Upgrade - 517: Maybe It's Catchier in Japanese

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 517 for june 17th 2024 today's show is brought to you by delete me tailscale and krcs my name is mike hurley and I'm joined by surfing Snell Jason Snell. Hang loose dude it's good to be here on the Summer of Fun. I had a thought in the shower last night people might not know what this is. Oh no. I just thought to myself I'm sure we pick up new listeners all the time welcome if you're a new lesson listener. Of course hello. What is the summer of fun and why do we scream so much during this time of the year well it's called art no uh many years ago we realized that there between wwdc and the iphone event september there is a strong possibility for news to be slow this hasn't happened every year uh especially the 2020 there was no summer of fun not not because of covid like it was wasn't fun but it was just This hasn't happened every year, especially 2020.

There was no summer of fun. Not because of COVID, like it wasn't fun, but there was just so much news during that time, which is because everybody was not taking vacations. I always describe WWDC as being the start of Apple's calendar for the year, right? Because it's the updates for the next year. And that also is the start of sort of our cycle. And then what I say is there's this burst of activity for wwdc and then there is the i usually say long slow cruise to the iphone event and it's not that things aren't happening right because there are betas gonna be can you it's gonna be the summer of details yeah as it always is but uh it's a

you know there's not a lot that's new going on because everything is happening kind of under the surface and we're kind of just cruising through summer until the big iphone event in terms of the apple calendar so it's often very quiet and so we've created a a concept for our summer episodes where we try to do fun things and weird episodes and off-brand things, and at least segments that are different to keep all of us entertained. And also in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, it is the summer. I hope people in the Southern Hemisphere enjoy a winter of fun while listening. But here, we're in the summer of fun. So over the next few months, we'll have various things going on,

topics and full episodes and all kinds of stuff, whatever tickles our fancy. This will run all the way up. The Summer of Fun runs from the week after WWDC to the week before the iPhone draft. That's the Summer of Fun period. Right. So it ends with the draft for the iPhone event. That's the Summer of Fun period. Right.

So it ends with the draft for the iPhone event. Today, we are going to be doing a bumper Ask Upgrade because last week I asked for feedback and feelings that people were having about Apple intelligence. And we got lots of great feedback and we're going to go through it today. But before we do, I've got loads of other stuff that I want to talk to you about, Jason. And we'll start with a Snow Talk question. And Matt matt wants to know in a hypothetical world where you have to choose

to either have an android phone and a mac or an iphone and a windows pc which pair would you choose well this is easy i've made it clear here that in my personal hierarchy of devices the ipad and the mac are on top and the iphone is down below i just don't use my iphone as much i work at home i use my ipad around the house i work all day on the mac i've used the mac since 1990 basically so the answer is clear i i'm never ever ever using a windows pc so android phone is the answer i really am not sure about this one for me. I keep going backwards and forwards on it the more I think about it

because I think an Android phone is closer to an iPhone than a PC is closer to a Mac in like its capability and feeling. Yep. So, but like, I would really struggle without an iPhone just like in my daily life,

because I love just using an iPhone and all the features that an iPhone has. But then I think, oh, I could get by with a PC because most of the stuff that I do is in a browser. But then I'm like, oh, but what about recording and editing podcasts and stuff? So I think I would have to go Android and Mac. And you have a PC right there.

I do. You have it right there. Right over there. So yeah, I would also go Android phone on the Mac. Yeah. I think the iPhone, most of the features the iPhone has are easier to be replaced

than a lot of the features that the Mac has, I think. The apps are not great on Android, but it's close enough. And again, like for me, the Mac is the Mac the mac is the mac i'm i'm not that's no nope no but they stopped doing the mac entirely i would probably just buy the last of that and use it forever until you use it to the ground uh-huh i'm sorry i buy two of those put one away right use the other one until it died and then use the backup. Good idea.

If you would like to send in a question to help us open a future episode of the show, I'd love some summer-themed Snell Talk questions. Yeah, please. Just go to upgradefeedback.com. Send us in your summer-themed Snell Talks. I have some follow-ups. Sam wrote in and said, I was thinking about the WatchOS

11 announcement and the Vitals app. One of the metrics that they use is blood oxygen. Currently the watches in the USA that are new have the feature disabled. However, considering they are highlighting this as part of the new Vitals app, they must be able to get around the current ban somehow or the new

sensor possibly, there's a new sensor possibly for the next series watch. Are they using new algorithms? I went to Apple's page, the watchOS 11 page, and looking for what was there, which is a note by the vitals app, which says like, you know, they put the little number

and you got onto the footnotes. It says the ability to measure blood oxygen is no longer available on Apple Watch units sold by Apple in the United States beginning January, 2024. Yep. So the answer here is not, I mean,

we'll, we'll see what happens with what they're doing with that, but there is not a gate happening here because every Apple watch that was sold before January in the U S and every Apple watch sold everywhere else that has an oxygen sensor, it works. So that's where they are. And I think Apple is not,

it works yeah so that's where they are and i think apple is not it is not going to limit a feature because some devices don't have it because some devices don't have the blood oxygen sensor anyway right some of them the older ones so i don't i'm not i just don't think this is evidence of any it is it's a funny thing though right because it's a funny thing though, right? Because it's a new feature which is using a sensor that they're not able... It's just like a funny set of circumstances, especially because watchOS 11 cuts off the Series 4 and 5, right? So there may be an incentive

for more people to buy a new Apple Watch, but then they won't have access to what is, I think, a great new feature. So it's just like a funny, you know, I don't think Sam's trying to suggest that there is like something crazy going on here, but it is just like a funny thing that like the blood oxygen sensor has had nothing. Like they announced it and then that was the end of it. And now they finally have something new for it,

but doesn't work on new Apple Watches in the USA. Right, right. I just, I don't think, because what Sam's trying to do is be like, well, this must mean something, right? Do they have a plan? And I'm not sure they have a plan. I mean, I'm sure there are things going on

in the background, but like you can launch this feature with just all the existing watches sold before January 18th and the rest of the world. And it's fine. In fact, American users should be used to the fact that sometimes everybody else in the world has learned this fact.

Sometimes there are features on Apple products that are only available in certain parts of the world. Yep. Imagine that. I mean, and I think what Apple is trying to do, which is where we left it last time, is they are trying to fight this in courts. That's what they're trying to do with Massimo to get the bads overturn courts. That's what they're trying to do with Massimo to get the

bads overturned. That's what they're trying to do. D Griffin Jones wrote in and said, Mike mentioned that his iPad was in dark mode, but the home screen widgets were in light mode because he had light mode icons, and that was true. I had to

switch to dark mode icons to get my widgets to be in dark appearance but uh d griffin says according to the developer release notes this is apparently a bug not the intended behavior and i went and looked and there is a a known issue which is widgets on the home screen might match icon appearance rather than system appearance so i think that it's great that it's actually supposed to be system appearance so I can keep my icons light because I'm used to that and I like the way that they look.

But I want my device in dark mode, which would mean that I would want my widgets in dark mode because that is a larger portion of the UI. But that is an issue right now with one of the banks. Developer beta one. Yep. Surprisingly, there are issues and there is

a two part episode of Upgrady award winning podcast and my favorite podcast The Town with Matt Bellany with Jon Stewart as the guest and it's fantastic I recommend people go listen to it but Stewart is talking about in

more detail than he has before of what happened with him and Apple with the problem with Jon Stewart. And essentially the way that Stewart puts it is as the show was becoming more successful and more viral, it seemed to raise questions at Apple about whether they wanted to pay for a show which could be focusing on things that could hurt

them, essentially, content-wise. And Stuart is I think incredibly fair in a way that makes perfect sense to me in basically saying that this is always the deal when you produce content for a corporation, no matter who that corporation

is. They might not like what you're doing, and if they don't, that's the end and stewart says the thing that was different for him was the situation changed over time and i think it changed for everyone and i still stand by what we said initially where if this show was i think more successful like more successful for apple that may have changed the calculus a little bit but i don't know but whatever it was like over time it just became less of a thing that apple wanted from stewart and stewart wasn't willing to understandably have to like work so closely with apple on all of the content that he wanted to make as to whether they would accept it or not really good to listen to. I still believe firmly that if this had been a bigger hit critically and or, you know, not ratings wise, but like, I don't know, statistics wise for Apple, they would have kept it.

But the and I think they probably went in thinking, yeah, he's going to touch on some sensitive subjects, but it's OK. It's Jon Stewart. We won the race. And then after a couple of years, they're like, this is not doing it for us. And and it's worse than we thought on the content side, um, to, to Apple's credit, Stewart says, uh, they paid his staff for season three, even though they didn't make season three and that they didn't have to do that. So he, he, I think Jon Stewart's a realist, right? He, he understands what, that he's working for big corporations and that he understands very clearly that big corporations are going to... Big corporation.

