we went through that last time. I think they're like 3x. The Mac Pro is dissipating 3x the heat. And I think there's a limit to how much you can redesign to move 3x more heat. I mean, you know, you don't have to make it as big as the current, like the 2019 Mac Pro, but you'd have to make it significantly bigger. And at that point, you got to start rethinking it, you know, because you can't just take that and like extrude it outwards or something you know what they could do so what if

38:48Marco Arment:what if they had they shot the heat straight up now bear with me a fan is a circle so what if the whole thing was basically a tube of fan and there was a big heat sink in the middle of it and maybe

39:03John Siracusa:the whole thing would just be a circle that would be brilliant they uh they did that without a fan

39:07Casey Liss:in the g4 cube i know you're referring to the trash can but the g4 cube is their first chimney computer and they're like well we've got this vertical thing because it's great because heat rises we don't even need a fan turns out they should have had a fan yes turns out having any

39:19Marco Arment:fan moves a heck of a lot more heat than having no fan than convection yeah yeah even even the slowest most slight fan has a pretty big difference in how much heat that moves but yes like honestly if they actually went went to something that looked a little bit more like the trash can who knows i mean i'm sure they wouldn't actually recreate that shape they have thermal corner ptsd from that design i know but like but actually like in like with what we are seeing now you know who knows how the internals would be laid out but like the mac studio okay if you wanted to dissipate a lot more heat from that what if you made it taller like you can start to see how they

39:58Casey Liss:would get there well the mac studio has such a convoluted airflow like it's i think it's in bottom in the bottom and out the back yeah it makes no sense right from bottom to top makes sense like the trash can from front to back makes sense like the 2019 mac pro and the earlier mac pros but from like from bottom vents out the bottom of the back is not it's like why are you making your life more difficult so i really do hope they revisit that at some point we are

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41:41Marco Arment:And then I looked at how it wrote it. And there was some part of it I wanted to change. So I just rewrote the first function. It totally broke the build. It wouldn't compile. And I went to Claude and I said, I want you to do it this way. I broke it. Finish the job. So I would never tell a human to do that it did it it didn't make fun of me to its friends it didn't quit it didn't complain it just did it it was amazing claude is really worth checking out for problems worth solving get started with claude at claude.ai slash atp that's claude.ai slash atp and check out claude pro which includes access to all the features that i mentioned in this read claude.ai slash atp thank you so much to claude for fixing my code and for sponsoring our show

42:28John Siracusa:let's do a little bit of follow out if we can please uh in episode 627 of upgrade which as we record this is not this week but last week uh there was a discussion about filemaker and i was aware of filemaker as a thing and i was aware that it was part was or perhaps is part of clarus which is itself part of apple now i remember clarus works very fondly from when i was a kid and using max briefly in school uh but i was hoping that probably john could explain to me what the heck is filemaker like i don't feel like anyone has actually sat down and explained what the heck it

43:02Casey Liss:is well you wrote in the notes here what was filemaker and i put a link into it it exists now it is not a past tense thing but yes it did exist in the past as well i have used filemaker back in the classic mac os days the best way i would describe it is i think it was described as like a database app and when you think about database you're thinking about like you know oracle database or MySQL or SQLite or something like that. Not that kind of database. Not a SQL database with tables and rows and columns and all that stuff. But instead, a program that would provide a database back end and you could write front ends that would write to your database.

43:38Casey Liss:So it was the same type of stuff. You'd define a schema and here's where your data is and you would get things into it and out of it. And you'd make like a GUI front end for it. And it was used by like businesses to sort of, this is days before the web, right? say you had like an inventory system for your small business you had to keep track of how much whatever stuff you have or you wanted to like roll your own system for keeping track of people's hours or something uh you can think of a kind of like hypercard because hypercard also had a you know similar type of like you can make gooey apps but without being a developer but very database focused like i don't know like maybe like a cross between hypercard and excel uh with more of a data focus so lots of businesses had filemaker databases that they ran their businesses off of i never used it in like in anger like in a real actual scenario i was just i was just playing with it as a kid so i never worked at a business that used it or wrote it for a business so i don't know how it actually performed and why people still might use it in the modern age but in the days before the web and in the days when you couldn't do all this from a spreadsheet it was like a little bit more than that and the days before like because the spreadsheet's not a good ui to like have employees using stuff or whatever although plenty of businesses still do it these days uh but yeah that's that's my impression of what filemaker was like for people who actually used it and i guess it still exists because hey if you're if your business runs on filemaker and they keep making new versions of it why would you ever change if it's still working for you like there's all these stories about you know someone wandering around in like 2010 and they see like a mac se in the back of some business running some filemaker database that their whole business runs on like how is that computer even still running it's like well we need it because it runs filemaker so i'm glad it still exists for the people who like it but of these days you'd be like why don't you make a web app why don't you you know there's a million other things that you could do other than a file maker database but it's still out there for people

45:22John Siracusa:who want it i was glancing at the marketing website which is apple like it's very appley except not which is very unusual this is claris.com file maker which is very interesting um and i don't have it in exact i'm looking at it i can't find exactly what it was i was seeing but it was they had some discussions about how you can do like agentic coding with file maker which is so mind-bending to me because i perceive filemaker seemingly unfairly as something from like the early to mid 80s and they're talking about stuff that's relevant in the last like 80 days you know and and it's just astonishing to me that this is still a thing i see the thing it's

45:59Casey Liss:like filemaker cloud i'm like what yeah yeah yeah what's filemaker cloud it's i just they've met i don't know if you remember there was uh some diversion i don't remember the details but like the the company was like hey filemaker is old and creaky we're coming out with a new thing called bento do you remember that yeah it was like a consumer focused friendlier revision of filemaker and i think that just didn't take off they're like oh never mind our customers just want filemaker i i have no idea what filemaker is today and the website really obscures what it might be but it kind of reminds me with with the agentic stuff it kind of reminds me of like we haven't talked about this in the show but a lot of other people have been talking about it the feature in the 27 os is where you can describe a shortcut you open the shortcuts app and you just like click a thing and you say i want a shortcut that does x y and z and it just makes it for you i imagine that it's possible to do something similar with filemaker because it is like shortcuts kind of like a high level uh higher level abstraction for data with certain number of operations that you can do that the filemaker knows about again it's not a sql database it's not it's not anything as low level as that it's its own thing so for all i know there is a sql interface to filemaker these days it wouldn't surprise me and a web interface and a cloud thing i don't know what they're doing but the point is they're still in business somehow claris.com slash filemaker slash agentic hyphen

47:10John Siracusa:development we'll put it in the show notes uh ai is reshaping software filemaker is meeting the moment claris is investing so you can build with the leading ai coding tools and deploy straight and filemaker securely permissioned and ready to run this is modern this is this is now it's incredible to me that this is a thing uh so yeah i i appreciate the uh short trip down memory lane And I would love it. I would love to see like screenshots of this. I haven't gone spelunking through the internet trying to find them myself. But I'm curious what this looks like both on the development side and on the production side.

