Upgrade - 555: What You Are Is What You Ship

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

From Relay, this is Upgrade episode 555, a triple woo! It's brought to you by Fitbot, Google Gemini, Squarespace, and Delete Me. I am your host, Jason Snell. Mike Hurley, of course, continues to be on Paternity League. But I, Paternity League, actually, I really like that idea. It's like various fathers battling over which, who has the cutest baby pictures. Whoa, he keeps sending them to me.

It's really nice to hear from him. He's out there somewhere. Joining me in our latest of our cavalcade of guests while Mike is gone is the one, the only my fellow JS John Syracuse. Welcome John. Welcome back. Thank you.

Glad to be here as always. If I sound extra energetic today, it's because my plane got home from my weekend in Portland, Oregon at 1230 AM and there's a lot of tea so that's good but we don't have time to talk about airlines let's talk about random things sent in by listeners it's Snell talk and this question comes in from Tim Tim says whenever I hear Jason talk about Mill Valley I which is where I live, I think of Back to the Future. Is Hill Valley modeled on it?

Do you have a mall? And if so, how many pines does it have? Important check for timeline questions. How many pines are at the mall? Two, one, or who knows, another number of pines could be at the mall. The mall could just be a pine forest with no shopping. It could be. Um, I don't know.

I, I, I've wondered this question to you. I think fundamentally Hill Valley is just a very funny name because it's a tall thing and a low thing like put together. How could that be? Whereas Mill Valley is named after a saw mill that was in the valley below the mountain, and that's not a very interesting name, but that's the name that we got. Um, I, I think the implication is that Hill Valley is in LA and not in, well, no, maybe it is, okay, we're not going to go deep on back to the future geography,

but there is a, there, there's, they ended up in a gold rush town. the future geography, but there is a, there's, they end up in a gold rush town. Um, it's a gold rush town in the 19th century, which suggests that it is in Northern California, probably it moves around a lot. Sometimes it's very LA like, sometimes it's very San Francisco like. Um, but I don't think it's really modeled on us. We are not, we, we are not as modern suburban as that because the geography here is very rugged and limited in southern Marin, especially. And so we're kind of the towns up in a canyon and there's not room for the sort of suburban sprawl. We do have, there is a mall up the

road, but it's not in mill Valley. It's in a different city. So, uh, and John, I have a related to that. I have a sun blasted hellscape report for you because whenever you visit me, you point out the Brown Hills behind my house and say, this is a hellscape. And I'll just say, not just behind your house, they're everywhere in California, but they are specifically also behind my house. I'll just say it's March. It's a St. Patrick's day. And guess what?

Those Hills are beautifully green right now. Don't get used to it. They'll be Brown very soon. But I think you're overthinking this Hill Valley, Mill Valley question. Like I have only been to your town a few times, but it is geographically nothing like the, you know, stereotypical back plot suburban streets. It's not.

I don't think there's anything like that there. Like it's not that wide and flat and just, you know. No, we do have a downtown that is not, you know, it's too small to be the Hill Valley downtown with the big square or other places in Marin that would probably be closer to that than Mill Valley. I really think, I think Mill Valley was resonating in their brains when they came up with Hill Valley, but I think fundamentally, I hate to say it, this is like a version of our friend Todd Vazirez is that a Easter egg or a thing in the movie. I think the answer

is like, is this, uh, does this have deep meaning or is it just a really dumb pun? Uh, and that's what it is. It's it's what it's Hill and Valley. That's it. Really. Uh, but thank you, Tim for writing in there. There's no mall in mill Valley and the nearby malls don't seem to have any

pines at all, which means we are in a bad timeline, but we already knew that. John, it is time for Fatherly Advice, a segment where we dispense some wisdom, question mark, to Mike, who is probably still listening to the show because it's early enough in the show that he hasn't given up in order to go feed a baby or watch a, apparently watch a Formula One race at 4 a.m. while feeding a baby, which is apparently what happened over the weekend. Do you have any words of wisdom to impart to Mike, listener Mike?

I heard the analog episode where he cut together like all the clips of like all the people that Mike does podcasts with on a regular basis, giving him fatherly advice. But he's making good use of his connections to fathers to try to aggregate this and you are continuing it. That was a good episode. I think he got a lot of good advice there.

I actually had a discussion with my wife about this after I listened to that episode. And I said, it's really difficult for me to think about what kind of fatherly advice I would give. And like, I could fill this entire episode with just that type of thing. But what I was discussing with my wife, I said, I really struggled because my inclination would be to give the kind of advice that nobody wants to hear. Cause that's just my nature. Like you don't want to tell people about

the bad things that will be a part of the difficult parts of fatherhood. Like why that's, that's no, like it's, it's a happy occasion. You have a new baby, you're a new father. Let's not bring it down by talking about all the difficulties and the struggles and stuff like that so a lot of my advice that I would give I have to set aside and then his questions were like Advice for the first month and then bigger picture advice And bigger picture advice. I feel like new fathers It's useless to them like that's not it's not time It's not time for like big picture fatherhood advice when you have a baby.

Like you're in triage mode, right? Especially your first baby. It is kind of an all hands on deck emergency. There's this new living thing that you are responsible for. Uh, so I think the first month advice is more actionable than the big picture advice, cause I just don't think the big picture advice, it's not time for that. It's not the appropriate occasion. So given all that, my first month advice,

my like, you know, and presumably he hopefully doesn't need much of this now. My first month advice is also kind of in the bummer vein. Cause again, me and it would just be this. And I think he got some of this on his program where people are trying to be a little bit nicer about it, which is when you have struggles during, you know, you're a new father, you've got a new baby. When you have struggles and difficult times, it's easy to think that the difficulties and thoughts that you're having are outside the bounds of normalcy. That like, yeah, sure, everyone struggles, but I'm, no one feels this bad about this. No one dislikes this as much as I'm disliking it.

No one, you know, like, and you'll beat yourself up about it. You'll be like, this is supposed to be a happy occasion. I'm supposed to be happy that I have a new baby. Why am I having any negative feelings whatsoever about being a new father? And I'm here to tell you that any terrible negative feeling that you have that makes you feel guilty about having it, do not feel guilty. Other people have had it. Believe me, you are not alone in this because people don't talk about it.

People are like, oh, I have a new father. How is it? And everyone has to put a brave face on it and say how wonderful it is and how they're making it through and it's tough, but I'm still loving every minute. You won't love every minute of it. And no one wants to hear you talk about that and I just want to let you know as a father who's had infants that anything you're thinking and feeling that is that you're feeling guilty about you should be assured that other people have thought and felt this exact same way and they've also felt guilty about it and beating yourself up about it

doesn't help. And then you, the other advice that he got on his program, which is totally true was like, This will pass. You will get through it and there'll be another thing and another thing and another thing. So everything is temporary. Hang in there, Mike. Yeah, it's, it's hard.

And there's a lot before you have a baby, there's a lot of joking of like, ha ha ha, we won't sleep. Ha ha ha. And it's not so funny when you haven't slept in days and the baby is crying and right at you as loud as it can and there's nothing you can do to make the baby quiet. It's not ha ha ha funny then. It's just...

And the thing is, you never want to tell us to people because maybe they'll have a baby that is easier than average, right? And they won't know because everyone's first baby is like, that's the only experience you have. But you don't want to scare people and think it's going to be terrible because maybe it won't be.

Maybe it'll be just fine. Right. But it just, this is like, just in case, just in case you find yourself having negative thoughts about fatherhood that you thought you would never have because you're supposed to be excited about it. And it's supposed to be wonderful and beautiful. Don't worry. That's the thing that happens to everybody. We're empty nesters.

And I know you are very close to being in the same situation. Not that close, but we'll see. Well, all right. I mean, okay, we'll see. We'll see. Well, my son graduates college is the question of whether he will come back to the house. So that is true. That is absolutely true.

Yes. We're empty nesters for the time being. And then any day we could get a call that said I'm returning home. And that's just what you, you just have to accept it. But what I was going to say is that one of Lauren's things that she has started to tell people and she laughs about it, but it's also true, which is, you know, they're just going to grow up and leave you. It's not, you're lucky.

It's not. Well, that's true. I mean, you've got to look at both sides of it. That's the goal. You're trying to give them escape velocity. Yes, that is, that is the goal. Um, but it's tough to get there after all that. And then you miss your kids cause they're not around.

We just spent the weekend in Portland and we got to spend a lot of time with Jamie. We were doing a curling thing, but we also got to spend a lot of time with Jamie. She came out to, to Beaverton, to the curling club and saw us there. And then we went in on, on Saturday and we had brunch with her and then we had dinner with her yesterday before we went to the airport. It was really nice. But we also came to that realization that the thing about your kids leaving where you live and being somewhere else is that now you have to go visit them. In addition to all the other travel you want to do it just is there's a lot going on there, but it's good to have her out on her own like that anyway, regardless, I think.

Thank you for the fatherly advice, John, I appreciate it. I came up with this idea and didn't tell Mike and then he did that whole episode and I was like, I'm still gonna do it. I'm still gonna do fatherly advice, I don't care. Let's do a little bit, we're going to start rumor roundup. And then we'll probably do some of it after the next ad break as well. But I wanted to start a little rumor roundup now with you because, you know,

Mark Gurman, he publishes things on Sundays and this podcast is recorded on Mondays. So it's perfectly primed to take in and decrypt or attempt to decrypt the mysterious reporting of Mark Gernberg. Mark Gernberg is a new guy. Hey, look, I didn't get to sleep until 1 30. The iPhone Air was in his clutches this week in terms of his topic on his Power On newsletter. And he's reported about it a lot. And he makes the point of saying,

I call it the iPhone Air, which is good, right? Because we all know that they can invent a product and call it whatever they want, but until marketing signs off on what gets printed on a label and stuck to a box and put in a press release, it could be called anything. But he did go over some of the details he's already reported and added some new details.

So just to summarize what he's saying, this is this, this falls new entrant replacing the iPhone plus that it is two millimeters thinner than the existing iPhone. So that reduces it by about a fifth. It will have a screen that's around six point six inches. So a little bit bigger than the iPhone Pro, but smaller than the Max. Slim borders like the Pro. Pro motion for smooth scrolling, that is an interesting tidbit. And a standard dynamic island interface, the camera control button, battery life that's on par with current phones despite being far thinner,

one camera, the C1 cellular modem. And then he said they were trying to make it bigger like Pro Max size, but that they had concerns that if you spread this thin thing over that big size, it will be too bendable and you'll get another bend gate. And he also said that they were talking again about the portless iPhone idea. What if there were no ports? None at all. And that German says they didn't go down that path

because they were afraid that the EU would be mad at them for making a phone without USBC and having another kind of argument about that, which that one, I'm not sure I- It doesn't make any sense. I'm not sure I buy that one at all. That feels like a telephone. Keep in mind, which I that one, I'm not sure I'm not sure. One at all. That feels like a telephone. Keep in mind, this is something I can always talk about. It's like, keep in mind, who are his sources? What do they know? What do they not know? And what do they have a particular point of view? And that one just feels like a like a telephone game kind

of thing where they're like, yeah, the EU and he maybe took that a little more legitimately than they than than they did. But interesting, you know, the thing that jumped out for me here was ProMotion, because that's not a low-end iPhone feature. But it sounds like they really are positioning this as, it's not an iPhone 17, but thinner. It's something in between the iPhone and the iPhone Pro. What did you think about this report? Yeah, this product is always, ever since it's been rumored

as like the slimmer iPhone, it's always seemed like a luxury play, like making something thinner and lighter in a realm where that is desirable and sacrificing some other stuff for it doesn't seem like the bargain model. It's so clearly the, uh, like, you know, aesthetics and handling over, uh, utility. And that is a luxury type of thing.

So it makes perfect sense to me that they would put promotion on it. Um, I mean, the only, maybe the only reason it doesn't even have the, remembered to have the A19 Pro is because it's just too big and too hot. Right. So it's like, but it's got the plane A19. The whole phone is built around trying to be thin and They're gonna charge extra for that, you know extra over the plane 17. So that makes sense and promotion Tell you like I'm so sick of that being a differentiator like the state of the art has moved on soon It's gonna be like the cheapest, you know

the state of the art has moved on. Soon it's gonna be like the cheapest, you know, $99 Android phone you can buy is gonna have 120 hertz screen and Apple's still gonna be trying to differentiate the low end products. It's like, all right, you had a good run. It's a good differentiator, but like at a certain point you have to say, can we even, you know, can we even get screens that are optimized

for 60 hertz anymore or should we just, anyway. I realize it's more expensive for the fancy screens that can do like the one refresh per second and all of this stuff but well yeah but 16 you know 16 gigabytes of RAM is more expensive than 8 but at some point you really do have to just say yeah and it's not that much more expensive not that it's like yeah and speaking speaking of not that much more is another thing I give a little bit of side eye for again we need some materials engineer like dr. Drang to do the math in this but okay they were they didn't want to make it bigger because they were afraid to do be too

much how much more leverage how much additional bending power do you have for the mere millimeters of extra length and width that you would get with a whatever the max sizes because what is the pro is like six point three or something yeah I'm terrible with those kind of numbers but yeah it's a little bit a diagonal measure it's not the pro it's not the pro size it's a little bit bigger so it's closer to that pro max size already but then they said they didn't want to go the extra mile there so so even just like lay a pro on top of a pro max how much taller is it and then do the math on how much extra force you get for an optimal? Scenario of like a fulcrum exactly in the middle and if they're that close to the threshold of the thing bending that that makes a difference

You know, so anyway, that's that's gonna be the challenge with that with a thin phone is to make sure it doesn't bend too much But they've been there before hopefully they do a good job of it I don't necessarily agree that the reason they didn't make it the Pro Max size was bending. There are so many other reasons you wouldn't make it that big just because like you're trying to split the difference here. And also it's so thin to get more battery. You want it to be bigger than the Pro. So yeah, they it's it's I think it looked they looked at it and they said what price

do we want to hit here? And they don't want it to be 1199 like a Pro Max, right? They wanted to be, maybe it's 999 like a Pro instead of 899 like the Plus, but I don't think they wanted to make it the high-end model, right? I don't think they wanted to do that. And so as a result, I think they made, right?