So, yeah. Yeah, he gets it. He gets it. I also really respected that he said he didn't think the first season was very good. I was like, oh, good. So it wasn't just me then. You know?

But yeah, it's an excellent two-part episode. Like, it's just worth listening. The show's so excellent two part episode. Like it's just worth listening to the show. So good. Anyway, the town, it's just a fantastic podcast that I think a lot of people listen to the show would enjoy. Yeah. And you should make,

could maybe start here. And if you like this, you're going to like the other shows. Time for the details. So we've had, I'm assuming a little bit more time with the betas. I know you've been using VisionOS 2, not just because you wrote about it, but because me and you hung out in Bora Bora together last week. We did.

We hung out on the beach in Bora Bora. We did. For a while, I was staring at the mountains instead of the sea, which seems weird. But we tried to do a share play of a photo that didn't work because it's beta um but we did we did a little spatial persona hangout on the beach had a nice chat talked about vision os talked about other stuff it was uh it was good it's that same old thing which is i feel like i want to start scheduling spatial persona hangouts with my long distance friends because i can't just ring you up and and

say hey mike are you on the vision pro because you're not right you're not i'm not you got to go get it and put it on but it's so good though i still would love an alert like in the people view where it's like this person is using the vision pro right now i would really love that as an optional like status indicator but um yeah it's really good we should we should set that up a little group i heard uh steven uh on connected i think said oh my god i'm gonna run that update and then i need to find somebody to talk to right it's like yeah don't get left out of the spatial persona campfire it's uh it's cool it's happening so yeah vision os2 it's good it's good i can when we talked last week you had used

it and i hadn't i can just say yeah you're right it's good um there are some bugs but i would say it's better than vision os1 and i'm happy to be on it also why uh why do we have this thing if not to be on the cutting edge and try new stuff like that's the whole purpose of buying this thing and using it now is that it's got all of this. And Bora Bora is really nice. Although really interesting detail about our conversation, which is, I told you I was going to write an article, which is literally the next thing we're going to talk about on this podcast. And I decided to write it in VisionOS and I was going to write it in Bora Bora. And you're like, I don't want to do work in Bora Bora. I don't want

my brain to think that the beach is a place I do work. And when we were done, I was like, well, I'll show Mike, I'll write my article in Bora Bora. And I wrote about one sentence and I thought, I don't want to do this. And I went to Joshua Tree and I worked there too. That environment is very, very effective. I've been sitting there- I'm sure it lowered my blood pressure and it feels relaxing like it's genuinely very relaxing and so yeah i recommend people use the boro boro beach environment not to be doing their email like use that you know maybe you're chatting with friends maybe you're playing games like it's just that should be a chill out space

and chill space for sure there's many other environments use use one of those yeah but i like it it's uh and that's that's the thing oh also i wrote that so i wrote this next article we're about to talk about entirely on vision pro and uh with the apple bluetooth keyboard and uh what a wonderful thing to see my keyboard through the environment of joshua tree not bora bora, because that's a feature. And it's a little weird. It's sort of hazy around the edges. And depending on where you turn it, it kind of disappears or reappears. But bottom line is, and I'm not a hunt and peck typist, but I do need to know where the keyboard is. And it helps to look down and be like,

are my fingers on the right keys to start? And then after that, I'm OK. But I do need to orient. So it's really nice to have it there. It's still, you know, a keyboard floating in space with hands that are floating in space. I feel like there's more work they could probably do in the long run on this. But that was that was a good thing out of Vision OS 2 as well. a good thing out of vision os2 as well you wrote an article uh about apple intelligence uh with a great just a great headline which is okay fine here's apple intelligence maybe you can dig into

that in a second but i wanted to read a quote from you um the truth is that apple right now is like a duck serene on the surface but paddling furiously underneath it was clearly complacent about the pace of ai innovation and allowed itself to get a bit too comfortable and now it's hiring to keep up i think it was a really effective way of describing kind of their spot right now which is they're doing a lot but it's very clear to me you people listen to this show that last week's wwdc looked like a regular wwdc like on the surface of things. When you hear about what they're saying

about when we're going to be getting these features, that's not a normal WWDC, right? That like, where straight up they're saying some of these features are coming next year, not later this year, not in the fall, next year, right? Which may mean July next year or or whatever you know that aggressively future tense siri block is the one that sounded the least like apple of anything i think maybe i've ever heard in a wwc where it was all just because apple is the company that says we're doing this now or

soon you know microsoft is is a company that traditionally has been like you announce it and then say it's coming and then maybe it happens but much later and but that siri thing was really just all like siri will be able to do this and one day siri will be able to do this and you're like wow okay and that yeah it it is them coming off as they want to come off as confident in ai but they're definitely furiously uh trying to catch up in certain areas i said said in that article, there's the three, I'm going to mention this last week too, that it was a blur last week. There's three kinds of AI announcements at WWDC this year, and it was the ones that they were going to make anyway,

the ones they probably were going to make, but maybe not this year, and the ones that they absolutely wouldn't normally make that they're making because they feel like they need to send a message to the world that Apple is on it, which seems to have been received. It's one to the world that Apple is on it, which seems to have been received.

It's one of the reasons that they did a full court press with YouTubers talking up the AI features. There was a real marketing push happening here. Very different. Because Apple wanted people to get the sense, even just generally, that Apple's on it. That's kind of the message they wanted. It's like, oh, there was all this talk about if apple was going to miss the ai boat and i think we are going to dig into all the details of where they are and aren't uh solid on ai stuff but i think the global broad view is

oh they're on it okay like now i'm not worried and like the the stock market reacted to that. I mean, the tone of the analysts has changed. Like a lot of this stuff has been altered by this, which was their goal all along. But as we dig into it, the specialists in Apple, you can see the cracks, right? You can see like the stuff that was already coming because that narrative that they weren't on it at all is wrong but there's also the stuff that they rushed probably and the stuff that they are like really out of their element trying to get because they don't want to be seen as uh behind and they don't want to be left behind so there's a lot a lot going on there i tried with the the headline so you know i write an article sometimes i write the headline first usually i you know, I write an article. Sometimes I write the headline first. Usually I don't, I get the,

to the end. And what I wanted to get across is, so back, uh, back in the day, I went to the, um, the,

the, what was it called? Which gate was it? It was the one where the, uh, antenna gate, it was antenna gate. Ah,

yes. Antenna gate press conference, which was like Steve and Phil and Tim all sitting up on stage at town hall in Cupertino at, uh, at the loop. And one of the things that Steve jobs said, which was so dismissive was like, you can have a free bumper case if you want. It was like, we don't think this is a problem, but it's annoying to us that you think it's a problem. So fine. We did something for you. Here it is. That was the attitude. And I felt a little of that at WWDC this year. So I wanted, I wanted something that was a similar kind of tone. And so it was okay, fine. Here's Apple intelligence, right? Like, all right, we did it.

Are you happy now? And I think the answer is yes, that, you know, there's nothing, some of the stuff is just like nowhere near shipping, but like they did the job of sort of saying, we're on it, hold on, we're gonna get there. We got it. And that is not,

I think it's not a place Apple's comfortable being. I think Apple would much rather announce it and ship it, right? But the realities of this situation, they couldn't do that. There was no way. I think if it's, I'm like, I was Googling around to see if I could find the quote. And I think he said like, okay, fine. We'll give everybody a case. Yeah, see?

Yeah, exactly. Okay, fine. Okay. All right. Fine. Whatever. fine we'll give everybody a case yeah i mean yeah see it's yeah exactly okay fine okay all right fine whatever like it's really that was the attitude so i i felt like a little of that with this we're just okay fine apple intelligence all right like that they were reluctant that they weren't their heart not that they aren't aligned on it now because i think organizationally they are aligned on it now but But I did get the sense that this was one of those things where they resisted for a while and then they're like, all right, you want it, so we're going to do it. Here it is. Right. And not that they're not committed to doing it, but that I think a normal, also, I think both of these things can be true. I think that they were spurred into doing a whole bunch of things that they wouldn't normally do.

I also think that they were too conservative and limited before and they needed that kick in the pants that I've been talking about. And that's why I think that there are the things that they would have announced anyway. And then there's those ones in the middle where it's like, you know, I bet they've been working on this for a while saying we'll ship this eventually. And it was only because of this new focus on AI that those things got out now instead of, you know, some of them I was like, you know, old Apple before they got that kick in the pants would be like, yeah, well, let's just kick it down the road another year. We'll get back to it. And now there's no kicking AI features down the road, right? Like that is not happening. And then there's the ones where they're out uh out on their skis a little too

much where they're like yeah we're gonna do it we're gonna do it and and like it's not even there but uh it doesn't matter if they're gonna announce it and they're gonna figure it out and and uh you know it's that it's a it's a weird time it's a weird time for apple they're doing some things that that i think that they're not comfortable with but you know what it's not the worst thing for apple to be a little uncomfortable and a little hungry and a little motivated. A lot of people have told us the bumper solves the signal shrink problem.

