Security Concerns at Border Crossings

What you can do John is you can just sit this one out because everyone knows that the show is really about Marco and me and you're just a cling on. So you can just takeit this one out and from Star Trek? No not that kind of cling on. Anyway, all right, let's get the show on the road. Hey, Marco, I have incredible, incredible news for you and for me. And I know we briefly talked about this privately, but I wanted to bring it up one more time publicly Marco on nugs dot net, which we've talked about fair bit recently on account of me being freaking obsessed with goose these days. They're really on a roll too. It's really not helping. It's not helping at all. Anyways, Nugs is finally one day later, broadcasting or archiving or whatever verb you want to use They're offering up for listening for streaming Dave Matthews Bands concerts, which is incredible news for you boy because I have to tell you, the only way I used to be able to get a Dave Matthews Band concert was to either trade for it when I was a child, with tapes or CDs, or there's some places where you can find torrents and the idea is that that sticks with the spirit of the band's taping policy, which is that you have to share becausecause with a torrent, you're sharing, but you're not supposed to go like stream it from somewhere or something like that. That's a pretty fine distinction. We're gonna to move right past that. We're gonna move right past that But these are all audience recordings. So this is people who bring it used to be Dat tapes and now it's like mixed Pes like I'm talking to you through right now and hook them up to microphones on towers. And the quality has gotten way better than it was in ' ninety six when I started listening to Dave Matthews band, but certainly pretty crappy still in the year twenty twenty. Yeah. It's still a microphone in the audience. Like there's only so good that can be compared to the soundboard. That's exactly it These are soundboard recordings from Date Matthew's Band. They have finally joined the ranks of their peer Jam bands and we're just going to cruise right on. They're pureer jam bands and they're offering their concert recordings the following day. This is monumental news for me and I'm sure for you Yes, obviously, what has been missing from my life is a way to get higher quality Dave Matthews band recordings of all the things I want to listen to from the Dave Matthews Band. Exactly right. So our long national nightmare is over, ourur long international nightmare is over. and I just wanted to make sure that I called that to your attention, Marco, that you can now stream Dave Matthews Band concerts the following day on Ng Yeah. and to be fair, like even though Dave Matthewban is not my cup of tea, I have, you know been so much enjoying for many, many years now that fish and then later goose would put for sale for about ten bucks each. everyvery live show they did, direct masterings from the soundboard with very high quality and you know, like with the same mastering you would get on like If a band released a live album to you know, iTunes to Spotify, like that same kind of mastering level. like they were they're doing that every show and they release it day the morning after the show or later that night for ten bucks. Like this, you know, fish started doing this years ago and as Goose has gotten popular, they've been doing it And it is such a joy for like your favorite band to to basically release a new a new set, a new album Every night of a tour, so you know, you get what twenty or thirty a year? Yeah. It's amazing to have that much music coming from a band that you love. And and, you know, because these are jam bands, plus Dave Matthews band, they're all the shows are all different. L so you get a different performance, like a noticeably quite different performance, quite different set list every night. You know, obviously there are some songs you hear a lot, but like you're getting a different different performance and a different work every time every night they play. And so You end up just getting a you know by being a fan of these bands, you end up getting a huge amount of new music every year. And its just it's just a wonderful thing to be a fan of these bands. So for Dave Matthews to have finally joined that mechanism, I'm happy for the fans like you who get to enjoy that same thing Also exciting, you had a vacation that you just went on, and I would love to hear a after action or trip report. Or I guess I should say in the vernacular of our dear friend John Syracusa, what was your vacation results? Overall pretty good, spent about five days in Italy, spent four days in Florence, and it was wonderful. I can strongly recommend Florence as an American tourist. They make it very easy on us. It is full of other American tourists and the Italians are very kind and very accommodating of Americans and I can especially call out m the Gucci restaurant in Florence is surprisingly good It has one Michelin star. I think it deserves two. And so that that was wonderful, Nice restorative trip, you know, a lot of good good u you know, good history to see there and sights to see. and you know, so that was wonderful. The art is great, the shopping is great. The food's pretty good. Although honestly, I kind of prefer New York style Italian food, but, please email Marco. Do do not email us. please I mean, look, I also prefer American style coffee. Like, you know, I couldn't get you know, regular drip coffee anywhere in Italy because everything's espresso. so they had very good espresso. Anyway. And then, you know, on the way out, we were flying out of Rom, so we spent one day in Rom right at the end of the trip. So you know, finished up in Florence, took the took the train to Rome. The trains are amazing, delightful. G to Rome. I get on get on the metro to go to the hotel. It's a crowded metro. Everyone's kind of cramming into to the stuff. I kind of got like pushed over on the way into the car, like into the subway car. Now, you know, I look, I've r the New York City subway all the time, so I'm used to this The doors close and I realize my wall it's gone Oh no. I was in Rome for five minutes and I was pick poocketed. Gracious. you know what they say What do they say, John? Apparently you don't know. just hope the listeners can finish that thought for me. What? When in Rome, like that whole thing? There you go. It just took a little while. I was right there with Marco. I was deeply confused. Do as the Romans do. Get your pocket picked. The Romans did to me what the Romans do. Did you have it in your front or back pocket I had it in my front pocket, but it was super hot. I was wearing shorts and so there it's a little looser, you know. And when I'm traveling always have in my front pocket, I always have my wallet and my passport. My passport never leaves my person when I'm traveling, like when I'm traveling internationally. And so The passport was between the wallet and my leg And so I think the combination of shorts plus that made me not feel it instantly, but I noticed like Obviously part of the like I've did a bunch of research afterwards. Obviously part of the scam was when I was shoved into the subway car And I stumbled slightly, that was obviously a physical distraction to get it. So I didn't know any of this This is like oftentimes a multi person operation pocketing in Apparently specifically Rome and Paris is like a really professionalized thing. Like it's very, very well done. There are many YouTube videos on this if you haven't seen them already. I haven't, but you know, as at first I was I mean, again, like I realized instantly like, oh, that's it It's gone. like I knew, but you know, I didn't want to like get into like, you know, an altercation with anybody in the training in case it was any of the people behind me, because I'm like,, I don't want to Now I know, okay, now let's go start canceling cards, you know, but fortunately I didn't have that much in there. And even more fortunately, I still had my phone and my passport, which are the two things that would be harder to replace in that context. I really didn't need cash or cards for anything on that trip. You know, the only real loss was, you know a couple hundred dollars worth of cash that I probably shouldn't have even been carrying and the annoyance of having to replace a handful of cards at my driver's license. But ultimately, it could have been a lot worse. It was more of an offense and more of a like I literally just like I was in Rome for five minutes and Rome said, F you right back to me. And I'm like, okay, you know what, Rome? F you. Like I can't imagine wanting to go back to Rome now, like it kind of ruined it for me. Whereas Florence was delightful, But Rome is like, you know what? you know what Rome really made me appreciate New York becausecause New York City is safer Nicer in terms of like the people, the people are way nicer New York City. The people in Florence were nicer though I gott to give them credit that. And I like the Italian food better in New York than I do in Rome. So you know what, Rome? please my apologies to Federico Petici. He's delightful. But my first impression of Rome was really bad. So I'm very happy to be a New Yorker right now I don't blame you. And when we were in Rome, this was pre Dclin. We stayed near some like plaza where apparently the pick poockets were legendarily really, really bad. And I remember I had my hands deep in my pockets every time I walked through there because I had the fear of God placed in me,ing including but I unlimited to when I was walking to the Vatican. But anyway, I now know like what I should have done is had like, you know, a zipper pocket or one of those front carrying bags that I'm like, you know, clutching, but like I ride the New York City subway but usually at least once a week. And I have never had any problem. This is a Rome problem. And like it it sounds like the Italians really don't intend to put any kind of effort behind reducing this. So like this is their problem to own. I again, New York is not a perfect place by any means. America is not a perfect place by any means. but it does it does it did make me appreciate how nice New York is in this one particular way I totally hear it. I'm sorry to hear that, but Now you get to go down the path of potentially, if you so choose, buying eighty four new wallets to figure out which one you like the most. Noope, inststead I reordered exactly the same one I had before. That was the other option, fair enough All right, let's do some follow out John, you guested on upgrade number six hundred twenty four, which was really a designed in California segment. Can you tell me about that? And if you'd like or I can handle it, tell me what is designed in California Yeah, so they're releasing bits of design in California in the upgrade feed, both separately and integrated into upgrade episodes. But that's going to end once D design in California gets its own feed. Design in California is a spinoff, I guess podcast series by Jason Sneell and my Hurley that is in the style of cas rest of history the rest of history It's a history podcast about the fifty years of Apple's history. and they've done a series so far about the Apple two and they did a kickstarter which we will link in the show so by the time you listen to this, the kicksar maybe Ogus ends in five days. If you just go to desesigned. FM, it's fast past tense designed . f. that currently redirect to the Kickstarter and I'm assuming eventually or redirect or be an actual website They're going to do something like fifty episodes, at least fifty episodes of the history of Apple. and they were kind enough to ask me to guess on some of those episodes I'm not sure if they've released everything that we recorded so far, but Anyway, whenever they need me, I'm available. the bit in upgraded six hundred twenty four, which you will also link was about Apple's need for a new operating system. So they're having me come on to talk about MacOS tenX surprise surprise. So if you want to hear that, check it out and there will be more. there will be much, much more from design in California in the coming year or two Ied Yeahah. I've already backed this, Ive backed it immediately. I enjoy the couple of rest the rest of history episodes that I've listen to but I don't, it didn't really rev my engine like it seems to rev everyone el else's But these done by good friends of mine about stuff I really, really, really care about, That's chef's kiss. So I definitely encourage you to check it out. desesigned. Fm and back the Kickstarter, You should. They also made a like pin or something, I forget exactly what it was now, but they made this California bear tow thing that I am still grumpy about after having seen it several days ago because it's so freaking perfect. So I think it's pictured somewhere, I'm sure. I can't find it on their Tickstarter right this second. But they made a I think it's a pin that you can get if you back the physical stuff, like one of the teiars is getting physical things from them. And I think this California cow bear thing is just freaking perfect and I'm still grumpy about it, but that's all right Anyway, go to design. Fm and check it out. You very much will like it Apple Intelligence, when booting MacOS from an external drive, Doug Winfield writes there may be a workaround for doing exactly that. And there's a link to Tech everythingthing d. com and Om Sashad writes. This process involves modifying a file in the system so that we can trick it into thinking that your external drive is actually an internal drive. This cannot be done unless we disable system integrity protection. Fortunately, the good news is that you can turn it back on after you're done I didn't try this, but I'm glad to see that someone figured out how to make it work. I would be scared to try this not because of the system integrity protection, but just because essentially lying to the system and telling them that yourirect external drive is internal drive just smells like a formula for disaster, you know that is just lurking out in the future. are you afraid Eddie's going to show up at your house? So anyway, I partitioned my not partitioned whatever. I made another volume on Mroal drives, that's I'm going forward. But if you are determined to install Golden Gate on an external drive. You can follow these instructions. They're long and complicated. goodood luck I can say I still have Golden Gate on my portable laptop and u is so far pretty enjoyable with the exception that it does keep filling up its hard drive. Cool. No, that's a bummer. Mine hasn't had that problem so far, although I have to say that the first beta of Xcode twenty seven running on Golden Gate could not launch my app in debug mode at all So that's bad. likeike I was trying figure out like is it launching what's happening? He was launching the process, but like the debugg wasn't attaching to it. So I had to uncheck the debug checkbox, so then I could run it from Exode but to bug it, which really puts a damper on doging. Yeah yeah so All right, and let's talk about indexing for Spotlight in the twenty seven OSs, Steve Reiggins writes, I'm on a six and a half of indexing my iPhone with the IiOS twenty seven beta one Alex writes, sameame here. I've even had it plugged in for multiple hours each day. Yikes. That could be what's filling Marco's drive or something could be doing haywire. but if you're wondering how long will it take to do the indexing apparently a long time. And like we said last episode, the rumor slash word on the street is that Apple is going to Make these indexes for everybody who upgrades to twenty six point six whenever twenty six point six comes out They will spend, I don't know, five, ten days or whatever indexing probably when our phones are plugged in at night or charging at night So that we don't have to wait a week after twenty seven comes out to have the index is built Right o. then with regard to Apple's AI Tech talkalk, this was the thing that happened right after the keynote what a couple of weeks ago now Yoken Marshall writes, what I didn't get from the Tech talkalk discussion is whether I will be able to casually tell Siri AI something like I put the screws for the bed in the closet in the guestroom and have it still remember that two years later. Or will I still have to keep sending emails to myself? I would guess that that's not something seri will remember. You remember doesn't't sound like an AI think that sounds like like a data storing app things. L like that's the kind of thing. I would put it in Apple Notes or something. You know, like So this is this is gonna to happen when people People who haven't been playing with the LM chatbots get this on their phone because everyone or you know, Mac users or Apple users or whatever, iPhone users have had S it on their phone for ages. so either they use it or they don't, but it's not new to them. And as far as they're concerned they change Siri again in some way. like they don't see it as a different thing, but this question you know points towards like, but it is kind of a different thing because in the past, if you were to do something like this with Siri, your