Beta Performance and Future Outlook

Hello and welcome to MacPower Uers. My name is Stephen Robz, and I'm joined by Apple Pricing Cairvoyant David Sparks. How's it going, David? Hello, Mr. Roblz. How are you today? I'm doing well if our meembers listen to our third bonus episode, you recounted your story of buying a MacBook Pro And now it looks like you're the smartest person Yeah, So now it's out there. I've been talking about it in the labs too. I upgraded guys. I went from M two stududio to M five MacBook Pro. and I was worried about the pricing. I'd like to say I was clairvoyant, but also I just wanted a new computer. Well it was sendipitous. That desire and what happened with pricing coincided as it did. And we're going to get into that a little bit. I think you both have thoughts. We did want to plug a couple fun things. We just stopped recording as we're recording this episode our monthly bonus with friends, Mike Schmidz and Chris Bailey as part of the relay bonus episodes. and we did a draft. I thought it was super fun, d. Yeah, it was. We did a productivity abs draft for each one of us and My goal going into it was to get obsidian before Mike Schmidz did. That was my goal. It actually was really fun, you know, because Mike's serious guy. He had a plan and we all were just like, it was like herding cats. And I think the episode came out really good. So Check it out That' be super fun members. Yeah later this month or sometime this month, it'll be coming out. So it'll be super fun. And on more power users today, I'm so glad you put this topic in the rundown becausecause I have seen Tor Story five with my entire family And we're going to talk about it and it is tech Very tech adjacent, tech related. Yeah. No, I want to talk about it with you. We went and watched it over the weekend and It it wrecked me as Pixar movies do all the time. Ill have to tell you the story of how I tear stains on my Vision Pro ft on my Vision Pro golfess. but can I let me just tell you. I wore Vision Pro and used it as I was traveling to Dub Dub and I hadd been meaneting to watch shrinking the third season And if you've seen it shrinking' is an excellent show, it's on my list. I haven't watched it yet. everyverybody says I should Yeah. It's very good. And if you cry at Pixar movies, you'll likely cry at shrinking. And I was watching it in the Apple Vision Pro and that light seal just gets soaked. It's like, what do you do? Do you stop you? take it off? That happened to me too. It was Mojana, frankly, that got me F first movie I watch it I look I'm like, wow, this the seal is not going to be the same. would we cannot watch a movie together, Dave, because we' probably just both be blubbering and crying. Yeah I know. I cry I cry at a lot of movies. I'm very emphatic, is that the word? Yeah emotivempathetic. empathetic. empathet. There there we go. Yeah. And Pixar movies especially I've not watched Coco because I specifically am a little nervous at how much I'll cry at it. so I've not not done it. Watch it alone. It'll get ugly. Okay. Well, you know what else got ugly, David? Thanks for that segue. is the Apple pricing schedule. Oh boy. Oh boy. This happened just as we're recording last week and it'll be about two weeks since youre as you're listening to this, but Apple raised prices on all the iPads, the Macs on things like homeome pods and Apple TV's with have a slight bone to pick there But pricing has stayed the same for iPhone and Apple Watch at least for now. We'll see what happens in the fall. But man, the the M five Mac MacBook Pro that you bought has gotten significantly more expensive, David. Yeah. I got a loaded one because I wanted to run local AI on it. so I had to check a lot of boxes And if I bought it today, it would cost two thousand eight hundred dollars more than it did two weeks ago That that is wild. And I looked up. so I bought my Max studio last May. It was the M four Max version And I didn't need to upgrade at the time. I had an M one max and it was okay, but I'm glad I did because one My configuration is no longer available I have the M four Max forty core GPU, one hundred and twenty eight gigs of unified memory You can't get that anymore. You can only get sixty four. Or you have to go to the M three ultra to get ninety six. That's it C can't get any more unified memory that on the Mac stududio right now And but if you calculate the upgrade on a MacBook Pro From sixty four to one hundred twenty eight unified memory, My Mac studio, a year old, even would be three thousand dollars more Yeah And that is wild. And even MacBook No is one hundred dollars more expensive. M of the iPad lineup iPad Ps two hundred dollars more. MacBook Air two hundred dollars more It's expensive out there Yeah all the coverage on this seems to be focused kind of on the entry prices like, oh yeah, the newal went up one hundred dollars. but whereere they really crush you is if you want to add, if you want to build up If you want to get an eight terabyte drive, that's now three thousand dollars or roughly six MacBook newos Right. And this is, you know, I've been seeing it on Amazon because as we talked about backup a few months ago, I'd wanted to upgrade one of my network attached storage devices and even then I was like, sheesh, twelve terabyte spinning discks are more expensive Let alone SSDs, SD cards even, I've seen some creators that are like canan't even get the size I want because it's hundreds of dollars But what are the most egregious Pcentage wise increases I feel like are the Apple TVs. The Apple TV is now two hundred dollars or two hundred and fifty dollars for the larger storage option. It comes in sixty four and one hundred twenty eight But to remind our listeners It is four years old Unudated, the Apple TV four K. so one thousand three hundred and fifty one days since it's been updated It runs on an iPhone chip which I think is curious that the iPhones did not increase in price but and has an A fifteen Bionic. It's an older iPhone chip And yet the Apple TV four K still increased in price. I think it's about seventy percent, especially if you go with the more expensive model. and the HomePod mini thirty dollars increase which is like a thirty percent increase because it was ninety nine dollars. And that's not been updated for over two thousand days. And those price increases, a lot of people online are like, they're just preparing because they're going to update them in the fall and they didn't want to have to increase the price then That's speculation. and even if so, it feels a little gouging to charge more for the devices that are multi years old and have the same components as iPhones, if not older, that didn't change price. Yeah. someomebody in Kuperbertino was just laughing hysterically as you paid two hundred bucks for a four year old Apple TV, right. And to everyone's and a lot of people on social media they said, well, it's still the best streaming box. and I agree Like if I had to get a streaming box today I would still get an Apple TV as opposed to anything else. I have a Google streamer. I've tried lots of other ones. It's better than your built in smart TV But for a four year old device, if you can hold out, hopefully it gets updated this fall with Siri AI, which we're going to talk about and some of the newer features So we'll see I actually bought one like just a month or two ago when I went on this Apple homeome journey. because I needed an ethernet based Apple TV to really make some of the matter stuff work better. Yes. And I hated buying it because I felt like, a, this is, you know, like we're months away