This Week in Tech 1036 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's time for twit this week in tech. Harry mccracken is here, the technologizer jason heiner, jason snell it's old home week got some great people on to talk about, of course, everything apple announced on monday at the wwdc the new android 16 and it's finally here the arrival of quantum computing. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Twit Podcasts you love.
00:30
From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1036, recorded Sunday, June 15th 2025. Apple Reflux. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show where we talk about the week's tech news. I like to bring in veteran technology reporters on this show. I think, if you include me, we've got about 400 years worth of experience. No, it can't be that much. 50 times four. I don't know what it is. Jason Heiner, how long have you been covering tech? 25?
01:12 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
years.
01:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there you go. He's editor-in-chief of ZDNet now. It's good to see you, my dear old friend. Great to be here.
01:17 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
A pleasure, a pleasure.
01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And with a distinguished panel, old friends of mine as well. So, uh, yeah, it'd be fun. You all know each other, which is cool. Harry mccracken, the technologizer technologizer, how? Now at fast company. How long have you been covering tech?
01:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I started doing it professionally in 1991, so 34 years that's nice.
01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I'm gonna beat you all, but that's good. So we got 25 34, that's 59 jason snell from six colorscom. How long you've been in this business?
01:51 - Jason Snell (Guest)
uh, depending on how you count about 32 years oh my well, 31, 32, something like that.
01:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We're going past 100 because I've been doing this since the late 80s I do have something I can pull out for cases like this, which is right after I got out of high school, which was 1982, I wrote a couple of pieces for creative computing, so got me beat um in very instances like this yes, we're close, because I I wrote my first piece for bite I think was 85.
02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I wrote for a couple of atari magazines before that, probably 83.
02:26 - Jason Snell (Guest)
So we're close. I wasn't in high school, I was a grown man. Compute magazine paid me for a basic program I wrote when I was 14 that's right, that counts about it.
02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That definitely that counts. Didn't you just recently resurrect that program?
02:40 - Jason Snell (Guest)
no, no, no, no, I don't think so.
02:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody I was talking to had done the same thing and he got it working again.
02:47 - Jason Snell (Guest)
No, that one's lost to history, although, trust me, it's not that hard to make a blackjack program.
02:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very easy. And which basic was it?
02:55 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It was Commodore basic because it was on a Commodore PET, so there was no graphics, it was literally just numbers before the VIC-20 and the C64. The Commodore PET had no graphics mode at all, so that was interesting. But yeah, I type really fast, in part because in the computer magazines of the early days they would give you programs to type in and so I got really good at typing without looking, because I was looking at the magazine and then typing the code in, and that's why I can type fast to this day.
03:27 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I actually did an article on the history of basic where I interviewed the editor of compute, who decided to get rid of the listings, which for them was a big decision because they were the most list centric magazine at the time well, it was.
03:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The bulk of the magazine was in programs you could typeutable code basic code. There were no pictures, it was just code.
03:49 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I guess they could put some ads around it, though I mean basic, so it was readable, but a lot of them still. At the end there were like 80 lines of data statements that were completely inscrutable.
03:58 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Right, right, yeah. What if ChatTPT can write code in BASIC?
04:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I've tried to get it to write TRS-80 BASIC and the last time I tried it was terrible at it. Ah, interesting, I don't think I can tell one old microcomputer BASIC from another, that's probably what it is If you're doing things like graphics commands. It was awful, although I keep meaning to try to feed a lot of TRS-80 listings into some LLm to see if that helps it's a good idea.
04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will say it does common list quite well, because common list was standardized in the 80s and so all the stuff it's reading are you know it's the same and it codes common list like a champ.
04:35 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Does apple bay, apple uh script pretty well too right, does apple script pretty well and I um, I can't verify how good it is, but I got it to generate some hyper talk for HyperCard. There's some of that in there too, but it's you know. Basically the question is is there enough on the internet as an example? And if there is it?
04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
can do it, but I like what you said, harry, because it's not standardized BASIC. There were so many different BASICs.
04:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And the guys who invented BASIC were really unhappy about that. They really looked down on TRS-80.
05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kevin and Kurt said there should be.
05:06 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
AppleSoft and they came up with something called True Basic in the 80s.
05:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember that, yes.
05:09 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Which was a reaction to the fact that basic had become so unstandardized.
05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's not talk about the week's tech news. Let's talk about last century's tech news.
05:20 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
This is an article I wrote for Time when basic turned 50, I think.
05:25 - Jason Snell (Guest)
So last century in tech is what the show is.
05:27 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Last century in tech.
05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not a bad show. People have often asked me if I would do a tech nostalgia program because I think people like them, some people People of a certain age anyway like that, and maybe the youngs like to hear how hard it was. It becomes history now. Yeah, it's history compared to what they're doing. Well, everything old is new again. Apple has brought back Windows XP Vero to be the new Apple UI. Apple, of course, had its WWDC on Monday. Jason, you were there. So was our good friend Harry. You were one role apart at the apple park, that's true, in the shade. One thing that didn't get a lot of coverage verge mentioned it. We didn't see it because we were watching a canned video, but you guys were there. There was a protester, was there not?
06:18 - Jason Snell (Guest)
yep there was one I was also there. Oh, you were there too, jason. Now I'm feeling left out.
06:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I saw jason from across the room but unfortunately we didn't get to say hi in person.
06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was also there. Oh, you were there too, Jason. Now.
06:25 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I'm feeling left out. I saw Jason from across the room, but unfortunately we didn't get to say hi in person.
06:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will never get an invite to Apple Park, but that's okay. Yeah, a pro-Palestinian Apple employee stood up and apparently harangued for 30 seconds before being escorted out.
06:41 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, I was surprised that it took them that long. I thought they would be a little more on guard, but they. It sort of took a little while where everybody was kind of looking at each other all the security people like what are we going to do with this guy?
06:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and then they took him away craig federighi was speaking at the time.
06:53 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
He didn't didn't pause after those microsoft events, you would think that every uh big tech company would be on guard the difference was this was inside the apple campus.
07:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I mean pretty hard to get in.
07:04 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Well, I heard it was an employee who was about to leave.
07:09 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Microsoft for their 50th anniversary was on campus and they had protesters.
07:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot of Microsoft employees are unhappy about Azure's involvement in the Israeli-Gaza-Palestinian conflict.
07:20 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Sabrina Ortiz, who was there also from ZDNet, you know, is our AI reporter. She said she's been to. You know she's been to almost all the developer conferences Microsoft, build, google, io, wwdc, a couple other ones. She said there's been. This has happened at almost every one that she's been to this year.
07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, less obvious at google's shoreline event and less even obvious at apple's event, which everybody outside of the campus was watching on tape well it was.
07:52 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It was an intro. So tim cook and craig federighi come out before the show and they say hey, everybody, you know, because there's a big group of developers and press there and then they play the video. So the, the, the protesters started shouting in the last couple of sentences of federighi before they rolled the video. So the, the, the protesters started shouting in the last couple of sentences of favorigi before they rolled the video, and so, you know, we couldn't hear him. It was kind of ineffective, other than to acknowledge that there was a protester and then they were gone. It was kind of I, I couldn't hear a word. He was saying and he was probably, you know, he was probably 30 feet from me well as with this show.
08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, life intrudes into tech, sometimes from time to time um, so this new liquid glass. It's funny how the reactions have been all over the place. Max stories had an article calling it.
08:36 - Jason Snell (Guest)
What, uh, opinionated design that was one of the lines I mean there. That was like a summation of, of a bunch of uh, the quick takes afterward.
08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, now, after the fact, you guys have had some time to think about it Most of you have probably installed the developer preview. I haven't, but you guys live on the edge. What do you think?
08:58 - Jason Snell (Guest)
You know, first off, it's a new design. It's always hard to judge. I'm trying to not rush in because it's human nature to reject anything that's new. And that doesn't mean that every new design is good it really doesn't. But it does mean that I am less inclined to listen to people who see something and immediately say, oh, that's terrible, or who have been complaining about Apple's design trends for a while and say, see, this is right, it's like.
09:24
I don't think that tells us anything. I think you need to kind of consider and, um, consider that it's new and that all of us have to kind of like, drink it in and and and sleep on it a little bit and spend some time with it. And so, you know, I I think it is ambitious, I think it's interesting, I think they're kind of showing off their, their GPU power that they can do something like some of this stuff. I think some of it is, you know, I think it's pretty sometimes and ugly sometimes, and I have a real question about, like, what they're going to ship. But I'll tell you, if you've only judged it based on the Mac OS beta, it looks really bad on Mac OS right now. On an iPhone, it looks really good. So I mean it is.
10:08
It's a work in progress in a way, and I wonder how they'll react or how they'll react to the reaction to it. But, um, I do think it needed. They needed a new design that was considered across all their devices. They really have been patching designs and importing one design language into another device that was based on a completely different design for quite a while now, and they really kind of needed a reset. Um, I will expect that it'll be painful for a little while, but in the end I I'm I'm optimistic about it, but like I mean it is, it is a fresh coat of paint. That's what it is.
10:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To me it seems more than a fresh coat of paint, like it's a's really. Everything's gonna look a lot different.
10:46 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yes, it feels very apple-like. That was the my reaction to it, especially on so I. I did it on ios first, then ipad os, then mac os, and on iphone and ipad os it just again it felt very apple-like and the consistency was was nice to to jason snell's point, you know. And then when I even started on mac os, then I started getting a little uncomfortable yeah oh, this is a lot different.
11:11
I like this. This is, this is um, I'm feeling a little. I I felt the reaction that the jason mentioned, like, okay, I'm now, I'm getting a little uncomfortable. I'm trying to, I'm trying to give this the benefit of the doubt, but I'm still getting used to it. There. It feels the most different on a Mac, I think, than it does on the others.
11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bloomberg managed to get a think piece out of two data points that and the fact that they have skeuomorphic icons in the Airbnb app to write an entire piece called Big Tech is Dealing Flat Design a Death Blow. Skeuomorphism is back.
11:45 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I mean a point, I mean it's. It is I mean because it's trying to ape glass. It is a little skeuomorphic, although not like super skeuomorphic where everything is a green velvet or anything no, no, nothing like that.
11:57
But I would say, yeah, this is the to your point about it being a not a fresh coat of paint. What I would say is I feel like something like ios 7. When they really redesigned it was functionally a very different way of interacting with the iphone in a lot of areas, and this doesn't feel like that to me. It feels, using an iphone or an ipad, like I've been using my ipad. I installed this on my ipad that I use all day and I had another ipad waiting just in case I it was disaster. It wasn't. It works really well, but it also it looks different. It doesn't feel that different and so it's not as disruptive, I think, to a user as some previous redesigns have been. It's more like a visual refresh than anything. There's more animations, there's a different look, but it doesn't like remap, how you view notifications or something like they all still pretty much are a bubble that is in the lock screen and like it's not that different look at this, though.
12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is uh, this is an airbnb icon from austin cars article in bloomberg. That is vivid. That is not skeuomorphism.
13:02 - Jason Snell (Guest)
That that makes me hungry and apple's not doing that which is so we've got two different kind of views of what the future of UI design might be.
13:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, I think it's definitely going to be a work in progress until it ships and in some ways, probably a work in progress for the next few years, because there's just a lot they can do with this and the devil is in the details. And anytime you introduce transparency, you're opening up the possibility of stuff being extremely hard to read and you have to kind of balance the cool transparency with just being able to read the labels and expect it to get better before the fall. But iOS 7 also kind of led to additional iterations and the updates that followed using that as the foundation, and I would expect something similar to happen here.
13:50 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Accessibility was the first thing that got called out. You know, because of the, the clear, the clearness of the, the notifications, then, depending on what your background is, they can be difficult to read. You can turn them off. Depending on what your background is, they can be difficult to read, you can turn them off. You can go into accessibility and make them so that they are easier to read.
14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'll be the test how many people who don't have accessibility issues decide to go back to the old style.
14:15 - Jason Snell (Guest)
That's exactly it, because accessibility I think it's great and Apple has a commitment to it, and in some of their sessions this week, the designers said you know, we've designed this with some different looks based on your accessibility settings, and there's different ways you can reduce animation, you can reduce transparency there's lots of things you can do and that they've designed this with the accessibility settings in mind. So it's not an afterthought. It really is sort of like they wanted to be able to scale, and my friend, shelley Brisbane, who writes about a lot of accessibility stuff, said back in iOS seven there really weren't as robust a set of accessibility settings as there are now, and so it is something that like, if you're really worried about it, there are probably going to be features under accessibility to change what the design looks like. There's a good argument to be made about, like why is that under accessibility? Uh, instead of just saying these are design settings, but um, but it's fine.
15:08
Wherever it is, all of us can probably take advantage of one or two accessibility settings. So I think that that's I. I think it's fine. I think the question is exactly what you said, leo, which is does everybody have to turn on those settings or does almost nobody have to turn on those settings, and in between between those two there's a spectrum, and I think that the more people have to resort to the accessibility settings, the more of a failure. The design is right. They want it to be something that most people will love, as is, and if you don't love it, there's a setting which is great. But if everybody is rushing to turn on opacity in glass, then they failed. How?
15:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
much of this is driven by vision pro and apple's ambitions towards augmented reality I think not.
15:53 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I think okay, I think they designed vision pro and it was almost like a spearhead for this design, where they knew it was going to go everywhere, but they needed to start somewhere. I think that they were inspired by some of the choices they made right, because the design team had to design that from scratch. That was a new ui for them and they they, I think knew that they were going to do a big redesign and so sure I think there's some inspiration from it, but I don't think it's not no, no, not backward inspiration forward, like let's get people ready, I just to start seeing through things, to having heads up displays, things like that I I'm skeptical of that.