assumption would be I have to tell Siri to put this in reminders or notes or like I have to instruct I have to like or say something like remind me and then it will use reminders. But if you are actually experienced with these type of chat bot things, you're like, well, can I just ask it to remember stuff Because a lot of the chat but things have what they call a memory And you can say things like remember that I like to use spaces and not tabs in my code, stuff like that And it will quote unquote, remember it And the memory feature, as far as I've been able to tell, because it's very difficult to tell how all these things are imped, but it's essentially like It's just going to write words in a text file and put that into and add that to all the other crap that goes before the thing that you enter. So it's going to be the system prompt, all your memory stuff, any skills you have your whole previous conversation and then the last thing that you wrote And that all goes into the giant Pacheno machine and comes out the bottom. And so In a sense it is remembering it by writing it to a text file off to the side But the memory is limited and the context window is limited and I wouldn't trust that little text file that the thing writes off to the side behind the scenes to survive and long term, not just with Siri, but with any of these things. I don't know what the policy is for compacting or trunkating or keeping long term the things I tell these chatbots to remember So my advice is do not assume that even if this works, which it might work for various shotbots, do not assume that, oh, that's safe forever now tellell it to use the app of your choice to store this information. So then you can open the app and look at it and say, yeah, there is now an Apple Note that says Here's where I put the, you know, things in the closet for the guest room or whatever. Have a note that already does that and have the agent write to the note and then look at the note and to see that it's actually there And even then I would to be a little bit careful because someday it might wander by and say, oh, look at this note. I can fix this for you by summarizing it or some crap like that and you lose all your information Be careful out there Yeah, in general, like don't count on The current world of AI to for like long term stability of any sort. because it's just it's everything is moving so quickly and changing so quickly. People are, you know, like the big companies are changing their products left and right. things change every two weeks, you know, it's Everything is like quicksand right now And so For something like like long term memory, long term note or data or fact storage Use an app that has a proven track record of doing that like Apple Notes or you know, Bear, you know, one of those any kind of like personal shoebox data app like that. And maybe that is your email. If you want to email it to yourself, that's another option too But you know, put the data in something like that and then use AI to index and search that data, in whatever form that can take. You know, if you're using something like, you know, Gmail, maybe Gemini can search it in a really good way or something like that. If you're using Siri, you use Apple Notes and you know, Siri will be able to read that. I think that's the much better way to structure your data like that And you can ask the agents to add it to a note to add it to reminders. You could ask it to email. I'm not sure which of those things with Siri will do successfully h But then you're just using it as the same way you would do say remind me when I get home to blah, blah, blah. It' It's Sira using the features of the rememinders app. So That's perfectly fine, but the storage medium needs to be an app that you trust You introduced John some interesting thought technology to me. I think in Rctiffes, and I think it was forever ago, but the idea of a squirrel list, which I have a pinned note in Apple notes. It's called Squirrelist and that's where I write where things are that I know I will forget where I put them in the future. And that has saved my bacon many times. And then it's Every time I go to my squirrelist these days, it's like, why did you not I use it as a verb now like Googling something? Why did you not squirrel list this U Yeah Usually I come out ahead like I had to replace a part of my kitchen faucet And I'm like, I've done I've replaced this part before. and when I replaced it, I know I bought extras because I could tell this is a newish faucet. and like a year or two into it, this thing is already having a problem. I'm probably going need more than one of the weeds. So I bought spares, but where in my house are the spares? Go right to the squirreless. Is it there? No, of course it's not. Of course. I did find it, though, and you know what I did after I found it, I put it on a damn squarerelist. So set a time or three years from now when that stupid magnetic ring and the deellta faucet rusts out again I now where to find the spares. Perfect There is a bootleg video, if you will, of the aforementioned SiAI talk where Craig is talking at least in the beginning, this is via Sayr, SAY RER. This guy This guy that Sarah links to has three such videos, but says Sarah, I saw one from Straight onn that has the opening quote that we talked about I can't find that one unfortunately. and then we have a link to a YouTube short where one of these videos can be seen. Yeah, see they should go on nugs, man. Like imagine there could be an official video instead of audience recordings stand. That's exactly right It's a whole new world for me, John, I tell you All right, and then with regard to some of the new tools and photos, Kevin Buderbaug writes, is the new spatial reframing feature in the twenty seven release is geographically aware? For example, my wife and I recently had our picture taken together by someone else, as in not a selfie, while we were standing on the pier in somewhere unpronounceable in California. The person taking the picture was facing south, so Moro Bay and Morro Rock were in the background The person who took the picture managed to pray it such that my head hides moreoral rock If I were to do use special reframing on it, would it knowode fill in moral rock or would it just generically fill in matching coastline? have to assume it would just fill in coastline. Yeah, I don't know for a fact, but I would put very good money on No it has no idea where you are and even well it knows your location. But it's not going to use any kind of awareness or photos taken by other people in that location, which again, as it would be a privacy nightmare that Apple wouldn't really delve into. It's just going to use the training data of all the photos that its image generator is seening and say, here's what plausibly could have been behind Now it could be that the training data includes lots of images of Moral Rcks. You're like, wow, it is location aware when I move my head, it shows me exactly the right shape of Moral Rock. That just means Moral Rock was in the training data. I don't think it is basing it on your GPS. Now again, I don't know for a fact because I didn't make this feature. so if someone on Apple knows otherwise, but I would put good, good money that that's not the way these things work currently. It's just going to use the model and whereatever the model puts is what the model puts interest All right, let's talk about Tesla and CarPlay. or in other words, let's have Casey pop off. Alec Hurdle points us to an article on notot a Teslapp. com which is entitled Apple Announces Maps feature that could finally bring CarPlay to Tesla And Hall Mollk from the aforementioned website writes, reports emerged last fall of Tesla actively pursuing native carple integration. Fo up reports from earlier this year indicated that carple integration was still in the works with Tesla reportedly working directly with Apple to bring the interface to its vehicles. At the time, the main hold upp was said to be how the navigation would be handled between Tesla's whatever they think they' full self driving except it isn't really full self driving system. and cararplayss own maps because suupervised self driving relies heavily on the car's navigation. Tesla and Apple were working together to ensure that turn by turn directions stay in sync across Tesla's and Apple's mapping platforms If this supervised automatic driving doesn't know where the carplay map is going, features like automatic lean changes, which I don't understand why that's a problem, but anyway, and supervised self navigation simply can't function During a WWBC twenty six session covering the latest updates to carplay, Apple announced a new feature called route sharing And we will put a timestamp link to the YouTube video in the show notes Route sharing allows navigation to pass a navigation app, excuse me, to pass a trip to the vehicle as an arr of route segments, which are geographic coordinates that are sent to the vehicle whenever the trip changes Apple notes that, quote, some vehicles with driver assistance systems work best when the intended route is known. For example, vehicles may support automatic lane changes or adjust their guidance systems to more closely match the route shown in your app,ot I really, really want this to happen, not because I want Teslaas to be more appealing to anyone if that's even really possible, but because if Tesla finally caves because they were you know the kings of No were too good for carplay, then maybe Rivian will cave and maybe GM will cave. And yes, I am living in a fantasy world things go my way. And no, that's not the reality world that I'm also living in, but man I can dream, can't I Well, maybe. I like how they didn't name Tesla in WOC session, you know, because they' but it's like the facts match up exactly that apparently this was what Tesla was waiting for. Now does this mean Tesla will actually do it? We'll see. But this rumor has been cooking for a while. And the hold up being, we can't do this because we don't, you know, there's not enough sharing route information to support our other features makes technical sense, but I still wonder about How committed they are to to doing this, but we'll see Yeah, just I do think it's interesting because this does not strike me as if you're coming at this as a Tesla fan, which is a fantasy world that I find hard to inhabit, but if you're coming at this as a Tesla fan, this does not strike me as something you would do from a position of strength because you've banged this drum for so long that o, we're too good for carplay. Our stuff is better than carplay. We have the best software in the whole car industry because we're amazing And yet they do in that voice too And they do it in that voice. And yet here they are potentially caving and saying, sure, we'll support car playay. I am struggling to find any reason to do that other than Man, it would be nice we sold more cars these days. Maybe that's just me I have incredibly you know, Marco, this is your episode. It just occurred to me because not only do you have access to what will eventually be just hours and hours and hours of Dade Matthews band on Goost.et or excuse me nugs. net, but the US has approved a new sunscreen ingredient. Reading from Scientific American, the US is finally getting a new better sunscreen ingredient at the Food and Drug Administration added Bememinolemetrzinol there, we'll go with that. And I tried this earlier and I already forgot what I tried. Bemotrzinol, an effective chemical filter that's used in sunscreens made in Asia and Europe for decades to the list of permitted active ingredients and over the counter sunscreens The list hasn't seen a new entry in more than twenty years So this is know as I was going through my sunscreen journey, I believe it was last year or the year before, I had realized that avobenzone, which is the chemical filter used in almost every US sunscreen, except for the mineral ones, but all the chemical sunscreens or the hybrids, they all had avobenzone. And it turns out Avabenzone is both not incredibly effective relative to modern sunscreen filter chemicals alsoso the problem that I was having was It's incredibly irritating to most people's eyes My eyes would just burn and get painful, you know, redness and everything all day if I had sunscreen on because even if like a little tiny bit traveled Oh, and Avabenzone travels through the skin through short distances too. It migrates. And so if you had sunscreen anywhere on your face, odds of it getting in your eye were pretty high. So at that point, I switched over, I tried European sunscreens and Japanese sunscreens And I found all these other chemicals that are more modern that are much not only more effective in most cases, but also allow much nicer formulations of the sunscreen. like you know, like how does it absorb? Does it have good textures? you know stuff like that? And then does it migrate through your skin? And it's not as irritating to eyes, like by a huge, huge margin So the one that I use the most and love is the Roto Super Moisture UV gel. It's a Japanese brand. I'll link in the show notes. Sometimes you can find people on Amazon selling it. It's more reliably found on eBay, or you can just order it from Amazon Japan, if you want toay a lot of shipping U But one of the filters it uses is this one This is also called Tinosorb S It's available in a lot of European and Japanese sunscreens. Theres also there's a whole community of Korean sunscreen enthusiasts. I didn't get that far because I basically got to Japan and was happy and stopped U So but there's this whole world of sunscreens that now the U. S has approved one of the chemicals that they use. and so therefore, we are likely to see better U.S sunscreens that are not irritating to people's eyes or not as irritating to people's eyes and work better against different different forms of UV. This is great news for the sunscreen entnhusiast worldorld. I'm going to still keep buying my Roto suupermoisture UV gel just because I like it a lot. L the formula is good, the bottles are convenient. It has a scent, but it's a very, very weak scent. so it's fairly neutral and it works great for me. So I'm gonna to keep buying that, but hopefully I'll have more options soon You have a lot of faith in the U.S sunscreen industry. I just assumed looking at this story that yeah, they'll put this ingredient in it and it'll also include Avabenzo Well to be fair, I don't think, I mean I haven't looked at this exactly, but I don't think it would make sense to have both because they probably cover similar UVA and UVB bands. So like I don't it probably wouldn't make sense for the same product to include both. I'm not saying it m sense. It just seems like a thing that the manufacturers would do. Yeah They would put a trace amount of this so they could put it on the label and raise the price, but just keep it the same as it was Yeah, probably. I mean, you wouldn't believe like how many sunscreens, how many US sunscreens I tried first that claimed to be like sensitive or you know, all these different marketing words. And at the end of the day, they all had the exactly the same problem because they were all using the only US chemical filter that was rated for UVA and UVB All right, we are going to dig up some freaking ancient follow up that we're finally going to exhume and get through. These are not that remarkable, but it's hilarious to me how long these have lived in our internal show notes. So like eighteen years ago we were talking about tracking Apple's environmental progress and Andrew Leehey writes, your mention of diffiffing the environmental impact report on the latest Apple products gave me an idea. I fed historical environmental impact reports into TOS trackers whichich is a terms of service tracker, if'm not mistaken, and we'll keep track moving forward. Mind the bugs. Some report PDF's are still being ingested, although this was like three months ago. And you can go to the TS tracker website, and we will put a link in the show notes where you can see this. And Andrew continues. If you go to an individual product, you can compare directly across whatever metrics Apple provides. And so there will be another link for, for example, the M one MacBook A versus the M five MacBooker go, the magic of technology. Yeahah, Th these long lasting fall up like lots of things have died out here, but these are the ones that survived. I just because I thought like we talk about this in diffiffing like this is a pain and who has time for that? Well, if there's a website for it, you just bookmark the website and if you're wondering, What kind of progress is Apple making on the environment and stuff? Are they just doing the same stuff year after year and just retouting it over and over again? orr are they actually improving And then finally, in episode six hundred and eighty, we were talking or we had questions about how Apple's AI servers work. This was keyed off of a Wall Street journal video that we were talking about and again, episode six hundred eighty back in February. And Friend of the show Gee Rambo writes, No need to rely rumors or leaks for what Apple's AI servers are running. The software