700: A Wet Dishrag Full of Lies

John, it's your favorite time. Is it anniversary corner? It's anniversary corner, baby. It's anniversary corner, baby. This occurred to me last week and I forgot about it, but now it's all coming back to me. This is ATP episode 700. 700 that you two and me have sat here except one Prisoner Exchange episode. it's been all three of us for 700 episodes which is absolutely bananas 700 regular episodes when i did when i realized last week that this was happening i did a small bit of math so i could do it on this week when you booby-trapped me with this obviously we have our member specials and we've done one-off things like interview shows and stuff like that so it's actually obviously more than 700 but for the regular episodes the not interview not member special not blah blah blah we've done 52 regular episodes per year for 13.4615 years which is not quite as round i know it's episode 700 but it's not as exciting as the the year round number so anyway we've been doing this for a while so i don't have the author's name in front of me and i'm deeply sorry about that but there is a listener who has been working on for like a year or two now cat atp.fm c-a-t-a-t-p dot f-m this is an absolutely incredible resource this is taking the spirit of what underscore done years ago about running shows through a transcription service and trying to make the best of what comes out of it. And obviously with today's AI stuff, it's quite a bit more impressive than it was years ago. There's a handful of these like underscores like CatATP that exist. And this one I happened to look at recently. And there are statistics. So if you go to CatATP.fm slash statistics, you can see that as of, I think, this most recent episode, not the one we're actually recording now, obviously, but as of 699, total length of all the episodes, 1,421 hours, 6 minutes and 13 seconds. Astonishing. Yeah. And Cat ATP, by the way, like what a level up that is from like everything that's come before because the author is using AI heavily and cleverly. And wow, it's advanced. It's really something. Yeah. At some point, I'd probably like to talk a little more about Cat ATP because there's some interesting stuff here. And the author who, again, I don't have the email in front of me. I'm so, I'm so sorry. But they had emailed us, and among other things, they had come up with a visualization of what sections of the last couple of episodes were cut from the bootleg to the released version, which I thought was a really interesting visualization of what you're missing out on if you don't listen to bootleg. Now, what you're getting if you don't listen to bootleg is Marco's genuinely, not sarcasm, genuinely exquisite edits. You're getting much better audio quality, but you're missing some of the nonsense and shenanigans that you would hear only in the bootleg. And if I remember, I will post one such example image and link it in the show notes. I don't have it handy as we speak, but it is really good stuff. And you can see as an example what makes the bootleg kind of fun. Now, I'm not necessarily saying the bootleg is like the canonical version. In fact, I'm pretty actively saying that's not the canonical version. But there is something to be said for some of the shenanigans. So like I said, I'll try to dig up one of those images and put it in the show notes. I think the author's name is Justin. And by the way, this is a fun thing from the website. It is the word cloud of word frequencies, and I'm pretty happy with this one. That is because there is Mac Pro, extremely large, phone, almost as large, and then a bunch of other stuff. It's basically Mac Pro phone. I can't wait for the Mac Pro phone. It's going to be awesome. It will be pretty work money try. Yeah. Right. But yes, this is Justin, Justin K., who has done incredible work here. And like I said, I will try to find one of these images where you can see what the bootleg gets you, and I will post that in the show notes. But happy 700, everyone. And I'm not going to go on for two hours like I normally do, but I will just say very briefly, thank you to anyone who listens, whether or not you're a member. Thank you for sticking with us for, what did you say, John, 13 years or whatever it's been. It's really a genuine privilege that we get to do this together, that the three of us get to do this together, that you give us your time, which is your most valuable resource. So thank you, everyone, for sticking with us. We really appreciate you. Public betas are out. And I'm curious, what do we have betas installed on? And I ask this because I don't have I have the betas on my Vision Pro and I have the beta on my iPad. And now that the public betas are out and now that all the travel that I know I'm doing for the summer is done, I think I might do public beta on my phone soon. So let me start with Marco. I believe you said you have already gone all in on betas on your phone. Is that right? Yeah, I've been on the main phone beta situation since beta 2. It has been mostly fine. Beta 2 was a little shaky with messages, like the messages app, sometimes like losing a whole thread and having to be rebooted or whatever. That seems to have been fixed after beta 2. And the only major issues I have with it now are some behavioral differences that are making my app behave weirdly and other apps occasionally behave weirdly. They did a lot of under-the-hood changes with iOS 27, and some of them are showing. So there's going to be a little bit of a bumpy period as apps get updated for that. And then finally, the biggest problem I have is CarPlay has gotten a lot of updates, and it's a little rough. In particular, if your car has a hardware play-pause button of some kind, like you click the volume knob in and it turns it off or on, or there's an actual play-pause somewhere in your car, and if that maps to CarPlay's playing and pausing. The previous treatment of that was that iOS would forward that to the audio app as a remote play-pause command, the same way as if you clicked the stem on an AirPod, same thing. For some reason, in CarPlay and iOS 27, They're instead treating those as audio interruptions, which means, which is the same kind of event as, like, if you're playing a podcast and you get a phone call or Siri comes on to speak a direction to you or something, that's an audio interruption. And then, you know, so it pauses your audio kind of forcefully, and then it unpauses it whenever the interruption ends. Well, in CarPlay on iOS 27, it has moved those from play-pause events to audio interruptions. And when they end, my AV audio engine totally errors out, fails, and crashes. Oh, that's fine. So that's a big problem. I haven't had time to file a feedback. Actually, you know what? I should have sponsored this episode, Claude. I wonder if, can I have AI write better feedbacks so that I don't have to? Because I'm sure Apple is not putting in any more effort than that to go through our feedback reports. So finally, maybe AI can be the great equalizer to finally equalize the amount of effort it takes to file a feedback versus the amount of effort Apple will spend looking at it. Incredible. John, what's your beta story? I've been resisting on the phone. I've thought about it a few times. Every time I look at my phone, I'm like, I don't want this to not work in any minor way. And also, this is my phone year, so I know I'm going to get both new hardware and new software, assuming it doesn't cost a million dollars, when it comes out. I mean, I probably will update this before my actual new phone arrives, but I've been resisting on the phone. I haven't even done my iPad. Normally I do my iPad by this point, but I don't know. I just, whenever I'm watching TV on my iPad, I'm like, I don't want this to be messed up. I know these vendors are really stable and everything, which is why I'm even considering it. But yeah, so none of my iPads or iPhones have been updated. I've got my development Mac that is running the latest Golden Gate beta, and I keep that updated, and I keep that with the latest version of Xcode and all that stuff, and I'm fixing bugs over there and doing all that. But that's it. actually what might happen well what will happen is that I'll end up updating my wife's Mac to Golden Gate and my children's Macs to Golden Gate because they all skip Tahoe obviously I won't be updating my Mac to Golden Gate so yeah that's my beta situation I'll be running Mac OS 15 until this rate December or something or whatever new Macs come out and I can actually get one of them which is fine by me but you know I'm not jumping on the beta train early Oh, one more thing about these betas. So Siri, there's a couple of things to be aware of with Siri on iOS 27. Obviously, it's the whole new Siri AI thing. In daily use, what that means is when you pull down on your home screen to type in an app name into Spotlight, it is slower because that pulls down all of Siri. and Siri is like, let me do the world for you. And I'm just trying to launch one password. It's like, let me do everything for you. So there are some common operations that now that Siri is everywhere, they're actually much slower now. So one of them is typing app names into Spotlight, what used to be Spotlight, to launch them. The other one, which is kind of annoying to me in particular, is creating reminders with the new Siri is actually significantly slower, which is not great news for somebody trying to launch a new app that uses reminders. And this is also just annoying because this is by far the way that I create the vast majority of my reminders. Creating a reminder now, you still say, hey, remind me later today to do this. it now thinks a lot more about that because it's invoking the AILM layers. And it asks more follow-up questions where I think it shouldn't. So it seems like it hears me worse now. Siri has upgraded to worse ears. And so it'll ask for clarification, like, did you say this or this? And before, it never asked me that. It would just dictate it pretty accurately almost every time before. And usually one of the things that it thinks I said is just way off. So they're still ironing some stuff out. But I think it is probably pretty safe to conclude at this point that the move to new Siri just is going to make a lot of common things slower. Because it is now applying a much higher level of complex intelligence to even simple things like searching for apps and creating reminders. So that's a little bit of a bummer, but that will probably be at least partially made up for by the fact that new Siri is actually really good so far. Earlier today, I was driving and I was cutting it close with making the ferry. And I was on the highway, a couple of miles from the ferry terminal, and I simply – I'm like, I wonder if this works. I asked Siri, what time is the nearest ferry from here to here, the places I'm going? and i didn't tell it what ferry company i don't have an app for the ferry it's one of those things where like you just go to their website and there's basically like a jpeg or something like making a table and like like just like a schedule table and i don't know how siri found this information but it did find it and it and it told me what time the next ferry was and i said how about the one after that and it successfully told me the one after that i checked and it was right That's incredible. It has never been able to do that before. So I do think it is like any other modern AI tool in the sense that this is a significant step up from what we had before. I think one of the biggest challenges that we're all going to have is just remembering to try something or thinking to try something instead of just assuming that something won't work and never even trying it. That is by far what holds me back the most with AI, and that is by far what will hold me back using new Siri over time. We're all so accustomed to Siri sucking for over a decade that we're not even going to think to try it, but try it because you might be surprised at what it can do as long as you're patient because it's slow. I feel like it's probably worth briefly following up on my weird – I'm not getting tap-taps from Aaron on my watch. if you recall it was working when Aaron sent messages and other conversations like in group chats and I was just constantly missing notifications from her and let me tell you of all the people I want to miss notifications from both selfishly and unselfishly she was the last on the list and somebody at some point had suggested hey do you somehow have her conversation muted and that wasn't it but what it was was that in the settings in her contact the text tone somehow got set to none. Maybe I did that, maybe I didn't. And it's worth following up that I believe that was the fix, that for me, moving her text tone from none to anything else seems to have done it. And it's not, I don't think it's 100%, but I think it's good enough that the remaining percentage, whatever that may be, is me genuinely not feeling my wrist get tapped. So I am calling this one officially solved as far as I'm concerned. All right. Congratulations. I hope you're right. Have you fixed yours? I have just worked around it successfully because I had the text tone set for TIFF. I can turn it off, but the reason I set it in the first place was because I was missing her messages. So that was not causing the problem. My workaround remains that I just keep messages, notifications as persistent notifications instead of, I guess, like momentary or whatever the other kind is called. So they stay on my screen on my Mac until I dismiss them. and that so far seems to have fixed the problem because i am not missing them anymore on my mac and it's it's specifically on the mac that i would usually miss them um so we'll see i haven't done the same thing well i think the phone already basically does that but uh yeah we'll see and there were a bunch of other stuff that people were suggesting you mentioned one of them already that you can mute notifications for individual conversations so that would have also fit if this had been the case which it wasn't it would also fit your symptoms which is like hey in the group conversation i get a notification but in my private one i don't if you had somehow muted the private one but not the other one were there other things that people suggested that didn't apply to you but were good ideas to check uh muting the conversation was definitely a good one i'm trying to think if there was anything else i mean there were a lot of offers there's nothing i can think of that seemed even remotely reasonable to be honest but conversations can be muted which i do use from time to time particularly on group chats and she her conversation was not the text tone was the only thing that I saw that really seemed to make a difference. I'm really struggling to remember anything else that I thought was plausible. All right. Well, we were saying this again because I know