Consumer Reports said that this week. We've heard it from a lot of people. Why don't you just give everybody a case? Okay, great. Let's give everybody a case. That's the quote. I found it. There you go.

I found a YouTube video and that's the that's the transcript of it yeah incredible okay great let's give everybody apple apple intelligence yeah yep do you have any any bigger thoughts on on the bay at this point or are you mostly in the getting to know you kind of phase i mean vision os is the only one i've used a lot i've got the mac and ipad ones installed on devices and this week i'm going to install it on an iphone and an apple watch but i haven't had a chance to dig in i mean part of it is that it's beta one and a huge amount of it is not going to be there for a while yeah um and and there are other issues about things at WWDC that I want to write about right like so

I don't have a lot more to say right now I just I mean we've got a summer of betas for that and we'll talk about it more anything you've noticed I have three small things that I think are really cool

two of them I'm very excited about for myself. One is VisionOS 2 now features a setting for apps persist on restart. Wonderful. So previously, when your Vision Pro shut down, turned it back on again, you had to open all your apps again. Now it will keep them,

which is wonderful because the battery dies on that thing way faster than I want it to. And I have to plug it in. Exactly which is wonderful because the battery dies on that thing way faster than i want it to and i have to plug it exactly or to save the battery so you don't have to wait five minutes for it to charge back up you on you you detach it and it's dead and then it restarts at which point again you really wanted to open up back where you were uh zach also was a good one that i should have put in here too in the discord. Compatible apps, so iPhones and iPads, you can now choose to have them set to dark mode if you want. I would still like more dark mode options in general

even for VisionOS apps, like for example Notes. I can't not see a white page. I would like a black page with white text, but hey, it's better. You can select preferred Home Hub now in the Home app. So this can be good. Sometimes I have in my studio, I have a couple of HomePods here in an Apple TV, and just sometimes the Apple TV won't see some of my HomeKit items, and I don't know why, and I have to, over multiple days, be plugging and unplugging and plugging and unplugging. And if I could just change it to the HomePod Mini, which always works, it'd be great. So you can now make the choice of your preferred Home Hub.

And there is going to be an express mode for unlocking doors. Like there is express mode for transit. But even better, using ultra-wideband on an Apple Watch or an iPhone. And if you have an ultra-wideband compatible door lock on your home, you can just walk up to the door and it will open. No tapping needed. Yeah.

I saw this and thought, oh, God, I'm going to be buying another. You're going to be buying a new lock. I bought an NFC lock to replace my Bluetooth lock because the NFC lock is way better. But for those who are wondering like why all these different technologies. The problem with smart locks is that device proximity is not enough.

So the Bluetooth door lock. Just think about it this way. If you're in your house and you walk up to the inside of your front door to go somewhere else. But you walk past the front door. If the door lock sees that you're close to them with your watch or your iPhone, the door lock doesn't know that you're inside. It just knows you're close. So if you set it to unlock when you're close, your door just unlocked randomly as you're passing by. And that's no good. So the Bluetooth door lock I had, the way it worked,

it was very clever, clever hack, but it was a hack is it wouldn't auto unlock with Bluetooth until you left and it would use location services and it would literally draw a circle around your house. And so if you went down the street, you know, far away, whatever it was far enough away to be outside that circle. And then you came back and it saw you, it would unlock the door. And that, so it was a proxy for you must be outside because you left the house, but that's, but it didn't really know.

Um, the NFC locks are less convenient in one way, which is when it worked and it didn't work that often, but when it worked, the Bluetooth auto unlock meant that my door unlocked itself as I was walking up to it, which is really awesome. And the NFC, it all is like home key. It's express pass. It's in the watch.

It's in the phone. I can hold my watch. When I come home, I just hold my watch up to the lock and it unlocks. It's not bad. NFC though, or UWB though, we've talked about UWB technology a lot. It isn't used in a lot of things. It's starting to be in car locks. It's going to start being in door locks.

And this is why. It's absolute positioning. The UWB sensor knows exactly where you are in 3D space, which means it knows if you're outside the door or inside the door and can be set to detect you approaching the door from the outside and unlocking automatically. It will be or your car door. It's the same idea. It isn't going to unlock your car because you're in your car, right? Like it needs to know you're outside your car and now it's going to unlock that door. So, you know, yes, again, somebody will announce they're making a UWB lock in the next six months, and then they won't ship it for another year, and then they'll be hard to come by.

But eventually, tune back into a far future episode of Upgrade. I will be undoubtedly buying another one of these and writing about it, because this is the dream. This is how all this stuff should work, right? Is the absolute positioning, knowing the context so it can literally know I'm walking up to the front door. So you should probably unlock the door, but not yet. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Do you ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see? Privacy is an important thing. It's important to me. I'm sure it's important to you.

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Yeehaw. Mark Gurman is reporting that no money is changing hands between Apple and OpenAI for their integration into iOS 18. A quote from Mark Gurman, Apple believes pushing OpenAI's brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments. And I'm sure Eddie Q said that very succinctly to Sam Altman.

That's my, that's my, well, government did not say that part. I said that part. The expectation that Apple has here and that OpenAI have here is that it will cement OpenAI's leadership position in the industry, let more people see the benefits of the service, and then in turn, push more people to sign up for a paid plan. More people know about it. If more people value it, maybe they'll sign up. If they sign up on the iPhone, Apple will get 30% of that, of course. And keep in mind, why would you want to submit OpenAI as leadership position if you're Apple? Well, I mean, we're going to say in a second, they're going to open this to other

things too, but OpenAI is not Google. And I think that Apple strategically is happier having open AI and yes, Microsoft be stronger in this area because the alternative is vertically integrated Google, which means Android, which means it really puts the iPhone at a disadvantage. And if you're open AI, it really puts the iPhone at a disadvantage. And if you're OpenAI, well, your biggest competitor owns one of the two platforms for phones, and that's the most important platform. So that's not great, right?

So if you're OpenAI, Apple is also a logical partner. And so here we are. Apple has been talking to Google and Anthropic. It's expected that Gemini will be an option later on in the year. I still believe that if they could have announced it, they would have. Yes, totally.

They were very clear, right? Outside of the keynote, Craig couldn't stop talking about Google Gemini. Everywhere he popped up, he was mentioning it. We love it. And I still stand by the fact that I think Google wants money for it, and Apple doesn't want to give it to them, as we can see from this. And then further from Mark Gurman,

eventually, Apple aims to make money from AI by striking revenue sharing agreements, whereby it gets a cut from AI partners that monetize results in chatbots on Apple's platforms. The company believes that AI could chip away at the billions of dollars it gets from its Google search deal because users will favor chatbots and other

tools over search engines. Apple will need to craft new arrangements that make up for the shortfall. Yeah, it's going to be interesting because it's possible that will happen, but we don't know for sure. But it's, it's a risk at, uh, Apple's search deal. And, and from Apple's perspective, Apple's got this great platform and it can point the fire hose at whoever it wants. And so the argument there is if this is going to be valuable for your business. And I think that in the short run, maybe this stuff is so expensive that it's going to cost open AI, for example. But in the long run, if this is truly going to be a foundation for your business, then Apple choosing to have you be on its platform is a big win for you because you're building your business. And Apple basically, you should pay apple and

i think i think they're right right like you should pay apple for the the user base of apple's platforms right like that that only makes sense in the long run if this is truly a foundation of your business if it's not then it's not the way i phrased it in my, in my piece about, okay, fine. Uh, was just think about all the things that Apple did. The hottest company in tech, literally the hottest company in tech, open AI just gave its crown jewels to Apple for free. Apple responded to that by introducing its integration as optional, turned off by default and tagged with warning labels to which I say, who has the upper hand here exactly? Because the whole idea was, oh, Apple is going to have to big open AI,

and they're so behind, and it's so sad. And then when it comes, Apple's like, yeah, we've got open AI. Sure we do. I mean, it's off by default. You can use it if you want, I guess. We'll put a warning label on it. Like, that was their attitude. It's just wild.

