Pre-show: Windows woes Follow-up: Thank you, listeners. 💙 Hard-wired camera indicator light AirPods 4 bass & new MagSafe puck (via Wayne Dixon) Quinn’s AirPods 4 review The A18 is not a binned A18 Pro Fabian Häusler’s interpretation The tiny ∆ between These AirPods iPhones 16 battery life Battery limiting AlDente app for managing charge settings Electrical battery release with reversed polarity (via David Schaub) Verizon activation problems Verizon self-service (via Steven) Bullstrap case review Peel Magnetic iPhone 16 Pro Case Apple Store experience (via Eli Liebman) Marco’s call for help Exist.io Sleep++ ATP #497: The Hotness Has to Go Somewhere Audio Advice Video Catchin’ Sync Masimo founder resigns as CEO after board ouster More from Matt Levine More from Ben Thompson Meta Orion Meta Connect overview NotebookLM Simon Willison’s writeup I Made This Post-show: Torturing John Again Better Pasta Members-only ATP Overtime: Kids and phones at school The Verge coverage California’s Phone-Free School Act Sponsored by: QA Wolf: Kiss bugs goodbye: Delivering 80% automated end-to-end test coverage for web & mobile apps in weeks, not years. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
I installed my first Windows malware in a long time.
Oh, well, that's fun. Like a real malware or a sarcastic malware?
No, well, I don't know the extent of it yet. So there was some saga with my son's gaming PC in trying to figure out what was going on with his laptop's cooling system or thermals or whatever. I wanted to know, what do people use on Windows to show CPU and GPU temperatures to themselves?
And this is one thing, honestly, I have found the web in general to be absolutely horrific at this, but ChatGPT would be pretty good at recommending stuff like this. What do people use for software type X temperatures? That would be something I would normally just search the app store of the device on, which I tried and there's nothing, or search the web and it's useless garbage constantly.
So I actually got pretty good results. And so there's this program called CPU ID, HW Monitor, something that everybody uses. And I was like, okay, I remember that from my old hard OCP days. That still exists. Okay, great. I'll download that.
And it's one of those things where the download link opens up an overlay on the page that looks like a download link, but it's actually an ad that is made to look like a download link.
It's like trying to download Minecraft mods.
Yeah, it's constant just like, okay, here's the real download link. Download now! But it's like, that's not really the download link. You have to close the ad, the download link's behind it or something. Anyway, through all the logistics of trying to find the real download link to this app,
I had one wrong try, and I installed, apparently, PC App Store, which messed up all his browser search parameters and stuff. It was a whole thing. So now I've got to figure out, like, how do I get rid of this now? Of course, Windows Defender is like, everything's fine. It's like, no, trust me, everything's not fine. So now I have to, like, do something else. I guess, like...
malware bytes it's like what do people do do you know like what do people do on windows now what was i've already forgotten what was the name of the thing that caused all the big downtime recently crowd strike out strike yeah so no we're not going to do crowd strike no that's it seems like a bad idea and also that's isn't that like expensive enterprisey stuff i don't know maybe it's a free trial
All of these PC security things are all like guys with guns in the desert. I'm just like, I don't want to... It's very easy to make a wrong step here. Anyway, so I think I've removed some of it. I would love recommendations on what people...
what do people who are not guys with guns and deserts what do you use to just keep malware off of windows pcs that your kid is using for gaming i think people just live with it and have 800 toolbars in their browser yeah and and you know and he's also like he'll install stuff like you know from random you know discords that tell them i'll use this auto clicker tool to cheat in this game so like god knows what else is on this pc so i just but like i just i want something that just like is a
I moved to the Mac roundabouts of 2008. And I think that's right. And I was still a Windows developer by trade until, oh, geez, 2016 or so. But I don't think I've spent more than five minutes using Windows since I left that job. Not the most recent job. Since when I got my most recent job. So I haven't really used Windows since 2016. It's been almost 10 years. And it's glorious. It's so great.
Because I don't have to worry about this. I just don't care. Do not care. And I know this is coming for me because there's probably going to be a gaming PC in my future. Little do I know. But right now, ignorance is less. Oh, it's so great.
And the thing is, after not using Windows for so long, I assumed, surely things have gotten a lot better. They're a little bit different. I wouldn't say they're better. They're just different.
Mm-hmm. All right, let's do some follow-up, and we have to start with a genuine and heartfelt thank you to our ATP listeners. It is no longer September, so it is no longer Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. However, during the month of September— Relay and ATP, but mostly Relay, raised over $1 million. As I sit here tonight, $1,061,652.04. And that is truly incredible.
The last year record, last year was the previous record for Relay, and that was somewhere to the order of $776,000. Here we are A year later, over a million dollars. And I want to say from the bottom of my heart, and I know I speak for you too, thank you so much to everyone who gave a dollar, $5, $10, doesn't matter, any amount of money. Thank you to all of you.
Look at what we have accomplished together. Truly, we have accomplished this together. And that's something to be extremely, extremely proud of. And I hope that anyone who donated feels some amount of ownership over this because you do have some amount of ownership over this. I will, as a final note for this year, I will remind you that corporate matching is a thing.
And if you go to stju.org slash Relay, there's a little bit of information about employer matching and how you can get credit or how Relay can get credit for an employer match, perhaps based on your own donation. So please check it out. But don't feel like you can't donate for the rest of the year or the beginning of next year. You certainly can. That's fine. Nobody's going to complain.
But genuinely, thank you so very much for the incredible amount of money that we all raised. I am incredibly proud of all of us and thankful to all of you. So thank you. We have some anonymous feedback with regard to the hardwired camera indicator light from years past. Anonymous writes...
When the first built-in camera was designed for the first Intel iMac, user notification was designed into the hardware. The camera board was separate, not integrated into the computing board. At the specific direction of a key individual, the light was hardwired directly into the board's power circuit. If the board was receiving power, the light was turned on.
If the board was not receiving power, the light was off. No software was involved. This design was passed on to the laptop team. And yeah, this is just anti-laptop propaganda. I don't want to read the rest of this. The design was passed on to the laptop. Don't extrapolate that laptops are bad, just from this one example.
That's not the conclusion I drew. I feel like you're getting defensive for no reason.
Because I know you.
I didn't write this.
This design was passed on to the laptop team. Much later, news of the camera light hack mentioned on the previous episode of ATP went around Apple. Alarms went off, circuit designs were laid out on tables, and a lot of shouting happened. Turns out, the laptop team had later quote-unquote improved the design, accidentally making this hack possible.
It's amusing to think that this quote-unquote secure exclave is a return to the spirit of the original design requirement.
This is big companies, you know, it's hard to make sure that things are communicated across groups, you know, across years, across different hardware platforms. So it is interesting to know that the design initially, at least according to this person, was sound. It just sort of got the soundness kind of got lost in translation.
And eventually they shipped a thing that was supposed to be hack proof, but was in fact hackable.
Indeed. Yeah, it's a bummer, but like you said, that's big business for you. Wayne Dixon writes with regard to AirPods 4, the base on the AirPods 4 with ANC is definitely heavier than the AirPods 3, according to Wayne. I have no personal experience, so I'll take Wayne's word on this.
Wayne continues, also, the new MagSafe puck does not align itself with the AirPods 4 case either, despite being slightly smaller than the old puck.
Oh, yeah, and Marco was asking how to tell the difference between the two of them. Someone wrote in to say that the new ones have braided cables and the old ones don't. I'm not sure if that's true, but that was a suggestion from a listener.
A friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, with regard to the ear sensors in AirPods 4. This is quoting from a YouTube video, which we will link in the show notes. These buds use Apple's old optical detection sensor, so anything opaque that modifies light to this spot will pause and resume music.
Apple does appear to be using the onboard accelerometers to prevent music from being resumed when the buds are at opposing angles, so you would think that it might be okay in your pocket, but it's not bulletproof. Placing one or both earbuds in my pocket will often resume music unexpectedly. This was a solved problem. The outgoing AirPods 3 had a sensor that only responded to capacitive skin.
This is a real bummer of a downgrade and a compromise that I hope was only made for that thinner fitment comfort rather than to save a buck or to artificially segment the lineup.
For whatever it's worth, I have this problem on the AirPods Pros. I think the AirPods Pro don't have skin sensing. I could be wrong, but I will often have... I'll put them in my pants pocket for a minute as I'm going in a building or something, and I will sometimes find out that it has been playing in my pocket.
So I don't know if this is just a little... You can do an experiment and use your finger versus covering it with a piece of cardboard or something. That's too much work.
Wow. John, do you want to tell us about discoveries with regard to the A18 and A18 Pro, please?
So the real hardware folks are finally getting to give us the hardware answers that we crave in these next two items. The first one is something that we talked about when these phones were announced is based on the specs that Apple gave, it was like, boy, the A18 and the A18 Pro seem very similar.
And some people were speculating that the A18 might be just a binned version of the A18 Pro based on like, oh, you know, the A18 Pro has six GPU cores and the A18 has five. Maybe they're just binned. And I went through all the differences on the announcement show and the differences were many besides just the GPU cores.
And I was like, technically, it could technically be a binned one, but there's so much that is different about the A18 Pro that it seems it would be totally unprecedented for them to be intentionally disabling so much of the chip. So now we have actual die shots of someone who cut the A18 and the A18 Pro open, and lo and behold, they are different chips.
They look pretty similar, but they're not the same chip. So no, the A18 is not a binned A18 Pro. They're just two similar chips, and you can... Look, this is from chipwise.tech. You can look at their die shots. And then Fabian Hausler also put in like a sort of a markup interpretation, labeling the parts of the chips to see what they are, and then put in an M4 for reference as well.
So A18 and A18 Pro, two separate chips.
I didn't mention this when we first were talking about these, but I kind of regretted afterwards not mentioning it. If you look at why they might be doing this, like the A18 being its own special chip, it's now the smallest and most likely therefore cheapest chip in Apple's lineup that can run Apple Intelligence. So this is not just going to be in the iPhone 16.
It is most likely going to also be in all upcoming Apple products that don't have a need for massive CPU power otherwise but want to run Apple intelligence. So think about things like future HomePods, like the rumored HomePod with the screen or the robot arm thing, whatever that's going to be, like that kind of thing. Low-end iPads. Maybe possibly the next Apple TV. Who knows?
There's lots of products across Apple's lineup that they're going to want to put Apple intelligence in, maybe because they are Siri-based like a HomePod or things like that. They're going to want that across as much of their product line as possible as quickly as possible.
So I'm guessing the base A18 is most likely going to be the next chip in lots of different things, probably all releasing over the following year or two. And we'll probably find out first when we get an update to the low-end iPad, because I bet it'll be powering that.
I hope that's true, and I know Apple probably says that the A18 is the minimum chip that can run Apple Intelligence, but I don't think the neural engine, the A18, is actually any faster than the 17 or maybe even the 16. When we're looking at the T-flops or whatever, I forget if there was a big difference. Obviously, the GPU is slower, the CPUs are slower, whatever.
It just seems to me that RAM is the real limiting factor. Because it's not like you can't run Apple intelligence on older chips. It will just obviously be slower. The limiting factor that would make it so you literally can't is RAM. But, you know, practically speaking, they might just say A18 is the minimum spec going forward. And, yeah, these chips tend to live on for a long time.
And the ones that live on are not the pro chips. So, yeah, A18 hopefully is in our future. I mean, I'm saying hopefully because I don't want them to, like, historically the HomePod line has not received... the cream of the crop of chips.
And even though A18 is the, you know, maybe it's Apple's current minimum spec for Apple intelligence due to the RAM associated with it and whatever stuff they claim about the minimum speed required for the GPU and neural engine and CPU, I can see them shipping like, for example, that robot arm thing with a chip older than the A18. I hope I'm wrong. I hope they don't do that, but we'll see.
And in the same spirit, it turns out there is a tiny hardware difference between the two, these AirPods. So John, what's going on here?
I fixed it, took apart the AirPods 4 painfully, because they do not come apart easily. And here's what they had to say in a video we will link in the show notes. Both versions, talking about both versions of the AirPods 4, the ones with and without ANC, both versions have the exact same system and package or SIP housing the brains.
In fact, they said, we won't be tearing down the AirPods 4 with ANC because the only difference between the two earbuds appears to be a single outward facing microphone, the ANC version having a bigger, beefier mic. So we'll, you know, link to the video and you can look.
these products as far as ifixit can tell are identical right down to the number of microphones the only difference is the airpods 4 with anc one of the microphones is bigger than it is in the airpods 4 which if this is true i mean obviously they can't tell every single minute component but they can tell the sip they can tell they can count the things that are in it they have whatever this weird scanning microscope thing that shows them all the guts or whatever
Like, now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, why didn't Apple make the hardware the same? Like, they estimated, I don't know if it's a sarcastic thing, estimated it as a $2 part that's the difference between them. And I guess maybe that adds up. And they said it's a $2 part, so maybe the one on the AirPods 4 is a $1 part, so it's a $1 difference.
I suppose when you're making millions and millions of things, that $1 really does add up, so they should make them separate, but... wow, like these really are, you know, for the $50 difference, you get a different case, which we'll get to in a second, and you get a slightly bigger microphone in one of the places. Pretty amazing.