Like a bigger phone is more expensive, right? Everything about it is more expensive. Grumman points out here too, that, that like, they really did target battery life with this and they did that by saving power in other areas. I think that's the C one in action among other things. I mean, I think the main place they get their battery life from is one camera. Yeah. One camera is just plain more room and they made the phone bigger.

So both of those things like square, square feet of the battery. That's the dimension that really helps, right? Like it, you make it thinner, but you also make it wider. You get some battery space back. You do some things with some maybe lower. Yeah. The, you get rid of the other cameras. You have a, a much more power sipping modem and you put it all together

and you try to hit that battery level, whatever the battery goal is for them. And the screen, like the promotion screen, the other feature of it, I'm assuming like all the other ones is that it can do really low refresh rate that saves battery life when you're not doing animation. So that all adds up to,

you look at this physically at the rumors of this phone and they have models of it out, you can see exactly what size it's gonna be. And it's like, up to I can you look at this physically at the rumors of this phone and they have models Of it out you can see exactly what size is gonna be ends like yep I can see that phone having pretty much the same battery life as the plane 17 given what's in it or the or the 16e Yeah, might be a better model. I do kind of think the 16e was like experiment number one This feels like experiment number two and as German wrote in his newsletter this week at Bloomberg, um, it breaks ground for future models. This was a thing that Mike and I talked about last year, that one of the

reasons you might try to make a thin phone is that if you're going to make a folding phone, each of those planes has to be super thin. And so you're building up knowledge and experience building, trying to minimize the thickness of your phone on the path toward a foldable phone, which German says might happen 26 or 27. And he mentions that as a part of that, one of the other things they might do

is finally do the proper kind of under display sensor thing that means you don't need a dynamic island or as much of a cutout in the screen. We'll see. I mean, I don't wanna think about how expensive that phone is gonna be, but I have to admit, as many issues as there are with iPadOS, and we're not even going to talk about Federico

Vettici wrote an article last week where he basically said, you know, that Mr. iPad himself was like, I think I'm just going to go back to the Mac. The iPad is just kind of what it is, and it's not really any more than that. But I'll say this, Apple's experience building iPadOS and building an OS platform that allows tablet apps to be decent. Um, I really start to think about that foldable iPhone being a nice iPhone that folds out into something that's more like an iPad. And I think I can see, uh, Apple having some real advantages there.

And German says that they, they are going to, the crease will be imperceptible, whatever that means. I don't know, it interests me as somebody who likes the iPad and has an iPhone, the idea that you could just carry around an iPhone and then pop it open and it's an iPad, I'm interested by that. I don't know if you find that intriguing. Is it like a back door to make Instagram

make an iPad app? Because they'll technically only be making a phone app, but if you want Instagram to fill the whole new foldable iPhone screen, you kind of already made an iPad app. I don't know, they'll still find a way to screw it up. They will. They'll find a way to ruin it. But that's the problem with, you know, when Apple, if and when Apple comes out with a foldable and the screen is just,

you know, much larger, more like an iPad, and phone apps have to fit themselves to that screen. Will the guidance essentially be do what you do in an iPad mini sort of? And if that's the case, they're back to the same old problem is like, people want to make phone apps and Apple's had real trouble getting even the biggest companies in the world to bother making a decent iPad app, or in the case of Instagram app, Instagram an iPad app at all. And it's a little bit embarrassing for them how many things on the iPad don't really,

forget about taking advantage of the very latest features and everything, like they just don't really care what they look like on the iPad. Yeah. As somebody who uses my iPad a lot, lot, I would say, I don't think the situation is dire. I do think that they benefit from having built the system that makes it fairly easy for an iPhone app

to be an iPad app and be decent. And mostly I say that because I think this year, Google once again rededicated itself to making changes to allow their tablet apps to finally be good on Android. And maybe they'll crack it, but they have said that so many times. changes to allow their tablet apps to finally be good on Android and you know maybe they'll crack it but they have said that so many times and every time I've used an Android tablet I have been aghast at how terrible it is and the situation is way worse over there that's why the iPad looks better it's

literally the only viable tablet platform really yeah I mean even if we complain about details and there are plenty to complain about about iPad apps let me tell you, last year I did it again. Last year I bought an Android tablet and tried it out. That one that had the non-reflective screen. So they were trying to make it like an e-reader. And I opened those tablet apps on Android

and they're so bad. Like iPad users don't know how good they've got it just because that, I mean, good for Google for acknowledging that yes, they are bad and we're gonna try again, but they have tried. They have said that so many times and it's still terrible. So I don't know what they're, I don't know. And then where Apple's got iPad, they've got split view.

And I just, I think about the folding and unfolding iPhone. And I think that's been the frustration is it's the rare case in modern Apple where the software is all there. It really is they got to get that hardware right in order to ship it. But I think their software story is decent. Yeah, the lack of competition from Google is actually really hurting Apple here because they don't, how would they feel any urgency when they're competing against nothing basically? Yeah, yeah, it's not good over there.

when they're competing against nothing basically. Yeah, it's not good over there. All right, we have a little more room around up to do, but first I wanna tell you about our sponsor. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by FitBod. When you wanna change your fitness level, it can be hard to know where to start. I am pleased to let you know, FitBod is an easy and affordable way

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Okay, John, I guess they're redesigning all the things. That's the other story that's out there this week. Okay, John, I guess they're redesigning all the things. That's the other story that's out there this week. I know you guys talked about this on ATP last week. People can check that out as always. I assume most people have already checked that out, but it is a wild idea that Apple is going to spend this summer unveiling a dramatic overhauled redesign across all of their operating systems, iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS. And it may be, I would not say inspired by Vision OS,

because I don't think that's how it works. I think Vision OS was the first aspect of this project to do an OS redesign to drop. That's how you would do it, as you'd say. What's our new, oh, we've got a new OS coming out? Well, let's use it as the testing ground for our new thing. But, you know, Mac OS, iOS, iPad OS as well. And a stated goal, at least in the report, is some more kind of unification of operating systems,

which, you know, anybody who's used the settings app on the Mac It's got to put a chill down your spine. What do you think about this? You know, I guess that on ATP like that the the first question about any kind of overhaul like this is to what end? Why why are we doing this and there are answers? I mean the the most obvious one is you just got to change the look of things every once in a while to keep things fresh. And we've had the current look, even though it has evolved

over time, for a long time now. And you can add excitement to all your platforms by saying, look at this new look. I mean, just think of Aqua for the Mac. It's controversial, but it sure added a ton of excitement. I mean, I don't know if the rollout of Mac OS X would have been half as exciting if they hadn't decided to do something incredibly bold with the look and feel

of their operating system. They could have just shipped it as platinum. I mean, Mac OS X server was like that. You could switch the betas back to that, right? But they, or they even could have gone with the next look if they wanted to, but they came up with something entirely new and it added a lot of controversy and a lot of excitement um

And so you have to do that every once in a while. So that's one of the answers now given The other things we may talk about in this episode and the current state of apple This isn't great timing for them to say, you know every every 10 years or so We should do a big look and feel overhaul to say, you know, every 10 years or so, we should do a big look and feel overhaul, but we're kind of in the middle of a crisis involving technology that's unrelated to look and feel.

And so the timing's not great. I mean, on the one hand, if everybody loves the new look, hey, this really helps us with the difficulties we're having in other areas, right? On the other hand, if the new look turns out not so good, which a lot of people feel like it might, based on past history, this is a bad time for that to be layered on top of all the Apple intelligence stuff. And I think the main reason, especially people in the know are wary about this is,

like you said, Apple's recent history in doing similar things, but just in general, hardware and software, one of the things that Apple has stumbled on in the past decade has been finding the right balance between form and function. And that is a balance and you can't be all in one direction or the other. But for a while in both hardware and software, it seems like Apple had been choosing form over function. They would make beautiful computers that didn't have the function out, didn't have the ports and everything people needed. They, you know, they would they wanted to make it as thin, their phones as thin as possible and they would bend. They want to make the keyboard as thin as possible and it would break. And on the software platforms they would redesign Mac apps

that were full-featured to make them look more like their iOS counterparts and lose half the features of them and they would never come back, right? It's beautiful, it's consistent, it looks nice, but it's like, these aren't just objects we look at. We like them to look nice, but we also have to use them. So what is the correct balance? And thinking about Apple doing a multi-platform redesign, we're just out here going, boy, I hope,

I hope those bad instincts don't come out. I hope they don't lean heavily into simplification, making everything look as clean and as beautiful as their least capable platform. Especially on the Mac, you don't want them to be inspired by how simple things are on the phone, because the phone is the phone and the Mac is the Mac. They're very different platforms. It would almost be as if the redesign for the phone had the information density and precision pointing requirements of the Mac user interface from like a decade ago. That would be equally inappropriate. Apple does not go in that direction, but you really have to let each platform be

true to itself. And that's Apple will give lip service to that all day, but we look at what they've done recently. And so we're worried, we're concerned. We've seen them make incorrect choices recently and basically not remedy those like settings on the Mac. It did one of the things that had to accomplish, which is give me a more scalable, easier way to add settings. Cause there are so many of them and make them a little bit easier to find with a better search, which arguably whether they did that.

But I think the, the actual like, you know, day-to-day use of that is that it is less pleasant to use than the old one. It doesn't look as good and you've just moved everything so no one can find anything anymore. And the places where things are don't really, I mean, they're new places, but set aside that they're new, the places things are don't really make that much sense. Lots of things are hidden under little eyes in a circle with modal things on top of other things. So it's, we look at that and we're like, at best it's a wash. At worst you've just sort of, you know, made different mistakes.

So I, I am going to give what I'm going to call an optimistic take on this. This is not a prediction. Okay. Because I, I agree with you. I am concerned that the track record here recently is not good, but my optimistic prediction or not prediction, non prediction, my optimistic scenario. There's your hope. My hope is because, because, you know, one of the things that I keep thinking is

like, it's not as simple as it looks from the outside. It's very easy to cherry pick things from the outside and not understand what actually was going on on the inside. And I firmly believe you get judged on your output. You don't, you know, you don't ship. It's like when all those COVID hurt shows shipped out nonsensical episodes and they said, but COVID and it's like, I understand and I feel for you,

but your episodes were still bad, you know, and you don't get a pass for that. Even though I understand it emotionally, in the end you are not judged because it was hard to ship. You're judged on what you ship. But that said, I do wonder, first off, when we talk about the things that they've done recently to the Mac to make them more like the iPhone and the iPad and

They are often not very good and don't make sense I mean the checkboxes example is a great one where switches where you can't necessarily even detect whether it's on or off or what You do when you click on it. What does it do? Whereas a checkbox that's empty or full is pretty clear but I think that was a directive to make the Mac more like the iPhone and the iPad, right? I think that that was the idea. I understand the impulse, which is we want a family resemblance between our products so that if you're an iPhone user, you'd rather use a Mac than a PC

because it will be more familiar to you. And there are so many more iPhone users. There are so many more iPhone users, which means even now, even now they are picking up new Mac users who've never used a Mac before because people are so comfortable in the Apple ecosystem and you want to give them a leg up.

You want them to be able to sort of understand the Mac conceptually, especially if they've only ever used a PC or a Chromebook. I get all of that. But my optimistic view is what we saw was literally make it more like the iPad, slap some iPad and iPhone coding on the Mac in order to make it look a little more like the other products. And what I want to believe, because right, like everything, it could be a new movie gets announced

and everybody's like, well, that could be terrible. I was like, well, literally every project could be terrible and literally every project could be good. It depends on how they execute it. We don't know what's going on inside, but I look at these reports and I think what they may be doing is saying, look, we have so many platforms. They've all evolved separately.

We've tried to put new coats of paint on parts of them. But what we really need to do, since we haven't done it since seven really, is let's go back and come up with a Apple interface language for the rest of the 2020s. And how it varies varies and good design would be how it varies across our platforms based on what kind of device they are because a watch and an Apple TV and a Vision Pro and a Mac and an iPhone and an iPad are all different but you want to make them feel sort of familiar so a good design team would absolutely do all of that and that's why my theory is that the Apple or the Vision Pro is a forerunner of that. Because if you've got a whole project to rethink all of your OS interfaces for the future

and you're shipping the Vision Pro, you could invent something completely random for it, but you know you're gonna be replacing it with this new thing down the road. Why not have it be based on like draft one of that as you're building it out for all your platforms. So my optimistic view is the right thing to do at Apple would be to take a step back, come up with general principles about what the modern Apple interface design should be,

consider all your products and the ways that they, you know, properly would be applied and then come up with a whole system that's in place, that's consistent, that you can go out with across all your devices that feels familiar, but is also well designed in the sense of it's designed for the product that it's actually running on. That's not inconsistent with the reports we've gotten. I don't know if it's happening, but that would be the right thing to do. I think. Yeah, that, that is a plausible scenario of what the project might have been.

