Upgrade - 599: Free... Although

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

From Relay, this is Upgrade episode 599 for January 19th, 2026. Today's show is brought to you by Century, FitBud, and Squarespace. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike, that's a lot of nines. It's a lot of nines. It's not all the nines. I hope one day we do get to all the nines.

That'll be fun. Yeah, but it's the 19th, and it's 599, so it's three nines. It's not bad. It's not as good as three-sevenths, but I guess we already did that. So, yes, hello. Hello. Hi, it's us. It's 599.

That means, dear friends, that means that next week, the draft of the ages will return. Can't wait. In which we predict things that happen almost, but not quite, two years hence. Yep. An episode 500, you made a set of predictions. We will see how right we were. Oh, boy. And then set our predictions.

Let me rephrase that for you. We will see how wrong we were. speak for yourself jason stahl but we'll get to that next week we have a snill talk question for you comes from dan who writes then and asks jason's lover zepplin's is known to many listeners but has jason ever gone for a ride in a zeppelin or similar airship well okay so i'm going to give you the background here which is the zeppelin thing which zeppelin represent the incomparable it's like one of our brand things and it comes out of episode one where we were talking about a bunch of sci-fi novel involving parallel universes, and we kind of did a riff about the fact that all of these things,

whenever you see a Zeppelin in a movie or a TV show or it's in a book, it's like a super universal signifier that you're in a parallel universe because it's like an easy thing of like, hey, there was a time when we thought zeppelins would be everywhere, little airships, would be going around and mooring to tall buildings and all that. And then in the, what, 1930s, the Hindenberg went on fire and people were like, yeah, it's not that great an idea, never mind. and it faded away. And so it became a really funny, I thought, signifier of like,

if you wake up somewhere and think you might be in a parallel universe, the first thing you should ask yourself, look around and ask yourself, are there zeppelins? And if there are, you are in a parallel universe. Anyway, so it's more of a running bit than a personal love. But it has over the years, you know, kind of been a, it's picked up and people send me zeppelins. It's true story. Somebody sent me a little, like, model zeppelin.

It's up there. And so the answer is no. No, I have never been in a Zeppelin. There was a Zeppelin here that was giving tours of the Bay Area for like, I don't know, six months or a year before the company went out of business and I thought about doing it and I didn't do it. I have seen a Zeppelin fly. That Zeppelin flew over my house at one point. And I was like very excited. That was pretty cool. Never been on a hot air balloon either. Maybe someday. I don't know. I have been. The closest I've ever been is I've been in a very small airplane, which is a very different thing than being in a large jet airplane.

I've been in small prop planes quite a lot because my dad flew a small prop plane. My mom and dad both had pilot licenses and they flew around and stuff for a while. And so we did that as a kid. And then when we were in New Zealand, we flew back on a small plane from Milford Sound. And Lauren was like, whoa, I've never been in a plane this small before. And I was sitting there thinking, it takes me back to my childhood. It was just totally. I was having a completely different experience than she was because everything, the smells and the feel of, you know, going in the little tiny plane and all of that was super familiar for me and not for her at all.

Yeah, I don't think I would like the small plane feeling. It is. I mean, it's, you're up against it. You can't, you can't pretend that you're just in a, in a, in a room, a magic room that sits still for a long time and then you're in a different place. You, you're feeling it. You're flying through the air. Anyway, so that's my, my story is, Small planes, yes.

Zeppelins no. However, I will guarantee that if I find myself in a parallel universe, I promise to ride on a Zeppelin. If you would like to send in a question for us to open a future episode of Upgrade, please go to UpgradeFeedback.com and send in your own Snow Talk question. I have a couple of items from a follow-up from last week's episode or from episodes prior. Matt wrote in and said, Following up on your discussion about X,

I have always assumed that for the largest third-party apps, Apple's negotiated custom contractual terms supersede the default app store terms. Do we know if Apple even has the contractual ability to take down X from the store? I'd be curious if you guys have any inside information on how that sort of thing really works. I mean, I don't have any inside information.

My guess is they don't. Yeah. It's possible that there are some understandings, handshake agreements, whatever, but I kind of doubt that Apple has negotiated contractual terms for apps in the App Store. Yeah. Well, I mean, they say they don't, right? Like, they say they don't.

They say they don't. Also, I think by now we would know. I think there's been enough discovery and enough lawsuit trials, and that's a terrible way of putting that, that we would know, because this is one of the reasons Google lost its anti-truths monopoly case is they were doing this. And so they were not setting a level playing field, if I'm remembering correctly. Like there were kind of like money changing hands between companies and that wasn't good for Google. I don't believe that Apple do this. I think it's possible that there are some financial terms that may be different or there may be some understandings about like we're not going to kick you out for this or that. I cannot envision that Apple and X have a contract that says that whatever X does in terms of objectional content, Apple,

won't take them out of the app store. I just can't imagine it at all. Remember also Apple removed TikTok from the app store because it was illegal. Apple and Google both did that. And then the Attorney General was like, ignore that law.

And so they did. Anyway, so I doubt it. And I especially doubt that there's any carve out for things like the kind of non-consensual pornographic image generation stuff that's been going on with Grock.

I just don't believe it. And Apple have carve out, but it make them public, right? Like the reader apps and all that kind of stuff. Like, that was created as the ability to allow companies like Netflix to not have to pay so much, right? Like, that's why that exists, right? Like, these terms, like, then Amazon and Netflix and stuff could take advantage of and only pay 15%. I think there have been a few cases. where people have been like, why does that app do that thing that shouldn't, shouldn't that be

outlawed? And I think that for that we have intuited that there's probably some sort of an understanding. But even then, is it a, is it a signed? Is it a memorandum of understanding? Is it a contract? Is it, you know, is it a very specific deal with lots of terms? I don't know. But I just, I'm super skeptical that Apple would ever in a million years agree that X could do whatever it wanted in its app. I mean, first off, I think Apple would tell X to pound sand. Because remember, this is a website. You can just load it in Safari.

So I just don't think that Apple in any world would say we're going to let you determine entirely the content of your social media app and whatever's in there is fine with us. I just don't see it. Well, they are kind of saying that in their inaction, but they didn't

contractually agree to it, is what we're saying. But they are still allowing for this app to exist. Yeah, that's true. That's true. This is all theoretical like if they stopped it, but they didn't stop it. I don't think a contract is what was an issue here. Are they like, our hands are tied? We agreed to let Elon Musk do whatever he wanted. And I'm not saying this on Matt specifically because I don't really know the context of the question, but that would be wishful thinking to me, right? Where it's like, you're like, well, the only reason they didn't remove it is because legally they can't. No, they can't. They absolutely can. I think Apple is smart enough and its legal teams, smart enough. If they want their rules to work the way that they want them to, they cannot create any paper trail of any special agreements. Now, I have said in the past, and I stand by it, Apple absolutely should have different agreements to different companies. And they should be public, but they should, because certain companies should have different terms. I think that's part of what

makes this stuff that work for people. Yeah, I've said for a while now that, like, Apple, I don't really buy Apple's argument that, oh, apps put in credit cards where you pay them directly in their apps is dangerous because, like, credit cards are a thing. And we, there is some credit card fraud, but we live with it and we live in a world where you pay for things with credit cards. And Apple itself uses credit cards, but they're like, oh, but that's Apple, you can trust us. And I said for quite a long time that Apple could say, oh, well, Amazon's not some fly-by-night operation. We'll let you put in a credit card to buy Kindle books because we, you know, Amazon, on we're okay with. But not everybody is going to get that special treatment. In fact, I don't think

it's unreasonable. This, to your point, I don't think it's unreasonable at all for Apple to say certain companies have our trust because they're huge and we have, we understand their businesses are very specific and they're very popular and all that. I just don't think that even if they had some sort of agreement with Elon or predating Elon with Twitter, that it would go to this kind of content, right? I just, I can't imagine that Apple would abdicate all responsibility for the content flowing through an app in the app store without any ability to respond. And keep in mind, Apple has used this multiple times. The Tumblr example, I think, came up last week where Apple was going to pull or did, I don't even remember what happened, the Tumblr app. And it was because of the content and it was because of content policies. And generally Apple has had a sort of like, we will, we will remove your app if you don't adjust your moderating. policies and stuff like that. And although they've been, I think that was an issue with truth social too.

I think that their policies there are soft, but they aren't nothing. And I think that this is a great example of something that's way beyond. And so I just, I can't imagine that they're constrained by anything other than their desire not to be seen intervening. Right.