we talked about it last week, too, just because so many other people said I have this problem, too. Apparently, it is a common problem. Yeah. John, you have a gift from Cloudflare. Can you tell me about this, please? I'm very excited about this. When I talked about making my move from my old shared hosting provider to Cloudflare and my process there, I talked about how the different ways they have for you to host websites at cloudflare um one of them is kind of like the old style like either dropbox or s3 bucket where you just chuck a bunch of files into essentially an s3 bucket and and you can put a host name that you own in front of it and the law instant website um but i'm way more picky about my urls than that would allow so i needed to have you know in my old static site it was just running apache and i was just using like a hd access to write rewrite rules and crap you know uh i want i needed something like that uh so the other system they have uh at cloud flow they have an old system called pages which is deprecated and i didn't use they have a worker system which is just basically um when someone hits this url we will run a little bit of code that you provide us and i provided this little and they have they have an api for node.js so you can provide um what they call a worker uh that runs code written in node against their api that it gets an http request and it sends a response So as I was describing, I wrote my own little dinky, like, if you get a request, respond in this way. It's like the world's simplest web server, right? And it does all my URLs and my redirects and all the stuff that I need to do for my various websites. But it annoyed me that Cloudflare has this amazing caching system that you can put in front of another website. Like, if you have a website hosted somewhere else, you can put Cloudflare in front of it to handle DDoS and caching and stuff. But you can't just take that cache and throw it in front of one of your workers. So then inside my worker code, I had to be like, oh, there's an API for the cache. So when you get the request, first check the cache if the thing is there and honor the various headers and blah, blah. It's just like, why am I doing this? You have a product that already does caching. Can't I just have a worker and then take the cache and put it in front of the worker? And they were like, no, caching is only for putting in front of websites that aren't hosted at Cloudflare. It's for other websites that are hosted in other places. So that annoyed me. Well, here we are. I don't know how long it is, maybe a year later or less than a year later. And they have, in fact, changed their system to allow you to put their cache in front of workers. And it was glorious. So first of all, it ripped out all the caching code. And there was a lot of it, and it was annoying. And I actually had a bunch of bugs in it that I had to fix. Ripped it all out. Nope, nope, no caching. Destroy, destroy. Just love deleting lines of code, right? And then it's like one configuration setting in your worker. It's like, do you want cache to be in front of this? And I said, yes. And everything else was already to go because all my content already had cache headers in it and everything, right? That's all I needed to do. And then I looked at my dashboard for my workers, and I think it was like an 80% to 90% drop in CPU time for my workers. because most everything is cache. Like the thing is when, you know, the worker would get activated, even if it was returning a cache thing, it would run your worker, and your worker would run the cache code that would check the cache and find the cache and set, like, but that's still CPU time. Your worker is still running. Now my worker doesn't even run, like 80% to 90% of the time because the request hits the cache. That's what caching is supposed to do. It was glorious. I tried to take good screenshots of it, but I think I lost all those things in a big desktop cleanup I did. But, yeah, all my charts were like, not that I was paying, I was paying like whatever the minimum is for workers, This is like $5 a month or something piddling like that. But now I'm using like no CPU. It's great. So anyway, I want to thank Cloudflare for implementing that obvious feature. It has made my life and the life of my workers a lot better. Yeah, the blog post is very long where they discuss this, but it's very, very interesting. And one of the things they walk through is how they landed here, which is basically like, oh, when we originally devised the whole caching infrastructure and whatnot, It was to serve this need over here at A, but to put a cache in front of workers that's basically starting from Z. And so now we need to, like, reconcile these two things. It was very, very good and very interesting and really a great example of documentation, Apple. So it's worth checking out if you have even a passing interest in this. Like I said, setting it up was, like, literally, like, in my worker config, you just do cache colon enabled or true or whatever. Like, that's it. That's the whole thing because the cache system already has a big web UI and everything. And again, if you have a decent little web server thing, you're already sending the expiration headers. It was like no work. It was just deleting code. Loved it. 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Like, what does amount 5 mean? What does specular highlight mean? Or whatever. and they have been changing. We mentioned last time that they have changed it between 26 and 27, but even within 27, as each beta of Golden Gate comes out, and presumably also the iOS ones, although I haven't been looking at those, they change how the icons render. The same icon renders differently in beta 2 and beta 3. And as Louie was pointing out when he was complaining about this, it makes it difficult to be an icon designer because you think, like, I've done this icon for a client, and it's all done, and it looks like this, and the next beta comes out, and it's like, well, now all your icons look different. And you didn't change a thing. Now, I know the 27s are still in beta. So, you know, if you're making an icon against a beta OS, it's always going to be a moving target. But it does make me a little bit concerned. I think I mentioned in the last show that I was hoping that 27 was just a big correction in icon rendering from 26. And that 28 wouldn't continue the trend of essentially changing how icons are rendered over and over again. Because that makes it very difficult to sort of have any kind of stable identity. I give them some leeway to tweak stuff mostly because I hated how 26 rendered stuff. But here's hoping this doesn't continue indefinitely because, or at the very least, like, if you want to change it, add new effects, but don't change how the existing effects render because it's just going to change how everyone's icons look. So anyway, still a little bit concerned about that. All right, with regard to our member special about Mac-asked Mac apps, on July 9th, a friend of the show, Steve Trouton-Smith, said, LOL at OpenAI replacing the native AppKit chat GPT app with the Electron Codex app after Gruber's recent post praising it as a good Mac app. Whoopsie-dipsies. Gus Mueller, another friend of the show, said, oh, and it went from 158 megs to one and a half gigabytes. Great. Stupendous. and then of course our good friend Gruber wrote today is the day OpenAI effed up the chat GPT Mac app yeah I'm glad he got in all these podcasts where he was praising it what a great native Mac app it is how much I love it it's a Mac ass Mac app but these other apps aren't he got in all those podcasts all those posts and all that praise just before they screwed it up incredible work everyone with regard to the globe key on Apple's extended keyboards if you recall I think it was Marco and I particularly or maybe it was John, one of you and me, was lamenting that the globe key had moved between the original Touch ID lightning keyboard and my new hotness USB-C Touch ID keyboard. And the globe key used to be in the bottom left, or excuse me, used to be in the area above the inverted T arrows, but now it is up, it is all the way down in the bottom left-hand corner and screwing me up all the time. Well, Philip Hofstetter wrote, the globe key was moved next to control with the USB-C revisions when the OS has started to use the Globe key as a modifier key. In the Touch ID versions, the key was still at the old place, just renamed from FN, or the FN key. FN key, there you go. There we go. All right, so Philip writes and continues, here's a launch agent you can put in tilde library launch agents, I'll put that in the show notes, to map the Globe key next to control, back to control, and the new menu key to Globe, restoring the old functionality, which is very clever. And I'm trying to convince myself not to do this because I try very hard to stick with like the vanilla version of Mac OS. I try not to tweak the ever-living snot out of it, but it is quite possible I will fail in this regard because this is very appealing. Then with regard to the good or lightning versions, that model for reference is A2520 Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and numeric keypad, which does come in both white and black, although it only came in white when I bought it. and we will put a link in the show notes that John has provided me to that. It comes in several colors, not just white and black. You're talking about the keycap color. Yes, it does come in with black and white keycaps, but it also comes in actual colors as in, I guess, like dyed to match the iMacs or whatever. Oh, the iMac keyboards, right. You can find lots of varieties of these. But anyway, the version that I have or that my wife has in front of her M1 Mac Studio, we'll put the model number in the show notes but it's uh mmm r3 ll slash a again this is the a 2520 keyboard but there's specific model numbers that's the one that is silver the silver aluminum with black keys uh and i based on the last show where we're talking about the globe key that i i think i had seen the globe key over there only but not on the i just assumed they hadn't messed with the extended one but they did and now i knew about it or my memory was refreshed so i immediately went on ebay and bought one of these so now i have a new inbox uh silver with black keys touch id extended keyboard with a full size complete control key in the lower left corner and i will use that with my new mac if i want to get it but lightning absolutely well here's the thing about lightning it's lightning where it plugs into the keyboard it's usbc on the other end so i don't care what it looks like that plugs into the keyboard i you know it's us it's a usbc keyboard or it's just the end that plugs in is lightning. I don't care about that at all. So, yeah, and otherwise it has all the same features. It has patch ID, blah, blah, blah. I don't care about the globe key. I don't care about the menu key. I was very happy to find this, especially finding a new in-box one. I didn't open it because it is sealed, but I do wonder if someone resealed it. So if I open it up and it's filled with a bunch of rocks, we'll find out when I get my Mac Studio, hopefully sometime later this year. Oy vey. This is our continuing and depressing price increase corner, where Brian Nehring writes, You guys haven't mentioned the studio display. If the Vision Pro gets a price increase, then shouldn't the display with RAM and storage in it get one, too? I think the margins are higher on the studio display percentage-wise than they are on the Vision Pro. I honestly do, because the stuff in the Vision Pro costs a lot of money, but it's still the super expensive stuff. The studio display costs a ton of money, and it's still with not quite that expensive stuff. So I think the studio display could just absorb it. But, hey, don't give them any ideas. Just because they haven't increased the price yet doesn't mean they're not going to. So shh. Right. I have been reflecting on my decision not to purchase a Studio Display XDR or even three of them, and I stand by it, but I really want one. Anyway, we have a little bit of anonymous feedback with regard to the decision to skip M6 Pro Max and Ultra. This anonymous individual writes, roadmaps for chips are decided anywhere between three to five years in advance. So any rumors suggesting roadmap changes a year before release is just not true. They were decided way before the rumor mill knew about it. Some last minute changes and delays do happen, but the Apple Silicon team still has the most aggressive and reliable execution timeline when compared to the rest of the industry. And the decision to skip all of those processor chips was based on multiple factors, including the use of new packaging technology to build separate CPU and GPU chiplets, available resources, design complexity, etc. Yeah, that's the problem with all these rumors is they will very often get the news whenever they get it and decide some. I guess they'll just decide either this just happened or it happened recently. But as we've discussed many times with these chip roadmaps, they're usually made very far in advance just because it takes so long to design chips. That's why I was asking last episode, like, do you think they designed these chips and had to discard them? Or did they just they were never going to make these and we were just finding out about it now? So this anonymous person says, no, this was decided a long time ago. There are no M6 Pro Max Ultra chips that they had to throw away. Finally, also with regard to Ultra chips, Mark Gurman wrote, when was this? This was a few days ago as we record. Apple plans to soon deploy a more powerful server based on the M5 Ultra under the internal codename J246 But engineers are already developing another new server chip for launch by 2029 that built around the M7 Ultra capabilities The new Ultra is designed to support as much as one and a half terabytes of memory. Roughly double the capacity plan for the M5 Ultra, though whether Apple ultimately offers that configuration will depend on the state of the industry. that i think a chip with one and a half terabytes of memory on it might cost as much as a small country at this point well for server stuff these things you know the nvidia chips already cost like 50 grand or whatever even more so it kind of makes sense in that context but this is relevant to the earlier uh discussions we had about apple using nvidia gpus in google data centers and it's like do you think they'll still keep trying to develop their own servers using mchips german says yes. The government says they are not abandoning this effort. In fact, they have new models with newer chips that are coming out and a roadmap that includes not just the M5 Ultra Base servers, but also eventually the M7 Ultra Base servers in 2028 with tons and tons of RAM. So, I mean, assuming these plans haven't changed, it