Still, I guarantee you the product also might've been, Oh, we really need to look, come up with something. Yeah, that's true. Um, but here's, here's the thing that always concerns me about that. Even if they, they, that was the project they were undertaking, I no longer have the faith I used to have that the people who are available will make the correct choices for everything. You just laid out what's required of them.

You have to do that. You have to, you know, a new look for all our systems, do what's best for each platform. And that's hard. It's really hard. But it just seems to me that the people they have there do not understand what the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms are as evidenced by what they do to them particularly on the Mac Where I feel like the phone they have a pretty good read on the iPad. I Think we've just got done complaining about like it's not like it seems like they don't understand the potential of that platform and what it Can and should be and so they end up treating it as a little bit more

You know less capable than we know it truly is. And the Mac especially, everything we've seen from them for like over a decade has been to take the Mac and make it less capable and make it less good, the things that only the Mac can do. It's the only thing with a gigantic screen. It's the only thing with a guaranteed precision pointing device. It has the most complexity, it has the most complexity, it has the most capability,

it has the most complicated software and everything they do to the Mac, whenever they touch it, makes me think they don't understand that. And don't know it like, and so I agree with the project you've outlined. I wish the people executing it, I had more faith that they would do the right things.

Honestly, I don't know because it's a black box and I don't know anybody who has told me anything about this. I am just going to be a small team. It's going to be, what I would say is it's just as likely that the people there are actually very talented and agree with everything you're saying, but the resources they've been given and the directives they've been given over the last five or 10 years. Have made them do things that even they don't, they know that ain't it, but they have done it because like that's just, I, I would almost guarantee you that people who designed the system, system app on Mac OS, the settings app, no, everything that's wrong with it. But they either weren't given the authority

to make it better or they weren't given the resources to make it better. And so it just sits there. But in the end, it goes back to what I was saying, which doesn't matter. What you are is what you ship, right? Like that is the lesson of the real art of ship. What you ship is all that matters.

The story behind it does not matter. It's either good or it's not. And what they've shipped hasn't generally been good. They've done some good stuff, but there's also been a lot of horrific stuff. So my hope is they were empowered to say, let's go back to the basics and start from the beginning and then get this design out across all of our platforms. they were empowered to say, let's go back to the basics and start from the beginning and then get this design out across all of our platforms. And a project that would probably have taken several years.

And I hope that that's the case, right? Because the worst case scenario here is yeah, it's a code of new paint that isn't really well thought out. Like that's how you do a bad user interfaces. It's the bad it's bad design. The Mac looks like this because of the iPhone and like that's not how a Mac works but it doesn't matter. Or even if it's even if it's like they do undertake the project as you described it but they say and this is our answer to that and our answer to that is less information density on the Mac. Our answer to that is

massively simplified things on the Mac. Our answer to that is everything you've ever seen on the Mac is now legacy and this is massively simplified things on the Mac. Our answer to that is everything you've ever seen on the Mac is now legacy, and this is the way new Mac things look. And our answer to that is the new way things look on the Mac is not good. And so even if they undertake the right project, they would say, here is our answer. And that's what I'm really worried about. I'm just worried about them hurting the Mac.

And the one thing I feel like you have in our favor is it seems like, system system settings, as an example, a recent part of the Mac that has been overhauled, despite them trying to improve it and so on and putting a brave face on Craig Federighi saying, we think it's great app, blah, blah, blah. I think within Apple, they know that system settings redesign was not a hit.

Yes. They can convince themselves, well, you know, it solves some problems for us and the user. And as long as people don't actively hate it, let's just call it a wash. But it wasn't a hit. No one was jazzed about it. Nobody was excited.

Nobody was like, this is great. I hope they redo the whole SOS to look like this. Like that wasn't happening. So I hope they take that feedback. And it feels like we're kind of in the same situation we were with the like the Mac laptops for a while where there was this pent up feeling where the customers just were frustrated because the customer base would say, Apple do X, Y, and Z and we will like your products better. And Apple just didn't have the ears to hear that for so long. And when they finally did, it was such a relief. Laptops,

a little bit thicker, more ports, get rid of the touch the touch bar put it and it's like, oh, thank god I mean we were and there was much rejoicing and people and it helps Apple silicon was amazing, too So but still like it was felt like such a release and I feel like we're in that same spot With the OS design stuff where there is some obvious stuff that the world wants Apple to do and so far they have just refused to do it. The biggest version of that of course is the app store where it's just like you can feel all you want but Apple's just not going to do it. In the realm of hardware and software, there is this pent up obvious thing. We wish they would come out, or like the Mac round type, we wish they would come out and

say we hear you, you're right, we should rededicate ourselves to the Mac being the place for complexity, information density and capability moderated by, you know, they make easy things easy and hard things possible. Like if they came out and said all the right things and have design that backed it up, people would flip out. It would be great. Right. Or on the flip side of that, if, if the new OS just plain looks really cool and has not that many things against it, just look at Aqua. Aqua had so many problems, but it looks so cool that you balanced all the problems with yeah, but come on, it's super cool, right?

And they glided on the super coolness until they got the whole rest of their fairly disastrous OS, you know, like it was slow, it's buggy, it didn't run that stuff, like they glided on the coolness and that can take you real far. So that's another possible saving scenario. Like maybe please just let it be like cool looking that we really like it. You also go, I mean, there was an argument to be made. And this is what happened with Aqua and it's what happened with iOS 7 is. Yeah, you gotta go too far. You ship it at 130%. Yeah.

And then you spend the next three years dialing it back to 100%. And like that just happens. That happens with the redesigns. I went through so many magazine and website redesigns, and I'm sure you have implemented many website redesigns and like everybody has a lot of great ideas and then they meet reality and then you back off of it. But what I'll tell you, I think bold redesigns and like everybody has a lot of great ideas and then they meet reality and then you back off of it.

But what I'll tell you, I think bold redesigns that have to be backed off of are more effective than timid redesigns that aren't really redesigns. Like if you're going to do it, have the courage of your convictions and then you'll learn, you know, you'll get beat up and you'll be like, oh, that doesn't make that doesn't work. People don't like it. Let's change it. And you saw that with iOS. You saw that with Mac OS 10. I do have, here's another little, I'm gonna give you a little injection of optimism here too, John. Okay, you ready?

I wonder if Apple is in a really different philosophical place with its OS's and its devices now than it was even five years ago. And this is the silver lining in the dark cloud of the evolution of the iPad, which is I think Apple legitimately believed 10 years ago that the iPad was the future and that the Mac was going to go away.

I think now the iPad is a curiosity that is mostly a media tablet that can also be used in some professional circumstances by some people, but will never be anything more than a Fisher-Price toy versus the Mac. And Apple is fine with that. Apple is just fine with that. It's not the future anymore. And meanwhile, in contrast, the Mac now seems to be the does everything product in their lineup, because it can theoretically run iPhone and iPad apps and control your

iPhone and all of that. And who's using a Mac? You're either using it in a very simple mode, I suppose, but really, like the Mac, as more people just live on their phones, the Mac is the place where complexity happens. So I could make the argument that today's Apple thinks more of the Mac being a power tool and is less distracted by the iPad being the real future of computing than it was five or 10 years ago.

And that could mean that they make some better decisions about the Mac on the software side, sort of like how they eventually made better hardware decisions with the Mac. So the problem with personifying Apple in this way is that Apple feels this and Apple feels that, is that it's easier to attribute changes in attitude of the company as personified when the leadership

is not exactly the same as it was then. And I know the leadership learns. Again, they had the Mac roundtable. Johnny Ive did leave, so the leadership's not exactly the same. They did fix stuff, but. The attitude toward the iPad is very clearly different than it was for whatever reason.

Yeah, like I do kind of feel like at the very highest levels that Tim Cook really wishes the iPad was what's a computer? I agree. The what's a computer tablet? He's still the guy in charge. And he's had to sort of like grudgingly shift course here, which is fine. Like with the OS stuff with the look and feel, I guess my biggest, most optimistic hope is at least have them make different mistakes. Like they already did the mistake where they made everything too translucent and the rumors that they're going to do that same mistake again. It's like, come on, like do a different mistake. Like there's plenty of other mistakes you can make, but do a different one. Like Windows has already made the mistake with like the arrow glass look that was too translucent. Mac OS 10 made it with Aqua, which was too translucent.

Vision Pro, it makes sense for it to be translucent because your room is behind it. But adopting that across all their platforms because it looks cool. I hope it does look cool, but just the problems, the problems caused by transparency, can we make a different mistake? There's so many other ones you can make.

Please pick a different one. And my concern now that I'm really vacillating between optimism and pessimism and being like, I'm processing, I heard you do it on ATP. We're all kind of processing this, right? And it's like, what do I think about this? My pessimism is, and I hate to bring up that settings app again, but this is, this is my

reasoning when I, um, for, for a few years, I taught, uh, web and information design, uh, at the graduate school of journalism where I went at UC Berkeley. And I got down deep into information architecture and understanding information design. And so although I'm not a computer interface designer or really a designer at all, I spent a lot of time

in products that are design adjacent, where the design and the output matters. And I'm supplying the raw content that goes into a thing that is designed and in various parts of my career I've been a person involved in making those decisions. So my concern based on what I've seen from Apple is that Apple seems to have some designers and some leadership that are very focused on visual design and are not focused on information and interaction design. And that's bad, because you need all of those things,

because you need to think about, it's starting to keep coming back to the Steve Jobs things, but it's like design is how it works. It really is not what it looks like. What it looks like matters, but how it works matters. And the things Jobs things, but it's like design is how it works. It really is not what it looks like. What it looks like matters, but how it works matters. And the things that concern me are, as you mentioned, the Settings app is a great example

where it looks like the Settings app on Apple's other platforms now. But some of the decisions made are counterintuitive. The content isn't organized in any way, which I hate to be the one to say, oh, it's a simple fix, it'll take 15 minutes, but like you could have a better starting menu. Yeah, when they're moving everything,

you're already moving everything. Yes. Take that opportunity to do actual information architecture. Organize it. Here, now's your chance, you're gonna move everything anyway. Otherwise, everybody's gonna use search and then you change the search index, it can kind of break it,

so now nobody can find anything. It's not good. So that concerns me. And then it goes down to that interaction level too. I mentioned the the the the sliders instead of checkboxes, which I know you brought up to like, that's a really great example of what's the problem we're trying to solve here. And it's bad information design to have a toggle that you can't tell how it's toggled. And also to move the labels much farther away from the toggles.

Exactly, so you don't know what it's regarding. Because that's on the phone, they're real close to each other. It's a narrow screen. On the Mac, oh, we gotta make the window bigger. But now my label is five inches from the thing as opposed to a checkbox where it's right next to it. So my hope is that that was all based on a directive, right?

Because what we can't read into this is there's a manager somewhere who was told, look, we have to do this. And we know it's bad, but we have to do it. It's like, okay. But is that manager, did that, did that change? Did those marching orders change? Did they get the old time religion? So he convinced himself that it's actually amazing. Like that was my other complaint about system settings. I just think the controls don't look attractive

either. So if they were concentrating on the look and feel, they failed there. So it's not attractive. I don't find it nice. I find it just a sea of dark, boring looking gray and text fields that don't look like text fields and labels that are far away from buttons. And that's even before you get to the information architecture, just writ small at the visual level. I think it's a failure. So not optimistic. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Google Gemini. I used Gemini for the first time the other day and the most impressive thing to me was just talking to it.

You go live with it, and then it's just like you're having a conversation. You can just talk about your day, or have it explain something to you, or start brainstorming ideas. I'll give you an example. I pretended I had a job interview coming up, and I asked for it to help me prep for the interview. It immediately started suggesting common questions I might get asked. Then, I started talking through my answers out loud and it would give me feedback, and it's all happening in real time like I'm talking to a

career coach. That's just what I tried first, but you can talk to it about anything, and that's the magic of it. How you can have this back and forth and it's all seamless. If you haven't tried it yet, it's definitely worth checking out. You'll see what I mean. Our thanks to Google Gemini for the support of this show and all of Relay. I would argue in fact that Apple doesn't need a design refresh.

I understand why they feel they must because it's fashion and I get that. But the underlying problem that I think a lot of users, and this includes iPhone users, this includes the most important users to Apple's business, iPhone users. I think, and Gurman does mention this, so maybe there's some hope here again.

We're trying to just hang in there, baby, just hang in there, is making it better designed, like from a functional standpoint, making it more intuitive, decreasing complexity. And that's hard, and it's not solved by a code of new paint, right? So that's the challenge here is like, it's really, and I really don't wanna say it's easy, cause it's not.

This is an incredibly hard problem to solve. So many of Apple's problems and the problems of the tech industry in general about user interface are very hard to solve because how do you ship new features every year and not have enormous complexity or have the features just disappear forever and nobody even knows that they're there, which is absolutely where we are with the iPhone. But their problem is about that. It's about usability a lot more than it is about look and feel. And my concern is that it's very much gonna be same old Winchester Mystery House with a coat of new paint.