I mean, maybe they did it this way so that it wouldn't be some big scandal that it's just like a software lockout kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, that's an interesting point. I mean, again, it could also just be that $1 difference that, you know, I don't know, iFix's offhand comment, $1 or $2 difference times millions of AirPods is millions of dollars. So there's that.
And then additionally from iFixit, if we take a look at the x-rays of the ANC version of the case, we can again see the exact same PCB, but with a speaker inside the housing. This is another component that contributes to the extra $50 you'd pay for the ANC version. As far as I can tell, those are the only two differences.
So they kept the guts of the case the same too, except for obviously, I mean, the case itself I think is different because it's got holes for the speaker. So there's one hardware difference. And the second one is, hey, there's a speaker behind those holes.
And so, you know, for the $50 for the AirPods 4 with ANC, you get one of the microphones is bigger in each earbud, and you get a single speaker component that is not, and the three holes that it talks through in the case. And that's it. Everything else about them is the same. Good profit margins on the high-end product. What else is new from Apple?
All right. And then Tom's Hardware or Tom's Guide, whatever they're calling themselves these days, did a large test of the iPhone's 16 battery life. And they have a summary table that John has been kind enough to put in the show notes for me.
They didn't have a summary table. I made a summary table. They just had a bunch of numbers.
and and that's the that's the thing like when these people do reviews it always boggles my mind that they're they spend all the time to do these tests they do all this hard work and they have all these measurements and they put them in a bunch of tables and it's like you gotta you gotta do the final step which is like like sum it up tell me what this means don't make me do the math which i had to do for all this to find out the actual important information
Here it was. I was trying to credit you, and apparently I did not give you sufficient credit. So I apologize.
No, you didn't yell at Tom's guy enough. Okay, I see.
Follow-up, copyright 2011, John Syracuse. So anyway, battery size for the iPhone 16. It's up 6.3%. Battery life up almost 15%. Battery size for the 16 Plus up almost 7%. Battery life up almost 16%. 16 Pro gets about 9%, and 30% increased battery life. 16 Pro Max, 6% battery size increase, and again, about 30% battery life increase. That is quite impressive. Yeah.
And so the reason why these are the things you should put in, like this is sort of the bottom line, sum it up for me, is how much bigger did the battery get? And yeah, I did the math on like how many milliamp hours or whatever, but you really want to know percentage-wise. And this is all versus its predecessor.
So it's 16 versus 15, 16 plus versus 15 plus, 16 pro versus, you know, it's directly versus their predecessors because there are direct predecessors for all these phones. It's like, what percentage bigger did the battery get? And then for that increase in battery size, what percentage better is the battery life? And Tom's Hardware is in a position to do that.
They put the numbers in for these different phones because presumably they ran the same test on all the 15s that they did on the 16s. And they come up with the number that's representative of whatever they're... Test is. So in all these cases, the battery got some percent bigger, but the battery life increased much more than the battery size increase.
So, you know, again, the 16 Pro got a 10% bigger battery, but 30% bigger battery life. That is huge. And then I put the absolute values here. Like, what does that even mean? So the increased battery life in terms of wall clock time for the iPhone 16 is an hour 38. For the 16 Plus, it's two hours and 15 minutes. 16 Pro is three hours and 14 minutes. And 16 Pro Max is four hours and four minutes.
These are not small battery increases like, oh, you get extra 10 minutes to 30 minutes. Again, how representative is this Tom's Guide test? Like, is it light web browsing? Is it representative of how you use your phones? But...
They made all the batteries bigger by a significant percentage, and the battery life got way bigger than the percentage increase, and you will feel those for most of these things, because they're measured in... Only one of them is a single hour, and all the other ones are in multiple hours. And this brings me to the next topic.
I have a 16 Pro, which apparently gets 30% better battery life than the 15 Pro did, which equates to an extra 3 hours and 14 minutes of battery life in Tom's test. What I did after having my phone for a day or two was I put on the 80% battery limit. I said, I don't think I need to charge this thing to 100%.
So in the battery, this is the first time I've had a phone that supports this setting because my 14 Pro didn't support it. So I went into battery or whatever and I said, never charge yourself more than 80%. And then for the next several days, I intentionally did not charge my phone during the day, even though I could have, like I could, plug it in when I'm doing dishes or whatever.
I intentionally didn't do that just to see, is 80% enough to get me through a regular day? And right now on a brand new 16 Pro, 80% is more than enough. Intentionally not charging like I normally would during the day. And so I'm currently on the 80% plan. And there's been lots of debate about this. People saying, oh, that's a waste. You're never getting the full capacity of your phone.
You should charge it to 100%. Don't worry about it or whatever. But if I don't need to charge it to 100%, I am, you know, making my battery last longer, especially since I keep my phone for two years than if I did otherwise. So that's my plan.
And we'll put a link in the show notes to some sort of anecdata from Nick here who had like a survey of like 100 people and said, hey, are you charging to 80%? And if so, you know, how's it going for you or whatever? I think this is something people should at least consider might be a possibility for them. And you know, everyone knows your own life.
If you're on a commute and you have no place to charge during the day and you barely make it through 100%, charge your 100%, like by all means. But I thought I could make it with 80% and so far I can. And so I'm going to keep it there. And if it turns out I can't make it with 80%, I'll probably crank it to 90 and then go up to 100.
And we'll see at the end of my two years how my battery life is doing.
Can you crank it to 90 or 100? I thought it was either 80 or nothing.
Yeah, it's like a slider. Maybe you can even go by fives. I don't remember. But yeah, it's like a little slider bar in the settings.
Well, for some reason, I thought it was the same. I think the laptops are 80 or 100, and I thought it was the same on the phones. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm wrong. I just didn't realize.
And on laptops, people always recommend this, and I forget to write it down, but there are programs for the Mac that give you even more control over this, not just the OS things. What is that one called? Maybe it's Coconut Battery. Maybe it's something else.
There's a bunch of Mac OS programs that let you do the same thing for your laptop battery and choose what you want to limit to and do all these fancy stuff with it.
Al Dente is the one that I think most people recommend. A-L-D-E-N-T-E. I will put it in the show notes. David Schaub has some input or correction, really. We were talking last episode or the episode before about the glue that becomes not so sticky when you apply a voltage to it. Um, and remind me what exactly we said would happen if we, if you reverse the polarity.
I was trying to remember what happened if you reverse the polarity and I misinterpreted the, or misremembered the, uh, the iFixit video that was explaining this. So David wrote in with the corrections.
So David writes, when making the positive and negative electrical connections to release an iPhone 16 battery, the polarity determines which side the glue residue is left on when it unsticks. If you mistakenly reverse the positive and negative connections, the residue is left on the chassis, which is hard to clean, instead of the battery, which is where you want it.
Yeah, so it's like the sticky gunk. Apparently there is sticky gunk and you get to choose where it's left and you don't want it to be in the phone. So that's why you have to be careful about the polarity, but it will not like re-stick.
Indeed. And then Eric Westland writes in to corroborate your story with regard to Verizon activation problems. Eric writes, I bought my iPhone unlocked from Apple, as did I. I had the exact same experience as John. My last phone was three years ago and I had the same problem then too. Verizon just stinks at this. I will interject as me now. Hi, this is Casey. Yeah.
And I'll say that for me, I think we talked last week about how my phone did not activate initially. And then if memory serves, it was like once I got to the standard Springboard iOS screen, I think it was at that point, it was like, hey, you're not activated. You want to do it again? I said, yeah. And then it worked no problem the second time.
For Aaron's phone, I did the exact same stuff that I did on my phone, and it worked no sweat. Now, hers was... Tuesday or Wednesday after release, I think it was, whereas I was doing it the Sunday, you know, the weekend of release. So I would imagine things were still a bit busy on both the carrier and Apple sides of things.
So maybe it was just that it was, you know, things were overwhelmed when John was trying to do it and Eric apparently, but who knows?
Yeah, I'm sure that's what it was. Like I always, I'm doing it like the phones are arriving at people's doorsteps that day. Right. And so it's the worst possible time to do it. But yeah, Verizon is apparently very bad at this. And by the way, I think Eric said he did it in two different states. I think one like Massachusetts and Iowa had the same problem.
So yeah, the moral of the story is even if you get an unlock phone from Verizon, if you get it on day one and you try to do activation, good luck.
Thank you for having me. With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Drada, Autotrader, and many more, you're in good hands with QA Wolf. Check it out today at qawolf.com slash ATP to see if QA Wolf can help you squash your QA bottleneck. Thank you so much to QA Wolf for sponsoring our show.
John, I believe this is your case review that we would like to talk about next.
Marco's got the same case. We can both talk about it. But yeah, I got the leather bull strap case with the open bottom on it. We'll put a link in the show notes. This is the one that has a hole for the camera control, as do nearly all but not all third party cases. Previously, I was using the Beats case, which I talked about on the earlier show, and so here's my review of the Bullstrap case.
Leather is nicer material, as far as I'm concerned, than the Beats case. I do think this one, the corners had some wrinkles on them that's a little bit unpleasing, but, you know, it's a... Artisanal product to everyone is a little bit different. Everything about it is the same as my iPhone 14 Pro case, obviously, except for the camera control cutout.
Marco talked about the Peak Design camera control cutout, which had sort of like a sloping on all sides to get down to the camera control, and that was not pleasing to him. Bullstrap has decided to try to avoid that problem, which I think is smart of them.
By not making it so there's like sloping things on all sides, so you have to kind of shove your fleshy finger into this little valley to get to the thing, they decided one of the sides is not going to exist. So if you look at the phone from the front, it's just a regular, you know, you see the case going all the way around. But if you look at the phone from the back, you see
part of the sidewall of the case has been notched out, right? So it's not symmetrical. It is not a symmetrical hole in the side of your case. There is a wall on the screen side, then there's the hole for the camera button, and there's no wall on the other side. Like basically the bottom of the case just comes to an end and that's it.
And it's not really, it doesn't really center the camera control either. So it's interesting. It feels flimsier on that side. It feels like there's a gigantic notch taken out of the side of the phone because there is a gigantic notch taken out of the side of the phone.
The sort of little stick or pole or whatever that is the front of the sidewall over the camera control seems delicate and fidgety and creaky. And I just generally hate this. I don't like it.
the hole in the side of the case at all i can get to the camera control i can press it but it is annoying to do so and now i also i'm going to leave this on the phone because i'm like i don't know if i can handle this maybe i'm gonna go back to the beads case but after having it for like a week or so i've decided the advantages of the leather the grippiness of the leather
outweigh the terribleness of this hole in the side of the thing. So I'm going to keep this on until or unless it breaks. But as of right now, what I am looking for is basically this case, a leather case with an open bottom, but with... the pass-through camera control. And third parties, I think there's like two or three or maybe four third-party case manufacturers that do have pass-through.
One of them I saw doesn't even use the quartz thing. It uses a piece of plastic with a bunch of little copper wires going through it to do the conductance thing. Look, whatever you got to do with third-party cases, but I'm out here saying, Bullstrap, Ryan London, and then the five other manufacturers who apparently sell this exact same case for differing prices...
I know you had to do the thing with the hole on day one. You couldn't, maybe you couldn't, like everyone else had to too. I get it. I bought your case at great expense. I'm using it on my phone. But please, somebody, somebody out there, make a leather open bottom case. With a quartz pass-through for the camera control. That's what I want.
And until then, I'm just going to have a gigantic wound in the side of my phone that I feel every day. And it makes it slightly less satisfying. Marco, what do you think of the Bullstrap case?
After however many weeks it's been, one, two, of using the Apple silicone case, I actually also switched to my Bullstrap case a couple of days ago.
because the silicone case it's it's just too hard getting in and out of jeans pockets it like pulls the whole pocket liner out with it you know um so it's just i i wanted to try this and yeah the leather does feel a lot better like bull straps leather is very very good um but yeah i too hate the camera cut out uh it doesn't feel good it doesn't work well uh it doesn't certainly doesn't look good um and i i too worry about the longevity of that little
little thin piece of leather that comes down across the front edge of it um this look this is all no one's gonna have this design next year like by the time everyone makes their cases for next year's phones like no one will be using this design on a good case and there's a reason for that it's not a good design um they did what they had to do with day one unknowns but yeah like john i'm hoping for a better version of this case in the future that has a button cover for the camera control that works
Do you agree that their decision to omit one of the sidewalls surrounding the camera troll makes it more comfortable to you than the Peak Design version of the whole?
I think it's only more comfortable because leather is softer than hard plastic. I've got the Peak Design one right here. Like the Peak Design one, it actually has about the same indentation shape. Like it is just as thin on a little skinny piece in front of the camera control button.
But look at the other side of the camera control. There's no wall there. You mean like the back of the phone? Yeah, yeah. There's not equal size walls on the front and the back of the phone in terms of surrounding the camera control. Do you see what I mean?
I see what you mean. It's pretty subtle. The Peak Design one is symmetric, but that's a pretty subtle difference. I don't think that matters. I think what I didn't like about the Peak Design is merely that their plastic is harder than leather, and neither one of these feels good. But the...