I think that's it right now. They're hoping that governments will do what a lot of governments seeming to be trying to do, which is to create laws that they can just abide by, but they seem to not be wanting to do it. Yeah, or to stall out enough and just waste enough time, run down the clock a little bit so that either X finally is like, yeah, all right, we got enough about that. We're going to turn it off and we're going to put in guardrails or politically, the winds blow in such a way where it sort of lines up and Apple feels like they can do it without

a lot of political blowback because that's, I suspect, what's going on here. disappointing to me. Yeah. David wrote in and said, I just need to vent a little about the Kindle Paperwhite. I got one for Christmas after using an iPad

as my primary Kindle reader for years. I know Jason complains about the lack of buttons, but I have a problem with the one button the Kindle Paper White does have. Why in the world is the power button on the bottom?

I'm constantly turning it off or restarting it when I put it on a stand and hard to find when I do want to turn it off. So I do have a Kindle Paperweight and I do use it occasionally the Paperwhite Signature Edition actually has an accelerometer in it so you can kind of double tap on the back to turn the page,

which in my opinion is better than nothing, but not actually better than a button. Yeah, the power button on the Kindle is weird, and I accidentally press it all the time as well. The power button on the Cobos is generally on the back, and it's recessed. So you have to find it and then press it in, but it's like otherwise flush with the back,

which is a really nice approach. You know, why did Amazon do it this way? I don't know. Maybe it was cheap. Cheaper to do it this way? I don't know. It's bad. It's a bad place to put it.

It's very easy to press it. Everything that happened. If you were reading and you just like lent the Kindle against your body, it would just, you could just turn it off or whatever. Holding the Kindle with your hand will accidentally press the button if you hold it wrong. So I don't know what they're doing there. Why do Kindles even have power buttons, like sleep buttons?

Why do they have those? Why do you need that? Well, I mean, it's a good question. It does, it auto-offs after a while. You do have to turn it back on when it's sleeping. It's not feeling the touchscreen. So you do, I guess you really do need to have one. Plus, you need a physical button to do a reset or something.

Like, having no physical button at all would be a problem. But it's, yeah, it's way too prominent. It's bad design. I don't understand what they're doing down there. I just, yeah, I don't get it. I think that their whole button strategy is a mistake. Also, if you have that button, you know, maybe it should have a different function too.

Maybe it could be multipurpose. Maybe you have to press and hold it to turn it off and on. And if you tap it more rapidly, it's your page forward button. That would be nice. But I don't know what they're doing. But yes, David, it's stupid. That's all I can say. This episode is brought to you by Century.

I love good experiences in the apps that I use on a daily basis. for the apps that I'm used to and the new apps that I add into my life. I feel happy as a user of these apps when they are smooth and I'm not hitting bugs. I don't want to experience that kind of stuff because I'm using these apps for good reason and I want to have a great experience. This is what Century will allow you as a developer to provide because logs are messy if you have issues in your app. It can be hard to dig through that stuff,

trying to grab through them and line them up with traces and dashboards. just to understand one issue isn't it. Century, that's S-E-N-T-R-Y, has logs too, but they made them usable. Century's logs are trace-connected and structured so you can follow the request flow and filter by whatever matters. And because Sentry's surface is the context right where you are debugging, the trace, the relevant logs, the error, and even the session replay all land in one timeline, no timestamp matching, no tool-hopping. Front-end, mobile, back-end, whatever you're debugging, Century gives you the,

context that you need so you can fix the problem and move on. More than 4.5 million developers use Century, including Teams at Anthropic and Disney Plus. Try it free at S-E-N-T-R-Y.O and tell them that we sent you. They have a free dev plan and listeners of this show can use the code Upgrade 26 to get $100 in Century credits as S-E-N-T-R-Y-O and the code Upgrade 26. Our thanks to Century for their support of this show and Relize. So I think it was just before last week's episode, the news broke that Apple and Google were partnering for supplying Google Gemini with Siri. The information has since published a report that has some more detail on the partnership. I thought we should give it like a shipping name, so I would like to call this Gemini.

What do you think about that? Is that terrible? It made me laugh when I heard you try that on connected. Gemini? Jimineri. I don't think it needs a name. I think you've just proven why it doesn't need a name. Definitely doesn't.

So according to the information, Apple will be able to ask Google to, quote, tweak aspects of how the Gemini model will work on their platforms and also fine-tune it to respond to users the way that they would want. So it seems to me in the way that I read this, because this is quite technical. Federico on the aforementioned episode of Connected, he did a good job of kind of explaining what some of this means.

And I guess the way that I would take it is there are some big changes to the model that they may want Google to make into how it works. But then also from what they have from Google, Apple can kind of layer on top of it and add in their own kind of prompts to get it to respond to users the way that they would like. So they can kind of put their own guard rails over it and stuff like that. Right, right. There's different layers that lead down to the model, and then the model is sort of being made to order by Google where they can make changes to it at that level. But that above that in the stack, like an example that's in our notes here is, you know, starting a timer, right? Yeah. Like there's a layer that deals with stuff that is like basic things, start a timer, start a workout that is higher up where you do not need to go down into.

a model, more basic recognition will get that process it and respond to it very quickly. So you do those at a high level and Apple is able to do that. And I think there's actually a model that lets you, that determines whether it goes to the on-device model or the cloud model, right? There's there's some routing that can happen on the device too because for simple techniques, simple things you don't need to require an internet connection. You want it to happen very quickly. And so you parse those out and then others. So it's complicated. There's layers here. Currently in the internal builds where the Gemini model exists inside of iOS and I assume other platforms at Apple, there is no Google branding on any of the answers given by the systems. So it's not saying like

provided by Google Gemini. It's not got a Google Gemini logo on it. And there is currently no expectation based on the information sources that this partnership will ever be spoken about or acknowledged publicly. Yeah, this is the white label aspect of it, which is if you're not following the news, you will not know that it's Google that's powering this. And that also gives Apple the latitude to change the model later. And it is Apple approaching this from a standpoint that this is a plug-in technology and that it's kind of a commodity and that they can use somebody else's model or their

own model in the future. And it shouldn't matter. Like, because you're an Apple user, you're using Apple intelligence, you shouldn't care. And so, you know, the way that I thought about it is it will be called Apple intelligence and they are not going to focus on what made it intelligent. Like that is not important from Apple's marketing to talk about it. And I've been thinking a little bit about this point over the last few days. And there are, you know, people talk about, you know, like Apple's aversion to partnerships, right?

Which I definitely have. but there are so many things that are fundamental to how a smartphone works that they do not do. Like they just don't do them. And like one of them is like a search engine. They don't have one. And they don't seem having a desire to have one. But they know it's an important part of the system. So like you set a default one.

But they don't provide it. You know, so there are little bits and bulbs which are like important to the way that phones work. But Apple don't provide them. And I kind of see more like Google Gemini is to Apple intelligence that Google search is to Safari. Yeah, keep in mind, Apple does have a search engine, right? But it's completely unbranded and invisible. Yeah. And it does like, you know, when you're typing things in, it'll auto suggest and all of that.

Things that are not that are like, yeah, Spotlight Siri, whatever, but they're not going to Google or another search engine. So it's there, but it's invisible because I think from Apple's perspective, anything provided by Apple or filtered through Apple is just, it's like air. It's invisible, it's just Apple providing it to you. Nobody cares. And in fact, I think that's good because the last thing I need is everything I do to be branded.

I was reminded of this when we're in, as we record this, we're right at the end of college football season and we just went through the college football bowls and they're all sponsored. And it's like, you know, it is the, you know, whatever citrus bowl and the whatever orange bowl,

or the Rose Bowl presented by whatever. Isn't there like a Pop-Tart bowl, too? There is a Pop-Tart bowl. Oh, the greatest of Bulls. But it's not the Pop-Tart Bowl. That's the thing is there used to be... Doesn't the Pop-Tart Bowl have a name? I guess it's just the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

But the Orange Bowl is not just the Orange Bowl, and it's like the Capital One Orange Bowl. Yeah, the Pop-Tarts Bowl is just the Pop-Tarts Bowl. Like that's... Yeah, because they own it. They can completely take it. taking it over and filled it with brown sugar and cinnamon. So the Capital One Orange Bowl and Lauren would sit on the couch and be like,

oh, the Capital One Orange Bowl, because like you don't want to confuse it with some other brands Orange Bowl, but it's just a tag. What I'm saying is it's gross to have all these tags. And imagine if that was the case with your Apple technology that everything was like branded and tagged by something or other, even it wasn't advertising. It's like Apple just wants it to be, it's all Apple. Just don't worry about it. So I think that this is a good approach.