images they distribute to security researchers include details about the hardware. With regard to how each ultra chip is addressed, we know that as well Each one of those chips is a single PCC node, or private cloud compute node running as a standalone computer with Cloud OS, which is variant of IOS. And there's an orchestration layer that handles distributing work within that ensemble, which is what Apple calls it You can also see there's a clloud or was at the time, anyway, a clloudS job listing which includes the Cloud OS team is responsible for all facets of delivering OS and system services on Apple silicon servers including driving hardware and software initiatives to enable new Apple Silicon based systems in data centers Finally, Zoe Knox contributes, here's Apple's documentation on how to run the PC virtual environment. and we will put a link to that in the show notes. In there, it says the Private Cloud compompute Virtual research environment or PCC VRE, is a set of tools and images that can boot a version of PCC software and simulate a PCC node on a Mac with Apple Silicon. We got to get this item in right before I would imagine potentially this whole tech stack becomes irrelevant. not We don't know that this is going to happen, but now that they've moved to using Nvidia servers and other people's data centers, I do wonder how long they're going to continue the effort of Building their own servers. That Wall Street Journal video like showed us inside the factory where they had those big giant rack mount servers that had a bunch of you know, M two Ultras or whatever inside them, Building their hardware racking the hardware, supporting it wrriting an OS called Cloud OS that goes on there, doing the security and like this is a hell of an effort for what I have to imagine at this point is just not competitive at all in any measure, like an M two ultra. It was a great chip back in the day, but boy, we've moved on compared to today's NVIia chips that, you know Google's got in its data centers Is Apple going really going to keep up with the state of the art? orr are they just going to say What Google is doing, we're also calling that PCC. We'll make sure it has all of the same properties as PC that we did were, you know theyre already in WWC is said we're not distinguishing between one or the other. It's all PCC to us, right? And they promised that by the time the twenty seven U S is shpped, Google's PC will be just as good as Apple's PCC. And I just feel like that's the clearly the path forward. Um For now or in the past, They have their own servers, that they built in their own factories that they ran clloud OS on and they had joblessings for it. So I don't don't know how that's going to go Tune in next year to see if this is still a thing I can't imagine it would be like there's there is not a lot of worlds where this makes sense for Apple to do long term while Google and AWS and everybody and you know Microsoft, like all these other companies are running giant data centers that are specialized for exactly this purpose with the newest cutting edge, everything from everybody. It just doesn't make sense for Appleps themselves Yeah I kind of see how they got there. likeike in the old regime the old regime that was wiped away and replaced with this new regime that gave us, you know, WWC twenty twenty six. in the pre WWC twenty twenty four regime, the idea of PCC is like, what if we could do this thing where we can do stuff in the cloud but in a secure way and where we have great silicon and like it's very efficient We could make our own servers and we could put our own OS on it. and like then we would it's basically like, well, you could run on your device and you can also run in this thing, which is basically as secure canan we make something that's not on your device as secure as being on your device? That's the whole idea between PCC. Like just like stuff that stays on your device is, you know we can't see it. Nobody can see it is encrypted whatever. Can we do that? but on the server? like it makes so much sense as a thing to do And it made sense to like the WWC twenty twenty four time frrame to announce it. if only all of that actually ever shipped. And it didn't. And the world moved on. and it's like, okay, well now The servers are still M two ultras and the world like The world has moved on. This is, you know, I'm not gonna to bang thisorn drum too much, but like If Apple wants to compete in the high end of hardware anywhere, including on the server you have to make new IN chips on a fairly regular basis because the state of the art in things that run in data centers and do AI stuff is moving rapidly The M two ultra is positively ancient, even if they've replaced it with M three ultras, also pretty ancient. And where is the M five Ultra? U sometime in twenty twenty six? Meanwhile, the world is racing forward so I just don't think Apple has it in them to compete hardware wise. And if you can't compete hardware wise, the whole effort is pointless, even if your software stack is really cool. So yeah, just have Google do with Nidia GPs We are brought to this episode by Squarespace, the on one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings through their professional website, grow your brand and get paid on one place. This is quite simply the best place to build a website, especially for your So Squarespace has cutting edge design that's super easy to use. So you can make a beautiful professional website with all of their built in tools. Everything is visual. you're not like coding anything. You're not dealing with software updates or anything like that. And it's super easy for anyone. 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Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show n june seventeenth Which as we record this on the evening of the twenty fifth, it was a week and a day ago, Tim Cook took one on the chin for John Turnis and did an interview with Ralf Winkler of the Wall Street Journal Rolph writes, Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging cost of memory and storage chips, Chief executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview, withith the Wall Street Journal, quote, Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable Cook said, We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we're try we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable led to offer details on timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected Just you wait. But they included a chart in the Wall Street Journal. Price changes from the first quarter of twenty twenty three And the baseline or it starts at, like I said, twenty twenty three. and there's you know little blips and blurbs for DRAM memory and NAN storage, how expensive they are It got a little bit more in twenty five and then toward the end of twenty five, it just hockey sticks. And the tall the top of this chart, which is what DRAM is estimated to be at the end of twenty twenty seven nine hundred percent above what it was in twenty twenty three. Now again, that's an estimate, Holy Jamoles, not great. This is one of those charts where you're like, please do look at the Y axis. It is rooted at zero. and you're like, yeah, but these graphs always exaggerate stuff. Yeah, it looks like they go up a lot, but I bet it's like it's zero and then the top of the thing is zero point zero one. No, the top is nine hundred. It's percent. it's a terrible Terrible scary graph. and by the way, Casey, it pains me when you skip my terrible puns. you need to put them in What one? maybe it's my pun this is on me because my pun is so bad that Casey didn't even recognize it as a pun which I'm going to take, that's on me, that's not on Casey the way I described this was This Tim Cookicks one for the Tourn Itakes one to the te, taking one to the te. And team and turnnis te. It's a stretch. It's on me. it's not on you. No,' I'll take some of that blame. That was a group effort because I did not my reading comprehension as always has failed me. I didn't see for the turnis. I just read that as take takes one for turns. I should have done your thing and may had team and then strike through and then had turnis then you would have figured out. Anyway, that's true. This again, this wasune sevententh obbviously we know where this goes because today is june twenty fifth and stay tun But not there yet. Yeah, but u When this came out on june seventeenth, everyone was like, Oh, that's nice of Tim because, you know, we all know this bad news is coming. We talked about the, you know, the the RAM crisis and everything and what Apple's doing. and we talked about how like Apple has long term contracts for its parts. They don't buy them the day they make the things. They lock in a price for a certain amount and they do that potentially a year or two in advance But That timer runs out eventually. Like eventually all those deals that you made one or two years ago those end and then you have to buy things at market prices. And then Apple is not magical and immune from market forces. So even though we saw that Apple was holding the line on prices, it's like, well, if the commodity prices don't turn around And Apple runs out of all its deals, eventually, they're going to have to make some hard choices Tim Cook could have said, Yeahah, but's, you know We'll just leave this and John Turnis can announce the increases. Now we don't know Um whether like They had to be announced now. and so it was always going to be Tim Cook because turnus doesn't take over until September or whether he was doing what people thought he was doing in the seventeenth. because remember in the seventeenth, we didn't know when the price increases were coming or what they would be. So in the seventeenth, people could have been saying, Well, it'll probably be the iPhes in September and you know, it would be bad if Turnus' first keyne, he's got to announce all the Phones are like hundreds of dollars more expensive. So let Tim cook on its way out the door, soften everybody up. and then when Turnus announces it's like, well, we've already known this is going to happen right now That turned out not to be the case as we see in a second, but But this is, you know This is one of like the u Instead of a strategy tax, it's like a strategy credit or whatever, not quite the same thing, but like when you have something like this happen, you have a transition There's lots of downsides to a transition. Change is scary and there's lots of instability. you're not sure how things are going to go. But one are the advantages of a transition is you can do stuff like this. haveave the guy on his way out the door do stuff that is unpalatable No, I'm not talking about the Trump stuff. He did that while he was not out the door. L like announce be the bad guy. announce the price increases. Don't make your new CEO do it. And that is totally a Tim Cook move. And as we'll see, it wasn't really taking one for Turnis. It seems like it might have been just like something that they needed to be announce now and Tim Cook is currently the CEO. so it is what it is But yeah. And so that chart, the chart is terrifying. please we'll put a link to the image, but you can just go to the article. I think you can see it, even if it's paywalled, but if not look at the image in our linked in our show notes And then there was some tangents here to the story to say, just This chart here again, that goes up to nine hundred percent. How this has ripple effects throughout the entire world. And so this Wall Street Journal story continue with some more fun details on this Right Oh, So from the Wall Street Journal, three companies dominate the market for DRAM memory, Samsung, and SK Heinix in South Korea and Micron in the US. Makers of NAandDA storage include those three companies as well as Kixia and Sandisk Their stock prices, along with their profits, have exploded over the past twelve months, you don't say. Micron and A Heinix shares have risen more than eight hundred percent, while Kyoxia and Sandisk have risen. thousand six hundred percent. Anybody buy any Sandisk stock in twenty twenty four Good. Not gravy Good gravy. So this has led to some interesting corollaries, like John was saying. So reading from CNBC, few workers can say that their bonuses have been so large that the company's central bank takes notice But in South Korea, the phenomenon is playing out as workers from tech industries receive bonuses worth millions of wan, prompting the Bank of Korea to warn of the upward pressure of inflation. According to an unidentified union source cited by Reuters, a memory chip worker with a base salary of eighty million w or about fifty two grand US, is expected to receive a total bonus of around six hundred twenty six million wars or four hundred ten thousand US dollars this year. Holy craamp. Imagine you're working in the memory chip factory for fifty k a year and your bonus is going to be four hundred K. That's a pretty good year Yeah, That good for them. Ver, very good. This part I tried to find more details in this. I think like some of those their union labor and the unions had negotiated like a profit sharing deal before all this happened, which is like, you know, we get some piddling percentage of the company's profits as a bonus littleittle did they know that the profets are about to go off like a rocket ship. And so what seemed like a reasonable deal of profit sharing with the union now becomes guess what? You get a four hundred k bonus this year I'm in hands all the way. And then there was a Reddit post that I presume John stumbled upon, which is quite funny. Someone took a screenshot of a chat GPT conversation. and I guess what they're doing is they're building a custom PC or something like that. And again, this is a screenshot from Chat GPT. Chat GPT says to this individual, that is a very solid build, but I spotted one thing immediately And then big warning, rotating light The RAM price is wrong Your screenshot shows blah blah blah blah blah, thirty two gigs of RAamp four hundred and twenty dollars That has to be a pricing error or the company picked some weird seller The thirty two gigs of RAM should be around eighty doll or one hundred and twenty dollars, not four hundred and twenty. I'm still quoting now. If you actually paid four hundred and twenty dollars for the thirty two gigs of RamM, I'd call the police. laughing with tears in myyes, emoji. Oh Chat GPT. inccredible. it's the hot dog the mee with the guy in the hot dog suit, saying we're trying to find the guy who did this I'm sure I've seen that, but I don't know it offh hand, but no matter what how do you not see these memes You have children? that' going help you. old people see memes all I know about is six seven, John. That's the only thing I know these days. That bro is used as a comma Anyway. yeah, this is incredible. I mean, it's sad in terri if you're not an employee of those memory companies, but it is yeah they're gonna have to use all that money to buy their next PC though, hu? Yeah all comes back around, right? So then that was all june seventeenth. againain, that was Wednesday, june seventeenth. It is now as I'm sitting here today, Thursday, june twenty fiveth. And guess what Apple's rais prices. So there's another post at the Wall Street Journal. We'll put in both for the prior one we were discussing and this one, We'll put in an Apple News pllus link if you happen to be a subscriber. But anyways, one way or another, Apple has said The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We haveve never seen a component price increase this much this quickly We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and for Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions. We will put some links in the show notes. Our dear friend Stephven Hackett had a good rundown of this. There's a good post on Mac rumors. And additionally, Gruber had a post that we'll end up discussing here in a moment. But the fifty thousand foot view is that basically everything that isn't an iPhone, if I'm not mistaken, has gone up att least ten to fifteen percent and in some cases, as much as sixty percent I'm just going to jump to what I was going to say later, I can't resist. I'm gonna say it right now. The Apple TV that is ancient has gone from one hundred and twenty nine dollars to the base model to two hundred dollars, which is a seventy dollars increase or fifty four percent. The nice Apple TV, the nice Apple TV that has Thread and Eethernet is two hundred and fifty fif dollars to put things in perspective, and I know this doesn't mean as much to everyone else as it does to me, but I'd like to think we've all joined in my familial journey over the years putut things in perspective My daughter Mikaella was not in elementary school when the last Apple TV was released. It was I forget how many days ago now, I don't have the buyer's guide in front of me out, but it was thousands of days like thirteen hundred days ago or something like that. And she was not even a kindergartner yet that was when that was released. Let's see, what is it as I stall for time. one thousand three hundred and forty six days ago, when the Apple TV was most recently released, October of twenty twenty