47:42John Siracusa:Because presumably on the production side, for whatever these apps are that this makes, presumably they can look like almost anything. But I'd doubly love to see what it looks like on the development side. So reach out if you're a FileMaker person. All right. I have to ask our editor to insert taps here. Uh-oh. because apparently maestrel is no more or soon to be no more yeah this is too bad this is the app

48:07Marco Arment:that we we kind of found around our circles uh of maybe i don't know three four years ago that was a replacement dropbox client for mac and linux and i don't know if it worked on windows but it works on mac and linux um and the idea it was basically like you know the dropbox app keeps getting bloated and crappy and just has a million things in it and it's electron and it takes a ton of resources and like so the dropbox app was really resource intensive and bloated and i wanted

48:35Casey Liss:accessibility access i wanted you to know if you wanted to save your screenshots into dropbox and it was just like uh it was i think there was some kind of like notes feature in it at some point it was just they were just chucking was there a mail feature in there i forget it was it was ridiculous

48:49Marco Arment:yeah and they were playing tricks like they were trying to get you to enter your root password by like faking an admin permission dialogue like dropbox at many times of its history has acted like malware on your mac like it's really it's rough um and maestrel is a client that it's open source and it uses the dropbox api um to basically provide what dropbox used to be like a basic sync client so you'd have a folder at home you dropbox and it would sync the content of that folder to dropbox which is exactly what dropbox used to do oh that's another factor we didn't

49:29Casey Liss:mention which is that dropbox was sort of forced to move to the file provider thing because apple made that api for them and the file provider api was worse than the old one that is another reason people preferred maestro like i don't want the i don't want the thing where my dropbox files are like well is it actually there or is it just like a little zero content thing that when i double click on it has to download from i just want the old thing where it was just local files and they just happen to be in sync with files somewhere in the cloud and that's what maestro would give you

49:54Marco Arment:exactly and anyway um unfortunately the creator of maestro um has moved on not from life fortunately but from all these terms sound the same when people leave jobs it's not like they're dying okay the creator of maestro no longer no longer uses dropbox and so they've decided to stop working on it and just kind of abandon it and it is open source so i hope someone else picks it up uh if not eventually like certificates will expire and stuff and it will stop working um i've thought like should i pick it up but i haven't used it in a couple of years either i know i also you should not i kind of made that same that same decision but like should i don't know should claude pick should somebody pick it up like i mean dropbox should pick it up honestly

50:36Casey Liss:no you don't want them ruining it no that would be terrible oh no they should they should pick Pick it up and say, why does everybody love this? Can we just make a native client that just does what this thing does? And the answer is yes, you could. And everyone would love it. But I guess it wouldn't make them any more money.

50:49Marco Arment:So, well, yeah, that's not going to work there. They're just going to mess it up. Like we don't want that.

50:55John Siracusa:Yeah, I think let's take this opportunity to do a quick ATP member special. ATP Diamond Dogs, should Marco take up the maestral development? And I'm going to vote no. Everyone says no.

51:06Casey Liss:I say no. Marco says no. Everyone knows that that's not a thing he should do. No, I'm not going to do it.

51:10John Siracusa:Thank you for joining us on our July member special. We hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you next month. You know who should do it? John Gruber.

51:15Casey Liss:Because he likes it. Yeah, because he's so good at maintaining software projects.

51:20Marco Arment:But he can use it as like an AI vibe coding excuse. That's true. That would be pretty great, actually. I should probably float this by him first. But yeah, everybody email John Gruber and tell him he should do this.

51:30Casey Liss:No, we want to have to update his site for mobile first. We're working on the backlog on Gruber things that he has to do with technology. It's quite long. Get in line.

51:37John Siracusa:You're way at the back, my friend.

51:39Marco Arment:anyway i i i mean look it is open source so so it is possible for someone to pick it up so i hope somebody does who has more time than than we do but um yeah i think it's just a bunch of python scripts right kind of like the original dropbox probably uh yeah and and that would and the the only reason i stopped using it was because it was a little bit slower to see changes than the original than the than the actual dropbox client and i had issues with it with in multi-user mode on the mac but it still runs on my server. Like it is my, I use Dropbox for the market.org CMS for, you know, for all the very high volume of blog posts that I still write.

52:17Marco Arment:And, you know, so I needed a Dropbox client on the server. Dropbox themselves used to make a Linux client. I don't know if they still do. And it was horrendous. And so I replaced that with Maestral years ago and it's been perfect since then.

52:29Casey Liss:At least they still support an API that Maestral is using. And also like I was reminded of this when I was messing with my Synology the Synology also has a Dropbox syncing thing somehow in there. I don't know if it's official Dropbox or they just wrote it themselves but the bottom line is you can just enable a thing that will sync your Dropbox to your Synology.

52:44Marco Arment:Yeah and the only thing is though what you mentioned a second ago is important. We don't know how long the API that powers this will continue to exist and be supported and be allowed. So I would caution anybody from building a business on this but certainly as long as that API continues to exist this could be a really great open source project for someone to pick up.

53:05Casey Liss:I know about the Synology thing also because Dropbox recently made a change to their API backend that broke the Synology client where the Synology client keeps losing its authentication every like two hours or something. So that's a Synology has said they know what's happening and they're going to fix their client. But it is a little bit of a moving target.

53:24John Siracusa:That's weird because I do not have that problem with Cloud Sync, which is what I use to share files with you folks.

53:31Casey Liss:Oh, you're not using Cloud Sync with Dropbox, are you?

53:33John Siracusa:Yes.

53:33Casey Liss:Check to see whether you've lost authentication.

53:36John Siracusa:How do I check that?

53:37Casey Liss:Go to Cloud Synology, go to the Cloud Sync app, and then look at your thing. And if it has a little red badge that says need to re-authenticate, then you've lost authentication.

53:45John Siracusa:All right. I'll take a look as we speak. But I don't think that's the case because, I mean, I sent Marco the file for the member special we recorded Monday, which is not available quite yet, everyone. Don't worry. But soon. I sent that file two days ago, and that was via Dropbox, via Cloud Sync. So I think everything's working. I'm trying to log in now.

54:03Casey Liss:I'm loading mine right now to see if mine has, no, mine's still good. Maybe they already fixed it. Maybe Synology already fixed it. But yeah, there was a big community thread in the Synology thing of everyone having the same problem that I did. But I think it's still working because I didn't touch this since yesterday and it's still authenticated for me. So maybe it has cured itself.

54:19John Siracusa:All right, I'll hear it. No, I've got a green check mark. It says everything's up to date. So I think I'm good. I'm just a CloudSync unicorn. I say as I knock on wood, because God bless, I cannot lose this. It would ruin me. We are sponsored this week by Quince. So it's summertime here in the Northern Hemisphere, and I really love that it's really warm, sometimes a little too warm if I'm honest, but that's okay. It's really, really warm. And then sometimes in the evenings, it gets actually ever so slightly nippy. And one of the great things about Quince, one of the many great things about Quince, is that they can cover all of your bases, and they are especially good at summertime stuff.

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56:36John Siracusa:Big topic for today is a couple of days ago as we record this, Apple decided to sue OpenAI. So we'll put many, many, many links in the show notes. Like there's a zillion different ones, but we're going to read a little bit, starting with our dear friend Jason Snell over at Six Colors. Back in May, OpenAI was rattling its saber about thinking about talking to lawyers about possibly considering a lawsuit against Apple for not treating it right when it came to chat GPT integration. What a misdirection. Indeed, Apple has sued OpenAI, and it's alleging that the hardware program it's building with Johnny Ive and company is being fueled by the theft of trade secrets.

57:18John Siracusa:Here's the statement Apple supplied to various news outlets on Friday. Quote, at Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world. And protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple's secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our team's hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.

57:48Marco Arment:Can I just pause at this moment? Please. these companies to be at this size and scale almost everyone at and near the top of a company like this is going to be a huge a**hole in some form like it's just it's just what's what is necessary to to rise to those kinds of levels right and these companies pathologically like you know just like the the personality of the company based on its behavior its actual behavior these companies are both just tremendous apples in different ways and so this this statement this this starts out as apple throwing such like manipulative bullshit language so let's okay our teams are developing technologies protecting their work it's it's apple's not doing it for Apple, they're protecting their team's work.

58:50Marco Arment:We will always defend our team's hard work. This is such like support the troops kind of language. We are forced to do this because we have to defend our team's work. It's all about our teams. Now, keep in mind, Apple, which they're about to, we're going to get into this later on in this discussion, what the work is that they're defending, Apple sees as 100 % Apple's work, and they own that work. So they put on a great language slant here, as they tend to do. But let's be very, very clear about what Apple is defending here. Apple is defending what it believes is its property, not the property or work of the troops.

59:30Marco Arment:It is Apple's, and Apple owns those troops, and Apple owns what it is trying to defend here.

59:37John Siracusa:Yeah, let me continue reading, but there's a lot here, and I have extremely mixed feelings about at all but continuing on there's a lot more in the court filing as summarized by chance miller at nine to five mac the complaint alleges that former apple designer tang tan used insider knowledge of apple's confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews additionally tan directed job candidates still working at apple to bring actual apple hardware components and samples for quote show and tell sessions furthermore apple says a candidate began quote screenshotting and downloading files related to a highly confidential Apple project, or excuse me, project hours before interviewing with Tan, who then solicited more information about the same Apple project.