from an update and At the time, I thought we'd have it by now, but we don't so far. At least I didn't pay the extra price for it, but Yeah Yeah. I'm kind of in that camp. I think they just raised it now because they don't want to have another news cycle about them raising prices when they come out with the other stuff. Sure. They look at the volumes and they're honestly like, I don't think they care, you know I'm hoping the weird thing about the current Apple TV, which is four years old, just remind every cheaper version, not only does it lack ethernet and has smaller storage, but it doesn't have thread which is the smart home connectivity standard that's now even being built into like iPhones and iPads and it's like, let' Hopefully with the next iteration, it won't there be these weird differentiators where if you want better smart home, you have to get the more expensive version. Maybe they'll stream streamline that. So I'm hopeful at least for that. And I actually don't feel like This overall price increase is chiseling. I mean, they have The costs are much more expensive now. I mean, we're seeing it with, like you said, all the electronic gizmos storage and memory costs a lot more now, so Apple wants their margins and The joke was like their exorbitant prices for storage and memory were suddenly reasonable. And you know, somebody at Apple said hold my beer and then they raise the prices. So but don't feel like this is gouging so much as like, yeah, this is going to happen you know, every other computer maker' raising prices. And when I bought my computer, that was a real big consideration for me because the other option was to wait for an M five studio And the rumor was that's getting delayed even further And honestly, I was thinking about the buildout that I wanted. and I don't think I wanted much more than I was going to get with a maxed out And um a bunch of reasons. We talked about it on the bonus episode, but I'm happy with the purchase and I have my M two studio here and I think we' gonna hold on to it. I might need to sell it to you know, pay for tuition or something at some point. It's probably worth a lot of money. wororth more now than it was a few weeks ago.. That's the thing, that's the thing. But yeah, your timing on that was very wise in that respect. Yeah, but I mean it wasn't a surprise. I mean people have heard it And I think everything costs more now gang. sorry. That's it. Unless you're getting aniPone and Apple Watch, but Stay tuned this fall as new models come out. We'll see. Yeah. Well they're going to make a folding phone. How much do you think that's going to cost you. two thousand or twenty five hundred. I think it's twenty five hundred. Yeah mee too. because it's three screens display front and then, you know, a big one on the inside or two on the inside. It's going to be expensive, but I am going hit a nerd crisis in September because all the rumors are that the cameras and the new iPhone Pro are going be amazing. likeike variable aperture, like stuff I've wanted forever. Yeah. And they're making a folding one. I mean, what am I gonna do? It's gonna to be a two phone year, David. You's got double fist it. Well, two phone, one kidney, maybe. That That's it. That's what it's gonna cost But you know what's free, David, if you want, you can update to the beta right now and try Siri AI Yeah.os Yeah And that's what we've been doing. We've been digging in on it and that's the that's the goal for today is to Im to share some more stories of working with Siri AI. I know, W stories is the wrong term. It's pretty good. You know, it's very good. and I'm curious with your M five Mac, your new MacBook Pro. Have you put the beta on that Are you running that? Not yet. No yeah. Okay. I didn't put it on my main Mac studio either nor my main iPhone. I have it on an iPhone air on the side So do you have it on your main one my iPhone, I just put it on my main one Dist in prep for the show. Oh did you? I have a I bought a used iPhone air Yeah and I've been running it on that. and if this had been a rough season, I'd still just have it on there I've had like no problems with these betas. like even, you know audio hijack works on it. So it's like Um on the Mac. So I I just decided to heck with it and because I wanted to use it more Yeah heading into this episode So like were record on Tuesday, I think last Friday. I upgraded to. the beta on my iPhone, my carry phone and no issues and I think I'm I think I'm gonna do it soon. I've been hesitant because I've saw some people say smart home stuff is a little wonky, but your experience with your Apple home has been okay Yeah, I mean, I'm not pushing it really hard like the old days, but like all of my gear works and all of my switches are working. nothing I have seen no evidence of failure But on my list is to get to the bottom of the resolution upgrade. likeike is that available to me now Or do I have to wait until the fall?'t I just haven't had time to look into that. That's the one that's on my list Yeah and that, I mean, on my device, I've not seen anythingy to tell me that it's there. Also the smart home notifications where it like combines and streamlines them. so you don't get a thousand notifications for like door open close, garage open close. That stuff's not in there yet But I did update an Apple TV to the beta and then I started getting some of the like descriptions of videos and like the different summaries, but the notifications are still wild. So I think some of those features are still going to be coming in the summer Yeah But Siri AI, I'm curious your experience.'ve I've been using it on my iPad a lot, the Siri app. Do things like helping me build shortcuts, talk about APIs, which we'll get into even things like world knowledge Yeah But when it comes to personal context, which maybe we could start there I've been finding it to actually be really good. You know, it takes a week or so to index if you just update to the beta and enable Siri AI. And whether I'm asking it about stuff in my messages, stuff in my mail and not giving it very much context in my request, I found it to be pretty good. I'm going to do an example live in a second For instance, my son is traveling to a camp soon. He's got some flights scheduled And just being able to ask it, what time is the flight or you know what is any information about that? it pulls it from my emails, It can show me messages I sent And I found it to be pretty good. And I did one example in my video on Siri A Him I was with Mike Clely at WWDC and there was a drink order. I got his permission to share this And when we were at the live talk show with John Gruber And I asked Si, I'm going to try one more time. And I said What drink did Mike Hurlely get the other day And ZAI goes off with this request And let's see if it actually talks me through it goes over my results, and this is just in the text messagage ly asked for a beer, an IPA specifically. And now that's several weeks ago And it still pulls it from my text messages and does a pretty good job getting it. What has been your experience with some of the personal context stuff? I have been a real jerk toiri the last few weeks. I am like intentionally vague with And it is hitting it. Like one of them I asked was, I said, How long will it take to drive to the restaurant in my dinner reservation tonight You know, we had a reservation at Disneyland, as you do. as you do. And it figured out how long it would take to drive to Disneyland. But I never used the word Disneyland. It looked at my reservation and the location and where I was So it was combining