Also, I'll say Gemini, I mean, Gemini is a technology and Google has been naming the Gemini models, Gemini 3 and all of that, which is fine, right? But I would say Gemini is Google's branding of its models, right? And it feels like we're calling it Apple has a deal with Google to use the Gemini models on Apple's devices. Another way to look at it is Apple has a deal with Google to license Google's foundational AI models to use in Apple intelligence. Those are the same models that Google uses, or similar to models, Google uses to power Gemini. Right? Think of it that way that Gemini is really a Google brand. And Apple's not, it's like stickers on a laptop, kind of, right?

It's like Apple's not interested in advertising that it's Intel inside. They never were. And so it's like that. It's like that's your brand. You can do with it what you want. Apple doesn't have a... If Apple felt a need, they're like, oh man, we really need to get that glow up

of being associated with Gemini. Maybe they would do it. But that's not how they work things. That's not how it works. This isn't even Google's first brand for their thing. Bard. Do you remember Bard? Oh, yeah, Bard.

That was an AI that had to strum a loot before it answered you. Oh, hey. verily, verily thine answer. Gemini series is expected to have world knowledge information baked into it. So it would be able to provide information to you without doing a Google search, right? So it's not like, it would be kind of more, I guess, akin to what OpenAI is providing. Really wonder if OpenAI is going to still be a part of iOS 27.

Like I wonder if that's even going to be in there. Will it even be needed anymore? I don't know. It's possible? That seems like a hat on a hat, though, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, okay, here's what stops me here. Is world knowledge, having world knowledge in the LLM is okay, although the challenge there is that if the knowledge changes, or there's new knowledge in the world,

and the model was trained with the old knowledge, it doesn't have the new knowledge. Modern LLMs, reasoning LLMs, do a good job instead of just searching their model and giving you the answer, the model comes up with a search term and does a web search and summarizes the results of the web search.

I am assuming this system will be capable of that. But like... It should be, or at least it will be eventually. If you ask it about a place, a location, that kind of stuff, it doesn't need to do Google search for that. It should just know these things. It's big damn. If you say like, where is the Coliseum, right?

Or like how many people live in Rome? Like, it can just give you these answers is they're just like basic piece of information. But if they're like, you know, if you're saying, and what was the weather like today? Like it should provide, you know, it should understand and do what is needed. And, you know, realistically, you mentioned it already

and I mentioned it now, again, like about the model should be able to understand the questions that you've been asking. And, you know, if you're saying turn a light on, turn a light off set a timer, Apple's current Siri understands that and routes it to where it needs to be, and we'll send things to open AI when is needed.

So Apple's system does a decent enough job with that. I have never asked for a light to be turned off, and then it says, chat GPT can't help you with this. It knows what it's doing there. So let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. So over the weekend, I did the MIT Mystery Hunt, a lot of fun, solved a bunch of puzzles,

didn't solve even more puzzles, but solved a bunch of puzzles. It was fun. And this year I used Claude to do some research for this. which was interesting because we were trying these puzzles make you really try to like figure out what they're even trying to uh to to get from you and one of them was we did a puzzle involving teams it was pretty funny it was actually uh it was a the whole puzzle was on the on the page where they give you the puzzle was we lost some data it was called it was called um drop star table teams and the premise of it was our database got corrupted, can you help? And there was a downloadable SQLite database. That's it. So I found a Mac app that opened SQLite databases. I opened the database. And the premise of it was basically, it's got all of this interrelated information based on a common key. But it became very clear that what was missing were the teams, that it was like 12 items that were referring to a team. But you didn't, the items were only labeled with kind of esoteric, shortened labels. So you have to intuit what they mean and then figure out what the teams are and that that gives you the answer. And we got it and it was it was fun. But here's an example of a query I gave

to Claude. What sport held its championship in Hamburg in 2025 and features teams with five players because that's all I've got? And what Claude did is searched the web. for Hamburg 2025 championship five players team sport. Now, I could search the web for that. But I appreciate that it wrote the query for me. And it looked, and then it responded, that did not return the results that I wanted. I'm going to make a more targeted search.

It went to basketball. It said there is no good championship for basketball. There was a Eurobasket thing, but that's not a championship. Then it did another one. and it was Hamburg in quotes, 2025 in quotes, championship final five players team.

And it says, aha, the International 2025, the annual Dota II World Championship organized by Valve took place in Hamburg. It's a video game, e-sport, not a traditional sport,

and teams have five players. And then it followed that up with another query to confirm, and this is all without me doing anything, that the Dota 2, championship was in Hamburg and it has five players. That e-sport has five players. And I was looking for a team with blue and white colors.

I said, can you tell me a Dota 2 team that has won championships twice started in 2012 and has blue and white colors? And it says, oh, that's Team Liquid from the Netherlands. And that was the right... I knew that. That was the right answer. that was what I needed. But what I'm saying is, like, I knew nothing about it. And it did a series, I could do the web request, right?

But, like, I asked it one question. It did a series of reformulations and analyzed the answers and got me a result. Like, ultimately, these engines, the state of the art is that they do stuff like that. So that's what Siri needs to be able to do if it needs to get there. And that ideally, I think even Gemini under the surface there would be, be like, I'm not confident in what I know. So this sounds like something that's more about, give me a web search.

And then they become an intelligent web searching companion. I think that that's perfectly reasonable. Because I didn't need to look at any of those web pages. Remember, the classic Siri example today is, I found some web pages for you, right? It's like, you read them. Oh, you're on the Apple Watch? Too bad.

You read them on your iPhone when you find it. So the Claude response. went all the way through it and got to an answer and that answer was what I was looking for. So I would hope that the layers of this lead you to a search. And if that's Google, that's, if it uses Google search for that, that's great, right? Because not only is that what Google is focused on, but that's Apple's search partner by default. So I think that works for everybody. So I hope that's what happens here. Now I'm going to read a quote from the information article. Another common set of questions,

Siri historically struggled with involved emotional support, such as when a customer tells the voice assistant, it is feeling lonely or disheartened. In the Gemini-based version, Syria will give more thorough conversational responses the way Chat Chupit and Gemini do. Does this feel on-brand for Apple?

Well, it depends on how they do it, right? I mean, one of the things that we found with these LLMs is that you can give them, they either have personality types attached or you can tell it, like, here's how I want you to answer this. And the Gruber wrote a thing about this, and it was funny because I was already doing this, too. The idea, like, I don't want you to treat me like a friend. I want you to treat me like a robot because that's what you are.

I don't want you to give me small talk. I just personally, I don't want that. So these things can have these profiles, personality profiles. Now, what we've seen with Apple is that Siri has a personality profile. And it is, it is not, I'm a robot. It is, you can, right, the whole, like, classic, oh, did you ask Siri this and see what it says and it says something that's kind of funny? Like, that has been part of Apple's whole, like, take on Siri. So my question is, how does Siri respond to a personal, emotional thing?

And that could be good or it could be bad. Like, I, what I don't want Siri to be as a therapist, right? I feel like my gut, my gut feeling, if I were in the room when they were having these conversations, what I would say is if somebody says something sad, I'm sad, Siri, I want Siri to be positive and also supportive. So I'm sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do to help? But the help that offers is not therapy. It's, do you have someone to talk to?

I could suggest someone for you to call, depending on how you're feeling. But like, professional but concerned, human, empathetic, but not overstepping. Like, there's probably a way to get somewhere that if you feel disheartened is supportive without it becoming your friend because it's not your friend, right? So I think that's all in the details of how they choose to approach this. But yes, I put up a red flag. Like, the last thing you need is for stories about people. People who think that Siri is their partner, right? Like, you can't, or their therapist.

Or their friend. Or their friend, because it is not. It is a, it is a computer who talks to you. But like there are companies that want to do that and there are people that want that from these models. But I don't believe Apple should be in the business of trying to do that. I don't think that it is a good thing for them to get involved in. but I echo you of like just and so what

what Adi is saying in our live Discord chat for Siri to just adjust a little bit to the user's tone yeah don't be so chipper if the user is sad I think that's reasonable right yeah it's like Siri I'm just having a bad I'm having a bad day to day and Siri be like great

what would you like to do like no read the room Siri and I know like the personality stuff and these models is like very much user taste. But I actually personally, I like the supportive tone that chat chit has for me. Like I like it. Like it, you know, I don't want too much of it. But I don't just want like pure answer.

Like because I don't approach, I know, I'm a weirdo. I don't approach these models as like the same way that I do Google search. I instinctively do write it a little bit more like I'm talking to a. person. It's just my nature of like this is a chat. So like I chat, I don't Google search. I don't know why I do this, but this is how I do. I have my, my personal preferences for Claude, which I'm using mostly now. I actually, I guess I'm going to disclaim here in a funny way, which is Claude was a sponsor. And one of the things of the things of the future, too, is probably one of knowing. One of the things that they did was they gave me three months free of Claude. premium, and I've canceled my chat GPT subscription because I like Cloud better. Yeah, I guess they should do that to everybody. I mean, I just think it's really good.