I'm a little worried. Yeah, actually speaking of that, whenever I see like to make it more intuitive, I just have negative feelings immediately because I've never seen that as a description of an interface and how it'd actually be good. But to that end and and the Winchester mystery house problem or whatever, actually, sort

of transitioning to the next topic, there is a technology that could potentially help with that if implemented well. It's true. Is it artificial intelligence? No, it's not. But it's LLM. And LLMs can actually help a lot in this area, a very focused,

that's kind of the problem is like when you have so many features in such a capable phone, it's difficult to design an interface that allow people to access all of them. If only there were something on the phone that could help them in that area without even just experienced users who know exactly which screen it's buried in.

Sometimes it's just faster to ask your Apple TV to turn subtitles off, even though you know how to get to the control, right? So that's the, you know, and so how's Apple doing in that area? So that's the great segue, thank you. It is, while we were talking in the last segment about interface design, I did think about that,

which is, or maybe none of it matters. It doesn't matter. Just ask your computer to do a thing and it does it. And then, you know, you walk away and you don't have to worry about it, which honestly, at this point, if they could nail that, just okay. Like, I mean, the settings app is so bad

that I would just give up. I'm like, can I just, please just do this thing for me. But it is, so we should talk about Apple's various Apple intelligence and Siri disasters. That's what this segment is, where that silver lining of the dark cloud, I can't see it right now. Obviously they, Gruber and I talked about it last week.

I caught Gruber sort of like in the middle of his, of his heel turn, of his identity crisis a little bit, where he said he felt bamboozled and then the more he thought about it, and then he wrote something rotten in Cupertino, and he's calling out like, the fact that they made this announcement and didn't really show it and advertised it

and then delayed it all because they couldn't get it to work is certainly a pretty powerful symptom of what feels like we've been witnessing in terms of what Apple is going wrong there. I think I was fascinated this week by some pieces, including one by Ben Thompson, trying to sort of like poke at it a little bit and say, Well, what could Apple do trying to sort of like poke at it a little bit and say, well, what could Apple do that might actually be better at this? And I thought it was a really interesting idea to say,

and it goes to Apple's control and it's Apple's desire to be perceived that they had last year for sure as being with it with AI and wanting it to all be about them. And Ben made the point that I think is a great one. And I was thinking of this in a different context last year, but it's still true, which is what if this was a little more about everyone else? What if Apple hooked the OS more

aggressively up to various LLMs, not just ChatGPT, and then built some APIs so that app developers could fairly easily leverage whatever LLM is set up and answer whatever questions that way, especially when Apple's work in this area is struggling. And then separately, the one that I kept thinking of, and I honestly was thinking about it, about Marco and Overcast, but I was thinking about it in another context too, which is Apple's stated goal for this product cycle was,

we've built an LLM of our own and it's running on your iPhone and iPad and Mac and developers can't touch it which I don't know if they want to touch it or not but like one way you could make your platform appealing is by saying your apps now can have features enabled by our on-device LLM isn't that great here's the API for it and instead it was very much like Apple intelligence is going to change how you use your computer, change how you use your phone. You can only use our apps. It kind of reminds me of the pre-LLM incarnation of this on iOS and Apple's other platforms, which was machine

learning ML. I remember the core ML framework that essentially let the demo was like you can make a model or whatever you know, train a model on how to identify hot dogs. And then with core ML you can wrap it up in a way that it's usable across all of our platforms, and then you ship your app with your model that you train to identify hot dogs and across all of your platforms. Now you have an app that you've shipped that can identify hot dogs. identify hot dogs and across all of your platforms, now you have an app that you've shipped that can identify hot dogs. Yeah. Uh, and that's cool technology.

And that's a great way to let people incorporate machine learning into their apps. But I feel like from my impression of the apps that are out there, most developers don't want to take a bunch of Python and training machine learning model on hot dogs and bundle it with their app and ship it and bloating the size of their app. And they just want there to be a framework on iOS that can identify hot dogs. Yeah. Just to give a silly example.

Yeah. Like OS level platform level integration of technologies is so much easier for third parties to adopt in their apps. It's great that they can ship their own thing. Like if someone, I haven't read Ben Hommerton's thing yet, but if someone's hearing this and saying, well, that's dumb. People can do that now. People can ship an LLM with their app now.

It's like, okay, how big do you want your app to be? And do you want seven different apps, each with their own model that by the way, can't run in the background because it'll get killed because it's too damn big. Like this is something that the platform has to supply. Exactly. For you.

They just give me one or two of them in a framework that I can use. I don't have to ship it with my app. To use your hot dog example, which I really love. So I'm going to run with it. The Photos app probably can identify hot dogs. And if not, I mean, it can identify lots of things. I don't believe there is an API

that lets you hand an image to the system and have it run through what the Photos app does and spit back a whole bunch of things that are describing what that image is. They do have things where you can identify faces and stuff. So some of the Phot photo app stuff is exposed, but like, and we're talking about all like pre L, I mean machine learning,

but it comes down to the same thing. The capability to bundle that with your app is great. It needs to exist for people on the cutting edge, but most people just want to be able to use a OS framework that they don't have to ship, that they don't have to train, that Apple makes better every year after year, that uses all of the hardware on the phone

to the greatest extent. Let me give you the example I was thinking of about Overcast. And this is not endorsed by Marco, okay? Not endorsed by Marco, but I walked through the process where I thought, okay, I use Whisper on my Mac to do transcriptions. It's amazing. The latest one on this M4 Max MacBook Pro that I've got,

it's transcribing it like, I forget what it is 30 30 X, like it's it's wild. I did last week's podcast with Gruber, which lasted like 10 hours, and it transcribed it in like five minutes. It was amazing. But so podcast transcripts, Apple is doing podcast transcripts up in the cloud, they are literally consuming every podcast that's an Apple podcast in a bunch of different languages and generating a transcript and showing it. Now, Marco is not gonna do that, right? He's not gonna be able to build an enormous cloud system that does that, he just can't. That Overcast is not gonna be able to do that. Guess what?

Overcast is running on a bunch of devices with neural engines that are pretty powerful. And you could build a system that that generated a transcript and maybe even intelligently check to see if there was a transcript available. If there isn't, you transcribe it and upload it to Overcast, at which point that transcript is available for everybody else who uses Overcast. It's distributed transcription. You could do that. That would be pretty cool. However, for that really to be enabled, there needs to be a model that Marco could use

that is run on the system, because if he tries to build it into his app, his app will just get killed. But the power of being able to say, for any app developer, not just Marco, for any app developer to say, oh, look at these great ML, AI, whatever, APIs that I can use that are provided by being on an iPhone

or being on a Mac. And that makes my app so much better because it's the system one and it's reliable and it's right there and I can use it. But with Apple intelligence, and I think for expediency reasons more than anything else, Apple was like, ah, we got to ship something. Let's just put our model on there and put some apps, we'll use it and that'll be it.

But that's why I think Ben Thompson's suggestion is a smart one, which is while you're having all these problems, what if you enabled your app developers to take advantage of your platform and your neural engine and all these great things you've done to make their apps better so that iPhone apps are good. Like it seems simple, but I think there's something to it. And I have thought there was something to it since last June because it felt very much like Apple was like,

you know, they do the, we can't wait to see what you do with it thing. Not Apple intelligence really. I mean, it's just not, they do the, we can't wait to see what you do with it thing. Not Apple intelligence really. I mean, it's just not, there was no, for a developer conference, there was other than the Xcode code completion stuff. There was no developer message for Apple, Apple intelligence. Other than to prepare your apps to be harvested. As I said, like make sure you set up your app intents, make sure we can get at your

stuff, make sure you know what your apps can do with our LM your apps. With Sunday in the future, our LM will be issuing commands to control your app and extracting information out of it. So there's two parts of this. The basic one that you just mentioned before, that Apple has this control issue, that they ... We're stuck in a situation, my pet example, because it is relevant to one of the apps that I make, is Stage Manager. Stage Manager is a different new way to handle multiple applications on both the Mac and iPad.

Stage Manager is one idea of how that could be done. I always felt like it should have been possible for a third party to make Stage Manager. There should be APIs involving the windowing system on both the iPad and the Mac, good, safe APIs that Apple vends that you can use so that third parties can say, oh, I have an idea about managing Windows, let me try this and then let a million third parties take their crack at

it. It doesn't mean Apple can't also have a crack at it, but if you make APIs that allow, if you make your system extensible in that way, I mean, Apple had to make the APIs for stage manager and it's way harder to make them public, but still that is a good discipline to do for APIs like that. We didn't do that. So what we were stuck with with window management, we just sit out here waiting around to see what the next idea Apple has is. And we're in the same situation with Apple intelligence. Obviously it's way less dire within a window management because every idea Apple has ever had, especially on the Mac, still exists on the Mac for the most part. They just keep adding them, which is like, okay, fine. But like, boy, imagine Apple, if this was no longer your sole responsibility,

imagine if you were empowered third parties to try out a bunch of stuff and then just steal the best idea and put it into the operating system for crying out loud. Right. And so we're in the same situation with AI. It's like we're stuck out here waiting for Apple to do it. Now, the second aspect of the AI thing, which is makes it more difficult, is a lot of the things that Apple has announced for Apple Intelligence. And the reason I think most of us, when we saw their announcements, said this is a good

strategy for Apple, this is a good idea, is it leverages Apple's strengths. They do have lots of information on device. They do have powerful hardware on device. Apple Intelligence's strategy of not being like, we just have a thing in the cloud and you talk to it. It's like, no, this thing runs on your device. It's going to make a semantic index of all your stuff and it's going to control your apps

that you already have, that app developers are already vending through App Intents. Like that's a good idea. Making that available third parties is extremely difficult because you would essentially be giving third parties access to data across multiple applications on your phone. It would know everything about you and be able to like, because that's what Apple intelligence would do. And we, we trust Apple to do that.

Now you're saying, oh, if I make this pluggable, third parties, third parties will be able to see all my text messages, all my emails, all my contacts. All, you know, it's just like, it's incredibly invasive. So it's even, even more against Apple's like, uh, philosophy, more against Apple's sort of inclination to say, well, we can never do that. Only Apple can provide Apple intelligence because we would never trust a third party that they feel that way about window management.

Only Apple can manage windows because we would never trust the third party to do that. God forbid they knew what size and position your windows are in. Right. It's like, it's, it's just so against what they want to do as an institution. And I understand the understand the pushback internally about doing that in Apple intelligence, but that's not what we were just talking about. We were like, okay, fine, just let Marco do transcriptions

of audio that he has that he uploads. He's already got that audio. There's no privacy implication here. It's like CloudKit. Yes, developers could make their own servers with their own data store and their own database, but if you provide CloudKit and it actually works and it's decent, people will just use that. And wow, now it's way easier to make that app on the phone

than it is on another platform. And their apps are better for it if you did a good job with CloudKit. Because there is a speech to text, for example, engine on iOS, you just don't get to use it. But it's not the same as transcribe this podcast. It's not the same as, hey, let me check this giant MP3 over the wall.

Oh, it looks like you already transcribed it. And that's one example, but like the larger, it's just like, there should be a ideally robust set of APIs that allow app developers to have access to these models that are running on the device that Apple, and again, from a battery standpoint, from a power consumption standpoint, that Apple and the system is able to prioritize

and say, this is gonna run slower because of the state that I'm in right now. Whereas if you put it in your app, Apple's just gonna kill it when it, because that app is out of control. The apps all have this screen that says, leave your screen on, plug your phone in. Play breakout.

Prevent screen sleep from going, like just all the things that third party, I think of the times when I was using a third party app that would essentially analyze your photos so you could type in hot dog and find all the hot dog was way before Apple did it. And to get that thing to index your photos required, plugging your phone in and letting the app be there

and the app would prevent the screen from sleeping and it would just sit there for hours grinding away to get the results. When Apple built it in, I don't have to do that anymore. I just use my phone normally and it indexes my photos. In the background and it controls it. And I know it could be frustrating sometimes where it's like, why don't have to do that anymore. I just use my phone normally and it indexes my photos. In the background and it controls it. And I know it could be frustrating sometimes where it's like, why hasn't it indexed yet?

But that's the reason why is that it's looking at your battery and your plugged in status and all of those things and a more robust selection of this. And again, I think we have to look at everything they announced last June as a function of panic, right? I think they are worried that they were caught flat-footed, they were seen as behind, they were behind. And what if, and this is the part,

I know there are a lot of real skeptics out there, what if it completely changes the game? And if you're Apple and you've got the most valuable company in the world, you really want to eliminate as many changes the games without it being us who changes the game as possible. And they got, they got really scared. And that is why they made some bad decisions, including, like I said last week, lowering the bar on what they were going to announce in terms of the

probability that it would ship in the cycle because they wanted to make a big, big, big push, right? The whole thing was make a big splash. Uh, and they did make a big, big, big push, right? The whole thing was make a big splash. Uh, and they did make a big splash and there is blowback now. And I guess we can debate whether the big splash was enough to get by, even though now they're dealing with the blowback. But the, the truth is this WBC is going to be so interesting because what happens when you're not in panic mode, you've had a year to consider, you've had a year to learn, but you've also failed at a bunch of stuff and people on the outside are going to look

at you with a more skeptical eye because you didn't deliver everything you promised. I do wonder, I hope to see them having learned something from this. My worry is that they won't. One of the things I think is saving them here is that the most optimistic promises of what LLM-based technology would be delivering by this point in time have not been met. Not to say that they're not useful. They are. They're very useful and Apple is behind and other people are doing better things with

them, but they have been saved by the fact that even if everything that they announced worked perfectly or was replaced with the best in the entire industry it's like this seems like a good addition to the phone but it's not replacing the phone or taking away their power as a platform or it's like you don't need a phone you just need an AI pin and that's all you need no right didn't happen either like and Samsung have not shipped phones with technology I know people are like oh but it does this thing great it's like the truth is people don't look and say, I can't buy an iPhone because it doesn't have all the things

that Google with Samsung. And that's what Apple's worried about. And Apple doesn't even need to be, I know it doesn't sound like Apple, it sounds more like Samsung, but Apple doesn't need to be first. Apple just needs to be close enough. There needs to be as little daylight between them

and everybody else as possible. And one of the most positive stories of the last year in terms of AI is it sure seems like AI is much more of a commodity than it was before. And that's good for Apple because if Apple can either just build it themselves and it's basically as good as anyone else's, then that's great for Apple.