world knowledge with personal context and it did G You know Yeah. that's some of the cool stuff I did at Apple Park. I was in the Cafe Max at the Visitor Center And I was able to just hold it up and say, you know, what drinks do people get here? It was with the camera and so it could see where I was. obbviously it was pinging my location, so it knew where I was and it would use that world knowledge to go out and pull thingsings people have posted, whether it's and forums or whatever, drinks that people recommend. and I was really impressed with what I could do And I want to try one another other request live here, which I know that there's a flight on Sunday where I'm going to take my son to the airport, but I'm not going to tell it I'm going to try not to give any context. I'm just going to ask it What time do I need to leave for the airport this weekend And I'm not telling you who's traveling, what day or anything like that and There was pet. nt to this Sunday, july fifth depending on how early for the airport. You should probably plan to leave between seven AM and eight AM prettyt good, David. Yeah, I mean, that's what we wanted. and that's always been Apple's secret weapon is the they own the device. orr they own the user, I guess And they've got access to information that isn't generally available to a frontier model. Like you open up Chat GPT, It doesn't know what time your flight is this Saturday. So if Apple could put together an AI that could access that information securely, privately, that's a that's a very powerful tool It is. and I've also found that the world knowledge On the new CAI is very good So much so that in shortcuts, I built one recently about World Cup recaps And I ran the same shortcut in Iow was twenty six in the sameame one and I was twenty seven, but with the Cloud Pro model which is the new Si AI. And it gives me more accurate, better results. It will actually cororrectly summarize and tell me what games were played yesterday And it says june twenty ninth, it was round thirty two. gives me the teams and the scores. And I'll also ask at things like movie quotes. you know, which is I open a podcast that I do with a movie quote every week And that's something where I might have gone to Google before, sometimes an AI tool, but Siri AI has been really good at it and it's really fast World knowledge is night and day wayay better. Yeah, well, it was unusable before. It just That's fair. Be you because it would tell you with confidence wrong answers Often Yeah Yeah, exactly. I feel like once this gets out to the public, if people are willing to give it a try, they're going to find that the series is no longer a joke, which you know, was just what I've been asking for for ten years. I mean,. I mean it was literally when it was first announced, the Phil Schiller announced Sira with the iPhone four S, it was the personal assistant. And it's not really been able to be that kind of personal assistant I think until right now, where even the demo they showed two years ago during Apple Intelligence of someone asking, what time should I leave to get to the airport or to get to my kids musical this is here now. Like you can do it and it works Can I talk for a minute about the new Spotlight index? Yeah, please, please I'm not sold on it yet. It doesn't seem like it's as smart as Apple pretends or talks about in a keynote. What's been your experience I've found it a hidden miss like you're saying One, I'm still not sold on the Sotlight plus Si together because there are times when like I'm on my iPad And I want to open an app Drag it into the screen as a window And if I want to do that now in iPad OS twenty seven Sometimes it'll just show me like a show results below my spotlight request And I have to eith hit the down arrow key or click with the mouse to get to the actual results And it seems to be trying hard at parsing like maybe this is a SII request So it's having to do kind of two things. It's like trying to answer your question or find the thing you're looking for. and decide is this a spotlight task or a Si task And I understand the desire to keep it more front and center, especially for new users or people who wouldn't try it naturally But I'm not crazy about that behavior just yet, and I kind of wish I could separate it a little bit I understand why they did it They really want people to use Siri. They want that to become a natural interface for folks and I think they also probably know that they've lost trust with the users on Siri. So I think the only way to get people to use it is to put it in their face every day. put it there. you know, I honestly think that's kind of the why they did it. but For power users, it's a degree of friction because you're adding basically a you know, a switch at the beginning of the process where we didn't have one before Yeah, and I almost wish I know this is complexity they probably wouldn't do, but I use Spotlight by default on my Mac. and I use the Command one, two thirty four actions pretty often. So if you could invoke sppotlight, command one is app search, command two is file search. three is shortcuts and actions four is your clipboard history. I almost wish there was an option or preference to be like, give me a command five And let that be Siri AI. Otherwise, just do a normal spotlight search. And if you yourre indexing is as good as you're saying Apple, like let that just be my file and folder index rather than the combined Siri and Spotlight. but ' not gonna to get that If nothing else, give us an option to do that I think the default will always be that Siri shows up whenever you get anywhere near that side. Yeah, I think you're right And on the spotlight thing earlier, we're at beta two now and I'm willing to give it some grace. The other thing that, you know, we're not seeing is the world not or the context should extend to third party applications. Since WWC since we recorded that show, I've talked to several app developer friends who are saying, No, Dave, this is not that hard. We're going to you know, it's going to be there on day one. And I'm hearing from a lot of people. So all the groundwork they've been laying with app intents and kind of the automation stuff over the last few years or smart developers is paying off now. and this Siri, even though they didn't go the MCP route, which is kind of what I wanted them to do They've essentially made their own MCP that people the developers are able to tap into pretty easily. So I think we're going to get a lot of good knowledge in Syria, even in third party apps Yeah, and I think that'll be great, especially I mean, fantastical. I've not heard from them, but you know, they can be their day one things I'm sure they're working on it and I don't know anything. but yeah. And big apps like Gmail outlook. I'm more curious if they'll be there from day one or if they're going to drag their feet a bit because they don't ha if you can use Apple's assistant It's more than that, do they want to help Apple build a bigger mat That's, you know That's what it is for them. Well, Apples paying Google a bunch of money, so maybe they're inclin to do it, but we'll see you about Microsoft But a couple of the tipets I just want to throw because I was impressed by this. I've been seeing what can I use the Siri AI app, especially on my Mac for. is instead of another AI chat bot. And one of the things I do when I'm building shortcuts is I will ask it for API help And I'll say here's some API documentation, help me figure out what dictionary values to pull or what the API request URL needs to look like And I've been really