seems like Apple is still dedicated to the idea that they are going to run their own servers with their own chips running their own models and not entirely rely on Google's data centers and NVIDIA GPUs. There's another story that just came out today that didn't quite get in here. Maybe it'll be in a future show if there's more details of what I'm about to say, which is that Apple is supposedly looking at AI chip companies for acquisition targets. I don't know if it named any individual company, but the fact that they're looking out there, hey, is there some kind of chip team? I think the article described it as like, is there the AI chip equivalent of PA Semi, like some team that has some really good people and really good ideas and some innovative technology? specifically for AI chips in data centers. The fact that they're looking, you know, again, if that rumor and this rumor to be believed, seems like all systems go on Apple Silicon powered servers. And it seems like Apple is expressing in these rumors. Again, if they are true, they do not want to be beholden to NVIDIA or Google to run any of their models. And I think looking at that again, the various reports of that tech talk they gave at WWDC, I think the only things that are running the Google data centers are like they're really big, beefy models. I think the dinky ones are still running on those M2 Ultra servers, the Apple Silicon ones. So, yeah, I'm kind of surprised by this. I figured they had just given up on this. And this was like a vestige of the old regime of the pre-JG departure regime. And it was like that whole Apple Silicon servers and the M2 Ultra and everything. Those were all under the JG era. And I thought, well, he's out and maybe that's out as well. But it seems no. So keep an eye on this for the future. I do think, though, that this one bit from Gurman, I don't think it necessarily says as much as it kind of seems like it says, because what this actually sounds like is Apple is developing an M5 Ultra and also a couple years later an M7 Ultra. Okay, well, that is good news in the sense that they put those in a product. It's called the Mac Studio, and it's their highest-end desktop, and they're pushing it as a great solution for local AI inference. Awesome. Okay. So it's good that they're developing Ultra Chips because they can keep that product going, and they can have high memory ceilings and high I-O ceilings that those really big chips allow. That's great. Now, whether that will go into servers that they will use, I think that's actually a separate question. And whether the servers will be running a different chip or a different variety of the chip compared to what chips in the Mac Studio, that's also a different question. And it doesn't sound like Gurman has a lot of information on that part of the question. He's got a codename for it. Yeah, but that could just be the M5 Ultra. No, it says Apple plans to soon deploy a more powerful server based on the M5 Ultra under the internal codename J246. That's the server codename. And it doesn't mean they're going to ship it or that this rumor is right, but that's the info in this. Not just that the M5 Ultra exists and they're going to stick it in Mac Studio, but they're also planning on sticking it in a server, and here's the codename of the server. Maybe it'll never happen. Again, it's rumors. We'll see how it goes. And Apple tends not to be particularly forthcoming with this, setting aside the Wall Street Journal video that we saw where they're like, hey, here's all our servers. I'm not sure when we'll see that again. If and when this does happen, I'm not sure Apple will even announce it. But this rumor is the first positive sign I've seen in the post-JG era that anyone has said, oh, yeah, Apple's still doing that whole Apple Silicon server thing, which is surprising to me. But we'll say, oh, and as for the 1.5 terabytes of memory, everyone's making a big deal about, like, M7 in 2028. They'll finally reach parity with the 2019 Mac Pro in terms of RAM again, assuming you can even get 1.5 terabytes of RAM. That is interesting, but it is also the case that giant gobs of memory in servers has been a thing for ages. And in the realm of servers, 1.5 terabytes of memory is not that unusual and hasn't been for decades. And AI loves tons of memory. So good on Apple for apparently setting up a roadmap where at least if you have infinite money, you can have enough RAM to run some big models. Yeah. And do you think it would actually cost more when they released this in 2029 than it cost for the 2019 Mac Pro? So the 2019 Mac Pro, if you configure it to 1.5 terabytes of RAM, was something like $25,000. Oh, it's got to be more. Yeah, right? It has to be more. By 2028, first of all, this RAM is going to be so much faster than the 2019 Mac Pro. It's not the same RAM. It's way faster RAM. And second, the RAM crisis will probably not be over by 2028. Right, exactly. What this rumor said is 2029 for... Well, which new Ultra does he say supports 1.5 terabytes? The M5 or the M7? I'm trying to say the M7 one does. His writing is so unclear, but if you parse it out, it's roughly double the capacity of the planned M5, so that means it's the M7. If he just wrote clearly, this would be a lot easier to parse. So if he's right, then the 2029 release of the M7 Ultra, and presumably a Mac Studio around that, would have 1.5 terabytes. So in 2029, will 1.5 terabytes of RAM cost more than inflation-adjusted $25,000 from 2019? I'm saying at least, like, it's probably going to be triple that much. Like, that really could be, like, you know, a $75,000 option. Yeah, and as for your question about whether these will be different than the ones they ship in the Mac Studio, I say no. It's hard enough to make a single one of these ships. I don't think there's going to be a special server variant. They've never made one before, a special server variant. that isn't rumored here. I just don't think it's going to be the case. The only thing I could possibly imagine is that maybe the Mac Studio won't support 1.5 terabytes of RAM, and that would be a server-only thing, but the chip will be the same. I mean, honestly, it would be really weird if they would limit the Mac Studio that way. I think they're going to design the chip to have certain resource limits, and that's going to be a chip design limit, not a logic board limit, I'm sure. And it's going to be dependent on components that are available at that time. And and, you know, what can they get, you know, whatever the memory chips of that, you know, of those sizes are. Can I get them in volume? Can they get them for less than seventy five thousand dollars? Like, you know, there is going to be a lot of uncertainty around that. But the chip will be designed and probably already is being designed with a certain target in mind. And I hope that whatever the Mac Studio or whatever the theoretical servers can do with the M7 Ultra alleged chip here, I really hope and I expect that the Mac Studio will probably have the same resource limits. And this actually, this bodes very well for the future of the Mac Studio. I am a little curious if they can do all that without redesigning the Mac Studio case. Well, the rumor is that they weren't going to redesign the case, but they were going to totally redesign the cooling on the inside. And so I'm not sure how that will work. I mean, they're already using, I think, copper in the Ultra ones. So maybe they go to that special metal that is even better than copper. But there was a rumor that, oh, no, there's no Mac Studio redesign in the next three years or whatever, but they are going to change all the internals for heating and cooling. So we'll see. Well, the next three years just means the M5 Ultra generation. That could be true. and then they could three years from now when the m7 ultra generation comes out they could have a redesign then yeah we'll see we'll be able to tell when the m5 ultra one comes out when someone cracks it open does it have the same cooling or not which generation that rumor is supposedly about the other thing about 125 terabytes of ram is that when you get up to that amount it does start to physically take up more room because it's just more chips right so and like obviously they generate heat although it's not that much heat so i don't think it's that big but like i guess you'd have to squint at the MacStudio logic board and say, if you had to put 1.5 terabytes of RAM, could you squeeze it in there? I mean, they probably can. We'll see. Now, all right, bear with me. If they redesign the case in three years to be a little bit bigger and to be able to have 1.5 terabytes of RAM and a really fast chip, why don't they just call it the Mac Pro at that point? They've just recreated the Mac Pro. Well, I mean, the thing about the Mac Pro is that it would need to dissipate significantly more heat as we went through that last time. I think they're like 3x, the Mac Pro is dissipating 3x the heat, and I think there's a limit to how much you can redesign to move 3x more heat. I mean, you don't have to make it as big as the current, like the 2019 Mac Pro, but you'd have to make it significantly bigger, and at that point, you've got to start rethinking it, you know, because you can't just take that and extrude it outwards or something. You know what they could do? So what if they shot the heat straight up? Now, bear with me. A fan is a circle. So what if the whole thing was basically a tube of fan and there was a big heat sink in the middle of it? And maybe the whole thing would just be a circle. That would be brilliant. They did that without a fan in the G4 Cube. I know you're referring to the trash can, but the G4 Cube is their first chimney computer. And they're like, well, we've got this vertical thing because it's great because heat rises. We don't even need a fan. Turns out they should have had a fan. Yes. Turns out having any fan moves a heck of a lot more heat than having no fan. Than convection, yeah. Yeah. Even the slowest, most slight fan has a pretty big difference in how much heat that moves. But yes, like, honestly, if they actually went to something that looked a little bit more like the trash can, who knows? I mean, I'm sure they wouldn't actually recreate that shape. They have thermal corner PTSD from that design. I know, but like, but actually, like, in, like, with what we are seeing now, you know, who knows how the internals would be laid out, but like, the Mac Studio, okay if you wanted to dissipate a lot more heat from that what if you made it taller like you can start to see how they would get there well the mac studio has such a convoluted airflow like it's i think it's in bottom in the bottom and out the back yeah it makes no sense right from bottom to top makes sense like the trash can from front to back makes sense like the 2019 mac pro and the earlier mac pros but from like from bottom vents out the bottom of the back is not it's like why are you making your life more difficult? So I really do hope they revisit that at some point. We are sponsored by this episode by Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. 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Thank you so much to Claude for fixing my code and for sponsoring our show. Let's do a little bit of follow-out, if we can, please. In episode 627 of Upgrade, which as we record this is not this week, but last week, there was a discussion about FileMaker. And I was aware of FileMaker as a thing, and I was aware that it was part, was, or perhaps is part of Claris, which is itself part of Apple now. I remember Claris works very fondly from when I was a kid and using Macs briefly in school. But I was hoping that probably John could explain to me what the heck is FileMaker. Like, I don't feel like anyone has actually sat down and explained what the heck it is. Well, you wrote in the notes here what was FileMaker, and I put a link into it. It exists now. It is not a past tense thing. But yes, it did exist in the past as well. I have used FileMaker back in the classic Mac OS days. The best way I would describe it is, I think it was described as like a database app. And when you think about database, you're thinking about like, you know, Oracle database or MySQL or SQLite or something like that. Not that kind of database. Not a SQL database with tables and rows and columns and all that stuff. But instead, a program that would provide a database back end and you could write front ends, they would write to your database. So it's the same type of stuff. You define a schema and here's where your data is and you would get things into it and out of it. And you make like a GUI front end for it. And it was used by like businesses to sort of days before the web. Right. So you have like an inventory system for your small business. You had to keep track of how much whatever stuff you have or you wanted to like roll your own system for keeping track of people's hours or something. You can think of it kind of like HyperCard because HyperCard also had a similar type of like you can make GUI apps, but without being a developer. but very database focused like i don't know like maybe like a cross between hypercard and excel uh with more of a data focus so lots of businesses had filemaker databases that they ran their businesses off of i never used it in like in anger like in a real actual scenario i just i was just playing with it as a kid so i never worked at a business that used it or wrote it for a business so i don't know how it actually performed and why people still might use it in the modern age but in the days before the web and the days when you couldn't do all this from a spreadsheet it was like a little bit more than that and the days before like because the spreadsheet is not a good ui to like have employees use and stuff or whatever although plenty of businesses still do it these days uh but yeah that's that's my impression of what filemaker was like for people who actually used it and i guess it still exists because hey if you're if your business runs on filemaker and they keep making new versions of it why would you ever change if it's still working for you Like there's all these stories about, you know, someone wandering around in like 2010 and they see like a Mac SE in the back of some business running some FileMaker database that their whole business runs on. Like, how is that computer even still running? It's like, well, we need it because it runs FileMaker. So I'm glad it still exists for the people who like it. But these days you'd be like, why don't you make a web app? Why don't you? You know, there's a million other things that you could do other than a FileMaker database, but it's still out there for people who want it. I was glancing at the marketing website, which is Apple. like it's very appley except not which is very unusual this is claris.com slash file maker which is very interesting um and i don't have an exact i'm