16:25
I think it's more about using their materials of their touchscreen devices than anything else.
16:29
I I do think that they built vision pro and they learned a bunch of stuff that they thought, well, this is kind of cool, we should do that for everything, and so that they have. I think that's that's so far out, leo, like I mean, I I just don't know if you're going to build an AR device in five or 10 years that you would make those changes today. I do think it's possible. I know Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has been talking about this a lot that they want to do a kind of like quote unquote all glass iPhone next year for the 20th anniversary of the iPhone, and that this is a good fit for that. I mean, I don't know about that story, but I will say sure, I'm sure this design was created knowing what the next couple of years of products are that are in the pipeline and if there's a folding iPhone, if there's an all glass iPhone, whatever that means. I'm sure they took those into account, but I don't. The AR story feels like way off to me.
17:18 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So I have the same skepticism. But I was sitting with Scott Stein from CNET you know my colleague there and so I was sort of asking him this same question. You know, like how much do you think the design language is related to some of this? You know mixed reality kind of future and of course you know, because he thinks about this stuff all the time, he's been thinking about it for years. He said that in his mind that a lot of the ways thinking about what do windows look like when you have it on any background, right, what do they? Because you can't predict what does it happen when you have certain windows of different depths, the way that you do in Vision Pro.
18:04
So he was a little bit more on the scale of like he feels like this starts to lay the tracks for some of that. You know future when there, when there are glasses, when there's a cheaper vision pro that is accessible to more people, and and some of those devices you know are, um, you know, more, uh, prevalent than they are today. I mean, we have to be honest, there are hundreds of thousands of people who have vision pros. There are 2.5 billion people using the other devices. So I tend to be a little more on the skeptical side as well, that that's a long journey from here to there. And yet I think it is compelling to think like okay, well, if we start to think about some of the design language and think of depth in different ways, then some of these things do seem to lay the tracks a little bit for that world.
18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course, that was perhaps the headline of the Apple event. They saved till the end what I consider one of the most interesting parts of the apple event pretty much a redesign of how the ipad works my goodness yes oh yeah.
19:10 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, it's a, it's a huge thing. I yeah, my piece on six colors is that apple got over its hang-ups a little bit. Which is they? They basically went back and redesigned. It's not a. They did like split view and slide over and then they did stage manager and they iterated on that a little bit. This OS, just to be clear, they threw that away. It's gone. They built an entirely new windowing model that you can turn on and off and so you can use it in single window mode, but if you're in the windowing mode it just works basically like Mac Windows do.
19:42
I think when I say that Apple has kind of gotten over its hangups, one of the things is that there was a period where they kept trying to do the iPad is like not quite the Mac, but let's reinvent it and put a spin on it. And I think that I felt a lot of confidence coming from people at Apple that, like you know what the Mac did, this it's good. Let's just like why are, why are we not just using something that's familiar? And uh, whatever that hang-up was, they, they definitely got over it and, having played with it this week, like it's good, it's.
20:12
It's good because it's familiar and it works it's a computer, not a consumption device, and and honestly, I felt like for five years they were fighting it's good and it works, and they're like, no, we're gonna, no, we're going to revisit this and we're going to move your windows around, and I mean, harry uses an iPad even more than I do.
20:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, you were iPad, complete right.
20:30 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I have been primarily iPad since 2011. And I have to say I have to say I'm not over my hangups. I feel like virtually 100% of the comments I've seen about this new approach have been extremely favorable, although some of them are from people who are not really iPad people, and I kind of feel like if you're not an iPad person, then who cares what you think?
20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think this is a renaissance for the iPad.
20:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
The thing I'm concerned about is that I basically feel like windows that float and overlap in a lot of ways are computing's original sin. The more time I spend having to fool around with windows and drag them and get to one that's below another one, the less I can do what I want to do, which is to create stuff or consume stuff. And I thought Splitview was pretty good for letting me do a lot of stuff without wrestling with Windows. And I don't think it's entirely clear whether somebody who doesn't want to drag Windows around can get anything except for this full screen mode, which does not offer Split View. And if they offered Split View as an alternative or potentially offered this new interface, but offered some way where you could kind of ignore it if you wanted to and just work with like two large windows at a once, at once, I'd be happy. But it's not entirely clear whether that'll be possible and I feel like nobody else is rooting for split view to survive except for me, so it might not survive.
21:58 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I'm surprised that they built split view and then they didn't make it easy to get to like. Split view is essentially you can tile two windows in multi-view.
22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hitting that button by accident.
22:09 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean you have to know it's there to use that stuff. Yeah, and I don't understand why stage manager survives, because maybe they're planning for bigger screen ipads and multiple screens. I'm thinking about plugging in a second screen to my ipad well, actually, on an ipad I think stage manager is terrible, but on an external screen it's not bad. So you do need the bigger the screen, the more um, it makes sense to have kind of more elaborate windowing options and it's optional now, like uh, it is on the mac.
22:37 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It no longer is a fundamental part of ipad windowing stage manager. It's just a window manager if you want to use it another choice.
22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It feels like we're relitigating one of the earliest battles in guis. Xerox Park had a tiled window interface, not overlapping windows. But Steve Jobs, when he visited, misunderstood. He thought he'd or maybe it was Andy Hertzfeld, I, I think, I I think it was saw it and thought he saw overlapping windows. So he wrote overlapping windows into the Lisa, into QuickDraw, even though Xerox PARC didn't do it, because it's computationally difficult and maybe aesthetically it's problematic. Harry sounds like he's a tiling windows guy.
23:17 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And Bill Atkinson, who I mean was a genius who just passed away, I think contributed a lot to the ability of GUIs to have sophisticated windows.
23:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, maybe I should say Bill Atkinson, because he wrote Quickdraw, not Andy.
23:29 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I should mention that part of this, this reorder. They also added all of those same window tiling features that they added to the Mac last year, where even with a keyboard shortcut, you can put you know side by side or four and a quarter. So there's tiling in there. But it's not a tiling system. It's freeform windows with tiling commands that you can assign to them. Yeah.
23:53 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, basically, if you want an iPad to work like a Mac, this is fantastic, and there is a lot of other stuff they added that I am enthusiastic about, like the Files app is much more sophisticated. Background tasks work better In a lot of ways. I think they did do a good job of finally making the iPad into a more professional tool.
24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And all of this was to kind of deflect from the fact that they had announced, a year ago at WWDC, siri as a chatbot, which they were not able to do, and I thought, though, that Apple handled it much better than I expected. They basically introduced a bunch of AI features, kind of gracefully integrated into the overall interface, and then said developers, you can do this in your apps too, and said we'll get to the chatbot later. Do you think that was the right thing to do?
24:45 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And they were also open-minded about calling on ChatGPT. When ChatGPT can do something well, so you can do image generation with ChatGPT now.
24:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gurman says it's spring 2026 for the Siri AI upgrade in his Bloomberg rumor piece.
25:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Of course, that's not been announced. That sounds about right, Gurman. It's clear it's not been announced. That sounds about right. It's clear it's not going to be in the fall. It's not going to be in the fall. It'll be a little while after that.
25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the interviews the executives did they did a whole bunch of them with everybody but John Gruber. After the event, they implied that we already have it working inside Apple.
25:21 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
We just want to make sure that it's completely reliable before it really releases yeah look, I think I know some people that have worked on um in siri and um are familiar with some of the code base and they've said, even they've been saying for a couple years, and they could be wrong. So I want to be, you know, honest about this, like they could be wrong. I think there are different opinions. I've sort of asked people um in my briefings with apple, so I asked them, as, as you know, respectfully as I could, this question, which is that the, the code base of siri, goes back. You know all the way to like darpa, you know apple acquired a company right.
26:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it wasn't even done inside, yeah.
26:03 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, so, so that you know. So, so, adapting that code base, my, my question to them was like, how do you adapt that code base to the you know, llms, right? Which is, how do you put, put that on top of it? And so the people that I know that that say they say they're going to have to start over. The people that you know had some familiarity with the code base at Apple, they say they're going to have to start over. The people that had some familiarity with the code base at Apple, they say they're going to have to start over. It's just not something you can build on. You've seen how it struggled the last few years.
26:29
So that's one school of thought. There's another school of thought. So inside Apple they're like well, macos is based on Unix code base which, like, look at that, over time, like that's been hardened in, tuned, it's, you know, has shown its strength. You know, by having a long code base it's not necessarily a bad thing. So there's like two. There's sort of two minds on this, but I think no one, you know, believes that it's really where anywhere close to where it needs to be yet. But I think that still, apple's larger strategy and I wrote about this.
27:07
This was what I wrote after WWDC, which is the headline, was Apple's de-chat modification of AI is nearly complete, which is like they're like our thing is not that you're gonna sit there chatting with chat bots all day right, like that's not that far away from a command line. Instead, we're gonna put these features where people are actually using them and finding the ways that they can make the most sense. To take the best things that LLMs can do, like language translation a great thing like taking pattern recognition and large bodies of text summarization. We're going to take those things and we're going to move them straight into the places where people can use them. I think there is some validity to this approach, based on some research that ZDNet and Aberdeen Research did some research this year and what we found was we did a survey that we published last month that we found that 8% of people said they were willing to pay for AI features in their devices.
28:07
That was far less than we expected. 69% said they would stop using the device if there were AI features they couldn't turn off.
28:17
So, there's a huge gap between the story that Google and OpenAI and Microsoft and Anthropic are telling about these things and the general public's sort of massive enthusiasm gap there and maybe understanding gap of these things, and our conclusion was that a lot of it is based on privacy right, that people are not real trustworthy. They've seen what happened with especially meta and at times, google with privacy and they're not real sure that they can trust these AI features. And so you know Apple, I think, taking some of the features, sometimes they use AI and they don't even call it AI. They just try to make a smarter feature out of it, and my sense and what I put forward in this piece is that that's probably the best way to start getting people used to using these features. Just give them better translation in the translation app.
29:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Right, it's still not as good as Google Translation, but it is better.
29:13 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I think that's a smarter way and it's going to get people more used to using these features, because in the here AI people are pretty skeptical. You know, that survey that we ran was scientific survey of of about 2500 people throughout the us, um, and yeah, it was pretty representative of of various.
29:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah so one thing apple did gloss over is the fact that this was more of a crisis than they let on, because they they basically kind of beheaded the whole department. Uh john g andrea kind of got sent upstairs, uh, a lot of people left. Uh, internally it was a much more turmoil than you saw at wwdc yeah, apple's never going to show that to you.
30:00 - Jason Snell (Guest)
They're never. I mean, that's pr101, especially. It's apple. Pr101 is that you remember they could introduce a disastrous product or product feature and the next time they fix it. What they will not say is we're sorry, this is our apology. They'll say, well, this one is even better, and they move on.
30:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's just that once, to my knowledge, and that's what the trash can Mac over Jason's right shoulder, yeah it is, yeah, they is. Yeah, they did apologize for that one.
30:27 - Jason Snell (Guest)
They did sort of, but so anyway it is. It's very much Apple. I would say, like Jason, my fellow Jason, I also wrote a piece about this that I said Apple intelligence shifts gears and the idea is, look, I think last year Apple felt so much pressure for the industry and for investors and all that they needed to fly the AI flag and they kind of lost track of who they are. And this year I felt like full credit to them. They remembered who they were. First off, everything that they announced is in the betas, which means basically they didn't vaporware anything.
31:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No pre-announcements.
31:02 - Jason Snell (Guest)
yeah, If there are things that they want to ship in the next year that aren't going to ship this fall. They didn't vaporware no pre-announcements. Yeah, if there are things that they want to ship in the next year that aren't going to ship this fall, they didn't talk about them. They'll do that later. I think that's super smart. I think that, as jason said, they integrated a bunch of ai and ml stuff throughout the operating system. They also got off their uh, I think they're kind of a well, we need to invent it approach where they're like, yeah, put chat GPT where it needs to be. They're update to Xcode. They had this thing called Swift Assist that they showed us a year ago and never shipped, and I went into the same room with the same demo people this year and they said it's already out in developer beta one and what they did with Swift Assist. So it's AI coding right and there's a huge amount of growth and pressure there. They took what was originally a feature with their model that they were going to work on and instead Xcode now will work with ChatGPT or literally any other on or off device model you want to plug in with a URL and an API key and it will be completely integrated with Xcode, and that's a great example of Apple getting over it, getting over their discomfort with relying on third-party LLMs when they need to. I think we're going to see more of that.
32:09
I mean, of course, there are table stakes. Apple needs to have good models. They have allowed their app developers now to use their on-device models, which could actually be a boon for third-party app developers, but they also are remembering oh yeah, we make devices that people like to use and maybe we should focus on making the platforms for those devices good and not overpromise, because we're panicked about AI and it was just a good like. There's still lots of issues with Apple's AI infrastructure and their research and all of that kind of. In the long run, there are lots of issues there. Just try to do an image in image playgrounds and you'll see it there. Just try to do an image image playgrounds and you'll see it. But it feels like they are understanding who they are a little bit more, and I think that's good, because last year I think they actually kind of lost the plot I'm a little surprised that android has not raced further ahead with ai, given google is google maybe they saw jason's uh survey maybe, so I mean, I agree with that.
33:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I also think, besides people being worried about privacy, we've just seen so many AI features that are terrible and a smaller set of AI features that are really good, and you know, the industry has to put up with stuff that actually is helpful, and I was a little bit hopeful at WWDC because that seemed to be what Apple was focusing on, rather than impress anybody that they were AI wizards.