It's really good. But what I have in Claude, in ChatGBTGPT, I just have a setting now because Gruber wrote about it, you can just choose a robot setting, a neutral setting. Yeah. In Claude, I actually have, use a neutral factual tone, avoid flattery, emotional language, or personalization. Do not express opinions, admiration, or enthusiasm,

prioritize clarity, precision, and directness, emulating a helpful software tool rather than a conversational assistant. Avoid first and second person pronouns. Use impersonal phrasing instead. And I have no complaints about how Claude talks to me. And that kind of a prompt gets baked in by Apple to what they're going to do.

So they need to choose. But what Apple does, like I said, is not what I want. They have Siri have a little more spunk. but being able to read the room and being this non-committal kind of like supportive but not going to get into it with you I think that's an important thing

for Apple to work on and they were doing that with their own models too right they've got to figure out how to draw the line and tune it so that you don't end up with a you know what Siri having you know any of the unfortunate things that we've had stories about with ChatGBT.

So we've already mentioned you know Apple's models will route people to the systems that are right for them. So, you know, if you ask a set a timer, turn your lights off, it's just going to do that rather than kind of engage the whole thing. However, when they get to the personal context system, and they get that up and running, I'm going to read another quote here. If someone asks Siri to send a text message to their mother or sister,

but the customer doesn't store their names that way in their contacts, the Gemini-based Siri could search through their messages to figure out which of their contacts is most likely to be their mother or their sister. By the way, my home part is going, it's just going berserk in the background now. Oh, man. I hope they can get that fixed too. I don't know.

Maybe I'm currently dictating a text message to my mom. That would be fun for me to find out later on. That's great. I read stuff like this and I just, my kind of internal brahm on this is, well, that sounds nice, but I absolutely do not believe that you, be able to do it. I just, I, I, I, I, I, I, I feel like this system could work with a small

amount of data. I don't know how my, how Apple intelligence will be able to crawl through my entire iPhone for this information. It's going to be what's indexed, which is going to be a smaller amount and they're going to be doing some targeted searches is my guess in the index trying to find things that are indicators and my my guess like i was thinking about this like my mom is not labeled as mom in my in my uh iPhone but i bet any decent model could figure out that she's my mom. My sister, I doubt

that it could figure it out. Maybe I'd be surprised, but I think of what what they might be guessing on, and I think it would be, I think it would be bad. But like, I'm okay with the idea. I think I'm where you are,

which is it sounds nice, show me. Like, show me, show me how you do this. The signals may be there, but, I'm going to be skeptical about this because your phone knows more about you than you would think, but to have to search through an index with all your, you know, think about Spotlight on your phone. Can you do a targeted Google search essentially in Spotlight to find information like this in a timely fashion and put it together? If you can, you may get some good answers, but if you can't, then too bad.

and we will apparently start seeing some feature shipping in the spring, but most will be unveiled again at WWDC. I also just don't even, what, what ships before WWC? I'll tell you. I'll tell you what. I think what ships before WWDC is using Google, is installing Google models underneath existing Apple intelligence features. So just writing tools is better because it's using Gemini instead of Apple's model.

Right. And private cloud compute is better because now it's using Apple's, using Gemini instead of Apple's model. Which that makes a lot of sense, but that is not what we were expecting, right? That like some Apple intelligence features that we didn't get from the 2024 WWC would ship in the spring. I just don't see that happening. I mean, maybe some of them do ship before iOS 27, right? But I just, what, like in eight weeks' time? Like it just seems so soon.

I think you're right to be skeptical. It's possible that some of those things will happen, but it seems like such a large problem and such a heavy lift, and that Apple hasn't said. They just said this year. So that allows them to kick anything and everything to iOS 27. And I think that's what they will do with most things. But there are going to be some things that they've got laying there,

that they either it's all. already implemented with Apple's models and they can switch it to Google's models, or it's a feature they built and they didn't ship because they weren't happy with how it performed on their models. And if they wire it up to Google's models, it looks okay. And so maybe some of those might ship. Man, the pressure on WWDC this year already feels pretty intense. Because whatever they show, like, I know we said this last year, but it turns out they didn't have anything.

the Apple Intelligence for last year. But like you expect that they have to this time. And whatever they show, they have to ship. And it has to ship it this year. Yeah. That's a lot of pressure. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, the other thing, there's some ML features, some AI features in the thing we're going to talk about next, which is the Apple Creator Studio. Yeah. And especially in the Iwork apps. Yeah. And it looks, based on screenshots and stuff, it sure looks like those are actually being fed by chat GPT. And it makes me wonder if that's one of those things where, I don't know if they've got a deal and maybe that it'll be fine.

But like, that's the kind of thing where you could, if you get access to Google's models for everything that you swap that out. And then you, you know, you take the label off of it. And now it's just run by Apple's models, which are actually Gemini under the hood. there's some stuff like that that they could that they could change over and yeah it's it's real interesting and I I'm not surprised by any any of this this is this is actually a surprisingly logical rational approach yes to the situation right to this disaster situation it's the

kind of thing you would expect by for a company that had a failure cleared out the people who failed, brought in new people to solve the problem and have them make a pragmatic decision about how to solve the problem so that your product gets better fast. And this is it. These are decisions you can make when you have people that are clear-eyed, right? And they're like, we obviously didn't do this. We obviously can't do this in the time frame that we are going to set for ourselves. So now that we have the kind of shackles taken away of we have to make this. Well, let's go out and make the best decision. Last thing on this, the Financial Times is reporting that this deal would, quote, be structured

in the form between Apple and Google, would be structured in the form of a cloud computing contract, which could lead to Apple paying several billion dollars to Google over time. Others have estimated this could be worth a billion dollars a year. This is nothing in the grand scheme of Apple and Google's relationship. Indeed. It could be, you know, it could be a coupon off of the search revenue. new. I mean, it is, and it's worth it for Apple. Like, it's worth it for Apple.

Also, it's cheap in the sense that, you know, Apple's not, I mean, these devices are running on Apple's devices and in Apple's cloud, right? So, like, from Google's perspective, even if it's structured as a cloud computing contract, it's going to be structured as Google providing cloud computing services on Apple's data centers, right it's therefore the cost to Google is a lot

less it's it's a software licensing agreement essentially because Apple is separately paying to build the private cloud

servers infrastructure yeah yeah so it's actually kind of a cheap deal unless you view it like overall

it's expensive but a lot of that expense is is stuff that Apple was already paying because they're building up private cloud compute

and whatever models run on it Apple has to set up those servers and use the power to run them. And all of those things are true regardless of who makes the model. So it really is just this extra Google piece. And so, yeah, we're throwing around billions of dollars. And if you think about it in terms of like our lives, it's mind boggling.

But in terms of these companies, it's cheap. And I think Google, yeah, I think Google gets money out of it or a discount on what they're paying Apple. I think they get some pride out of it. they can point to it. Even if Apple doesn't, they can point to it. It's like people, everybody knows that our models are powering that right now.

It's extra, yeah, I mean, at a time when AI is struggling with the idea of like, okay, now we've got AI, how do we make money on this? One way you make money on this, if your Google is licensing it to Apple, right? Like that is, you know, boom,

there's a billion or several billion dollars in Gemini revenue coming in. That's pretty sweet. So, yeah, make sense. for everybody right now, I think. And last thing, reportedly, according to the Financial Times,

Open AI declined to be the partner because they are focused on competing with Apple, not working with Apple, ultimately. I think it's two things. I think they are focused on competing with Apple, but I think also, I believe, I said this last week, I believe that fundamentally Open AI

doesn't care about the things that Google cares about, and that Apple cares about. Open AI is putting all of their efforts toward enormous cloud models and not privacy. Like they are full, they're all in. And so for Open AI, I mean, I'm sure they talked to Apple about it, right?

And then it declined. Why did they decline? I bet you one of the reasons they declined is that they looked at it and said, why would we take any of our people and any of our model engineering off of what we're doing and put it on this thing that is not aligned with our strategy?

It's a small data center run by Apple with privacy. It's on a device that's running on an iPhone. Like, I just don't think that that's where they, where their head is right now, strategically. And I don't think they're wrong. I think that Google is, that's one of the reasons that why Google is such a good fit, is that Google is doing a private cloud infrastructure.