looking at it i can't find exactly what it was i was seeing but it was they had some discussions about how you can do like agentic coding with file maker which is so mind-bending to me because i perceive file maker seemingly unfairly as something from like the early to mid 80s and they're talking about stuff that's relevant in the last like 80 days you know and and it's just astonishing to me that this is still a thing i see the thing it's like filemaker cloud i'm like what yeah yeah yeah what's filemaker cloud it's i just they've met i don't know if you remember there was uh some diversion i don't remember the details but like the the company was like hey filemaker is old and creaky we're coming out with a new thing called bento do you remember that yeah it was like uh a consumer focused friendlier revision of filemaker and i think that just didn't take off and they're like oh never mind our customers just want FileMaker. I have no idea what FileMaker is today, and the website really obscures what it might be, but it kind of reminds me, with the agentic stuff, it kind of reminds me of, like, we haven't talked about this in the show, but a lot of other people have been talking about it. The feature in the 27OS is where you can describe a shortcut. You open the shortcuts app and you just, like, click a thing and you say, I want a shortcut that does X, Y, and Z, and it just makes it for you. I imagine that it's possible to do something similar with FileMaker because it is, like, shortcuts, kind of like a higher-level abstraction for data with a certain number of operations that you can do that the FileMaker knows about. Again, it's not a SQL database. It's not anything as low level as that. It's its own thing. So for all I know, there is a SQL interface to FileMaker these days. It wouldn't surprise me, and a web interface, and a cloud thing. I don't know what they're doing, but the point is they're still in business somehow. Claris.com slash FileMaker slash agentic hyphen development. We'll put it in the show notes. AI is reshaping software. FileMaker is meeting the moment. Claris is investing so you can build with the leading AI coding tools and deploy straightened FileMaker, securely, permissioned, and ready to run. This is modern. This is now. It's incredible to me that this is a thing. So, yeah, I appreciate the short trip down memory lane. I would love it. I would love to see, like, screenshots of this. I haven't gone spelunking through the Internet trying to find them myself. But I'm curious what this looks like both on the development side and on the, like, production side. Because presumably on the production side, for whatever these apps are that this makes, presumably they can look like almost anything. But I'd doubly love to see what it looks like on the development side. So reach out if you're a FileMaker person. All right. I have to ask our editor to insert taps here. Uh-oh. Because apparently Maestrel is no more or soon to be no more. Yeah, this is too bad. This is the app that we kind of found around our circles of maybe, I don't know, three, four years ago, that was a replacement Dropbox client for Mac and Linux. And I don't know if it worked on Windows, but it works on Mac and Linux. And the idea was basically like, you know, the Dropbox app keeps getting bloated and crappy and just has a million things in it, and it's Electron, and it takes a ton of resources. So the Dropbox app was really resource-intensive and bloated. And I wanted accessibility access. I wanted you to know if you wanted to save your screenshots into Dropbox. And it was just like, I think there was some kind of like notes feature in it at some point. They were just chucking. Was there a mail feature in there? I forget. It was ridiculous. Yeah. And they were playing tricks like they were trying to get you to enter your root password by like faking an admin permission dialogue. Like Dropbox at many times of its history has acted like malware on your Mac. Like it's really, it's rough. And Maestral is a client that is open source, and it uses the Dropbox API to basically provide what Dropbox used to be, like a basic sync client. So you'd have a folder at HomeU Dropbox, and it would sync the content of that folder to Dropbox, which is exactly what Dropbox used to do. Well, that's another factor we didn't mention, which is that Dropbox was sort of forced to move to the file provider thing because Apple made that API for them, and the file provider API was worse than the old one. That is another reason people preferred Maestro. Like, I don't want the thing where my Dropbox files are like, well, is it actually there, or is it just like a little zero content thing that when I double-click on it, it has to download? I just want the old thing where it was just local files, and they just happened to be in sync with files somewhere in the cloud, and that's what Maestro would give you. Exactly. And anyway, unfortunately, the creator of Maestral has moved on, not from life, fortunately, but from all these terms sound the same. When people leave jobs, it sounds like they're dying. Okay, the creator of Maestral no longer uses Dropbox, and so they've decided to stop working on it and just kind of abandon it. And it is open source, so I hope someone else picks it up. If not, eventually, like, certificates will expire and stuff, and it will stop working. um i've thought like should i pick it up but i haven't used it in a couple of years either i know i also should not i kind of made that same that same decision but like i don't know should claude pick should somebody pick it up like i mean dropbox should pick it up honestly no you don't want them ruining it no that would be terrible oh no they should they should pick it up and say why does everybody love this can we just make a native client that just knows what this thing does and the answer is yes you could and everyone would love it they would but i guess it wouldn't make them any more money, so oh well. Yeah, that's not going to work. They're just going to mess it up. We don't want that. Yeah, I think let's take this opportunity to do a quick ATP member special. ATP Diamond Dogs, should Marco take up the maestral development? And I'm going to vote no. No. Everyone says no. I say no. Marco says no. Everyone knows that that's not the thing he should do. No, I'm not going to do it. Thank you for joining us on our July member special. We hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you next month. You know who should do it? John Gruber. Because he likes it. Yeah, because he's so good at maintaining software projects. But he can use it as, like, an AI vibe coding excuse. That would be pretty great, actually. I should probably float this by him first. But, yeah, everybody email John Gruber and tell him he should do that. No, we want him to update his site for mobile first. We're working on the backlog on Gruber things that he has to do with technology. It's quite long. Get in line. You're way at the back, my friend. Anyway, I mean, look, it is open source, so it is possible for someone to pick it up. So I hope somebody does who has more time than we do. Yeah, I think it's just a bunch of Python scripts, right? Kind of like the original Dropbox. Probably, yeah. And the only reason I stopped using it was because it was a little bit slower to see changes than the actual Dropbox client. And I had issues with it in multi-user mode on the Mac. But it still runs on my server. I use Dropbox for the market.org CMS for all the very high volume of blog posts that I still write. And so I needed a Dropbox client on the server. Dropbox themselves used to make a Linux client. I don't know if they still do. And it was horrendous. And so I replaced that with Maestrol years ago, and it's been perfect since then. At least they still support an API that Maestrol is using. And also, like I was reminded of this when I was messing with MySynology, that the Synology also has a Dropbox syncing thing somehow. In there, I don't know if it's official Dropbox or they just wrote it themselves, but the bottom line is you can just enable a thing that will sync your Dropbox to your Synology. Yeah, and the only thing is, though, what you mentioned in a second ago is important. We don't know how long the API that powers this will continue to exist and be supported and be allowed. So I would caution anybody from building a business on this. But certainly, as long as that API continues to exist, this could be a really great open-source project for someone to pick up. I know about the Synology thing also because Dropbox recently made a change to their API backend that broke the Synology client, where the Synology client keeps losing its authentication every, like, two hours or something. So Synology has said they know what's happening and they're going to fix their client. But it is a little bit of a moving target. That's weird because I do not have that problem with CloudSync, which is what I use to share files with you folks. Oh, you're not using CloudSync with Dropbox, are you? Yes, absolutely. Check to see whether you've lost authentication. How do I check that? Go to Cloud Synology, go to the Cloud Sync app, and then look at your thing. And if it has a little red badge that says need to re-authenticate, then you've lost authentication. All right. I'll take a look as we speak. But I don't think that's the case because, I mean, I sent Marco the file for the member special we recorded Monday, which is not available quite yet, everyone. Don't worry. But soon. I sent that file two days ago, and that was via Dropbox, via Cloud Sync. So I think everything's working. I'm trying to log in now. loading mine right now to see if mine has not mine's still good maybe they already fixed it maybe Synology already fixed it but yeah there was a big uh community thread in the Synology thing of everyone having the same problem that I did but it was I think it's still working because I didn't touch this since yesterday and it's still authenticated for me so maybe it just cured itself all right I'll hear no I've got a green check mark it says everything's up to date so I think I'm good I'm just a cloud sync unicorn I say as I knock on wood because god bless I cannot lose this it would ruin me we are sponsored this week by quince so it's summertime here in the northern hemisphere and i really love that it's really warm sometimes a little too warm if i'm honest but that's okay it's really really warm and then sometimes in the evenings it gets actually ever so slightly nippy and one of the great things about quince one of the many great things about quince is that they can cover all of your bases and they are especially good at summertime stuff and so for example quince offers 100% European linen pants and shirts that are breathable, easy to throw on, and the summer upgrade your rotation needs. And they start at just $34. I got to tell you, Quince has sent me a set of their linen pants. They are astonishingly comfortable. I absolutely love them. And I will be sad when I can't wear them anymore at the end of the summer because it's not really in style. And even I know that. Their t-shirts are soft enough to live in all day. 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They are very excited to receive all these, and if it's anything like the clothing that Declan and I and Michaela actually have already gotten, it's going to be great. And it's not just clothing. Quince has become a trusted favorite for everything from home to travel and everyday essentials. They do a little bit of everything. So make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com slash ATP for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Quince is now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash ATP for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash ATP. Thank you to Quince for sponsoring the show. Big topic for today is a couple of days ago as we record this, Apple decided to sue OpenAI. So we'll put many, many, many links in the show notes. There's a zillion different ones, but we're going to read a little bit, starting with our dear friend jason snell over at six colors back in may open ai was rattling its saber about thinking about talking to lawyers about possibly considering a lawsuit against apple for not treating it right when it came to chat gpt integration what a misdirection indeed apple has sued open ai and it's alleging that the hardware program it's building with johnny hive and comp and company is being fueled by the theft of trade secrets here's the statement apple supplied to various news outlets on friday quote at apple our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously recently significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by open ai wrongfully took apple's secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies processes and products we will always defend our team's hard work and innovations and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so can i just pause at this moment please these companies to be at this size and scale almost everyone at and near the top of a company like this is going to be a huge a**hole in some form like it just it just what what is necessary to rise to those kinds of levels And these companies pathologically like the personality of the company based on its behavior its actual behavior these companies are both just tremendous a in different ways And so this statement, this starts out as Apple throwing such, like, manipulative bullshit language. So let's, okay, our teams are developing technologies, protecting their work. Apple's not doing it for Apple. They're protecting their team's work. We will always defend our team's hard work. This is such like support the troops kind of language. We are forced to do this because we have to defend our team's work. It's all about our teams. Now, keep in mind, Apple, which they're about to, we're going to get into this later on in this discussion, what the work is that they're defending, Apple sees as 100% Apple's work, and they own that work. So they put on a great language slant here, as they tend to do. But let's be very, very clear about what Apple is defending here. Apple's defending what it believes is its property, not the property or work of the troops. It is Apple's, and Apple owns those troops, and Apple owns what it is trying to defend here. Yeah, let me continue reading, but there's a lot here, and I have extremely mixed feelings about it all. But continuing on, there's a lot more in the court filing. As summarized by Chance Miller at 9to5Mac, The complaint alleges that former Apple designer Tang Tan used insider knowledge of Apple's confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews. Additionally, Tan directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring actual Apple hardware components and samples for, quote, show and tell sessions. Furthermore, Apple says a candidate