Just absolutely wild. Yeah, it's definitely different to the story that we thought it was which was that they were going to be using open ai as the underpinnings of everything which is very different to where it's been very much not the case ben thompson mentioned this and you put it in our show notes but uh just this is this is the point right which is apple as he said apple is positioning itself as an ai aggregator this is the point, right? Which is Apple, as he said, Apple is positioning itself as an AI aggregator. This is the power of its platforms. He says, the company owns users and by extension, generative AI demand by virtue of owning its platforms and is deepening its moat

through Apple intelligence, which only Apple can do, the on-device OS integrated. That demand, Ben writes, is then being brought to bear on suppliers who probably have to eat the cost of getting privileged access to Apple's user base. And this is what I was saying before. It's this idea that the reason Google pays for Google search on iPhones is that there's a whole lot of users who just use Safari on iPhones. And I mean, they use it on all of Apple's platforms and Apple's user base is incredibly valuable. And you're like, you could say to yourself, well, why would Google give money to its competitor? It's like, it's a competitor on the phone space, but in terms of search, like it is a great source. They wouldn't be spending that money if it wasn't an enormous source of traffic. And so if you're an AI company, especially if you're competing with Google, but also if you're Google, you look at the Apple user base and say, wow, those are really valuable customers that we want to reach and we

don't want our competitors to reach. And if you're Apple, you say, well, yes, that's why you're going to pay us for access to our platform because they're our users, not yours. And we can choose where they go, at least by default. And Ben's absolutely right. That means that Apple is aggregating the AI services. And it'll be really interesting to see how they all respond because we are potentially in a very weird place right now where AI is more like an idea of the future, but it's not quite the future yet.

And if AI turns into search engines where it's essentially a huge monetizable blob, right? Where it turns out OpenAI and Google are just making money hand over fist on their AI stuff, then they should absolutely pay Apple for access. The problem is right now it's very expensive. They're probably losing money on every query. And so now is an awkward time for Apple to demand that ransom. But at least OpenAI ended up doing the math and saying, how about free? How about we just go in on free for now? And that's really interesting.

Although I don't like, as we're talking about this, I'm hearing some of the things that I don't like, which is Apple making the decisions again, right? And it feels like the app store all over again, right? They are going to be the gatekeeper for access to their users, and Apple will then financially benefit as a company based on the decisions that they make. Yeah, although

what I would say is, if what we're hearing is true, and Apple is going to integrate all the AI providers, right? Yeah, but you know it won't be all though. Well, okay, many of the AI providers. They will decide. Right. But just like the search engine, what they're getting paid for is probably being the default, which again, the user can change, but a lot of them don't.

But you're right. That is very similar to choosing the default of anything else. And then the EU coming in and saying, no, you need to be more explicit and offer up a whole bunch of different things. And there's some debate there. But I think it would be interesting. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. But yes, this is Apple acting as a gatekeeper, but in a limited way. Acting as a gatekeeper, but in a limited way. I think what would happen is if I had an AI chatbot that Apple decided, for whatever reason, it refused to have as an option in its integration, I would have a real beef with them. But I think Apple could allow everybody in and then also take a cut of the queries that go to all of them. And that may be the direction it's going.

We'll see. Moving on, in his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman reports that Apple is working on making thinner devices across the board after the introduction of the new iPad Pro. This would include a slimmer iPhone that we spoke about before, rumored for 2025, as well as work underway for the Apple Watch

and the MacBook Pro. A quote from Mark, the plan is for the latest iPad Pro to be the beginning of a new class of Apple devices that should be the thinnest and lightest products in the categories

across the whole tech industry. Mike Hurley says, Yes, please. Go for it. Make them good. Make them capable. Make them thin. Make them light.

That's what I love about Apple in general. We've both spoken about our love for the M2 MacBook Air. This is part of the reason. It's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly thin and light. I love the new iPad Pro. It's incredibly powerful for what an iPad can do.

And it's incredibly thin and light. So yes, do this. I want the balance. If you can continue giving me that balance, great. Right. The danger is always you make it too thin and light and it's not powerful enough and all that. But I think the truth is that it's balance.

I don't think we're in that world anymore. With Apple Silicon, I think we're at the point where it's capable. They tried to do this previously before they were actually able to do it. And Ming-Chi Kuo is reporting that the Apple Watch Series 10 will not only be thinner, it will have a larger display. Kuo says that the screens are going to go from 41 and 45 millimeters to 45 and 49 millimeters, respectively. That would mean that the watches would also be getting bigger. As Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac points out, unlike other Apple devices,

these sizes measure case height of the watch, not the diagonal screen size. Naturally, a taller case also means a bigger display. So those numbers that usually say, like Apple are saying, oh, it's a 13-inch iPad Pro, that's the display. But on the watch,

they're actually measuring the size of the case because that's kind of how you measure watches. That's like how you talk about watches. It's like the physical size of the watch. This means that the display on the larger watch could be as big or maybe a little bit bigger

than the Ultra, depending on the way that they measure it all out. I mean i mean look this is a thing where uh we'll wait and see on that right like yeah okay bigger screen is one thing but if it's thinner maybe it's overall less bulky and it's not so bad like i think this is one of these things that just taking the numbers and making a decision about them, I would just caution. But for me, if they made a watch with as big a screen as the Ultra that is a little bit more delicate in design and still has a great battery life, that would be my ideal. I use the Apple Watch Ultra because I like the big screen

and the battery. I don't necessarily need or want the Ultra for what the Ultra does. So we'll see. Right. I mean, we'll see. And of course, they've got to be very aware of who is buying the smaller watch and feel confident that they're not going to get turned off by this, right? Yes. That's the danger here is that they say, oh, congratulations, your small watch is the size of the old big watch. That's like, that's not enough right there. So we'll have to see.

Lawyer up, Jason Snell! Um. Dun-dun! Order! Order! Clunk-clunk! Clunk-clunk. There was a pretty huge news last week that got hidden by WWDC. Japan has passed legislation that will require Apple and Google

to allow third-party app stores and payment systems, and to make it easier for users to change default apps and browsers. Have you heard this one before? This will be called the Act on Promotion of Competition for Specified Smartphone Software. Not as good a name as DMA. Maybe it's catchier in Japanese.

I mean, yeah, maybe. This is like the way they specify in english um yeah never mind uh this will come into force by the end of 2025 and penalties for not following the rules would start at fines of 20 of domestic revenue so less aggressive uh than the european union when it comes to fines but we were waiting for it to happen like who was going to follow europe and japan is following europe yeah not surprising given that japan has already been active in this area but this is also that example of once the once the the seal is broken once the dma goes into effect and apple has to build all those features it's very easy for other regions to say i want

that let's do that and apple can't say like, this is supposedly coming into effect at the end of next year, but like Apple can't say they don't have this built because they've got it built. Yeah. So it's just going to be other regions saying, yeah, Apple, all that.

I think we are headed for a world where there are two iPhone experiences and it's in the, in the, uh, legislatively opened world and the classic closed Apple world. That feels like where we're headed. Genuinely, I think we may be getting closer and closer to an America and rest of world. I think it's probably what's going to happen, but- Could be. Well, I guess, well, that's me forgetting about the DOJ case. So who knows?

The Financial Times is reporting that the European Commission is planning to charge Apple over DMA violations in the coming weeks. It is suggested that they feel that Apple continues to steer customers away from using third-party marketplaces in the EU, and there is continued dissatisfaction with the makeup of the core technology fee. The report from the Financial Times does say that the EU's reports would be preliminary, meaning that there could be adjustments Apple could make before any fines are levied. So they may say again, like, hey, we're unhappy with this. You're going to change it? And then Apple will go, okay. And they'll go back and change it again before they get levied many billions of dollars. Or they'll get a fine and agree to change it, right? Like that's the other way that this can go is they've gotten some fines and they'll probably continue to get some fines.

But because one of the reasons you do the fine is you're like the fine is for your past behavior and you agree like, okay, we'll pay this fine and then make this change so we don't get fined in this way again. connect devices and services to each other wherever they are. It's super secure, providing remote access to production, databases, servers, Kubernetes, and more. And it's fast, like really fast. Plus, it grants privacy for everyone and every organization. It is an intuitive, programmable way to manage a private network, including a zero-trust network access that every organization can use. With Tailscale, you can use device posture management to granularly restrict access to resources based on a wide range of attributes like OS version, user location, and more. You can save time with a trusted and proven networking solution that just works, and you can code from your iPad with Tailscale and VS Code Server.

Try Tailscale out for free for up to 100 devices and three users for free at tailscale.com slash RelayFM, no credit card required. That is tailscale.com slash RelayFM to try Tailscale for free for up to 100 devices and three users, no credit card required. Our thanks to Tailscale for their support of this show and RelayFM. So on the last episode, I encouraged the Upgradians to reach out to us. Tell us how they're feeling about Apple Intelligence, how they're feeling about how we feel about Apple Intelligence. And we got lots of good feedback.

And what I've tried to do is bring some of that. And today we're going to talk about it. You know, there was obviously a lot of good feedback. And what I've tried to do is bring some of that in today. We're going to talk about it. You know, there was obviously a lot of overlapping stuff. So I'm going to try and just pick out, and I've tried to just pick out things that are relatively unique or have different takes on the same point. And we can talk about it. So I'm going to read these two that we said.