Google is running an operating system that runs on smartphones. Like Google cares about the same stuff that Apple cares about in a way that Open AI, does not. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at FitBod. If you're looking to make changes to your fitness level, it can be hard to know where to get started. That's why I'm pleased to let you know that FitBod is an easy and affordable way

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at F-I-T-B-O-D dot me slash upgrade. Once again, that's FitBod. Dot me-Sach upgrade for 25% of your membership. Thanks to FitBod for their support of this show and Relay. So last week, Apple unveiled the Apple Creator Studio. This is a subscription that combines Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, PixelMator Pro, Motion Compressor, Main Stage, Keynote Pages, Numbers, and Freeform into one 1299 a month subscription.

I think you can pay $1229 a year. too, so you get a little discount if you get a year. This includes the Mac apps and the iPad apps where they exist and brings some new features to the apps that are free. So the I-Work apps and free form. They get

if you are in the creator studio, the free apps get Apple intelligence features that are exclusive to those, exclusive templates and access to Apple's quote content hub, which includes a selection of high-quality images, illustrations and graphics from Apple. These are

appear to be human made, from what I've seen, but I think they would say if they were Apple intelligence made. Also, you can use all the App Intelligence models. This will be available from January 28th. I don't know why they announced it two weeks before they ship it, but they did. The existing standalone paid apps will remain available. I would say it is unclear if they are equally supported into the future. Is it a bit murky? Apple's saying, it's just not clear. I will, before we continue, Peter asks, do you think this is the beginning of the end

for the standalone pro apps and that Apple will ultimately move down to a subscription? What do you think, Jason? I think it is. I think there will come a time where they decide to do a major update and give it a number, and then will they offer that as a new version in the app store

or not for purchase for the Mac or will they just say, look, we're moving ahead I guess they can choose that down the line. At some point, though, if they start charging for the standalone, it will, my guess is it will become apparent that if you're planning on using it forever, that it would be cheaper to subscribe, right? Like, if they come out with the next version of Final Cut Pro,

and you can be on the subscription or you can pay $300 for it, maybe you go, well, okay, let's just subscribe now. And that, well, it feels more likely, doesn't it? That, like, a new version of one of these apps will come out and they'll make it a paid upgrade because they won't incentivize you to become a... I don't see how you can...

I don't see how you can become a subscriber, how you can offer a subscription. And then on the Mac have these standalone apps that have a price and that always get updated and there's never another price. And in the past, you know, when they went to Final Cup Pro 10,

like there was a price to go to final... You had to buy the new version. And so that's going to happen at some point. and maybe they'll offer it, but my point is that I can't imagine they'll offer it at a price where people who are just using Final Cut even look at it and go, oh yeah, I'd rather pay $300 than pay $119 a year, especially if Apple says we're going to keep releasing new paid versions

every two or three years. Apple will make it worth your while to be in the subscription bundle, I think. it's possible they will keep selling those things but my guess is it won't make any sense maybe it will barely make sense if you only use a single version of the product but I think in most cases I think effectively the standalone versions will fade away

even if they aren't like removed or something I think they will effectively fade away over time yeah I think they'll stop adding features to them at least effectively what will happen is they won't have to stop adding features they will just stop releasing new versions and continue releasing new versions in the subscription. And then, you know, it's like you can use your old version,

standalone that you bought. But like if you want the new stuff, or again, if you want the new stuff, you can get it, but you're going to have to pay hundreds of dollars for the one, and then you can use that again. And this is the classic age-old argument of subscription versus buying software. And subscription makes more sense. for almost everybody,

but there are some people who remember how it used to be and I just want to buy it and use it forever. I mean, the thing is that nothing is forever because there's new OSs and new devices and things break and then you've got to pay again. So you may be paying a different kind of subscription fee, but in the long run,

if you're going to use product X and it's a standalone product, you're still going to have to pay over time because they're not going to keep giving you all the updates for free. You're going to have to pay them because otherwise the people making the updates are not going to be able to survive.

So you will have to pay them eventually. This seems not unreasonable to me. I mean, I paid for Microsoft Office for a long time. I paid for, I still pay for Photoshop annually. And the full Adobe suite, like you and Stephen both pay for the full Adobe suite, right? I don't know if I pay for the full suite, but I pay for a pretty significant chunk. Yeah, I mean, it's hundreds of dollars a year for the Adobe Suite. Oh, yeah, I mean, I pay a lot of money to them.

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. lot. And so this, for, and again, different apps, different use cases, whatever. I pay 50 pounds a month. Creative Cloud Bros. So I guess that's the full thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that, that is, you're, you're paying what? That's 600 pounds a year. Yeah. But I don't want to, but I use three of their apps. So exactly. I haven't got a choice. They actually won't let me. I'm like, I don't want everything. I know. I know. They basically, their system is you can buy one or you need to buy everything. or subscribe to one or subscribe to all. And because I'm using Photoshop

and there's like a special plan that I'm still on that is not super expensive, I'm still doing that. And I don't think 129 a year is unreasonable for access to those apps. I mean, do I prefer buying them in the distant past

and then just using them and never getting charged anything ever again? So it's also important that they charge for things. I've heard this argument from people that it's Apple, they make a lot of money, they make all the money in the world. Why are they even bothering? And I was thinking about this over the weekend.

Fundamentally, it's important to have a P&L for stuff, a profit and loss center, a corporate structure for things. Yes. That is how companies subscribe value. That is how they allot resources. Even Apple is not, Apple is not run as like there's a money machine at the center from the iPhone

and the money rains down and they're like, yippee, and they do whatever they want. That is not how it works. You could argue maybe it should work more like that. Okay, but it's not how it works. So let's talk about how it really works, which is there are people who work on these apps, these pro apps. And although they charge for them, the pro apps are in a weird place, right? Because in some ways it's kind of a legacy of Apple's past that a different Apple 15, 20 years ago that was much more focused on the creative community.

And I'm not saying that Apple isn't focused on the creative community now. I'm saying that the creative community is a much smaller percentage of their business, much smaller. than it used to be. Much, much, much, much smaller than it used to be. It's like, okay, but it still matters to them. They've got that whole thing where they've got pros who are there to, like, advise on what the creative community wants, and they've got these pro apps.

But you know what clarifies things is a budget. So, like, we know everybody who's working on Final Cut and logic and motion and compressor and main stage. We know what that costs. And we know how much money that brings. in directly and not from selling hardware that has it on it, from sales of the software.

And so that helps, having this model helps clarify what this is worth to Apple and what they can spend. And I think maybe in a good way, I think that maybe Apple has done a disservice to Final Cut and logic by having them be kind of free or kind of like you get it

once and then you just kind of use it and there's no more money coming in. And making it a more, making a subscription base means, like, you are judged and funded based on who's using your apps. And I think that could be bad. If these are apps that have been funded under the largest of Apple, just not paying attention for years and years and years, and it turns out nobody's using them,

that could be bad because that means they're not going to get support anymore. But I think it also could be really good, because my gut intuition here is that, they do get used a lot. And having a figure of who's subscribing to them could be really good for them in terms of now that there's a budget where you're like, look how much money, Logic and Final Cut bring in. And what are we, you know, now I want to hire a new developer.

And whoever is in charge of that group at Apple will be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. It's a really valuable product. I'll give you, I won't steal your developers away to work on a different project. I won't refuse to hire or slow walk this hire that you're trying to make to replace somebody who's walked out the door. Because that's a big thing that happens in organizations, right? It's like people leave and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll hire a replacement. And then they just don't for a long time. Every day that goes by where there's nobody in that job saves them money.

Yeah. So I think this could be good. And I think that it is more understandable and structured in a way that makes sense, which is even inside Apple, I think it's good to have money coming in, subscriptions coming in, and a thing you can point to and say, here is the value of Final Cut,

instead of it just being kind of this amorphous, like, isn't it nice that we have our own editing software that's not DaVinci Resolve or Premiere, which strategically sure it is, but like it's very hard to have an amorphous strategic niceness and then a lot money to it. Well, I mean, I agree

of what you're saying completely. I think it makes a lot of sense. But does a blanket $1299 fee for everything actually help prescribe which apps are most used amongst the bundle to help them set budgets?

Like, if nobody uses Main Stage, this isn't going to show that, right? Well, Main Stage and Compressor are utilities that are attached to logic and Final Cut, essentially. So they're, they'll probably analyze use, but they're also sort of thinking like those, those are adjuncts.