began, quote, screenshotting and downloading files related to a highly confidential Apple project, or excuse me, project, hours before interviewing with Tan, who then solicited more information about the same Apple project once the interview started. This became an established pattern, Apple says. So on this topic, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know about the legalities of this, but again, assuming what Apple says is true, I do wonder, and we'll get more into this as we go on, where the line is between what I think is a fairly clear line. Well, I don't even know because, again, I'm not a lawyer. Whatever your legal responsibilities are as an Apple employee, presumably you sign stuff when you become an employee, and by you violating your employment contract or whatever, I'm sure there's civil legal things there. Say, hey, you're an Apple employee. You're not supposed to, let's say, take hardware devices and bring them to a job interview with a competitor. I'm pretty sure the Apple employment agreement probably has language saying that you shouldn't do that. But that feels like it would be on the person going on the job interview. They have broken their employment agreement with Apple by doing a thing that is against that agreement. I don't know where the line is because I'm not a lawyer of like, say you're at the competitor company, say you're TangTan and OpenAI. Can you just tell people? Oh, totally. Go like, do you bring all that stuff? Like, can you if you tell someone, hey, you should do a bunch of stuff that will probably break your employment agreement. Are you liable for that? if i say oh you should totally go out and rob a bank and you go out and rob a bank am i liable in any way you're the one who robbed the bank i didn't do it so i don't know where that line is i don't know what the what the the civil legal penalties are for like encouraging someone to break their employment agreement or whatever which makes it hard for me to understand what the chances are of this thing even if you take everything apple says at face value it's like okay well but where does the responsibility lie like i read this and we're going to read more of And it totally seems like a bunch of people who either are current or former Apple employees did things that were clear violations of their employment agreement. And they're going to get destroyed because like if it's true in any way whatsoever, it's so clear that you've done something bad as an Apple employee. I don't know where OpenAI's responsibility appears in this because I'm not an employment lawyer. I don't know anything about how that works. But people reading it, you're like, oh, open AI is a villain. And I'm like, well, are they just telling people to break the law and then people are doing it or break it again? Break it, break their contracts and they're doing it and then they're they're blameless. But we'll see if this actually ever goes to court. Yeah. And honestly, I hope it does. That would be really popcorn kind of levels of interesting. That's why they'll settle it because they don't want that popcorn. Yeah. But but it's certainly like, again, none of us are lawyers of any sort, let alone a relevant sort. But you could probably make the case that, like, inducing somebody to do this or possibly compensating someone. And you can say, like, well, is a job offer maybe a compensation for doing this? Like, yeah, yeah, I can imagine scenarios where there is a liability there. I just don't know what the what the parameters are. I'm sure what Apple is hoping for is a whole bunch of document discovery from, like, open AI emails and stuff. Like, I'm sure that's that's what they're probably hoping for. Well, they seem to have tons already. You should continue, Casey, with more of the fun tidbits. Yeah, so this gets really astonishing. And it's worth noting, again, that these are accusations. They have not been proven, as far as we know. This is Apple's side of the story. It's only Apple's side of the story. But let me tell you, it sure sounds like Apple has some of these folks dead to rights. But anyways, two more allegations from Emma Roth at The Verge in her article listing the six wildest claims in Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI. Chang Liu, a former Apple employee who worked as a systems electrical engineer on the iPhone for over eight years, allegedly kept an Apple-owned computer, allowing him to download dozens of confidential files. Lou also allegedly accessed Apple's cloud-based network storage weeks after he left the company using an authentication vulnerability that Apple didn't know about. Again, I'm pretty sure Apple's employment agreement says you can't keep your Apple-issued computer after you leave the company, and you certainly can't use it to access our network after you're no longer employed. That's like basically, I'm sure there's like criminal, like whatever laws they passed in the 90s to criminalize hackers. that's criminal liability of like you broke into a foreign network like you you unauthorized access to a blah blah blah like we have so many laws in the u.s about that because back you know back in the 90s when they made these laws it was like to punish you know mitnick or whatever his name was like uh he's so there's if again if this is true there's criminal liability and just really really poor thinking like the worst industrial espronage you can ever imagine don't use your apple issued computer like what do you think they're not trapping your apple issued computer like really these are technology people it's not like just if this is true it's just mind-bendingly poorly thought out yeah i mean this is like yeah like this again not lawyers but cheng lu sounds like he has some significant uh legal problems if this if any of this is true again they're possibly criminal exactly yeah like that i i think odds are either either he has to make a heck of a deal or he's going to literally be in jail for that. Like that's, that's going to be a big problem. Although Apple would be probably very willing for him to, you know, make a deal and turn on OpenAI. Oh, I'm sure. I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure everyone's talking about stuff like that. Yeah, this is, you can argue about some of the other things, like what does Apple own in terms of the people, their expertise, things like that. But Apple does own their documents, their hardware prototypes. That's pretty clear cut. Exfiltrating those and bringing them to a competitor is generally a crime. Continuing from The Verge, OpenAI allegedly coached Apple employees on how to bypass security measures. Woof. Apple claims TAN kept an internal document that outlines employee off-boarding procedures. OpenAI allegedly used this information to warn employees coming from Apple about the company's security checks and coached them on how to avoid it. They did a poor job of coaching, I feel like. They said, hey, don't use your Apple laptop. Don't refuse to give back your Apple laptop and then use that same laptop, which you know Apple is tracking, to infiltrate their network and get stuff out. So maybe they updated their coaching. But this gets to what Marco was saying. Like, okay, at the point you're coaching, again, presuming Apple is to be believed here, at the point where you're coaching applicants on how to avoid detection while performing industrial espionage, that feels like, again, not a lawyer, but that feels like a place where OpenAI suddenly has a bunch of liability. Well, there's a version of this that's okay. It's kind of like when we tell our kids, don't talk to the police. Never, ever talk to the police. If the police come and try to stop you, if you're not under arrest, you can say, am I free to go, and you can go. We tell people that. That's okay. So if OpenAI is saying, here's what's going to happen. Apple is going to demand your laptop back. They're going to ask you for all these things. If any of those things are like legally not required and you can just say, no, thanks, like I don't want to do your security interview. I don't see anything wrong with them telling people that sort of thing. But there is a fine line between telling people what their rights are and telling people what's going to happen when they quit or get fired or whatever versus saying, like, well, you can keep your laptop for three extra days and copy all the files off if you do this. So there is a line, and there's a bunch of stuff on the okay side of that line. But it sounds like Apple thinks there's some stuff on the other side, too. Also from the complaint, as quoted by Gruber, OpenAI has used confidential Apple information in approaching Apple's trusted partners, even having one carry out a specific trade secret metal finishing technique for OpenAI, misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so. holy god if this is true my work again i don't know about the legalities here because like oh isn't that just fraud but it's like i there are so many situations where things seem like they should be against the law but aren't for example police can lie to you about this stuff all the time speaking of police they can they can just lie and say oh yeah no apple gave me permission and you just i know it's the same thing but i can and do right so so let's say open ai lies and says apple totally gave me permission to do this uh is that on open ai yes they're telling a lie But isn't it kind of on the manufacturer to say, like, I'm sure the manufacturer has an agreement with Apple that says, here's our metal finishing technique. And our agreement says you can only use it for us. You can't tell anyone else about it. You can't use it for anyone else. And if someone says, oh, just ignore that agreement with Apple. Apple said we could do it. Shouldn't the manufacturer say, well, we actually can't because the contract says we can't and we can't take your word for it. Like, is there liability for opening it? There sure is liability for the manufacturer. I can guarantee that because Apple's not making contracts that don't have a clause in it that says you cannot use this metal finishing technique for anyone else. That's surely in the contract. I feel like the manufacturer has violated the contract. Has OpenAI done anything? Again, I'm not familiar with the law. I'm sure there's something in there that says, as Marco said, there's some line that you cross when you induce a partner or you provide false information to a partner as part of your contract with them. It says, no, Apple said it's fine. The thing you're doing for them, they said, yeah, we love OpenAI so much. You can do it for them, too. It's fine. You don't need to check. Don't call them. Continuing from Gruber, footnote 13 on page 15 states, Apple and OpenAI have a commercial relationship involving the integration of OpenAI's chat GPT into Apple Intelligence. The companies have entered into a written agreement governing that integration. That agreement is not at issue here. OpenAI's act of trade secret misappropriation alleged herein do not arise from and have no connection to that agreement. Yeah, this is the big picture on this is why is Apple mad at OpenAI? The answer is obvious. Apple was not mad at OpenAI when they were making AI chatbots. Even though Apple was trying to do that, Apple was so incredibly bad at it that they needed OpenAI to bail them out to the extent that they could back in 2024 with ChatGPT integration and iOS when they couldn't get their own act together. And Apple just felt like, well, we don't have this and we're not competitive with this and we have this deal with OpenAI. But where Apple has always felt like this is our area, don't step on our toes, is hardware. So as soon as OpenAI said, hey, we're going to do hardware, we're hiring Johnny Ive, and we're buying his company, and we're doing this, and we're doing that, and Johnny Ive is pulling all the Apple designers out of Apple into OpenAI, and Apple's looking at that and saying, no, no, no, you don't make hardware. We make hardware devices. You can make that AI stuff that we don't understand. Maybe we'll figure it out, but hardware is us. And so they feel very competitive in that area. And this entire lawsuit seems entirely about metal finishing techniques and hardware designers and eggs and all like hardware devices. So thus far, OpenAI has not introduced a hardware device. And we've talked about it a lot. We'll talk about it more probably next episode. But that is the place where Apple's like, no, that's too far. We hate you now. It's kind of like when Google started doing Android and they were like, you just were supposed to provide us maps and search. What the hell? What is this? What is this? smart we do smart you don't do that you just do maps and search so this is totally that moment where they're like oh so you're going to take all our designers and johnny ive and you're going to make a hardware product that competes with us we hate you now what can we do about that uh you're hiring by all of our employees what is it something like 400 people they said that had left apple's hardware team to get open ai like think about the soap opera going on about this or like okay so So, first of all, yes, it is important to bring up Johnny Ive because Johnny Ive's company that he created, not Love From, his main company, but he created this subcompany called IO or EO. They had to rename it because of a trademark thing. It's called like IO colon podcast player. It's got to feel like the app store name. Right, right. Because of that lawsuit. Right. But, you know, so Johnny created this like subcompany for his hardware efforts, sold it to OpenAI. this is obviously like a bunch of like you know moving cups around to try to somehow legally and financially work out the fact that johnny ive is working for open ai but not exclusively for open ai but seems like mainly for open ai and johnny ive had a whole but he hired a whole bunch of people out of apple seem seemingly a lot of the people who used to work for him like like his whole team everybody including all the people who succeeded him like evan tanky was in charge for Like, his whole team is over there with him, including Tank Tan, I think. Think about the relationship already that had to have gone on between Apple and Johnny Ive. Now, the last thing Apple wants to do is point this out or draw attention to it, which is why Johnny Ive is mentioned nowhere in this lawsuit, even though it obviously involves the division of OpenAI that is basically his team. Like, it would be really out there and far-fetched if it didn't involve any of him or his core people. so it probably does but apple does not want the pr to be that they are suing johnny ive in any context or any of johnny ive's you know properties but they sort of are especially since at this point as far as the public's concerned they're like it's there is no johnny ive open ai product if they had done this after like johnny the