33:29 - Jason Snell (Guest)
And the empowering of third-party developers. At a time when Apple's relationship with third-party developers is kind of at a low, the fact that you basically get access to their on-device models for free and we know that those are private because they're on-device they opened private cloud compute, which is their private cloud infrastructure. That's open in shortcuts now. So not the third-party app developers, but like I think they're sending a signal that in the long run, if you're developing an app for the iPhone or the iPad or the Mac, you are going to get access to Apple's private models and like that's a really good thing. Not only do you get the power of those models in your app for free or for cheap in the case of the cloud model probably but also it's got the privacy story that goes with it and I think that that's a way that Apple can kind of say this is what being an app on our platform brings you. So like I think I think they're making some smart decisions.
34:21
Sometimes I think we let the fact that they got behind on their LLM technology kind of cloud other places where they have been making good machine learning decisions for a decade. They blew that one and last year it seemed like they blew that one and they were freaked out, and this year it seems like they've got a game plan. They still got a. I would say I'm much more positive about them in general. I do think they're going to need to prove it when it comes to their models. But you know, although otherwise I I think that because they're open to other models, they're going to be okay we're going to take a little break because I do want to talk.
34:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, we probably won't spend as much time on it, but google did release android 16. That'll be a three-minute conversation. Harry's just written a piece about quantum computing. Ibm announced that it's going to have a real quantum computer in just a few years. A lot more to talk about in just a bit with our esteemed panel of tech journalists Jason Heiner, harry McCracken and Jason Snell.
35:24
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36:56
I have it on my pixel. You'd be hard pressed to see a whole lot of differences. It's not a giant release, anything like what Apple's planning in the fall. In fact, what Google did and what they have been doing is held back some features for monthly Pixel feature drops. This has been their new thing of late, but there's a new live update notification which mimics the live activities notifications on iPhone, which, by the way, I really like. I'm glad to see that on Android there's group notifications so you can mush them all together again.
37:41
Another thing Apple has been doing, more important than anything else though, I think advanced protection, which adds security for your android device, initially again for the pixel online attacks, harmful apps, unsafe websites, scam calls and more. You have to go to advanced protection to enable it um, anything else to talk about. It's there. Uh, there's dark artwork now in the media player. Uh, health connect lets you. It's funny because people complain about Apple copying Android. Almost all of this is stuff that Apple's been doing, that Android's now. But this is good. You want cross-pollinization between platforms? Right? That's good for users.
38:28 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I do think it's weird that Google has not done more to kind of make Android clearly kind of the first well-known existing operating system where AI is absolutely at its core and is doing transformative things, because if anybody has the opportunity to do that, it's probably google and, uh, if they're working on that, they have not really told us about it or shown it and in fact, it sometimes seems like android is not one of their top three or four priorities these days well, there was a rumor I don't think it's uh true spread by the creator of one of the third party roms, that Google was about to abandon AOSP, its open source version of Android.
39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if that's true. I think he was maybe overreacting, but still, android does not seem as important to Google as it once was. Do you think they're worried that the courts are going to force them to divest?
39:26 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
worried that the courts are going to force them to divest. They're worried about the courts forcing them to divest something, um, although that's something, might be chrome or something, or their ad business rather, rather than their mobile operating system I thought we were going to know it sooner than now.
39:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought we were going to know in the end of may, but I guess the judge is still debating that one let's talk anyway. Chrome seems more likely, chrome or that business seem or stop paying apple 20 billion dollars a year to be the the default search engine I mean, if they don't somebody else will right.
39:56
It's a lot of people right. I'm sure sam altman's sitting there ready to write a check any minute. Now that's google's biggest threat, I think, not government intervention, not apple, but but ai and I. You're right, harry, gemini is a good, is a strong platform, but you would never know it. Really it doesn't get all the press, it doesn't get the attention. Partly google fumbled it with, uh, their initial releases of Gemini talking about putting Elmer's glue on your pizza and recommending eating rocks and things like that. That kind of stuff sticks in people's minds. In fact, when you talked about your survey, jason, I honestly I don't think people are worried about privacy. I think they just are creeped out by AI in general.
40:42 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
There are a lot of things it's not very good at. So the hard thing about the chatbot is you do it and you figure out pretty fast. I ask it purposefully, ask it things that I know, sometimes just to see if it's going to give me the right answer. And it's still far too high a number of times where it gives me wrong answers or inaccurate or just almost dangerously incorrect.
41:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's how we judge search engines. All these years, you'd put your name in and see what they came up with. See what happens. Yeah, now we do that with AI, and it's just as dumb. Google is buying out. This is actually, I think, a bigger story than I saw. I mean, the information had the exclusive, so maybe that's why, but Google is offering voluntary buyouts to employees across search, knowledge and information. They're offering buyouts this all started on Tuesday to US employees in Core, which is the engineering team working on Google's underlying technical infrastructure, research, marketing and communications. I'm not sure how big they are. They laid off 20,000 people at the beginning of the year.
41:59 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I wish we had a chart here, because I think this is more related to anything than the massive overhiring that the tech companies did during COVID in 2020, 21, 22. If you look at the number of people they hired, like Meta for example, it's just now starting to get back to almost about where it was in pre those years, pre 2020. And there was so much hiring that they did. They just hired huge numbers of folks and they overhired and now they're having to rationalize some of their costs around that stuff. It was a bit of an arms race, right. Whoever could hire, they were trying to hire the best talent the fastest that they could. And the thing that's really rough right now is I know some people who've just recently graduated that have graduated from computer science, computer engineering.
42:58
They cannot find jobs because all these tech companies have let go so many um folks and so now the the market's been flooded with a lot of, uh, a lot of folks and they you know, if you're trying to hire in the last six months or a year and you just are a new graduate, it's just, it's pretty brutal there's another reason, uh and I floated this last week, but let me, you guys might have some uh handle on this uh, in the tax code.
43:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, for a long time, the tax code allowed you to uh write off r d expensive which which includes, by the way, engineers and coders uh in the same year that you spent it. That will change soon to amortizing those costs over five years, which is a huge change in the tax bill for these big companies. Uh, this was in the 2017 law. Uh, the congress didn't want. They wanted to keep it revenue neutral, so they want to mention this change, but it is. It is now going to kind of kick in and and at this is a, an article by Catherine Bob in uh Quartz. She says that that's probably the reason more than half a million tech workers have been laid off in the last two years because of section 174. It's gutting in-house software and product development because they can't write it off in the same year that it's incurred.
44:26
Anybody got a line on that, or is that I? This was out of the blue. When I read this, I went holy cow. Yeah, I hadn't seen that for 70 years, american companies could deduct 100 of qualified research and development spending in the year they incurred the cost that salary, software contractor payments, if it continues, if it contributes to creating or improving a product that's off the top line right there, fully deductible. Uh, that was changed in 2017 and now, uh, you know, it was changed in a way that it wouldn't really kick in until uh now but it's, but uh, it didn't start affecting people until 2022. So I don't know.
45:11 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It does make sense. Actually, it's interesting. Like I said, leo, I wish I had the chart with me, but if you look at the chart at some of these companies, the hiring 2020, 2021, 2022, and then it's stair-stepping downward right, and that's why downward right and that's why or at least that's one contention that's the tax code.
45:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I haven't heard any coverage of this, so I I this is the. I saw the story in quartz and it was repeated, of course, in a lot of publications, but it came out, of course. I don't. I don't know any more about it. I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff, but as a small business owner I know if you can deduct it in the year you spend it, that's much better than spreading it out over five years. That's a big, big difference. All right, moving on, let's talk about quantum computing. Harry, you're writing a cover not a cover piece, but a big think piece for a fast company. I saw this this week in the MIT Technology Review. Ibm is planning to build the world's first large-scale, error-corrected quantum computer by 2028. Now, harry, I had thought quantum computers were like fusion reactors, this stuff of science fiction.
46:23 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean well, they've definitely been making progress, and the piece I wrote, which will be up on our website shortly, is not so much a think piece as an explainer. Like, all of a sudden, my colleagues who work at our headquarters in New York, who are not full-time technology people had been hearing enough about quantum that they were intrigued in a way they hadn't, which is how this story came to be, and it's trying to get kind of curious people who don't know a lot about this topic up to speed. And I mean the state where we are now is that progress has been made. It's not just stuck in the labs. Ibm has made progress. Google and Amazon and Microsoft have all had major announcements in terms of breakthroughs in the last few months. Smaller companies like D-Wave have also kind of reached an inflection point.
47:32
Computers are doing the kind of stuff that people envision, which is essentially like coming up with amazing new drugs through forms of computing that you couldn't ever have done before. But they are getting there they are. We are at a point where I think there have been some examples of quantum computers performing calculations that could not have been done before and might even be useful. They're not yet ones that will change the world. But I think that for a long time people kind of thought that maybe it might be like fusion and something that people love to talk about as a breakthrough. That would always be years away and the biggest stuff is probably still years away, but but I don't think that it's fanciful at this point the uh ibm computer is going to be called starling.
48:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The big breakthrough is an error correction. That's that's kind of the. The challenge of this. Qubits are, it's kind of in superposition. They're they're a little fuzzy.
48:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, essentially controlling quantum physics is really hard yeah.
48:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm amazed we can even consider it to be honest with you.
48:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It's extremely hard to get a qubit to respond in exactly the same way every time, in the way that we're used to bits being very reliable, unreliable, and the way, generally speaking, you solve that is you take a bunch of unreliable qubits and you pool them together into a logical qubit which relies on all of them, but you get out the unpredictability by pooling them, and so logical qubits are really interesting, and if you want to look at numbers that relate to these computers, look at how many logical qubits they have rather than how many physical qubits they have.
49:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The MIT Technology Review says that Starling will have 200 logical qubits. That means it could perform 100 million logical operations consecutively with accuracy, although they say some experts say 100 million is a tenth of what you need. You need at least a billion error-corrected logical operations to execute any useful algorithm. She quotes wolfgang pfaff, who's a physicist at university of illinois, urbana-champaign.
49:36 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
He says it's unlikely this will generate economic value I mean, one of the big challenges about writing about this stuff is that even the people who know a lot about it kind of disagree wildly about how soon it's coming. And a lot of the people who do know a lot also are working for these companies and they're invested in the idea that it is going to happen relatively soon. And if you're working at these companies you can't say that a useful quantum computer is 30 years away because you probably would not be investing in it.
50:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but a lot of the major work on this stuff sort of happened 20, 25 years ago and uh, it has gotten us somewhere ibm says 2028 for starling and then, shortly after 2029, it plans to build blue jay, which will contain 2,000 logical qubits and will be capable of 1 billion logical operations. So maybe it is closer than we thought. Nist is preparing for that. Of course. They have quantum hard encryption technologies available now so that you can start encrypting your stuff, preparing for a future where these computers will be able to crack strong encryption.
50:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
The software is a very large component of this and is kind of making progress in parallel, because you don't, you know, once you actually have the quantum computers you need algorithms that can accomplish useful things. But it's been a little bit of a chicken and the egg. But there are a number of startups that are entirely focused on algorithms and other stuff, like IBM has this thing called Qiskit, which is essentially a platform for creating quantum algorithms that works on their computers, but it's open and not solely for IBM quantum computers.
51:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I wonder where quantum intersects with the ai, you know, revolution where benita was asking that.
51:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does this make them? Does this make smarter, ai?
51:33 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
because we're cheaper because one of the biggest challenges is ai is massively unprofitable, right like llms are massively unprofitable right now, because it takes so much computing power to do it. And so I I wonder, uh, you know why? And there's so much, there's like so much hyperbole around um generative ai, um, and and yet like even open ai is is years and years away from profitability, right as high as their value well, wait a minute.
52:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sam altman on his blog post this week said that chat gpt uses 0.34 watt hours for each query about what an oven would use in a little over a second. And it uses 0.000085 gallons of water a 50th of a teaspoon per query. Now, do you believe, sam altman?
52:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
here's what I do believe. I do believe that they are massively unprofitable, and they've said it, and they said we're not even close to being profitable.
52:30 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
So, however much it costs, they're using a metric ton of it to do everything that they're doing what he didn't mention is, yeah, 0.34 watt hours per query, but we do a billion queries a day, so do the math on that A billion times a 50th of a teaspoon adds up to a significant amount of water actually, generally speaking, I think the conventional wisdom among people who know what they're talking about is that quantum and AI will work together and there's an opportunity for quantum to do things like train AI models, but quantum is not going to supersede AI and the future is probably about quantum doing some things, such as drug discovery, material science and working in concert with AI, which is also tackling some aspects of some of those same challenges.
53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's closer than it seems and farther than it looks, or something. What was? What is that? Quote, uh, one more, one more uh. You know, of course the president and elon musk had a little bit of a falling out. Elon's been trying to make up to the president, maybe scared that he was he'd lose some of the contracts uh that he has with the federal government, including, uh, the spacex contracts. I don't know if he's gonna, because, uh, there isn't much competition for those contracts. Jeff bezos's rocket company, blue origin, has delayed the second launch of the new glenn from late spring to august 15th. Second launch of the new Glenn from late spring to August 15th. Um it, there, there isn't a lot of competition for what SpaceX does. Boeing, of course is is struggling as well. So that's the latest from according to the information from Blue Origin.
54:17
Let's take a little break. Come back. 23 and me has a new owner, just like the old owner. We'll talk about that and more. Uh, it's great to have uh you here. Harry mccracken, the technologizer at fast company. Uh, jason snell from sixcolorscom and editor-in-chief. No dashes at zd net, mr jason heiner, I checked you right. You don't use dashes. I thought that that was always.
54:45 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Eic was always a dash dash I love that you checked uh the the. I didn't believe you, sure how could that be true?
54:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't gotten up to go get the ap style guide though spoken like a true journalist well, you remember that email was initially e-mail, yeah, and then it became email, capital e, one word, and now it's lowercase e. The language evolves obviously, and I guess internet was also capitalized originally yeah, do we not do that anymore? I remember I was shocked by my spell checker on windows saying it's a capital. I said what?
55:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I capitalized it personally because it is just one thing. But that's not our copy standard, it's not a proper name.
55:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is the rule on that? It has to be a proper name, but the internet is just a technology right.
55:40 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
To me it's a thing. It's a very large, sprawling thing, but it's a thing. I don't know the new yorker, just I started lowercase cnet, which is why this discussion has been in the news lately yeah, I love that, I love the see.
55:57 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
We're all nerds here, you're all writers, we're all nerds, we're talking, so this is such a nerdy.
56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's such a nerdy, such a nerdy topic. Great to have all three of you. Thanks for being here. Our show this week brought to you by Melissa. So we just celebrated our 20th anniversary.
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59:05
So for a while, okay, 23andme what a story. This was the genetic testing company founded by ann wajiski, who is the sister to sus Wojcicki, who recently passed, ran YouTube. Her mother, esther, rented the garage to a couple of guys named Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were starting a little thing called Google. I mean really Silicon Valley royalty. But for some reason and I've never really understood why 23andMe was really struggling. Maybe people didn't want a genetic testing. I did it, everybody in my family did it.
59:43
The board quit, not happy with Wojcicki's governance. Eventually they declared bankruptcy and the bankruptcy court found a buyer, a biotech company called Regeneron, who says we don't want your personal information, but we do want the genotypes and phenotypes, all that data for hundreds of millions of people that 23andMe has collected. That's going to be useful enough for us to make new drugs. That's what Regeneron does. Regeneron dress weirdly and Wojcicki came back and said outbid Regeneron and bought, and just this week bought 23 and me back. It was a nonprofit controlled by Wojcicki that made a bid that outbid Regeneron. Regeneron had been 256 million dollars. She bet 303 million. This. I don't know if this is going to reassure former 23andme customers, because there's some value in 23andme that it's beyond the business. I have already deleted my data from 23andme. Apparently so have 15 of the customers, but that's not close to all what is going on.
01:01:04 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I didn't delete my data um. I probably should have should you do?
01:01:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you think?
01:01:09 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
you think you need to.
01:01:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was kind of waiting to see what happens yeah, the bankruptcy court hired a privacy ombudsman to make sure that that data you know wasn't passed on to some company that was going to use it against you yeah, I haven't been deleted, mine either yeah, I deleted mine, so it's 50, 50. But here's the first of all. Here's the question why did they fail in the first place?
01:01:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
it seems like a good business I feel like none of these companies have figured out how to help people once they've done this test.
01:01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now what I did that partially You're 5% Ashkenazi Jew and 3% indigenous Indian. Now what?
01:01:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I've done a bunch of these, partially because of the genealogical aspect of it. Yes, and there is a lot of, and you get, you get a long list of people you match, but, um, you know a lot of cases. I've tried connecting with his people and they never respond and it's not even entirely clear. You know why you should.
01:02:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know that at least one case in in my ex-wife's family where a guy who was put up for adoption found his family and they had a reunion and it was a big deal.
01:02:19 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
There are a lot of stories like that.
01:02:21 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, I feel like 23 and me's problem was that they were.
01:02:24
They thought that the genetic testing was the entire product and it seems like you need more, right, you need a community that people are going to be in or you need other things, like I know, I think like ancestry and myitage and sites like that that do also are doing.
01:02:39
You know, they're doing family trees online. They're connecting people's family trees, they're doing like deep scanning and search of old archives for newspaper articles and public records about people, the genealogy side of it, and you pay to have access to the larger trees and all that. I was like, okay, well, that's a product and they also do a dna screening. Right, that's a product that goes with it, and I feel like it's either that or it needs to be almost like a facebook sort of thing where you've got a community, so it's all attached together. Because, with 23 and me having done that, I don't even know 10, 12 years ago, like, occasionally, I got somebody who said I think we're a third cousin or whatever, which isn't that exciting. But, um, mostly if you find a near relative and you like ping them, they're not even there because they they ran their dna, they looked and then they went away.
01:03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They haven't gone back.
01:03:28 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It's not an ongoing family, there's no ongoing product to pay for, whereas if you're at something like one of these family tree sites, at least there's an ongoing product that's attached to it, that is related, and I feel like those are the right businesses for this model.
01:03:42 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I give Ancestry money every month but the only money I ever gave 23andMe was when I did the test and I also belong to Family Tree DNA, which actually has a McCracken group, so that they've done a good job of the community side and I can talk to other mccracken. You found other mccrackens and very, very, very, very, very distant relatives, but that's so cool.
01:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I found a few. Uh, I never talked to them, but I but I knew that they must be relatives because they shared a family name. 23 and me had about 14 million customers, so it wasn't a. You know, they had a good customer base. The company, according to the wall Journal, never made a profit. They burned cash across its DNA testing drug development that was the, by the way, and that's why Regeneron wanted it is that there is, in aggregate, some use to this data. Drug companies would love it, right. And they also had a telemedicine business. I didn't even know about that. They don't have a lot of debt, which is interesting of it, right? And they also had a telemedicine business. I didn't even know about that. They don't have a lot of debt, which is interesting.
01:04:41
They just, they just didn't make any money they were valued at six billion dollars briefly after they went public in 2021 yeah, they just weren't sure what they exactly they wanted to be.
01:04:52 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Did they want to build a consumer business, you know right, you know like, like everybody said it? If so, they needed to create a community. They needed to do sort of go sort of more the family tree genealogy route. Or did they want to be more of a drug company or a research company, more like crisper therapeutics or fulgent genetics or some of these other ones Intelia, beam Therapeutics? Those companies and I'm sort of surprised that one of them didn't buy it for the data that's sort of what I expected it to go in that direction.
01:05:30
But there's also, from my understanding, one of the things that probably hurt them was the regulatory environment over the past four years made it very difficult, almost impossible, for any of those companies that I mentioned genomics companies, anybody in healthcare to make any acquisitions. That it was really difficult. As a result, those companies have sort of, you know, complained that they haven't been able to go to the market to get valued as what their true value is because the regulatory environment is so bad. They really have no hopes of getting any kind of acquisition if they were acquired right to be approved because of the regulatory environment in the previous administration and I guess there's, I don't know.
01:06:23
The regulatory environment now is sort of tough to read. I mean, we talked about Google earlier. It appears like Google is going to continue to. You know, the breakup of Google could, you know, be continuing even under the current administration. So it's a little uncertain. But I suspect and this is only a, you know an opinion, I suspect that that Ann Rodzicki, you know, believes that the environment's likely to get better and so that if she can pull off what she tried to do she tried to take the company private when she was there and the board rejected her.
01:07:02
Yeah, the board rejected it, and so I suspect, if she's willing to put this much money forward now that she anticipates that the regulatory environment is going to be better, they could go to the market and get a valuation and that some of these other companies actually could be in the market and get a you know evaluation and that some of these other companies actually could be in the market and make an acquisition. Again, that's, that's pure speculation, but, um, that seems to be you know why she would will be willing to potentially put up a lot of you know her own, um, her own funds and her own reputation.
01:07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It feels like, given that all four of us have done and I bet a lot of our audience has done it, that it was like the pet rock of its time, like 10 years ago, like everybody you know, like oh, let's all do our genetic testing. Like I think we hoped we would learn something from this, like, oh you're you know, you're going to have a higher incidence of heart disease, or something. It turned out to really just be kind of faddish.
01:07:56 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It was about, about it was about like, uh, ancestry, Like you get your family stories, I'm like oh well, you're, you're really Irish or you're really Scottish or whatever yeah. And so and and they did a pretty good job. I mean, it's not perfect and there are people who are skeptical that they they act more certain about your background than you actually are.
01:08:15
but still statistical, statistical it's better than you know. It's better than a story handed down or the fact that, uh, everybody's family names come from their father's side, and so you, you might recognize a mccracken, harry, right, but you've got seven other family names out of eight that you might not even know or pay attention to and like. So, the genetics. It's like aha, we've got science, we're going to find this out and that's interesting. But I will say, for years I've been telling people that my uh family name is dutch, because snell means fast in dutch, and uh, it was not 23 and me that told me the truth it was. It was, uh, my heritage or ancestry, where I found, uh, a detail that took it all the way back to heinrich schnell, who was from germany, and when he came to south.
01:09:02
Now also means fast in german but it was, and I could pinpoint literally the man who emigrated to america that's cool and went by henry snell once he came to south carolina in 1720 or whatever, but that was the family trees. That did it.
01:09:17
That's cool not the genetics so that's the, that's why I I think I mean it is cool to know that that I yes, I am just as british isles as I look, but um, but uh, yeah, it didn't, it didn't blow like. I know people. I know somebody who's a friend of mine, who was adopted, who put his uh dna results in and it came back and said this guy's your father. Whoa right as it would if you, really if your father had to do it too.
01:09:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, in fact, there was a good story in the uh, I think it was this new yorker, the son of new york times a couple of weeks ago, about chinese families who are discovering the real truth about her family. American families are discovering the real truth about her family. American families are discovering the real truth about the Chinese babies that they adopted. They were told stories that weren't in fact true, and that was because there are volunteers who are getting people in China who don't have the money to do genetic testing, like 23andme, to do it, so that they could then try to find relatives. And it's really interesting I did. A couple of years ago.
01:10:19
I was interviewed by Frank Church, who's the father of modern genomics, and he has a company called Nebula Genomics that, for 10 times more, will do your full genome. I mean, literally, it's gigabytes of data. I did it, but this is the same problem. Now what? Okay, great, I have my genome, my full genome, which is not what you get from 23andMe. There are companies you can send it to and they will tell you oh, you shouldn't eat sugar or something, but it's not hugely valuable, I think that's why I think of it as a fad.
01:10:52 - Jason Snell (Guest)
You have 8% DNA.
01:10:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the same day that they announced Ann Wojcski was going to be able to buy 23andme, 27 states in the district of columbia sued, saying customers did not expect their dna data would be sold. I guess that's probably true and the states, uh, are opposed to the sale of it without direct consent.
01:11:19 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Each and every one of us has to say it's okay before their data is sold although that was a valuable part of the company I mean that that idea has been looming over this entire industry for as long as this industry has existed.
01:11:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's not a complete shock that um push would come to shove, and with at least one of these companies eventually oregon attorney general, dan rayfield says people did not submit their personal data 23 and me their spit thinking their genetic blueprint would later be sold off to the highest bidder. I guess that's true, but what did we think? What do we think was going to happen?
01:11:54 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
what did we think was going to happen? Yeah, we're probably a little more cynical than the average American, but I think, yeah, and also know a lot about the tech industry and how things are monetized, and that when things start, they do a lot of things and when they have to actually make a profit, they do a lot of different things.
01:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, there's something in there because she's willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a non-profit she's running called ttam research institute.
01:12:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
There is some value in it, obviously I want to have that much, to have that much data right on that many people is, uh, it is incredibly valuable, like the whole value of what's left in. The thing you know is very likely you know the, the data from the people right. So I I think that it's just a long game. They weren't quite sure who they were and what they wanted to do with all that data. Um, but long term, you know there there are is likely a treasure trove of information that's medically valuable, that is valuable in lots of different ways that you could build businesses on, that you could make potentially medical breakthroughs on. That's why I expected it more to be one of the genomics companies to be more likely to buy these things, to to have all of that. You know, all of that data. Um, now, it's not as valuable as, like you said, leo, the whole genome, because it's only you know, mapping part of it.
01:13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it is interesting, it is. It is not even just the genotype, because, remember, you answered a bunch of questions, you filled out a bunch of questionnaires. That's your so-called phenotype and it's the connection between the genotype and the phenotype. That's a value. Uh, you know, does your family have a history of heart disease? Okay, well, we have your genotype to match up to that. That's, that's what's a real value, apparently. What hasn't been settled in law, and this lawsuit is expected perhaps to help settle, is well, do you have the rights to your genetic data? I mean, if you give it to a company?
01:14:05 - Jason Snell (Guest)
right. Who wants the copyright on your genetic code?
01:14:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, uh, the lawsuit could be significant in helping to establish this is from the new york times not just whether a customer needs to give consent to sell the information, but who actually owns that data?
01:14:20 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
is it your intellectual property in some way?
01:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
very interesting. There is a public interest, of course, in getting that anonymized data out there because it could develop new drugs, new treatments.
01:14:34 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It could be very valuable in a variety of ways this could certainly intersect with tech more and more too, with the wearables and um, uh, and also, uh, you know, biometrics and and things right. We're starting to give more and more of who we are to the tech companies. Um, and that's only likely to increase as more sensors get put in devices and um, it's that's not quite as sensitive as the information in 23andme, but it's getting there right, all right, let's take a little break.
01:15:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching this week in tech, jason heiner. I always want to say nice things about you, jason. Maybe, maybe it's, I don't know you got me elected to be president of the internet back when it had a capital. I so thank you.
01:15:24
I appreciate that. Always good to see you, my friend, Actually all three of you. I have great affection for you too. Harry McCracken, known you for years. Your wife Marie is sitting in the other room with her cats. Give her my best. Nice to see you once again. And uh, of course, Jason Snell, who I get to see every week because he also among his many other efforts.
01:15:49 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I guess on about 100 podcasts he's on.
01:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have back break weekly yes, tuesday and six color stuff my wife is also in the other room with cats.
01:15:58 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Well, there you go actually so is mine.