1:00:19John Siracusa:Once the interview started, this became an established pattern, Apple says.

1:00:23Casey Liss:So on this topic, I'm not a lawyer and I don't know about the legalities of this, but again, assuming what Apple says is true, I do wonder, and we'll get more into this as we go on, where the line is between what I think is a fairly clear line. Well, I don't even know, because again i'm not a lawyer of like whatever your um legal responsibilities are as an apple employee presumably you sign stuff when you become an employee and by you violating your employment contract or whatever like i'm sure there's there's civil legal things there to say hey you're an apple employee you're not supposed to let's say take hardware devices and bring them to a job interview with a competitor that's i'm pretty sure the apple employment agreement probably has language saying that you shouldn't do that.

1:01:09Casey Liss:But that feels like it would be on the person going on the job interview. They have broken their employment agreement with Apple by doing a thing that is against that agreement. I don't know where the line is because I'm not a lawyer of like, say you're at the competitor company, say you're TangTan and OpenAI. Can you just tell people, oh, totally go like, do you bring all that stuff? Like, can you if you tell someone, hey, you should do a bunch of stuff that will probably break your employment agreement. Are you liable for that? if I say oh you should totally go out and rob a bank and you go out and rob a bank am I liable in any way you're the one who robbed the bank I didn't do it so I don't know where that line is I don't know what the what the the civil legal penalties are for like encouraging someone to break their employment agreement or whatever which makes it hard for me to understand what the chances are of this thing even if you take everything Apple says at face value it's like okay well but where does the responsibility lie like I read this and we're going to read more of it and it totally seems like a bunch of people who either are current or former apple employees did things that were clear violations of their employment agreement and they're going to get destroyed because like if it's true in any way whatsoever it's so clear that you've done something bad as an apple employee i don't know where open ai's responsibility appears in this because i'm not an employment lawyer i don't know anything about how that works but uh people reading it you're like oh open ai is a villain and i'm like well are they just telling people to break the law and then people are doing it or break again break up break their uh contracts and they're doing it and then they're they're blameless but uh we'll see if this actually ever goes to court

1:02:37Marco Arment:yeah and honestly i hope it does because that would be really popcorn kind of levels of

1:02:42Casey Liss:interesting that's why they'll settle it because they don't want that popcorn yeah but uh but yeah

1:02:46Marco Arment:it's certainly like again none of us are lawyers of any sort let alone a relevant sort but you could probably make the case that like inducing somebody to do this uh or possibly compensating someone and you can say like well is a job offer maybe a compensation for doing this like yeah yeah

1:03:03Casey Liss:i i can imagine scenarios where there is a liability there i just don't know what the what

1:03:08Marco Arment:the parameters are i'm sure what apple is hoping for is a whole bunch of document discovery from like open ai emails and stuff like i'm sure that's that's what they're probably hoping for well they

1:03:16Casey Liss:seem to have tons already you should continue casey with the with more of the fun tidbits

1:03:19John Siracusa:Yeah, so this gets really astonishing. And it's worth noting, again, that these are accusations. They have not been proven, as far as we know. This is Apple's side of the story. It's only Apple's side of the story. But let me tell you, it sure sounds like Apple has some of these folks dead to rights. But anyways, two more allegations from Emma Roth of The Verge in her article listing the six wildest claims in Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI. Chang Liu, a former Apple employee who worked as the systems electrical engineer on the iPhone for over eight years, allegedly kept an Apple-owned computer, allowing him to download dozens of confidential files.

1:03:55John Siracusa:Liu also allegedly accessed Apple's cloud-based network storage weeks after he left the company, using an authentication vulnerability that Apple didn't know about.

1:04:04Casey Liss:Again, I'm pretty sure Apple's employment agreement says you can't keep your Apple-issued computer after you leave the company, and you certainly can't use it to access our network after you're no longer an employee. this is that's like basically i'm sure there's like criminal like yeah that's actually whatever laws they passed the 90s to criminalize hackers that's criminal liability of like you broke into a foreign network like you you unauthorized access to a blah blah blah like we have so many laws in the u.s about that because back you know back in the 90s when they made these laws it was like to punish you know mitnick or whatever his name was like uh he's so there's if again if this is true there's criminal liability and just really really poor thinking like the worst industrial aspirinage you can ever imagine don't use your apple issued computer like what do you think they're not trapping your apple issued computer like really these are technology people it's not like just if this is true it's just mind-bendingly poorly thought out yeah i mean this is like yeah

1:04:59Marco Arment:like this again not lawyers but cheng lu sounds like he has some significant uh legal problems

1:05:04Casey Liss:if this if any of this is true again they're possibly criminal exactly yeah like that i i

1:05:09Marco Arment:think odds are either either he has to make a heck of a deal or he's going to literally be in jail for that like that's that's going to be a big problem yeah although apple would be probably

1:05:18Casey Liss:very willing for him to uh you know make a deal and turn on open ai oh i'm sure i mean i'm sure

1:05:24Marco Arment:i'm sure everyone's talking about stuff like that yeah this is you can argue about some of the other things like what does apple own in terms of the people their expertise it's things like that but Apple does own their documents, their hardware prototypes. That's pretty clear cut. Exfiltrating those and bringing them to a competitor is generally a crime.

1:05:48John Siracusa:Continuing from The Verge, OpenAI allegedly coached Apple employees on how to bypass security measures. Apple claims TAN kept an internal document that outlines employee offboarding procedures. OpenAI allegedly used this information to warn employees coming from Apple about the company's security checks and coach them on how to avoid it.

1:06:06Casey Liss:They did a poor job of coaching. I feel like is it, Hey, don't use your Apple laptop to don't refuse to give back your Apple laptop and then use that same laptop, which you know, Apple is tracking to infiltrate their network and get stuff out. So I don't know. Maybe they, maybe they updated their coaching, but this gets to what Marco was saying. Like, okay, at the point you're coaching again, presuming apples to be believed here at the point where you're coaching applicants on how to avoid detection while performing industrial espionage. that feels like again not a lawyer but that feels like a place where open ai suddenly has a bunch of

1:06:37Marco Arment:liability well there's a version of this that's okay like it's kind of like you know when we tell when we tell our kids like don't talk to the police like never ever talk to the police if the police you know come and try to stop you if you're not under arrest you could like you can say are am i free to go and you can go like we tell people that that's okay so if if open ai is saying like here's what's going to happen apple is going to you know demand your laptop back they're going to ask you for all these things if any of those things are like legally not required and you can just say no thanks like i don't want to do your security interview i don't see anything wrong with them telling people that sort of thing but there is a fine line between telling people what their rights are and telling people what's going to happen when they quit or get fired or whatever versus saying like well you can keep your laptop for three extra days and copy all the files off if you do this.

1:07:28Marco Arment:So there is a line, and there's a bunch of stuff on the okay side of that line. But it sounds like Apple thinks there's some stuff on the other side too.

1:07:37John Siracusa:Also from the complaint, as quoted by Gruber, OpenAI has used confidential Apple information in approaching Apple's trusted partners, even having one carry out a specific trade secret metal finishing technique for OpenAI, misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so. holy god if this is true my work again i don't know about the legalities here because like oh

1:08:00Casey Liss:isn't that just fraud but it's like i there are so many situations where things seem like they should be against the law but aren't for example police can lie to you about this stuff all the time speaking of police they can they can just lie and say oh yeah no apple gave me permission and you just i know it's the same thing but like canon do right so so let's say open ai lies and says apple totally gave me permission to do this uh is that on open ai yes they're telling a lie but isn't it kind of on the manufacturer to say like i'm sure the manufacturer has an agreement with apple that says here's our metal finishing technique and our agreement says you can only use it for us you can't tell anyone else about it you can't use it for anyone else and if someone says oh just ignore that agreement with apple apple said we could do it shouldn't the manufacturer say well we actually can't because the contract says we can't and we can't take your word for it that like is there liability for opening up the sure is liability for the manufacturer i can guarantee that because apple's not making contracts that say that don't have a clause in it that says you cannot use this this metal finishing technique for anyone else like that's surely in the contract i feel like the manufacturer has violated the contract has open ai did anything again i'm not familiar with the law i'm sure there's something in there that says as marco said there's some line that you cross when you induce a partner or you you provide false information to a partner as part of your contract with them it says apple said it's fine but the thing you're doing for them they said yeah we love open ai so much you can do it for them too it's fine you don't need to check don't call them.