Like main stage is a live performance adjunct to logic. And compressor is a, is basically an export utility post final cut. So they're not, their costs are a lot less. And they're really just kind of like part of the larger thing, which is we have video, we have audio, and we have photo imagery design. thingy in PixelMator. I feel like it

those are the three kind of those are good three legs of a stool for them. They don't have everything that Adobe has, right? But PixelMator, this is why they bought PixelMator, right? Like it helps a lot to say we have audio, video and we have, you know,

non-dynamic imagery and design. Yeah. In our bundle. There's a and the, I mean, the advantage of the bundle, this is what we were just talking about with you and Adobe. Like the advantage of the bundle is you sort of say, look, it's a pretty good deal if you use a couple of these things. If you use one of these things, it's less good of a deal. But even then,

I could argue that the price of this subscription is what I pay for Photoshop every year. So I think that if you use logic a lot, 129 just for logic is not a bad deal. And if you don't use logic a lot. Subscribe monthly when you use it and then cancel when you don't and you'll save a lot of money that way, assuming you use it less than 10 months out of the year. And I think that goes for all of them. And there is overlap, right? I think between Final Cut and Logic, there's probably a lot of overlap. And PixelMator throwing that in the mix, people do need to generate imagery. And that's part of Apple's pitch here, right? It's like, oh, creatives need to do all these things. And I think they overstayed it because it's marketing. But I do think that there's enough value in here for that part of

this, that it, it, it looks like, I mean, I was, I came into this expecting to be not impressed about Apple's attempt at doing a creative suite, creator studio. Um, and actually, I think it's a pretty good deal. And part of that is that I do use final cut and logic. The price is good. Like, yeah, if it was $300 a year, I would think very differently about it. But I get final cut and logic for, for $1.29 a year, uh, plus PixelMater, which I could theoretically use instead of Photoshop. I love pixel meter. I love it. And so. for the price of Photoshop, I would get all of it. That's pretty good.

I do use PixelMator instead of Photoshop. I need Photoshop because other people don't. Right? So, like, I'm being sent files from people that I work with and designers that I work with. They're all Photoshop files. I will often open them PixelMater and can edit it in that way, but I can't always. And so I need Photoshop because some stuff, like just from compatibility reasons that I'm working with, require it. Same as for that reason, I also need to pay for Illustrator because I'm sent some

stuff that I need to edit in Illustrator. Yes. That's why I ended up getting Affinity Designer, which the Affinity app is now, I think, a free as well. So there's other competition out there and there's some other. I mean, you can. And look, if the argument is, but I can use a bunch of stuff for free, I think that that is a perfectly valid thing. If you want to edit your video in DaVinci Resolve in the non-premium version and if you want to use the affinity apps to do design stuff the affinity app i guess which is which is i believe a free thing it is free which is weird because i just use affinity designer which i paid for um and i love it and i use that instead of illustrator and i i chose that because i

that's a great example i chose affinity designer because i need to do like t-shirt designs and podcast art designs occasionally and i used to haul out an ancient version of illicit But like I didn't want to pay a huge amount of money for the Adobe suite to just for those occasional uses. So for me, I found a different tool that had a different price structure that worked for me. If Adobe let me, and they don't, but if Adobe let me turn on Illustrator for a month for 1299 and do my T-shirt designs, I might do that. But which is why I think, I mean, I always thought, I thought this was a a good deal when we were doing our upgrade live stuff and I was using Final Cut

for iPad. Both of the times we did that I just turned on the Final Cut for iPad subscription, which was I won't be able to do now. I won't be able to do the $4 for a month. It'll be $13 for a month. But it's not unreasonable. You now will probably just get this, right?

Like, the 12-99 a month? You surely, oh, you don't use you don't use Final Cut, do you? Sorry, Logic. You don't use Logic. I use Logic. I use Logic. I use Logic all the time. Oh, I thought that you used

Fairite? Fairite, yeah. If I'm doing an intense edit on my iPad, I use Fairite. And I would say, logic for iPad is a music app. Pure music app. It's terrible for podcast editing.

It's not substantial. But I use it for podcast editing on the Mac still. For me, if I get this, it's more, what am I doing on my iPad? Because I currently

have these standalone versions of Final Cut and Logic for the Mac. So right now it's a lot less of a good deal than it would be if I didn't have that but the time may come and certainly if I'm specifically doing something targeted like using Final Cut on the iPad to do Final Cut camera

I would do it then. Sure. Now, let's talk about the IWork apps. You wrote a blog post about this. You seem quite frustrated about the inclusion of the IWork apps in the creators to be. sweet. Yeah.

So what's going on here that you find to be kind of, I would say, perturbed about? Yeah, well, so I, everything we've said about this up to now has been positive, right? I think it's a good idea. I think bringing PixelMator out and having it be PrixelMater on Mac and an iPad and part of an Apple suite, like, I think that's all really good and smart and the price is pretty good. They threw keynote pages, numbers, and freeform in here. And at first glance, my thought is, what? Like, it doesn't make sense. Because, well, one, they're free, and two, they're not creative apps in the same way.

They're not. They're already installed on all my devices by default. So what's going on here is they've created, I think for App Store technical reasons, they've created like new versions of them with different icons that live in the App Store under this bundle. And there are a lot of confusion about this. Like, what does this mean? This doesn't mean that Apple is putting these four apps that you could think of as the I-Work apps behind a paywall. That's not true because they'll still be available for free.

Everybody who gets a new Apple device gets these things for free. But what Apple is doing is Apple is turning them into essentially freemium apps. They have announced that they are adding access. So part of it is they're giving access to, clip media essentially, templates and the content hub, which is this Adobe-like, in a way, like a stock image library and of stuff, which is great. That's the kind of thing that you paying a subscription for access to is not unreasonable. And that stuff getting thrown into a bundle often makes the bundle worth getting.

Like I use things in the Adobe. It's a bundle. It's Photoshop and Lightroom. But I also get like fonts with it. and stuff and it's like okay great bonus i'm paying for it i get fonts with it so what they've thrown in is that stuff which if you're a subscriber you get access to the libraries okay that makes sense and and if they want to make fancy keynote templates and stuff and and have them be behind this and they're especially if they're more like for content

creators you who use keynote okay whatever but what really bugs me is they're also adding features that are only going to be available in these free apps if you pay. And there's two issues here. One is the features are really interesting because they seem to be AI features. And like I said, there's at least one screenshot out there that is like powered by chat GPT. So it's like, okay, I understand why you would need to charge for that because you're using somebody's AI resources and those are not, you know, when you ship normal software, it just, you can ship an infinite number of copies for no extra money.

but if you're using AI resources, they cost. So, okay. I get it. I don't love it, but I get it. And the chat GPT relationship there is hilarious because is that going to continue? They're going to replace that? It's a mystery. I don't know, but they had to do it to ship this.

So that bothers me, but I understand it. And the other part is just that these things don't connect, right? There are, I don't know how many there are. And maybe Apple knows. but they're not going to talk about it. How many people rely on numbers or pages or keynote who are never, ever,

ever going to use logic or Final Cut or even PixelMater? Because they are just doing spreadsheets and numbers. And what troubles me is not just that Apple has turned this free product into a freemium product,

but that the only way to get it is to pay for this creator bundle and there's no other bundle that is targeting i work users who I would argue or a different group.

So it's a misaligned bundle. It's turning a free product into a freemium product and it is adding, I mentioned this in my story, it's adding an asterisk, right? Now you don't have a simple product that's like, hey, you buy a Mac,

you get a spreadsheet and a word processor and a slideshow creator so you don't even need to get Microsoft Office because Apple has provided that for you. That's like a huge advantage that Apple has. But now it's like, well, you get a free version of that, but there's some other stuff that they're adding.

And we don't know what they're going to add in the future. Are they going to add more new features that are just in the bundle versus outside? Does the out, for the free version lag? Are new features talking about P&Ls? Are new features now pushed into the bundle because it is a way to upsell people on the bundle to get that number of feature or whatever.

It just feels like complete bundle stuffing for no real reason. Like, these apps don't need to be in here for this to be an attractive proposition. And I think the AI thing is what led to it, because they're like, oh, we've got AI features, but we don't want to put, but they require chat GPT because we couldn't build our own model

that does this. So we went with OpenAI's model, but that costs us every time we kick that out there. So we got to put it in a, we got to find a way to charge them. Let's throw it in the bundle. Like I understand the thought process involved there.

But, and if it's an AI feature and you need to charge for it, okay. But like, why is there not an alternative bundle? And I hate to say it, I think the reason is because the app store back end sucks. And it would be, they'd have another version. There'd be like three different versions. Well, hence them having to have separate versions anyway. It's ridiculous. Yeah.

Right? It's a ridiculous thing that they're doing to make that work. And it makes, I just hate how it makes everything a little more gross, right? Like, it's like, here are these free apps is one thing. Now it's, here are these free apps, asterisk. Apps don't have some of the features unless you pay us more money. It just makes it worse. And it also, and again, I may be going too far down the slippery slope here, but I'll say it.