01:16:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there you go.
01:16:03 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
You got any cats, jason uh, our cats recently have passed on, otherwise my wife would be in the other.
01:16:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's dreaming of cats. She might have gotten one even now, while you were doing the show. She might have just that's what. Basically, that's what Lisa did. She's. She said no. After we put our cat down a couple of weeks ago which is very sad, both of us are in tears she said no more cats for a while. I gotta, I gotta get over this. Next day we got a cat. It was like it was fast and we were just in love with as much in love with this one as we were with the others. Yeah, she's turned me into a cat person. I used to be a dog guy. I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened this Week in Tech is brought to you this week by Drata.
01:16:49
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01:18:13
In tech Club, twit Discord is posting pictures of their doggies and their kitties. Uh, if you don't know yet about the club twit discord, please consider joining our clubs. At 10 bucks a month you get some great benefits ad-free versions of all the shows, pictures of dogs and cats. In the club twit discord you also get a great conversation. We're doing now all the keynotes. The Developer Week keynotes were all in the club, only to avoid takedowns from a certain fruit company, but that worked out really well because we got your input as well. I invite you to join the club. Help us out. It's about 25% of our operating revenue now comes from your membership. That's a big, important part of what keeps a twit alive. Join the cool kids. Look how fast pretty fly for a CIS guy is on the AI image generation. How many cats is too many, asks Leo Laporte club twit. Join the cool kids club twittv slash club twit. Can't wait to have you in the club.
01:19:20
We've got some big events uh coming up. Actually we just did chris marquardt's uh photo thing. Micah's crafting corner is this week. It's a chill place to sit down and do some coding. Home theater geeks is going to do a chat room q a special on june 25th. You want to be there for that. And my old friend we're talking about it before the show the guy I uh I was at the ballpark with during the 1989 earthquake, uh norman maslov mazzi to his youtube fans, will be talking about vinyl with us and I'm trying to book a second piece after that about the rise of the mp3 so we can really cover the history of music in the 20th century. But that'll be the 27th with mazzy's music. Our ai users group uh, normally on the first friday of the month, but that's the fourth of july, so we're going to put it off to the second friday.
01:20:10 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Uh, this week, anyway, lots of stuff that happens in the club, so please, you did the the one, the WWDC chat or sort of live stream in just in the community.
01:20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, so over the years, apple's gotten more and more prickly about it. What we've always done for almost 20 years is stream the keynote and then you know Mystery, science Theater, 3000 styles comment on on it, which, in my opinion, should be fair use. It's a journalistic commentator commentary on a news event. Apple doesn't feel that way and so, uh, and it wasn't, it wasn't content id, it wasn't the automated takedown. They had a lawyer write us a letter, uh, in youtube, and then they went after us on twitch. And while microsoft and google haven't done that, I just thought you know what? I don't, it's not worth. I think it's defensible, but I don't. I don't want to defend it in court. It's not just not worth the trouble. So we just moved it into the club and the. There's a lot of members in our club and I think they enjoyed it. So that's just how we're going to do it.
01:21:15 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It's absolutely fair use for you to comment on while you're showing it. But you know, the problem is we live in a world where fair use is after the fact and all the content scanning on every video platform will just kill things.
01:21:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just yeah, and I think we can't afford to lose our youtube or twitch channel.
01:21:31 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I just don't want to take the chance of that but you know it's interesting, like of uh, you know, necessity being the mother of invention, like it's, it's really great. I think that you're. You know it's interesting, like of, you know necessity being the mother of invention.
01:21:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like it's, it's really great.
01:21:44 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I think that you're, you're doing it that way too.
01:21:46
It's a community, yeah, yeah, and the ways, and even you looking at the current environment and thinking ahead, like of of the way that the environment is going, both with AI and the way that the YouTube algorithm is, and all of these things.
01:21:57
But you know, you doing what you're doing is so smart of like going even deeper with your most loyal members, right Even the people you have direct connections with, versus relying on any other platforms to bring you your visitors, right. Same thing, jason Snell, too, in the way that he runs. You know all the things that he does. You know, going more deeply, invested in the people who care the most about the things that you do and the things you say, is really, really smart. And I think, as the media whole industry is in the midst of a major transformation, and probably even more so over the next you know, 12 to 24, 36 months, and and I think that, like the things that you all are doing, is really the way that more and more media is likely to go yeah, I just saw an article that said that, while digital advertising spend is going down in general, it's doing nothing but going up in the influencer market.
01:23:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, you know the youtube stars and so forth? Um, I guess not a surprise, um, but oops, let me find that. But this is the atlanta voice talking about the invest influencer marketing industry ad revenue set to grow 12 in 2025 to 22 billion with dollars. Um, yeah, it's. It's kind of an amazing uh story. Uh, I guess we all are creators, right, but, uh, jason and I decided to go it. I don't know about jason, I didn't have much of a choice, but decided to go in independently. Uh, and I think I certainly don't regret it. I know you don't, jason yeah, I don't.
01:23:42 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I don't Harry did. Harry had a great site on his own too for a while, that's true he's gone back in back in the golden days of blogs.
01:23:49 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I'm the only one chicken enough not to have done it you've held on to a job for a long time.
01:23:55 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, that's all. That's all.
01:23:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It kept your job, good job, pretty good, pretty good I don't know. You know, if I had, I probably, if I still had a tv career, would still be doing that. But I do really much prefer working for myself.
01:24:08 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It's uh, you know I I like having the control and we're fortunate to live in an era where broadcasting um can be to a smaller audience and still be successful, and that we the tools like even in the last 15 years, the tools that the internet provides for people to do what we do. It's amazing. It is amazing there are so many different little companies that have, like you know, this tool that will let you do this aspect of it, and I mean, for me, hardware and software A lot of my stuff is cobbled together from it's not like there's a.
01:24:40
I know like substack wants to, just like everybody just do substack. But like you can also build from. You know pick and choose, you know you stripe and you use wordpress and you use memberful and you use all of these different sources and you can like put them together to make the product that you want and then reach an audience of. It can even just be a few thousand and suddenly you've got your. You know you've got your job.
01:25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even Apple kind of acknowledged that at WWDC. They added tools. They even said for podcasters they did.
01:25:11 - Jason Snell (Guest)
They gave. They gave all of us iPad podcasters a solid, which is you can record. So so many of these podcasts not twit, actually, but many podcasts are edited after the fact and what you do is you're doing it live over the internet, but that quality is a little reduced and so everybody records locally and then you send your file to somebody and they put them together and they make it. It's like you're all in the same room. It's full quality, and the iPad just couldn't do it. You could do it in the cloud, but you couldn't also, while you were using Zoom, for example, also record your voice locally on the device, and they just tossed it in there.
01:25:47
And that's the feature a lot of us have been asking for for years and years, because I used to travel exclusively with my iPad, kind of like Harry. I still prefer to do it that way, if I can. And then I either need to bring a laptop just to do podcasts or I needed to rig up a thing where there was like a recorder that was recording on a memory card that then looped into the iPad. And now I tried it out. Actually, dan Morin and I did our Six Colors podcast last Friday. I bet you.
01:26:14
We were the first podcast to be entirely recorded on iPad using iPad OS 26, because both of us did that on our iPads using a Shure MB7 microphone and it worked it works.
01:26:29 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It's amazing. That's a big one. I was so unnaturally excited when they announced that in the. I was like I never expected, or at least like I thought it was gonna be another 10 years or something before they did that. I know I was like I never expected, or at least like I thought it was another 10 years or something before they did that. I know I was like what that and the um.
01:26:42 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Two years ago they did final cut.
01:26:43
I mean, harry mentioned this in passing, but two years ago they introduced final cut for the ipad and uh and logic for the ipad and the untold story there is you could do final cut for the ipad and then export your 4k project.
01:26:56
But if you and then you sat there and stared at the screen but, like if you wanted to go check your mail, you could, on your mac, you can't because it goes, oh, like I, I can't, I can't export video in the background. And they added this function which would be great for rendering and video exports and audio exports and file copies, big file copies, where it just sticks it all in the dynamic island instead and lets you actually because I would use Harry, that's how I would always use slide over is I'd start an audio export and then I'd like open my email and slide over so that I didn't close the export. So, yeah, some big, some big wins for like niche audiences. But you know what hitting, you know, closing a bunch of gaps for niche audiences is one of the things that helps build loyalty to a product I think it's gonna be good just for stuff like dropbox too.
01:27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah I feel like it's more than that. I feel like it really is. Look, we know, warner discovery just spun off the profit making part of the business, the movie studio hbo and then took all of the streamers and said you, you go over there and be your own business because we don't want you dragging down our results for the next five years. It's, it's. Everybody knows that. That's what's happening. Look at this. Youtube said its ecosystem last year created 490 000 jobs and added 55 billion dollars to the us gdp. Now that that is youtube's own reporting, but uh, even if it's only half that, it comes from a research study by oxford economics. It's remarkable. Yeah, so this, this is a YouTube report exploring YouTube's US impact in 2024. It's pretty clear this is the up-and-coming television for the new generation, generation Alpha. It's YouTube.
01:28:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We used to complain all the time that the new iPads, especially the iPad Pros, were incredible in terms of computational muscle, but the software was way behind and Apple wasn't really taking advantage of it. And while I do have some reservations about some of the stuff, with iPadOS 26, you can't argue that the software hasn't taken a large stride towards being something capable of soaking up all of this computational power.
01:29:17 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, Prior to 2023,. You know they've done these two moonshots, the last WWDCs, right Like Vision Pro and then Apple Intelligence. They were just like such huge moonshots but prior to those two years, if they made this iPad OS announcement back then, this would have been all anybody was talking about. It would have been the hugest story, it would have been the biggest thing. It's just that our perspective is a little different and there's still also a little bit of hangover from those things in terms of you know, we're still talking about Vision OS and we're still talking about Apple intelligence and were throughout this, but the the what happened with the ipad um was so big and I think, uh, potentially the both sort of short and medium term impact of it is is pretty, pretty huge. I was going to ask earlier, harry, when we're talking about, if you use the 13 inch or the 11 inch ipad, because you use it so much I currently use the 13 13-inch.
01:30:15 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I had the 11 for the round of iPads before that. Essentially, 11-inch is more portable and 13-inch is definitely better for drawing and probably better for productivity, although I have to say that I'm a little disappointed by the battery life on my 13-inch compared to the 11-inch I had, which I still use as an e-reader. Also, the thing that's changed completely since the iPad was new was when the iPad came out. 10 hours of battery life was amazing compared to a MacBook, and MacBooks have raced way past 10 hours, and so now 10 hours is a little disappointing and I would love it if the iPad Pro, in order to keep a clear difference with the iPad Air, maybe got ever so slightly thicker and got battery life that was more MacBook-like, because that's the game has changed.
01:31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll stand back because according to Gurman, next year 2026, apple's going to release a redesigned MacBook that'll have the same screen as your beautiful 13 inch ipad, a beautiful oled screen and, uh, probably the m. What it will be? M6 by them, I guess, five m5. Okay, the ultimate computer, yeah, yeah stand back.
01:31:33 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I use the 11 inch um ipad and so it's been. It's really interesting and I love the 11 inch ipad like I was mostly.
01:31:41 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I was mostly really happy with that, except for drying. Like a larger screen, for the big one is basically a laptop, isn't it the same price?
01:31:49 - Jason Snell (Guest)
it is about the same weight as a macbook air. Um, I use the big one mostly because I'm a keyboard snob and the keyboard feels a little cramped to me on the 11. Yeah, but every time my wife's got an 11, every time I pick it up I'm like, oh, it's so light though, it's so nice. Yeah, but yeah, I mean that's a good problem to have.
01:32:07 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It is, so I use the 11. I can't draw, so that helps. I don't have that holding me back, but the keyboard is is a little bit cramped. But I also. When apple made the um 11 inch macbook air, that was my favorite. That was like my favorite mac ever and I was so sad when that thing was uh, went out of uh, yeah, went out of uh.
01:32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Circulation was that the macbook? Nothing, that was the nothing.
01:32:32 - Jason Snell (Guest)
No, it's the 11 inch air there used to be 11 and 13 inch air so so then they did the 12 inch nothing, but they did the 11 and 13 before it was retina and they only made a 13. There was an 11 and that was the best, the best laptop Absolutely.
01:32:48 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, that that was. That thing was incredible and I can only imagine like that size now, even with like Mac, with like Mac Silicon, apple Silicon, but the 11-inch. The interesting thing about the new iPad OS 26 is, most of the time I want to do kind of what you expressed earlier, harry, like I want to focus on one thing, right, I want to focus on doing something and be able to use the iPad as a way to do that. But every once in a while there's like something I need to do where I need like a couple windows. I need to like have two things open to copy and paste or I need to reference something, and I never.
01:33:31
On the 11, it's really hard to do the tiling. They're so small and so challenging that the new one I almost feel like you know the handcuffs have come off like okay, I can have three things open at the time. I can just be able to click back and forth on those moments that I needed. It's probably only 10 or 20% of the time maybe, but that's where I think the power of this iPadOS 26 potentially could really make the iPad, give the iPad a bit of a renaissance, even for older ones, because you know, we know that, even going back to the last several generations of Apple Silicon, they're going to run really well, and imagine having even those. I have an M1 11-inch that still runs amazing and is running iPadOS 26 really well and yeah, I was thinking about that and thinking like this is going to, it's almost like giving new life to some things that have been around for a while that now are even more powerful.
01:34:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I also thought it was interesting that they're bringing the new windowing interface to all the iPads, down even to the Mini, rather than kind of building it primarily for the iPad Pro type of people who are doing really heavy-duty stuff.