1:09:17John Siracusa:Continuing from Gruber, footnote 13 on page 15 states, Apple and OpenAI have a commercial relationship involving the integration of OpenAI's chat GPT into Apple intelligence. The companies have entered into a written agreement governing that integration. That agreement is not at issue here. OpenAI's act of trade secret misappropriation alleged herein do not arise from and have no connection to that agreement. Yeah, this is the big picture on this is why is Apple mad at OpenAI?

1:09:45Casey Liss:The answer is obvious uh apple was not mad at open ai when they were making ai chatbots even though apple was trying to do that apple was so incredibly bad at it that they needed open ai to bail them out to the extent that they could back in 2024 with chat gpt integration and ios when they couldn't get their own act together and apple just felt like well we don't have this and we're not competitive with this and we have this deal with open ai but where apple has always felt like this is our area don't step on our toes is hardware so as soon as open ai said hey we're going to do hardware we're hiring johnny ive and we're buying his company and we're doing this and we're doing that and johnny ive is pulling all the apple designers out of apple into open ai and apple's looking at that and say no no you don't make hardware we make hardware devices you can make that ai stuff that we don't understand maybe we'll figure it out but hardware is us and so they feel very competitive in that area and this entire lawsuit seems entirely about metal finishing techniques and hardware designers and eggs and all like hardware devices so thus far open ai has not introduced a hardware device and we've talked about it a lot we'll talk about it more probably next episode but that is the place where apple's like no that's too far we hate you now it's kind of like when when google started doing android and they were like you just were supposed to provide us maps and search what the hell what is what is this what is this smartphone we do smart you don't do that you just do maps and search so this is totally that moment where they're like oh so you're going to take all our designers and johnny ive and you're going to make a hardware product that competes with us we hate you now what can we do about that uh you're hiring away all of our employees what is it something like 400 people they said that had left apple's hardware

1:11:20Marco Arment:team to go to open ai like think about the soap opera going on about this or like okay so first of all yes it is important to bring up johnny ive because johnny ive's company that he created not love from his main company but he created this sub company called io or eo however they

1:11:39Casey Liss:had to rename it because of a trademark i think it's called like it's called like io colon podcast player it's got like the app store name right right because of that lawsuit right but you know

1:11:48Marco Arment:so johnny created this like sub company for his hardware efforts sold it to open ai this is obviously like a bunch of like you know moving cups around to try to somehow legally and financially work out the fact that johnny ive is working for open ai but not exclusively for open ai but seems like mainly for open ai and johnny ive had a whole but he hired a whole bunch of people out of apple seemingly a lot of the people who used to work for him like like his whole team everybody including

1:12:16Casey Liss:all the people who succeeded him like evan tanke was in charge for like his whole team is over

1:12:20Marco Arment:there with him including tank tan i think think about the relationship already that that had to have gone on between Apple and Johnny Ive. Now, the last thing Apple wants to do is point this out or draw attention to it, which is why Johnny Ive is mentioned nowhere in this lawsuit, even though it obviously involves the division of OpenAI that is basically his team. Like, it would be really out there and far-fetched if it didn't involve any of him or his core people. So it probably does but apple does not want the pr to be that they are suing johnny ive in any context or any of johnny ive's you know properties but they sort of are especially since at this point

1:13:02Casey Liss:for as far as the public's concerned they're like it's there is no johnny ive open ai product if they had done this after like johnny the open ai egg comes out and johnny ive is there on stage telling everyone how great it is and then they sue then that's a big scandal story but if they sued and mentioned johnny uh johnny ive now people would be like what are they suing him for he hasn't even done anything and like but he is doing stuff it's like i don't i don't see any where's the egg i don't see anything like it it's it's all behind the scenes now so the timing of this is actually pretty good and allows them to not name him and to avoid this story because there is no focal point for it there is no egg for us to look at and say open ai came out with hardware and now apple hates them open ai is going to come out with hardware that's why apple hates them but they haven't done

1:13:40Marco Arment:it yet yeah anyway so imagine the feelings between johnny ive and his former and now current again team, whoever moved over, and it sounds like it's a lot, there must be some pretty bad blood between them and Apple. Because first of all, they all left. So they probably weren't super happy with Apple. Second of all, Apple's probably not super happy with them for leaving and then pulling so many people with them. So obviously, something has gone down over the last few years. there has been some kind of significant turmoil in these relationships between these these factions that used to be all with an apple and look now we have a new ceo so probably there was something

1:14:26Casey Liss:related to that those dynamics of like yeah according to the most recent dithering uh tang tan and uh turnus hate each other from back in the apple days because basically they were it seems like they perhaps were up for the same type of thing ahead of hardware and turnus got it and tang tan didn't so yeah if if you are tang tan and you're over at open ai and apple already hates you a new ceo personally hates you lawsuit right and and so there's obviously there's all this

1:14:52Marco Arment:drama going on between these of the all these factions that used to be old apple now they've split up it probably you know explains a lot of the you know different directions apple has gone with hardware over the last few years that i think are universally better um but you know it it probably helped explain a lot of a lot of those you know machinations that we've seen over the last few years um that like obviously there's there are these factions and they and they do they don't like each other and so apple also super hates losing people to competitors i mean there was that famous steve jobs you know uh collusion thing um they really don't like that and so yeah apple's gonna feel really attacked and i'm sure apple was just looking for something that they could that they could like bring up in in some kind of legal threat to try to you know try to stop some of this and it looks like open ai was totally happy to give them lots of things to the

1:15:48Casey Liss:yeah like it's it i mean again again transferring it to open ai might be tricky but i'm sure the security team had all these people as he said dead to rights on if this all this is true for a long time it's just a question of can we turn this into an open ai thing the other angle on that discussion that has come up in our little circles is the broader discussion about when you leave a company, do you have to empty your brain of everything that you know? Or can you leave? What do you get to leave with? Marco mentioned that obviously when you do work for a company, it is work for hire. The company owns the work you don't in most companies.

1:16:23Casey Liss:But California in particular has fairly strict rules as compared to the other states in the United States about not allowing employers to unduly restrain their employees because part of the silicon valley culture is you work for one company you learn something you work for another you go to another company you do a startup or whatever they don't want to allow things like draconian non-competes i think non-competes in general are not even legal in california where they say oh if you leave this company you can't work in this industry for two years stuff non-competes like that are legal in some states of the united states but not in california because it is against their culture of like we started this company, then we leave to do a startup, then we compete.

1:17:03Casey Liss:Like they want to see more competition. Similarly, I would imagine the laws about like, what do you get to take with you in your brain when you leave a company? Like if you, you know, learn a bunch of stuff at one company about like machining and metal finishing. Obviously there's the various legal constructs like patents and trade secrets that you've signed an agreement that you're not going to reveal. But what about just your experience? Like, you know, good ways to do things and how to organize people. And like, you take those with you, obviously, you can't, you know, Apple doesn't own the things that you learned when you were there.

1:17:37Casey Liss:And I'm sure there's a whole complex realm of law about, okay, well, you learned like best practices and how to organize things and what makes a good deal and a bad deal or whatever. But what about this one very specific thing that you're doing at OpenAI that is a quote unquote trade secret and is not just like a thing that you learned when you were there. And it's the same for programmers. Like I can say in all, like in all my past jobs, I don't know how many web frameworks I wrote, starting with my very first web development job out of school. I think at various jobs, I've written multiple web frameworks.