impressed on SAI's ability to do that It's been able to give me API information, tell me what dictionary results to pull. I asked about the moovie database API, and it helped me build that I asked even for a URL scheme for an app. I had a request in my community for a shortcut that opens a specific DM conversation in the teelegram app with one tab And so rather than go to an AI tool, I went directly to the Siri AI app and I said Is there a URL screen for telegram, a scheme? and can I do it? And it gave me the right one? first shot, I was able to make the shortcut with a simple open URL action and it did it. And so I've been impressed in a lot of that It also do a lot of things which we'll get to. I was thinking about how would I have reacted to this one or two years ago I and I'd be more over the mon for sure. because now with cowork and the things I've been able to build kind of take it for granted that these things are smarter and can do this kind of stuff. I feel like where it does fall down is the harness into files. actions on files. This was something I was really disappointed about because In shhortcuts, one of the demos I got at last year's WWDC was using Apple Intelligence and Shortcuts on the Mac to rename files based on their content. And I've built shortcuts for this And so this seemed like a natural Si AI implementation Because on the Mac, you can select multiple files and in the contextual menu in Mac WS twenty seven, there's an ask series right there And I just realized we might be setitting off everybody's home pods if they're listening out loud. So sorry about that. I'll try to say another word like Dingus for the name of the voice assistant. But the Being able to select those files and then doing the Ask Dingus onene of my first requests was rename these files based on the content And in the app for Dingus AI, it will tell me names it recommends for the files It will say screenshot, blah blah blah should be renamed as this It clearly can see the file, see the content, give me a name, but it refuses to go that last step and actually change the file name itself. And so those kinds of weird limitations are unfortunate and also means As like Clogd Cowork or openingI codex. still have a lot that they're going to be able to do outside of the AI This morning, I was looking through my email and I set up back bllazays on my laptop And I needed to do an account transfer. I had some stuff and I had a bunch of email from back like five emails from them, and I don't want to deal with it today And I told coworkers Take a look at my inbox takeake all the emails that I got from Back Ble and create a task for me to deal with this and put links to each one of those emails in the task and archive the emails. you know? Yeah. thats so I just kind of spit that into Mac Whisper. and then I went and did other stuff and I went back to my email app and they were gone. They weren't there anymore There's a task with links to those emails. And that's the world I live in now. So The execution phase of Siri AI falls down a bit. like I could not do that with Siri AI Yeah. And I think the hold up is probably Apple being a bit too conservative about it I think the processing power is there. The information is there, the knowledge is there I suspect under the cover, the linking power is there they just for whatever reason aren't taking it that far yet. Yeah. and there's other missing things like schedued tasks where I have many schedule tasks in Claud running things on my email, like you just said But also things like I was using change detection. io to keep an eye on products in the past Yeah. And now because that costs monthly and I'm already paying for Claud tasks that do that for me. Yeah. And I have scheduled tasks. I have scheduled tasks I run every hour and I will give Claude Cork a push cut URL and tell it, Hey, when you see this thing come back in stock or if you see this price drop below this number Send me a notification via this URL and it works great. It can do the push cut stuff And so those kinds of scheduled automated stuff We're still not there with Apple's AI. and But I do think for the reggular person, I think their response is going to be largely positive because all the things that they wanted from a voice assistant will be there from day one This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by one password. Go to onepassword. com slash mpU to get twenty percent off your plan And if you've got a family, start using one password to protect the accounts that power your life With one password, it's easy to remember your password even when you don't What I mean is with one password, you can lock down your most valuable essentials. One password makes it easy to create mananage and use unlimited number of strong passwords All you need is the one password, just like the name says But they are completely tied into biometric verification on your iPhone, iPad and your Mac. so touch ID, or face ID has also got you covered With one password, you can easily create unique, strong passwords And you have control over that. Do you want it to be a series of words you can remember or do you want it to be a completely random string You can even set it so it doesn't have confusing characters like zero and O in your password. so it's always easy to read And with one password, you can securely share those logins, credit cards, Wiifi codes, and other sensitive data with appropriate permissions person you're sharing with doesn't even have to have one password And you have very granular control. over what can be done with that sharing link That's just the beginning. There's so much more to one password with secure notes and watchtower, but The bottom line is the bad guys are out there. They're always looking for ways to get into our data. It's worse now than ever with AI You need something powerful at your back to protect you and that's what one password is I've got the family plan. I've had it for years kids and I and my wife, we all use it. we share passwords with each other And they have really great security habits as a result. So Check out onene passassword at onenepassword dot com slash MPU now, get that twenty percent off and let them know you came from the Mac Power users Thanks One passassword for all of your support One of the big things Apple said at the keynote was the grammar checking improvements. Are you ready to cancel your grammarly account So this might be a backup situation, David, but don't I don't use grrammarly. Okay. Yeah. that's not a backup situation. I think grrammarly is a little overrated but I has always something like it I do use I use Grammarly. Okay, okay, okay. But it's very aggressive and I don't take itss advice, but you know, I'm just always worried. and even with Grammarly, I manag to publish typos, you know. I had people email me say, I think you're using AI to write and there's a typo. I'm like, well, pick a site If you're going to complain, you know I was struggle with that a little bit because I with like videos. I will have I have a custom GPT that I use to help me with titles and descriptions Yeah. And I never copy paste it totally. But I do take it as inspiration. I'll take elements of different titles. I'll end up doing like twenty to thirty title suggestions from ChatT and I'll meld them together But I'm also like in order to produce the volume of content that I do, it's I need these tools to help me. Otherwise I just won't won't doing it.t I couldn't get it out there But But the grammarly thing is interesting. likeike my buddy Tim Stringer over at Learn Omni Focus. he refuses to