01:34:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't imagine many people will use it on the Mini though, will they?
01:34:51 - Jason Snell (Guest)
No, you never know.
01:34:52
It does speak to the fact that they wrote a new windowing system Like the Stage Manager system.
01:34:58
They had to limit it to like the M series and then they brought some of it back to like the very last before they went to the M series and this version. The tech has moved along enough, there's enough RAM in those devices now and then that they built this thing for all iPads to have and it's not, you know, it's not walled off at all. I think that speaks to the fact that they really stripped it back to nothing and and started again and built something completely new, which, you know, a lot of new features are just new additions to old features and this one, you know, is not like that. This one, they, they literally threw the old one away and I know there are issues with that that Harry has, but I think in terms of the performance, that's one of the reasons why it's it performs as well as it does and it's as compatible as it is, because they you know they built it for all iPads and it works on all iPads. I think that's pretty sweet it surprised me so much.
01:35:49 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
If you, if you like the iPad, you've sort of been used to disappointment for years, you know, and so maybe it's like our expectations are so lowered. But I was just like so surprised at everything that came to the iPad this year and, to Jason's point, the fact that they really have put it across. Everything does speak to this becoming such a core feature, core functionality of the OS now, which is fantastic, certainly likely to be much more performant. You know because of that and there was these, these reports beforehand that this was only going to happen, like if you docked an ipad pro in an apple, you know, keyboard, it's not that at all right, there's none of that like it's yeah, it's just a mode when the ipad first came out, it was just seen as a big iphone, frankly, and a lot of companies like meta said, well, we're not going to develop for it, it's just a, it's a big iphone.
01:36:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, meta finally has put out whatsapp for the ipad. Do you think companies like meta will? Will we ever see an instagram for the ipad? Are they going to start treating it like?
01:36:51 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
a real computer yeah, finally.
01:36:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, when did they announce that?
01:36:57 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
well.
01:36:58 - Jason Snell (Guest)
So I saw news and rumor of that, at least in the last the rumor week or two yeah, it sounds like the code is there and they're going to release it at some point here soon. So yeah, hell froze over.
01:37:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the that's the other difference. Now the big difference. I mentioned this on mac break weekly on tuesday. The big difference is you can only install apps from an app store on the ipad. It's not a real computer in the sense that you can sideload stuff.
01:37:20 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, and that is both a pro and a con, right, Because for some of us who would love to have a wide, open kind of platform, the Mac will do it, but the iPad won't. On the other hand, the other argument is this is a platform that you might be more comfortable on, because you know that everything is passed through the app store. It really is sort of like what you want out of it it. You know, you, apple offers both kinds of devices and you know, unfortunately, philosophically, apple has just decided to draw the line on on the shape or functions of the hardware, so like you can't run Mac OS on an iPad and you can't run iPad OS on a laptop, instead, you need to pick, and on one side you get these features and on the other side you get these other features, and that's just, at least for now, that's where we are. You can't use an Apple Pencil on a Mac either.
01:38:11 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
One minor but cool thing which I don't think was mentioned during the keynote is that if you add a web app on an iPad to the desktop so you can open it again from an icon, it will perform like a web app, whereas in the past that web app had to have some code in its manifest saying treat this like an app and run it at full screen if it's on an iPad, and they don't need to do that anymore. So I I think if you're not happy with the the app store versions of apps which in some cases I'm not I'd rather run the web app. A lot more of them should run really well on an iPad than in the past.
01:38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This isn't PWAs, though. This is being a PWA without the support of a PWA, basically.
01:39:03 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I'm not sure. I mean I'm not sure if it's technically pwa but um, but it can get you along with. Federico vatici wrote about this on mac stories recently how he was actually starting to use more saved website apps on his ipad. I do a lot of that because some of them are really good. I mean, this is the thing is like. Native apps are great. Some companies do not invest at all or very much in the native apps and they generally, generally, can invest. Some of them invest a lot in their web apps and some of those web apps can be really, really good on an iPad.
01:39:24 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Like Airtable, which we use at Fast Company. The iPad version is not so great. It doesn't do everything that the full version does, but the web version is fine and so I use that on my iPad and that already works like an app. But a lot more apps should look like apps if you save them to the desktop as an icon.
01:39:42 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Now, yeah, so I use WhatsApp on on iPad and and some of the volunteering work. I do have a lot of WhatsApp groups and so I love using the real estate, yeah, yeah. It's great. Yeah, it's much better than doing it on your phone, for goodness sake.
01:39:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, as a testament to how much interest there is in this, we did the whole apple segment at the beginning but, now we got back to it.
01:40:05 - Jason Snell (Guest)
This is the overage, uh, overage segment, about, about. I wanted to mention one of the things because, because, since we're on this topic again, uh, as well one of the things that everyone at the event was.
01:40:18
Apple intelligence, apple intelligence, right, and what were they going to do this year? And I found it hilarious that when I came out of the event, the two things I was most excited by were the Mac and the iPad. And so when I say Apple was kind of like sticking to its knitting a little bit, I was like it's kind of comforting that you walked out of an Apple event and the things that you thought about were the Mac and the iPad, not about Apple intelligence or a vision pro or something like that, but like it's like real meat and potatoes the Mac and the iPad. So to give the Mac it's due, the new spotlight which is only on the Mac right now, that has support for like all of these kind of power user features. They added keyboard or clipboard history to Mac OS for the first time. It's like the big missing piece of productivity built into the system and it's there inside spotlight. They've got the quick keys thing which is, you know, like launch bar. You know, I think pioneered this, the idea that you can launch something with a couple of keystrokes and it will learn and figure it out. They built all of their app intents frameworks into Spotlight so you can do things like send an email from Spotlight, because it knows how to talk to the mail app and it knows what blanks you need to fill in in order to get it to send off that action. It's like building a shortcut from the command line for a one-off and then shortcuts on top of that. Has access to all of their ML models all the way from on-device through private cloud out to chat GPT.
01:41:50
As a Mac user, I'm like, oh man, I can't wait to get my hands on this stuff. And I can't remember the last time that I came out of an Apple developer event really thinking the Mac was one of the big winners. Usually the Mac just kind of comes along from the ride these days, but like it was a good iPad show, it was also a really good Mac event. So I'm, I'm, I'm hyped for spotlight, which I cannot believe I've ever. I've never said that before. I'm excited for spotlight. What is going on?
01:42:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm actually in actually considering taking Raycast off, because a lot of course Raycast has more features, but a lot of the features of Raycast I don't use yeah, I'm.
01:42:27 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I've been using LaunchBar for like 15-20 years and I think with the, and they still update it, but I use it. You know, I use it as a launcher and for clipboard history and I look at and I don't use more advanced clipboard managers that are out there. I don't use those features at all. I just want a list that I can pick from of previous clipboards and so, yeah, I might be able to just dump it to leo and just say doesn't it feel like you want to use whatever apple has decided to do natively, rather than add a third party?
01:42:55
yes, it also gives encouragement, like you're talking about the iPad and how Harry especially uses it so much. Once they put clipboard history and quick launching and stuff like that into Spotlight on the Mac, my immediate thought is it's only a matter of time before they bring it to the iPad 2. And that'll be great. That would be amazing.
01:43:14 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I thought it was a good WWDC for Vision OS 2, by the way, I thought it was a good WWDC for VisionOS 2, by the way, I agree, despite the fact that they've acknowledged this is not a mainstream product, I don't think it's a back burner product and they actually are putting a lot of work into improving this operating system and the new personas are pretty amazing. They're so good. It's a much, much more realistic digital version of you that's created almost instantly and the widgets are cool and it supports GoPro Pro and Insta360 360 degree videos now.
01:43:46 - Jason Snell (Guest)
We debate Vision Pro a lot on MacBreak Weekly, but I'll just say here that I think what we can all agree is it's not a product for the present. If it's anything, it's a product for the future. It's a bad apples making on being able to create AR glasses and other products down the road. And if it is a product for the future, what you want to see is that they are iterating right. You don't want to see it dead in the water and I am impressed that now you know, a couple of years in, they do keep adding features, they do keep making improvements.
01:44:13
They're like the geographic persistence thing is like they had to have that If they're going to do this, they got to have these features. So they're like it would be a real red flag if they're like, yeah, vision OS, who cares? But instead they're pushing it forward, and I think we could all, as somebody with a vision pro, like it's great to see those features, but really what they're doing is just kind of loading up on the features so that when they finally if they finally make products that are more affordable and more wearable and all of those things that are a problem, their os base looks pretty good, like the software is not the problem with that product line, it's the fact that they have a heavy thing that costs 3500. That's the problem. So push the software forward. I agree, and the personas thing, which was my least favorite thing, when they announced the product so much better.
01:44:58
It was the jedi's the creepy and the new personas like they made spatial personas which were better, and then these new personas are are even better. They're like it's amazing how good they are, so they. I love that they're making advancements.
01:45:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I agree completely here it's not like uh, tv os, which is still a hobby all these years later and something they don't, they don't really pay attention to. They seem fully engaged by by vision OS. So I think even if I never buy a $3,500 headset, I'm still happy to see them do that.
01:45:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have a vision pro.
01:45:29 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I do not own one, no, yeah.
01:45:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason, do you have?
01:45:31 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
a vision pro. I do have a vision pro.
01:45:33
I'm a vision pro user. Uh, this is Pro user. This is one of the things I was really looking for. I was to see how much do they talk about it, because I was worried, you know, about, yeah, it becoming tvOS or homeOS, right, but it wasn't. Like you know, they definitely invested in fixing and incrementing things that, like, needed to get better, right, and so that's a clear indication. I thought that they are still investing in it. They still see this as the future. They they took, they took it on the chin. There were some things they didn't do great.
01:46:09
You know, I think the biggest problem with vision pro it was not the product. I think there were two things that were the that were wrong, like one. One, the stupid thing to make your eyes on the front was silly. They didn't need that. It would have been a lot less expensive if they didn't do it. And then, two, they just marketed it so badly, like they really, you know it should have been and it was a developer kit, and I think they don't make developer kits, so they weren't going to market it.
01:46:37
They had to make something that was still a consumer product, but I feel like they over-marketed it a little bit, and then we saw that a little bit again with Apple Intelligence last year. They over-marketed Apple Intelligence a bit and it's kind of not like them. I think in both cases it felt very, very kind of unlike them to do that, and I do feel, like this year, that they they have sort of gotten a little bit back, as Jason Snell said, back to their knitting of like they are. They may have gotten burned a little bit by some of their the way they've messaged things. I still think that there's a there is a great product and a great roadmap in vision pro, and so I was excited to see them um, you know, do what they did, and so I was excited to see them, you know, do what they did.
01:47:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I hope you've enjoyed our Apple reflux. Yeah, it just keeps coming back.
01:47:25 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I thought that was a brilliant hosting move by you, Leo, where you're like we can't start the show with two full segments about Apple, so we'll just do one and then we'll move on and then like, oh, there's overflow, stuff it in at the end, put it back.
01:47:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the end, put it back. I tried to do a youtube segment but nobody wanted to, so sorry, that's fine. Uh. Uh, we will have more uh with who knows what the topic will be, with jason heiner, uh, harry mccracken and, of course, jason snell.
01:47:52
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01:50:42 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
no, zero, nothing haven't dug into it yet, but I am interested.
01:50:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty smart, it's it's different, right, because it's it's a now kind of a research tool. Um, here's, here's an article, uh, on substack. God is hungry for context. It turns out that if you're going to use o3 pro, you can't use it the same way as you would use o3 or other versions of open ai's. Ai, it really wants as much context, as much information as possible. Um, so that's a good thing, uh, but if you don't give it enough context and this is something people complained about it will this guy says overthink. I think it will hallucinate, it will. If you don't give it enough information, it will make stuff up. Uh, so really important to consider that and give it as much information as you can. This reminds me of the apple paper that came out last week, uh, saying that thinking is hard, yeah yeah, and if you think too hard, something bad happens.
01:51:53
Yeah, it's out yeah, uh, the limitations, although there have been a lot of responses to it saying, well, it wasn't, it wasn't the best, uh, it wasn't the best test, blah, blah, blah. Um, basically, the researchers who, who were from apple, uh, gave, uh, the variety models, not the latest models. It was signed at 3.7, uh, I think three, three, point, oh, four, uh, three, oh, four, um, open, ai, some kind of common puzzle. In fact, I went out and I bought one just the other day. Let me, let me go get it there. He's gone. Everybody, we run the show now, party time. Oh, no, dad's back on my, uh, on my coffee table. My whole childhood, have you, have anybody? Uh, anybody, played with the towers of? Yeah, I'm a nerd, I know Anybody played with the towers of Hanoi.
01:52:51 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That was the sort of game people used to program in BASIC 40 years ago.
01:52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a very simple game that a human can pretty quickly understand. I was a six-year-old when I figured it out. The idea is you want to move this entire stack of disks to the far peg without putting any bigger disks on top of smaller disks, and it's you know. It's actually pretty simple. The only key is which peg you start on, and that's the insight that maybe took me a little while to figure out. Depends if there's an odd or even number of disks left. But basically it's repeating this process over and over. Whoops, the peg came out. That's what you get for buying cheap amazon towers of hanoi. Pegs, uh one of these.
01:53:38
This is great. So, and yeah, everybody who's done programming has probably solved this at one point. Um, but apparently, the more discs, the worse and worse these ais got and in fact it they completely collapsed. Uh, by the time it got to, I think, seven or eight discs. I think this one has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight discs. So, um, I don't know. I I think some of this is really just people assuming more they I can do, more like it's going to be smarter than a human right look the the.