Oh, thank you. Sorry. Yes. Extra lasers today. I'll give you another attempt at lasers in a minute. So this first two pieces of feedback I'm going to read together. So Dave writes in and says, Criticism for Apple using public web content to train its models prompts the question,

what is the realistic alternative? Apple intelligence's performance we measured against ChatGPT and others. Years of Siri criticism likely made Apple weigh a likely worse performing Apple intelligence against a less pure version. The term table stakes that you've used is to evaluate Apple. Using the same training data as their competition was probably considered table stakes by Apple in making Apple intelligence. And Stephen says, It's rare I'm in disagreement with either of you, but I see no issue with the way Apple have gone about it.

They were between a rock and a hard place. If they didn't troll the open web, they'd have been even further behind and have got hammered for it. I think it was a calculated decision that annoying the techies versus impressing the populace only had one possible win i'll just say that what dave said i said last week sure which is but we said absolutely let's we did say a lot i said a lot i just but just to restate it yes apple did what it did because it's trying to catch up with the others in this category and this is how they did it and apple

my guess is apple was like i don't love it but like they have no chance that they view they view this as potentially an existential threat and everybody's doing it and i think what i said last week is if it turns out that some court ruling makes it illegal to use the open web without permission to build models. All of them will get hit and be reset to zero. But the alternative is that it's not illegal. And if Apple stands up for this very specific issue that is debatable, that Apple could potentially lose everything. And so, of course, they didn't choose that.

could potentially lose everything. And so, of course, they didn't choose that. It's possible that I'm projecting, but I have heard Apple in a couple of places talking about this. I get the impression that they're a little embarrassed

about the fact that they did this. Like, I don't think that they're particularly proud of the fact that they have scraped what they call the open web to build their model. I would expect there was a lot internally about this because they know that this was going to upset people

and it is upsetting people. I agree with these statements that Dave and Steven have made that if you were going to do this, this is probably the only way to do it I think that there are some ways Apple could have gone about this a little bit differently which would have been better I think a scenario where they would have told would give given people the opportunity up front to opt out and or a system where instead of just what they're

saying now where you can say hey don't us, that there was actually a simple system to be like, pull me out of your model, even though it's a bit late of that, but like that may have gone a little bit further. I genuinely think though, in the ways that I've heard them talk about it, they're saying very specific language and trying to move on.

I don't think that Apple is proud of the fact that they have done this and I'm not proud of them for having done it. I'm completely of the belief that this is probably right now the only way to build a large language model, because you need such a huge amount of text, and I don't think any amount of licensed data would probably get you there right now,

if you want to be competitive at least. But I'm still disappointed about it. And I believe it is possible for humans to hold two opposing views in their minds and that'd be okay. I am disappointed about the fact that this happened, but I am also looking forward

to using the features that it will enable. And corporations can also hold opposing views because they're made up of people who hold opposing views. I would say the other tell here is that Apple is licensing content for AI. They're licensing text content. They're licensing image content. They're making some original image content to train their machine learning models.

That suggests to me that Apple actually does have some opinions about that all the content doesn't belong to them. And yet for this particular foundation model, they couldn't see their way to do it, right? Like they couldn't do it. Maybe in the long run that will change. But I think this is the case where Apple, this was such a high priority that Apple said, no, we're going to do this. We may not, you may not like it, Parson within Apple, but this, you know, but we have to do it. And so they did it. Yeah, there is a thing though about the licensing thing, which kind of shines a light on it and makes it worse in some ways of like,

so, okay, Apple, so which part, which content do you think is worthy of a deal then? You know what I mean? Like, so is it that text is okay to steal or scrape or however you might want to say it, gobble up, but imagery you should only license? Why is imagery better than text? You know what I mean?

There are a million things about this, and I think it's too complicated. Let's get to the next bit of feedback because I think this will help us address that point, actually. Cool. Ben says, on the topic of Apple training their LLM on the open web, I think it's useful to consider

how their text-generative AI is being applied. That is, so far, Apple intelligence is only applied to augment or transform your personal data, like adjusting the tone or grammar of your emails or summarizing a PDF. It's not being applied to prompts regarding world knowledge which could replace the website that generated the source content

is an important distinction regarding the ethics here so everybody gets to have their own opinion about this but i generally agree with ben um i listened to your conversation federico vatici is very upset about this and i understand why there is scale. Federico is at the top of that scale right now. He's at the top of it. Yeah. So here's what I would say. I do think that for some uses, likening the AI training to search engine bots indexing the internet is a good parallel. a good parallel. The fact is, it's not a copyright violation for Google to scrape or search the entire internet content and index it so that they can do a search of the internet. It's not.

Some people probably disagree with that too, but I would say it's not. The thing is, though, the thing is that that search is, at least up to now, has generally had a benefit for the publisher, which is itLM to find out information is that if you're generating the answer based on the contents of someone else's work and preempting them from preempting the user from ever going to the generator, the generator is not being compensated and they've lost everything. The content has been generated from at least in part their content they get nothing that that's an issue so i think that's part of what's going on here and then the other part of it i would say which which ben touches on is is using all of the internet to generate a model that knows how people write and how people speak and can do things to correct your grammar or change the tone of your article or whatever you're doing. I would argue different from using it to generate material.

And this is what some of the lawsuits, this is what the New York Times lawsuit is, is you can ask ChatGPT a question and basically a New York Times article comes out of it. And that is, I would say, that is probably a copyright violation, right? You're literally parroting my words back without giving me credit or without sending me traffic. You're literally parroting my words back without giving me credit or without sending me traffic. I'm less inclined to be bothered by the idea that you're scanning the entire internet because you want your LLM to understand what humans in general think, like a search index, than if you're using it to make new things, to be generative. And I will say this for Apple. It seems to me like this is where Apple has drawn the line right now.

It seems to me that Apple is doing things that are transformative and not generative. And where they are doing generative things, they are talking about licensed content. So the image generation, they said, they have photo, stock libraries, not photos, like illustrations and stuff and their own stuff that they trained it on. And I don't think they said that the image playgrounds is trained on the open web. I think they said it was trained on some specific things. I think it was part of what Craig Federighi was talking about. I wonder if that's where they've

drawn the line. It's like, look, we're going to train the LLM using the web and we don't love it, but like all we're using it for is not world knowledge, this phrase that they keep using. It's for kind of like the sum total of how words are put together by humanity. And we're using it in ways that are helpful, but that are not going to generate content that takes the place of the content that we scanned. And I think people can disagree about where that line gets drawn, but I think that's where Apple is drawing it. And actually, I think that's probably where I would draw it because I don't think it's fundamentally evil that Google built a giant business on indexing the internet because I don't think they stole my stuff to index the internet. I don't think they stole my stuff to index the internet.

I think the whole product was built to let people find my content on the internet and then read the content on my site, not read it in Google. And the more Google has diverged from that ethos, I think the less ethical it has been. And the AI generation is like an extreme lack of ethics on that point, I think. But everybody can draw that line in a different place. Anyway, I like Ben's comment here because I think there's something there about the idea of generative versus using the model to do some transformative things on your own content. But again, reasonable people can absolutely differ on this point. So I think the thing about Apple drawing the line on the text content, I think the thing that we don't know is, did they do this because of philosophical grounds or technical grounds? Maybe their model is not good enough to generate from zero. And so that's why it doesn't do that. Oh, I'm sure their model can do generative

and that it's terrible. And that's why they've walled it off, right? I'm sure of that. And so the question then is like, does if it gets better later on, does this line get redrawn? And I don't see why it wouldn't. Are they drawing the line for ethics or expediency or both?

Right? Why can't it be both? They clearly have not drawn the line for ethics or expediency? Or both? Why can't it be both? They clearly have not drawn the line against all generative AI from zero because image playgrounds exist. So it's not like they have a fundamental issue with the entire idea. But if that's being generated from licensed content, that's a different story, right? I would agree, but I don't know if they do. I don't believe if they do like i don't want to say they are not all right i don't believe that apple have made specific statements because i think they're being purposefully cagey about what their belief of the ethics of open web content right they can

change their mind and that's why i think that that's and the other thing for me is i agree with the point of like it's maybe better if they're just create using these models to create things that would do things for my device but ultimately the result is the same which is like every company that is scraping the open web is doing it for their financial gain apple is still doing this for their financial gain oh totally and but their financial gain is make the iphone an even stronger product so that they continue to sell more iphones and i believe that that is different to the search engine thing, because the search engine deal, which is amended over time, I admit, but the search engine deal was you write on the web, and if it's good, people will find it on Google and come to you, and then you will be able to do

whatever you want from that point on, whether it's paywall content to get people to give you money, put advertisements on it so you can make advertising revenue or build an audience. The LLM stuff, however it's used, takes that content that was created under that arrangement that people had with the internet and with search engines and how content was found and completely removes it from the end user who has zero understanding of where it came from and any attempts that i have seen to try and point people towards that content is bad or pointless because once you've already gotten everything you need why would you continue i agree although that's not what apple's doing with their stuff