use it when he does journaling because he doesn't want, you know, his private thoughts going through the grammarly robot And Yeah, I get that. I think that actually makes sense. and If Apple makes a good on booard grammar checker that does the job saves you one hundred dollars a year and is private. I think that's the win Um, I have been I'm looking at it. I'm kind of interviewing it as to whether I can cancel Grammarly because like I said, Grammarly wants to do more. It always wants to add commas and I feel like it tries to rewrite more than do grammar checks sometimes. Do do Do you do an Oxford coma? Are you an Oxf coma guy? I mean First of all, of course Ands make it sir And secondly, please don't tell me that you're not on No, I'm an Oxford Ca guy. I just wanted to check. I just was a double check. But I want to talk about the kind of cultural response because we talked about Apple's price hikes earlier. And when those came out, there was a lot of reaction of like, thanks AI. even I shared a reel on it and I had some friends And they reshared it with the similar comments of like This is if this is what we get, I'll trade AI any day And there's a really negative feeling, I think, just in the popular culture about it But I'm bullish on what people's response will be for Siri AI because it will, I think, not feel like the other tools like chatPT Yeah. A. B, it's because it has that personal context, I think people were going to have a more visceral positive reaction to be like, oh, it can really help me plan these things, get this information, help me find things, which I think a lot of people just non techy people and techy people alike. like Just help me find the thing. Now I think people just have that emotional like, I just need to find this thing. I don't know where it is and Apple's Eye is going to be able to do that But three, even though A lot of Apple's AI is going on in the cloud v Parive private Cloud comppute. Their deal with Google actually meant some data centers and videoia chips are going to be using being used to power Apple's AI. I think people are going to feel like it's happening on their device And they're going to have the reaction of This feels better than using a chat bot that I think is running in a data center and having bad environmental impacts. And so I think in this moment The Negativity on AI, especially as it's affecting pricing and with CRAI on the horizon, I think it's going to be positively received, but I'm curious what you think Yeah, my thoughts on all this are complex. I feel like Apple is going an entirely different direction. and I'm not the first person to say this, frontier models, the idea is you build up these server farms and you ramp up as much juice into an LLM as you can and see what comes out the back end. And that gives you this conversational chat bot And u If you look at the way Apple executives talk about it, they always say the word chap up like, you know, Like it's a disease. Yeah, like. And I think that a lot of people right now culturally are not happy with AI in general. I mean, there's environmental impacts on it There is it's really disrupting the job market for knowledge workers. If you're coming out of college, there are a lot of companies who are not hiring entry level people because they're giving that stuff to AI I mean, there's a whole bunch going on right now. And also the AI companies don't instill any love. and Right And they keep talking about how this stuff is going to kill us all, you know, but nevertheless, keep the pedal down. I don't really buy that that it's going to kill us all, especially this version of it, but maybe the one in twenty years will But You know, there's just a lot going on and I witness in my own like small circle of friends and family that are not super plugged into technology that there is a real animosity towards AI. and it's Young and old alike for various reasons Just wait until And it's already starting, but you have like something that takes Stephen Roz's voice because you've done all these podcasts It generates a convincing version of you and then it sends called to your wife saying that, you know, you've been in an accident and you need ten thousand dollars or whatever. You know, and they can do that at scale with AI and they're going to hit a bunch of old people and they're going to steal their money. and then they there's just so many negative things that are going to be associated with this only more as we go forward. Th then there's app. Apple's staying away from that. They call it Apple intelligent. They don't call it artificial intelligence. They. They are disambiguating the the AI from the actual technology, even though they have a Siri app The real entry point on Apple devices is through You know, remove this person from my picture. tellell me, you know, look through the or just, hey, when did Stephven tell me when are we recording Mac power users? Look and look through your chats. You don't know have to tell them where to look at and'll find out, you know And they're they're kind of separating themselves from it in the interface They're also separating themselves with the underlying technology that is largely local and on device stuff. So it gets you away from some of the other discussions about environmental impact and cost and you know, why is everybody buying all the hard drives And I think that Apple's making a bet that that's going to take off I do. And I think the honeymoon period for the AI chatbots is over Because when ChuT first came out about twenty twenty two I mean, it was mind blowing that this thing can understand requests at a level not felt before Yeah. And I still remember there was a TikTok that went viral early on And it was someone who it seemed like not a native English speaker but they were there was this woman and she was kind of talking for a long time and her question was, what's the deal with exchange rates? Like what is why is currency different in different countries? Like that was her question. But her request, like she talked for probably a full minute. trying to get to that request. And ChatCBT understood and actually answered her questions And that went viral because it was amazing. Like if you had tried to do that to a smart speaker or to your iPhone at the time, or Siri? Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like had no chance. It had no chance of figuring out what is you want. It would have stopped listening halfway through as well. Like you would only had a very small window before it started processing And so I think that honeymoon of wow, these things can understand me as a human. It was very cool, It was amazing. And I think now people are like, okay, we get the pony trick. L we understand that's what it's doing Now like I'm not impressed. And also my laptop is more expensive and I'll trade that back for a cheaper laptop. And that's the reaction of the Apple pricing And I think that is what Apple bet on and for the last two years it looked like, man, maybe they bet wrong. L they just totally missed this And somehow, I think they're going to pull it out like fourth quarter Where the Si AI on the iPhone is going to do the thing where it will understand those complex requests. It will finally understand, even if you don't say the request clearly, hopefully it will finally get play this song by this artist and it nails it most of the time. When you tell it a reminder, it'll parse it properly the right time. If all of that pans out this fall when IOS twenty seven launches I think a lot of people, especially outside the tech bubble are going to be like, I'll