01:54:22 - Jason Snell (Guest)
there are powerful not to sound all conspiratorial, but there are powerful forces in the technology industry that wants you to believe that AI just kind of number goes up, expands, gets bigger, better and eventually is superhuman and all of those things. But it's entirely possible that we've already discovered a lot of the things that AI does incredibly well, but that it can't be applied to everything and it doesn't always go up, and I think that's okay, because I'm one of those people. I'm not a skeptic or an AI boomer either. I'm very much like it's overhyped and also world-changing.
01:54:55
I think both are true, yeah, it's both, but there is definitely. You feel like the clampdown happens when anybody dares suggest that it might have limitations, some things might be inappropriate for it, like people start to freak out in Silicon Valley, but like I think we need to be open to the fact that there's a we're in a boom right now and what follows the boom is a bubble that collapses, and then you pick it through the rubble and find out the stuff that was actually useful, because there's AI is. I mean, I use cursor for the first time this week. Ai is amazing.
01:55:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the vibe coding editor that lets you code.
01:55:29 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, and it edits my code right in line and shows me the changes and it's amazing. But again, there are also places where we all know AI kind of flops and this sort of research suggests, yeah, if you push it beyond a certain point, you eventually lead to a complete collapse. And it's like I don't think it's the end of the world to say everything has its limits, but if your business is predicated, on convincing investors that it doesn't have limits, then you're going to be upset by this.
01:55:57 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I've been doing a lot of vibe coding lately and overthinking is a real issue. I have some like rather minor bugs, as far as I can tell, in my apps, and Replit, which I use when trying to solve a minor bug, will sometimes just sort of start digging and digging more into the code it generated itself and making bigger and bigger changes and I'll come back 20 minutes later and it's caused many more problems than it's solved because it's not good at pinpointing this one thing and it doesn't know when it's spent too much time and invested one thing and it doesn't know when it when it's spent too much time and invested too much energy in solving a problem in a way that's counterproductive there's also, I think, a group of people who are ready to go aha, I told you so, of course, and they're, they've been using this paper uh for that purpose.
01:56:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, let me. What happened uh is basically it's called the illusion of thinking, understanding the strengths and limitations of reasoning models. These are these new uh reinforcement, learning or reasoning models that have emerged uh in in the world ever since deep seek, and if you look at the graph, it just collapses. Uh, even even the regular ai collapses. Here's a. Here's a perfect example. Zoom in on this claude 3.7, that when it gets to eight discs in the tower of hanoi, just zero can't solve any of them. Thinking claude a little bit better, but okay, when it gets to maybe somewhere between 10 and 15 discs, it fails, and neither, of course, can do a 20 disc tower of hanoi, whereas a human, even a six-year-old, once the human understands how it works, which doesn't take that long, can easily do it. But that is not. I don't think that's an indictment of AI.
01:57:46 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
No.
01:57:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a limitation.
01:57:49 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
LLMs can do incredible things it is an incredible breakthrough and they also can't do everything. And they can't do everything that OpenAI and Anthropic tell you that they can do, because those are the two most highly valued AI companies in the world, right, and so the thing that and this is one of the things that I think Apple pulling back a little bit on AI and integrating it more directly is like let's look at the things that LLMs are really good at and let's find ways to integrate those even if we don't call it AI into the operating system in ways that are measured, that are predictable, that are proven to actually do some good things for you is a good first step of where we're going. I mean the AI there are now 55,000 AI startups, according to Crunchbase out there. That's mind-boggling, wow.
01:58:43
A bunch of them haven't. A lot of those haven't even launched their products yet, maybe never will. Some certainly are going to. And then there, according to New York Times, there is $29 billion that has been invested in AI and is being invested right over the next, this next phase that we're in, next phase that we're in. That is like 50%, as I understand it, of like the VC money.
01:59:12
So it's hard to get VC money if you're, if you don't have AI in the company right now. And so there, all of that leads to the bubble phenomenon that Jason Snell mentioned earlier, and like we are going to hit the trough of disillusionment any moment now, and I think it's good that we're having conversations about what it does well, where it struggles, so that we can, you know, modulate, calibrate the expectations around what these things you know can do, because otherwise, that's the difference between this sort of hitting the trough of disillusionment and sort of rising back up and finding things to use it for, versus, like this, the thing like crashing, uh, you know, the bus, sort of all the wheels coming off and crashing in a fiery inferno into the one thing that does worry me.
01:59:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's fine if venture capitalists are swept up in the latest fad, and it's their money, they're throwing it in there but it does worry me a little bit when government goes all in on AI, and right now that seems to be what our government is doing, choosing to use AI, for instance, to find fraud in Social Security applications. The Army has put together a new Innovation Corps, recruiting executives from OpenAI and Meta and ai companies palantir. They're all, by the way, going to be lieutenant colonels. So congratulations, colonel um I I do hope that this is experimental. They're interested, but they understand the limitations I think it's driven more by fear.
02:00:45 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Like that is is like we want to know what it can do, because what we don't want, what they don't want, is they don't want another nation state sort of using this and having capabilities that they don't understand, or very similar to the argument used to create the manhattan project well, if we don't do it, the nazis will, right, if we don't do the ai thing, china will.
02:01:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if that's the best reason to do it. I guess it's sensible. Uh, there are some good uses of ai. Ai is making health care safer in the remote amazon. I'm not talking about amazoncom, I'm talking about the south american amazon. This is from rest of world. The Amazon, yeah, the other am the real Amazon. At overburdened clinics, pharmacists are using AI to catch dangerous errors, which seems a sensible use of it. I think AI is very useful if you understand the limitations right. I think where we went wrong perhaps is with the consumerization of ai, the, the chat bots it's great it's.
02:01:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, it's the humans who can't really trust, because a lot of the humans don't understand it and misuse it and think it's capable of doing things it's not capable of doing well, elton john's not too happy, nor is dua lipa.
02:02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The bill in the uk that elton and dua and others uh, including paul mccartney opposed the drably titled, according to the bbc, data use and access bill. Uh, they wanted a uh amendment to the bill that would have forced tech companies to declare their use of copyright material when training ai tools to say, hey, we're using copyright material. Without it, these uh creators argued tech firms would be given free reign to help themselves to content without paying for it. Elton john told the bbc that would be committing theft thievery on a high scale. The government refused the amendment. So, uh, sir, elton is unhappy, so it's doing people I think that regulators and governments I don't think they.
02:03:00 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I just worry that they don't understand it well enough yeah, well, in that case, don't regulate, or see.
02:03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the problem. If you don't understand something, it's hard to regulate it. On the other hand, there's not a lot of time to solve this.
02:03:15 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, understand it I should disclose, like the company that I've worked for, as if davis is suing open ai right for saying that what they did was not fair use taking and ingesting all of our content and using it to train their models. New York Times is the other entity that's done that as well. The courts will decide, but that aside, this is one of the things that, and then Disney also a big lawsuit against the infringement of their Mid-Journey.
02:03:45
They're saying Mid-journey stole darth vader so so you have a lot of this, this issue of is it fair use for the ai companies to ingest things that are publicly available on the internet but they don't have the the rights you know to use? Do they have the rights to use? It is the question. Um a lot of that has to get worked out in the courts over the next couple years.
02:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paper published last month by computer scientists and illegal scholars from Stanford, cornell and West Virginia University studied whether five popular open weight models three from Meta, one each from Microsoft and a Luther AI were able to reproduce texts from books. Three, that's the collection of books that's widely used to train LLMs those books still under copyright in many cases. In fact, they were able to reproduce Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with many of these models, you know. But see, that's the question Are you going to use Llama 3 to read the book? No, you're going to buy the book. I don't know if this costs them business, and I guess isn't that, in the long run, the real test of copyright? Is this going to harm my business? That's one of the tests for fair use. For sure it doesn't harm, yeah, does it harm it harm?
02:05:08 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
yeah, does it harm? So? So this is sorry to bring it back to apple one more time. One of the things they didn't talk about image playgrounds. Um, so last year this is one of the most shocking things that they did last year.
02:05:15
Um, that that I thought was really like um across the line for for them to to go out and train on all of uh, the data you know, open web of images and to put that out there. I was really surprised they did it. I thought it was not a great move or just a good look even, because you figure, a lot of that industry builds there and the people who create a lot of that stuff creates it on Macs and that's a lot of the groups of designers and artists and the people who stuck with Mac, even when Mac was struggling right, they were the only group that stuck with them until like to go, and you know and I asked this pointedly last year to multiple people at Apple to make sure I understood it correctly Like did you train this on the open web? Like did you just go out and scrape everybody's images who put their artwork out there and then use that to train your models? And essentially they said that, yes, they did.
02:06:11
Now people could you know going forward, say, oh, we don't want you to train on our data, you know now. But that was the thing that just really to me struck the wrong note, the wrongest note about OpenAI. But I did like the fact that they really didn't go back and touch that much. Or maybe I'm I don't know, harry or Jason may have gotten more information, but my sense was that they've backed away from that a little bit, or at least haven't leaned into it. You know as much.
02:06:42 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, they said something about honoring robotstxt, going forward and things like that.
02:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a must, I think.
02:06:49 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean you could argue it's the fruit of a poison tree and that all of these models are in that sphere. I would love if they started building models out of licensed content from various companies and all of that. I think that they're playing a little bit of a hedging game here too, Because, right, like Apple is seen as behind in AI. But you know, so you kind of, if you're Apple, you need to build a model. But if it turns out there are lots of legal entanglements with these models, that benefits Apple, right, Because it maybe throws the brakes on a lot of their competition as well. So I think they're playing both sides right now. But I do think, you know, we'll see how this policy changes. But again, the vibe was very much like last year, was almost like a fever dream, and they're kind of coming out of it now.
02:07:41 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Adobe is one of the few companies I know of doing a image generating LLM that, as far as I know, really is only trading on things they clearly have rights to trade on.
02:07:53 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Getty too is also doing.
02:07:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Getty's also suing, doing and suing. Alright, one more break, no more Apple Reflux, and we got. Actually, all I have is a bunch of silly stories to wind this up. So hang in there.
02:08:09
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02:09:23
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02:10:51
We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech zscalercom security impressive number of Enterprise uh sponsors you know it's funny, in the early days of podcast it was all what we call B2C business to consumer right. It was food boxes, mattresses, all that stuff, that stuff. I don't know if those businesses aren't any good anymore or for some reason, that that advertising has dried up. We're very lucky that we're in the enterprise space and the technology space because that advertising has not dried up. Space and the technology space because that advertising has not dried up. Yeah, those people, you know why companies like yours have stopped publishing pc week and all of those you know enterprise focused magazines are all gone.
02:11:39
So where these companies are going to go to advertise, I mean some of them go to cnn and stuff. I see it's funny how I see kind of pretty high-tech companies advertising on football games. I don't know if that's the best place for them to be. Yeah, I mean it's good for, I guess for brand name, but that's about it. So we're, we're one of the. You know, podcasting in general is one of the few places people can go to to reach, uh it deciders, and we've got a lot of them. That's, that's pretty much our audience. The rest of them are gamers. That's why there's we're so happy to say that the nintendo switch is now the fastest selling gaming console of all time four days to three and a half million units. Who says nintendo is, uh, is number two or number three?
02:12:29 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
that's pretty impressive, I went to best buy this morning and, um, they had an enormous sign outside saying switch to now available. And then when you, the moment you go through the door, there's an equally large sign saying switch to not in stock. Which, uh, I'm pretty sure which one of the signs is correct costco really made me mad.
02:12:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I went in there and they have a big switch to display and I thought this is great, they've got some ran over. It was just the controller. They didn't everybody's trying to. I don't think costco's even selling the switch to. I don't think they're one of the retailers like target, uh, walmart, um anyway. Uh, nintendo thinks they're going to sell 15 million during its current financial year, even though I don't think it's that much different than the original switch by design, almost like.
02:13:19 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I mean, remember the switch, original switch was already. You know, quote, unquote behind the other consoles, so this this one is a tech upgrade and I've heard from people who say when it's docked and it's on your TV screen, it's a major upgrade on that front.
02:13:34
And like people love them and it's great, I mean I. So I was one of those people who I didn't want to make an effort to buy one, I just wanted to get one. And so I registered with Nintendo with my Nintendo account, to just say, yeah, sell me one when you're ready. And I got that email a couple of days ago. They're like, okay, we'll sell you one and ship it to you. And I'm like great, Send it, send it my way, I'm so jealous.
02:13:54
Hopefully in a week I'll get one, and I'll have done it in the laziest way possible.
02:13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been searching my email every day since June 5th.
02:14:01 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Maybe Nintendo for once will kind of at least sort of keep up with the demand in a way they usually do not.
02:14:06 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Yeah, I think this is my big complaint about games stuff is for Pete's sake, apple can ship lots and lots of iPhones and when you order an iPhone they just say, ok, you'll get it in a week or two weeks.
02:14:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it wasn't that way from the beginning, was it?
02:14:22 - Jason Snell (Guest)
It wasn't, but over time they've managed to do that and I know there's a lot of theater involved and, but over time they've managed to do that and, like I know there's a lot of theater involved and they want people lining up and stuff like that for these things. But honestly, I would love to go to Amazon or Target or Nintendocom or whatever and just say, hey, here's my money, send me a Switch when you're ready, and they, like they don't want to do it. This is the closest they've come and I mean kudos to them, because the word on the street is you can get one if you want. Which? The original switch? That was not the case. It was real. I think it took like a year for me to get one of those same for nintendo wii.
02:14:55 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It was like impossible to find forever, you know oh yeah, is this the email?
02:15:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did I did, I get it. Nintendo switch 2 is available now. Buy now. I don't know, is that the email, or is it?