two My daughter, who was not yet in kindergarten I shouldn't say graduated, just finished second grade has gone through three years of school in the time since we have had a new Apple TV. What the fuck is going on? And why the fuck do they think this thing is worth two hundred fifty dollars? Are you out of your mind? What is happening? I think the M Sswell went up by sixty seven percent. Oh even worse. But I have to say I find this one of the least objectionable. Oh my go. Price increases actually Obviously absolute value it's not lot, because yeah, it's seenty bucks. percentage wise is big, but it is a cheap product But the thing about the Apple TV is like honestly, I don't quite know why Apple hasn't been gouging us even more on it ' because as time passes It's competition in the realm of thing you use to watch streaming video on your TV has just gotten like worse and That is fair. fair. it's just like, what would you pay for an App TV? And the answer is I'd pay more than two hundred fifty to not have to use like smart TV software like a streaming stick or some other weird thing. I'm not encouraging Apple to increase prices. This is all terrible, but that particular one doesn't bother me that much. although it is, I believe the highest percentage increase and But what we're going to mostly be talking about here are base prices because obviously we're getting into upgrade prices in a second, but the base prices have gone up and this is for like They say Macs and iPads, but Vision Pro is int there too, which is great The average price increase is two hundred and fifty eight dollars and the average percentage increase is twenty one point five percent whichich is bad, this is bad going up, but like depending on what you're looking at as the as the base price goes up the percentage increase, the absolute value goes up as well. So Apple TV, I think, is the worst with the base price going up fifty four percent. Some of them only went up like eighteen, seventeen, fifteen. U The big expensive Maxs with the big CPU's in them, like the M three Ultra Max stududio. thirty two point five percent increase, which isn't that bad, but that's an additional one thousand three hundred dollars to the base price. which is rough. Vision Pro got out easy with only only a five point seven percent increase. So they just added two hundred dollars to the Vision Pro And you can look at this chart and kind of see like products with RAM and SSD, the more RAM and the more SSD, the more the increases go up. So ye it's brutal. And the percentages are Weird and uneven, but if you look at the price increase, it's like two hundred, two hundred, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred, like they tried to make all their increases round numbers. There's a one hundred fifty thrown in there as well. and Apple TV is seventy and HomePod Mi is thirty, right? But they tried to make the round numbers And this makes me start thinking about the timing of this. like The whole, you know, we're going to have to increase prices announcement on the seventeenth. It seems like thing something came to a head at this point wherere like we can' wait until September. Like we can't just wa until September and just have like the new phones be more expensive. We have to raise the price on other products too, and there's no good time to do that. So why don't we rive off the bandaid and raise the prices on all of them? Now does that mean every single one of these products just ran out of its one or two year contracts for SSDs and RAM? No It's better than doing a piecemeal. So it could be that some of these products have been coasting on not having Apple style margins for like a month or two, and other ones could have another year of runway with based on the ram and SSD chips they already have or they already built for the thing But they're not going to do it based on like exactly when the things they're not going to wait tntil last minute. like if if any one of these products needs to be increased so we don't lose our precious margins We're going to do all of them now and we're going to do all of them by round numbers. Are these round numbers exactly how much more Apple has to pay to build them? Absolutely not. Like there's no way it would magically come out. So it just so happens. The low end products get like a hundred added and the other ones get no, it doesn't make any sense. But they just pick the round numbers. Their announcement uses careful words as always. It says Apple's statement says We have shielded our customer from these increases so far. I think shielded is the correct word because Apple's deals have shielded the customers from these increases in the same way that they've shielded Apple from the increases because hey, if we have a contract that says you're going to go this many ramp chips at this price And we haven't used all those RamM chips yet or the contract doesnn't run out We're shielded from the increase, and so are you as the consumer. But the second that contract is up and we have to buy at market prices, We're not going to eat that cost. right. And so they were shielding and then they're no longer shielding, but they're not no longer shielding themselves either. What they didn't say is we have been eating that cost for you. That's not what the statement says. Now, they may have been eating some of that cost. Like I can think maybe like on the NO or some other products that like you know, got caught by surprise by this or a super low price that maybe they actually have had reduced margin on some of these products But then I look at the price increase list and I say, well, Whatever products you had been suffering decreased margins on I think you're in for another few months of what I imagine will be. potentially better than normal margins, especially on the products that still have locked in contracts for components, but their prices still went up by twenty percent That's going to be some good margins on those and those will offset the other ones. So anyway, we'll see in their financial calls. I know we don't cover the minutia like that, but And across the board price increase like this on basically every Mac and every iPay plus division Pro in round number amounts is totally an apppple thing to do, which is like, let's do this. let's do it once, let's get it over with, and let's make the numbers big enough that we don't have to do it again and I would assume and we'll see, but I would assume that when they come out with new Macs and new iPads in the future they will simply adopt these prices as the new normal prices. L even if and when commodity prices go back down, I don't expect Apple to have announcement and say, hey Remember in twenty twenty six when we had to increase all our prices because commodity prices went up? Well, guess what? The IA bubble popped and now commodity prices are back down because there's a gl of RAM manufacturing capacity because it's twenty thirty and all these factories have been built They're not going to lower the prices back down. It're just going to keep them where they were. so This is the new normal for us probably Uh for multiple reasons. One All more capacity for SSDs and RAM is coming online. in a few years. So don't expect like this will be over tomorrow. No The only thing they can say of us is The factories get built in several years O The AI bubble bursts before that and AI companies have to start actually selling services at the cost of m you know, the whole giant influx of free money with which to by all the RAM chips in the world stops flowing for whatever reason. So what do you think will happen first? that the new factories will get built in three or four years or that the a bubble will pop? I don't know. I'm not predicting. this is not financial advice, but I would expect these prices to be with us for a while, which is terrible news for me Yeah Yeahah, not a good time to need to buy a very high spec Mac. I mean, like certainly everyone's focusing a lot on the base prices, but where you see even more of a hit is on those upgraded RAM and SSD sizes. Like I look today like the like a maxed out MacBook Pro right now is now a little over ten thousand dollars You know, before I think they Mac had around the seven thousand range. So it's especially like I was looking the the eight terabyte SSD on a MacBook Pro is now a three thousand dollars BTO option Cood G. So it's these are these are pretty big numbers. Most of those are up, you know, fifty percent to sixty percent. Now that being said You know, Casey you brou up the Apple TV example And the Apple TV was adated as far as I could tell quickly in twenty twenty two. And in that time, there's been about fifteen percent inflation. Like just inflation alone covers a lot of these for the older stuff. And like Ben Thompson hass been making this point a lot that basically in inflation adjusted terms, Apple products have actually been getting a lot cheaper over the last, know, five, six years. Well, the phones in particular. someome of the mac questionable, but definitely the phones. Yeah, because you know the reality is like This is we're talking about one reason why a particular type of thing is now more expensive We've been going through a pretty significant period of inflation, certainly in the U.S, and I think a lot of the world has too. You know, look around our lives Nothing costs the same now as it did even three years ago because everything is more expensive. You know, we had not to get, you know political much about this, but like, we have in addition to general fiscal dynamics and know interest rates and things like that, we also have ridiculous tariff chaos from our current president that throws the entire supply chain into Casen a moment. Then he started a war and you know ruined oil prices for a while. And so like all these things are going on in the world around us Of course everything's going to get more expensive. There is nothing in my life that costs today what it did three years ago except I guess, iPhone based prices, but that's probably not long for this world now either. R? So like I do think it is you know, I think Apple has been basasically eating inflation rises for us also for all this time I don think this is going to be that temporary. I think this is just what these things are going to cost for the foreseeable future you know, when more capacity comes online in two years, maybe supply demand will get in balced Maybe not Mbe the capacity that is being built today isn't enough We don't actually know that know it's, it's equally possible it's way too much, and there'll be a big glut and these companies will go out of business. Like there's certainly a lot a lot of you know, unknowns about this dynamic. But We are in the middle of a very inflationary period of all costs of everything going up And then also we're adding spepecifically problems with common computer components. This is just going to be our world for a while I think Apple has done a great job so far of not letting it show and not having it affect them or us particularly much. But That time is over and this is just what things cost now. So I think this is a good opportunity to Extend the lives of devices you have Um, you know, look for deals on used things maybe if you need, you know, if you need to get that get a discount to make to put something back into your price range Um you know, do what you can to be more efficient and pressure app developers and other people who who are making very memory hungry apps and stuff, like, you know, maybe pressure them to a little more concerned with that, but This is a really good time to already have a computer that you like. This is not a good time to need one And this is also going to affect Apple kind of broadly by Whenever they release new products in the coming years, deemmand is going to be a little bit softened by the fact that they're going to cost substantially more than they used to. you know, this this fall we're heading into pretty significant iPhone season. Like they're going to launch just foldable. Foldables are expensive Even before this, You think like now imagine like You know, what you know, the iPhone Pro, you know, you get you go now for about tw thousandve hundred bucks was that thousand twelve? What's the b price on the iPhone Pro S like that. Yeah You know, that's I figure that's probably going to be at least fourteen hundred now And then what's the foldable going to be? Like people were expecting before these price hikes that it might be two thousand dollars Um Yeah, thinking that might be conservative. Maybe it's twenty thousand five hundred. Well it depends on what they do with margins because Speaking of the upgrade price table, the grouper hatnness thing The upgrade prices for this stuff are a concentration of this problem to like because like the whole, you know, your whole Mac, your whole iPhone has lots of different components in it. not all those components are getting more expensive, right? But specific ones are If you're upgrading one of those specific components like Oh, I want to get a Mac, but I want more RAM in it Those are not twenty percent, fifteen percent increases. L can look at the group of Charts, someome of them are one hundred percent increases because that's where the problem is in the supply chain right now. If you want a bigger SSD, that's a fifty, sixty percent, seventy percent increase in price. And it's not just because Apple iss gouging it because that is the source, that's the source of the problem And speaking of the foldable phone and stuff, the foldable phone is more expensive because It's got more screen, it's got more battery, but screens and batteries aren't the things that are going up in price. Things that are going up in price are RM and SSD. So does the foldable and have more RamM and SSD than the prophone No, but it does have more screen and battery. So maybe that will actually take less of a hit because The things that it has more of are not appreciably hit by the particulars of the Ram and SSDris. Obviously just there's inflation or whatever, but like and it's a new product and it's complicated to build and it's folding. so it will definitely be expensive. but h yeah, the When I look at these tables of the upgrade stuff, all I can think about is like Apple's strategy of on device AI seemed so smart a couple of years ago. It's like, well, they have great silicon and everyone else has to have these big expensive data centers and Apple's going you know, if Apple tried to run data centers for its billions of iPhone use this would be really expensive. But if people can do it on device So that we got the Apple intntelligence RAM windfall year or two ago where Apple put more RAM in all its devices so they could run Apple intntelligence. Well, now we're in a world where Apple needs even more RAM. likeike they're increasing the RAM even more above and beyond what they did for like the old Apple intelligence for the new one because they want to run stuff on device Well, guess what's expensive now, specifically because of AI dentaenters. It's RAM because they're stealing it all and Apple needs more of it than ever on its devices to run its local models. So Apple's strategy of we're going to run local models because we have the best silk and is great until RAM is prices are destroyed. So I don't know if they're going to reconsider that policy. Like the rumors of all the upcoming devices are they will, in fact, have more RAM than the old ones specifically so they can run the whatever, you know the Apple foundoundation model, core advanced, blah, blah, blah like Apple is putting more RAM and all its devices above and beyond what that used to be the baseline for Apple intntelligence. so they can run this new stuff That's going to hurt prices way more than you would think because Yeah, it seems like those had to buy they had to buy that rAM at prices that were inflated. We'll see, we'll see what happens with the phone stuff But these Mac things, I feel like they're running probably running at an inventory and some of these are going to be replaced and their deals are expiring or they didn't have long term contracts for these things. But with the phone, I still have some faith that Maybe some of the phones introduced this September will benefit from locked in rates for certain components But we'll see as with the big price increases we just saw here, it probably behooves Apple that even if they do have good locked in rates for their components for the for the iPhones in September, just increase all the prices by two hundred dollars anyway because guess what? in a year, this will probably still be going on or potentially like the rumors are the rumors, The predictions are, this is going to get worse next year, notot better, but like it's going to get twice as bad as it is now in twenty twenty seven. So buckle up for that and that means Apple should probably increase the prices on all of its phones by a big amount so they can keep that price the same in twenty twenty seven and maintain their incredibly high margin. To go back several steps, I priced what is a modern facsimile for my current laptop. So I have an M three Max, sixty four gigs, eight terabytes because like Marco, I'm a fool I want