trade it all. you know, for my cheaper prices back. I don't need to pay for ChadGBT plus or whatever, like I'll just take the assistant on my phone because it's finally good enough And u to my earlier rant There's a flipite because this stuff is truly transformational. I was talking earlier about how I had it pull my back Blaze emails this morning like the stuff I talk about robot Field Gide is People are doing amazing things every day. there was a guy on the call this week who is a home baker And that's his business. He makes bread and cookies and sells them at farmerss markets and out of his garage and He says the whole business is based on the robot assistant stuff, where it figures out his shopping lists, it figures out his supplies, his costs, it tells him when he needs to take the sourdough out of the oven, you know And like everything, he built basically a software stack for his business. with no software development knowledge. So like this stuff is really I'm not disputing it's transformational But it's also got a bunch of downsides on it. and I think it's really polarizing. And I think there I think the backlash has really just begun and Apple is kind of dodging it with what they're doing But what they really need to do though, is to make those hooks To my point earlier, the third party software really needs to work. it needs to become a thing we can rely on. question for me is As the models get more and more powerful and they can, you know, now we have models that the government won't even let us use, right? They're so powerful For most of us normal humans, we don't need that. We need it to rename our files. We need it to sort our email You know, the stuff we needed to do is not high end And one of the things I'm discovering, Stehven with this new computer, I got one hundred and twenty eight gigs so I'm running LM stududio and I'm getting decent size models Most of the stuff I need in AI to do, I can now do on my back s not. I mean, the harness isn't there. There's pieces missing, but that's coming. The normal human AI lift is becoming increasingly something that I think we will be satisfied with existing models and local. And u Does that lead to some big bubble bursting with all these data centers I mean, I don't know. donon't take advice from me I don't know what the heck's going on, but but I do think that There is There's a point coming where a lot of the stuff we want AI to do Normal folk like us, even power users, will be accomplished with something like Siri or something local And then, you know, folding proteins will be done on servers. you know. That's right ye. Well, I think of Federico Vitici was just on last week And the wild work that he's doing reverse engineering shortcuts, building CLIs for reminders that other people can use, that he no chance he could do that with Apple's AI, but he used Codex and Cloud code. And so I think Kind of like shortcuts where describe a shortcut coming out this fall, I think it will expose people, like ChatuBT exposed the world to the idea of natural language input and these large language models The descri a shortcut is probably going to open up people's minds to what is possible, what this could do, introduce it to them But they'll still need to go to someone else or go figure out how to build it themselves when it comes to that really complex type shortcut or those personal automations that make it most useful to you And we've been using shortcuts and automations for years, but maybe things like Apple's Assistant will show people what's possible and there will be some people who need cloud cowor in Cloud code. like I'm still going to pay for it come this fall, even though I have the Siri AI app on my Mac. Yeah because there are tasks that's just not possible, whether it's the scheduled tasks, more deep processing, or just simply renaming files, which is something I do I rename files a lot. I take a lot of screenshots And so I think You know, for the techy crowd, I think the tools like Claude and openpen Eye will always be there, but for the general public when they look for think about What is the AI tool I want to use regularly and that I feel good about using? I think Apple has the either like expertly done or somehow stumbled upon, I think what they're going to want W you ask The more I think about it, there's a spectrum of tools AI for me. And right now that stack is at the top. cor in Claoded code And then intermediate is LM stududio running at local on my Mac which is more private, less expensive, not as powerful, not as easily harnessable. And then below that is Siri, which is the interface for my personal data And that's going to be a moving target over time, you know? as the harnesses get better for local models, then maybe I'll need clodless. as Sirria gets more powerful, maybe I'll need the local model less. you know, I just think that it's something that We got to be aware of and just understand the technology. But Now Siri is in the conversation and it wasn't before Exactly And speaking of kind of the vibe coding esqu, Safari, if we could talk about some of the changes there. Yeah I've been really excited because Safar I got some cool features like Nify M me which you can have it watch a website and it can only update it once a day, which again, that's one of those use cases where You know, cllad cowork with a schedule task every hour might be more useful if you're watching a more time sensitive thing. Notify me in Safari is really cool. It does work even if Safari is closed, if you quit it It actually puts that request in the cloud But the notification only goes to the device you created it on. So if you want a notification on your iPhone, you'll want to tell Safari in IowOS twenty seven to notify me on my iPhone. But the custom extensions in David, where you can vibe code your own extensions in Safari, I've had great luck with. I'm curious, have you tried building any? Have you had any luck there Um, I am Barely, I'm barely into it. but when they described in the keino, I'm like, that can't be You know, And But it is. it is. And there's definite limitations like you can't distribute them. but You can build them very easily. It kind of goes along the lines of the describe a shortcut thing It's a great equalizer for Safari because You know, suddenly the stuff that's missing from Safari, you can just makeake yourself It is very cool. So I'll put a link to a video and I'll put because in the video description, I have like prompts that I use to generate the extensions. So was the best I could do to of like sharing them. Be becausecause you can't just share a link. But just to give you an idea, some extensions that I built was an image downloader. So when I'm on an Apple Newsrooom page, I can click the extension one click and it just saves all the images to my downloads folder, only the high quality images over a certain pixel count which is faster than downloading the zip file from the page I have a grab video frame, which was a wild extension. You know, when I'm watching Apple keynote and there's a live stream, I'll use Cleanhot X to grab a screen grab And then you know post it on social media or whatever And I wanted to see can an extension do that? And sure enough, the saafari describe an extension Not only does it grab the current frame of the video being played, whether it's a YouTube video, Apple's live stream But it's not just taking a screenshot. It's actually pulling the frame from the video file itself And the reason I know this is because if you go to a DRM style protected streaming site like Netflix. you know, if you to try to