If Apple offers various LLMs from other companies, because they're all just commodified and it's like, sure, you got a GPT account, you got a Google account, you got a Claude account, what we don't care, whatever. Then that's good for Apple because Apple's building a layer up from there, doing their secret sauce stuff on top of those great models that other people are building. Either way, that's good for Apple. But despite, despite, I would say a much more favorable environment

over the last year, they are stumbling. I, again, I think they're stumbling because of the decisions made not in the last year, but before that, when they got caught flat-footed and put this crash program together to generate Apple intelligence. And that's why I'm so fascinated by the idea of the course correction.

Cause yeah, we could, they are messing this up and yet the conditions are still really favorable for them to get their act together. Yeah. Yeah. Like I feel like the, like the sort of hockey stick graph things of like, well, you know, by 2025, you don't even need a phone. It'll just be an AI and it will artificially render things to a dumb screen that you hold in your hand and it will render apps in real time.

And there won't even be apps. It'll just be like a thing that it's like, that has not come to pass. So like the things that Apple was afraid of that would essentially make their platform moot not moot, but like a, do to them what the, the iPhone did to the PC. Right. That's what they're afraid of. Right.

That it still exists and it's still important, but the new most important thing is no longer the phone. Now it's the AI pin or now it's phones that are essentially tiny little AI things with the screen. And the path towards that, if we are even on that path, has stalled out and LLMs are like, this is an important, useful piece of technology that you have to be good at

because it's gonna enhance your phone and you have to have it. But nobody is in a situation where this like LMS like open AI is not going to put Samsung and Apple dethrone them as important hardware makers of phones or something like that. It's like, Oh, that's great. Remember when Apple was important because they made iPhones, but only all everyone cares about is the open AI pin now. Nope. So it doesn't seem like they're on that path. So yeah, it definitely seems like a technology that there's a lot of competition in, but that it's, it's like, it's like, uh, you know,

desktop publishing or the web or the internet, the internet was so incredibly important and yet it did not make the personal computer no longer relevant. And if anything, it made it more relevant. Well, and you could argue that again, unless there is a moat somewhere, unless Google comes up with something that allows them to completely make an AI powered version of Android, that means that the iPhone is irrelevant and Apple has nothing to contribute

because that's the fear, right? Is there whatever comes next, Apple has nothing to contribute, whether it's, you know, which I would argue, given how they're doing in the hardware, on the hardware side, I have a hard time seeing it. They always have something to contribute. Yeah, so the most, even, and it would hurt their pride,

right, it would hurt their pride if they became more of a hardware and layer company on somebody else's model. They don't want to do that, but I feel like that is probably their worst case scenario, knowing what we know right now about AI is it's hard to imagine a scenario where one company does this and nobody else cracks it. And even then I would argue in a scenario where there was one company, if let's say Google figures it out, I think even Google would be like, yeah, you can do this on the iPhone too.

Because it's like, no, no, no. They just want your eyeballs and your ad dollars. And Apple would love that. But also, there's all the competitors to Google. So I think that lack of a moat here means that in the end, Apple does need to catch up. They need to get their act together. But in the long run, when we talk about layering,

putting things underneath apps, creating APIs that connect your great iPhone and app experience with whatever AI technology is relevant. If they can do that part, it doesn't really matter about how far behind or ahead they are in terms of their LLMs because the assumption here is that nobody ultimately is going to be very far behind. Because we saw with DeepSeek, the lesson that at least we're trying to take from DeepSeek is, it's not as hard as it seems to catch up. And once the genie is out of the bottle, it's out of the bottle for everybody. And that's actually good for Apple,

because when you're behind and you're struggling to catch up, if somebody tells you, don't worry, it's easy to catch up. We've rubber banded it. It's like Mario Kart. I know you're in the back, but guess what? Good news. That's what, I think that it's potentially good for Apple, but they have to execute.

And that is, I think the real kind of gnashing of teeth that's happened over the last week is, it feels like Apple has, they set ambitious goals, they did it last minute, but if we look at the last nine months of what they've shipped, it shows that it was last minute and slapped together and overly ambitious and that they couldn't do it. And that's worrisome. Yeah. LMs kind of remind me of like most sort of technological innovations where like they're founded on scientific papers that anybody can read. It was a breakthrough and a technique to do a thing that they have been trying to do with

different techniques earlier and said, well, here I have a new way to do it. Everyone can see those papers. It's kind of like the integrated circuit in the transistor, right? Anyone could make a chip, a CPU memory, like that whole revolution of the personal computer revolution. There was no one who has a, we're the only people who know how to make an integrated circuit. So we're going to take over the world. Like, no, everybody knows how to make them. And what turned out to be the moat was like, you know, Microsoft's platform deal with IBM and their integration with Intel as a, you know, the Intel Windows duopoly had nothing to do with no one else knows how to make a

personal computer. There was lots of competition and their moat was involving business deals, some of which turned out to be illegal, and a bunch of stuff. In that respect, Apple is looking like the Microsoft of today. They've got all the terrible draconian control over their platform and a stranglehold on all these devices. Not the same way Microsoft did, but like the moat has nothing to do with no one else knows how to make a CPU. And now arguably you just mentioned like Apple's hardware, like they're actually really good at that. That potentially comes from the fact that they've made so much money by controlling the app store that they can pay for the best process from TSMC. And that's what gives them the hardware mode, but also like

the intangibles. So they talked about an ATP of You know Anybody can make a PC but who can make a really good customer pleasing PC if you have all the same parts We all got the same CPUs hard drives memory cases blah blah now go who can make one that's pleasing Apple's been historically pretty good And making products that please customers that are desirable using things that everybody else has access to. That's true of the iPhone, that's true of all the Macs that they make. There's no other than Apple silicon which arguably Apple has shown is not that big of a deal because for many many years Apple was not the hardware leader when it came to CPU performance and still Macs were very

desirable and in the news and popular computers and seen as the best in the industry even when they were at miniscule market share. So most of the advantages Apple have seem pretty durable. They're either Microsoft style business terribleness that we hate but nevertheless gives them an advantage or they're Apple's traditional strengths of they make good tasteful choices assembling the pieces that are available to everybody. And in the LLM realm, everything that has happened has been open for everybody, including the DeepSeek thing. They were open about what they did. They said, we just have a new twist on doing the stuff that you were doing, but we can do it cheaper.

And here's how we did it. Now everybody knows that. So only in the movies is they're like, I've got the secret formula and nobody has it. Most technological revolutions, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine integrated circuit Everybody gets access to that tech It's just a question of who can execute with the best combination of things that give them an advantage and very often the advantages Are not fair Microsoft advantages in that era were not fair Apple's advantages are really with the app store quote-unquote not fair But those are durable advantages as are just, you know, being a good company that makes products that people want.

And that's why the Ben Thompson argument holds a lot of water for me is the idea that how does Apple in a world where the LLMs are just kind of out there, what is your advantage that keeps you on top? And their hardware is part of it, but being a platform that's really good to take advantage of all of that is probably more important than like, do we have it? Because everybody's gonna have it. That's not enough. It's what do you do with it? And if they can add their own secret sauce in some places, that's great, but also allowing the developers and their ecosystem to use the power of this stuff because Google will probably do that. And like, again, it's competition and they just don't wanna be on the other side of it.

So they're gonna have to. Yeah, and some of the advantages that Apple has, they are essentially a stable platform. They've had customers for a long time. They don't change things in a way that breaks stuff that often. They have the customers that are the most willing to spend money.

Like they just, it's already an extremely attractive place to do Whatever it is you're gonna do with computers and LLMs or whatever and so it should be easy for them to continue to make this a good safe place for you to Launch your new service or app that is powered by LLM stuff because they have just so many other surrounding advantages and their sort of refusal to open up to that but instead said just wait to see what we do it'll be great is not working well for them. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by DeleteMe.

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go to joindeleteeme.com slash upgrade 20 and enter code upgrade 20 at checkout. Once again, join delete me all one string.com you know how to spell.com slash upgrade 20 and the code is upgrade 20. Thank you to delete me for supporting upgrade. So John, this Siri report from Mark Gurman also adds into the overall narrative, I guess. He obviously has people who are on the Siri team who are in that meeting who just recorded and transcribed or whatever and just leaked the whole thing to him, which is a little like those stories about like Facebook has a big meeting and they're like, okay, nobody leaked this and five minutes later,, okay, nobody leaked this.

And five minutes later, you know, nobody leaked this says Facebook at meeting because it immediately leaks. Um, this is Robbie Walker, who's apparently the senior director in charge of Siri. He did an all hands meeting where he said the delays were ugly and embarrassing, but he also said that, you know, marketing is, is partially at fault for

doing ads about these features. And on one level, he's right. On another level, who gave ad marketing and advertising the confidence that this feature would be implemented? I mean, maybe Robbie Walker was like, no, don't do it. We can't do it. No. But probably it was like, yeah, we could do it.

And sweating a little bit. And, and, uh, it's so like, who gave them the idea that they could, they could, uh, advertise these features. I do wonder that. Um, and, uh, German's report says it's unlikely to result in management changes on tip cook's executive team. That would mean admitting fault, which Apple hates doing. Boy, I hear that. Right. That's hard. It's hard to admit fault. You can make leadership changes without admitting fault. They get rid of people all the time and never admit fault. How many different people have been involved

ahead of Apple retail, the paper master guy with the CPU thing, like they don't admit fault, but they still make changes. Scott Forstall just wanted to spend more time producing plays, okay? Yeah. Look, a lot of people are interpreting this in ways that suggest that they've never been at a big corporation and been in an all

hands meeting, right? Because like, you know what they don't do in an all hands meeting? What they don't do is say you guys all blew it. You suck. You hate, I hate you all. You're lucky to have jobs. Maybe some of you will get fired. Um, you in particular blew this, you in particular blew that. I don't even know what I'm doing here. You guys are a bunch of rejects. Like that is not what happens. Instead, it's sort of like, Oh, I know it's bad out there and I know there have been some missteps, but it's not just us. It's a whole bunch of people and we're going to work together and we're going to, we're going to figure this out. The difficulty is that everybody on the

outside look at the looks at this and go goes, really, you gave a pep talk to the Siri team. Because it's just such a wayward I think it might have been one or two ADP episodes ago, but I think I grabbed the exact same analogy that Gruber grabbed in his article. And I think I was also talking about the same thing, which was the Siri team, which is the the famous, uh, the famous mobile me meeting where Steve jobs did his, uh, classic Steve jobs is a giant jerk thing where he asked questions of what mobile me is supposed to do and listens patiently for the answer and says them why the F doesn't it do that.

And then he yells at them all and tells them they're a bunch of rejects. Um, Steve jobs is a jerk. Uh, and, uh, like it grew even put in his article that like what, what the Siri teams need is not the like, what is the participation award type of thing of like saying, oh, you tried your best or whatever. What the team needs is for leadership, tell them they're a bunch of losers.

I disagree with that. I don't think, yeah, Steve Jobs did do that. Doesn't mean it's good leadership. It's a thing that he did and he was a jerk. He had other qualities that made up for that, but don't do that. Because if you actually like it doesn't mean put on the blinders and say, oh, we're great in everything.

Like there is a way again, if you've worked in a big company, there's a way for leadership to say we have not, we're not working up to expectations. We should hold ourselves to higher standards, but not say that in a way that is Viscerally satisfying to outside observers who want to see the Siri team get yelled at right? That's leadership leadership is letting people know that we have to do better But also not berating them and shoving their dog in the poo They made on the carpet showing the dogs nose in the poo They made another carpet which by the way is also not good for dogs

Yeah, this authoritarian mindset that wants to see the people who did the bad thing punished and yelled at. Yeah. It may feel good on the outside. Two minutes hate for Siri, let's do it. Yeah, it may feel good to think that's happening, but that's not what leadership looks like. And Steve Jobs is a poor example to model here.

But I do agree that, I mean, honestly, like do you think there's anybody on the Siri team who thinks that their product is awesome at this point? Nobody, this is the thing, and this is think there's anybody on the Siri team who thinks that their product is awesome at this point? Nobody this is the thing and this is why it's complex and I know that people have very strong feelings about this but Nobody knows the weaknesses of Siri like the Siri team, right? They especially the rank-and-file, right? They know and and that's what I was gonna say is look given everything Wave hands it like given everything, wave hands,

given everything about Siri, obviously there's a problem. But what is the problem? I don't believe the problem is that the engineers aren't working hard enough and don't know what they're doing. I don't believe it. Exactly, yeah, for sure. It is, at this point, I would say, clearly a deeply structural problem at Apple.

And that's why it's hard to change because, I mean, I put it in our notes, I actually like this whole sequence that's happened in this last week, because Apple needs to have a struggle and a challenge, because Apple's been riding so high for so long that they're like, why change? Why should we ever change anything we do?