open ai egg comes out and johnny ive is there on stage telling everyone how great it is and then they sue then that's a big scandal story but if they sued and mention Johnny Ive now, people will be like, what are they suing him for? He hasn't even done anything. But he is doing stuff. He's like, I don't see any. Where's the egg? I don't see anything like it. It's all behind the scenes now. So the timing of this is actually pretty good and allows them to not name him and to avoid this story because there is no focal point for it. There is no egg for us to look at and say, OpenAI came out with hardware and now Apple hates them. OpenAI is going to come out with hardware. That's why Apple hates them, but they haven't done it yet. Yeah. Anyway, so imagine the feelings between Johnny Ive and his former and now current again team, whoever moved over. And it sounds like it's a lot. There must be some pretty bad blood between them and Apple because, first of all, they all left. So they probably weren't super happy with Apple. Second of all, Apple is probably not super happy with them for leaving and then pulling so many people with them. So obviously something has gone down in, you know, over the last few years. There has been some kind of significant turmoil in these relationships between these these factions that used to be all with an apple. And look, now we have a new CEO. So probably there was something related to that. Those dynamics of like, yeah, according to the most recent dithering, Tang Tan and Ternus hate each other from back in the Apple days, because basically they were, it seems like they perhaps were up for the same type of thing ahead of hardware and Ternus got it and TangTan didn't. So yeah, if you are TangTan and you're over at OpenAI and Apple already hates you and new CEO personally hates you, lawsuit. Right, and so there's obviously, there's all this drama going on between these, all these factions that used to be old Apple, now they've split up. It probably, you know, explains a lot of the, you know, different directions Apple has gone with hardware over the last few years that I think are universally better. But, you know, it probably helped explain a lot of a lot of those, you know, machinations that we've seen over the last few years that like obviously there's there are these factions and they and they don't like they don't like each other. And so Apple also super hates losing people to competitors. I mean, there was that famous Steve Jobs, you know, collusion thing. They really don't like that. And so, yeah, Apple's going to feel really attacked. And I'm sure Apple was just looking for something that they could bring up in some kind of legal threat to try to stop some of this. And it looks like OpenAI was totally happy to give them lots of things. Yeah, I mean, again, transferring it to OpenAI might be tricky, but I'm sure the security team had all these people, as Katie said, dead to rights. If all this is true for a long time, it's just a question of can we turn this into an OpenAI thing? The other angle on that discussion that has come up in our little circles is the broader discussion about when you leave a company, do you have to empty your brain of everything that you know? Or can you leave like what do you get to leave with? Marco mentioned that obviously when you do work for a company, it is work for hire. The company owns the work you don't in most companies. But California in particular has fairly strict rules as compared to the other states in the United States about not allowing employers to unduly restrain their employees. Because part of the Silicon Valley culture is you work for one company, you learn something, you work for another, you go to another company, you do a startup or whatever. They don't want to allow things like draconian non-competes. I think non-competes in general are not even legal in California where they say, oh, if you leave this company, you can't work in this industry for two years. Non-competes like that are legal in some states of the United States, but not in California because it is against their culture of like we started this company, then we leave to do a startup, then we compete. But they want to see more competition. Similarly, I would imagine the laws about like what do you get to take with you in your brain when you leave a company? like if you you know learn a bunch of stuff at one company about like machining and metal finishing obviously there's the uh the various legal constructs like patents and uh trade secrets that you've signed an agreement that you're not going to reveal but what about just your experience like you know good ways to do things and how to organize people and like you take those with you obviously you can't you know apple doesn't own the things that you learned when you were there and I'm sure there's a whole complex realm of law about, okay, well, you learned like best practices and how to organize things and what makes a good deal and a bad deal or whatever, but what about this one very specific thing that you're doing at OpenAI that is a quote-unquote trade secret and is not just like a thing that you learned when you were there? And it's the same for programmers. Like I can say in all my past jobs, I don't know how many web frameworks I wrote. Starting with my very first web development job out of school, I think at various jobs, I've written multiple web frameworks And each time I went to a new job, I didn't take my old web framework with me because I didn't want it because I had learned so much since then. But when I wrote my next web framework, it built on all the knowledge of my previous web frameworks. And I kept doing that and making better and better and better ones. I was taking my knowledge and experience with me. I was not taking the code with me, but I was definitely taking like, oh, last time I did it, I did it this way. And I learned that this is good and this is bad. And if you squint at one of my web frameworks, you're like, that looks kind of like the one you did at your last job. Only I see this change, this change, and this change. It's all new code, but I'm taking my experience with me. That's what makes you a more valuable employee as you gain experience is that you learn things. And that's why someone hires you for more money at another job. And again, I feel like California is one of the best states. I said strict before, but like strict in terms of defending employees rights to compete, to leave one company and to go to another or to leave one company and start their own company. And we can't say, oh, that's not fair. You learned a bunch of stuff at Apple. And that's the only reason your startup is successful. Yeah, I learned stuff. And now I'm smarter and I'm making my own company. right so that also is kind of against apple on the broader issue of like you took things that you learned and went to another company to compete with us like yeah that's how it's supposed to work um is open ai a california company i don't actually know i'm assuming they're all incorporated in delaware but i'm assuming these lawsuits are going to be in california yeah presumably and yeah and i agree like i think the it's a very clear in in broad strokes apple can own the work that you did at Apple. Again, documents, products, hardware, like they can own that. Source code. Yes, exactly. But they can't own your expertise. Now, we're not lawyers, again, and so the definition of what is considered a trade secret, that is probably going to be possibly argued here. That's going to be pretty important because that sounds like it's a somewhat squishy concept. But yeah, I think if you are really good at metal finishing and OpenAI hires you and they say, hey, we want you to give us some really good metal finishing expertise. Unless certain things are patented by Apple, I think you can probably bring them your metal finishing knowledge in most cases. And if they're patented, the whole point is the patent allows that to be shared, but then there's perhaps a licensing fee. The whole point of patents is we tell the world, but you don't get to use it for free. The idea of hiring away Apple's people with competitive salaries and offers of freedom or excitement they might not have at Apple, that's fair game. And Apple, they are a big established company with mostly big established mature product lines. So, yeah, people are going to get the itch and want to go do something new. And Apple historically is somewhat stingy with salaries, what we've heard. and so OpenAI is able to throw around some cash or Meta famously throws around big salaries. Of course they're going to be able to hire away some of Apple's people and every time somebody at Apple gets promoted, there's going to be someone who didn't and they're going to be upset and maybe they'll be easy to hire away as well and people are going to move around. Apple does the same thing. I saw somebody saying that breezed by earlier that this is kind of what Apple's accused of doing to Massimo. where they kind of just hired away their people and had them recreate blood oxygen sensing technology and the Apple Watch. This is what happens in companies. This is fair game. As long as you don't cross certain lines of things like stealing documents and stuff like that, that is obviously a line that they should not cross, and it sounds like they did just walk right past it and stomp all over it. But the idea of restricting a company from hiring away your people with compelling offers and then having those people do similar work for them, Apple doesn't own those people. And if Apple does not want to lose those people, they should pay them better if they need to or work with them in whatever other things that they want if they can and recognize that that's not going to always be the case. Again, like the promotion situation, if somebody gets promoted but someone else didn't, there's not that much Apple can do about that. And so if those people want to leave, they're going to leave. or somebody wants to leave the giant mothership of Apple and go work for some, you know, fast moving, exciting startup like Apple probably can't do much to keep those people either. And so it happens all the time. Yes. So I end up returning to Apple a lot. Yeah. All the time. That's just part of working in this business and many businesses. So this is going to happen. And Apple is going to put out a whole bunch of bravado about how they own all their stuff. And I'm sure Apple believes, I'm sure some people in Apple believe that they own a lot more of these employees' talents than they really should. But at the end of the day, it does sound like a lot of really clear lines have definitely been crossed by OpenAI. And I'm not surprised to hear that. Like, going back to my earlier comments, like, a lot of these people have very strong personalities, let's say. amateur psychologists would have a field day with a lot of these people trying to figure out what exactly their their issue is um these are some some really strong personalities at these levels and so many of them have no problem lying i mean sam altman has basically made a career out of it like many of these people are you know really showing like significant sociopathic kind of behaviors of just like totally disregarding morality effects on people rules laws fraud so yeah you're gonna see a lot of this kind of behavior at these levels i'm not surprised honestly like all of these allegations assuming that even that even you know any of them are true like none of them actually surprise me they're kind of galling in terms of like wow i can't believe if they actually thought they would get away with that. But think about who you're dealing with here. Yeah, of course, these people are going to try stuff like this. Again, not a lawyer. Apple probably has a pretty good case. Like, I don't think Apple would do this if they didn't. And I don't know if they're going to get all of what they want, but I bet they're going to get some of what they want. Yeah, when Apple initiates a lawsuit, there's usually a pretty good chance that they think they're going to win it. When they're the victim of a lawsuit, you never know how it's going to go because you don't know what Apple did. But when they initiate a lawsuit, they're probably, they're so conservative about this. And in this particular case, you would imagine if you were to remove most of these personalities, you were like, oh, OpenAI will just settle this because they've got tons of money. And what you do in cases like this is you throw money at it and you make the problem go away because the last thing OpenAI needs is some like long legal battle and bad press and blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, just settle. But then we get to the personalities involved. And I'm of two minds about that. One, if there's like personal animosity, like, again, between Ternus and Tang Tan and maybe Johnny Ive and Apple and Sam Altman and Apple, because, again, we started the Snell's thing with OpenAI was putting out these little leaks that like we're thinking about suing Apple like a long time ago. There was already bad blood, probably because they knew they were going to be sued at that point or whatever. So that bad blood exists. And you're like, OK, well, when you have these big personalities and bad blood, on the one hand, you're like, oh, that means OpenAI is not going to do the smart thing. And instead of settling like they could with their giant pile of VC money right now when they're rolling in it, they're going to, you know, dig in and say, no, we're going to fight this. Right. Which I think would be dumb. Like, why fight it? Settle. Right. Just settle and make this go away. But maybe they'll fight it. But then I look at the specific personality of Sam Altman, who seems like so incredibly feckless and just just not. he's more like a pathological liar and untrustworthy or whatever, but also not particularly like brave. He's not Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg, I can imagine, digging in and being like, they're going to fight this. Steve Jobs, for example, of course, would dig in his heels and fight this way past the edge of logic. I don't know what Ternus is like in that regard, although it seems like he's okay with this lawsuit. But Sam Altman, even though he has a strong personality and has no problem lying, I would imagine he doesn't seem like a fighter to me like in the in the elon musk lawsuit and everything i mean elon it's not hard to look better than elon when you're on the stand or whatever and i think sam altman did but i just he just seems so like just like a wet dish rag full of lies like it's just not like i don't see him going like we will we will fight apple to the bitter end about this lawsuit so i think he'll settle assuming apple's willing to settle and i think apple would be willing to settle they just want to stop this from happening i don't know well let's