today no but that's like yeah but apple's apple today has taken that content i went a little bit further right but like apple is taking the content from the web they're using it to build a product that they are able to benefit from with their customers and the person who created the content that helped generate that model get zero for it nothing i see your point i just think that there's no harm being done in there at all which is so it's a different transaction because it's taking the sum total of knowledge i don't believe there is harm i agree with you it's but it's it this isn't about like somebody's losing out it's just the ethics of it and i'm not saying the ethics are right or wrong but they're there right and and that's just the question that everybody has to ask themselves like do you

think this is okay and honestly i don't from for me i don't know the full answer to this i have not gotten to my answer as to whether I think the ethics on this are okay, but I know that this is more of an ethical question for me than a search engine. You know what I mean? Yeah. I come down on the side of if it's indexing and not generating, that it's probably essentially a search engine index, and I'm not as concerned about it. But like I said, reasonable people can differ about it. And there are different lines to be drawn. I think the generative stuff, especially when it's literally generating, for example, art in the style of an artist

or using a, you know, stock photography in from a, uh, an unlicensed stock photography source and generating, for example, the watermark, like you can see how, and they can engineer that out, but like you can see what that means is that they're literally taking pixels and relationships of pixels from copyrighted art and using it to generate new things. That's where I think it becomes completely unethical. I don't feel that way about, like, I mean,

and my human learning argument would probably come in here too, which is every human being learns by observing things in the world that don't belong to them, that are copyrighted by other people. And they take them and they learn them. Every musician listens to music. Every artist looks at paintings or drawings. Every writer reads. And they are building a model in their head that is their brain.

And then they use it to generate new material based on that. again, cause harm or generate copyrighted content is probably okay. But like I said before, you know, if courts decide that this is too far, then all the AI companies will suddenly have to license content. I would say that what's going to happen is they're not going to license Federico's content, right? That's not going to happen. Also, I would not put it past Google to say, if you want to be in Google search, you have to agree to this, right? Like literally, well, I think they already do that. But like, if it came down to it, they'd be like, you either disappear from the web or you're trained in our model. Those are your choices and you would have to decide. We'll see how that goes. But from an Apple perspective, I feel like, yeah, if you think that this is fundamentally unethical to train models on the open web, even for general use and not for generating

content, then Apple is being unethical here because I think Apple feels like they have no other choice but to do this due to everybody else. Literally, it's like, if your friends would jump off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge? It's kind of like that. Depends how many friends. Maybe if I have no friends left, maybe I would, I don't know.

Siridjit writes in and says, I live in India. I use a mid-range Android phone that is seven times cheaper than an iPhone Pro. It absolutely does the job for me. I'm seriously thinking of getting an iPhone Pro. It absolutely does the job for me. I am seriously thinking of getting an iPhone just for making my mother or my late grandmother into

superheroes. It's too soon to tell what it might turn out to be. But to be dismissive is telling. Maybe you guys are just too jaded. And an anonymous listener writes in and says both of you sound overwrought about Apple including Image Playground and the Apple Intelligence Suite.

Sure, it is childlike, but not all iPhone users are serious professional types. Sure, you can doctor up an image using a photo of someone other than you, but nothing stops you from using Markup Now on a grandma's photo and giving her a mustache or a goatee. Okay, I appreciate how everybody inserts thoughts about who we actually are.

Yes, we're very serious professional types. That's what it's all about here. And super jaded as well. Yeah, I mean, you got us. People hear how, like, look, this is how people take it. I mean, I'm not going to argue with this. If people hear me complaining about this

and think that I'm jaded, I understand that. All right. Well, I don't. So Stridget's answer is it's kind of a bogus argument because you can generate stuff on Android phones just as easily as on iPhones. There are third party apps that do it. They already exist. I don't think you need to buy an iPhone just to do this.

Although I guess it shows you why Apple did it. Right. And that's fine. Again, part of my problem is that I feel like Midjourney and Staple Diffusion have ruined this art style for me because now I look at it and I think it's just kind of gross because it's this weird AI art that's not, I think there's an uncanny valley. I think it's kind of gross.

As we said last week, Apple is approaching this as being, it's fun, I'm having fun on my phone. They've said numerous times, and I think this is really interesting. I guess this goes into our next comments too, likening it to clip art, right? Where the idea is, you're not, and I think we mentioned this last week as well. We did mention it. You're not really costing anybody a job here. It's like clip art. You're putting it in a message or putting it at the top of a newsletter that would otherwise have no art. And so I think that's what Apple is approaching this as. It's like, come on, it's fun. And especially if it's not, in my opinion, if it's not being generated based on people's unlicensed artwork, then I'm more okay with it. But I don't love it. And I don't love the examples because remember, these are the best examples Apple could come up with because they use them in their keynote and their marketing materials. And I didn't think they were great.

And in absence of any other evidence, I would say, is this really going to be good or is it going to be kind of weird and unpleasant but i agree with our anonymous commenter and our non-anonymous commenter here that i think that's apple's intent is basically come on it's fun people like making this stuff it's true also you can make that stuff with other apps you don't actually need image playgrounds to do it but uh apple is figuring again if it's on the device and it's a default makes it really easy to do it but uh apple is figuring again if it's on the device and it's a default makes it really easy to do it i'll just for this one i'll just restate my points from last time i think gemmoji is good i think it's a great idea i think people are gonna have fun with that i'm looking forward

to that that's gonna be fun i don't like the idea of making it easy to create imagery of other people. I just don't like that, especially based on photos of them. I think it's just, I think I find that gross. But my biggest issue is that I just don't think what they produced in the keynote was good enough quality. Like, I just felt like if you're going to do this, at least make it look good. And I don't think it looked good. So what was the point in doing it? Yeah, I think that's the number one rule is whatever thing Apple is showing in the keynote or in its marketing materials, this goes for like the colored icons on the home screens too. That is literally the best Apple could do. And so you take that as the highest bar because realistically, the stuff that they show is never as good as the stuff that you actually generate when you get your hands on it of whatever it is.

And so we looked at that stuff and we're like, I don't know about that. That's just also I have a severe revulsion to the idea of people taking images of me and making generative art out of them. And so, you know, grandma's photo is great. And I'm like, but I don't like it. And so having Apple make that easy is unpleasant to me. I don't, I don't like it. Eric writes in and says, is image generation just the next phase of clip art? I think if it's viewed that way, it's less impactful than trying to hurt creators. If I'm just looking for a basic image for a slide or a document, something that I made that's basic seems better than just grabbing a random image from Google. And Brandon says,

one positive of generative images might be the reduction of image copyright violations that happen when somebody wants an image for a PowerPoint, a flyer, or a brochure. And the most common solution is a Google search, copy, and paste. This probably happens millions of times a day and is likely never even considered by most to be an issue. I think these are good points, interesting ideas. And I would just say again, I'd like the images to be based on licensed material. And there's a whole other conversation about like, did the artists who put them in the stock library and assign that agreement know that they were agreeing to this? But for me that would be the only thing because i totally see this point i mentioned this i think last week that um i have a friend who does a newsletter

and and and like a patreon and didn't used to have art and now has little cute cartoon art that's generated by an ai model at the top and like he would never have been paying an artist and he gets to express himself and do a little bit of branding. And like, he would never have been paying an artist. And he gets to express himself and do a little bit of branding in a way that he couldn't have done before. And like, there are two ways that artists are harmed by this stuff. One is their content is stolen,

unlicensed and used in the model. And then it looks like their art, but it's not their art. And two, the harm is that they lose their jobs because nobody wants to commission art anymore and those are the two things that i'm kind of looking at here but i think this is a good point there is there is truth to the fact and i know people might not like this argument but i'm going to make it there is truth to the fact that there are enormous copyright violations going on

all the time just casual theft of images on the web. It happens all the time. Let's be honest, listeners. We've all done it, all right? You cannot tell me you've never gone to Google and just copied an image and used it somewhere, anywhere, even in an iMessage. We've all done it, right?

That was why hearing this I was like oh this makes a lot of sense like for that presentation you have to have an easier way or a different way of creating that thing you're looking for rather than going to google and typing in like I don't know what like picture of a photo like a photo of a building or whatever like yeah I think this is actually using a computer right which is a great series of stock images but those then get licensed put on websites and then other people come around because it's the open web and just rip it off like just pull it out and use it themselves i that happened there's a wikipedia page i i paid for a licensed

image this is a long time ago now a licensed image and put it on my website and i found that wikipedia there was a wikipedia section that was using it as an icon and it was very clearly pixel for pixel the size and like everything about it was the licensed image from a stock library and i said do you have a license for this image because wikipedia wouldn't allow it right and the guy was like no it's a picture I took of my grandma's TV. I thought, well, that's a lie. But, you know, what else can you do? He found it probably on my website, but if not, someone else's website that used that stock photo and just took it.

Right? That happens all the time, very casually. So, like, the idea of you needing something for the presentation, like, I think that this is a very valid way to use tools like this in a way that I had not considered. I mean, the thing that I don't like, and I think the thing that I would assume most people could agree on, is the scenario in which somebody goes from paying an artist to not paying an artist.

