WWDC Reactions, Claude Fable 5 Debuts, McAfee Eyes ESPN Mega Deal | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:Anthropic launched Mythos or Fable. Fable's the main consumer model, but Mythos, there's some details about that as well. More for cybersecurity. And China's waking up. China is waking up right on schedule. They have a new$295 billion infrastructure fund of sorts. Tim Cook took his last bow at Apple's showcase event. This is history on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. So, yeah, he needs a 21-gun salute, a 21-AirPod salute where you throw him into the wall. Or a 21-point nuke. 21-point nuke. I don't think so. I think the stock's going to do great. So this is actually fascinating. So the focus of Tim Cook's last WWDC was Siri, and reviews are good.

0:46John Coogan:They launched a bunch of new features. I think people are going to be very satisfied with it and all the decisions that they made. Did you know Tim Cook's first WWDC was when they announced Siri the first time, 2011? So we can play this clip from the first Apple Siri announcement, listen to what they actually say, how they talk about Siri, and then look at where we are today just 16 years later, 15 years later. That you're going to be able to talk to technology and it'll do things for us. Haven't we seen this before over and over? But it never comes true. We have very limited capability. It's crazy.

1:22Just learn a syntax, call a name, dial a number, play a song. It is such a letdown. What we really want to do is just talk to our device. Ask a simple question. What's the weather going to be like today? And get a response. In fact, we don't want to be told how to talk to it. We want to talk to it any way we'd like. Someone else might ask, what rain in Cupertino? Where's the weather going to get worse today? Do I need an umbrella today? And your device, in this case, your phone, will figure out what you mean and help you get what you want done. That's a feature of the iPhone 4S we call Siri. Siri is your intelligent assistant.

2:00It helps you get things done just by asking.

2:04John Coogan:Pretty crazy. Called it. What happened? But it just took 15 years for the technology to actually catch up. And so I think they launched a functionality. When Siri launched, it was the best voice assistant. It was a great experience. You did have to know the syntax. But it was cool. It took 15 years for their technology to catch up. Yes, but it took 13 years or 12 years for the technology industry to catch up. And so they're only 10 % behind if you look at it that way. Like it's been a 15-year project from that announcement. It's been 12 years for the leading labs to get there. And so they're three years behind.

2:40John Coogan:Feels like an eternity in AI world. But it's really only 10 % slower. And they wanted to do it their way. and they got there. It is very interesting to me that they're calling it Siri AI because Siri, the whole pitch was AI. And like Siri, the name Siri comes from SRI International, which was the Stanford Research Institute. And it's from SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. Like these were Stanford AI researchers who started this company in like 2008 or something like that and grew it and then eventually sold it to Apple as Siri Inc. Acquired October, initially released October 4th, 2011, 14 years ago.

3:24John Coogan:But do you know what happened the day after October 4th, 2011, the Let's Talk iPhone WWDC where they announced Siri? Tim Cook was the first, this was his first WWDC as CEO. He obviously hands it off to his colleague to introduce Siri. Steve Jobs passed away the next day. Pretty crazy. And so you have this bookending of Siri on both sides of Tim Cook's career where sort of nothing happened in an interesting way, you know. But the stock did fantastically well. Tim Cook created an immense amount of value. But it was this AI winter. Lighter, cheaper, faster, stronger. Look at the stock price. Look at the earnings.

4:05John Coogan:I understand what you're saying. I'm not saying that in a negative way. So you have like Tim Cook operationalizing the company. making so much money from the app store, building the business. But at the same time, he just happened to be the CEO during the greatest AI winter ever, basically. From 2011 to 2022, 2023, when we started getting LLM, started getting chatbots. And it did take them a few years because they'd lived through a decade of like, okay, so the Siri team, have you guys got it better? And they're like, not yet. The technology is not moving fast enough. Like we haven't invented anything new.