to say I paid around abouts to five thousand dollars for this computer when it was new when the M three Max was brand new. This was late like. two or three years ago, what it late in the year three years ago. So it was five thousand dollars then Today, although I did option the nanotexture display because I want it, but leaving that aside, that's the only real difference thousandousand two hundred and fifty dollars. Y Mine went from seven thousand two hundred to an even ten thousandars Good, freaking go. So I'm really right now I'm really happy with my M three Max right now. It's like, o, do I want to spend ten thousand dollars to have the modern version? notot particularly For the past like month, I've been pricing out like used and refurbished like Apple silicon stuff, including like a used M two Max studio with a third party eight terabyte SSD in it and everything. I wonder if those prices are gonna go up too, likeike because I didn't pull the trigger on anything. I' like, oh It's still a huge amount of money And do I want to pay a huge amount of money for an ancient computer? Maybe I'll just keep holding out because it's what I'm good at. but Speaking of that Apple has by the way, also raised the prices on their refurbish Macs and iPads and you would think, wait a second the refurbished ones, those are already built and assembled and probably pre owned. Why are they going up? Well, market prices Dmand supply and demand. Yeah people want them because they dont they don't want to buy the new ones because they're too expensive. So the demand for the refurbished ones goes up, which raises their prices too Although I did see someone complain about this and I did not confirm it. But a question is Have they also increased the trade in prices? And the person was complaining that Apple hasn't increased the trade in prices, but I did not confirm whether that's true or not, but that's something to watch When you go to buy a new whatever Has your trading gained more value just because the price of all these things has gone up? We'll say, Narrator, no Right I'm just saying I didn't check it. I'm saying didn'tck it. I mean I'm sure I'm sure the value was up like on eBay or something, but not an Apple straight in world. No. I seriously doubt that will go up. It certainly hasn't yet And then we should note that this all happened, like I said today as we record this, Apple stock is down to six point one five percent today on account of all this So not a great day for Apple either. I mean, yeah. It's also worth noting we mentioned it before, but like these are Mac and iPad increases. There were no price increases for iPhones, watches or airPods iPhones, you just assume they're waiting for September to increase, you know, the new ones will be more expensive, okay? Watches probably the same deal and airPods Don't have SSDs have the tiniest piddling amount of RAM And so maybe aren't actually affected by this, but watch for that. Watch for the AirPods price increase and try to explain that. I mean, again, like inflation adjustment, it's not as if Apple has never tracked inflation. They do tend to increase the prices of their products over time They've held the line on the phones mostly because the margins are so massive and they find ways to or decontent them to keep their margins the same while keeping the price the same. But the phone is such an important product. They just like anything having to do with the phone is like multiplly by a billion and it's like it's scary to mess with that But the other products they', you know, adjusted over time. I will be watching the AirPods to see. I mean obviously they're going to come out with theirPods with the camera, IR camera, whatever, and those would be more expensive simply because you know, they have more stuff in them and they're the fanciest and the newest But the plain old air pods, the ones that are like the ones we have now, which I assume they will continue to sell in some form. I wonder if those will actually stay more or less the same simply because they don't use any of the components that are affected by this crisis, But the phones and watches certainly do. so watch out for that. And yeah, Wall Street says We don't like this apple we think this is not good for your business because if you raise the prices on all of your products probably going to make the demand for them go down and that doesn't bode well, but we'll see we'll see how Apple does. It may be a buying opportunity for people who want to get in and on the stock and you know, because In Apple's next earning call, they're going to be like, we sold more phones than we've ever sold you know, and then it goes back up again. But anyway, this is again, not financial advice. Don't play the stock I wouldd also point out though like you know, when you're thinking like the AirPods are not going to be as affected, firstirst of all, you know, they do they do have some RAM. I mean, almost every electronic device has RAM, NAN, storage or both. And I do think though, you know, you have to consider that Okay, well right now, These component prices are going up. So that means that now Apple's products are going up The companies that You know, like all the different companies that make all the components that go into AirPods All of their costs are going up around them. likeike all of their components are going up, their own, you know R and D costs are going to go up E as everyone in the world is facing inflation on all of their expenses, they have to demand higher salaries so they can afford regular stuff. And so Eone's costs go up broadly and diffusely across everything. So even things that are not directly affected They get the ripple effect I don't think there's any major product category, you know, in the same way that like fuel costs affect everything I don't think there's any major product category that's gonna to escape some effect of this Everyone is going to have to raise their prices on almost everything, almost everywhere Yeah, it's it's really not great. And I mean, again, I'm I'm very grumbly at Apple for just cranking up the cost of this freaking ancient Apple TV. But other than that, I mean, I don't really blame them for most of this. But there is some good news at the end of this story. We had three people either reach out or we had seen three people talking about how they had great timings. So Tim McGeary writes, I owe Marco a beer. I bought a MacBook Pro a few weeks ago based on his warning about Apple prices increases on ATP. Thanks Eron writes four or five episodes ago, Marco recommended that if you were planning on buying a MacBook, now is the time. I'm writing to than you. I bought a new MacBook air for my wife in late May, and that same machine is four hundred dollars more today And then a friend of the show, Greg Pierce wrote, Guess I pulled the trigger on a new M five Pro MacBook Pro at the right time. The specs I bought two weeks ago for three thousand four hundred dollars is now eight hundred dollars more expensive That's that's what happens I don't think the end is in sight. I also don't think this is the last price increase to happen in this wave Again, we're going to see more across everything And we're going to see significant ripple effects of those price rises. So you know, not only everyone's cost going up and everything that, but also We got to think like, how will this change the market for certain types of devices at all You know, as we know, when computing resources get very cheap, That enables stuff like raspberry pies and like all sorts of like fun and new new types of gadgets, new types of you know, new uses for hardware that used to be expensive or that used to be expensive and then got cheaper. Now we see the opposite of that categories of hardware are now just not going to be worth it. O are going to be you know such low volume customers of these component vendors that they won't even be able to get allocation of stock so they won't even be able to exist So you know, this this could affect things like, you know, obviously like in the medium sized market This could affect things like game consoles significantly. Al yeah EXpoock just announced price increases. And we'll talk about the Steam machine next episode, probably. Right. Like you know what we're seeing in that world is like consoles are being, you know price hiked or delayed. know peoplee are kind of just kind of try to get more of what more out of the current generations because it's just not a good environment to try to launch a new electronic that's not super critical This could affect other stuff like you know my beloved e ink tablet world or e readers. there's all sorts of electronic categories that Now that hardware is becoming more expensive and harder to even come by supply wise Some of these categories aren't going to make it orr they're going to kind of just be put on ice for a few years until things stabilize I think this is going to be in some ways a pretty dark time for the electronics business while in other ways like Also, AI is very exciting and opening up new possibilities for lots of people and lots of contexts. So It's a really turbulent time and some of it's positive and some of it's not if you're business or hobby life relies on. certain electronics being available to you, you know, maybe move some of those purchases up quickly It might be too late. Yeah on that topic again to call back to the episode we did about why everyveryone hates AI. it's like, oh, that's all well and good. You talk about that episode. what other people think? But now they come for your Apple hardware and all you Apple fans like, Well, suddly I care about it It was fine when they were increasing prices of stuff that I don't care about, but now they're increasing Apple product prices. this just can't stand. but this is basically it's all the same thing, which is like Obviously there is a massive investment. across the entire industry in AI. That massive investment is allowing those companies to buy up all the RAM in the world, like literally all the RAM in the world right They're not doing that because they're so rich fromfable from the profit they're making from selling their products. They're doing that with the money that they have invested because people think these companies are the future. And so they're piling all this investment in and they take that investment money and they shove it to NVidia and all the RAM companies and everything That is that's the bubble. It's just starting the market with all this money flowing into it and If and when This market distortion comes for the thing that you care about, our case being Apple hardware, but it could be anything, as Marco said, it could be, you know, garage door openers. They have chips and ram and everything like it's anything, right Yeah. And you know, as Marco said that just the general price increase everywhere, as we saw with COVID nineteen lockdown, people take any opportunity to price gouge, even if their costs haven't actually increased. Everyone else is doing it, they're just going to do it anyway because it's the thing to do. if you've got cover, it's like, o Ohh yeah, AI RM crisis. That's why, you know when that happens to you people are naturally going to think as I am right now Is this trade off worth it? Oh, AI is cool and exciting and everything, but there are things I hate about it and also Would I be happier with a slower growth in the AI industry in exchange for samee prices in Apple hardware or garage door openers or raspberry pies or e ink tablets or whatever you have And I think a lot of people would say Hell yeah, like AI is exciting and everything, but do we need to destroy the entire world economy to allow that that industry to grow as fast as possible Be people would look it's like, what am I getting in exchange for that? Okay, say you love Chat GapPT. It's the best thing since livepread, but then you look at the things the costs on the other side of it and you're like, even me is the biggest fan of this I'm not sure this balances out. So you hate AI and everything about it. Then you're looking at this and saying, Oh, so the thing I hate is making all the things I love worse. This makes me hate it even more. So Yeah, this like I feel like this is, you know, it's it's not imminent that something is going to happen, but things are going to have to come to a head. Like I said, it's either the case where we weighit out three terrible years, which like I said, will probably be worse than this year. L next year is predicted to be worse than this year, not better We were at all these years and they build capacity or whatever, and then eventually the bubble bursted as consolidation or whatever and then it comes back to sanity. O Maybe the bubble verse sooner, maybe Chickens come home through, Maybe these companies go public and it turns out when you're public, you actually have to turn a profit in a more reasonable time. Although look at Amazon. they spent a long time not turning a profit and they were did fine. So again, not financial advice, but like It seem the current situation seems both terrible and unsustainable in obvious ways that everyone is looking at and just like the financial people were like, well, this is just the horse race. This is just, yeah, we know this is all going to end in some kind of consolidation. and it's not going to go on like this forever and they'll be winners and losers and blah, blah, blah. But this is what we're doing now and screw the people who get sideswiped by the damage we're making. and then the rest of us are just out here like hitch to this wagon like I mean, nothing highlights this more than what was it the Stupid SpaceX IPO, which you may think, what does rockets have to do with AI The LM Musk is combined all its companies into one giant cluster of evil. Anyway, when companies are that big, These funds that buy like you index funds for like your retirement accounts end up owning them just because they're so big and they buy like the top five hundred companies or whatever as part of their index thing. And now SpaceX is part of that instantly because it's so big by market cap because it's a combination of Twitter and XAI and blah blah blah. And so all of a sudden, people's retirement accounts, people who do not buy individual stocks, this may be a more US centric thing but anyway, we have retirement counts here because we don't have any kind of social safety to speak of If you have an individual retirement account or a four hundred one K or whatever, and you have a bunch of index funds, this is a wide ranging paragraph. Yeah. You have an index fund. and now that index includes SpaceX, which is an AI company because they went public. And when this bubble bursts, oh, your four hundred one K gets screwed too. So we have that to fl look forward well, not only enduring all the pain of this, but when it does quote unquote end and things consolidate and the bubble bursts and wins and losers are picked and companies have to actually start turning a profit All our retirement accounts get screwed,'s like, I never consented to buying any of this crappy AI stock. Well, tough luck. If you're buying the S andP five hundred or some other index fund, SpaceX is going to be in there So yeah, things are not looking great financially for us and Like I said, for me in particular, because I do have this intntel Mac here and At this point, any kind of arm based Mac is looking like it's going to cost a lot of money. So I may be cruising on this for a while. I We made fun of my old Mac Pro that I had for over ten years. and it's like, well, that won't happen again. They did a processor transition right after you bought your new Mac. sureurely, you'll get rid of that one pretty soon I'm on year seven. so Tun in three years to see if I'm still running this intntel thing Well you can't on account of the OS, right I can just keep running the OS I'm not running twenty six. I know. I mean, yeah, I know. I'll do increasing amount of devwork on my M one MacBook air, which is what I'm doing which is but booted into Golden gate right now I'm sorry, John I really. I mean the good news is you have a precedent for spending as much as a civic on a computer. I don't I don't like but your voice haunting me, case you remember in the previous episode or a couple episodes ago, you were like, do you think you're gonna spend as much money as your Mac Pro and your new Mac? I'm like, No, that can't because I subtract subtract six thousand dollars because they're not buying a new mor knock on wood But now, maybe you're right maybe the eight terabyte M five M Mac studio with sixty four gigs of RAM is going to actually cost as much as my entire Intel Mac Pro setup from twenty nineteen John, it feels good to be right, but I did not want to be right about this. I mean, I'm really hoping though, because if that's a situation like Maybe like maybe I'll just get like the the Is the Max the smallest one?'re probably is gonna to be the smallest one. The problem is, they don't let you get eight terabytes in the Mac M mini. I'll be like, I'm gonna get a Mac mini Yeah. if you want eight terabytes, you got to get a Mac shift these days. and the smallest CPU that comes with it is the Max, right Yeah, I