see how this goes is it that apple just wants to stop this from happening which i think is true and by this i mean both the exodus of employees and the hardware fantasies of open ai oh this lawsuit's not going to stop either one of those well that's true um but the other thing i don't remember if i heard this on dithering or somewhere else but somebody pointed out maybe on upgrade that this is a really great opportunity to do a whole lot of discovery and and i think that that's very appealing to apple because they can but that why open ai was settled to avoid that oh i agree i agree but if open ai really wants to go for broke that not going to end well for open ai i don think and coming back to something that i think marco said earlier might have been it was either one of you but but somebody said earlier you know if you don want to have an exodus here an idea pay your people better and i know that apple employees make a butt ton of money but i also know it costs a butt ton of money to live in the san francisco bay area and everything i've understood from many many many different people inside and outside of apple is that amongst silicon valley and amongst the like facebook's and and google's and apples and netflix's of the world apple's like really cheap from everything i've ever understood when it comes to salary now granted they have you know stock programs for their employees and non non-salary compensation and so on and so forth but here's the novel idea which was said earlier and i would like to agree with maybe pay your people a little more and i think that might solve a portion of these problems now it's still not the new shiny over at open ai you know the the iphone is new ish and shiny ish but it's not new shiny like whatever they're doing in open ai but i think some of this could be solved by having more competitive salaries and i'm pretty sure apple could afford it well the flip side of that is something we've discussed in the past which is first of all you're never going to compete with the giant bucket of investment money that is sprinkling down on open AI, nor will you compete with the apparent huge pile of money that Facebook is willing to throw into these efforts. And it probably would be foolish for Apple to pursue that. Apple has chosen not to pursue the creation of a frontier model, which costs billions and billions of dollars. So they're not doing that. But I like how much would you have to pay to compete with like the Facebook salaries? Like, do you want to do that? Is that a good idea? And the second aspect is the thing we talked about back in the JG days where they were hiring AI people to JG's team to do Siri or whatever and paying those people way more than other Apple employees. And that makes the other Apple employees go, hey, I'm over here working on iOS. You know, the thing that makes actual money. Why are all these new employees getting paid more than me? I've been here for eight years. and you're like you can't just like okay we'll just we'll raise all apple employees to the bubble and zuckerberg inflated prices of 2023 2024 for ai things that's also a bad decision so in some respects as marco pointed out you just have to take it you just have to i'm not saying they shouldn't raise their salaries even more competitive across the board like but to the to the sane baseline not to the 100 million dollar mba star ai researcher line because that line is not sustainable and even if you just raise it for one group of people all that does is make your other employees even more disgruntled it is not feasible to say every apple employee needs to have ai bubble salaries so you just say look we know people are going to leave and you know we're we can't like we shouldn't try to stop them with salary and perks because we won't be able to and even trying would distort things so much in apple that when the bubble pops what are you going to tell everybody oh now the bubble popped all your salaries are going back down to same levels no you're not going do that either so it's just a fact of life i mean it's the same reason people have always left apple to try to do something else like apple is there to be steady and reliable and a place people can circle back to after their startup fails or after they get sick of working for zuckerberg or whatever um and so they're fulfilling that role i do agree with you that they probably should be less stingy than they are especially since a lot of their stinginess relied on the fact that apple stock was just always going up and up and up and by the way it still kind of is going up and up and up but not to the levels it used to be and also the whole like don't you want to work in the games industry don't you want to work for hollywood people's willingness to take less in exchange for being what they consider in a really high profile place like it's the reason the game industry exploits workers is the reason hollywood exploits them because they're like oh i just i've always wanted to work on games i always wanted to be in hollywood i've always wanted to work for apple so apple takes advantage of that and to the degree that apple does that they should stop because the shine is a little bit off that Apple. See what I did? Wow. But, yeah, they can't. It's unwise to pursue the unsustainable salaries that everyone else is getting. And, you know, we'll see how it works out for those companies. I bet, speaking of Facebook, the people who went over there and got those huge salaries but then realized that they're going to have like that Facebook is going to be looking at the key loggers that are installed on other computers to make sure they're all working hard enough or whatever, I wonder if they're reconsidering their life choices. Yeah, seriously. Before we move on, though, we should say that OpenAI's response was as follows. On the 10th of July, Drew Pusateri, who is apparently head of comms at OpenAI, said, Our statement in response to this suit, colon, we have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere. Nothing. It says nothing. It was probably written with ChatGPT. We have no interest. Why would we care about other people's trade secrets? That sounds boring. I'm not interested. Are you interested? I'm not interested. in other people's trades. If you gave them to me, I wouldn't even look at them. And then on the 14th, four days later, OpenAI's statement is reported by Bloomberg. While we take these allegations seriously, we're not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit. We believe in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose, and we're focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere. I believe Apple will soon make you aware of evidence. Yes, we're not aware of any evidence of this. Well, they haven't seen any yet. They've just seen allegations. I'm sure the person who wrote that statement maybe has not, can say they are not aware of any evidence of that. That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. It doesn't mean that they aren't aware of the event happening, but they just need evidence. Yeah, prove it. Yeah, right. That's like, you know, if I don't pay my taxes, I'm not aware of any evidence that I didn't pay my taxes. That doesn't say I paid them. You know, there's a lot of ways, there's a lot of holes in these words. Yeah, that's why the supposed comms person, I don't know if he's the head of comms, but his bio on Twitter was comms that open AI. I love the fact that he's on Twitter. Says, you know, we have no interest in other companies. Just like if you can't put out a denial as your first response, don't say anything. Don't say we're not denying it, but I'm just saying we don't even like that stuff. Why would we have that? We don't even like it. We don't like trade secrets. We would never do that. We have no interest in that. Yeah. What an incredible defense. I would say that the comms department at Apple has a little bit more experience and maturity when it comes to dealing with these stuff than a very young company like OpenAI. And we'll see how this goes. But my advice to OpenAI is just settle. Well, if that's even an idea. Like, look, Apple has lost hundreds of people to OpenAI. How do you know they would even be willing to settle? like apple probably like if apple thinks they have no real risks of you know like in discovery oh how do you know apple will be willing to settle i think apple's willing to sell maybe but for what because they want to declare victory they want to say we've reached a settlement and open ai paid us this amount of money here's here's the thing apple in in this particular context apple probably they probably wouldn't have brought this suit if they thought that discovery would be a big risk for them so they probably think look if you dump a bunch of apple emails out into court that you know around this this particular area we have nothing to hide we're fine is it going to be worse than the app store emails whereas like if open ai gets their stuff dragged into court who knows what that's going to be and by the way open ai is trying to ipo pretty soon probably so like this is bad for them like timing wise like apple did not do this without care like apple knows exactly what they're doing and when they're doing it. This is a pro move on Apple's side. We'll see what happens. But if I were Apple, I don't think I'd want to rush to a settlement. Because OpenAI, they're going to keep getting more and more desperate as their IPO dreams get closer and if things start looking very bad for them and if a bunch of discovery stuff starts coming out, Apple is probably in a pretty strong position on that. Who knows if this actually goes to court and goes to trial and goes all the way to the end of a trial. Those are very big ifs. But if this actually gets that far, who knows if Apple would actually, quote, win or not. But they can inflict a lot of pain on OpenAI in the meantime with dragging them out into all of this, dragging all this into the public, all the discovery coming out, and casting doubts maybe on some of that IPO. So Apple is in a pretty good position here. I would imagine that the ChatGPT and iOS deal is probably going to lapse and not be renewed though yes and also once you use iOS 27 you're like yeah there's no need for that anymore Siri has taken most of the need for that away and the OpenAI deal of having it be integrated if you ask Siri to hey also please ask ChatGPT to tell me this that's so clunky and less necessary now no one's going to really be doing that anymore Honestly, it never worked that well to begin with. Hopefully that will be replaced next year by the thing that was rumored this year's WWDC, which is like a third-party pluggable, hey, if you want to use a different chatbot because the EU is making us, you can plug in some other company's chatbot besides Siri in there. And then OpenAI would just do that just because they have to because Anthropic would do it and all the other stuff. So anyway, we'll see how that goes. But, yeah, the specific, very, very particular deal that Apple referenced, I don't know what the expiration date on that is, but I feel like neither one of the parties is going to be excited about renewing it. Yeah, I think you're right. And by the way, if you're an Apple employee and you want to go work somewhere else, go for it. If you can get a higher pay somewhere else and something that you're really excited about, do it. Except unless it's at Facebook, don't do it. Yeah, don't do that. That's that's just a step down. But like feel free to take your expertise wherever you want. You are valuable without committing crimes on the way out. Like you have a ton of value. If they're going to hire you, this is like counseling. If they're going to hire you, they're going to like you for you. Don't put yourself in hot water by bringing out documents and crap. Like you don't need to do that. You're just – you are so screwing yourself on that. And if you're that valuable, you're going to get the job no matter what. yeah i mean i just i can't understand the math that these open ai employees did in order to make this thing seem like a good idea and they they're going to be screwed for getting any sort of job in any of these fields anytime in the future because clearly they're not trustworthy if assuming this all is proven in some way shape or form but i mean it sure would make me think twice if i saw one of these names on a resume that crossed my desk like or even just like if you're hiring somebody and you're like, hey, can you bring a bunch of internal stuff from your old company? Don't you, for a second, think ahead? When they leave my company, are they going to do the same thing? Not to mention, huh, that's a really skeevy thing to ask me to do. Maybe I don't want to work here. Exactly, yeah. The people will do it. Yeah, please commit some crimes on your way out of your old company, but your first day here, please sign our employee handbook policy. Just bananas. Alright, thank you to our sponsors this episode. Squarespace, Claude, and Quince, and thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many, many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Sony having announced the end of PlayStation game discs. End of an era. Covering that and more in Overtime. Atp.fm slash join to hear it. Thank you so much for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So my intention is to do kind of a twofer after show, because I think I have two things to talk about. Both should be pretty quick. Famous last words. First of all, last week we were on vacation. We had our second beach trip of the year with some dear friends of ours. And I wanted to talk about vacation results specifically around nerd stuff. And if you recall, when we went to Cape Charles a few weeks ago, I was using the Unify Travel Router in the car. and was not sure how that would work out in the house because the travel router, while I adore it, it's not the strongest thing in the world. And in the Cape Charles house, what's nice is the internet happens to come in. Unfortunately, it's like crappy cable internet, but it happens to come in in roughly the center of the house. And so the travel router actually mostly did great, both in terms of performance and distance and everything else. But this particular vacation, it's a bigger house. It's a two-story house instead of a one-story house. And the internet comes in in the corner. Now, I will say that the Internet went from crappy cable Internet to fiber. They apparently since last year, it's the same house we were in last year, but apparently they've added fiber to this section of North Carolina that we visited, which was incredible. And I loved it. And astonishingly, the actual fiber optic line was in like a jack on the wall. You know, like with Verizon, the fiber optics is generally speaking terminated outside and then Ethernet runs into your house. In this case, in one extreme corner of the home, that's