I'm tolerating the bull strap case because it is the smallest number of bad trade-offs that I have found yet. I also have the Apple clear case. I thought that would solve my problems, and it does not. The Apple clear case I found to have very bad buttons. Especially the sleep-wake button, it's much harder to push than the other cases I have, and it doesn't have good feedback.
So I think it's just a lower quality, or maybe it's a materials thing. So far, the Apple silicone case works the best and feels the best in use. It just sucks at going in and out of pockets, which is the problem they've always had. Whereas the...
The bare-bottomed bull strap case is the nicest leather case that I have found so far, but with the exception of that giant thing that John complained about, the giant camera cutout.
By the way, if Apple made an open-bottomed silicone case, I would probably be using it instead of the leather one because I don't have so many problems with getting it out of pockets, and I'm desperate to not have this giant hole on the side of my phone. It feels like a chicken pox scar.
Yeah, I hope in a few months people have remade these cases with better designs.
I'm so afraid they're going to be like, ah, we'll do that for the next phone. This phone, tough luck, right? I really hope that they come out with version two. It's like, we couldn't have it from day one, but now everyone knows how to do the quartz pads through. So here's like, I'll buy a second case ball strap. Just put it out.
You know, I don't want to be like, well, we could never figure it out for the 16 line, but for the 17, we'll have the quartz pads through. That doesn't help me because I'm not getting a 17. Yeah, I hope they do. I hope they do.
And I hated that. And I'm currently going caseless, caseless on the iPhone 16 that I have. And I'll probably continue to do that. But I was looking and I was wondering, hey, I wonder if since last year, did Peak end up doing, or I think it's, no, Peel. I'm sorry, Peel. Did Peel end up doing an action button and how have they handled the camera control?
And the answer is they did not do an action button and they just have a hole for the camera control as they do for all of the buttons. Yeah. And it's too bad because like the way I remember it, this was a year ago now, but the way I remember it, the case felt great. It was thin because I don't want, I'm not an Otterbox kind of person.
Like I want something thin, but more than zero if I'm going to do a case at all. And the key to the peel, and they say it as a piece of marketing as they should, say it with me, gentlemen, no branding. No branding. And I loved that. And what I ended up doing was returning that case because I hated the lack of a fake button, if you will, for the action button.
And I got a Taurus, T-O-R-R-A-S, which also doesn't have any outward-facing branding, but the case was...
fine like i i didn't like it near as much as i liked the peel but i could not abide by the gaps for the buttons and i was hoping so much that by the 16 they would at least have an action button even if they punted on the camera control and from everything i can tell nope it's just a bunch of holes Just like your Mac Pro.
I really hope they update these cases. If not, I don't know what I'm going to do. If that little delicate thing does break, what am I going to do? Go back to the Beats case? Buy a second one of these at great expense? Honestly, because all I get on Instagram now are ads for phone cases, as you can imagine, I'm really seeing...
how many different people sell that resell this exact same ryan london bull strap like i forget what the other brand sr recently like at least three or four maybe even five different brands that are clearly selling the same case that some manufacturer makes in china somewhere right and so we say oh bull straps leather is good it's not bull straps leather what they do is stamp the little bull thing on it and put it in a pretty box and sell it to us for way more money than everyone else does which is fine like whatever i'll take it you know they were the first one to ship so that's why they got my money
But please, somebody out there, open bottom. I'm asking for a lot. Nobody cares about open bottom but me, right? Open bottom leather quartz camera control. Otherwise, I'm going to be using this weird scarred case for two years.
It's sad times. Part of me wonders if we should, you know, try to design a case that makes all of us happy. And then I immediately decide that that's a terrible, terrible, terrible decision.
Can you imagine trying to design a case that would please John?
It wouldn't actually be that hard, but the problem is most we'd ever be able to sell, assuming we sold this as a product to our listeners, is like a few hundred cases at best, right? And no one's going to manufacture anything with those kind of small numbers.
That's probably why these companies are not going to make a new case, because they have to pre-order like millions, not millions, but like thousands and thousands of them to get whatever good price they get on them. And they can't afford to say... you know, let's design a whole new case and buy a few thousand of those. They have to sell through all these ones that they made and paid for.
And then by then it's time for a new phone.
I mean, hey, we did it for the chicken hat. Can be done.
Yeah, I think a chicken hat is a little bit easier to manufacture than something that has to be precisely fit around an iPhone.
Yeah, and first of all, imagine if we had to make the chicken hat, but we didn't know where people's ears would be or how big their heads would be until after they were all made. And by the way, we did know where people's ears are. We did know how big people's heads are.
And we still had a lot of fit complaints about the chicken hat, let's be honest. Well, the good thing about the chicken hat was, first of all, the manufacturer that was making it for us was in the U.S. and had a short turnaround time. And second of all, we had a prototype, which is my actual chicken hat and the chicken hats we sold.
If you lay them down on top of my actual chicken hat, they pretty much nailed it. I bought several of these hats that we sold and I have the original and I can just lay them on top of each other. They're constructed the same way. They're the same size, like pretty much down to the millimeter. Now, again, they ended up being too small for a lot of people's heads.
Because my chicken hat is too small for a lot of people's heads. But what you got with the chicken hat was exactly what we were selling, which is as close a clone as possible as we could get to my chicken hat. And so I think we did a pretty good job with that.
But yeah, trying to do something like that with a complicated product like this manufactured not in the US with six months turnaround time, not going to happen. But somebody out there, somebody, somebody, please. Find this manufacturer in China that's making these cases for all these. If they sell one with a quartz pass-through on it, somebody buy 10,000 of those and start selling them.
I will buy one. And then step three, profit? I don't know.
Only 9,999 left.
uh this is the complaint about the apple store corner uh eli liebman writes i was planning to upgrade to the series 10 watch but wasn't sure which size to get and wanted to see them in person before purchasing after confirming online that both sizes were available for pickup at my local store i made my way there to choose and purchase my new watch i found an employee and asked to purchase the watch the conversation went like this uh marco actually would you mind playing the role of apple in this little uh skip for me please
Sure, hold on. Wait, should I play it cool?
Here we go. I'd like to buy this watch, please. Do you have an appointment? No, I didn't know which one I wanted, and I wanted to see them before I purchased it.
All of our new products require an online order and an appointment to pick it up.
Uh, huh. I didn't know that. Is the watch in stock? Yes. Jesus. So can I buy it? No. First, you need to make an appointment. Okay. When's the next appointment? In two and a half hours.
So even though the item's in stock and I'm standing right here, I need to come back in two and a half hours in order to purchase it. Exactly. Thank you, Marco. Very well done. Yeah, so Eli writes, so I left and ordered the watch on Amazon where it was delivered to me later that same day. It's just terrible. Anyway, Eli continues, I can't think of another store where this would be acceptable.
If they were busy, sure. I wouldn't expect to be helped before folks who made an appointment, but the store was empty. Why is it acceptable to tell a customer to come back in a few hours to purchase an item that is in stock? It seems like they don't value their customer's time. I have things to do. I already took time away from work to come to the store.
I've been buying Apple products for almost 20 years and this is the first time I've had a negative in-store experience when trying to purchase something. What used to be magical, watching the employee pull out a receipt from under the table was delightful, is now simply inconvenient. I truly believed Apple solved the retail experience, but not anymore.
This is the danger when saying, like, we're reimagining the experience of retail. You always picture in your head that what you're going to be doing is not accepting sort of the status quo for all the bad things and saying people just accept X, Y, and Z are just the way stores have to be. Well, we don't think that way. Everything's on the table. We're reimagining the whole experience.
But if you're not careful and you just stick to that philosophy and you're like, you know, we're reimagining the experience, what you can end up doing is removing some of the good things and reimagining them to be way, way worse.
And one of the good things is if you walk into a store and they have a product in stock, you can give someone money for it and then walk out of the store like you can buy it. Like, do you have this product? Is it in stock? I'm here and you're here and the product is here. My money is here. Let's make this happen.
in an empty store and when they say to you no please make an appointment on the app and the first appointment is two hours from now that is reimagining the retail experience so you are following your philosophy of reimagining the retail experience but for the worse that you get into just ridiculous territory like i would you know we've complained that even the whole like oh there are no lines is an example of reimagining that maybe
isn't positive but this is definitely not positive like you should be able to go in there and buy something it's like i have money you have product let's let's make this happen but they're like no make an appointment come back in two hours that's no good it's it's so bad and i know that some of this is just the east coaster in me coming out i want a line i want a queue i want to order i want everything to be ordered i want to get in get out as quickly as possible but that being said
Ugh, it's just, it's unnecessarily complicated. And this is the sort of thing that we would just eviscerate a Microsoft Store for, and here it is Apple doing it.
I mean, if there was ever too many people in a Microsoft Store, it would require such a system like this. Well, that's true.
Yeah, like, it's just, as I pointed out, it doesn't value the customer's time. They drove to the store, came to the place, brought their money and their wallet, and they want to, like, look at it and buy a thing, and you're like, no, make an appointment for two hours from now?
That doesn't value the time of the person who made the trip to do this, especially if the Apple store is, like, far away from them. It's not acceptable.
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So build them, man.
Come on. It's tempting, honestly. But I have a bit on my plate right now with the app I do have. So I don't have time to make these right now. I assume someone has made them, but I cannot find them. So number one, I recently started sleep tracking. I'm just wearing the Apple Watch to bed. I even discovered the sleep focus mode, which I'm finally using because it makes the screen turn off at night.
The funny thing is, I hadn't been using the sleep focus mode for whatever reason. I just use auto do not disturb at night. And I was trying to figure out how do I make the watch screen turn off while I'm sleeping because it was bothering my wife and so on. Theater mode. That's what I tried. Theater mode. Guess what theater mode turns off? Alarms. Does it? Yep, sure does.
Remember when the alarm went off when the person was in the theater? Do you remember that whole controversy?
Oh, yes, I do.
Yes, yes, yes.
So one night of that, I'm like, okay, well, that's not the answer. This is like the equivalent of the shoe bomber. 25 years later, theater mode still doesn't let the alarms go off.
yeah anyways yeah theater was not it but this turns out the sleep focus does that um so all i want to do is i want an app that every morning i can tag the sleep i had the night before with arbitrary tags that i input things like you know whether i like stayed up too late or maybe i had a late meal or maybe i was like you know sleeping alone i was you know at the beach by myself or something like
I want to have like tags that I can tag my sleep, you know, late coffee, alcohol consumption, things like that. And then I want to be able to see in the future, like I want to be able to pick a tag and see like, okay, with this tag, your sleeps with this one are, you know. 12% better on average than sleeps that don't have this tag, or 12% worse.
Remember that app that Merlin always talks about and makes fun of? Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, when you are in Washington, you sleep worse.
You weigh more, but sleep worse. So I have been looking for apps to do this, and... I have – so thanks to some chat GPT research, I installed the top couple of sleep apps. They have been like super disasters of just gross, like massive privacy invasion, huge suites of functionality doing all sorts of stuff I don't need.
There was one app – this was one of the top-rated sleep apps in the App Store – That, first of all, puts you through an in-app purchase flow immediately and with no way to get around it. So I'm pretty sure that actually violates the App Store rule against minimum functionality. But the App Store rules are not being enforced here in lots of ways.
And there's a handful of top sleep apps in the App Store, and this is one of them. One of them offered me to pay $40 a year for premium features, including I can listen to recordings of my own farts from my sleep the next morning. Nice.
Oh, cool.
And I learned when I saw that for $40 a year, not only have we really hit App Store bottom here, but that's when I decided I think I should probably raise the Overcast subscription price, which is currently a quarter of that.
How many farts does Overcast let you hear?
None. Well, it depends. I mean, what do people generate?
You know, you've got to up your fart game if you're going to compete in those leagues. Obviously, yeah.
Maybe I'm just tackling the wrong feature set, apparently.
I mean, we started out with fart apps on the App Store, and we've come full circle now.
You have to supply the farts. Exactly. Real-time follow-up, by the way. Apparently, exist.io is the app that Merlin always talks about. Yes, I remember that now, so thank you.
to people in chat who said that but yeah so anyway so i just want a simple app to do and like these apps they want to be they want to give you like a meditation routine and be custom alarms and tie into like you know lay your lay your phone on the pillow and subscribe to our service so we can life coach your partner and it's like oh my god just let me just tag my sleep and see data that's it that's all i want so far i have not found anything to do it doesn't underscore have a sleep app
Yeah, sleepwalk spots.
Yes. I don't believe it has that feature, though. Well, I think you have a direct line to getting that feature added. Yeah. That's probably easier than making it myself. Anyway, so that's one thing I want. The second thing I want, I finally set up the rest of my Sonos system.
I finally moved my Sonos speakers out of my office downstairs to where they were originally purchased for the living room TV. So I have the ARC soundbar, two ARR 300s as the surrounds, and a sub.
Good God.
It is a very nice system. However, the one challenge with setting up a Sonos soundbar stuff is audio delay. Any Sonos input introduces latency because of the way their system buffers and processes things and has network Wi-Fi stuff. There's always latency on the input on the audio. And TVs have ways to adjust the audio sync.