We're so awesome. And I feel like the LLM thing was like the start of the humbling moment, but I feel like maybe this week we've really got the humbling moment, which is if you look at Siri, it's not the people who are working on it. It is whoever decided, it's either whoever decided, oh no, this is our strategy and it failed.

And they gave the wrong marching orders. Or my gut feeling, John, is this is a fundamental structural problem at Apple where the people who are in charge of the various parts of implementation or budgeting made some decisions about Siri where it's like, well, we could completely throw it away, but why don't we patch it? We'll kick the can down the road and, you know,

we could, or I need more money. And they're like, Well, we got this other thing on the OS side, we're not going to give you more money for the Siri team. Whatever the reason, it's unless you're inside Apple, you don't know the reason. But it feels to me, like this is a fundamental structural problem in Apple, not a couple of lazy people in the Siri programming team, right? It's a structural problem. And the problem with that is for a structural problem to be fixed, you must admit that it exists. And that means high level people admitting that either they blew it, or the power structure that gives them some power is not how the structure should be and that some people may need to lose power and authority and budget in order to give somebody else power and authority and budget in order to make this work better. And it's that famous line like, you know, nothing makes somebody commit to a bad idea, like their job, depending on it. Or sorry for the paraphrase, Charles Dickens or whoever that was, but Is it Upton Sinclair convincing someone of something when the job depends on not understanding it? It could be, that sounds like him, but that's, yeah,

you have to depend on misunderstanding it. And that's, my gut feeling is that's where this is, is this is Apple, for all of the success Apple has had with some of its structures, and I've said this about Steve Jobs' whole like rebuild of their corporate culture, for all the success it led to, there are little corners of it where you're like, ooh, that's actually kind of ugly.

And that's why Apple has these warts in various places. And, and so that, I mean, that's when I look at this from the outside, again, it's like we could kick Robbie Walker, we could kick at the Siri team, but he's just trying to pump up a team that's probably deeply demoralized about all of this. And my guess is it's not any of their fault. And so you could like, let's fire somebody. But my guess is that it's gotta be up at the Tim level, really to say, why have we failed at this?

And that takes somebody admitting they failed at it, which I think Apple has a hard time admitting, especially modern Apple. Yeah, so the Siri situation makes some vague sense and they're like, you know, whatever, it's an acquisition, was it Forstall found this company in 20 whatever, and says we should get this, it's a cool thing it should have on our phone,

and they roll it out and it does some stuff, but like, you know, it's not great, doesn't set the world on fire, people like it, eventually voice assistants become more common, Apple's like, well great, we've already got one of those, we were in fact, we were one of the early voice assistants, but it is part of the iPhone, but it's not a part that's driving sales. And for all the efforts of the Siri team to improve it

over the years, I think Apple just started to see it as like, this is just the price of admission. You need to have a thing on your phone that is like Siri. We have one of those. And so we're basically fine. Just put this on autopilot, right? Then LLMs come along and it's like, oh, we're basically fine, just put this on autopilot, right? Then LLMs come along and it's like, oh, we probably should have been awake earlier because even things like Amazon's voice assistant, we're kicking our butt, but it's like, well, we're fine. Like they're not a big differentiator.

What we have is fine. And all of a sudden they are gonna be a big differentiator and you can't turn the organization on a dime like that because you're not built to treat this part of your operating system as strategically important as it has suddenly become. So you can just tell the existing team and the existing structure, do the better thing that other people are doing now.

And it's like, well, that's not this team for how long since 2011 has been sort of like a thing that you need to have, but that isn't probably going to get that much better. And we've heard stories from inside the Siri team and years before the LLM of like, uh, warring factions within it was like, this team has a new idea of how, how we can overhaul Siri. And this team has a different idea of how we can overhaul Siri and let's pit them against each other and pick the one that wins and like whatever ones they were picking were not the right ones.

And that didn't put them in a good position now to say, Oh, and by the way, uh, LLMs exist, uh, re-imagine Siri in light of current technology that the organization is not equipped to do that, but that is their task. Their task is to, I talked about this in ATP, it's asked us to do what Amazon claims to have done, which is re-imagine our voice assistant for the LLM age. And Alexa has been around for ages and has huge numbers of capabilities and must have been an incredible project to say Start over do a new thing based on LLMs You know and they claim that they're shipping like this month or so

Apple has barely claimed to barely even tried to claim that they're gonna do what Amazon says that they've done And yeah, that's a task that's before them Yeah, so it just seems like a structural problem that it's going to be what Amazon says that they've done. And yeah, that's a task that's before them. And yeah, so it just seems like a structural problem that it's going to be difficult for them to solve. And also I think, I don't think Apple is yet entirely convinced. Like if you asked the big leadership at Apple, how much more important has Siri become now that LLMs exist? Like strategically for our platform,

obviously it's more important than it was. Is it the most important thing? Has it just moved up a little bit and it's like a tie with like some other function? Like it's just, I don't know if they're ready to turn. I mean, I bet they would say, well, we did. We hired the Google AI guy years ago. And so we think we're giving it

the appropriate amount of attention. And as you said, all we see is what you're producing. What you're producing is not competitive. Yeah. You are not producing much. You're producing stuff that's not competitive and you don't even have like the most optimistic plans still have you behind everybody else. And by the way, we haven't even seen what that's going to produce.

So if you think you've appropriately turned the dial on structurally and budget and everything for Siri, the outside world is telling you it's not the most important thing in the world, but it's way more important than you're treating it. And the organization you have now is not capable of doing it. And that has nothing to do with anybody in that all hands meeting who's listening, except for maybe one or two of the people up on the stage, but probably not even them because it's not like they get to decide how much money they get versus how much money the car project gets versus how much money Vision Pro gets, right? That's not, they can lobby for the resources

they think they need, but in the end, their career depends on them saying that they can deliver something that they think they can deliver without asking for 10 times the budget. Yeah, I also suspect that something you just said was right, which is, I don't think Siri has been prioritized. I think that they talk a good game I also suspect that something you just said was right, which is I don't think Siri has been prioritized. I think that they talk a good game and they market it. And there's not a sporting event that goes by

where there isn't a, oh, ask Siri who the leader in home runs is or whatever. My gut feeling, just as an outside observer is that Siri isn't well-funded and that part of this is like, it's suddenly become this incredibly important thing, but they are dealing with years of neglect. And one of my examples of this, it's not just, you know, that Siri is kind of dumb. It's that shortcuts is Siri. That's the Siri group that does shortcuts. They bought workflow, the Siri group bought it. And then Apple says, okay, shortcuts is the future of automation on

all of our platforms, which is great. There's a lot to like about shortcuts, but even, well, especially the greatest fans of shortcuts would tell you that for a core part of the operating systems of one of the biggest companies in the world, it feels like five people, three people, two people are working on it. The app is a mess. It hasn't really advanced very much. Um, it is, it's fine, but it, it's a rickety, it breaks during every beta.

It just feels like there's not a lot of love on shortcuts. And then all of a sudden Siri and shortcuts because of app intents have become like a major tenant of the future of Apple's platforms. And that's great. And I hope it got them more money, more resources. But they also have to deal with the last five years of not really getting a whole lot of love and a whole lot of patience, or the money got poured into a research project that didn't pan out and they're left in maintenance mode over on the other side. We can't, we can't decide that, but it's a mess and it's led to, and here's the thing. I think it's just a lack of vision. I think it's a lack of vision that Apple thinking everything is okay, believing that because they're Apple, everything is going to work out okay. When you look at AirPods, you think about maybe the Apple equivalent of the Meta Ray Bands. You think about maybe the Apple equivalent of the Meta Ray Bands. You think about CarPlay. You think about, it's not just the novelty of talking to your phone. It's about all of the smart home devices, including apparently this new smart home screen thing that they were supposed to have shipped that was going to require App Intents that haven't shipped.

So that product probably can't ship. But like, yeah, I think there was a lack of understanding about exactly how far behind they were on Siri, a lack of prioritization of it. And then one of those oh no moments when they realized the LLM thing was happening was oh no, it's also a chatbot. And it puts us to shame. And I gotta say again, the LLM chatbots aren't good.

They're impressive, but they say a lot of stupid things. And yet they are vastly better than Siri. Like even so they are vastly better than Siri. Even though, and they're bad. I think they're bad. I use them to, I ask them questions and I'm like, Oh man, you just completely made that up and that's really bad. And yet they're better than Siri.

So like, I don't know, I don't know what the solution is, but it is not because, you know, Mary over in the corner there has been working at home three days a week and we think she's kind of slacking off on her Siri work. That is not what's going on here. This is people with bigger salaries than Mary who have made some bad decisions. And I think it goes to the top. Yeah, and that's the difficulty being an armchair quarterback outside of organizational structures. All we can know is that there's something not working,

and we can make guesses about why, but like, we can't actually, anyone who has a strong opinion of exactly who's responsible, unless you work for Apple, even if you do work for Apple, you probably don't know that, because you just see your little world where your boss's boss makes some dumb decisions, but you don't understand that their boss actually is the real source of that dumb decision And yeah, that's that's what leading a company means you have to you know, correct these things and to be fair to Tim Cook

I think he As shown by him hiring the wrong people and then firing them quickly afterwards. He does eventually figure out that things are wrong I just don't know where the blame lies here other than it's clear that they haven't given this the attention that it needs to get, whether that's personnel attention or money attention or both. And they already started out behind.

And so we're seeing the obvious result of that, which is they are not able to put out things that are competitive because of the decisions they made years and years ago. That's the way this stuff works, right? If they made bad decisions about manufacturing CPUs, they'd be in the same situation, but they made good decisions there and poor ones here.

And these are decisions that you can't turn around on a dime. So it's, you know, even if they're doing everything right, right now, still it's going to be years before they write this ship. Yeah, it's, like I said, I like that this is happening in the sense that I feel like Apple needs to take some punches, right? I feel like they have been riding high for so long and I always cart out the famous John Madden expression because I love it, which is winning is a great deodorant. As long as you're winning all of those things

that are going on that stink and you can't smell them. And then that's why Siri got to be the way it was like, Siri exists and supposedly does some things. And Siri's there, so who cares? Right. Yeah. We have one and we're doing great. So it must mean Siri's great. Nope, didn't mean that at all. It creates organizational delusions because everybody's job depends

on them misunderstanding what's going on. And so on that level, if you're somebody who wants Apple to do better, Apple getting a black eye in public and having to make like, how much did they hate having to say we're not gonna ship that? So much that they loaded that one sentence at the beginning of the statement

with just the most ridiculous hyperbole about how amazing Apple is before they said, but that being said, we are not shipping that feature. And then they use like in the coming year, which nobody knows what it means, but they're not gonna say. Like that is- Some year that comes later.

They hate that. They hate it. They hate it. They are a very proud company. They hate any sign of weakness like that. And so obviously this is painful for them. And, you know, again, we saw it in Robbie Walker trying to give his team a pep talk. Right?

Like I get it. I totally get it. Um, you hope really what I hope above everything else is that people at the very top of the company, and this goes all the way to Tim use this as an opportunity to dig down and say, why did this happen? Because obviously at some point in the chain, everybody was like going great boss, going great, we're going to do it. It's going to be great. There's some people who are too successful at managing up somewhere in this chain.

Yes. And so you got to dig it out and that's very painful. Um, and, and again, it may, it may lead to somebody getting fired, but probably, my guess is probably not unless there's gross incompetence somewhere. My guess is it was, you know, this person had this incentive and this person had this incentive.

And we realized, oh, that completely ruined us for Siri because they were working in opposite and there was nobody to say, you guys need to work together on this, right? Like they just, that's probably what the cause is. But somebody's got to get in there with a flashlight and figure it out because you know, they let that sit there until Siri became a disaster. Unless I mean, look, there could be gross incompetence, somebody could be like, embezzling money and like, I don't know, but probably the most likely scenario is just,

it's a large organization that didn't need to understand what it was doing wrong until it got punched in the face, which it did this week, last week. Really quickly, I wanted to talk about, because this show is on Mondays and the embargo was on Tuesday morning, my review of the MacBook Air and the Mac studio. I know you guys have talked about that on ATP a bunch.

I just wanted to say I wrote a review. It's called am I blue? I know I'm asking. I'm asking am I blue? But Abadi. The oh no get Elliot Kaelin in here. Here's the thing that I really like about that. Like, look, John, you know this from your big review days of OS X. Writing a review is a challenge.

It's more of a challenge where there's less to say. And so I have a lot of these Apple products that are so iterative, I've started to just think I'm going to really write an essay about thoughts that are so iterative, I've started to just think, I'm going to really write an essay about thoughts that are tangentially related or prompted by the release of a new product, because it's very hard to do a lot more than that when the product hasn't changed very much and neither of these products change very much. But the one thing that I landed on with the air, and I hinted at this with Gruber last week, but again, I couldn't talk

about the piece like that. I had it is the most important thing about this product. I think is the price. I think that they finally got the brand new MacBook Air with 16 gigs of RAM down to 999, which is, you know, where they want that product all along, but they couldn't afford it with the M2 and the M3. And it makes it really easy for me if somebody says,

oh, I need to buy my kid a Mac for college or whatever, like, just get him a MacBook Air. Like it's not just get them a MacBook Air. It is, it is back to being kind of the default. I don't have to say, well, save a little money, get the M2 or well, the older design, but it's still pretty good is the M1. Like, I don't have to do any of that anymore. I can really just say the M4 at 999 is more than, I would argue probably like more than 98% of Mac users need. It is just the Mac to buy, I think. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean, as with any exercise in finding and eliminating bottlenecks, as soon as you do that, the next bottleneck appears because whatever is the second biggest thing. So now they've eliminated just so many things. You mentioned the price, 16 gigs of RAM. This is a great design. It's got MagSafe back on it.