1:18:06Casey Liss:And each time I went to a new job, I didn't take my old web framework with me because I didn't want it because I had learned so much since then. But when I wrote my next web framework, it built on all the knowledge of my previous web frameworks. And I kept doing that and making better and better and better ones. I was taking my knowledge and experience with me. I was not taking the code with me, but I was definitely taking like, oh, last time I did it, I did it this way. And I learned that this is good and this is bad. And if you squint at one of my red frameworks, you're like, that looks kind of like the one you did at your last job.

1:18:33Casey Liss:Only I see this change, this change, and this change. It's all new code, but I'm taking my experience with me. That's what makes you a more valuable employee as you gain experience is that you learn things. And that's why someone hires you for more money at another job. And again, I feel like California is one of the best states, I said strict before, but like strict in terms of defending employees' rights to compete. to leave one company and to go to another or to leave one company and start their own company. And we can't say, oh, that's not fair. You learned a bunch of stuff at Apple and that's the only reason your startup is successful.

1:19:01Casey Liss:Like, yeah, I learned stuff and now I'm smarter and I'm making my own company, right? So that also is kind of against Apple on the broader issue of like, you took things that you learned and went to another company to compete with us. Like, yeah, that's how it's supposed to work. Is OpenAI a California company? I don't actually know. I'm assuming they're all incorporated in Delaware, but I'm assuming these lawsuits are going to be in California.

1:19:24Marco Arment:Yeah, presumably. And I agree. I think it's a very clear, in broad strokes, Apple can own the work that you did at Apple. Again, documents, products, hardware, they can own that. Source code. Yeah, exactly. But they can't own your expertise. Now, we're not lawyers, again, and so the definition of what is considered a trade secret, that is probably going to be possibly argued here that's going to be pretty important that that sounds like it's a somewhat squishy concept um but yeah like i think like if you if you are really good at metal finishing and open ai hires you and they say hey we want you to uh give us some really good metal finishing expertise unless certain things are patented by apple i think you can probably bring them your metal finishing knowledge in most cases and if they're

1:20:20Casey Liss:patented the whole point is the patent allows that to be shared but then there's perhaps a licensing fee the whole point of patents is we tell the world but you don't get to use it for

1:20:28Marco Arment:free the idea of hiring away apple's people with competitive salaries and you know offers of freedom or excitement they might not have at apple that's fair game and apple they are a big established company with mostly big established mature product lines so yeah people are going to get the itch and want to go do something new and apple historically is somewhat stingy with salaries from what we've heard um and so you know open ai is able to throw around some cash or meta you know meta famously throws around big salaries like of course they're going to hire they're going to be able to hire away some of apple's people and every time somebody at apple gets promoted there's going to be someone who didn't and they're going to be upset and maybe they'll be easy to hire away as well and people are going to move around.

1:21:17Marco Arment:Apple does the same thing. I saw somebody saying it breezed by earlier that this is kind of what Apple's accused of doing to Massimo where they kind of just hired away their people and had them recreate blood oxygen sensing technology in the Apple Watch This is what happens in companies. This is fair game As long as you don't cross certain lines of things like stealing documents and stuff like that like that that is obviously a line that that they should not cross and it sounds like they did just walk right past it and stomp all over it but the idea of restricting a company from hiring away your people with compelling offers and then having those people do similar work for them apple doesn't own those people and if apple does not want to lose those people they should pay them better if they need to or work with them in whatever other things that they want, if they can, and recognize that that's not going to always be the case.

1:22:11Marco Arment:Again, like, you know, the promotion situation of like somebody gets promoted, but someone else didn't, you know, there's not that much Apple can do about that. And so if those people want to leave, they're going to leave. Or if somebody wants to leave the giant mothership of Apple and go work for some, you know, fast moving, exciting startup, like Apple probably can't do much to keep those people either. And so it happens all the time.

1:22:30Casey Liss:People end up returning to Apple a lot.

1:22:31Marco Arment:Yeah, all the time. That's just part of working in this business and many businesses so this is going to happen and apple is going to put out a whole bunch of bravado about how they own all their stuff and and i'm sure apple believes i'm sure some people in apple believe that they own a lot more of these employees talents than they really should but at the end of the day it does sound like a lot of really clear lines have definitely been crossed by open ai and i'm not surprised to hear that like going back to my earlier comments like A lot of these people have very strong personalities, let's say.

1:23:10Marco Arment:Amateur psychologists would have a field day with a lot of these people trying to figure out what exactly their issue is. These are some really strong personalities at these levels. And so many of them have no problem lying. I mean, geez, Sam Altman has basically made a career out of it. Like many of these people are, you know, really showing like significant sociopathic kind of behaviors of just like totally disregarding morality effects on people, rules, laws, fraud. So, yeah, you're going to see a lot of this kind of behavior at these levels. I'm not surprised. Honestly, like all of these allegations, assuming that even that even, you know, any of them are true, like none of them actually surprise me.

1:23:55Marco Arment:they're kind of galling in terms of like wow i can't believe they actually thought they would get away with that but think about who you're dealing with here yeah of course these people are going to try stuff like this again not a lawyer apple probably has a pretty good case like i don't i don't think apple would do this if they didn't and i don't know if they're going to get all of what they want but i bet they're going to get some of what they want yeah when apple initiates

1:24:18Casey Liss:a lawsuit there's usually a pretty good chance that they're they think they're going to win it when they're the victim of a lawsuit you never know how it's going to go because you don't know what apple did but when they initiated a lawsuit they're probably they're so conservative about this um and in in this particular case you would imagine if you if you were to remove most of these personalities you were like oh open i will just settle this because they've got tons of money and what you do in the cases like this is you throw money at it and you make the problem go away because the last thing open ai needs is some like long legal battle and bad press and blah blah so yeah just settle but then we get to the personalities involved and i'm of two minds about that one um if there's like personal animosity like again between turnus and tang tan and and maybe johnny ive and apple and sam altman and apple because again but we started the snell's thing with a open ai was putting out these little leaks that like we're thinking about suing apple like a long time ago there was already bad blood probably because they knew they were going to be sued at that point or whatever so that bad blood exists and you're like okay well when you have these big personalities and bad blood on the one hand you're like oh that that means open ai is not going to do the smart thing and instead of settling like they could with their giant pile of vc money right now when they're rolling in it uh they're gonna you know dig in and say no we're gonna fight this right which which i think would be dumb like why fight it settle right just settle and make this go away but maybe they'll fight it but then i look at the specific personality of sam altman who seems like so incredibly feckless and just just not he's he's more like you know as a pathological liar and untrustworthy or whatever but also not particularly like brave or like he's not mark zuckerberg mark zuckerberg i can imagine like digging in and be like they're gonna fight this or steve jobs for example of course would dig in his heels and fight this way past the the edge of logic but uh i don't know what turnus is like in that regard although it seems like he's okay with this lawsuit but sam altman like even though he has a strong personality and has no problem lying i would imagine he's not like he doesn't seem like a fighter to me like in the in the elon musk lawsuit and everything i mean And Elon, it's not hard to look better than Elon when you're on the stand or whatever.

1:26:17Casey Liss:And I think Sam Altman did, but he just seems so like just like a wet dish rag full of lies. Like I don't see him going like, we will fight Apple to the bitter end about this lawsuit. So I think he'll settle. Assuming Apple is willing to settle. And I think Apple would be willing to settle. They just want to stop this from happening. I don't know. Well, we'll see how this goes.

1:26:39John Siracusa:Is it that Apple just wants to stop this from happening, which I think is true. And by this, I mean both the exodus of employees and the hardware fantasies of OpenAI. Oh, this lawsuit's not going to stop either one of those. Well, that's true. But the other thing, and I don't remember if I heard this on Dithering or somewhere else, but somebody pointed out, maybe on Upgrade, that this is a really great opportunity to do a whole lot of discovery. And I think that that's very appealing to Apple because they can -

1:27:06Casey Liss:But that's why OpenAI was settled, to avoid that.