That's the thing that i find concerning about these tools um and is the thing that i don't want to happen and that i'm sure will happen and and that's what is disappointing to me about this but i actually don't believe apple's tools are of that quality oh certainly not certainly not that's why they've constrained them to certain cartoony styles and they've got very limited like they're and to say again, one of the things I love about image playgrounds is they're trying to put a proper user interface on something that otherwise is a command line where you have to kind of exhort the image generator to do exactly what you've got in your mind's eye and then do it again and again and again because it just doesn't get it right. and then do it again and again and again because it just doesn't get it right. Apple is trying to give you a bunch of little things to click on. And even when you do the text, it sort of turns it into tokens that you can edit.

And it's trying to do what Apple should be doing with all this AI-driven technology, which is build a good UI on top of it because command line ain't it, right? Like we learned this lesson before. Anybody who thinks the command line for a chatbot is enough uh you know i'll introduce you to the trs80 i guess like we we've gone past that 1984 happened the mac happened good ui on top of that stuff is better so they are trying that this episode is brought to you by krcs one of the oldest Apple premium resellers and your one-stop shop for all things Apple in my home of the United Kingdom. I cannot tell you the joy that it gives me to be reading an ad from a UK-based company. I feel like this is such a rarity and it makes me very happy. very happy. At KRCS, you can shop for the latest Apple products online and in-store,

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One last time, go to krcs.co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Our thanks to KRCS for their support of this show and RelayFM. I have more. We have more Apple intelligence ask upgrade questions. There you go. We get some more lasers going on. So like your halftime lasers right there. Yeah. So Steve writes in and says, I'm surprised

at your reaction to Apple's new AI features. Apple has a long track record of borrowing, copying, and even outright stealing from other developers and companies. Apple got its start from borrowing technology that Xerox and HP already had.

AI is brand new. It cannot feel, cannot reason, and cannot learn on its own. AI only knows the information that's fed into it by people. Whether that information is right or wrong or should or shouldn't be shared, Apple had to start somewhere.

Okay. I mean, he's not wrong in the sense that Apple often strikes at what it thinks is the right time. I think that... Hence Sherlocking as an entire thing. They were a little late. And also, integrating things into the operating system is a thing only the platform owner can do.

And that's where Sherlocking often comes from. And that's fine too, I think. Because Sherlocking gets this treatment as like a death sentence and it's generally not. Except in the case of Sherlock. Yeah, maybe then. Anyway, there's some truth in that. And yeah, so Apple's getting started and building its own thing.

And I think it did have to start somewhere with this. I'm not sure I entirely buy the long track record of borrowing and copying, but I mean, okay, you can view the world that way if you want to. That's, I get it. So yeah, I don't think I have, given all of this, I'm not quite sure why Steve is surprised, but that's fine. Great.

I hear what Steve is saying. I don't buy the idea that because you borrowed or sold them once that you should be able to do it forever. And that I shouldn't be surprised if you keep doing it in new and interesting ways. Oh, no, that's... Don't you know that's how theft works? If you steal and they don't catch you, then stealing is legal. Raphael writes in and says,

what worried me the most about Apple's announcements is the pure lack of taste. The generated images in the keynote looked so bad, like meme material. Was this really necessary? I feel they could have not shown this feature and no one would have missed it. Gemmoji would have been enough.

I think I wanted to include this one. I know we spoke about this kind of stuff already. I just like the idea of using taste as part of the argument because I do think that that was a key component here. I think that there was some taste that was lost in doing this stuff. I don't work for Apple apple i don't own apple stock you know i i can't so i'm going to put myself for a moment in the position of what if i worked for apple and i don't know all the details of everything and if i were making the decision i would not do image playgrounds and i would have i would have just done genmoji and i would have just done Genmoji. And I would have been able to point at it and say, see, this is how constrained image generation

trained on a limited set of emoji concepts makes a really nice generative model that is going to be fun and understandable. And maybe we'll do more in the future, but this is what we're doing right now. And yet they even could have gone as far as to generatively made Memoji. Memoji.

Which they didn't do, right? There's generatively created emoji that look like your friends. Then there is this image playground stuff, which clearly builds on Memoji, but it's trying to go a bit further than Memoji, I think. Right. So what I don't say, what I can't say is, did this help build Apple's case with

investors and the general tech industry about perception, fighting the perception that Apple's behind? And my guess is that that's why the Image Playgrounds is in there. Is not because I, everybody can have an opinion about all of this stuff, obviously. But like, for me, I didn't think it looked very good. Lack of taste is a great way to put it. But is it serving another model here, right? Is it serving the other thing that they're trying to do, which is just get across that we get it, that we have AI stuff. Because we're not, the Upgrade podcasters and listeners are not the primary audience for this keynote. And we often are, but we're not. The big message here was to the rest of the world

just saying, Apple gets it. We're on the AI thing. We got it. Don't worry about us. We're fine. We haven't said anything about it, but here it is. We got a roadmap, right? Apple doesn't do roadmaps, but they basically did a roadmap. And they're like, yeah, we got it. And is the image playgrounds part of that? It probably is. And that's probably why it's in there. Then again, I also think, like I said last week, there's a group inside of Apple that is sort of like, come on, it's fun. We're having fun. And I think there's some truth in that. And apple that is sort of like come on it's fun we're having fun and i think there's some truth in that and i also think that some of it is a little delusional and which this is i can't say but uh i think that that's part of it too is they're like look

we're being whimsical with our ai art and your mileage may vary about how you take that brad says in my, the image playground feature is likely to be tucked away and rarely used. But how Apple reframed AI as an OS personal assistant

was huge to me. AI as a text box is so limited, but AI as an OS feature deeply integrated into every app changes everything. Seeing their plan

and imagining the next steps is fascinating to me. Yep. The reason i'm willing to accept any of this is because i want this right like there's power there's incredible power here i that's what's the most encouraging about this whole thing right is is all the places where apple is not saying huh here's a text box figure it out right which is what ai has sort of been up to now for a lot of these companies is like yeah just you know just here's a box whatever and apple's like no we're gonna have very specific things that our models do and

we're gonna build ui around them and we're gonna have them solve problems that people have with their stuff i used did i mention this last week again it was a blur um i used uh there's a new version of grammarly that's got an upgraded ai model And I use that because I don't have a copy editor. And the new version, the first time I used it, I was like, oh my God. The old version was like, it was basically a grammar checker. It was okay. The new version suggestions were like suggestions from a copy editor. They were really good. And it's like, what I like about that is, yeah, there's an AI model back there. There there's an AI model back there, you know, right. There's totally an AI model back there, but it is very limited. And like, we are focusing on fixing mistakes in your writing and, and, and building a UI

to show you, here's the change we're suggesting. Do you want to make it or not? Do you want to tell us it was wrong? And then we'll learn from that. Like that, that kind of stuff, the potential here is enormous. The, the potential for making our phones more usable is enormous. So there's a lot going on here. Uh, that is interesting. I also understand as we've covered a lot, the trepidation about it. Uh, Sam says, do you think Apple intelligence's base model

plus all of the data it builds based on the user will take up enough storage space that we'll start to need devices of larger storage? I doubt it. You think so? I think, I mean, the model is multiple gigabytes. I think memory is more important than storage.

Yeah, but it's got to be stored somewhere, right? Yeah, I mean, they've gotten way better at compressing models down um in terms of size uh yeah i mean if the model is huge then sure i think they will i think the ram is more important because you've got to have that model in memory um and they're getting better at compressing models down just following whisper i think the whisper models keep finding they find new ways of making them smaller and smaller and the semantic index i don't know how big that is either i mean anything is possible i think apple's probably more concerned with ram than storage

at this point but you know we'll see i i don't think apple wants to get caught in a case where any apple intelligence capable device can't do apple intelligence because its storage is too small. I think they don't want to end up there. So if that means that they will raise the storage limits in addition to the RAM, I'll just say though that Apple loves its margins. And if they have to choose, I think they're choosing the RAM over the storage because they'll just try to get you to pay for more storage. Yeah. It might mean that for at least a little while as a user you may want to decide to jump up one tier um but we we don't know yet but the thing to say is it is storage that wasn't used before right however much it is right so if you were going up to the limit then maybe you will

want to bump up um i realized i i forgot what i wanted to say in regards to Brad's question. So I just want to jump back a little bit. So this is the idea of AI as an OS assistant. Like we don't know if this is going to work, right? Like I feel like me and you over the years have seen many instances of Apple saying like, hey, look at this thing that we've done. And then when you get it, you realize it's not as powerful, right? And shortcuts is such a great example of this over the years or people don't adopt it and you know it doesn't get developer support so it doesn't move on right but if they are able to pull it off