take a screenshot, it'll just be black It's a black screen because they don't want you to steal anything. But if I run that saafari extension that I made on a Netflix stream It will pull an image. The colors are weird, like something got messed up and the DRM was doing something, but you can get a frame from something like a Netflix stream, which was wild. So that was a cool extension. Things like you can cite a website, like MLA format, APA for like a research paper You can I created one where when I roll my mouse over an image or element on a webpage, it tells me the resolution in pixels of what that is and even a font extension. So I can roll my mouse over headers and body text on any website and it will show me a little pop up what font is being used via the HTML code. And just little extensions like that where when you first prompt it for a new extension, it will give you recommendations in the app store. So if there's an app or extension that you know, it can tell already does what you're asking for. You can download it very quick in that process Or you can always bypass that in just to create it from scratch. And all of these were created from scratch and they work great. and it's super fun You see that that slide during the keynote where they fixed so many things And you got to know that Apple's using AI to like bug fix their own code, right? Oh sure. It's gota be. And but now it feels like they've learned that like, well, let the user do that too. And the way they're letting us do it is with Siri and with custom extensions for Safari But it makes me wonder like how far are they going to go down that stack? What if you wrote something cool in Apple Mail where I could describe a rule and it just created it for me or calendar filter group or you know, I just feel like I hope this is the tip of the iceberg for them That is true. Yeahah, That's a good point Well one thing I did wanted to mention when it comes to Safari on the iPad As awesome as describe an extension is The iPad Safari browser I still get frustrated by. And it was probably three or four years ago where Apple said in the keynote The iPad saafari browser is now desktop class brrowser, which never really defined very clearly. But I can tell you from experience, it is not the same and a saafari on the desktop And there are many times where my wife, she kind of uses iPad by default. She has an iPad Pro And she really likes it. And then she'll go to some website that requires her to fill out a form Or she has to log in and there's some weird thing about the website that iPad Safari just won't render it properly And she will look at me and she'll be like, do I have to go on my Mac for this? And I'm like I guess and she'll have to pull out a MacBook A and do it there. And so I wish with all this cool describe extension stuff and Apple AI, I wish the iPad saafari browser would actually be a desktop browser And every time I try to edit a squarespace site, I'm once again reminded, no, this is not the same Do you feel like The changes they've made in Safari is enough to keep up. I mean, now we're living in an era where there's AI based browsers. h Chrome and Firefox and brave I just like got the gas pedal down Is Safari keeping up Sometimes I wonder because I would love a one browser life Bea I do a browser right now. I use Safari for ninety five percent of things. And then I open Brave to do Rriverside, to do the clawed cowork stuff, if I wanted to do any kind of web control And I think I would like one browser. But then I think maybe not. Maybe I like it separate. Maybe I only want Claude working in the browser that I open only when I want it to work You know, a lot of people Safari is not for everyone. And people don't, you know, obviously there for market share. You know, you got Chrome way up ahead Yeah man, I still like sofar. I still like tab groups. I like the iCloud tab syncing with my other devices I use profiles in Safari. I have a profile for MPU profile for my video stuff And so I know a lot of other browsers have those features too, but I still prefer it. Do you? I like the experience in Safari. And when you're on mobile, you know it's always going to set power as opposed to some of the others. Yeah, I really, um But I question myself sometimes. likeike am I just drinking the kool A aid and You know, using Safari, but I try other browsers. I've even tried to switch once in a while. It never really sticks for me. They're keeping up, but I don't feel like they're really keeping up as fast as some of the other stuff is going, but maybe that's part of the master plane Maybe. And you know, the describe extension adds some and there's actually a lot of great saafari extensions in general. Like I've done videos just talking about whether it's picturing picture or content blockers or just kind of bespoke ones because there's so many great Mac apps, you know, I think of Downy Transloader and all these apps have great toolbar type extensions that you can put in Safari those you know, you can't really get some of those elsewhere because they're working with the Mac app themselves So I'm still a saafari guy and I also like knowing like tracking and privacy Yeah whatever can be done is being done Yeah. And that's why I like you, I think I probably am in it ninety percent of the time. but my robot Has been using Chrome by I of the process of switching it over to Brave for a variety of reasons. Yeah Oh really, I'm just curious, what reasons? Well, first of all, I just don't want to use Google's browser. and the other thing is the way it groups tabs is a pain in the neck And that's easier to manage and brave and brave is more private Yeah, that yeah. And that's there were things that came out years ago with like Google Chrome and like passwords and stuff and I got a little weirded out. so I've been on the brave kick. And also like Google is not It does not make Chrome an efficient application. And now I have a computer that has a battery in all of a sudden And so that's that's that's a thought, you know. That is true. That's also the reason You know, when Gemini they came out with a Mac app and I was using more Gemini at the time now. I pretty much used Clad for everything But When you download a Google app There's so many utilities they put behind there, like Google Updator And that's just going be in the background all the time. And that was downloaded when I did Gemini. It does when you do Chrome and like I don't like that stuff. I'm not gonna about it. I agree Singgree But's spe of performance How's your been experience with? I think it's better I mean, I mean, it's just like everything is snappier. Like I was talking earlier about the general bug fix run. This is a snow Leopard year and This has been a very painless beta for me, asterisk, be careful, you know, but the I just like everything it's just like for the last couple of years Vision Pro I inststall betas was abandoned because Vision Pro was so rough out the gate Every improvement made it better This year feels kind of that way across the board It's pretty wild and that's a universal experience. everyveryone who has installed the beta. Again, do it to your own risk. I still don't have it on my main Mac and won't update that until the actual release this fall. I think I will sooner than later. You think so? I wasn't going to tell you, but I think so. Wa. wait a minute, wait aute. are you going to do public beta, or you gonna to do one of the dev betas? I don't know, Iven't figured it outet But I want to use it more, you know, and I feel like when I've got it on my computer, I'll use it more. you