4:44John Coogan:So we are the best of a very mediocre category. And Siri sort of slowly fell behind. But even when people say, even if you go back to 2019, pre-ChatGPT, pre-AI, pre-LLMs, and you ask the question of like, is Siri good? People would say, ah, nah, it's not really delivering in the promise of like, talk to your phone, it does whatever. Like people have the idea of the C3PO, the agentic computer. It's not delivering there. It's not like people were switching in droves to Android because Google Assistant was so much better. Or Alexa was so much better. Alexa was the same system. I'm sorry I'm triggering a whole bunch of smart home devices.

5:22John Coogan:You're triggering every device. Oh, this is interesting. So during the keynote at WWDC, whenever the keyword S-I-R-I was mentioned, they took out the 4 kilohertz, 6 kilohertz, a few different spaces, so it wouldn't trigger the at-home devices. Anyway, so they were like sort of behind, but it didn't really matter because they weren't getting their lunch eaten until the dawn of the LLM, the dawn of the chat app, ChatGPT, and other apps that came out and became like super powered relative to serious capabilities. Today, they're catching up. And it's a very interesting bookend on the Tim Cook era at Apple, where he was incredibly effective, but the technology was just not at an inflection point at any time during his career, basically, until the very, very end.

6:11John Coogan:And yeah, they got, you know, they were a little bit behind the ball, but ultimately they did catch up. There are a bunch of interesting other things in here. The facts first we should go through. So Apple spent roughly 12 minutes yesterday detailing the expansion of its child safety and parental control features. This was interesting because It was a notably short keynote. It wasn't a particularly long keynote. I think they spent like 15 minutes talking about products and then 12 minutes on parental features. Sort of gives you an idea of where the energy, where the focus is, where they want to spend time.

6:45Yeah, and potentially what you were saying yesterday, I think people, more and more people are waking up to maybe phones or causing systemic issues in society. Yes, yes. And I think they want to get ahead of that.

6:57John Coogan:Brain rod, utility stuff. And so that's what I wrote about today in the TBPN newsletter. Quick on the facts, child accounts with built-in age protections like limiting adult websites and showing age-appropriate media, good, ask to browse, which asks for the parents approval before the child can visit a new website. So any, so the child can say, hey I got to go to this website for my homework, click a button and it sends a notification to the parents phone and they approve and they say yeah that's fine. So you can really lock it down. Communication controls allow parents to manage who their child talks to and will ask for confirmation before their child can add a new contact.

7:31John Coogan:Apple also unveiled a new photo editing tool. This is separate, but spatial reframing. So if you don't like the angle of the photo you were taking, you took it over this way, you can, with AI, reframe it so that it's more straight on. This is a very cool feature. I think this is awesome for a few reasons. One is that it doesn't feel like full gen AI to me, where it's like going to slop it up. It's more just like a nice feature that's in the actual camera app photo roll camera roll I thought that was cool um and also this doesn't feel like oh yeah this is something that every that there was already a startup doing and it was already baked into Instagram and so Apple's just rolling it out and they're like behind the ball this feels like the first time I've seen this seems really obvious you could probably one shot this in uh images or Nano Banana or any of the image models but it was cool and it wasn't like oh yeah this is a startup and they're just like rolling it in this feels like Apple's DNA of like understanding the technologies and then doing something cool with it and unique was on display here.

8:31John Coogan:So I thought this was cool. What was interesting. I think some of the pushback is that a lot of this kind of functionality had been available in other apps like post-production apps and now bringing this basically bringing it into effectively the realm of the camera. Sure. Where the computer is now the camera. It does feel notable to me. But So notable how, like pushback, because there was pushback, which was interesting. People were saying that like, this is too much AI. I just view this as a camera. It's a camera. This is a way to capture reality. Sure. And now in the reality capture device, you can use AI to...