believe so. Yeah have to and you have to get the fancier max because there's at least on the laptops, there's two maxes and when I was pricing it a few minutes ago, I went to eight terabytes and it was like, o, no, no, no, no, no, no no. You need to get the super baller CPU before you can get eight terabytes. Thank you very much. Maybe I have to become an external disc person again and just have a bunch of discs and divide up my world into little pieces. I'm not looking forward to it. That is a problem for another day because I mean, this just makes it so much worse that like this exact same crisis essentially caused if the rumors are to be believed, the Mac studio that would have been announced to WWC to be pushed back because you know, because of this whole thing And now it is pushed back past the price increase horizon. So if andone Apple does roll out an M five Max based Max stududio, it will benefit from the price increases in both the base price and the upgrade prices that we just read because they are going to be this bad or potentially worse G pop. No. And o, and by the way, just for the record, in case this is unclear Space data centers make no sense because of heat and radiation and everything. And so yeah, that doesn't work. just for the record. J just putting that out there. That's not a thing. I guess that wasn't clearly a stupid idea. Right. L in case anyone doesn't know science, just look into what it takes to radiate the amount of heat that a typical data center rack needs to radiate into space. But Margo isn't space cold? Yeah, the problem is how do you transfer the heat from the chip to space. And it turns out there is a way to do it. It's just really large Um So yeah, that's that's not that's not going to be a thing You can just build on land, it's a lot easier and cheaper We are sponsored this episode by Zockdoc Raise your hand if you've been putting off a dental cleaning, an annual checkup or honestly any kind of doctor's appointment yourour hand up Mine is when something, you know, when I know I need something, maybe I'm feeling a little bit off like I am this week, honestly. What I usually do is either nothing or I'll search the web and try to like, you know, diagnose my symptoms myself or I'll ask an AI bot what I should do. But these are not amazing. If this sounds familiar to you, this year, consider doing things differently. Find doctors you love and book appointments with Zakdoc. ZockDoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high quality in network doctors, so you can find someone you love. There's more than one hundred fifty thousand providers available across all fifty US states. 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So availability on it is fantastic I know I personally I often put these off because it's such a pain to book them. Zakdoc promises to make that easier. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to Zakdoc dot com slash ap to find and instantly book a doctor that you'll love today. That's Zakdooc spelled ZodoC dot com slash ap Zockdooc dot com slash ap. Thanks to Zakdooc for sponsoring our show All right, let's do at least a touch of AskATP. and Brian Webster wrote, I don't know, maybe a month ago or so, given the soaring cost and unpredictability of RAM prices And given that Apple already manufactures its own SOCs and many of its own cell modems, would it ever make sense for Apple to start manufacturing its own RAM? They ship high enough volumes of RAM that they would likely get an okay return on investment in facilities for RAM production. It would insulate them from the supply constraints triggered by the AI boom. And most importantly, since they would only be paying manufacturing costs without extra profit margins, they could finally lower those ludicrous RAM upgrade prices, right? Right? You know the mee he's referencing here, which youes I do. All right, you know meme Marco, do you know this one? The Anakin padm mee. You're lowering ramp prices, right Right? Okay, well, that's we're batting five hundred. Casey knows the name and Marco doesn't. Again I don't know both of you exist on the same interternet as me. No, Marco does' know it. he just doesn't realize he knows it. Marco doesn't know it. He doesn't know how Anakin and Patm me are. No, I know you know, no, I'm very familiar with those characters from the terrible Star Wars prequels that Inexplicably, she falls in love with him and then dies of sadness. I mean there has there ever been a worst written woman in all of cinema? Well, doctors never believe women, so. She probably just had a blood clot like Serena. Oh gracious. Anyway so how do we want to approach this? I mean, obviously the clear answer is you can't just spin up know, a new RAM factory. And we were talking about that earlier, like it takes two to three years to spin one of those up. So that if you're a company that already does that. Right, exactly. So you should just read Joe Lion's answer because he knows the industry. R right. So Joe Lion writes, memory is a commodity. That's why Apple doesn't design it and also why they will never manufacture it. Eventually, same pricing will return But if Apple made their own memory, they would be locked into their own cost structure, and they wouldn't be able to bargain with vendors in multi source nor meet surge demand. Also, the Chinese government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building and propping up domestic memory suppliers over the past twelve years. And there's still several generations behind the leading edge. If Apple broke around on a fab today, it would be five years before the first wafers came out ten years before high volume yield on a decent process and fifteen years or more, or perhaps even never, before it would be cost competitive with the current DRAM vendors. That's the rememember that episode we did where we talked about like the silicon fabbing machines from SML and everything. you say, well, they're not making processes. they're making RM. It's the easiest thing to make. It's very regular and it actually is a little bit of a different process than use for logic and everything But the base facts remain the same This is not a turnkey business. You don't just buy the kit and like have a franchise and start a thing. These companies that have been doing this have been doing it for decades and decades and you can't catch them by just saying, Well, we'll just make a factory and do the same thing they're doing. It's incredibly difficult and complicated and anyone who has ever tried to do it, like the Chinese government example is great. What if you had It's basasically unlimited money, like the Chinese government is funding you, They want this industry to come up and it's taking them a long time. And they're not a private company that has to have investment. That the Chinese government is backing it, saying, We want to be contenders here. and they spent twelve years doing it and they're still several generations behind those three big companies. And Apple kind of sort of needs like the good RM best the industry has for a purpose in an iPhone. They can't, you know, you could put crappy RAM on the Apple TV, fine. But the iPhoneess kind of got to have the RAM best suited to the iPhone. They're not bargain shopping for that in terms of like, we'll just get a two year old version of it. No. they want the best. And so yeah Apple Even if Apple decided to do this today, it wouldn't help them unless this crisis goes on for a decade and a half, which God, I hope it doesn't But that's the kind of the timeline. But but the earlier point, I think is more important that Joe made that like It's a commodity business. If Apple is just making RAM for itself, the only way you can survive in a capital intensive business like silicon fabrication is you spend billions and billions of dollars building the factory' machines and expertise to make chips. And you need those things to be running and churning out money to make back your investment And so you can't have them be like a single customer. This is why Intel was in such trouble. You can't have it just be a single customer thing.'s like, we just make what Apple needs. Well what about when Apple doesn't need any more chips for the year Do you just let the factory sit there and be idle That's terrible. That' you'll lose tons of money doing that. You need to keep running that factory and selling people chips. And so you end up essentially in the RAM business, selling commodities to the entire industry. And Apple tends not to want to be in the commodity business, like we sell components to the world. But if you build a RAM fab, the only way it's a viable business is you have to sell RAM to everybody and suddenly you're not Apple making these special products just for your customers with big margins Now you're competing with the existing RAM vendors to sell the world. And it looks like great business now because everyone wants RAM. but again, you got to build the factories and learn how to do that over the process fifteen years. and who knows what the RAM situation will look like in fifteen years. But Apple essentially never wants to be in the business of manufacturing things for the entire world to use as parts in their products. They just don't do that. They have other people do that. And as Joe points out, they play them against each other to get better rates and everything But it's those people's problem what to do with the excess capacity in their factories. Now now it seems great. it's like There is no excess capacity. TSMC is running flat out. All the RM manufacturers are selling every chip they can sell. It looks like a great business. But that doesn't stay true forever. So if you spend a decade and billions of dollars build building yourself up as a commodity business for RAM, and then eventually the world changes and we're not in the current crisis, you either lose money hand over fist or you have to become a different kind of company and Apple doesn't want to do either of those things. So I mean, this makes sense when you as I think Brian lays out the question, like it makes perfect sense. Look at all the other things they do. it mentions the SOCs, but they don't make their own SOCs. They pay TSMC to do it. TSMC has that factory that they invest billions and billions of dollars into that they need to constantly turn out chips And Apple is not their only customer. Apple used to be their biggest customer, but not their only customer. So Apple doesn't want to do that. They want someone else to do it for them And they want to be able to, you know have things fabbed in Arizona for last years or two years old chips or whatever. So It seems like it might be a good idea, but if you look at it more closely, it is a thing that Apple is never going to do and would probably be a terrible idea. and even if they didn't, wouldn't save us from the current crisis Anonymous Rs, I remember a while back, there were stories about TSA doing searches of mobile devices as people entered the US. Does the new Sity open up any security or privacy concerns? Does Apple provide any settings that could mitigate these issues while traveling similar to one password's travel mode I mean, I guess if you allow Siri when unlocked, and I haven't used the new Siri yet. I've only got a couple of devices the new on the beta OSs and I haven't made it through the waitlist yet But if you allow Siri one unlocked and if it allows you to go searching your personal context without, you, like a face ID challenge or whatever, then yes, I suppose that is possible. But if it were me, even as an American, I would do the thing where you hold the side the buttons on either side for a few seconds to force a non biometric unlock. I would absolutely do that as I was approaching like immigration or customs or anything like that just to be safe. And that's how I would handle this. And at that point, you can't use Siri no matter what, until you type in your password and unlock your phone again I think that's very optimistic of a solution, but I think the reality is so you know, so that solution of like locking out the phones so biometric authentication doesn't work That's great if you are afraid of being arrested in your country and having you know having law enforcement try to get you to unlock your phone That's a different situation than like Border control entry. for a border interested situation, like You have to get through these people to get where you're going and They can just say no Like if you won't let if you won't give them access to what they want They can just deny you access to the country So it's a different situation. And I think in that case, like I think the for especially like for non U. S. citizens trying to enter the U.S I think we are such incredible jerks in that area. and again, that's only getting worse under the current administration. they might not have that option. like If they lock out their phone, then the border controlies can say, okay, well, I'm just not letting you in the country then. whatever you need to come to the U.S. for, it's not happening So it's a very different power situation I think if In this context, if one of our terrible border agents wants to ask you to show them your, you know, your Instagram account or whatever I think your only real option is to do it Or again, or like cancel your vacation or cancel the conference you're going to and leave. and that's not really an option for most people enturing the borders. So The reality is they're going just do it. And whatever technical measures you're going to try to implement, I think, you know, best case scenario is you could hide apps. Like that's that I think is, you know, if you if you don't want them to see that you have a certain app installed You can just you can you can put it in the hidden folder and make it require face ID. that's that's the best way to make sure an app like doesn't appear to exist on your phone so that if they you know, make you search for it. or whatever, it won't show up So that you can do If they're asking for your social media handles and they're going to look at that to say I don't have Instagram, it's a pretty easy thing to go for them to go verify. know So like I think that that kind of approach will work a lot better on certain types of apps than others. If you don if you want them to not see that you have like you know signal installed, that's probably a lot easier of a lie to keep up. Whereas if you say I don't use any social media They could very easily just check and find your profile if it's public. and then you're in trouble for a couple of problems. So Be very careful with this kind of thing, but I think hiding apps is a much better way to do it than assuming that they won't convince you to unlock your phone I don't know if the N new serory makes this worse. Like in theory, the new Sory is more capable, so a technically savvy person, if it was working from the mock screen, blah blah blah, could use it to be more successful, just because the old serory was so useless that you couldn't use or anything. But this assumes a fairly sophisticated attacker in the form of whoever is doing the screening here. If you want a social engineer your way to mitigate this, my advice would be to drain the battery on your phone and just tell that it's broken because they are they geniuses or are they going to sit there because you know how long IOS devices take when they're like the battery is totally drain. When you plug it in, it just shows the little battery with the thing. That takes forever and they're not going to wantan to wait. And if you just tell them it's broken and they can't turn it on, like that's social engineering. it's rolling the dice, but that may be your best bet in terms of mitigation And second best is, you know the password unlock thing or whatever. But it depends on the situation. This is talking about TSA, which I assume is just inside the US or whatever. So I would say the new Sa probably does make it slightly worse if you have a sophisticated attacker who knows that they can do things from the lock screen with Siri because you've configured it that way. But you can not configure it that way and you could also hold the power button your phone and require a passcode. and you can also drain the battery completely before going to the airport if that doesn't freak you out I know your boarding pass might be on the phone too, so you're gonna have to print it out like It's a terrible world we live in, donon't come from the U.S. It's not a good place to visit. Our government is bad Pretty much betteret of than room I don't know Rome has universal health carere. That's true. and will not arrest you for saying something on social media and won't shoot you dead in the street Yeah, I guess they do have a couple of things on us. lot, a lot. And they have one more wallet now than they used to. All right, thanks to our sponsors this episode, ZockDoc and Squarespace. And thanks for our members who supporter uss directly you can join us at AP.fm slash join. One of our many perks of ATP membership is ATP oververtime, our weekly bonus topic every week We do about twenty more minutes of content on some topic that just wouldn't fit in the main show because