The Apple TV also has a built-in way, something like calibrate wireless audio sync, where if you're using HomePods or anything else, it's like, all right, place your phone in front of the Apple TV, and we'll figure out your audio sync for you, which seems to change things, but not correctly.
Anyway, so I'm trying to watch TV and everyone's lips aren't matching up to their audio, which is infuriating. And so I'm trying to align it. My TV also has a built-in control, but it's negative five through positive three or something. These units make no sense. And so I'm like, all right, well, what is it? And I've been adjusting it, trying to figure out what it is.
Eventually, there has to be an app to automatically use my phone and the TV to tell me, all right, you're 15 milliseconds behind. You're 30 milliseconds behind. Show me an actual number. Play something on the TV. Use the phone to show me an actual number. And there's even videos on YouTube that will – that show you like – it like plays beep, beep every few seconds, beep.
And it shows you like a little bar going across when it hits the middle right when the beep happens. So you can tell if you use your own phone to shoot video of the TV screen and then slow-mo through the video to find where does the beep happen if you can see the waveform. So here's how I did this.
Oh, by the way, this all sounds familiar to you listeners because we talked about this in episode 297 of ATP when I set up my AV setup, including probably the exact video that Marco was looking at and me recording on my phone in slow motion and seeing the waveform in iMovie. So we'll put a link in the show notes to that episode of ATP and also to the two apps slash videos that I used for that.
I did the same thing with Final Cut. I didn't have iMovie on my computer, but I had Final Cut still. And this is such a ridiculous overuse of a tool. Final Cut is not what this is for. It fights you at every turn. It should not be doing this. And yet, that's what I was able to see where the waveform of the video is.
I mean, you still have to make the choice, like I said, in episode 97. Then you still have to decide, all right, so when the little bar is in the middle in the video, should that be just as the waveform goes from silent to not silent? Should it be the peak of the waveform where the volume, the amplitude is the highest? You have to make all these judgment calls.
But I can tell you from experience that no matter how you make the judgment calls, as long as you do something reasonable, you can get it so close to being perfect that you won't notice it anymore.
yeah but what I want like this process would be very easy so here here's what this process should be the phone plays a video over airplay to the Apple TV or you just have a YouTube video that you can point your app to and say play this video on the Apple TV and then the phone uses its camera and microphone to watch for a big white flash on the video and
and listen to the microphone, and listen to the beep, and you can see those impulses on the input video and on the input audio, and the app should be able to tell you. Every time it sees flash beep, every time it should be able to tell you, you're 35 milliseconds behind. It can tell you that. That's not hard to write. I could write it.
I just shouldn't write it. The tricky part of that is when you get down to these kind of timings, that the time between when a photon hits the camera and the time when an app...
registered that that took place is probably a handful of milliseconds and you have to account for that and it might vary from phone to phone so that's a little bit tricky i'm guessing that's a that's probably less than a frame of of time maybe i mean but like again maybe it varies by device like it's not something that comes up normally like when you're recording video or something like that like oh how much lag is there how much lag between again photons hitting the lens of the camera and a program that is watching for that knowing that that happened but
uh but yeah it would definitely be better than the than doing it the manual way which is very annoying uh and you know why marco was using final cut and when i was using my movie is because you need a visual representation of the audio you need to be able to see a waveform and i don't think there at least there was no apps that i knew of on the phone that did that that were not like full-fledged video editors and honestly i'd rather just do it on the mac so i was recording videos coming back to the mac opening the video in imovie
watching the slow motion thing going frame by frame seeing where the waveform is and then adjusting the you know the uh delay until i dialed it in and i did that in 2022 and haven't touched it sync and it's been great so i believe in you mark you can get over this hump
I have it set up that it seems okay now, but it still doesn't seem quite right. But I think it's so close, and I have it between negative three and negative four on my TV. If I put it on the next one over, it looks too wrong. I think this is about as good as it's going to get, but this process took me like 40 minutes, and it could have taken me four minutes.
yeah no and the tricky part for you is like i don't know maybe it's not tricky maybe it'll be the same but like what you hope is like you get some scenario where you're tweaking it right and you get it say you get it right there you're like okay it's right is it right for all video sources and all output types and all like for example if you did it through airplay does that apply to things you play on apple tv does that apply to things you watch over regular tv if you have like any other video source connected if you have a video game system connected like
You're hoping that you'll be able to configure this in one place and it will apply to any picture that ever shows in your TV. But you have to be careful of where you're doing it. Like, for example, if you're doing it on the Apple TV, it's not going to apply when you're playing a video game because the Apple TV is not involved.
If you're playing like Nintendo Switch or something, it's not going to be involved in that. And so now you have a second place where you have to dial it in. And this is one of the places where it comes in handy to have something like a receiver, which is the central meeting point for all the audio and the video.
And that's where I made my adjustment and everything that goes on my TV screen goes through my receiver and my receiver applies the delay. And so far, so good for me.
Yes, but everything else about having a receiver sucks, and I will accept no other contrary arguments. Anyway, I should note that in the Sonos app, if you go to the gear in the upper right, and then go to your living room or whatever setup, and then scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, way down in the home theater section, there's TV dialog sync.
And I have mine cranked to five seconds for my 2019 LG OLED TV. Five seconds? Or five units. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Five units. I think I said seconds. Five units. It's zero to five, I believe. Anyways, and that has worked for me across Switch, across Wii, across TV.
I have to look at that. I assume that would, because it's only like a positive offset. Correct. I assume that would change it in the wrong direction.
I mean, give it a shot. You may not have the good experience I did, but it can't hurt to try.
Because what has to happen is the TV has to hold the video back. The TV has to buffer the video for a few milliseconds while the audio catches up because the audio is where Sonos is introducing latency.
Yeah, but the TVs also have latency as well, so it depends on which, adding more latency, and you've got to kind of match them up. But the audio advice video, it's a YouTube video that I use to do my adjustment, has helpful labels on the plus and minus sign where it says basically like, it says audio early, increase the delay, and then audio late, decrease the delay.
But bottom line is, once you have something that you can measure on, you just push the delay to the maximum or minimum value and see which side of the zero it's at, and then you know which direction you need to adjust it to. You know, get it in. Mine, I think, was on, I can't even see in this picture, it's too blurry. Mine was like 120, is that milliseconds? Maybe it's milliseconds.
497.
497.
August 25th, 2022. There you go.
All right. We have some breaking-ish news from a few days ago. If you remember our friends at Massimo that do the blood oxygen detection thing and have a patent for it, And oh boy, we've patented it. And so they have been in a bitter fight with Apple to the point that it went to the courts.
The courts said that Apple cannot enable the blood oxygen detection in new Apple watches, including the one on my wrist right now. And they've been battling it out for a while now. Personally, I don't understand why Apple doesn't just pay them all the money and make them go away. Not to say that they're wrong, but just make them go away. You have all the money in the world.
You have infinite money, less the $15 billion you just gave to Ireland. But you have infinite money. Just make them go away. It'll be fine. But here we are. Anyways, the breaking news a few days ago, actually a couple of weeks ago now, or maybe a week ago, is that the founder and CEO has resigned after he was removed from the board.
So Reuters writes, Massimo said that on September 25, founder Joe Chiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker CEO days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company's board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management.
So the answer to your question of, like, I don't understand why Apple doesn't pay this, one of the rumors is that it's because the CEO was being unreasonable and would just not accept any kind of reasonable offer.
And this hedge fund thing here, like, again, I don't know any truth to this, but some of the things I've heard swirling as people speculating was that, like, oh, this hedge fund is actually – the hedge fund and the shareholders and basically everybody who's not the CEO were, like – Massimo, take the money. You've got you won. You've got Apple over barrel. They have to pay you.
Maybe they're even offering to pay you. We, as the people who are either current shareholders and board members of the company or speculative shareholders who want to invest these hedge fundings or whatever, we think if you let us be in charge of the company, we could make you more money because we wouldn't be dummies like your CEO and we would just take the Apple money and make us all rich.
And so... I don't know if any of that is, if that's just speculation or rumors or whatever, but it sure looks like from the outside that there may have been one person and one person only who is stopping this from being resolved with large amounts of money. And that was the founder and CEO. And he is out. Uh, and there's more from Matt Levine and Bloomberg. If you want to read about this, um,
We'll find out in the coming weeks and months if, oh, suddenly there's a Massimo deal between Apple and Massimo and they get a lot of money. We'll see if that happens. It seems like, again, from the outside looking in, it seems like finally the way is clear for large amounts of money to change hands.
But if he gets kicked out and still we go years and years and Apple still can't enable this feature in the U.S., then I'm out of ideas.
I mean, it sure seems like Apple just didn't want to pay anything for it. So I don't know. I don't know that this was the problem here, but we'll find out.
There's also some news over the last week or so. Meta, Meta, Meta, whatever you want to call them.
Meta? Are you saying Meta? Does anyone pronounce it that way?
Sorry.
I do sometimes.
Um, anyways, uh, the, that company that Facebook would not, uh, they have really, or not released, I shouldn't say, but have demoed, uh, some AR glasses that they're calling Orion. And apparently this stuff is really freaking slick. Uh, there's a, uh, wrap up at the verge for meta connects, which is their, you know, kind of equivalent of WWDC.
There's also a post, uh, where, uh, one of their authors whose name I don't have in front of me. I am so sorry. Uh, Alex Heath, um, actually got to demo the Orion glasses, uh, in part with Mark Zuckerberg. And there's also a post over, a couple of posts, I think, over at Stratechery with our friend Ben Thompson. I will try to dig up a link for the show notes for at least one of those.
But anyways, I haven't read a lot on this, but everything I've read on this is, oh my, this is the future. The Vision Pro is a mistake. When can we have this? And the answer is, well, probably not soon. So let me read some stuff. So from The Verge,
meta not meta has revealed its orion augmented reality glasses and they look almost like a trendy pair of frames you could pick up without all the tech inside orion uses micro led projectors inside the frame and beams images in front of your eyes via wave guides in the lenses
The glasses pair with a wireless compute puck and a neural wristband you wear on your arm that responds to gestures like pinches. Again, this from the Orion review now. Orion, Meta's first pair of augmented reality glasses, was supposed to be a product you could buy.
When the glasses graduated from a Skunk Works project in Meta's research division back in 2018, the goal was to start shipping them in the low tens of thousands by now. But in 2022, amidst a phase of broader belt tightening across the company, Zuckerberg made the call to shelve its release.
As Meta's executives retell it, the decision to shelve Orion mostly came down to the device's astronomical cost to build, which allegedly is in the ballpark of $10,000 per unit. Most of that cost is due to how difficult and expensive it is to reliably manufacture the silicon carbide lenses.
When it started designing Orion, Meta expected the material to become more commonly used across the industry and therefore cheaper, but that didn't happen. Quote, "'You can't imagine how horrible the yields are,' says Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth of lenses. Instead, the company pivoted to making about 1,000 pairs of the Orion glasses for internal development and external demos."
Quote, it's probably turned out significantly better than our 50-50 estimates of what it would be, but we didn't get there on everything we wanted to. Zuckerberg says to the device, quote, we still want it to be a little smaller, a little brighter, a little bit higher resolution, and a lot more affordable before we put it out there as a product.
And look, we have a line of sight to all those things.
This has really shaken up the tech press world over the last week because— And I don't understand why. Well— I mean, I'm sure people have had that take, but I said, I agree with you that this is like the tech press is all over this, and people are like, oh, my God, it's this, it's that. But, like, honestly, people, like, there is no new anything here that changes anything as far as I'm concerned.
Well, I don't know. I mean, so what they've shown – this is – first of all, this is very smart by Meta, I think, because this goes along with – first of all, with their overall pretty, I would say, successful rebranding efforts. We are the last people calling on Facebook. They've rebranded themselves as meta. They've dropped their terrible baggage from the Facebook name to almost everybody.
Mark Zuckerberg is out there rebranding himself as this cool, normal guy somehow. Good luck with that. It's working.
you know i don't know man it's working no i disagree rebrands work like that's that's why people do them because you you can hold on as much as you can to the old one but the rest of the world moves on and listens to it like they work no i i the renaming i think it's going better than alphabet for sure because everyone just keeps calling them google but like the the whole meta renaming was about the metaverse which bombed and so now they're just a company who doesn't want to be associated with one product called facebook and so they rename himself meta it's fine but like
The metaverse still is not a thing, and they're the leader in glasses, but they were before they renamed themselves, too, because they bought Oculus.
Well, yeah, but the thing is – well, I mean, that's true, but I would say in the same way that, like, yes, they bought Instagram. They didn't make it from scratch, but Instagram is way more Facebook now than it's Instagram. Like, you know, in that same way, like, you know, their VR products are way more meta than they were Oculus at this point. But anyway –
They show a very different approach to AR and VR than what we see from Apple and Microsoft and everyone else who's tried it. What we see from Meta has been pretty successful at the low-end gaming market for VR headsets with some basic pass-through features. And we see – using that foundation to slowly build towards something like this.