9:11John Coogan:So Apple has long prided themselves on like, what you see is what you get in the camera app. But that started to change with the artificial depth of field, the tone mapping that happens. There's a lot of things that you can do. Yeah, there's a lot of upscaling. And sometimes you see images, people are like, oh, that's AI, but it's actually just upscaled Apple image. Yeah, yeah. Especially if it's low light, noisy image, it'll clean all that up. I think it's fine. You could just not do it if you want to not have your photos reframed. But it was interesting seeing that there's a lot of folks that do land in that camp of Apple is not going too hard into AI.

9:49John Coogan:They're not stuffing AI everywhere. and then here's a feature that feels very on the nose in terms of AI. We'll see, we'll see. And there's mixed feelings on the timeline about spatial reframing, with some calling it one of Apple's most exciting AI features, while others are expressing concern about the detection, direction AI-generated imaging is headed. Because you can, I mean, Apple's been mediocre at like the remove trash in the background feature, like Gemini or I guess Android AI, like the AI camera on Android devices has been smoking them there. They're probably going to get better at that.

10:20John Coogan:But pretty soon it's like you take the photo in super low light, it up reses it, camera filter, color grade, spatial reframing, remove everyone else and you get a totally different photo. And I think that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. But like I understand why people would be. I mean, it's a little bit strange because. Just take the normal photo. Just turn off all the features. At least. Yeah. No. And I think a lot of. It's an option. You can always pull it into Photoshop and just do whatever you want. Yeah. It'll just be interesting. because we're going to enter an era where people's memories of their lived experience are different than...

10:53John Coogan:The Joe Weisenthal view of the future. Joe Weisenthal got in some hot water because he said that, why do you need to store any photos in the cloud when you could just embed them all and then on demand be like, show me a photo of my kid riding a dinosaur when he was five. And it just shows you a photo of that. And people were like, that is not the world I want to live in, Joe. Yeah, we're just not that far off from, hey, Siri, your phone's in your pocket. Yeah. And you just have your AirPods in. You say, hey, Siri, make sure to generate some images of my time at Disneyland today. Okay. Yeah. I am interested to see what's going to happen on Instagram.

11:31Yeah. And if there ends up being divide between accounts that are constantly getting the tag, like the AI tag on them.

11:39John Coogan:Oh, yeah. And people that just say like, nope, no AI ever. Yeah. And I think there will be a pretty clear split. Yeah. And when do you apply that tag? A little spatial reframe? No, I think Instagram, I think they do the tagging. But would they for a color grade? Yeah, they'll have to figure out what the line is. But to me, to me, the spatial reframing... To say, make it black and white, does that count? Spatial reframing is slightly... Because it's capturing a picture that never existed. Whereas a filter is just sort of like enhancing color. It's kind of just separating the layers, rearranging them.

12:14John Coogan:I don't know. It's clearly like a blurry line, but it's the blurriest we've ever seen. But we could use AI to make it less blurry. Yeah, and that's literally what they do, because you can see that the rest of the space is sort of blurry, and then it puts it together. Tyler, what do you think about this? Yeah, I was just saying, I was kind of surprised that they didn't release more AI detection kind of features around this. I would imagine that, like I assume there will be some metadata, if you do the reframing, that says that it used the reframing. Yeah, I'm sure. Then you just take a screenshot and you're good.

12:41AI true, but it's like, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah.

12:44John Coogan:Easy. So this was my wildcard topic yesterday. Maybe they'll talk about something related to the fertility crisis or something. And this feels like three steps away from it, but I like the direction that they went for a few reasons. So we got a bunch of new AI features, especially the new Siri technology and UI patterns are mature. We talked about this. So it's easy for Apple to nail. Also, as I predicted, they're giving Siri an app and the models are strong enough that I expect random hallucinations to be basically completely acceptable from a daily use perspective. But my wild card was that something in the presentation loosely would link to the topic of the fertility crisis that Derek Thompson has been covering recently.