02:15:07 - Jason Snell (Guest)
just no, it was it's time to purchase your nintendo switch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the three-day window to go in and buy it, which I did oh yeah, on behalf of my nintendo store team, thank you for registering one.
02:15:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let you know you're still in the queue. Still in the queue still in the queue.
02:15:25 - Jason Snell (Guest)
A lot of people in the queue probably said no, no, no, I've already got one, but I didn't.
02:15:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bought one I would buy one if I could, but I can't. So there did you have 50 hours worth of gameplay well isn't that the criterion I have.
02:15:42 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I mean, given that we have had the switch for ages and before that we had the, we in the wii u and yeah, my kids play it and like everybody plays it like yeah, I that we, we were in there, we, we were grandfathered in. There's no, not a problem nice, nice job.
02:15:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, all right, continuing on with the uh, the silly, uh stuff. Let's see here what else do I have an experimental new dating site matches singles based on their browser histories why, not.
02:16:11 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
What could go wrong?
02:16:13 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I mean, what could go right? Jason is the real question. What?
02:16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
could go right. Browser dating users upload their 5 000 most recent searches, which are then turned into a great browsing personality profile by ai. Did google write this?
02:16:32 - Jason Snell (Guest)
whose idea?
02:16:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was this, we're in the same ad pool.
02:16:36 - Jason Snell (Guest)
We're meant for each other actually I think it's a.
02:16:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, it's one of those artists creating a art project yeah it's a browser dating artist and developer dries deporter, who's known for creating digital products with an eye for mischief I believe there's.
02:16:53 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I believe there is a lot of signal in what we do other than the crippling privacy problems. I believe you probably could figure out how a browsing history correlates to making a match. It's probably not identical browsing histories, right, it's like complimentary browsing browsing history. I'm sure they're signaling lots of you're looking for a comb.
02:17:13
He's looking for hair replacements, something like that well, that's going to lead you to a real gift of the magi kind of situation which you don't want, I guess. I guess blind date of the magi, but still I wouldn't recommend it uh, if you want to know more browser dot dating.
02:17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a dating website matching people. Based on that, should I upload my browser history? Don't do it, sure? What could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Every I am married, so that's probably the first thing that's going to go wrong it sounds more dangerous than 23 and me yeah, it does.
02:17:46
Uh, it's worse than spit. Uh, just a heads up, anchor is recalling 1.1 million of its power banks. We love anchor power banks, but if you have the power core 10 000 power bank with a model number a 1263 as a recall, they also have recalled in the past, like six months.
02:18:09 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
They've also recalled a couple bluetooth speakers because of these similar battery problems and another power bank as well. So you know, if you have any acre power banks like think about, just make sure to check them I have nothing but anchor power banks everywhere in the house, I think I think mine are only anchor. There's one right here. I'm not a hater at all this.
02:18:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not a um you know, a false alarm. The consumer product safety commission says anchor has documented 19 cases of fires and explosions. Include including two minor burn injuries in 11 instances of property damage totaling more than sixty thousand dollars. So burn injuries in 11 instances of property damage totaling more than sixty thousand dollars.
02:18:49 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So you've got one of those hallucinating.
02:18:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not a hallucination, this is actually it's the real deal, yeah uh, things have caught fire this isn't exactly a tech story, but I I find it fascinating. New york times today, a town's single largest taxpayer is also his biggest headache. Small towns are having a problem with deserted malls. Nobody wants to be in the deserted mall, uh, but they can't redevelop them. Timothy sorel, a town selectman and former rural police chief in lanesboro, massachusetts, population of 3 000, says there were times you could not find a parking place in this mall. Inside it was packed, for teenagers in particular was a place to hang out.
02:19:36 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I feel for teenagers they don't have a mall anymore to go to well, I think the challenge is that the malls they're like you remember when there used to be like three or four paper newspapers in a city and they went down to one paper. Yeah, malls are like that, like it's not that there's no malls, it's just that there used to be three or four malls. Now there's one mall.
02:19:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Some malls are still thriving, but then there's another mall near us that's turning into a biotech campus, right.
02:20:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Didn't Rackspace turn a mall into its network operations center many years ago?
02:20:06 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Well, I mean, I don't know the last time you were down in Cupertino, but having just been down there, Tell me the prune yard is still there. Just south of Apple Park is what used to be Valco Fashion Park which is a mall, valco, yeah.
02:20:18
And very slowly, they are taking all of the property around the mall and turning it into high density commerce. Residential, oh, interesting, it's offices and restaurants and all of this and and and. Residential, uh, the mall itself, the core mall, I think, is still there, Cause there's like an ice center and a Benny Hanna.
02:20:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but uh, eventually it'll, it'll all be gone, baby, you gotta have an anchor tenant.
02:20:45 - Jason Snell (Guest)
If's benihana, so be it yeah, and ice skating and benihana, but not together. Don't do them together. So, uh, but they're doing it even in a place now, a place as wealthy as cupertino. It's very easy to build that stuff um and repurpose that land. I think the question with the story, like the town of massachusetts, is what do you do? And it's a little like the inner city cores that they're trying to turn office buildings into residents, like in manhattan. The problem is a lot of those buildings are just not suited for people to live in, and so what do you do? And the mall like I, I mean, I love a mall, I love a caramel corn and an orange julius, and I'm a kid from the 80s, I love a chess king, whatever, but like I wouldn't want to live there. So what do you do?
02:21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know Sad story. Benny and Gizmo have left the nest. This is the. Where are they? Where is this? This is the Eagle cam in big bear Valley. No more Benny and Gizmo, the two Eagles that were huge. This was huge. There's still 11, 11 000 people watching this, even though there's no birds.
02:21:52 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
They should use the roofs of malls wow, um.
02:22:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So of course this is uh, spawned numerous think pieces. Still a little feather hanging in the wind, but that's about it. Think pieces here at Fast Company, you might have heard of them. What's next, now that Sonny and Gizmo are leaving the nest? This was huge, this family of bald eagles. We covered it a couple of weeks ago they were still there, but Sonny and Gizmo have moved on as eagles will, as they do. They've left the nest. June 7th, gizmo's turned to fledge. She practically fell out of the nest. Anyway, she landed nearby and they're gone. They came back Monday for dinner, but their days are numbered. So I guess that's all I have to say about that they're the, uh, they.
02:22:58 - Jason Snell (Guest)
They spotted some peregrine falcons on the campanile at uc berkeley and this there you go, put the camera up, because they and they've they've had cameras for a long time.
02:23:05
But the big story is that the bird flu has really killed a lot of the birds and so they're trying to figure out, like how it impacts the larger population and like will. And then they, so they spotted a new falcon that they've never seen before on their cameras, because the falcons who had roosted there for like eight, nine years vanished and they figured that means that they got the bird flu and they died. So it, it's a, it's a huge, yeah, it's. It's like I want to shout out all these people who love birds and I put these cameras in these places because in some ways, this is how, uh, how, biologists and scientists find out the impacts of things that are kind of hard to see, like bird flu, where you know, you don't, you don't know what the birds are doing and how many there are, because they're flying, flying around and stuff, but some of these people are really making an effort to track them in places where they roost.
02:23:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And here is the unknown female visiting the.
02:23:53 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Campanile, yeah, and they're like come on, stay, it's a nice place to have chicks. They've had, they've had many, many chicks there over the last 10 years. There's quite a Cal Falcons there. There's a real great setup they've got they've got multiple webcams on the top. This is the campanile, which is the it's a, it's a, an obelisk. It's the tallest building, uh, in berkeley. And so the paragreens, which are the what fastest birds, they uh, they love it up there.
02:24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So hopefully somebody else. They could see everything going on down there. Yeah, because that's what they do is they.
02:24:22 - Jason Snell (Guest)
They attack other birds that fly lower, so they go up high and then they see the other birds and they swoop down and kill them I thought it was mice, I thought it was rats they're going after birds, they also get, though they kill a lot of birds. They do they do. So you know top two sources of bird death one bird flu, two other birds wow, and of course you are a uh proud alumna yeah, I'm a berkeley guy, so I that's why I follow cal falcon the cal falcons.
02:24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we have a red tail hawks here, but our crows are black. Lisa tells me have chased the red tail hawks off.
02:25:00 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I believe they dive bomb those crows are mean, we have some imposing crows in this neighborhood posing. They're huge and I was just in vancouver, uh, near the convention center, where they have signs saying for god's sake, be careful about these crows and try to walk under the overhang, and we'll even lend you an umbrella to fight them off if you need one they're super smart.
02:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a crow. We have a street out here that I walked down and apparently I didn't know this. This crow's following me like it sits on the front it's this fence looks at me, he goes and I walk a half a block and then it flaps around to ahead of me on the fence. It goes and I thought what the hell is this out of the Alfred Hitchcock movie? Turns out Lisa's been feeding this Crow as she walks that way and somehow the crow has identified me as a related to Lisa is now following me you have.
02:25:54
You have a similar smell now that I must smell like her, that's probably what it is. Well, on that note, thank you, gentlemen, for making this in a quite enjoyable afternoon, despite the apple reflux.
02:26:07
Uh, jason Snell will be back on Tuesday to talk about everything and we're going to get in the deep nitty gritty of it all on Mac Break Weekly. I look forward to that and, of course, you already covered it on your own podcast. You can find out about all of Jason's podcasts at sixcolorscom slash podcasts and his written coverage. You and Dan, uh, the moose, the you've all done a great job of covering this great place to go Six colors Dot com. Thank you so much, Jason. It's nice to see you on a Sunday.
02:26:36 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Nice to be here on a Sunday. Did your team win? Did my team we? We did we, we dominated in curling today. Actually, we did, we, we blew it out. I made, I made most of my shots. I do curling in oakland every sunday and uh, yes, that olympic sport, and uh, it's harder than it looks but uh, I nailed it. I'm gonna go out this season on a high note, I think the number one uh sport in canada winter olympics coming next year yeah, do you?
02:27:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are you? You throw the stones or you sweep, or do you both?
02:27:04 - Jason Snell (Guest)
curling is a team sport, so you four people play and they all rotate through, so you shoot a couple of stones and then you sweep a bunch of stones, and that's how it works.
02:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How fun it's great.
02:27:13 - Jason Snell (Guest)
People should check it out.
02:27:14 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, the best thing to watch on the Winter Olympics, you know, especially on silent, like you can watch it silent. And you're sort of like it's like it's just oddly mesmerizing.
02:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But every once in a while somebody makes this impossible shot and you go oh.
02:27:28 - Jason Snell (Guest)
I mean, I thought they were impossible before and then I did curling for a couple of years and now they're just I don't even know what I'm seeing, and it's so they're so good at that. But I will say, yeah, my club and clubs I imagine all over the country, are planning for next winter, because this is when people are curious about curling and they come out and learn, and that's what we did three years ago.
02:27:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When and where are the Winter Olympics? It's.
02:27:52 - Jason Snell (Guest)
February in, and I want to say it's in Italy, france, in the Alps, I think it's in the Alps, but yes, so yeah, try curling. But curling tends to shut down in the summertime because most of the places they do curling, those people want to be outside in the summertime.
02:28:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, here in the Bay Area we can just do it all summer, Jason, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you, Harry McCracken the technologizer. You'll find his work at fastcompanycom and he's on Blue Sky At Harry McCracken, Anything you want to particularly plug.
02:28:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I guess I at harry mccracken. Anything you want to particularly plug? I guess I. I want to read this article. You're writing an introduction. Yeah, sure that quantum story. Um, yeah, my newsletter plugged in comes out every friday. Uh, you can find that easily at fast company and sign up subscriber.
02:28:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You bet, you bet. Thank you, harry, great to see you thank you.
02:28:42 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Thank you, leo. I will thank you jason's. Thank you, Leo. I will Thank you Jason's.
02:28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the other, jason. Jason Heiner, editor-in-chief. No Dashes at ZDNet. Great to see you, jason, and your TwitFez. He's a proud holder of a TwitFez.
02:28:56 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Always a pleasure. Yes, and the TwitFez, and someday in the back, maybe a Vision Pro. I don't know if it's a Newton or if it's a 1984 Macintosh.
02:29:08 - Jason Snell (Guest)
Either newton or if it's a 1984 macintosh.
02:29:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Either way, that's kind of my attitude, by the way. Either way although that's right, I admit I bought that cube, got it home and that day and apple announced they were discontinuing it.
02:29:16 - Jason Snell (Guest)
So they never discontinued it, they just put it on ice.
02:29:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I yeah I like it. I have a soft spot for that. That was a great computer. Thank you, jason heiner. You're all great. Really appreciate your time. Thanks to all of you who watch.
02:29:29
As you know, we do Twitter every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 pm Pacific. You can watch us. That's 5 to 8 Eastern and 2100 UTC. You can watch us live If you're in the club, in the Discord, but there's also open to the public Twitch, tiktok, xcom, facebook, linkedin and Kik everywhere. But you don't have to watch live.
02:29:51
There's on-demand versions of the show you could download from the website twittv. There's a YouTube channel, a great place to go if you want to share just a clip with somebody and introduce them to the addiction that is called Twit. And, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Do me a favor, though if you do subscribe, leave us a review, a good one, I hope. As many stars as you can muster, uh, that helps us spread the word, and you know, after 20 years, uh, it's easy for people to forget you even exist. I still, every week, hear from somebody say you're still around, you're not dead. No, we're alive and kicking. So tell the world we thank you for being here. Join the club if you're not a member, and thanks to all of our club members for the great support. We will see you next time, um, and I guess, as I've said for the last 20 years, and I'll say it again, another twit is in the can.