And what we see from Apple is really – is like the total opposite approach with Vision Pro platform and product, which is like Apple started at the extraordinarily high end with no gaming to speak of, no software to speak of. Really not, seemingly not putting much faith in this being a consumer product at all, but for some reason putting it out there, which I continue to doubt at this point.
But anyway, Meta is doing great at the low end and the mid-range with their gaming stuff. and they're not even touching the high-end anymore. They had a brief time trying to make the Quest Pro happen. It didn't happen. They backed off of it. They had a high-end one planned that they canceled because they saw Vision Pro, and they're like, eh, nah, no thanks.
They're doing fine at the low-end with VR stuff, with gaming, and with kids and everything, and now they're demoing kind of where they think the high-end can go, and all of the tech demos, or all the demos from the people who had them...
the people come away being blown away by them like everyone's like oh my god this is the future now granted it's a tech demo it's not a shipping product that is a massive difference obviously But this kind of shows where there is huge value to this is in the AR glasses format, in that kind of physical product format. AR glasses are a thing that people think is very cool and has a lot of promise.
VR headsets are a different thing that people also think is cool and has promise, but for very different reasons and in very different use cases. You can kind of see the two companies trying to solve this from two different ways, but I think Meta's approach is more likely to succeed, to be honest.
There are so many physical challenges around these products, so many technical challenges, so many fashion and just coolness challenges, and so many practicality challenges to these products. Apple took a really big swing and I think has almost completely missed. I think they went down almost every wrong path possible and shipped it out there.
And I think part of the reason why we're hearing all these rumors around the Vision Pro launch that like maybe some people in the company weren't really supportive of it or they weren't sure if they should release it or it was divisive within the company. We've heard that for a long time. I think we see why it's a really hard area to get right. And the vision pro didn't get it right.
And what meta showing here doesn't exist yet, but there is like, they're going towards that. And I think what everyone is kind of seeing is, Oh, they have a pretty good chance of doing something good here. Whereas what we're seeing from Apple has not really led us in that direction yet. At this point, I would be surprised if we ever saw another Vision hardware release from Apple.
Like that's how – I think the platform – has gotten off on such a wrong foot, I honestly would be surprised if we ever see a sequel to it. If they do anything in this space, I think it will be radically different. Not the same thing, but a little bit better and a little bit cheaper. I think it'll be radically different, if at all. And not soon.
But what we see from Meta is they're already succeeding in the VR market better than anybody else ever has. They're doing great in that market. It's still a small market, but they're doing great in it. And they might be doing this thing at the high end. That's why everyone's excited because everyone sees it and they're like, huh, it has some trade-offs, some pretty big trade-offs.
And with the largest asterisk being it literally is not shipping and is not buyable and will never ship in this form. So this is literally just a tech demo. However, People like it, and they're excited by it. Now, that being said, I don't think AR and VR, even in a great form like this, I don't think that's going to replace the smartphone.
I don't think it's going to be nearly as big or as important as a lot of people think or hope that it will. What we're seeing with the actual products that exist in this category is they're fun. They're useful to certain people. They're not replacing phones. They're not replacing game consoles. They're not replacing TVs in any kind of meaningful numbers.
I think the whole investment in this area is interesting. And in certain ways, it's exciting. But I don't think it's the future of computing. I think it's the future of more wearables to add to our lives. In the same way that the Apple Watch and wearables like it didn't replace smartphones. They just added to them. I think AR glasses will add to our computing lives as well.
I don't think they will be replacing nearly anything. However, if they are to succeed... The approach Meta is taking, look, and they already have the Ray-Ban glasses that are pretty successful. I think that approach, like what Meta is doing, slowly adding things that people will add to their computing lives, not replace things with, that's working.
And this is the latest demo of like where that's going. That's working. And I think what Apple's doing is not working.
Here's why I think this is a non-story and I'm very disappointed in the press for how they've handled this. Ever since we've been talking about this topic at all on the show or in the Apple world or in the entire tech world. Everyone has known that some kind of glasses thing would be amazing. But it's too bad we can't build that.
And years ago, when the rumors were about Apple's headset thing, it was like, Apple's not going to do a headset. They're going to do glasses. Because they know headsets are big and clunky and crappy. And... Tim Cook would just constantly, anytime he's asked about this for years, he'd be like, we're interested in AR, not VR. We're all about augmenting reality.
Have you seen all the AR features we've added to our phones and iPads over the years? We don't want to be closed off inside a VR headset. We're all about augmented reality, right? The reason Apple was into that, it's not just like, oh, Apple thought AR would be good. Everybody thinks AR is good.
Everyone thinks glasses where they can let you magically see the world, but also stuff laid on top of it is a great idea. It's in science fiction books. It's in our culture. It's baked into everything. And that is an Apple strategy from day one. When we eventually heard, actually, Apple's going to ship a VR headset.
You're like, well, what about all that stuff that Tim Cook's been saying about the glasses? And the basic consensus was, well, nobody can make the glasses. So Apple's going to ship something. And what they did ship was their attempt to say, you know, in typical Apple fashion, super expensive VR headset. But look, we do it.
One of the reasons it's so expensive is we're trying to give you that AR glasses experience of like, look, the pass through is magical. It's like you don't even know you're looking through cameras or whatever. But of course, it's not an AR thing. You're not actually looking at the room. We're just applying technology and money to try to get something out there
that has some desirable attributes that are better than the competitors that we try to spin as a computing device and blah, blah, blah. You get into the whole thing. But the bottom line is Apple didn't wait until they could ship glasses. They shipped a headset that they kind of sort of tried to push in the AR direction, but wasn't really that.
And setting the Vision Pro aside and all its failures or whatever, that's what they did. But at no point during this did anyone say Apple doesn't think AR is the future, or they shouldn't have said that. It was just simply the fact that no one has technology to ship something that looks like what the Vision Pro looks like, but is a pair of glasses that you can see the room through.
That doesn't exist, right? So here's Facebook, and they're like, they come out with this thing. Now, first of all, AR glasses have existed for a while. There was Magic Leap. There was the HoloLens 1 and 2. It's very difficult to do this. Obviously, the screen technology is not great. They come out with their thing and they're like, look, it's glasses that you can see through.
But it doesn't really change anything about everything I just laid out. Everyone knows glasses are going to be awesome someday. Everyone also knows we can't actually currently do them. And I would say a $10,000 device that doesn't look as good as Division Pro is an example of not being able to do them. I mean, like... It's not... You can't ship this to people. It's not a product.
And it's not even as good... It doesn't even look as good as Vision Pro in terms of the graphics, setting aside the room that you're actually looking at or whatever. Right? So this is the type of thing I would imagine that Apple would have and say, well, we can't ship this. It's not a shippable product.
The only difference is Facebook says, well, okay, we have something that's not a shippable product. Let's show it to the world to try to basically get our investors off our back because we're spending all this money and they think we're just burning it because the metaverse didn't happen and we're just selling a bunch of quest headsets and why do we keep burning these billions of dollars?
And Facebook's got to come out there and say, this is why we're burning billions of dollars because we think someday we'll be able to make something like this only good and shippable. And as Zuckerberg says, we have a line of sight on that. If they had come up with a product that you could buy that did this stuff, maybe we could say they're ahead of everybody else.
Apple couldn't find anything that they could ship, but Facebook could. But they can't ship this. It's not a shippable thing. And even if it was shippable, certain attributes aren't even as good as Vision Pro fidelity-wise. So I don't think this is anything other than Facebook trying to get some good press out of a thing that is essentially on par with what everyone else has in the industry.
But everyone knows that it's not shippable. And when Apple has something that's not shippable, they don't talk about it. Right now, since we know nothing about what's going on inside Apple, it is possible that Apple at some point three years ago.
diverted all of their resources in division pro and left their glasses efforts dying on the vine and facebook really is ahead of them but we don't know that just like we don't know anything about what goes on inside apple so we can't say by facebook showing us this prototype they're ahead of apple apple's never going to catch up apple doesn't have glasses like this we just don't know the answer to that question i would imagine that if apple if you went into an apple lab and wanted to
get the same experience, although they might not look as nice as these with the little frame around them or whatever. You could probably get something similar if Apple had continued their AR thing, but we don't know if they continued it. If you look at this product, though, one of the things that it does seem to take from Vision Pro is the idea of eye tracking and pinching as your interface.
But interestingly, it doesn't use cameras to track your hands. It uses the little wristband. This is something that Apple could maybe see how that works out, try the prototype, see how it goes if they haven't already been trying this.
choosing how you are going to do eye tracking and pinching uh is kind of like an implementation detail versus deciding eye tracking and pinching is how you should interact with things like in other words they're not saying orion it comes with quest hand controllers quest hand control is great for games maybe not so great for what you would imagine you would do something that's more like a pair of glasses these things seem to have like the wristband has like a little electrical conductor sensor thingies
that catch your nerve signals or whatever. It's a nice way to do it that doesn't require you to have line of sight on your fingers and doesn't require like these glasses frames to be bristling with even more cameras that are tracking where your fingers are as opposed to the ones that are just tracking your eyeballs.
but anyway like i don't like people saying this and say were there people out there who were like previously i didn't think augmented reality glasses would be a good idea but now that i've been able to try a prototype i do think they're a good idea i suppose there are people like this but like read a sci-fi book we all want magic glasses that you put them on and they cover the world with information and you can see all the things and your walking directions go like that and as we said there's a name tag over people's heads and there's that whole story about like the put the ray-ban glasses that do like image lookups for people and like docks them as you walk around you
Yeah, that's the sci-fi future, dystopian and utopian, that we're all talking about here, right? And there's gonna be a lot of problems with it, but first things first, we gotta figure out how to get the screens, and by the way, the way these things work is they have a little tiny screen that projects a little image into the lenses, and the lenses try to bounce
the image from the screen off of the lenses and into your eyes so they focus on the back of your eye. And yes, that is as annoyingly hard as you can imagine it is because it's not like you can put a big mirror in there because that would block your view of the outside world.
So these wave guides are essentially taking the image of a tiny little screen that's projecting from the side on an angle into the lens And internally bouncing it inside the last lens until it exits the lens at just the right angle so it focuses on your eye, it is as complicated and apparently very expensive to manufacture as you would think.
And in the end, still doesn't have the fidelity of, you know, a very expensive closed-in VR headset where you don't have to worry about all that business. You can just literally project the screen right into their eyeballs because you're not worried about them seeing through it to the outside world. Final thing I'll say about this is the...
The way the hardware is implemented, having the little, I don't know, puck stick thing where the compute is, is, you know, if you want something that's like glasses, don't put all the computer stuff inside the glasses, right? So they didn't. They put the computer stuff inside a puck.
And I've seen a lot of people look at that puck and say, well, the future is going to be that puck will just be your phone. Maybe the distant future, but the near future, no. Because in the near future... A, you're not going to want to literally destroy your phone's battery by getting two hours of AR glass on this thing.
And B, the hardware that you would want to put in that puck is going to have to be... It's on the ragged edge of what's possible. It's going to have to be so purpose-built and so, like... high-end for a portable thing, phones have to do so much different stuff.
They have to have their cameras and the battery life for that, and it's for web browsing, all the Wi-Fi radios wherever, and this is a purpose-built device that the first one of these that actually ships somewhere needs to just be a thing that feeds these glasses. Eventually, yes, why have a separate thing, right?
But that's going to be when we have so much excess computing capacity that it's no problem for our phones to do. And I would say today, it is not no problem for our phones to do what that little puck is doing.
So I suspect whoever gets to be the first one to ship something like this, and again, arguably Magic Leap and HoloLens already did ship something like this, albeit a much lower fidelity without the same Apple Vision Pro inspired UI, it's going to be a separate puck. And I think it'll be a separate puck for many years, which is fine and is the right move.
And it is much better than hanging off a giant computer with a metal case off your face like the Apple Vision Pro does. But for now, I would expect there to be a puck.
Now, we'll find out in a few years when the, you know, or many years when the tell-all things come out and it's like, oh, Apple abandoned AR because someone was convinced that there was no way they were going to do it within the next 50 years, so we should stop. And they didn't see these silicon carbide lenses coming or whatever.
But I would hope that inside Apple, all the technology you just saw Facebook demonstrate was also known to them and had been expanded with them. And they realized that for the next X number of years, It's not a viable product, so they're going to try this Vision Pro thing, and it's not going great for them. But I don't think philosophically...
I don't actually think there's a philosophical difference when it comes to the long-term view of AR between Meta and Apple. I think they both believe glasses of the future, and they want to get there as fast as they possibly can. The only difference is, how does that manifest? For Facebook, it manifests with tech demos of $10,000 headsets.
For Apple, it manifests for saying nothing and shipping an entirely different product that they can actually manufacture and hoping that works out.