13:21John Coogan:There was that article in the Financial Times, are phones causing brain rot or problems? Like, how do you address this? The correlation isn't perfect, for sure. But there's enough evidence that reasonable people are starting to put phones in like the probably linked bucket of reasons why there's a modern fertility decline. It's just one of them. I think Derek Thompson says like he's maybe 30 % of the reason, something like that. But what's interesting here is that Apple is not a fear-based marketing company. So their execs don't go on podcasts and make freewheeling proclamations about doom scenarios.

13:52John Coogan:They identified environmental concerns about fossil fuels and energy use early. And you cannot find a clip of Tim Cook talking about like climate apocalypse. We're all going to die because the sea levels are going to rise. That's not, he wasn't saying that for years and then figured out how to do clean energy for Apple's data centers. That's not what they did. They just worked privately and then started talking about the solutions in their marketing materials. They didn't put the cart before the horse. And it seems like they're doing the same thing here with parental controls, phone addiction, instead of giving a long speech about how bad endless scrolling can be and how it might lead to a less flourishing life down the road, they only talk about solutions, parental controls, 12 minutes of content in a notably short keynote.

14:32John Coogan:I think many parents are very hesitant to give kids smartphones these days. So it's also a good business reason to say, hey, you can buy your kid an iPhone because there are so many controls that you are fully in control. You know what's going to happen. You're safe with us. And there's already a whole niche market in these dumb phone devices for kids. There's this watch that has GPS and the ability to call home, but not much else. There's no screens. There's no social media. And so being proactive about building solutions and then only talking about the solutions is just extremely refreshing to me.

15:01John Coogan:And I think it's a good move. Anyway, the timeline was in turmoil, and we'll take you through it after I tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We got Gruber versus Gurman, two of our best friends from the show. We love both of these guys. The Gurbinator versus the Gurbinator. It's rough, but we'll take you through it, what happened. So John Gruber and Mark Gurman threw the timeline in turmoil over the rollout of Apple's new Siri integration strategy. Here's the play-by-play. Citizen says, again, this all sounds complicated.

15:33Just generate your kids.

15:35John Coogan:Generate your kids. Back in March of 20, March 26, 2026, so four months ago, three months ago, Mark Gurman reported in Bloomberg that Apple plans to open up Siri to rival AI assistants in iOS 27 update. And so that was the headline. He got some scoops and he says the company's working on developing new tools to allow AI chatbot apps installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri AI Assistant. The chatbots also work with upcoming Siri app and other features in the Apple Intelligence platform. That means, for instance, if you have Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT installed, they'll be able to send those queries to those services within the Siri Voice Assistant, just like they have been able to do with ChatGPT since Apple Intelligence launched in 2024.

16:18John Coogan:But as of yesterday, according to John Gruber, Apple has not fully announced exactly that, at least according to John Gruber who says, quote, maybe Apple ran out of time today and will announce this tomorrow. That was yesterday. Maybe they forgot to announce it. Maybe they scrapped the next generation Siri that existed two months ago and in the last month rebuilt an entirely new next generation Siri. I'll bet something like that is what happened. So he's taking shots. He's putting Mark Gurman in the truth zone. But Gurman fired back and said, here's some screenshots of integrations that basically match his original reporting.

16:49John Coogan:And so Gurman saying, no, no, you can actually go, oh, there's a model picker in the Siri app. You can configure Siri to work with other apps. But there's a deeper question here. I think they're sort of quibbling over like minor leaks and rumors and like the interpretation of these things. And I actually think there's like enough of a gap here that it's not totally unreasonable for both of their interpretations to be roughly correct. Someone in the X chat says, I feel like I'm watching this in 2X feed. Hey, 0.5X buttons right there, buddy. 0.5X buttons right there. I actually don't know if it's on livestream.

17:22This is great. This is a feature, not a bug. I'm sorry, Humble.

17:25John Coogan:You've got to warm up for Dellian every once in a while. Okay, anyway. John's on a tear. Let him cook. I think the core question is about expectations versus reality. There was some hope from hardcore AI users that the Siri button, me, the Siri button would be able to fully remap to their AI model of choice. So you're deeply integrated in ChatGPT and knows a bunch of things about you. You're confident with that model. You know what keywords to use when. You have the integration set up. You press the Siri button and you wind up getting that model by default. Currently, you have to say, hey, Siri, go ask ChatGPT to do this for me.