as you know, a lot of stuff happens in computers. So this time on oververtime, we're going to be talking about Anthropics Fable and John's quote LM bug releases. We're going to hear what that means in oververtime If you want to hear that, join AWWFM slash join. Thanks everybody, and we'll talk to you next week Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin ' it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ' it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes atp dot m And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at CAS EY L ISS that's Casey Lis M A R C O A R M Anti Marco Armen SI R AC USS Sacuse It's accidental to accal acc The check podcast so long So John, you wanted to talk to me about a blog post I wrote recently. What's going on? We're gonna jam it into the overtime because it was like kind of AI related things. and I had this overtime topic in before you wrote your blog post, which was just a happy coincidence. but we figured we searate out because it's more like after show material because it's you talking about your feelings and your feelings and your feelings about AI, evenven though like, again, the overtime is going to be about anthropics fable and all the drama there and me using fable, but you've also been using AI. and beforefore I read your blog post, I was like o, this is great. Casey has the exact same idea as me. He's going talk about exactly the thing that I'm going to talk about and And then I read your post and I'm like, no, It's totally different. So summarize what you wrote and why you wrote it. Yeah, so when I was at the beach a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, whatever it was during WWC week I had somebody write in and they were very kind and very polite and they said that something was broken. And the particular something, if I recall correctly, was that U In callall sheet for the last several months now, you can Turn on or turn off different sections of the discover screen, which is to say the screen that you land on when you open the app coold. And so maybe you don't care about recent TV shows, and you can turn that section off. And maybe you want to see now playing information from like Plex or Jellyfin or something, but you don't want that to be front and center at the top. You want it to be toward the bottom of the screen so you can rearrange them and so on And I'd had reports, sporadic reports since I released that feature that For some people, their settings would get ploughed over every time they restarted the app and I had no strong theories about what that was other than Well, maybe they're like force quitting the app before user defaults has a section of like flush its before it has a chance to flush its like queue, if you will I don't know, man, user defeault is the mechanism by which most apps save like user preferences onto your device. and It's got to be up there on the most you know, battle tested like almost flawless bits of the IOS SDK. So it was a very weak theory that I held very loosely. But this person wrote in and you said, oh, it's not working for me. They were very kind about it. They weren't jerks about it. And I asked a follow up question here and there and then got a log file from them, which was very kind to them to spend the time with me and and give them, you know, or give me that log file and There's something in log file that made me go, huh That doesn't seem right. And I'm at the beach. I don't want to sit down and like properly do work, like I don't want to bust out X code. I don't want to like really, really do work. So I thought to myself, well let me talk to my budy Claude And let me see what Clad code can come up with And so I asked Claude to take a look at this one particular section of my code. And the literal verbatim query that I asked of Claude was In usersettings. save, I save the user's preferred arrangement of sections of their main or discover screen on call sheet. Sometimes users will report that this setting is reverted to the default. I'm completely at a loss as to how or why that could be happening. Can you take a look and see if you have any guesses, please That was the entire prompt It obviously has access to all my code, but that was the entire prompt. It was a brand new session. I'd given it no other information And this had been happening for months now. And again, I glanced at it. I'd looked at the code here, looked at the code there Couldn't frickin figure it out So I asked Claude and it churned for some amount of time. I want to say it was between two, maybe five minutes tops and it said Oh, I think I know what this not veratum anymore, but I think I know what this is. and it spelled out what it thought the problem was. and it wasn't changing code at this point. it was just saying, here's what I think the problem is actually so I'm looking back, this is the compressed version of the conversation, but you know I had my prompt and it does says, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Found it. Let me confirm by looking at discover section state, which is a piece of my code and the constant keys you read for a little bit. I've found it. let me confirm nothing else writes the old toggle keywood now I'm getting into specifics. but then Confirmed. I have a strong guess, and it clearly explains why only some users see it And it turns out that there was a very brief window of time When I allowed users to turn on or off sections of the Discover screen, but I did not yet have the code written to rearrange sections of the Discover screen And That was a released version of call sheet, not just test flight, like a honest to goodness, released version of call sheet And I sent that out into the wild, and then very briefly thereafter, I released into the wild, the version that lets you rearrange things. And it turns out the specifics aren't particularly important, but it turns out that the way in which I was trying to key off of, well did they have the version that only did the on and off, or do they have the version that does on off and rearranging When I was keying all when I was looking at that and trying to do like basically a migration, I screwed it up. It was myault I screwed it up such that if you had run the version of the app that did the on off, which again, only existed for maybe a week at most, And then went and did the migration and went to do the other newest version at the time, which was the one that allows the on off and rearranging I screwed up the way I did that migration, so it would keep migrating every time. and every time it migrated, it would clear out what was there and it would reset it anew. So the reason it was sporadic was because was only people Potentially who messed with this setting or at the very least, that ran that one specific version of the app. I don't remember what version it is offhand And Claude found it and it found it in Five or ten minutes And that was that And I thought, okay, well, there's one other thing that's weird. Occasionally when you override the language settings or the region settings in call sheet, similar stuff happens. Now that That isn't user defaults. that's what is it Cloud ubiquitous key value store or something like that? It's basically like st. Yeah, than you. It's basically similar to user defaults, but it's store in iCloud, right And I don't remember the specifics and it doesn't really matter, but suffice to say it looked at it for a few minutes and said, oh This is your problem. And again, it was me being an idiot at the end of the day. That's what it boiled down to. But it was fascinating that here I am at the beach and I'm obviously like paying attention to what's going on. and when it presents a theory I don't remember if I had it implement the fix, but at the very least, when it presented the theory, I looked at it and then I did end up opening up ExCOe because now nerd I've nerdnide myself. but it presents the theory and then I look at ExCO and say, Ohh, no Nope, this sounds right. Yep, yeep. that's got to be it. And so then I either implemented it myself or I think what I might have had to do is like do a first pass and then I rejiggered a fair bit of it. And then I asked it, okay, I've rejiggered what you've done. you know, does this still look right Does this still look right to you et cetera, etera What was fascinating about this was This is two different bugs That again, wholly my fault. I'm not trying to deny that they're my fault, but two different bugs that were very permitious and very tricky and that I had been trying to figure out what the heck was going on again, on and off for months I would look at it, you know for a few minutes here and then I'd decide I still don't get it. And then I'd look at it for a few minutes another time and I still don't get it bothoth of these bugs And Claude was able to look through my code and figure it out And what was so striking about this and I was sitting on the couch in the beach house and I was leaning forward on and because my laptop, my five thousand dollars seemed to be eight thousand five hundred dollars laptop, was sitting on like the coffee table I've caught myself leaning back. against the, you know, the back of the couch And thinking to myself, holy God coworer again. I haven't had a coworker in the better part of eight years. it's I think eight years justs a week or so shy of eight years that I've been independent, which is also bananas, but anyway I have a coworker again because what this felt like was so it felt like so much like me saying to a coworker, hey I'm banging my head against the wall. Can you take a look at this code and see what you can figure out and working through the problem together. And let me tell you One of the things, if not the thing that I miss most about being about working with coworkers and partarticularly doing so in person, although, you know, maybe this would be just as f just this would work just as well remotely. but My memory of it was in person because it was eight years ago I miss so desperately being in like a conference room, standing in front of a whiteboard and working a problem Or maybe standing you know maybe sitting in front of a projector, you looking at a looking at code together and working a problem and more than I have at any point in the last eight years I felt like at least when it comes code, obbviously I have coworkers with you guys, with Mike in other cases as well. But when it comes to writing code Suddenly I had a coworker again and As I said in the top of this blog post, as a pundit And as a person, I still don't know what I think about AI. And I echo what you were saying, John. Like, yes, there's so many amazing things that AI provides for us like this very moment, But is it worth my computers being twice as much? Is it worth the possibly systemic inflation as we were talking about earlier I don't know. As a pundit, I'm really not sure how I feel about it But as a developer This was an incredible feeling that really felt genuinely good. And as I hear myself talking, I I'm a little uncomfortable with how much I feel like I sound like, oh, I just I found myself a girlfriend, you know what I mean?ike obviously it's not all the same, but it almost was like a Not a relationship feeling, but like, oh, this is an interpersonal thing or on the verge of an interpersonal thing that I haven't had in so long. And I know that I could get either one of you or both of you on a Zoom call. And if I was really desperate, you would work with me with work through these problems with me. but It takes so long to bring any human being up to speed on my code base in the way I like to write code that Even if they would have taken either of you ten minutes to spot the bug. It would have taken the three of us working together or the two of us working together ten hours to get up to speed and the way my code works. and as a developer, thinking myopically as a developer This is such an incredible boon to my ability to write code and do work and fix problems. And I'm so enthusiastic about it and so excited about it. As a pundit, as a human, as a person U I don't know, as a developer, holy crap it's so cool Yeah, I have found I'm leaning more into that that opinion as time goes on. you know, when you look at Even just what you're saying now, like even just the bug fixing and testing abilities of modern AI tools it dramatically changes the landscape of software development. L even even if you're writing most of your code yourself, like the other day I look If you're an overcast user, there's a couple of things that you probably have with problems with the app. And some of them are probably obscure bugs. And one of the most common obscure bugs that I get reported is basasically unexpectedly large storage usage. like somewhere something is leaking temp files or something and What is going on? Why are some users getting really high storage usage for overcast And I have thought for a while this was related to the background download dememon because it creates these weird like NSRL session D folders in various places and fills them with crap. And you know, maybe at some point the tem files aren't being cleaned up properly. And so I've had logic in Overcast to try to clean those up over time and one of that like I actually I rewrote the downloader a few months back in the fall And I actually made it a whole separate component. I gave it a name. I might open source it at some point. It's like a whole separate thing because I was so tired of having to deal with downloader bugs and I feel like let me actually write a good one and open source it so that nobody has to deal with downloader bugs and maybe other people can help me fix my downloader bugs And it turns out, you know, most of the things have open sourced They don't get a lot of users because don I don't make the kinds of things people want and I don't support them in the kind of way that open source software N needs to be supported to get a lot of community around it well Um, but I said you know what? the other day just last week I asked Claude Hey, here's, here's this component in overcast that's the downloader People reporting the soft this this storage usage. I can't figure out why Look through this component, it's probably here and try to figure out why. and fix it And sure enough, it churned away for a while. It read a bunch of stuff, It dumped a bunch of garbage to the console And then it found a bug There is one case where I I had like, you know, I was testing a boolean condition with a knot on it And I had logic backwards. Oh, this is like a weekly occurrence for me, and I'm not proud of that. But oh my gosh, I need one of those signs. you know, It has been zero days since I've screwed up basic Boolean logic Oh my gosh, I'm right there with Well, of course we're programmers,'re humans. that's like programming involves a lot of Boolean logic. and it turns out humans aren't perfect. So it found this inverted bullying condition. I never would have spotted this The only way this would have ever gotten fixed is next time I rewrote the entire component, maybe I wouldn't have made the same mistake. Yep, Or if you had tests. Well maybe this would have been a hard one to come up in a test, honestly. But yeah, point taken. and I've had Cloudwrite tests for me too. It's wonderful. On the topic of buooing logic though, I've never even proposed this and every know has proposed it would have surely been shoted down with this exact argument. but I come from a language that had the keyword andless So you didn't have to do if exclamation point condition you could do in less condition you know, anyone who hasn't used that thinks it's going to be the end of the world because they're going to, oh, it's going to make me screw up the logic because I can't handle it, right Um, guess what Swift has? Gard condition else Yeah. Oh yeah. And guard condition else is I would say, worse than an unless key word in terms of making you accidentally put the wrong bulling logic in a condition, especially if you convert an if to a guard once you realize it's kind of a precondition Don't forget to reverse all the logic of all you people out there saying, I'm never going to allow unless and swift, you would love unless. And guard as much as I like it. and I understand the function it serves in the language guard else P particularly like that I've come to enjoy the guards, but linguistically it is kind of weird, but I like the function. Anyway, you know, Claude found this bug and it could very well be related to some weird edge case downloaded behavior And the downloader never cleaning up those temp files that are abandoned by the system. So like if If the background download demon abandons a file, like if the process crashes maybe. then that file might never be cleaned up. This found that bug and While it was there, it found a couple other little bugs that might affect background download terminations Nice. Oh, and by the way, and it was it was giving statements to me in in like the feedback chat stuff about like, oh, when users delete episodes I never told her it was a podcast app I never the component it was looking at was not dealing with episodes. It figured all that out just from the rest of the code This is amazing and