It's got all these things going for it. And by being so successful in correcting past mistakes and removing bottlenecks, now 256 gig SSD is sitting there saying, here I am, I'm the tall poppy, I'm the problem, I'm the long line on the graph. But still, unlike the RAM, storage has the advantage that there are people who are fine with that. You can say that it's easier to extend storage. You can add storage like you can't add RAM

And 256 if you're using it mostly as sort of like a terminal for a cloud-based things or whatever That won't affect you in the way that RAM would because you keep opening up those Chrome tabs And you keep doing more complicated things the Rams gonna be a problem But the storage space is you're not gonna need much more of it if you open up 75 new Chrome tabs So yeah, they've they've they've come they're really really close to like, if I had to say the next two things they need to do to make this like even more perfect is you need obviously a bigger default SSD

and you put an SD card slot back on it right before that thing becomes obsolete, right? Everyone uses SD cards. And then you're basically done. But yeah, this is, I feel exactly the same way you do. There's so many people in my life are saying it's a slightly more complicated decision, but at this point you should wait for the M4 it's coming out soon. Uh, and now that it's here, it's like, it's a no brainer.

It's just, it's, it's so, it's so great not to have to try to convince people to upgrade the Ram, right? You don't, we don't have to have that conversation anymore. You don't have to tell people what Ram is. It's just, and all you have to do is how much stuff do you have? Cause people understand that. How much stuff do you have? Do you have more than 256 gigs of stuff right now on your Mac laptop?

Well, then you need to get a bigger one and they understand that. But it's like, Oh, that's the stuff that I have. And that's it. And everything else about it, like just the performance of their lowest price, $1,000 laptop in single core, which is what matters for that is amazing. The battery life that you get from the M4, the M4 is such a great chip. It's so perfect in the MacBook Air, such an ideal combination of chip and laptop. This is and we're in the place where like this has been the design for a little while now,

right? We're not like this is a brand new design or it's not getting old. It's just, this is a great computer. I'm, I'm, I'm going to recommend my father by one of these. I'm going to get one for my daughter when she goes off to college. Uh, I got my son, I think it was the M two one, which was the most recent one when he went off to college and he's used that for his whole time in college so far. So yeah, this is basically, uh, taking a Mac that was already great and making it even better. And even though I can see ways it could still improve, it is a relief to just see this computer come out and have it be like back in the 2011 MacBook Air days, when you knew exactly what computer would recommend to everybody. This is that again. They took them a long time to get back to that.

There was a dark period where it was non-retina and then there was the whole apical silicon transition. Arguably the M1 MacBook Air was pretty close to that but it didn't have MagSafe and stuff like that. So, but yeah, M4 MacBook Air, great computer. If you need a Mac laptop and you don't know what you need and your needs are not high, get this computer. It will, as long as you don't drop it or break it,

it will last you so long. I get the idea too about storage being the tall poppy, but one knock-on effect from it being 999 is that also means that the 512 storage is just an add-on to 999 instead of an add-on to 1099 or 1199, which means if you say, well, yes, but 16 gigs of RAM and 512 SSD is the minimum anybody should buy. Well, guess what?

Those used to be way more expensive too. They're not 999, but they're less than they were because the 16 is now thrown in and you, you know, it was 256 to start when it was more expensive too. So it's now you're starting down at 9.99 and if you need more storage, you can add it. So it still is, that's what I've already told a couple of people is, we'll get this and consider the 5.12 storage upgrade,

but otherwise it's just great. Yeah. And they're also enjoying this like, I don't know how brief it is, but they're enjoying a period now where we're still in a situation where it is reasonable for the least expensive Apple laptop to have a non HDR non 120 Hertz screen We just talked about that on the phone before and it's kind of untenable for a thousand dollar phone to have a 60 Hertz screen But still I would say they have not passed out of the area where it makes sense for their

cheapest laptop to not have the amazing screen that's on the MacBook Pros. At a certain point, that won't be true. At a certain point, every Mac will need to have 120Hz HDR screen, but we're not there yet. So enjoy this time when you don't have to look. It's like when the MacBook Air was non-retina, when it was non-retina and everybody, most everybody was non-retina, it's like yeah, that seems appropriate, but it was non-retina for way too long. And at a certain point you're like, oh, the MacBook Air, it's a good computer, but it's still not retina.

Can you believe they haven't made a retina MacBook Air? So enjoy this period of peace in MacBook Air kingdom where the computer is well specced and well priced and it's a great computer and the chip is great. And the things that it has make sense for the price point and have the things that most people need because a few years from now we'll be back

on this program saying I cannot believe that the MacBook Air still doesn't have 120-yard screen. Yeah, now's the time. The sun is shining on the MacBook Air right now from out of a blue sky. Let the bush set about that. I went to the Apple Store, by the way. I went to the Apple Store to look at these and they had a gold one sitting next to one that was either silver or blue.

And I swear to you, I did, could not determine. I was refused to ask the help. I could not determine what color that was. I went to the, about this Mac to see if it would reveal if it's buried in there. I couldn't find it. I could not tell to this day. I don't know if it was silver or blue. The sole, the sole way to tell,

cause it's so subtle is you have to have brighter light or different colored light. You have to tilt it. You have to go so much. And this is because that's the idea is it's super subtle. And like, again, whatever I get, they must just really feel like this is the way is, it's gotta be a silver laptop.

And then it could be light silver or dark silver. It could be blue silver or yellow silver, but it's still silver or it's black slash Navy. I'm leaning towards it being silver because again, the gold one was next to it. And I could tell the gold one was gold, but I could not tell what color the one next to it was. I swear to you, I almost gave this away

on last Monday with Gruber and I was under embargo. So I kind of had to pivot really quick to having it be a more general anecdote, but I can now reveal when I opened my review unit of that, of that sky blue. I thought they sent me silver. I just assumed they sent me silver and I thought that's a weird choice when you have a new color to send the reviewers, the old color. And then I did a search on my shipping manifest from the Apple PR review. You can look on the box. It says sky.

I'm like, I guess this is it. I had to go get a silver, I got a silver MacBook Air and a silver Apple TV remote and I laid them on it. And I was like, oh, it is. I mean, even then it was sort of like, it is a little darker and I guess that could be blue. But at that point, is my brain making it blue? I don't, and blue is my good color, John.

Blue is a good color for me. They're just gaslighting you by sending you a box that says sky blue, but putting a silver one in it. I mean, I wondered, I wondered, but it does seem like maybe it is blue now. I don't know. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is of course the all-in-one website platform

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I mean, I don't know. It's just a little update, whatever. about the Mac Studio? I mean, I don't know. It's just a little update. Whatever. No. Speaking of things that build up over time and you're waiting for that big release, I feel very much like I did at the beginning of ATP when we were waiting for them to update the Mac Pro with an appropriate successor. Way back when I read that blog post, the case for a true Mac Pro successor, you have to look at the data that to realize I was writing that before the trash can came out.

Which at least was like them trying, right? The story for the whole Apple Silicon era has been, but what do you do with the really big powerful Mac? Because we know you don't sell a lot of them. And that is actually the most difficult kind of chip to make, and it costs the most. And it's, you know, it's just, you want me to spend all this money on a computer that I sell so few of, and the chips are so powerful, we just got done saying the MacBook era is more Mac than anybody ever needs. Why are we even trying to do this? And I have been a strong proponent of,

this is a thing you need to do. Not because it will make you money, because it will not, or it shouldn't, I think it shouldn't. I think you should lose money on every Mac Pro that you sell. You should be making it the same reason, like I said in that post, the same reason car companies make concept cars or limited production sports cars

that lose money on every one that they sell. They make them because they're car people and they like fast cars and it helps the business, it helps morale, it helps the people who work for you, it has a halo effect outside the company. Apple should always be trying to make the fastest personal computer ever made. And if they're trying to do that now, they're not doing a great job because thus far they have had, as far as we know in the outside world lots of interesting ideas and plans about how they could make An appropriate super high-end Mac with Apple silicon and they have not been able to let any of them see the light of day

So instead what we've gotten are the Mac studio, which is an amazing computer That is tiny and sitting behind you there. Look how small it is. So powerful so great It's basically like take take our laptops and put them in a desktop case with way better cooling It is tiny and sitting behind you there. Look how small it is. So powerful, so great. It's basically like take our laptops and put them in a desktop case with way better cooling and more ports and all the things that you get from a desktop. That's a great computer.

No shade on the Mac Studio. And then the Mac Pro is like, it's a Mac Studio with slots that you can't do much with. Yeah. So the Mac Studio now gets a little bit of the Mac Pro treatment. Oh, Mac Studio has been perfect. Everything's great about the Mac Studio. They in fact do make a chip for the Mac Studio now gets a little bit of the Mac Pro treatment. Oh, Mac Studio has been perfect. Everything's great about the Mac Studio.

They in fact do make a chip for the Mac Studio called the Ultra Series of chip, and that is appropriate for a computer that big. And it's a really good chip for a computer that big. And they made the M1 Ultra, and they made the M2 Ultra, then the M3 came along and there was no M3 Ultra. We're like, huh. Hmm. What's up with that?

Anyway, the M4 came along. M4s are great everyone loves M4s they're great in all their computers they're gonna come up with a Mac studio they'll put the M4 max now and it will be great don't know what the deal with the ultra is but you know like an M4 max Mac studio is great too and so they put out the new Mac studio it's got an M4 max which is a great chip for that great but it's also got an Ultra chip and guess what? Is the M3 Ultra.

Yeah, here we are at the end of the M4 generation and here's an M3 Ultra. It's like, hey, I exist too. It's like, wait, wait, wait, we were looking for you a long time ago and you didn't appear, so we assumed you wouldn't but here you are. We thought you died. Yeah.

Where were you? And now I'm not gonna say the M3 Ultra is not an appropriate chip for the Mac Studio because it is. It's just an appropriate chip for the Mac Studio last year. Yeah. Yeah, and they said, look, I got the briefing. I was on the same briefing as Gruber.

You know, they, I don't know the exact wording and I wouldn't be allowed to quote it anyway, but I got the strong impression that the goal with the M3 Ultra was to make it Thunderbolt 5 and like to soup up and have more addressable RAM and all of that. And you know, they're never going to say it because again, they're a very proud company. But my guess is that that that project got it got delayed.

Like they didn't they weren't able to do it and they threw some shade I would say during that briefing at least the suggestion was that the Thunderbolt certifying it for Thunderbolt 5 took longer than they expected. And, you know, they, so they wave their, like their hands at it because it is weird, right? It's a weird, weird choice, weird choice that they did it. And that they chose not to release an M3 Max,

Max Studio without the Ultra. They just delayed it. And they delayed it so long. I think this is probably the story. They delayed it so long that they had an M4 max, so they're like, well, I guess we. We'll put that one in there and let's be clear 95%, I would say 90% of the max

studios that will be sold will be M3 max or M4 maxes because it will actually be the fastest way to do most of the most people will do with the max work because it's a, it's a slower core in the M three, but there are more of them. And so if you're doing work that requires all of that, like that extra top layer, it's worth the money to spend on getting it. Cause it will be faster. But even in my briefing, Apple was like, it is faster than the M four max at when it's maxed out.

And they said, when it's maxed out and that's like, literally that's the only time it is faster than the M4 Max when it's maxed out. And they said, when it's maxed out. And that's like, literally, that's the only time it's faster is when it's maxed out. And for your day-to-day work though, when you're not doing maxing it out, the M4 Max is faster. Like it's not just as fast, it is faster.

It is faster. It is plain faster for most of the things you're gonna be doing. Because it's an M4 and not an M3. I was talking to Gruber about this actually of like, back in the Intel days, we were kind of used to the old Intel's cadence, which would be they would make a bunch of CPUs and often when they were having a new process node Intel back when they were the king of the fabs and they had the best process technology, they'd come up with a new one and they usually make a laptop chip first and then a desktop

chip and then like sometimes like a year and a half later, there'd be the Xeon that uses those cores. You didn't notice the connection, because they didn't name them like Apple does, where it's like an M and a number. But the Xeon alphabet soup or whatever, you'd be like, well, that actually has the cores from last year's chips in them. And that was just the way we thought

silicon would always work with CPUs, because Intel was so dominant. So you make the small, easy laptop chip first, then you make a desktop chip. And then ages later, you make the 28 core big giant Xeon. And everyone was fine with that. And by the way, the Xeons were slower in single core, right? They had slower clock speeds. But in exchange, you got a huge number of cores. When Apple came out with Apple Silicon, they threw it was so disruptive of like, all your previous assumptions

about how Silicon work, throw them out the window, because here's Apple Silicon. And it does things that seems like they shouldn't be possible. And one of those things I felt like was the time delay between the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra was like, they're practically doing these not at the same time, but like it's not a Xeon timeline. The M1, I mean, M1 came out a little bit earlier than the other ones, but like the Pro and the Max and then the Ultra and then the same schedule with the M2, how long those took. And then the M3, there was no Ultra,

but the Pro and the Max seems so contemporary with the other ones. The M4, I think they shipped the M4 Pro and Max before the plain M4 MacBook Air, which just came out, even though there was the plain M4 Mac mini. And so the timelines were so compressed. And so now we're in this current era, it's like, well, if you look at the M3 Ultra,

it's basically on a Xeon timeline with the M3s. And it's like, okay, well, two things to that. One, that's not what they had trained us to expect with the previous generations. Were those just anomalies and this is the norm or whatever? We'll see how that goes. But two, one of their explanations that you just gave for the delay in the M3 Ultra is like, oh, well, we made the M3 in the Thunderbolt 4 era.