I both agree and disagree with basically everything that you guys just said. I'm not so disappointed in the tech press as John is. I concur that it's been obvious to anyone who's paid even the tiniest bit of attention that this is what Apple is angling for, that they want something that looks, maybe not aesthetically, but in principle, like functionally looks, if you will, like Orion. That
You don't have pass-through because you're already looking at the real world, and you're just augmenting that. Hence, Tim's saying over and over again, AR is very interesting to us. It's clear that's what Apple wants. And I think a reasonable way to get there, maybe not the best way to get there, but a reasonable way to get there is to say, well, let's make some hyper, hyper great-looking cameras.
internal pass-through inside these goggles that lock you away from the world to get us used to what it'll be like when we don't have to have pass-through, when the pass-through is the real world. Hopefully I'm making sense here. And to get ahead of that and to hopefully build a developer story around that, you just fake it until you make it. And that's what Apple has done.
Now, the problem is they haven't really made it, right? In the sense that developers are mostly ignoring it. And I think that Apple is largely, mostly ignoring the Vision Pro. But I don't think it's unreasonable for Ben and others in the tech press to say, oh, my God, this was amazing. Oh, my God, this is the future today. I don't think that's unreasonable.
Now, it should be couched and there should be asterisks and daggers and double daggers saying, well, yes, this is the future today, but you can't buy it because it is what? The future.
I don't fault them for being impressed by a cool tech demo. I fault the people, and it's not Ben, Ben knows what's up, but it's other people saying basically like, this shows that Apple is going in the wrong direction and Meta knows what's up. They're both going in exactly the same direction long term. They both have VR headsets, albeit very different ones, right?
And I think they both have AR headsets. It's just that Facebook is showing you theirs that they can't ship and Apple is not showing you theirs that they can't ship. You know what I mean? And again, we don't know that's true. I'm speculating because Apple doesn't say anything. But like the people who are citing this as like a condemnation of Apple has dropped the ball.
They've taken the eye off the ball. They shouldn't be bothering with VR headsets.
meta is also bothering with vr headsets there's a difference in strategy there which we've talked about at length between how they're doing with vr headsets but vr headsets is what we can make now and you know they have differing opinions about how to do that but that's the difference in their strategy is like apple has taken one direction in vr and and facebook's take the other a difference in the strategy is not that meta thinks ar is the future and apple does not that's insanity and that's what i can't handle from free you're like at
Apple doesn't think AR is the future, but Meta does, and Meta is showing Apple how it's done. No, that is absolutely not the case, based on public statements from the CEO of the company.
Yeah, I would agree with that. I don't know. And I also, I know it's fun for everyone, including sometimes me, to slag on the Vision Pro. And I'll be honest with you, I don't use my Vision Pro very often. And if it wasn't purchased for my job, like if I'd done this just because I thought it was neat and I wanted one, I would really, really regret spending all the money I did on it.
That being said, I maintain that for specific things, the Vision Pro is really incredible. It is not an all-things-to-all-people device, if you ask me, even though I think that's what Apple wanted it to be, if you were to look at keynotes when it was announced and whatnot. But I cannot say enough good things about the immersive video that Apple has put out.
Now, admittedly, they've put out very little of it. And it's coming in at a snail's pace. But it is unlike anything I've ever experienced. It is so much better than any other cinema-like experience I've ever had. It is truly, truly phenomenal. And they are releasing more stuff. It is way too slow. but they are doing it. And I believe there's going to be an immersive film.
I don't know if it's a short film or a film film sometime either late this year or early next year. And I'm really excited to watch it because I think it'll be super cool. Additionally, when I went to Memphis a couple of weeks ago, I did travel with the Vision Pro, but because both of my flights were so darn short, I didn't bother using it on the plane.
But on occasions that I have used it on a plane, leaving aside that you are literally 1 trillion percent that guy. If you don't mind being that guy, it's unreal because you're in an incredible movie theater. You're not in a plane. You're in an incredible movie theater by yourself. Nobody's around you. And it's amazing.
Additionally, when I was in Memphis, I did get the Vision Pro out because I did have a little bit of downtime to do work. And you know what the Vision Pro is? It's a giant-ass screen that doesn't take up a giant-ass amount of space in your bag. Well, it doesn't take up a small amount of space in your bag, but you know what I mean.
Pretty big space in a bag, actually.
No, you know what I mean.
It doesn't take up a lot of length and width. I wonder volume-wise if it would actually be the same as a very thin screen. Yeah.
Maybe. Maybe. But you know, I mean, we're snarking, but you know exactly what I'm saying. And it was really great for that. It really, truly was. I was in this actually very small hotel room. And yes, it had a mediocre TV that I think I probably could have hooked up to my laptop.
But it was so much nicer to use Vision Pro because I was suddenly in a different space and I've got this huge screen in front of me. And especially with the developer strap, it is basically lag-free. I think the fidelity of it, admittedly, my eyes are not perfect, but the fidelity of it is great. Like, there are times the Vision Pro is incredible.
I do not argue that it is, to my eyes, it appears that it is a flop. Now, we don't know what Apple's expectations were. Maybe they expected to sell three of them, in which case, mission accomplished. But I suspect they wanted to sell a whole heck of a lot more. Certainly, the rumblings we've heard in the press is that they wanted to sell a whole heck of a lot more. And they haven't.
So it is a flop by most measures. But if you have an obscene amount of money to burn and light on fire and have these specific use cases, I don't want to continue to slag in the Vision Pro because in certain circumstances, it's unlike and better than everything else I've ever tried. Admittedly, those circumstances are few and far between, but they do exist.
And I do think that this is a really solid precursor to something like AR glasses. It's going to look way different, both inside, outside, in every way. It's going to look different than the Vision Pro does. But I think it is a reasonable precursor. And those who have embraced the Vision OS and Vision Pro
their AR experience when designing stuff for Apple Glasses, they're going to be ahead of the game because they've already done it. The same way that Underscore was way ahead of the game for widgets on iOS because all the APIs were basically just ripped from watchOS for complications and stuff. I think I have that right, but you get the idea either way.
Underscore was way ahead of the game because he's basically already done that. And so that's part of the reason I think that WidgetSmith was there on day one and was so good is because he had so much experience and he's Slightly different context, but using basically the same APIs.
And I think that people who really and truly embrace the Vision Pro and Vision OS, I would say I have reluctantly shown it a small amount of attention. I would not say I've embraced it. But anyways, those who have really embraced it, I think they'll be way ahead of the game. And I think that everyone would agree that something that's like Orion is the future if we can get there.
Yeah, I think your point about the Vision Pro being like, oh, we can't do AR glasses, but just if you get used to this as a platform extension, like if we build this platform over many years inside these stupid goggles, this platform doesn't look that much different than the platform we would build for AR glasses. And I'm sure Meta is doing exactly the same thing.
They've got the Quest headsets, which are, you know, addressing a different market in a different way.
But whatever interface and APIs and compatibility they're building up there, even though they don't emphasize pass-through as much, I would imagine that as they extend into AR glasses, it will be an expansion of their existing VR platforms, if they're smart, rather than just saying, oh, here's all new platform. Nothing you did on the Quest headsets is applicable at all to this.
I hope they don't do that. Now Apple, I think has a little bit of a headstart in this because their VR headset is so focused on pretending it's an AR headset and the quests are not. Even like I said, down to the choice of how to do the UI, Vision Pro does eye tracking and you use your fingers to like pinch and do stuff, right? so does Orion, but Quest does not.
Quest does not lean that heavily on that type of interface. On the other hand, Quest uses the wristband instead of cameras to track, but still, like, the whole idea of, like, how would you want to use... sci-fi type of AR glasses. You probably wouldn't want to have hand controllers because that kind of defeats the purpose of like, oh, they're just like regular glasses. You put them on.
Where do the hand controllers fit in that? So it's going to probably have to be, well, how do I do stuff? Well, how about if you looked at it and did gestures with your hands? And then it's just a question of how do we implement that? Looking at stuff, eye tracking, that seems to be obvious. Just with your hands, you could look at your hands with cameras. You could have a wristband.
You could do both at the same time. You could use your Apple Watch. There's all sorts of platform synergies. I think I heard Ben and Gruber talking about what if your Apple Watch was the nerve-checking thing, and what if your phone was the puck for the glasses, and it's like... yeah, maybe eventually let's hold your horses now.
Because like I said, I feel like AR glasses are going to be so close to the edge of what's even possible for so many years that there's going to have to be dedicated hardware for it. And like I said, you wouldn't want to destroy your phone's battery on this. Like,
it's not okay but it is the status quo that the vision pro gets like two hours of battery life right orion gets two hours of battery life your phone you do not want to have two hours of battery life so let's wait on this let's it's you know it's ten thousand dollars doesn't look as good as vision pro the battery lasts two hours right we'll get there eventually but but yes there are platform synergies that apple is well positioned to take advantage of but apple is not going to show you their ar glasses demo things
until they actually have a product they can ship. And we've been talking about Vision Bro and we haven't been like, oh boy, I can't wait until next year when Apple ships the glasses. No, we don't think that's coming next year. And guess what? It's not coming next year from Meta either. Despite Zuckerberg's, we have a line of sight on that. I'll believe it when I see it.
Again, you should look at it on a surprise. I haven't seen many people talking about this. HoloLens and Magically, whatever the hell the other thing's called. There have been AR glasses that have shipped as actual shipping products over many years from both Microsoft and Magically startup.
Uh, and they didn't look great and they weren't popular and they made slightly different choices, but they have existed. So it's not like we don't know like real shipping products that you could buy with less than $10,000 worth of money that would let you see the room and also see images projected on it. Many of them have existed.
It's just like the people looked at them and said, they're not very good yet. And even Orion, I mean, it's the best, it's the most impressive that anyone has seen outside of, you know, development labs inside Apple or wherever, uh, But still, it's like, okay, but this is not... I can't buy this. And if I could, it would cost too much money.
And even if I could, even if it didn't cost a lot of money and I could buy it, it still has limitations compared to, let's say, the best images you can see inside Vision Pro or whatever. So... We'll get there eventually, but I really think this is a perhaps very shrewd PR move from Facebook to satisfy the people who are upset that Facebook is spending billions of dollars on the metaverse.
And they have to say, no, no, we're not spending millions of dollars on that thing where people with no likes talk to each other in meetings. What we're actually trying to do is this. And we haven't actually done it yet, but let's show you what we've got so far so you know we're not just making the Quest 3S and we think that's all we're doing with these billions.
Yeah, I was listening to Upgrade, and they had a really good turn of phrase for it, which I've already forgotten. But they were saying another thing that this might accomplish is kind of like reverse Osborne-ing anything that Apple's doing, right? Because now it's like, look, the Vision Pro is lame because you've got to put this thing on that keeps you away from the world.
Do they need to do that to the Vision Pro? Is it selling so much it needs to be tamped down? Yeah. I mean, you're not wrong. Like, look, look, if they're Osborne-ing anything, they could be Osborne-ing their own, actually, you know, well-selling, the quest heads. I don't think anyone sees a product that they can't even buy.
And like, no one who's playing Beat Saber is like, I want those $10,000 glasses where I can't play Beat Saber. No, like it's a tech demo that shows how close are we to AR glasses? And the answer is closer than we were, but still not really that close. Anyway, back to your VR stuff. If Vision Pro had been selling like crazy, I can see how this working is like, like you said, like a...
Hey, stop going gaga over Vision Pro. That's not the goal. The goal is this, and we're closer to it than Apple, but I don't think they need to stop Vision Pro from selling. I don't think there's any juggernaut that needs to be tamped down.
All right, the other bit of breaking news over the last few days is that Google will, I'm a little fuzzy on the details here, but apparently you can point Notebook LM, which is I think a pre-existing product of theirs that I was not previously familiar with. And you can, I guess it's like a data management thing or like a knowledge management thing.
It's like a research tool. okay um i haven't looked too much into notebook lm itself but it's it's like you know you like add your documents and stuff that you're researching on this topic to notebook lm and it can tell you stuff using lms about about your documents you can use like study guides too is this the same product I think so, yeah.
You can put in PDFs or websites and things like that, and it'll tell you stuff about them.
It'll be canceled in five years. Don't worry about it.
Oh, less than that. But what's interesting about this is they introduced this feature called Audio Overview, which auto-generates podcasts about whatever you put in. And so, of course, people have been having a lot of fun with this. Before I begin, have either of you heard one of these podcasts yet?
I sure have. Same.
In this case, this won't be as much of a surprise to you, but I'd like to welcome to our show some guests. Oh, no. So we get pitched all the time for guests for our show. It's just from PR spam.
I would be worried about what you're about to do causing that to increase, but it's so clear that those people never listen to our show, so it's fine.
Yeah, no, definitely not. I listened to one of the podcasts that was generated by Notebook LM, and it kind of blew my mind.
Agreed.
It was not anything that made me scared about us and our future as a show. However, I think this is worth hearing. So now I'd like to play what I fed Notebook LM for this guest appearance here was John's post on Hypercritical entitled, I Made This.
Oh, gosh.
Oh, gosh. So this is a podcast that Notebook.com generated. It's seven minutes long. I'll chapterize it. If you want to skip it, you can, listeners. But I suggest you listen to it. Now, I have not heard this one yet. I saved this for the three of us to listen to live on the show. So here is this AI podcast discussing John's post about AI creation entitled, I Made This.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back. We're going to be diving into some pretty fascinating territory today. AI art. You guys sent in some really interesting questions about John Syracuse's blog post. I made this. And to be honest, it's got us thinking pretty hard over here, too.