The more Apple takes things that are part of the product experience and makes them an upsell. I get why that drives services revenue. But the more they do that, the worse the product feels. And Apple sells a premium product at huge margins. And I just made the argument, I understand that stuff, that putting things in P&Ls and charging and that Apple doesn't have free money that's raining down on everybody. I get it. But like, however, if you go too far down that path, you turn your premium product into

an empty vessel that is designed to just upsell people to more product. How long after January 28th will I get an ad on iOS or MacOS or iPad OS to sign up for this? If you're a numbers user, are you going to get an upsell to this misaligned suite?

Is it going to be a badge in the app somewhere to tell me? And we make fun of like Microsoft sticking ads and Windows and stuff, but like this is where that goes, which is why do we not take all of our free stuff and stop updating it and giving people things for free and make everything part of a subscription package of some sort or other? And, you know, some of that is reasonable.

But once you start going down that path, the danger is, and this is my slippery slope part, the danger is you go down that path and eventually you are withholding everything unless somebody is tithing some amount of money to you. And I think that is a bad, I think that's a dangerous. path to walk down. And if you're going to walk down it, having it only be available, again, for apps that are not creative apps in a creative bundle is, it feels, it feels desperate, but more than that, it feels like a failure.

It feels like Apple is incapable of generating another bundle because the, they basically their product, their consumer facing product line is distorted because, because, of their failings on their back-end technical side. And anybody who's an app developer will tell you, or a podcaster, frankly, that Apple's backend tools that are not consumer-facing, not customer-facing, are garbage. They're real bad. Because why make them good? Because this is the part that it's behind the scenes.

I'm sure behind the scenes at Disneyland, it doesn't look like Disneyland, right? Because it's industrial, it's just behind the scenes. It's the back side of a movie set. it doesn't look like anything because it doesn't need to. But here you've got a case where I think maybe Apple's technical limitations are oozing through into a weird and ugly customer experience. So, like, so yeah, I got a lot of feelings here. I don't mind them throwing this stuff in, especially the content hub stuff. But I really don't like the idea that these productivity apps now have subscription features.

and I'm not, and again, I'm not saying that if they're tied to expenses on AI models and you don't want to give that away for free, that you don't find some way to limit that, you throw it into the Apple One bundle or you offer an I-Work bundle

with extra features. I don't love turning I work into it, but, so that it's, I've got a two-level argument here, which is one, I don't think making I work freemium is good. I think it's bad. But if you're going to do it,

you've got to offer it to people who, for a price that makes sense that is not, you get Final Cut Pro on top of your numbers. Like I use numbers all the time and never am I in numbers thinking, yes, I am here as a person who uses Final Cut Pro and logic. It's a different audience with a different market. It probably shouldn't be in that other bundle at all. There should probably be two bundles. But, you know, if you want to throw it into lots of bundles, fine.

Throw it into Apple One. throw it into iCloud plus do what you need to do in order to justify it but like what it's what they're doing now is broken and and and it's bad for it's bad for those apps and it's bad for the experience of users because now i'm never going to be able to say apple gives you numbers pages and keynote for free i'm going to have to say apple gives you number numbers pages and keynote for free although some of the features require a subscription i hate it so we're a Six days out from the announcement of the Apple Creative Studio, in those six days there have been,

I would say, an overwhelming amount of takes on the icons that Apple have created for the Creative Studio apps. I just want to give you the opportunity here. If you have anything that you want to say on them, I don't think I can bring myself to do it again. To have any more takes? I think people are getting,

from my tastes, way too overexcited about this. Well, I will say it's easy to criticize icons. We did it for fun for the Christmas special. Absolutely. For fun. And we will do it many more times. As a laugh.

But it's also very easy because you just look at a image and you go, oh, I don't like it. Or I like it. I think it shows, you know, you want to unify apps in a suite. And so they are fundamentally samey. I mean, I don't think anybody would praise the Microsoft apps or the Adobe. apps for their icons either because they're super sami. Adobe made that decision. Adobe just made the decision that every app was going to be an element in the periodic

table, I guess. And it's like, okay, whatever. But these apps, so they are samie and they're kind of boring. I find it very funny that the last refuge of skeuomorphism at Apple apparently is app icons, which have metaphors that are often so far beyond. the actual thing that it's completely unintelligible. I think we overstate the importance of icons in a way because icons are more about recognition of the thing that's familiar

and not about initially recognizing it. So like I don't need to know that the Logic Pro icon is a record. Yeah. Like it's like a turntable or a record, gold record on a wall or silver record, whatever. The one that it is aping from is like if you were to get a gold record, silver record, platinum record from a music label. Yeah.

where it's coming from. So I don't need to know that. All I need to know is when I launch Logic, that's the shape in my dock, right? Like, in a way, that's all that icons are for is that kind of recognition factor. When you're looking to launch it on your iPhone or your iPad

or in your dock on your Mac or whatever, you just need to recognize it. And so they've color-coded them and they've got shapes. Now, if you want to take the critique to the next level, a record is a weird thing. I mean, it makes sense for music, except now that metaphor is old.

It's a little like a floppy disk. I guess you could say it's like a CD, but even that is getting old now. But how do you make an image of music, right? Like, it is a challenge. And Pages is a, like a pen or pencil on a line. And again, my standard feeling here is it's an app called Pages. Why is it a pencil or a pen? and not a page.

There was a period where it had a page. There was a period where it was a fountain pen and an inkwell. Yes. So, which I think is not pages. It's fountain pen or inkwell or ink pen or something. Not pages. Show me the pages. And they did show us the pages. Pages now are gone.

So I don't know. There's Sammy. What do you expect? It's really easy to criticize icons. Apple has kind of, you know, whatever. I'm also kind of over it. I'm not surprised. It's a very easy way to get engagement and traction to criticize icons.

The PixelMator one doesn't have any personality and it used to. And so, like, I get, I think this is this is the truth of it is you put things in a suite and you hammer all the individual out of it because you want them to all seem of a kind. And I kind of wish they were a little more whimsical. but at the end of the day, probably what's motivating Apple here is what I said earlier, which is what you really want with icons

is recognizability so that you can know which app to launch. And so you color code it and you make it a shape with an interesting kind of like aspect to it. And then you don't need to know

that the page's icon is a diagonal pencil with a line that's a shadow or is it a page or a notebook or whatever it is. You don't have to think about any of that. And also distinct color too, right?

Like it has distinct color. Yeah, it's orange with the backslash and the line. And numbers, it's green with bars that go up. And PixelMator is, you know, that whatever it is shape with the dots under it. And Final Cut is the clapboard. And the motion is the bouncing ball, right?

Like, in the end, don't overthink it. Because although it's, fun to overthink it and talk about it. The truth is that the utility in them is their recognizability, which is based on shape and color. And I think they all are recognizable from one another, which is really all that they're trying for here. I mean, obviously, we all care a lot. You know, like, it's why we're doing this, is why any of us do this, why anybody listen, I think that sometimes we care too much. And I think that the feelings, the many, the many, pages spilled in the last week,

I think is a bit of proof to the fact that maybe we care too much. I think we overthink it a lot and I think we care too much. But I think also we're so focused on like all the design travails that Apple has been going through. Everything now has become a signal for that.

This is like, oh, was this done before Alan Die left or after or whatever? And like, you know, I think we look into it and we see what we want to see in it. I suspect, I do believe that at some level it is maybe representative of the fact that Apple has gone down

in extreme design direction and philosophy that they need to start kind of getting away from and that these are part of that tradition. But on the other hand, I think you can wish for a different design approach while also appreciating that the brief here

was recognizable color and shape so that people can pick them out of a dock or on their home screen. And they do that. Right? They do that. They do that. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace. They are the all-in-one website platform that is designed to help you stand out and succeed online.

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first purchase of a website or domain. That is Squarespace. Squarespace.com slash upgrade and the offer code upgrade for 10% of your first purchase and to show your support for the show. Now, thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of this show and all of Relay. It is time for some ask, upgrade questions. This one comes in from Drew. With Apple turning to Google Gemini to power its new models, do you think there will be token limits for how many questions the cloud model could be asked for every day? Will that limit be higher for iCloud Plus customers?

We know these models can be expensive to run and need a lot of power. Will Apple just give them away to customers for free? How will they recoup it? Jason, I'll ask you, what's going to be the P&L on Siri, you know? I think that Apple will give this away for free because it's on their servers. That's what they're currently doing. ChetGBT. ChetGBT, there's a limit.