And to make the M3 Ultra make sense at all, we have to put Thunderbolt 5 on it. Cause can you imagine if the M3 Ultra came with Thunderbolt 4 and like all the old stuff? And if the gap is long enough between the M whatever and it's ultra variant, you end up having to ship that ship in a world where there's a new version of Thunderbolt. And by the way, that delays you even more because now you are retrofitting, like the

whole M3 line was not made with Thunderbolt 5 in mind. It didn't exist. And now you have to jam it in there. And that draws the timeline out. So whatever the appropriate time gap is between the plain old M and the Ultra version, I think this gap is too long. So shrink it up. Imagine if last year they had shipped an M3 Max and M3 Ultra Max Studio, and they said,

and the Ultra has Thunderbolt 5. We've got a Thunderbolt 5, isn't that amazing? And it was, I get the impression that it was too early or something like that. And that was a bad decision, I guess, on their part to plan it out that way, or it slipped. I don't know the story. Or they hadn't been able to retrofit it in that timeline.

It could be like, I know they're blaming the certification, but maybe because it's a big deal to make a chip for both Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5. So the Ultra is not just like, oh, we just two Maxes and stick them together. No, you had to redo all the Thunderbolt stuff for the minimum, plus the memory addressing, right? So maybe it just took them longer to do that.

Like if you don't design the whole family upfront, like the M1, Pro, Max, and Ultra, where they all have the same crap and you know, like that strategy, if you don't do that and they're of a piece and the Ultras are somehow even more exotic and different, that's just going to push the Ultras out even farther to the point where you now you're shipping a computer with an M with two different numbers, M3 and M4 are coming in. Gruber suggested last week that maybe they just need to come up with a new name for it, like the Xeon, where it just obfuscates the fact that it's using old cores.

Yeah, to hide the fact that they do that. But like, I mean, I'm not ready to give up on it because like, you did it with M1 and M2. Were those anomalies that we could never see to be repeated again? Like those timelines seemed reasonable to me. I believe you can do it again. Given everything, you know, that they've done with the Apple Silicon transition,

that this is maybe the weirdest hiccup so far is, you know, I think they're still doing a pretty good batting average. For me, the weird thing about this, John, is that they didn't update the Mac Pro. Well, so that's, that's, I always thought of an ATP. Like you look at this and you try to apply logic and you say, okay, they didn't update the Mac pro.

And also they said not every generation will have an ultra, which is a strong hint, a strong hint that the M4 ultra won't exist. Yes. So if I put those two together and use logic, that means the Mac pro will have a chip that's not an M4 ultra, but is even better. Yes. Finally, a chip appropriate to that case. Or they care so little about the Mac Pro

that they're just gonna announce an M3 Ultra Mac Pro in a few months. Exactly. And the other shoe drops and it's just like, everybody's like, oh, womp, womp. I feel those are our choices. I want to believe that there is an M4 Magic chip that is just for the Mac Pro and that we're gonna get maybe even like a little

Tik Tok thing where there's like a high end studio chip one year and a Mac pro chip the next year. And we go like that back and forth. I want to believe, but the other option and it will just be so sad if like in June, they're like, oh yeah. And also we added that chip that we, that we shipped in March to the Mac pro to yay, and then that's it.

And it remains identical, functionally identical to the Mac Studio. Cause what you want is, cause I think some podcast I was on last week, we were talking about this, it's like the reason you wouldn't put that super high end extreme chip in the Mac Studio is because the Mac Studio can't cool it, right? It can't fit, yeah.

It can't fit, can't cool it. And finally there's a reason for the Mac Studio can't cool it, right? It can't fit, yeah. It can't fit, can't cool it. And finally, there's a reason for the Mac Pro to exist. Yeah, like that's the problem with applying the logic that it leads you to these conclusions, but then you have to have out there of like, no, they just don't care. They just, it's gonna, you're gonna, they're gonna be M3 Ultra is gonna be the highest end Mac Pro

and they're gonna roll it out of WWDC and it will be like as disappointing as the M3 Ultra Mac Pro was, cause it's like, what are they gonna do with the Mac Pro? Because it hadn't transitioned, you know, like what are they gonna do with that? Nothing, they're just gonna, same as the Studio, right? Like those two computers should not have

the same top-end chip. The whole point is that that massive case with that massive cooling can handle things that tiny, let the Mac Studio be the Mac Studio. It should not have the same chip in the Mac Pro. And so the fantasies of the extreme are still out there. And if they just ship it with the Ultra, it's like, oh, it's just another year

of this built up tension about like, what are you doing? Like some people will say they should just get rid of the Mac Pro. Some people like me will say they should have given an appropriate chip. We know they've had designs and strategies of how to do something for that. They just haven't been able to execute in any of them, which is fine. Like you try your ambitious, the Jade 4C die and the M1 didn't work out.

Too expensive. Can't make the math. Whatever, right? Come up with a new plan. That's why that's why my hope for the Mac Pro chip is that it is not any assemblage of Max's, but is instead two things that are even bigger and better than Macs is stuck together or maybe just like you know I don't know what the reticle limit is for how many things but like just a purpose-built thing just for the Mac Pro that absolutely would not fit in any other

computer and and here's the thing you can put the M3 Ultra in the Mac Pro too. You can put an M3 Max in the Mac Pro 2. You can put an M3 Max in the Mac Pro. Like if people need card slots, like don't tie them to paint, you know, not that they're gonna do this, but I don't begrudge less powerful chips in the Mac Pro, but that case needs a reason to exist. Yes. And so I really hope they roll something out that is appropriate for that. And if they do just roll out the M3 Ultra, and that's the top end, we're just, we'll see here next year with with my believe shirt on I'll just keep wearing that shirt until they stop using that case or until they finally figure out what they're gonna do and like your your

What you said before at the studio like it's kind of weird that they didn't ship it with the with the m3 max, right that The fact that they didn't ship the studio with the m3 max when they could have it was a chip that existed and you could have put it in that case and it would have been fine the fact that they didn't do that lends credence to them rolling out an m3 ultra max studio is top end and you would say but why didn't they roll that out when they did the studio so they didn't feel like Yeah, or they or they could it wasn't ready then yeah they wanted to save all them for the studios only thing is like the volumes are so small here. You can't be like, Oh, the Mac studios are absorbing all those M3 ultras. Really? Like the volumes of everything is so small. Like, I just, this is, I know people that you would, we just talked about, Oh, what are they going to do with Apple intelligence, WDBC?

And like, that is the more important thing to be watching. But my, my personal one, number one interest with a bullet going to WDBC and continues to be from past years. And this year is what are you doing with the Mac pro? I have, I have, when we're talking about the logic of this timeline, I have a disconcerting suggestion for you, which is it comes and goes, there's no Mac pro news in the fall, the MacBook pros come out with the M five pro and max chips. In the spring, the MacBook air comes out with the M5.

And in WWDC 2026, the M4 Extreme is released after all M5 chips have been released. And that's in the Mac Pro. You sound like a sports fan of saying there's always next year. We'll get them next year. I don't know. I just, I worry that we're now saying, well, yeah,

but the M4 Extreme is going to come on the M4 timeline. And what we just saw with the M3 Ultra is that it didn't. So is that going to happen? Here's the thing though, like if they do in 2026, they come out with an extreme chip. The existence of the stream chip alone gives it excuses that the existence of the Ultra, the M3 Ultra does not, because they've never made a chip like this. They've made multiple Ultras before, which is why it's so disappointing that the timeline on this one. If 2026, they come out with the M4 Extreme, still I will be jazzed because it's like, you did it.

You made a chip that's the big, it took a long time. It's probably gonna be expected, but you did it. And so I actually won't be that mad about that. I have to believe that Ben Thompson's reaction to the M3 Ultra, which was, oh, when you start having that much RAM available to the GPUs, it starts to get really interesting in a lot of AI applications because you can run enormous AI models on it. Not the biggest, but some big ones. I cannot imagine that people inside Apple who are working on Apple silicon have not had that same thought and that perhaps that is one of the selling points of an M4 extreme will be

look at how much addressable RAM we are gonna give these things. There's the private cloud compute angle which is like okay so Apple doesn't care enough about the Mac Pro to actually ship a chip appropriate for it but they seem to care a lot about private cloud compute. And yeah, they're using M2 Ultras in there now, but the rumors are that they're going to make a chip appropriate for doing AI and the cloud stuff with huge amounts of addressable memory and huge resources. Maybe the thing that the Mac Pro could not make happen, which is an appropriate chip, private cloud compute will make happen. And the Mac team are like, can we just, can we just use what you're using for the private cloud compute servers and like

vaguely repurpose it to the Mac Pro because we tried to make our own chip for this computer and no one, they would never let us do it, but you're doing it for the data center. Can we steal that and stick it in a Mac Pro and call it the M4 extreme? That's the desperation we're in now, which is like something that Apple cares enough about to actually fund. Cause I think they're going to do private cloud compute. I think they're going to make a purpose-built server chip for private cloud compute for Apple

intelligence. Gurman says made in America too, which is perfect because that's a Mac Pro kind of deal too because they're low volume and... Well, the chip won't be. The chip will be fab. Yeah, but they'll assemble them all. Yeah, sure. Wherever they assemble these are. But yeah, like that is a chance. And I don't think that it'll be like, oh, they're going to repurpose the Mac pro chip for private cloud. No, it's entirely going to be the thing Apple actually cares about, which is Apple intelligence of private cloud compute.

They'll make that. And then if the Mac pro team can say, finally, finally something exists for us to stick in this case. Uh, can we steal that from you? Uh, we'll see how that works out. Uh, before we go, I have one Ask Upgrade question that is perfectly a good way to end a perfect segue. It comes from Hank. It says, when speculating on an Apple Silicon chip

above the Ultra, why aren't all the old Mac heads, that's us, John, leaning toward calling it a Quadra? Seems like a good fit because Quad means four and it's hypothetically gonna have four Macs chips welded together. I personally became a Mac user in 2004 is that the quad is Quadra a bad idea because there is baggage with those computers or is it just too dated? Just an opportunity to say Quadra, which is a fun old Mac name.

Quadras weren't bad. Quadras were really good. There's no baggage. That's a great baggage. They had a great reputation. They felt so fast. I remember the first time I touched a Quadra and like an Apple, not an Apple retail store, an Apple retailer, a third party seller. No Apple stores existed then. Anyway, first time I touched one,

I was like just pulling down menus. It felt like when I first used the SE30, like the 68040 and the Quadras, which I believe is the origin of the Quad. It was the 4. The 040. 040s, right. So fast. Great name recognition for those computers. It was back when Macs cost even more than they do today.

It's hard to believe, but it was true. It was Pentium before Pentium in the sense that they made a brand name out of the code number of the chip, essentially. Yeah. But anyway, I don't think they'll reuse that name because I don't think the right approach To the Mac Pro is at this point considering their attempts is four of them because it's a waste of a lot of resources They should Reallocate this the the space that they would have for four of them Like you have the problem with crosstalk and the communication overhead and even just doing two of them

They've struggled to make it twice as fast So I think they're better off making two really big things that look like nothing they've ever made and sticking them together than taking four of their existing things. And so that kind of rules out the Quadra name. And I don't think they would reuse it because it's definitely a 90s era Apple marketing name.

Even though we have nostalgia for it, today's Apple would never pick a name like that. Yeah, that's true. But it's a fun name. And I had no baggage. I just wanted to clear the Quadra's name. It was a great, those were great computers. Quadra is a name like that. Yeah, that's true. But it's a fun name and I had no baggage. I just wanted to clear the Quadra's name. It was a great, those were great computers. Quadra is a name of honor.

There were a lot of computers that Apple was selling then and you knew that if you got the Quadra, you were getting the really, really good chip. And it was really fast. Yes, it was the end of the Motorola era and then we got our Power PCs that were amazing. But like in the day, the Quadra was awesome. That was the best.

I remember looking on to a co-worker's Quadra when I started a Mac user with great envy, but then the Power PC came out and everything changed. All right, that is gonna be the end of our regular episode. Of course, upgrade plus, we will continue the discussion. I'm gonna ask John about his new app, Hyperspace, which is now available in the Mac App Store. And if you would like to be a part of Ask Upgrade,

Upgradefeedback.com is the place to go. I have to read all the feedback while Mike is gone. So be nice. Thank you in advance. And get UpgradePlus.com if you want to hear that extra segment every week. And also if you want to support Mike and Mike's baby, that's a great way to do it. You can find us on YouTube, just search for Upgrade Podcast.

You can see me and John in person, but you've got to the end of this episode. So it will be repetitive. It'll be redundant. I don't know. But I also want to thank our sponsors this week. Thank you so much to DeleteMe, Fitbot, Google Gemini, and Squarespace. Most of all, thanks to everybody out there for listening. And thanks to John Syracuse for being our guest this week.

Thank you, John. Loved it, as always.