Yeah, it really gets into some thorny territory fast.
It does. It does. So, I mean, everybody's sort of played around with those early AI art generators by now, right? But Syracuse is kind of digging deeper here. He's asking, like, who actually creates AI art?
It's a great question, because on the one hand, you've got these AI systems that are basically like giant sponges just soaking up all this data, right?
Right, images, styles.
Exactly. And they can pump out these crazy realistic images in seconds.
Which is mind-blowing in itself, basically.
Totally. But Syracuse is really wrestling with something more fundamental, I think. He's trying to figure out if we can even call it creation when it comes to AI.
Right. Like, are we just talking about fancy algorithms here or is there something more going on?
And that's where it gets interesting because he uses this analogy of emailing an artist and asking them to paint, you know, a polar bear wearing a cowboy hat riding a unicycle. The artist goes and paints it. Beautiful masterpiece. They own the copyright. No problem.
Makes sense.
But what if you swap out the artist with an AI?
Right. You just type that same request into a text box and boom, you've got your polar bear unicyclist.
Exactly. So then who's the creator in that scenario?
No, you missed the middle part where you asked an artist to do it. Or is it the company that made the AI? That was the important part. Because it's their technology.
Finally, we get the experience of yelling at a podcast.
Before we can even begin to untangle the whole question of ownership, like who owns the copyright to AI art, we need to grapple with this more fundamental question of who or what is the creator in the first place?
Because if we don't know who the creator is, how can we say who owns it?
Precisely. And that's where things start to get really interesting and complicated.
And I think that's what makes this such a big deal, right? It's not just some theoretical debate happening in a vacuum. This stuff has real world implications.
Absolutely. I mean, you think about all the different fields that could be impacted. Photography, graphic design, music, even things like writing and filmmaking. I mean, the potential here is huge. And it's already happening.
Right. Like it's not even a question of if AI will disrupt these industries. It's already starting to.
Exactly. And that raises a whole host of questions about jobs and livelihoods. And, you know, copyright law is scrambling to catch up with all of this.
Which is a whole other can of worms.
Oh, totally. But beyond even the economic and legal questions, Syracuse makes this really interesting point about the impact of all this on human creativity. Like what happens to us? What happens to art when suddenly anyone with an Internet connection can crank out something that looks like a masterpiece?
I don't think I made that point at all. If you don't have to hold your craft over years and years of practice, does that diminish the drive to create in the first place?
Right. Like you think about your own creative pursuits, whatever they might be. There's a certain satisfaction that comes from the process itself, from pushing through those frustrating moments, those creative blocks and coming out the other side with something you're proud of, something that's uniquely yours.
Absolutely. I mean, I was working on this song a while back and I hit this wall just totally stuck. Couldn't figure out where to go with it. Almost gave up. But then, I don't know, something clicked and I finally broke through it. And that feeling of having wrestled with it and finally found the solution, it's just incredible.
And I can't imagine getting that same feeling from just typing a few words into a computer.
Yeah, it really makes you question what it is we value about art in the first place. Is it purely about the end result? Or is there something inherently valuable about the human element, the intention, the struggle, the imperfections even that go into the creative process?
Is it even possible for AI to replicate that experience? And if it is, do we want it to? I mean, it's a lot to unpack. So where do we even go from here? We've got this potential decline in human creativity, this legal minefield around ownership. What's the next step?
Well, Syracuse doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but he does offer this really intriguing what if he suggests that maybe trying to force AI art into our existing copyright law is kind of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Is that what you said?
No, absolutely.
The idea that creation has to be this single definable act by a single entity, right? Which has always been the basis of copyright law. You can pinpoint the creator and therefore you can determine ownership.
They missed the whole thing about hiring someone to do it, which is like the key to this whole article.
But AI throws a wrench in that whole system because it's not always so clear cut. Is the creator the programmer who wrote the AI's code? Or is it the user who typed in the prompt? Or is it somehow the data that the AI was trained on all those millions of images and text snippets?
It's like this weird blend of human and machine creativity where it's almost impossible to separate the two.
Right. And so Syracuse's point is that maybe instead of trying to cram AI art into this outdated framework, maybe we need to rethink the whole concept of creation and ownership for the digital age.
So instead of black and white, it's more like shades of gray.
Precisely. He's suggesting that maybe we need to embrace the ambiguity and complexity that AI brings to the table instead of trying to erase it.
It's like AI is making us rethink like centuries of assumptions about what art is and who gets to be called an artist.
Yeah. And, you know, that can be a little unsettling for some people. Like it's challenging these deftly held beliefs about human exceptionalism.
Deftly held beliefs? Totally. But for others, it's like this really exciting time, this explosion of possibilities, like we're on the verge of something totally new and uncharted.
Exactly. And I think Syracuse captures that tension really well. He doesn't shy away from the hard questions.
No, he definitely doesn't. And speaking of hard questions, he leaves us with a pretty big one. He says, instead of just asking, you know, who made this when it comes to AI art, maybe we should be asking, how do we want to define made in a world where AI is becoming this powerful creative force?
I love that question because it shifts the focus away from trying to find the one true creator. And it puts the emphasis on what kind of future we're trying to create.
Exactly. Like it's not about assigning blame or credit anymore. It's about taking responsibility for the tools we're building and the impact they're having.
And it's about recognizing that AI isn't just this neutral technology. It's shaped by our values or biases, the choices we make as a society.
It makes you think about the ethical implications, all the unintended consequences that we might not even be able to foresee right now.
Absolutely. It's like opening Pandora's box in a way. But instead of just fearing what might come out, maybe we can try to steer it in a direction that benefits humanity.
So it's not just a technological challenge anymore, right? It's a philosophical one, a social one, an ethical one.
Totally. It's about figuring out what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines and what role creativity will play in all of this.
Yeah, and I don't think there are any easy answers here, but I do think Syracuse gives us a good place to start. But this is the end.
We didn't get anywhere. It's about having those difficult conversations, being willing to challenge your own assumptions and being open to new perspectives.
And I think that's something we've tried to do here today, to really grapple with the complexities of AI art. Are they going to do a Squarespace ad now? Absolutely.
And I think it's a conversation that's only going to become more important, more urgent as AI continues to evolve.
So on that note, I want to thank you all for joining us for this deep dive into the world of AI art. It's been quite a journey.
It really has. It's just the beginning.
Definitely.
Yeah.
So until next time, keep those creative sparks flying, whether they're human or artificial. And we'll see you all in the next one.
to that to quote a famous line from a nerdy show uh the line being maybe i use too many monkeys maybe they use too many cliches when they train this llm because wow there was like the whole thing was just how many different cliches can we work in at the same time it missed the main point of my article which is not a great i mean you would think people think oh llm is great at summarizing
Not if you miss like the main most important point. Even when they were parroting back the beginning in the part of whatever they trained it on, I was like, this is the part where we're going to go over the article. They did not get the crux of it.
And when they sort of did verbatim the example I had in the middle, they missed the important part of the example, which was the similarity between typing a prompt and then typing an email to an artist who makes it for you. They omitted that entirely. And the only two examples they had were typing a prompt and you making it yourself. And that's not, there's nothing interesting. Oh my God.
Anyway, this was a bad podcast that if I heard a person doing a podcast like this, I would be to quote another famous line, Woody Allen, whatever. What was this? Was it Annie Hall? You know nothing of my work. Boy, if only life were really like this. Old people know what I'm talking about. Anyway, yeah, they know nothing of my work. The LLMs did not get it. It's a shame.
And they talked in circles a lot. And they use so many cliches. And it's obvious that they've trained on a lot of information surrounding AI and stuff, which is not surprising. So they can riff, freeform riff on it. But as an example of trying to look at an article and talk about what the article is talking about, they fail.
As an example of natural sounding voices speaking text generated by an LLM, these things are actually pretty okay. You can still tell if you've heard a few of them because there's kind of a sameness to what they do. But honestly, there's kind of a sameness to what a lot of humans do in certain things anyway.
Yeah.
What's interesting about this, so to me, when I hear the podcast generated by Notebook LM, they don't sound that ridiculous to me. They don't sound that bad. No, absolutely not. The words that they're saying or the voice that they're saying them in? Because it's two different things. The actual content is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be.
Well, but I think that the actual content is very similar to the actual content of text that comes out of an LLM. When you type in the chat GPT and it gives you a big answer and you read the text, it's coherent, right? That's the whole point. That's why people are always so impressed by it. That's why it fools so many people into thinking that it's actually intelligent because the text is...
It makes sense. The sentences join to one another or whatever. Now, maybe the sentences are filled with made-up stuff or whatever, but the sentences themselves join. So I think the most impressive thing about these is taking that text that you would see in ChatGPT and then reading it in the style of a podcaster with the same ums and oohs and pauses and emphasis or whatever.
And that is the more impressive thing from my perspective.
And that is what they're doing. This is still based on modern LLM generation techniques and summarization and things like that. And obviously they're then forming it into a podcast with these kind of podcast formats of people saying, hey, what about this? Hey, welcome back, guys. That's a good point. But to me, like –
This shows, I think, the immense power of generative AI to actually replace a bunch of mediocre media. What this sounds like to me is a lot of real podcasts that are out there. Nothing that I really listen to, but it sounds like a lot of podcasts out there. And in many ways, the style of speaking where they're very prepared and professional and yet there's no personality being shown whatsoever.
Hey, that's a good point, Jane. It sounds a lot like news anchors talking to each other and trying to appear human.
Or like what a news anchor or a host or, I don't know, a presenter you would call them in the UK, what they're asked to do, what part of their job is, is to fake interest in things that they have no interest in. Because if you're like a news anchor, you can't have interest in every news story.
But it's your job to pretend that you are interested in this bake sale or the school budget committee or whatever. Like your job is to make it sound interesting and engaging. But you as an actual newscaster –
Can't possibly be interested in all those things, which is why we read newscasters, for example, as having their interest or like I put them on a morning show and they're talking about, oh, so you won the pie competition. Tell me about that.
We know they're not actually interested in the pie competition or the fact that these people won, but it's their job to pretend they're interested, which is why they read is fake to many of us. But morning shows are popular. People like seeing that. And so that artificiality is essentially what we're paying those people for. And it is a service that people like to consume.
And I think this provides the same thing in that we listen to it and we're like, okay, well, there's no actual person who's actually interested in anything here. But is it that much different than the hosts of Good Morning America feigning interest in the world's biggest ball of yarn? I don't think it is. Right.
And the thing is, what I am into podcasts for is people and the personalities and and the chemistry between hosts and and like you know how people just interact with each other and have interesting conversations and this is not that and doesn't sound like it will ever be that however there's also a lot of people out there who just want like Information digest.
Here is like what happened today in X or whatever my industry or interest is. I want to hear the latest in that. Summarize the news headlines for me and give me a little bit of context for each of those that I can listen to every day on my jog or whatever. There is a large market for news.
utilitarian mediocrity and that's what this delivers it's not going to replace like Dubai Friday but it is going to replace a lot of mediocrity that's out there because a lot of people like and especially because you can make something that is specialized to like You're like one thing like if you're the only person who wants to hear a summary podcast of topic X, you can do that here.
And I think that's very powerful. You really like individualize your media. It's like this is exactly what you want, even if. No one else wants to hear this or is interested in this or it's about something that's like private documentation that only you have for whatever reason or like your own content. You can listen to that kind of stuff. You can use it as a learning tool.
It can be a summarization tool. It can be – get me up to date. Give me like a quick refresher on the notes for my presentation before I give my presentation in an hour like on my drive to work.
Well, now you're getting into things where accuracy might be required and I would be wary about that now.
sure okay yeah but like because because on the test they're gonna want you to get the answer right not just well i told you what my lm told me but like but this like this blew my mind because yeah this does not sound as good as a good podcast but it sounds better than a lot of bad podcasts that i've heard from actual people i would rather listen to these than a lot of actual podcasts i have heard
Did you hear that Facebook's going to – one of the things they're proposing or slash implementing is in the Facebook, like, I don't know, the news feed, the feed that is personalized for you where they take stuff from your social network on Facebook where they also throw stuff in your face that they think you might be interested in based on what they know about you.
And then the third leg of that stool is going to be, and also we will AI generate stuff that we think you might be interested in. Oh, yeah. Because the old way was like, stuff from people you follow who are in your network. And then it was like, but also stuff that are algorithm that you might think is going to be interesting. But all that stuff is stuff that presumably humans were creating.
And now it's like, you know what? There's a third leg, which is stuff that we create out of thin air based on LLM stuff. And we'll put that in your feed too. And to Marco's point, do you think people... will notice that that is not different than the stuff they're being algorithmically fed and the stuff that is from people in their network.
Like, depending on what this stuff is, lots of things created by humans have that same look and feel. And if Facebook AI generates something that's, unbeknownst to you, is specifically for, like, you or a tiny slice of the population, but it looks just like the thing they fed you from People magazine...
As far as you're concerned, you'd never be able to distinguish the AI-generated – like the average person would never be able to distinguish the AI-generated content from the real people magazine content because they are really kind of at the same level. And they both fulfill the same need.