1:27:08John Siracusa:Oh, I agree. I agree. but if open AI really wants to go for broke, that's not going to end well for open AI, I don't think. And coming back to something that I think Marco said earlier, it might've been, it was either one of you, but somebody said earlier, you know, if you don't want to have an exodus, here's an idea, pay your people better. And I know that Apple employees make a butt ton of money, but I also know it costs a butt ton of money to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. And everything I've understood from many, many, many different people inside and outside of Apple is that amongst Silicon Valley, and amongst the like Facebooks and Googles and Apples and Netflixes of the world.

1:27:45John Siracusa:Apple's like really cheap from everything I've ever understood when it comes to salary. Now, granted, they have, you know, stock programs for their employees and non-salary compensation and so on and so forth. But here's a novel idea, which was said earlier, and I would like to agree with. Maybe pay your people a little more. And I think that might solve a portion of these problems. Now, it's still not the new shiny over at OpenAI. You know, the iPhone is new-ish and shiny-ish, but it's not new shiny like whatever they're doing in OpenAI. But I think some of this could be solved by having more competitive salaries.

1:28:20John Siracusa:And I'm pretty sure Apple could afford it.

1:28:23Casey Liss:Well, the flip side of that is something we've discussed in the past, which is, first of all, you're never going to compete with the giant bucket of investment money that is sprinkling down on OpenAI, nor will you compete with the apparent huge pile of money that Facebook is willing to throw into these efforts. And it probably would be foolish for Apple to pursue that. Apple has chosen not to pursue the creation of a frontier model, which costs billions and billions of dollars. So they're not doing that. But I like how much would you have to pay to compete with like the Facebook salaries? Like, do you want to do that?

1:28:55Casey Liss:Is that a good idea? And the second aspect is the thing we talked about back in the JG days, where they were hiring AI people to JG's team to do Siri or whatever, and paying those people way more than other Apple employees. And that makes the other Apple employees go, hey, I'm over here working on iOS. You know, the thing that makes actual money. Why are all these new employees getting paid more than me? I've been here for eight years. And you're like, you can't just like, okay, we'll just, we'll raise all Apple employees to the bubble and Zuckerberg inflated prices of 2023, 2024 for AI things.

1:29:29Casey Liss:That's also a bad decision. So in some respects, as Marco pointed out, you just have to take it you just have to i'm not saying they shouldn't raise their salaries even more competitive across the board like but to the to the sane baseline not to the 100 million dollar mba star ai researcher line because that line is not sustainable and even if you just raise it for one group of people all that does is make your other employees even more disgruntled it is not feasible to say every apple employee needs to have ai bubble salaries so you just say look we know people are going to leave and you know we're we can't like we shouldn't try to stop them with salary and perks because we won't be able to and even trying would distort things so much in apple that when the bubble pops what are you going to tell everybody oh now the bubble popped all your salaries are going back down to sane levels no you're not going to do that either so it's just a fact of life i mean it's the same reason people have always left apple to try to do something else like apple is there to be steady and reliable and a place people can circle back to after their startup fails or after they get sick of working for zuckerberg or whatever um and so they're fulfilling that role i do agree with you that they probably should be less stingy than they are especially since a lot of their stinginess relied on the fact that apple stock was just always going up and up and up and by the way it still kind of is going up and up and up but not to the levels it used to be and also the whole like don't you want to work in the games industry don't you want to work for hollywood people's willingness to take less in exchange for being what they consider in a really high profile place like it's the reason the game industry exploits workers is the reason hollywood exploits them because they're like, oh, I've always wanted to work on games.

1:31:00Casey Liss:I've always wanted to be in Hollywood. I've always wanted to work for Apple. So Apple takes advantage of that. And to the degree that Apple does that, they should stop because the shine is a little bit off that Apple. Ha ha, see what I did? Wow. But yeah, they can't. It's unwise to pursue the unsustainable salaries that everyone else is getting. And we'll see how it works out for those companies. I bet, speaking of Facebook, the people who went over there and got those huge salaries but then realized that they're going to have like, that Facebook is going to be looking at the key loggers that are installed on other computers to make sure they're all working hard enough or whatever.

1:31:33Casey Liss:I wonder if they're reconsidering their life choices.

1:31:36John Siracusa:Yeah, seriously. Before we move on, though, we should say that OpenAI's response was as follows. On the 10th of July, Drew Pusateri, who is apparently head of comms at OpenAI, said, Our statement in response to this suit, colon, we have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.

1:31:56Marco Arment:Nothing. It says nothing. It was probably written with chat GPT. We have no interest.

1:32:01Casey Liss:Why would we care about other people's trade secrets? That sounds boring. I'm not interested. Are you interested? I'm not interested in other people's trade secrets. If you gave them to me, I wouldn't even look at them.

1:32:08John Siracusa:And then on the 14th, four days later, OpenAI's statement is reported by Bloomberg. While we take these allegations seriously, we're not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit. We believe in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose, and we're focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.

1:32:23Casey Liss:I believe Apple will soon make you aware of evidence. Yes. We're not aware of any evidence of this.

1:32:29Marco Arment:Well, they haven't seen any yet. They've just seen allegations. I'm sure the person who wrote that statement maybe can say they are not aware of any evidence of that. That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. It doesn't mean that they aren't aware of the event happening, but they just need evidence. Yeah, prove it. Yeah, right. like that's like you know if i don't pay my taxes like i'm not aware of any evidence that i didn't pay my taxes that doesn't say i paid them you know like there's there's a lot of ways a lot

1:33:00Casey Liss:of holes in these words yeah that's why the supposed comms person i don't know if he's the head of comms but his bio on on twitter was comms that open ai love the fact that he's on twitter um says you know we have no interest in other companies just like if you can't put out a denial as your first response why like don't say anything don't say we're not denying it but but i'm just saying we don't even like that stuff why why would we have that we don't like it we don't like trade secrets we would never do that we have no interest in that yeah what what an incredible defense i would say that the comms department and apple has a little bit more experience and maturity when it comes to dealing with these stuffs than a very young company like open ai uh and we'll see how this goes but my advice to open ai is just settle well if that's even or not like apple like look

1:33:46Marco Arment:apple has lost hundreds of people to open ai how do you know they would they would even be willing to settle like apple probably like if apple thinks they have no real risks of you know like in

1:34:02Casey Liss:discovery how do you know apple will be willing to settle i think apple's willing to sell maybe but for what because they want to declare victory they want to say we've reached a settlement and open ai paid us this amount of money here's here's the thing apple in in this particular context

1:34:15Marco Arment:apple probably they probably wouldn't have brought this suit if they thought that discovery would be a big risk for them so they probably think look if you dump a bunch of apple emails out into court that you know around this this particular area we have nothing to hide we're fine is it going to be worse than the app store emails right whereas like if open ai gets their stuff dragged into court Who knows what that's going to be? And by the way, OpenAI is trying to IPO pretty soon, probably. So like this is bad for them, like timing wise, like Apple did not do this without care. Like Apple knows exactly what they're doing and when they're doing it.

1:34:53Marco Arment:This is a pro move on Apple's side. We'll see what happens. But if I were Apple, I don't think I'd want to rush to a settlement. Because like OpenAI, like they're going to keep getting more and more desperate as their IPO dreams get closer. And, you know, if things start start looking very bad for them and if a bunch of discovery stuff starts coming out like that, Apple is probably in a pretty strong position on that. You know, and who knows how if this actually goes to court and goes to trial and goes all the way to the end of a trial that those are very big ifs. but if this actually gets that far who knows if apple would actually you know quote win or not but they can inflict a lot of pain on open ai in the meantime with dragging them out into all of this dragging all this into the public all the discovery coming out and casting doubts maybe on some of that ipo so apple's in a pretty good position here i would imagine that the uh chat

1:35:48Casey Liss:gpt and ios deal is probably going to lapse and not be renewed though yes and also like once you

1:35:54Marco Arment:use ios 27 you're like yeah there's no need for that anymore like siri has taken most of the need for that away and the open ai deal of like having it be integrated but if you ask siri to hey also please ask chad gpt to tell me this like that's so clunky and less necessary now no one's gonna really be doing that anymore it honestly never worked that well to begin with oh hopefully that

1:36:17Casey Liss:will be replaced next year by the thing that was rumored this year's wwc which is like a third party pluggable hey if you want to use something you want to use a different chat bot because the is making us uh you can plug in uh you know some other companies chatbot besides siri in there and then chat open ai would just do that just because they have to because anthropic would do it and all the other stuff so anyway we'll see how that goes but uh yeah the specific very uh very particular deal that apple referenced uh i don't know what the expiration data on that is but i feel like neither one of the parties is going to be excited about renewing it yeah i think you're

1:36:49Marco Arment:And by the way, if you're an Apple employee and you want to go work somewhere else, go for it. If you can get a higher pay somewhere else and something that you're really excited about, do it.