17:56John Coogan:And then it gives you this little pop-up with this button. You have to click OK. Yeah, you're playing telephone. Yeah, you're playing telephone. It's not good. Now, there are screenshots of a model picker dropdown in the Siri app, but it's unclear if that resets on some regular cadence, like maybe every query, or if it's a permanent change. And I'm sure we'll learn more. Marques Brownlee had an interesting thing that they're calling, what was it? Maybe like the new, the new operating system is called Golden Gate. And he was saying that like the nominative determinism of calling something Golden Gate is like, it's a golden gate in the sense that they are maintaining their gated walls, their walled garden and producing endless gold from mining what's inside the gates.

18:32John Coogan:It could just be that they like San Francisco, but as someone who, as someone who loves nominative determinism, I thought it was a fun, It was a fun take. Brian Macduff shares exactly what's going on with the cleanup feature, drastically improved in iOS 27. This feels like it might be nano banana under the hood or something fine-tuned on that under the hood. It was very rough in iOS 26. There's also this interesting detail that I got more information on the private cloud. So the private cloud has been extended into Google Cloud. So for AFM, which is Apple Foundation Models, AFM3, this is the third iteration, AFM3 Cloud Pro, which is their reasoning model that's a fine tune of Gemini or some train on Gemini, they say they worked with Google and NVIDIA to extend private cloud compute, which they put a bunch of resources into securing and branding, onto NVIDIA GPUs in Google Cloud while maintaining the same guarantees to protect our user privacy.

19:39John Coogan:Apple's been very privacy forward. They have a ton of trust. People put everything on their iPhones. They're very, very confident in that. And Apple's bringing that. But they're vending it into Google, which is like the advertiser, the dangerous one, the one that is listening to you. Not really. It's actually like Facebook that's more of like the listening one. But back in 2023, I said, with all these incredible advances and conversational AI chatbots, I'm willing to put down a firm prediction. By the year 2043, Siri will be usable. And I think it came true. I was correct. I think Siri is visible now.

20:09John Coogan:Well, you haven't been able to verify this yet. Ahead of schedule. Oh, yeah, it doesn't release yet. It's not live for a couple more months. Okay, I'm downloading the beta. Let's go. Okay. At one point, I actually replaced Siri. You're an archive of posts. I know, I know. You got to know this lore. At one point, I replaced Siri with ChatGPTV on iOS short cut. January 8th, 2023. Yeah, early. The most complicated short cut. Yeah, so you go in and it would take an API key. You would trigger this with a shortcut. You'd say, hey, Siri, trigger Siri Pro Mode or something. Or you'd ask Siri Pro Mode a message.

20:43John Coogan:And then it would route that to ChatGPT. Before they had the integration, you had to do this manually. And you'd have to set all this up. But it was pretty easy to copy and paste that. But important Apple history, Siri was an acquisition. M &A for AI is in Apple's DNA. This was a reminder from last year when Apple met with Mira Moradi, the former CTO of OpenAI, to discuss a potential deal for her new AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. The talks never progressed to an advanced stage. What a different fork in the road moment they went with Gemini. But they could have had Thinking Machines Lab inside Apple, all of those incredible engineers and that talented team.

21:23John Coogan:But they would have had to pay through the nose in Apple. You know, Siri was, I think, a couple hundred million dollar acquisition. and it was not in the billions. Yeah, I think it was 200. Yeah, and thinking machines would have been 10 or something. It would have been a lot to actually get that deal across based on where they were. Gaussian splatting is coming to Apple Maps. This is very cool. Wow, it looks so much better. Look at this. Wild. Normal Apple Maps, no, that is what looks good. Right there, once it gets the color grade. I like that. I don't know when you would use this. Maybe if you're looking around a town.