know. Yeah, I have it on my MacBook Air, which I use whenever I'm not at my desk and I like the sixth perade Mac I get I get weird about my Mac studio. L I don't like front of Bazon it but.. The performance has been amazing. Anytime I'm using my iPad has been the best beta experience ever. In past years, my iPad Pro is usually a beta test device And I edit podcasts in there every day with Ferite past years's been issues, but none of that this year has been solid. Things are faster, more reliable I think Airdrop is better, which is Apple said, Airdrop would be better with IOS twenty seven One thing that really surprised me and I actually got to ask S someone at Apple about this If you use iPad Pro If you are transferring any kind of files from an external drive, like an external SSD, it is much faster in transferring it. And I was curious about that because I would have thought that was a hardware limitation like the Thunderbolt connection or the drive that you're using. But why does software improve that And I was told that In iPad OS twenty seven, the underlying architecture of the files app has been made to much more resemble Finder on the Mac rather than whatever iPad iPhoney type files app was behind the scenes And so the files app in general, an iPad and an iPhone Much better, much faster. If you ever experience that thing where you go to the files app on your iPhone or iPad, you tap a folder and like there's nothing there for a while. It's like a blank screen.. That stuff has improved in IOS twenty seven, transfers, all of that. so I can't say enough good things about it. I think performance and reliability ome this fall, I think a lot of people they're going to be happy when it comes to. And my new computer, the disk wr andite read speed is so much faster. like you put those two together, I'm going to be flying He' going you're going to be flying. So love all of that. And u Yeah What else what else is it? The design? I mean, I haven't slid that liquid liquid glass design sllid or anywhere, have you Yeahah, I've tried it on both extremes, you know. Okay liiquid glass, I'm not as vigilant against it as some of my fellow podcasters. It's okay, you know, But there are definitely some UI issues like the way that cororner window thing kills me. Can you imagine, I hate to say this, but can you imagine Steve Jobs, right? He would the Apple shifted a version of MacOS where to move the window, you have to take the mouse outside the window I mean That yeah, I know it's not often that we invoke that, but I feel like He would have I don't think you would have let that go through, I feel like. I don't know. So anyway so the liquid glass improvements I'm definitely in favor of When push comes up, I'll probably push it to the right. I'll probably just keep it Less liquid glassy. More opaque I don't get enough joy out of the little visual distortion to justify the hassle. Yeah. But I think I you know the stability thing to me is a big deal and this we're only in beta two now by the time this thing releases, I think This is going to be a very well received update And it makes going to make Siri work and Siri' never worked before. and I think it'll just take a couple. There's a reason they invite all these influencers to WWC because this is going to take take a couple TikTok videos of people doingl stuff with Siri And suddenly the world will get it that series good again. And Yeah the penny I want to drop is the third party software stack. I want Siri to work with whatever app that you're using, like if you like drafts to write, it should search your drafts. If you like, you know, whatever your app is, it should work. and I know that's reliant on some work from developers, but I think that there's a real payoff for them I think that'll also help shortcuts because they're going to use the same underlying technology And I would imagine and I've said this before, but I would imagine in the future Sies is going to be quite useful and it's going to have access to a lot of great data. And like you were saying earlier, for a lot of people, that'll be enough Exactly. Al right, so end of our favorite new features of IOS twenty seven? Um, the Siri Sir AI. I mean, it's like for so long. We've wanted it to be good and now now it frankly it is What about you Yeah, it's going to be super fun. Im I mean, we talked about it all last week, but ye shortcuts. shortcuts. The describe a shortcut, honestly, in my community, I get a lot of requests from people And sometimes the request is very doable and I know how to execute it. but it's time consuming Sometimes people just want a bunch of choose from menu type actions and then it's programming each choose for menu. Sometimes it's complicated if actions and you have to like format dates and then do the if statements And so for one, taking in those requests Well I'll be able to show people how to do it themselves pretty soon But I can take those requests, sometometimes I've even copy and pasted the request into describe a shortcut and it'll get it And there was one where someone wanted a automation Now whenever their phone connects to car playay If it's a weekday, Monday through Friday and if it's before nine AM, meaning they're commuting to work automatically send a text to someone And that's a a pretty straightforward automation to create I've done it before in different variations. Yeah, you could wire that up. Yeah. Well, they're pretty easy but you got to format the date, you got to format the day of the week, you gott to do the if statements. Yeah, you gota nest those if statements. Yeah gota nest the if statements But giving it to describe a shortcut, just one shot and it did all that work for me in a few seconds formatting the dates, doing the if statements. And you know, sometimes I tweak an action here or there because it got it a little off or maybe added something it didn't need to. But it has been going to save me a ton of time Allow me to experiment more because sometimes with shortcuts, I'm like, I want to see if this is possible the cost of seeing if it's possible and then not turning out, it's like, do I waste a couple of hours Having Describe a shortcut there to kind of get me started and not have to have the blank page document with the blinking cursor, you can just start from Describe a shortcut. And so I'm excited for that in the new actions and shortcuts, especially the storage stuff open up a lot of possibilities and I'm excited for it. Yeah, I feel like has I'm not sure this was all intentional, but it's working out well for them. Y you know, like I said earlier, for the stuff most of us need Siri is well on its way of being a And I think I'm excited for people to get their hands this fall and to see the larger reception I think you're gonna see a bunch of TikToks and the reos live. Oh, myiPhone's smart now. think exactly. You're gonna say that Exactly. It's going to be fun. So Well, we should go talk about Toy Story five. We gott to get to it. I'm excited for it Let's do it. So for more power users, you can join and become a member of that link is down in the show notes. You can also get all our monthly bonus episodes now. We got three monthly bonus episodes in our pro Max users feed and then our special with our productivity app draft will be coming very soon. So you can get that link in the bio. Thanks to our sponsor, not Linkcoln Bio. Sorry, that was my Instagram, TikTok coming out. You just went into autopilot right there. How it' autopilot. The link is in the show notes down below. And thank you to our sponsor this week onene password, and we'll catch you next time