1:37:01Casey Liss:Except unless it's at Facebook, don't do it.

1:37:03Marco Arment:Yeah, don't do that. That's just a step down. But feel free to take your expertise wherever you want. You are valuable without committing crimes on the way out. You have a ton of value. If they're going to hire you, this is like counseling. If they're going to hire you, they're going to like you for you. You know, don't put yourself in hot water by bringing out documents and crap. Like you don't need to do that. You're just, you are so screwing yourself on that. And if you're that valuable, you're going to get the job no matter what.

1:37:33John Siracusa:Yeah. I mean, I just, I can't understand the math that these open AI employees did in order to make this thing seem like a good idea. And they, they're going to be screwed for getting any sort of job in any of these fields anytime in the future. because clearly they're not trustworthy if assuming this all is proven in some way, shape or form. But I mean, it sure would make me think twice if I saw one of these names on a resume that crossed my desk.

1:37:58Marco Arment:Or even just like if you're hiring somebody and you're like, hey, can you bring a bunch of internal stuff from your old company? Don't you for a second think ahead? Like, well, when they leave my company, are they going to do the same thing?

1:38:09John Siracusa:Not to mention, huh, that's a really skeevy thing to ask me to do. Maybe I don't want to work here.

1:38:14Marco Arment:Exactly. Yeah. And the people will do it. Yeah, please commit some crimes on your way out of your old company, but your first day here, please sign our employee handbook policy.

1:38:23John Siracusa:Just bananas.

1:38:25Marco Arment:All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Claude, and Quince. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many, many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Sony having announced the end of PlayStation game discs. End of an era. Covering that and more in Overtime. ATV.FM slash join to hear it. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.

1:39:10Marco Arment:research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental it was accidental

1:39:19Casey Liss:and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into mastodon, you can follow them at

1:39:30Marco Arment:C-A-S-E-Y-L I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O A-R-M and T Marco are S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long.

1:39:58John Siracusa:So my intention is to do kind of a twofer after show because I think I have two things to talk about. Both should be pretty quick. Famous last words. first of all last week we were on vacation we had our second beach trip of the year with some dear friends of ours and i wanted to talk about vacation results specifically around nerd stuff and if you recall when we went to cape charles a few weeks ago i was using the unified travel router in the car and was not sure how that would work out in the house because the travel router while i adore it it's not the strongest thing in the world and in the cape Charles house, what's nice is the internet happens to come in, unfortunately, it's like crappy cable internet, but it happens to come in in roughly the center of the house.

1:40:43John Siracusa:And so the travel router actually mostly did great, both in terms of performance and distance and everything else. But this particular vacation, it's a bigger house, it's a two story house instead of one story house, and the internet comes in in the corner. Now, I will say that the internet went from crappy cable internet to fiber. They apparently since last year, it's the same house we were in last year, but apparently they've added fiber to this section of North Carolina that we visited, which was incredible. And I loved it. And astonishingly, the actual fiber optic line was in like a jack on the wall.

1:41:19John Siracusa:You know, like with Verizon, the fiber optics is generally speaking terminated outside. And then ethernet runs into your house. In this case, in one extreme corner of the home, that's where a fiber optic line was coming out of the wall and going into like a combination ONT router situation. But I figured, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the UTR, the Unified Travel Router, and I'm going to see if it works at all and gets anywhere near the distance I need it to get. And this is not a gigantic house by any means, but it's like I said, it's two stories, et cetera, et cetera. And I have to tell you in the primary bedroom, which was in the opposite corner of the house.

1:42:00John Siracusa:Unsurprisingly, it was a very spotty reception from the Unified Travel Router. But basically everywhere else, it was really good. So this little, little travel router that's roughly the size of, I don't know, like 10 credit cards stacked on top of each other, worked astonishingly well. I was very, very proud of that little feller. And I thought it was really cool. And so I don't know if I would be happy to take questions if you have any. But I just thought I'd share that the$100, which is also an incredibly good deal especially for unify uh the 100 unify travel router did great i was very

1:42:33Marco Arment:proud of it that's awesome yeah i i just i love how like you know we obviously we're in this weird situation now with ram and ssds being super expensive but like in general most technology these days is so unbelievably cheap and capable yeah i i like we are in such an embarrassment of riches in terms of like overall technology just being so good and so affordable compared to you know where it was 5 10 15 20 years ago like it just again it isn't it's a bit of a roller coaster sometimes like it doesn't always go in this direction and not exclusively in this direction but the overall trend is very very clear things are so like what you can do now with 100 bucks worth of hardware is so amazing.

1:43:23Casey Liss:On that front, that brings up the one question I have about your travel router obsession. Since technology is advancing, as you noted, this place is like, oh, they have upgraded to fiber. Doesn't it also mean that all the crappy vacation houses that we rent should be getting better and better Wi-Fi and therefore making it so that we don't need travel routers because the home Wi-Fi actually spans the whole house and works?

1:43:45John Siracusa:So that's actually a very, very reasonable question. And a couple of things about that. First of all, I find that generally speaking, Wi-Fi is an afterthought at these places. Like obviously they know they need to provide some form of Wi-Fi some way, somehow. But it seems to me that generally speaking, they don't really think about it at all. They just use whatever the ISP provides and they walk away. so in the cape charles vacation house it happens to be like it's not comcast i forget who it is off the top of my head but it's effectively like a comcast cable modem square in the center of the house that's your wi-fi i hope you like it but those things have been getting better too that's

1:44:25Casey Liss:my point like that's fair those suck and they're lagging behind obviously they're not on the cutting edge of technology but they do change over the course of decades and i would imagine that the current ones aren't as awful as they used to be i think you're right and broadly that

1:44:38John Siracusa:That is true. It's a low bar, though. It is a low bar. In the vacation house from last week, they had this odd-looking, and I think I took a picture of it because I was trying to identify it. I didn't know what it was. But they had this odd-looking gray orb, for lack of a better word. I'll see if I can find a picture and put it in the show notes or put a link to the device. Again, I don't have it handy. But it had Ethernet going into it. It was plugged into the wall and had Ethernet going into it. I had no idea what it was. I didn't know if that was like some sort of ONT, but it didn't have fiber going into it.

1:45:09John Siracusa:Long story short, I eventually figured out it was effectively like one Eero. It's not literally Eero, but it was like an Eero mesh base station. And so there was one of those downstairs in this particular home in the upstairs. It was like a loft situation and almost line of sight from the one downstairs was one upstairs. So they have some sort of mesh Wi-Fi, which honestly I didn't even touch. I never tried it, not once. but to your point they're they're they're at least trying which is good uh but the other thing that's important about the unified travel router and i also brought with me a gl inet router um because those tend to be far more powerful they're also quite a bit bigger but they're far more powerful and um what i love about the utr in part we spoke about this last time we spoke about the utr was that it has support for teleport, which is Unify's no-config wire guard.

1:46:01John Siracusa:If you're squint, it looks kind of like tail scale, but it's also very different than tail scale. But the point is, once I got the travel router up and running, it connects to my house, and every bit of our internet goes through my house here in Richmond. And although I don't think anyone is doing data logging or anything like that, It just gives me peace of mind to know that whatever is happening in this house with my devices, they can't touch it because it's encrypted and going through Richmond. Is that a little bit bananas? No, it's a lot bananas, but that's how I am. This is the way I am, and I'm sorry.