You know, I I come from a little bit different angle in that It's been a much longer time since I've worked with other programmers And I never work with that many of them. L my biggest team I ever worked on programmer wise was like six people. I'm not coming from the corporate world where I'm used to having a lot more infrastructure around me, a lot more like testing and process and things like that. Like I don't come from that world, so I don't know it The way I see this so far is like Not only is this allowing me to Write better software The kind of bugs is finding, You know you know how to do next Overcast fans I'm having it look at my priority podcast logic because the priority podcast insertion into playlist with priorities set on them Ever since the rewrite, people have been very upset that it has weird behavior that they don't think is right And that's a really hard thing to write tests for And of course, I'm not going to do anyway. But Claude can and Claude also found some logical bugs in that. And so I'm going in the next few days probably, ship an overcast beta update that includes that download fix and these priority playlist fixes and people can start telling me how they work for them And these are these are like really Obscure little logical things. L like the priority playlist thing was like, A greater than less than was flipped backwards littleittle things like that are just really hard for humans to find. And it's and it found them like the first time I asked to So it's allowed me to write better software. and it's allowing It's allowing me to continue being a one person team for longer. Now, I don't know how long I want to be a one person team with Overcast to be honest. I've been honestly thinking about maybe trying to hire another programmer to help help me, you know do more things because I feel a little bit stretched right now Claude gets me some of the way there in terms of like, If I have like certain bugs on my hit list I can have it take a look And it fixes about it dis disclosure, Claud has been a sponsor of our show and probably still will be. But honestly, all this also applies to Codex and everything when you have it, look at it's just like AI broadly rightight now, I happen to be using Claud. but anyway I also think like from what I've heard Apple also uses Coud internally a lot over the last year or so Well, look at what happened at WBDC this year. when they scrolled by those giant walls of text of Oftentimes fairly small but nice little fixes How do you think Apples did all that in one year It's not because they had a change of heart and realized software quality now matters. No, it's because they are using Clawud to fix their own bugs. and to help them develop things more quickly And that's going on across the industry. So I think even though this is this is kind of a It's going to be a bumpy ride for lots of reasons as we've talked about, you, both for like a straight up like AI coding and security perspective, which we'll talk about more in the in the over time. Also to just everything we've been talking about, you know AI itself is very disruptive and turbulent and causing a bunch of turbulence in the world and is not a universal gain for everybody But spepecifically in the area of software and software quality. I think it's a huge boon because Everyone can start finding and fixing really weird obscure bugs that a human never would have found When you see Apple's giant Wall of text WBTC slide, you can tell That's what's going on here They are fixing their own stuff and we are all benefiting from it So I Again, it's as Casey said, like this is not a universal good but There are some real benefits to this and specifically this area And I am here for that Yeah, and just very briefly and I also covered this very briefly in the blog post, but I'd like to reiterate here In my perfect world I would have enough money coming in from Call Sheet where I could hire somebody either you know, halfime or full time to be that person that we can work together to figure these things out. But That Call Sheet does not make that kind of money. It does make enough money to handle a, you know monthly fee from from Claude, which I'm now paying. I mean, they did sponsor in the past and I was rolling on the freebies that they gave us when they sponsored, but but now I'm paying them and I'm choosing to because it has been that transformative for me. Now, again, in a perfect world, I'd much rather have a human being to work with on this T to be honest Id still probably ask Claude some of these questions, but I think there's something to be said for having a human and having a human do these things and make these decisions and use what makes humans uniquely wonderful and amazing to figure out some of these problems. Since I don't have that and I cannot afford that with call sheet alone The next greatest thing I could do is ask Claud. And I think that the thing is, what I'm saying in a roundabout way is This isn't the question of hiring a human or hiring Claude. a human was never going to be here. I just don't it doesn't Hul she does not make that kind of money. So the question is Do I fix these bugs by using the tools that I have at my disposal or do I not, right? And that's the thing. And so because of that, I don't feel too guilty about it. I feel guilty about AI in the broad strokes like we were talking about, but in this one specific way, I don't feel too guilty about it at all. and it is so rewarding having What isn't a person, but occasionally kind of feels like a person to fire questions at and work with and figure out problems. And again, even a lot of times I don't take the code that Claud writes, or I vastly change it to to fit my preferences and style and so on and so forth But having it identify where a problem is, like I said, like Marco said, is incredibly valuable, incredibly valuable. and it makes my product better, which makes my customers happier. And I think that's very cool Two things on tops you touched on first, Marko on the B big Wall of techs and Apple fixing bugs. I'm sure Apple's using all the same tools everybody is to find their bugs, but you still need the essentially corporate mandate that that's where they're allowed to spend their time because every bug fix requires understanding the bug, finding it verifying the fix and the risk inherent in changing any code and blahah blah. And all of that requires a corporate mandate, an actual decision to, hey, this release we're going to fix bugs. Once that decision is made, yes, the tools make bug fixing way more efficient as before, but I still give credit to management deciding We are going to fix bugs this release. Maybe the decision was influenced by the increased power of the tools available to do that, but it's the decision and management that's the most important part, In other words, if Apple hadn't made this decision and these tools were available, they still would have been forced to do whatever features there have to do for the release and they wouldn't have been able to spend time with these tools of Fixoxs Maybe they would have snuck you in because they're more powerful, but nothing like what we saw. So Kudos to Ale for deciding to spend time fixing bugs. And Casey on your Bog post I do feel like even though you've spent a lot of time talking about the nitty gritty of the bug or whatever, I felt like the thrust of your post was what you were getting out at the end there, which is like the feeling of working with someone else and I feel like you're post essentially identified or crystallized for you a need that you have. And I'm sure this is not a surprise to you. You know you miss working with people or whatever, but like having that experience with the coding agent was like, you know I really do miss working with people. I miss this Yeah this kind of reminds me of that. And here's a need that I have in my life On the flip side of that, I would say that even though this evokes that feeling and reminds you that you want it, you know the AI thing is not a person. I know sometimes it fools you into thinking it is, but it's like That's that's a dangerous trap. I mean, it's a trap that a lot of people fall into. Obviously, it's more dangerous the more these things are able to fool people into thinking that they're a little person that they're talking with. And so I mean, in all cases When someone finds themself in that situation It is highlighting a need, not fixing a problem. And the need is I have a need for human context, right? I miss my coworkers or whatever. That need is not filled by talking to an LM agent unfortunately. So take if you find yourself using one of these things and finding, it's like, I find myself I just love talking to it and it makes me feel better. That's highlighting a need that is not fulfilling that need. So please everybody LM's or not people But But the need is real. and I feel like that experience and like what you took away from it is not entirely, oh, I just I now I have a tool to make my apps better. That's part of it. You just talked about it, but also I've identified somethinghing that I'm not getting in my life, especially if it's something that you used to have, unlike Marco, who is far removed from that and never really had it to the same degree as you You could find other ways to get that. I mean, I mean, working on open source projects or other things where you're collaborating with someone on code. Doesn't make sense to do it for call sheet for the reasons you stated becausecause you'd have to hire someone to do that because it's not like someone's going to help you with your app for fun. But that's you know that's maybe argues for like say you get super into Jellyfin or home assistant or whatever like dabbling in that environment. It doesn't become a second job or a third job or a fourth job or whatever, but like that could give you that experience of working with other people. And then you also mentioned like You could have had someone else like As some other programmer, you know to look at this thing and see if we could figure out the bug or whatever. Well guess what? If you asked another programmer to do that, if you asked me to do that I would have said, why don't you just askk the agent of your choice to find both. L because and that highlights the role of these tools from my perspective is they are tools There have been tools that will help you find bugs in your program before LMs. There's, you know, fuzz testers and valel grind and don allt like This is not the first tool that humans have ever made that helps find bugs and programs. It's an amazing powerful one that surpasses all others. Yes, but it's not the first one And so if you were ask another human today to come in and help you find bugs in your program, this would be the tool that they would pull out. They wouldn't spend ten hours learning your code. It's like, well, let's do this for five minutes at least. And if it can't find them, oh well, then we'll dig in. But ignoring the tools available to you as a programmer is counterproductive unless you're taking some kind of moral stand against it, which is fine But I'm saying most people who you asked would would grab for the same tool that you are already going to use anyway. And that's how I view these things. They are in fact tools for programming. tools with questionable origins and bad externalities and whatever, but in the particular case of programing, as I' argued in the past I personally believe that it is possible, not currently happening possible to make a ethical environmentally responsible created under ideal circumstances, blah, blah version of this, simply because Code like to give an example If Apple trained its own coding agent, if it was not terrible at doing that, let's say they were actually good at doing it. They trained their own coding agent onn all the source code Apple has ever created That would be an incredibly powerful agent for writing for Apple platforms, just based on the code that Apple owns because it wrote it That's what it would be trained on And they would do a good job of it and they would hire people to like, you know, like just they could make an Apple centric coding agent And then run it on you know, in data centers run one hundred percent from renewable resources, you know, like can do all the things. like it is possible because we see the technology is there. and it's like, well, isn't the rest of it just details? I mean, it's kind of important details. So if you're living in Memphis and you got XAI data centers spewing out smoke next to you, it is not a it is not a theoretical thing. It is a real terrible thing. So I get that but like My techno optimism says But I can see how it would be possible to both have this useful tool and not destroy the world and bankrupt us all and blah, blah, blah. Currently that's not the path we're going on which sucks, but it seems possible. So I do feel like this kind of tool will inevitably become an essential part of every programmer's toolbox eventually Hopefully not in the current form that we'rent currently have it available to us. and perhaps after a long dark period of it being so expensive that nobody can use it becausecause if we were paying the true cost of the things that we're doing right now, none of us would be using it either. because in the same way that callall sheet doesn't make enough money to hire another programmer, it also doesn't make enough money to pay for the tokens you've been using If you look at what the actual cost of you're getting, whatever you're paying for your agent for a monthly thing, that is not the true cost of what you're getting. The true cost is thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars And that's a bubble, folks. And so someday, maybe by the time that ends, infrinnce will have gotten so much more efficient with dedicated ASI six and everything and we'll all be running on renewable resource data centers and all that stuff. But like we're not there right now. So It's a weird time to be in, but I do I did enjoy your blog post less for the technical aspects of it, which by the way, we will get into more and overtime because it's more in that vein, but more in terms of like What I felt like your thrust was in the post, which was like I miss programming with people. Yeah, which is whichich is a very strange conclusion going in to say, oh, I use these cool AI tools to do coding or whatever. And the lesson is I miss coding with people Not because the tools are bad, just you explain how the tools are good and helped you, but because it reminded you of what it was like back when you work with people. And I felt that too because I used to work with people as well. And that's, I mean, if you're ever listening to this program, it's like, well, I wantan to be a cool indie developer and support myself and do all these things. There are lots of upsides to that, but there are downsides too. And one of them is if you came from a world where you were working with other people Even if you're not particularly social like me, just working with people in their capacity as fellow programmers on a problem or working with people on any kind of problem, programming or otherwise is fun h and, you know, rewarding And when you're working on your own unless you can hire a staff, and even if you can, by the way, because your staff aren't necessarily going to be your friends, especially if you're like your boss or whatever. it's a downside of being an indie developer is any developer loneliness, I guess. Andh yeah, yeah, that's's that's what I took away from your posts and I thought it was good I think the thing I missed the most from working in an office is lunch Like with other people, just being able to hang out. You can have lunch at home Mark. it's okay No, I hear you. I really do. I mean I was lucky enough to work in very, very ress isn't the what I'm looking for, but places where they did not micromanage every second of my day for the most part. And I remember like at my most recent jobby job, this is when the switch was brand new or very new. There were a handful of times that we would go down to the cafeteria and all of us would do eight player Mario Kart races with our switches for a little while over lunch You can do that to a degree over the internet, but it it's fun and different doing it in person. And yeah, you're exactly right. That was the thing that struck me so much about this experience was reminded me of having coworkers and I do miss that quite a bit. I not I'm not trying to complain I live an incredibly blessed and lucky life. I'm so thankful to everyone listening to my words right now because you, you listening to me makes my life, Marco's life, John's life possible 't please don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not trying to complain. But as John said, there's something to be said for having coworkers, for having people, even if they're just work friends, and once you leave that job, you never speak to them again. It's still nice to have work friends. and I miss that in the development capacity. I'm so lucky to have that with the two of you, with Mike and with others from a podcasting capacity, but I do miss it quite a bit from a development capacity.