But I feel like these are Apple servers and this is part of the cost of selling Apple devices. Then again, we just had a whole conversation about. about Apple finding new places to get more revenue. But I think if you're making requests on device or in private cloud compute from the stuff controlled by Apple, Apple is going to foot the bill. However, what will happen for, because apps are going to be able to have access. And apps, right now, you can do shortcuts to private cloud compute, but apps don't have access to private cloud compute.

And I would be shocked if this summer app developers weren't given, and I know I've said this before, weren't given access to private cloud compute APIs like apps were given WeatherKit access. When they bought Dark Sky, they rolled out Weather Kit. Weather Kit is an API you pay for. If you're an app that uses Weather Kit, you pay Apple. And you pay Apple per API request at a huge number. It's like millions of API requests cost this.

but it means that if you're using Apple services, you're paying for it as a developer. And then it's the developer's job to figure out how to pass that cost onto its, you know, that developer's user. So my guess is that will happen is that if developers want to use AI models on private cloud compute,

they can, but they just got to pay for it. So that's my gut feeling is that Siri and image playgrounds and stuff are free. And then that helps recoup some of the cost of Siri in general, right? Like, as well. Like, you know, Apple will, you know, essentially they'll give it to you for free

because they control it and the, but so they can keep the costs lower because it's all theirs, but then they make some money back, you know, on the idea of like they amortize it across the sale of the products. But then also developers that then also paying for access to this is another source in to kind of take the sting

away from offering this private cloud compute technology away for free. And that's, that's, that system stuff, although, I mean, the apps bundle shows us that they may be more open in their apps, especially apps that are not part of the system, that apps that are in the app store to have some cloud stuff may be bundled, where, whether it's this existing bundle or a new bundle or it's just thrown into iCloud Plus or whatever, the idea that there's some features that get added that use private cloud and you just have to, you know, that,

that is a premium feature or something like that. I don't think Apple is going to be charging per, you know, per query or setting a query cap on just a random iPhone user, but there are some scenarios where they might get some stuff that's add-on stuff, but I don't think anything that just kind of comes with. Yeah, I would expect

that the device model, the on-device model, that's like the foundation model, should be better as well, though. So, you know, maybe developers might be able to make, make use of it, but then I do expect it's kind of like the first taste

free kind of idea that if you have a really good model that can do some interesting stuff, you're like, well, what if I had something even more powerful? And that's where you end up in the private cloud compute land. Yeah, right. Yeah, and the processor on the device is for free. So it makes sense there. I don't know if we

know for certain what's going to happen in terms of like Google model on device versus Google model and private cloud compute. I don't know if we know that 100%, but yeah, that would be the hope. is that both of those models are a lot better. But, you know, the cloud model is always going to be better because it's going to be bigger.

Yeah, maybe it was just me reading it, but then referring to it as the foundation models, like, would suggest to me it's in both places. And I feel like it logically to me says it should be in both places. I agree, but I don't know if I've seen a specific indicator that it's going to be in both places. No, I don't want to assume. Google do offer it, though, as well.

So, like, they have some, some small models that can run on devices. Yeah. So it would be interesting. I think the moment that there's a Google model that runs on iPhone hardware that is better than Apple's model, Apple will use it. Right? I think that is undeniable. Holly asks, we hear about Apple product rumors quite often.

Sometimes they amount to little more than rumors. But other times, they have meaningful support and may make Apple change direction. How often do you believe Apple changes direction because of rumors? And I will add on to this one. just real quick and say that like this has been like a thing that I feel like I've observed over time that sometimes there are things that catch hold in such a way that build over time that result in Apple doing a thing and this could be something say like a video iPod or it could be something like hey the Mac should get more attention like I think that there is a

they do pay attention and I do feel like if something can really grabs hold in a certain way that they do kind of have a, they do feel compelled to explore it if they weren't already. Yeah, I think vibes are different from rumors, though. Absolutely. And we hear about rumors. Sometimes they amount a little more than rumors. I would say most of the rumors, I think rumors is actually the wrong word for it. We do rumor round up and that's fine.

And I guess collectively they could be thought of as rumors, but they're leaks, their reports. They're based on people who are in the know. Very rarely is there's something that's completely made up. Or, you know, spread by a whisper network, but it's been changed to the point where it's incomprehensible. Most of the stuff that we talk about here, for example, is coming from Mark German or Ming Chi Kuo or somebody else in the supply chain. Yeah, I guess it's maybe better to say there is discussion and sentiment

that can lead to Apple doing a thing as opposed to a quote-unquote rumor. Right, because most rumors other times they have meaningful support. I'd say most of the time they have meaningful support these days. There's very little it's like, oh, I heard Apple's going to do a thing. And it's just completely made up. It's usually like, no, there's somebody who says that people at Apple say that they're doing this thing. And that's much more supported or the supply chain is working on this thing. And sometimes

Apple changes direction because it's not done yet. I think there are very few examples where Apple would change direction because there was a rumor, right? Like, I don't think Apple's going to be like, oh, no, we can't do that phone now. We can't do that folding phone now because everybody knows what it's going to be.

That doesn't happen. So, yeah, I think we're just, we're peering into the Apple product process, and I doubt it has a whole lot of effect. Which is not to say that Apple isn't paying attention to everything that's said about it and that people are well aware and that it can influence,

discussion that happens internally, whether it's a bunch of writers and podcasters and stuff or other people in the tech media or it goes more mainstream. Like, they're tuned in. They know that that's going on. They know whether they're being criticized or whether there's a desire to do something. I think all those reports about the success of the meta-reban's definitely gave internal people the argument, more ammunition for their argument that they should do a product like that.

But generally, that's how it happens is these conversations. conversations are all happening on the inside, and then something happens on the outside, and a person who's been arguing for it on the inside brings it to the table and says, see, look, we should do this. But I don't think Apple is affected by product rumors. I don't think Apple has gone and said, oh, like, we're not going to do any, you know, X because somebody reported, because Mark German got it. Like, that, no, I don't think so. And Bob writes in and says, with the rumored upcoming low-cost MacBook using an A-series chip from an phone. What are the chances that Apple will offer a cellular option, making this the first Mac to

have that feature? The base iPad uses an A-series chip and has a cellular option. So do you think Apple could offer it for a low-cost MacBook as well? No, because cellular is expensive and cellular parts are expensive. And the last thing they want to do is make this thing expensive. It's the last place you'll see it. Yeah. My bet is that the OLEB MacBook Pro will be the first place we see it, and they do it for impact. That's much better. That's going to be a brand new model and it's a high-end model. The M6 is what we're talking about here. Yes. I think that's a far more likely scenario. This has everything, including cellular, right? Like, I think they're, I mean, I followed the logic. I appreciate the desire to put a low-cost MacBook, put a cellular thing

in a low-cost MacBook, but it's exactly the wrong product. Just because it's got an A-series chip in it, like, it's exactly the wrong product. We finally got this product really cheap. Also, there's a $200 more product that, like, I mean, the first thing you do is you put it in the MacBook Air and get it to upsell people from this thing because that's the goal of that product. So it's the exact wrong product for it. Think at the other end. Think of the MacBook Pro. I think that is a great way to view it and then it'll come to a MacBook Air after that. And those will be the ways that you get it. And yeah, I think. And also if it's the if it's the OLED MacBook Pro, that means that they could roll a bunch of cellular support features into Mac OS 27. And then they'd be ready for that.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like I understand where Bob is coming from in that like the cheapest iPad has this option, but that's just because that's been that way forever. So iPads have similar options. They just always have. So they will. And eventually, all Macs will as well, but we're just not at that point. And if they're going to introduce it, they want it to make a bang on a big bang product,

not like a bang on a small bang product, which is what this computer will be. We'll care about it and find it interesting. but it's not going to, you know, it's not going to set the wall and fire. People are going to be very excited. It will probably sell very well, but it's not really the banner product that you would maybe want to add like a brand new feature like this too. Now, if you would like to send in a question of your own for us to answer on a future episode of the show, go to Upgradefeedback.com and send us your Ask Upgrade question, but you can also send in your feedback, follow up or a snail talk question there too. Thank you to our members and supporters of Upgrade Plus.

You can get longer ad-free episodes each and every week. I want to ask Jason what he thinks about Dave Filoni, taking the creative reigns of Star Wars in Upgrade Plus today. So if that is of interest to you, go to getupgradeplus.com. You can find this show on YouTube. We have a full video version. Just search for Upgrade Podcast, and you can see us speak as well as here.

If this, that's your kind of thing. Thank you to Squarespace, FitBod, and Century for their support of this week's episode. But most of all, as always, thank you for listening. next time. Say goodbye, Jason Snow. I'll see you in episode 600. Get your picks ready.