like this is exactly what i want right that and we spoke about this leading up to this the ability for me to be able to issue commands to my computer and my computer can action those and use third-party apps to do so like isn't incredible like if i'm able to say look at a photo and say can you make this look the way that i want it to and it understands that what it wants is to open darkroom on my iphone and apply like a standard filter that I've created. You know what I mean? Like that kind of understanding and action would be incredible. But we're a long way away from that to knowing if they can actually do that or not. John wrote in and said, you expressed disappointment in Apple for profiting off the platforms it created by taking 30% from developers. You also expressed disappointment in Apple for profiting off others' online works

by using them to model their AI engine. Why should online content creators make money when Apple uses their creations for AI modeling, but Apple not be allowed to make money when developers use their platform and APIs? Is this not a contradiction? I'll sum this up i'll sum this up just in case anybody didn't follow because there's a lot going on here so john is saying that we uh criticize apple for taking 30 from developers but we don't oh i think i will say

maybe he's issuing this more to me because I am the more heated, I think, about this sometimes that I say that I believe Apple make enough from selling their iPhones and all of their other things to not need a full 30%. And I don't think developers get enough from that. So he's saying that why should content creators not make money then? You know, why are we saying that it's okay for Apple to take it? For Apple to steal. But yeah, it isn't a contradiction, John. And the answer is because what happens,

first off, Apple makes a lot of money selling iPhones. Developers make a lot of money selling apps. The complaint is really about the cut and also many of the rules. I mean, the cut is less relevant for a lot because for most developers, it's now 15%. It's a very limited number where it's still at the full 30. And also, that's a partnership where you sign an agreement with Apple as a developer. And we think that the partnership is sometimes unfair. But it's a partnership

where both parties are making money and building their businesses. Apple, and I don't feel as strongly about this as Mike does, but I'll just say it here. Apple going out on the internet and taking all the content that everybody does

and taking it back and building features that are going to sell iPhones is not a partnership. There's no partnership there at all. It is Apple strip mining the open web for money. And so no, John, it's not a contradiction. They're not comparable at all.

Thank you. I mean, look, the thing is that in both of these scenarios, the way that they are comparable is Apple is exerting its power to make its products more desirable to sell more of them. Yes, exactly. That happens in both instances. But developers at least have an agreement.

Right. Never forget that. And I'm not saying that it's bad, right? Apple, we live in a capitalist economy. Apple is a profit-seeking corporation that's a public company. Apple, I've said this for 30 years now, Apple is not a charity.

Apple is not a religion. Apple not a religion apple is a profit seeking company they are allowed to make money but to say that how dare you criticize apple for taking money and doing other things to developers but uh and then criticize apple for stealing from people on the open web because aren't those contradictory? Like, no, they're not remotely contradictory. It's a difference. There's no consent happening. There's no quid pro quo at all. It's literally all of the AI companies are just going out and taking your stuff. And again, I have limited issues with it that I delineated earlier, but it's not the same. It's not the same because we don't have a issues with it that I delineated earlier, but it's not the same. It's not the same because we don't have a relationship with Apple.

People who put web pages on the internet do not have a relationship with Apple. That would be great. What if Apple came to me as somebody who is in their search engine index and said, you know what? We found a way that we're going to start paying you for all of the work that you did that feeds our model. That would be an interesting thing they could do. They're never going to do it, but they could do that. And so could OpenAI and so could Google, but they're not. And that's the difference. Yeah. 0.00001 cents for a free iPhone sold. I

don't think Jason would turn that one down. You know what I mean? I'll take it. That's some good money. I don't even know how much that is, i bet it's good money uh ava says do you think there will be any kind of opt-out for the generative ai features in uh of apple intelligence personally i hope there is i don't like it in general and i don't want it taking up battery cpu or storage space on my machines i think don't use it was probably the right yeah i think you'll probably be able to turn off some of it yeah um and yeah i don't know how what form the model is going to take are they going to download it it may take up some storage space on your device regardless that may be the case there's you know there's stuff that's taking up storage space now um your spotlight index tapes

takes up space right like there's stuff in there and the semantic index is going to be kind of like that. But I don't think it will take up battery and CPU if you don't use it. And probably some of it you'll be able to turn off. And Justin says, while I understand the technical limitations

of Apple intelligence being limited to the devices it's limited to, don't you think it will be a poor user experience for those who are a mixture of some older devices siri will behave completely differently depending on what device you're using yeah yep this is but this is going to be awkward for a while for a lot of people right but this is one of those things where in part it's apple pushing this forward

faster than it might have otherwise where the where there'd be a larger portion of the install base that was on the latest. If they had waited a year, right? Like John Syracuse would probably have an Apple Silicon Mac, but he doesn't right now. And so this stuff's not going to work on his Intel Mac Pro. But also I'll refer to my previous statements about Apple being a profit seeking company. I think this is a great opportunity for apple to sell new hardware saying you need the new hardware for these features and they're happy to do that yeah i i do believe though that this the cutoff being where it is on the iphone i think speaks to the fact that this came quicker than they were expecting i know this is not an original thought but like my i agree my feeling on it is look they know they would have sold devices regardless i think right like for this i believe that they would have preferred to have had at least a couple of years of iphones

that could have run this system i think um and yeah this definitely came up on a podcast it might have been your podcast but and i agree with the idea completely that one of the pieces of evidence that this happened faster than apple expected is actually the lack of support for apple intelligence in the regular iphone 15s from last fall and probably from the ip 14s and 14 Pros as well. Even if you just went to the iPhone 14 Pro, right? Like even if you just only went that far, like I am convinced that they would want it to go that far. Totally.

I think this may have, I think I may have heard an Apple executive say this. I don't remember at this point, but they didn't limit it to the M4 iPad, right? It's any M series ipad will do this any m series mac i think it just shows that they had a technical limitation with the iphone specifically but i am i think it's a shame that this is the case and it's disappointing but i i don't i do not believe that this is a ploy to sell iphones i don't believe that's the case because they will they they will sell iphones like iphones will be sold like it's fine and maybe they will sell more iphones but this is just going to be one of those things where all they'll do is pull forward

demand which i think apple doesn't want to do they know the problems that are inherent for them in doing this that if now they sell more iphone 16s this year because of apple intelligence that only hurts them in two years it's not like a you will be able to sell a new iphone every year to these same people you may just be pulling forward a bit more demand because of it right you know what i'm saying like every time they've had this happen where they have this spike for some reason they're only they end up having to answer to it and earn these calls for two years yeah i think they're doing it for lots of reasons and i think that if they could they would it shows you the length of time that goes into an iphone cycle because i i think they would make different decisions about the iphone 15 now now they were kind of stuck because of the three nanometer

process thing but like i think they would have made different different choices if they had known that this was coming in this timing and you know back when they were developing those phones and they didn't i'm i feel certain that they will all support it this fall, right? Yes. But it didn't happen last time. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how they handle it. I also wanted to mention a thing that came up last week again, which is one thing Apple's not doing is taking stuff that some slower devices can't do and putting them in the cloud. Right now, or at least when this ships, what Apple has told me is,

if it happens on device, it happens on device everywhere. If it happens in the cloud, it happens in the cloud everywhere. It's possible that if they had wanted to relocate more stuff to the cloud they could have gotten some older devices on there but i don't think so because i think the model that runs that determines whether it'll go to the cloud or not itself needs that power to to do that but it's possible that like, couldn't they have put some of those models in the cloud? It's like, I don't know, maybe, but they decided to draw the line here.

Now going forward, I would not be surprised if there are things that happen on device. And this will maintain, to Justin's point, this might maintain more device continuity going forward across the platform, is in the future, they may introduce Apple intelligence features that can run on device for newer devices and run in the cloud, they may introduce Apple intelligence features that can run on device

for newer devices and run in the cloud for older devices. And if, and that is not happening yet, but it could happen in the future. And that would mean they don't work as well on the older devices, but they do work. And then you get to create more platform consistency, but like you really want the M6 MacBook Air because it can do magical whizzy thing locally. And the M5 MacBook Air can only do it in the cloud. Maybe. We'll see.

Thank you to everybody that took the time to write in. If you would like to write in to talk about this with us or anything else, go to upgradefeedback.com. You can leave your questions, your follow-up,

your Snell talk, anything you like in there. You can check out Jason's work over at sixcolors.com. You can hear his podcast at theincomparable.com and here on RelayFM. You can listen to my shows

here on RelayFM and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. Jason is online. He is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. If you'd like to see video clips of this show, you can go to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where we are at Upgrade Relay.

Thank you to our members who support us every week with Upgrade Plus. This week, we're going to talk about a horrific internet mishap at jason's house uh you can go to getupgradeplus.com if you would like to sign up and support the show thank you to our sponsors this week krcs tailscale and delete me but most of all thank you for listening until next time say goodbye jason snell goodbye mike hurley Goodbye, Mike Hurley.