where a fiber optic line was coming out of the wall and going into like a combination ONT router situation. but i figured okay what i'm going to do is i'm going to start with the utr the unified travel router and i'm going to see if it works at all and gets anywhere near the distance i need it to get and this is not a gigantic house by any means but it's like i said it's two stories etc etc and i have to tell you in the primary bedroom which was in the opposite corner of the house unsurprisingly it was very spotty reception from the unified travel router but basically everywhere else it was really good so this little little travel router that's roughly the size of i don't know like 10 credit cards stacked on top of each other worked astonishingly well i was very very proud of that little feller and i thought it was really cool uh and so i don't know if i would i would be happy to take questions if you have any but i just thought i'd share that the 100 which is also an incredibly good deal especially for unify uh the 100 unify travel router did great i was very proud of it that's awesome yeah i i just i love how like you know we obviously we're in this weird situation now with ram and ssds being super expensive but like in general most technology these days is so unbelievably cheap and capable yeah i i like we are in such an embarrassment of riches in terms of like overall technology just being so good and so affordable compared to you know where it was 5 10 15 20 years ago like it just again it isn't it's a bit of a roller coaster sometimes like it doesn't always go in this direction and not exclusively in this direction but the overall trend is very very clear things are so like what you can do now with 100 bucks worth of hardware is so amazing on that front that brings up that brings up the one question i have about your travel wire obsession Yes. Since technology is advancing, as you noted, this place is like, oh, they have upgraded to fiber. It doesn't also mean that, like, all the crappy vacation houses that we rent should be getting better and better Wi-Fi and therefore making it so that we don't need travel routers because the home Wi-Fi actually spans the whole house and works. So that's actually a very, very reasonable question. And a couple of things about that. First of all, I find that, generally speaking, Wi-Fi is an afterthought at these places. It's like obviously they know they need to provide some form of Wi-Fi some way, somehow. But it seems to me that generally speaking, they don't really think about it at all. They just use whatever the ISP provides and they walk away. So in the Cape Charles vacation house, it happens to be like it's not Comcast. I forget who it is off the top of my head, but it's effectively like a Comcast cable modem square in the center of the house. That's your Wi-Fi. I hope you like it. But those things have been getting better, too. That's my point. Like, yes, those suck and they're lagging behind. Obviously, they're not on the cutting edge of technology, but they do change over the course of decades. And I would imagine that the current ones aren't as awful as they used to be. I think you're right. And broadly, that is true. It's a low bar, though. It is a low bar. In the vacation house from last week, they had this odd looking, and I think I took a picture of it because I was trying to identify it. I didn't know what it was. But they had this odd looking, like, gray orb, for lack of a better word. I'll see if I can find a picture and put it in the show notes or put a link to the device. Again, I don't have it handy, but it had Ethernet going into it. It was plugged into the wall and had Ethernet going into it. I had no idea what it was. I didn't know if that was like some sort of ONT, but it didn't have fiber going into it. Long story short, I eventually figured out it was effectively like one Eero mesh. It's not literally Eero, but it was like an Eero mesh base station. And so there was one of those downstairs in this particular home in the upstairs. It was like a loft situation. and almost line of sight from the one downstairs was one upstairs. So they have some sort of mesh Wi-Fi, which honestly I didn't even touch. I never tried it, not once. But to your point, they're at least trying, which is good. But the other thing that's important about the Unified Travel Router, and I also brought with me a GL-INET router because those tend to be far more powerful. They're also quite a bit bigger, but they're far more powerful. and what I love about the UTR in part, we spoke about this last time we spoke about the UTR, was that it has support for Teleport, which is UniFi's no-config wire guard. If you're squint, it looks kind of like Tailscale, but it's also very different than Tailscale. But the point is, once I got the travel router up and running, it connects to my house, and every bit of our internet goes through my house here in Richmond. And although I don't think anyone is doing like data logging or anything like that, it just gives me peace of mind to know that whatever is happening in this house with my devices, they can't touch it because it's encrypted and going through Richmond. Is that a little bit bananas? No, it's a lot bananas. But that's how I am. This is the way I am, and I'm sorry. Also, Marco, I owe you an apology. It was not $100 for the Unify Travel Router. $80. $80 for this thing. And if you are in the Unify ecosystem, if you don't have one, you're cheating yourself. It's delightful. I absolutely love this thing. I was astonished that it worked as well as it did. For events like this, I'll probably travel with a GLI net because, again, I'm me. I enjoy doing this stuff. This is kind of a hobby for me. It is not necessary. I understand that. It's totally overkill, but here I am. However, speaking about GLI net, I wanted to bring up something else. It turns out that I didn't know this until we talked about the KVM. I think it was a couple of weeks back or maybe a month ago now. but we actually have a couple of listeners that work at GLINET and they were kind enough, not as a sponsorship or anything like that. They never said I had to talk about anything. This is completely of my own accord. They sent me a couple of devices and said, hey, you know, you might like these. That was all that was said. There was no guarantee of anything, not sponsored content or anything like that. But they sent me, among other things, a Comet Q, which I feel like I kind of know GLINET's product line and I had no idea this was a thing. So we talked several weeks ago about the KVM. This is the thing that has native tail scale support. You plug USB into a device, like, you know, into a computer, and you can control that computer remotely. And it's as though it's physical hardware. As far as the computer is concerned, it's an actual keyboard, an actual mouse, et cetera. This is largely the same thing. It is basically a remote control device, a KVM kind of device for a computer. but what's fascinating about this is it works with anything that uses, I think it's DisplayPort over USB-C, I forget, shoot, I should have looked it up beforehand, I didn't, I apologize but basically, oh yes, there it is ComicQ works with any device whose USB-C port supports DisplayPort alt mode for video output. This includes, but is not limited to, laptops and mini PCs, Android phones iPhones and iPads. What? Yes! iPhone 15 and newer, or all iPads Pro, iPad Pros 2018 and newer, iPad Air fourth generation and newer, iPad Mini sixth generation and newer, and iPad tenth generation and newer. What this means is you can get one of these little dinguses, which is like a little circle. It has an on-screen display, which is very neat. You can plug this into basically any modern iPhone, excluding the 16e and 17e and the Air. Sorry, Air folks. But any modern iPhone, so 15 or newer, 15 Pro and newer, et cetera. And you can control that device remotely. Now, what you're going to do is ask me, why would you want to do that? And I have no f***ing idea. But the fact that you can do it is so cool. Well, I can tell you a couple ideas. Okay, well, I would love to hear some ideas because I think this is the coolest device I've seen in a long time that I have no idea why I would use it. So talk to me. Two things. Number one, I can have two times when I would have needed this recently. One, it wouldn't have solved the problem, but one, it would have. So when dealing with audio issues at the restaurant, if I am like on the mainland, John, at a moment when like, you know, the subwoofer, like, you know, like the subwoofer volume is off for some reason, like the app to configure the mixer and like electronic controller and everything that we use is an iPad app. Oh, this is for you, Marco. Right. And so I already have one of my Mac minis is in the restaurant. That way, if I need access to the network there, I have it through Tailscale. So I can be on the network, but I can't control an iPad remotely. And it doesn't work running an iPad mode on the Mac. Like, the app doesn't work that way. So I could theoretically have an iPad there with this and be, like, running that app and could, you know, control it remotely. That's number one. Number two, Tiff broke her iPhone a couple of weeks ago. We were outside and we were walking and she tripped, took a moderately bad fall. Don't worry, she's okay. But she landed on her iPhone and it totally destroyed the screen to the point where the screen would not turn on. So we had to, okay, crap, Google make an appointment at the Apple store. She has AppleCare, so we'll go get it fixed or whatever. but the question we had was like is it backed up like is it like when's the most recent iCloud backup and how do we figure this out it's like well i can try to restore it onto another phone that's going to take a few hours the apple store closes in you know two hours or there's like that won't be done in time let's you know we went back to the house and we could tell like by if you like you know would if you like squeeze the button it would vibrate so we thought okay it's still on So we just have to plug it in. I'm like, I know iPhones support monitors and keyboards and mice externally. I'll just plug it in. Okay, well, the problem is it was on but locked, and it had never been connected before to a monitor or a keyboard or mouse. And they have, like, similar to modern Macs, they have some kind of protection of, like, they're not going to just allow a USB device to just connect without authorization. how do you authorize it without a screen to type in your passcode so i thought great voiceover so i held down the siri button to try to try to say turn on voiceover um but that didn't work because the phone was locked and she had it set to not allow siri while locked oh all right can't do that like oh what about um iphone mirroring on her mac well she had never done it So that wasn't authorized either. So that didn't work. Siri didn't work. There was a point where I could plug in a USB-C, little like foldy portable monitors. I could plug one of those in and get the screen to show up. But the problem is I couldn't unlock the screen because the touchscreen wasn't working. Now, I could plug in a keyboard, but there's only one port. And if you unplug the monitor to plug the keyboard in, it somehow relocks itself. So even if you get the passcode screen to display on the screen and then unplug the screen and plug the keyboard in and type in the passcode on the keyboard, it doesn't work. For whatever, I guess it relocks or something. So I thought, oh, what about a USB hub? USB-C hub. So I plug in the USB-C hub with the keyboard and the monitor at the same time, and that doesn't work. Because apparently in this pre-unlocked state, hubs don't work. only a display will work because a hub is like a USB device you have to authorize I was running into all these different security barriers I'm like maybe just maybe in this context this dumb thing might have given me like one more option maybe probably not but what if I could pre-authorize this on all of our iPhones what ended up happening was we couldn't get into the phone if the iPhone screen is broken to the point where Touch also does not work on it, you have no way into that phone. Unless you have authorized one of these things ahead of time. And even then, all these methods that you use to authorize remote control things on iPhones, they all time out after a while. So if I use iPhone mirroring on my Mac, that's going to stay authorized for, what, three days? And it's going to make me log in with my passcode again? So I don't know. This probably wouldn't have saved me there, but maybe it could have been one more option. So anyway, I might have used it there, but I definitely would use it for the restaurant iPad situation. Yeah, so I've tried plugging into my iPhone, which I had not plugged it into before. I did try it with my iPad, but I'm just now trying with the iPhone. And I'm definitely, oh, I can see the screen. Oh, you know what? I face ID. I was going to say, I was about to say that it said, you know, you must unlock to authorize this accessory. and I didn't unlock the phone, but I looked at it with the screen active, you know what I'm saying? And so I accidentally face ID'd. So I think it would have been the same problem here, but maybe you would have been able to see but not interact. But yeah, I mean, what this does is it puts the iPhone in a web browser. How about this? If you live in the EU and you want an iPhone near it, you could get one of these bad boys. I'm sorry, I'm so mean. But yeah, I mean, all kidding aside. I don't think they have a sense of humor about that. Yeah, but they probably should. They probably should. But truly, for your iPad in the restaurant, what I would say is next time you're in the restaurant, do the dance of authorizing this once. And even if what you did was put it in a drawer somewhere and said to somebody, if there's an issue, the first thing you do is plug this in, and the second thing you do is you call me. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And that might really set you up really nicely. I genuinely don't know how much this costs. I don't think it's terribly expensive. No, it's on sale right now for $110, but unfortunately it is backordered until late August. Oh, there you go. So at least late August. And apparently if I'm not a VIP customer, I don't get priority access. So this will not be here for this restaurant season. Maybe next year. Unfortunately not. But again, I think this is just one of those devices that I'm happy that it exists, even though I have no idea why I would need it. Well, that's not entirely fair, actually. If I didn't already have the POE-powered KVM that we talked about a few weeks ago, then I could potentially use this. But I think this is an incredibly cool device, and I had no idea that something like this existed for iOS devices, which I thought was neat.