1:46:35John Siracusa:Also, Marco, I owe you an apology. It was not$100 for the Unify Travel Router. $80. $80 for this thing. And if you are in the Unify ecosystem, if you don't have one, you're cheating yourself. It's delightful. I absolutely love this thing. I was astonished that it worked as well as it did. For events like this, I'll probably travel with a GLI net because, again, I'm me. I enjoy doing this stuff. This is kind of a hobby for me. It is not necessary. I understand that. It's totally overkill, but here I am. However, speaking about GLI net, I wanted to bring up something else. It turns out that I didn't know this until we talked about the KVM.

1:47:13John Siracusa:I think it was a couple of weeks back or maybe a month ago now. but we actually have a couple of listeners that work at GLINet and they were kind enough, not as a sponsorship or anything like that. They never said I had to talk about anything. This is completely of my own accord. They sent me a couple of devices and said, hey, you know, you might like these. That was all that was said. There was no guarantee of anything. Not sponsored content or anything like that. But they sent me, among other things, a Comet Q, which I feel like I kind of know GLINet's product line and I had no idea this was a thing.

1:47:42John Siracusa:So we talked several weeks ago about the KVM. This is a thing that has native tailscale support. You plug USB into a device, like you go into a computer, and you can control that computer remotely. And it's as though it's physical hardware. As far as the computer's concerned, it's an actual keyboard, an actual mouse, etc. This is largely the same thing. It is basically a remote control device, a KVM kind of device for a computer. But what's fascinating about this is it works with anything that uses, I think it's DisplayPort over USB-C. I forget. Shoot, I should have looked it up beforehand. I didn't.

1:48:18John Siracusa:I apologize. But basically, oh yes, there it is. ComicQ works with any device whose USB-C port supports DisplayPort alt mode for video output. This includes, but is not limited to, laptops and mini PCs, Android phones, iPhones, and iPads. What? iPhone 15 and newer. Yes. iPhone 15 and newer or all iPads pro iPad pros 2018 and newer iPad air fourth generation and newer iPad mini sixth generation and newer and iPad 10th generation newer. What this means is you can get one of these little dinguses, which is like a little circle. It has an onscreen display, which is very neat. You can plug this into basically any modern iPhone, uh, excluding the 16 and 17 and the air, sorry, air folks, but any modern iPhone.

1:49:05John Siracusa:So 15 or newer, 15 Pro and newer, etc. And you can control that device remotely. Now, what you're going to do is ask me, why would you want to do that? And I have no f***ing idea. But the fact that you can do it is so cool. Well, I can tell you a couple ideas. Okay, well, I would love to hear some ideas, because I think this is the coolest device I've seen in a long time that I have no idea why I would use it. So talk to me.

1:49:28Marco Arment:Two things. Number one, I can have two times when I would have needed this recently. One, it wouldn't have solved the problem, but one, it would have. So when dealing with audio issues at the restaurant if i am like on the mainland john um at you know at a moment when like you know the jersey the subwoofer like you know like the subwoofer volume is off for some reason like the app to configure the mixer and like electronic controller and

1:49:55John Siracusa:everything that we use is an ipad app oh this is for you marco right and so i already have

1:50:01Marco Arment:one of my Mac minis is in the restaurant. That way, if I need access to the network there, I have it through Tailscale. So I can be on the network, but I can't control an iPad remotely. And it doesn't work running an iPad mode on the Mac. Like the app doesn't work that way. So I could theoretically have an iPad there with this and be like running that app and could control it remotely. That's number one. number two um tiff broke her iphone uh a couple of weeks ago she we were outside we were walking and she tripped uh took took a moderately bad fall don't worry she's okay but she landed on her iphone and it totally destroyed the screen to the point where the screen would not turn on so we had to okay crap you know go make an appointment at the apple store she has apple care so you know we'll go get it fixed whatever but the question we had was like is it backed up like is it like when's the most recent iCloud backup and how do we figure this out it's like well i can try to restore it onto another phone that's going to take a few hours the apple store closes in you know two hours or whatever so it's like that won't be done in time let let's you know we went back to the house and we could tell like by if you like you know would if you like squeeze the button it would vibrate so we tell okay it's still on so we just have to like plug it in i'm I'm like, I know iPhones support monitors and keyboards and mice externally.

1:51:31Marco Arment:I'll just plug it in. Okay. Well, the problem is it was on but locked, and it had never been connected before to a monitor or a keyboard or mouse. And they have, like, similar to modern Macs, they have some kind of protection of, like, they're not going to just allow a USB device to just connect without authorization. How do you authorize it without a screen to type in your passcode? So I thought, great, voiceover. So I held down the Siri button to try to try to say, turn on voiceover. But that didn't work because the phone was locked and she had it set to not allow Siri while locked. Oh, all right.

1:52:08Marco Arment:Can't do that. Like, oh, what about iPhone mirroring on her Mac? Well, she had never done it. So that wasn't authorized either. So that didn't work. Siri didn't work. There was a point where I could plug in a USB-C, little like foldy portable monitors. I could plug one of those in and get the screen to show up but the problem is I couldn't unlock the screen because the touch screen wasn't working now I could plug in a keyboard but there's only one port and if you unplug the monitor to plug the keyboard in it somehow relocks itself so even if you get the passcode screen to display on the screen and then unplug the screen and plug the keyboard in and type in the passcode on the keyboard it doesn't work for whatever I guess it relocks or something so i thought oh what about a usb hub usbc hub so i plug it plug in usbc hub with the keyboard and the monitor at the same time and that doesn't work because apparently in this pre-unlock state hubs don't work only a display will work because a hub is like a usb device you have to authorize so like there's all i was running into all these different security barriers i'm like maybe just maybe in this context this dumb thing might have given me like one more option maybe probably not but what if i could like pre-authorize this on all of our items because what ended up happening was like we couldn't get into the phone like if the iphone screen is broken and to the point where like touch also does not work on it you have no way into that phone like unless you have authorized one of these things ahead of time and even then like you know all these methods that you use to authorize remote control things on iphones they all have they all time out after a while so like if i if i use iphone mirroring on my mac um you know that's that's going to stay authorized for what three days and it's gonna make me log in with my passcode again so like i don't know this probably wouldn't have saved me there um but maybe it could have been one more option.

1:54:13Marco Arment:So anyway, I might have used it there, but I definitely would use it for the restaurant iPad situation.

1:54:18John Siracusa:Yeah. So I've tried plugging into my iPhone, which I had not plugged it into before. I did try it with my iPad, but I'm just now trying with the iPhone and I'm definitely, oh, I can see the screen. Oh, you know what? I face ID. I was going to say, I was about to say that it said, you know, you must unlock to authorize this accessory. And I didn't unlock the phone, but I looked at it with the screen active. You know what I'm saying? And so I accidentally face ID'd. So I think it would have been the same problem here, but you, maybe, maybe you would have been able to see, but not interact. But yeah, I mean, what this does is it puts the iPhone in a web browser.

1:54:54John Siracusa:How about this? If you live in the EU and you want to iPhone near it, you could get one of these bad boys. I'm sorry. I'm so mean. But yeah, I mean, all can be aside.

1:55:04Marco Arment:I don't think they have a sense of humor about that yet, but they probably should.

1:55:06John Siracusa:They probably should. But truly, for your iPad in the restaurant, what I would say is next time you're in the restaurant, do the dance of authorizing this once. And even if what you did was put it in a drawer somewhere and said to somebody, if there's an issue, the first thing you do is plug this in and the second thing you do is you call me. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And that might really set you up really nicely. I genuinely don't know how much this costs. I don't think it's terribly expensive.

1:55:33Marco Arment:No, it's on sale right now for$110, but unfortunately it is backordered until late August. Oh, there you go. So at least late August. And apparently if I'm not a VIP customer, I don't get priority access. So this will not be here for this restaurant season. Maybe next year.

1:55:50John Siracusa:Unfortunately not. But again, I think this is just one of those devices that I'm happy that it exists, even though I have no idea why I would need it. Well, that's not entirely fair, actually. If I didn't already have the POE-powered KVM that we talked about a few weeks ago, then I could potentially use this. But I think this is an incredibly cool device, and I had no idea that something like this existed for iOS devices, which I thought was neat.