The problem, of course, is if the AI-generated thing is just completely made-up BS that is filled with lies or, for example, a podcast discussing an article that misses all the major points of the article. That's not great, but maybe people won't notice. Yeah.
I think a large effect that we are already having with generative AI and LLMs that will continue to get even more severe in the future is There's a lot of media out there that is formulaic and low personality and is mostly being used to just generate stuff for people to consume in mediocrity. I think there will be a lot of AI stuff that will replace that.
Like a lot of AI generation will replace a lot of that mediocrity. And this is going to be a large theme of the AI age in general that – There's a huge amount of mediocrity out there that can be easily automated and the results will be good enough or better. And I think this blew my mind when I heard it because it's way better than I would have guessed.
It's not great, but it's way better than I thought it could be at this stage.
Yeah, I very much agree. When I heard the one that somebody had done, I forgot, we'll put a link in the show notes, but somebody had done one of these about a subject that I knew nothing about, and I only listened to the first couple minutes, and I was gobsmacked by how real it sounded. And yes,
If you really pay attention and if you really listen, if you do active listening or whatever, you can tell that it's probably not real. But note that I said probably because genuinely, if I didn't know that I was listening to AI, I would have thought that these were typical but not terribly skilled podcasters.
And the ums and the inflections, or maybe they weren't ums, but the inflections in the- There are ums.
They insert them. Okay.
There you go. And there's not – it's not just monotone, right? And they play off each other well, and it sounds real, certainly at a glance. And I would argue, unless you're really, really, really paying attention, it sounds real. I was stunned at how real it sounds. I could not – and I still can't believe it.
And yes – That part isn't new, by the way. Like, they've been able to do people speaking like this – And obviously the text from LLMs, that's all been around for a while now. The new thing that I think is impressive about this is understanding of the podcast format. And I know it sounds silly. It's like, how do I make a podcast out of this?
It's clear that this has been trained on how podcasts are structured right down to like, hey, we're going to talk about this article. First, we're going to talk about like we'll give you an overview of the article. Then we're going to get into some of the details. And then after that, we're going to spin off into a more freeform discussion on ideas from there.
Like that is the structure of a podcast discussion. And that's what this model knows. And if you haven't heard voices like this before, you're impressed by the intonation or whatever. But previously, this same type of voice would be saying things, but it wouldn't sound like a podcast because it would just be like, look, we can make this voice.
recite this passage from the book and it sounds very expressive and it does ums and ahs and aren't you fooled by it like this is the whole like origin of all the deepfake stuff is out there but this one is like how i mean i guess they just fed it the transcripts or the audio of podcasts however they did it it definitely gets the the structure and the vibe of a podcast uh despite the content being terrible
But the thing... Obviously, you're going to be, I think, a more critical evaluator than many.
John? But that's the thing about all these. When Casey was saying he listened to one that was about a topic he didn't know about, that's the danger of these. The whole thing of LLMs is like pets and many other things. It's so easy to fool humans into thinking that there's a spirit living in the tree or the chair or whatever. We will personify anything.
And so it's so easy to fool us into thinking... That's a real person expressing real things and blah, blah. And it's the worst when this the content is in it has no rhyme or reason other than just a bunch of statistical probabilities. And so you end up listening to a podcast about a topic you knew nothing about. And at the end of it, your head is filled with completely false.
information because the accuracy of the podcast is not really important at all and you're like well it was a person saying it to me so I really totally believe it so I guess that's the truth and it's like no not even close and that's why that's why I feel like it's the utility is
potentially somewhat limited it's like we talked about the uh summarization of notifications once you rely on this or like studying for a test once there's like a once there is a measurement to to like that you compare against like okay but the summary of my notifications has to be accurate otherwise it's useless okay but this study guide needs to tell me the correct capital of minnesota because when i enter it on the test if it's wrong i can't say well that's what the llm said
Because there actually is a right answer. And the purpose of this study guide is to let me know the right answer. The purpose of the study guide is not to fool me into thinking that this is a good study guide. Because I thought that right up to the point until I took the test. And so I would say podcasts are somewhere in the middle. Like, do you care if this podcast about avocados is full of lies?
I bet there's plenty of real podcasts about avocados that are full of lies. Maybe it doesn't matter. But... Right until you get to the point of like even something as simple as, oh, iPhone, summarize my notifications. And that's not accurate. The stakes are still low. But suddenly now you're mad. And now you're not impressed by the intonation and the ums of the voice that was reading the thing.
You're like, well, what the hell? If you're not going to be accurate about the summaries of my thing, I'm just going to turn this feature off.
Well, I'll tell you what. I've been living with the notification summaries on 18.1 for the last week or whatever. I find them very useful. Even when they are not always right, I find them very useful. And when I listen to Notebook LM generated podcasts about things I do know about, I find their error rate to be about the same as people podcasts covering the same topics. I really do.
It's not like this is closer than you think to human accuracy.
Well, like I said, podcasts are somewhere in the middle. You're not being tested on them. And in the end, you knowing false information on avocados isn't that big a deal. But like notifications, that's an annoyance question of like whether you're annoyed when it gets things wrong. But like study guides.
Now we're starting to get into like it actually kind of matters if it gets it right, because I don't want to study incorrect information. That's just going to make me mad. And then, obviously, you crank that up into, like, you know, let this LLM control the surgery machine. Yeah.
No. At this point, my only problem with Apple's summarization on Apple Intelligence Beta so far – and this is a big problem – is that there is no API.
For you as an app developer to try to make the summaries better?
For me to use them at all in my app. Like, for example. Yeah, it's applied to you or not. Yeah, in mail, it can show in the table list there a summary of each message. Right. I can't do that in my app.
Yeah.
And the most infuriating thing, Apple sent a developer email like two weeks ago saying, bring Apple intelligence to your apps. And every single thing the email suggests that you do is not Apple intelligence. They're just using that to brand like, here's our ML features that we've had for years. Use this. Here's Spotlight. Try to use that, we guess.
All of the Apple intelligence features that they're advertising everywhere else is Apple intelligence are not available in any APIs to any developers right now.
But by doing like the spotlight thing, that feeds into their semantic model on the phone and everything, right? No, not yet. It doesn't. It might someday. I know, but you've got to do it. It's chicken egg.
They want you to do it. So when they roll that out, the data is there. This is like the biggest Apple development on iOS in iOS's history that only Apple can use. They have opened up zero of it. There's no API for any of it. And that makes me very angry. Anyway, but besides that, I like them. But that's a big thing that I will keep harping on.
And by the way, we talked about this on past shows. You can disable those summaries both on an individual app basis and I think also globally if you don't like them.
Honestly, I live with them for a couple days before you do. I have found them to be very useful and accurate enough to be useful.
Oh, you know I'm going to. I'm the one who asked my three different voice assistants the same questions all day. You know I'm going to. But I just question the utility for people who aren't doing what I'm doing.
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Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them.
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Auntie Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Right. Get ready to fire up those stoves. Because today we're diving into something seemingly simple, but surprisingly nuanced. John Syracuse's legendary basic pasta sauce. You wouldn't think a simple tomato sauce would require such a deep dive.
Right.
But trust me, Syracuse approaches this recipe with almost philosophical reverence.
What's fascinating is how he breaks it down into this soft trinity, emphasizing that the ingredients, the process, and the time all hold equal weight. He argues you can't just nail one of these elements. You have to treat them all with equal importance.
Okay, so it's like three-legged stool, neglect one leg, and the whole thing collapses. So let's start with the foundation ingredients. And seriously, that doesn't hold back on his thoughts about tomatoes.
Oh, no, he goes deep, especially on the San Marzano tomatoes. He could have just said, use canned tomatoes. But no, he practically wrote a dissertation on finding the perfect San Marzano.
For those of us who haven't quite reached that level of tomato enthusiasm, what is it about these San Marzanos? What makes them so special?
They have this unique combination of low acidity, a natural sweetness, and a meaty texture, which makes them ideal for a well-balanced, flavorful sauce.
Right.
However, Syracuse is also realistic. He knows finding truly authentic San Marzano's can be a challenge. He even links to this hilarious video where he's case testing different brands. Wow. I'm sorry, what?
Oh, man, I've got to see this video. Me too. Yeah, me too. I didn't know I made a video. Can they generate that for us?
He does say a good San Marzano style tomato you enjoy is better than an authentic one you don't. Right. Exactly. And that actually ties into his whole philosophy. Is that two different people? Same voice? Understanding the ingredients. Ultimately trusting your own judgment.
There's that trust element again, just like with the sauce trinity. You have to trust your gut, which leads us perfectly to the next part of the trinity. They're really adding a lot to this, because this is not that much text. And Syracuse gets real about the anxiety of burning the sauce.
He does. I get real. People stop being polite. Start getting real about burning the sauce. Reference acknowledged.
He says a burned sauce ruins the entire batch, which, let's be honest, is a fear we've all experienced in the kitchen. I hope you haven't all experienced it. But what's the science behind this low and slow approach?
Low heat allows the flavors to develop slowly and evenly without that harshness you get from high heat. And it prevents burning, which can ruin the flavor of the whole sauce. He's also a stickler for stirring, not just letting it simmer on its own.
So it's about being engaged in the process, not just letting it simmer. This is so. He doesn't want us to just go off and watch TV while the sauce simmers.
You don't need to go back. Definitely not.
I'm so angry.
If someone wrote like this, this is like top of mind because my daughter is doing college essays.
This is not a set it and forget it kind of sauce.
Get out the red pen for this one.
Speaking of being present and engaged, let's talk about Syracuse's very specific instructions on fresh herbs.
Oh, yes. The fresh factor, as I like to call it. He's very clear about wanting us to use only fresh parsley and basil chopped right before they go into the pot.
He is. And I love how he emphasizes not refrigerating the basil, saying it dulls the flavor.
It's like he wants to capture the essence of these herbs at their peak. And that little tip about storing parsley in a glass of water like a bouquet of flowers. So simple yet brilliant. So brilliant.
I'm the first person to ever think of that.
He would argue, and I'd have to agree that it makes a world of difference, See, fresh herbs have these volatile oils that give them a vibrant, almost nuanced flavor, which you just don't get with dried herbs.
I love this method of torture for John. Have somebody poorly summarize your own content back to you.
And expand on it in the most kind of like, you know, what is this whole thing about low heat? I expect them to start quoting thermodynamics.
It instructs us to add a whole peeled onion to the sauce, but then we just discard it at the end. Spoiler alert.
It's like a culinary magic trick. No, it's not. It infuses the sauce with this really subtle depth of flavor.
So it's like a secret ingredient that disappears, leaving behind its essence. It's not a secret.
It's an ingredient. It's a classic technique to add another layer of complexity without overpowering the other flavors. Think of it like using a bay leaf. You don't eat it, but it subtly enhances the overall taste.
Mind blown. It's like sugar. Even when it comes to something as basic as an onion. Now, his actual cooking process seems pretty straightforward, wouldn't you say?
It is, but straightforward doesn't mean foolproof. This is longer than the recipe you wrote. Way longer. Yeah, it is. Time.
Ah, yes, the simmer. He does have some specific guidelines about that, right?
He does. He recommends simmering for one to two hours, which seems pretty standard for a good tomato sauce. But then he throws in this interesting curveball. He says he often finds less is more.
Wait, hold on.
Interesting curveball.
So it's not like baking where you absolutely need to follow the recipe to the letter. You're telling me he's cool with me eyeballing it.
That's classic Syracuse of you.
Not you, AI voice.
The man could explain the nuances of drying herbs and make it sound like a suspense thriller. No. He emphasized the sauce as it simmers because overcooking can make it bland.
Wow. Wow. I'm blown. The more you cook it, the more flavorful it gets.
That's what's so great about Syracuse's approach. He encourages you to trust your instincts, not just the clock. Your instincts. No, I definitely do not encourage that. And start adding those optional meat additions.
Right. We briefly touched on the meatballs and sausage before.
Yeah.
How does simmering time come into play when you're adding those to the mix?
Well, now you're not just simmering for flavor. You're also making sure those meats are cooked through. And, of course, Syracuse has some very specific thoughts on this as well.
I bet he does. Does he have a size guideline for the meatballs?
He does. He actually compares them to sports equipment. He says they should be bigger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball with a billiard ball being the absolute maximum size.
Only Syracuse could use sports equipment as a meatball size guide. What's the reasoning behind this?
It all comes back to that final element of the sauce trinity, time. The larger the meatball, the longer it will take to cook through. You don't want to end up with undercooked meat in your sauce.
Safety first. So it's all about finding that balance between simmering long enough to develop those deep, rich flavors, but not so long that you end up with a bland or even worse undercooked sauce. It's a delicate dance, but clearly undercooked.
Why are we cooking it so long?
It really highlights how even a seemingly simple sauce requires a certain level of like attention and care.
It does, and that's what makes Syracuse's approach so fascinating. He doesn't just throw a recipe at you. He guides you through the process and encourages you to understand why.
Someone needs to feed this model more podcasts where they trash something because they're already so positive. Absolutely.
It's about trusting your sense of your instincts. You can tell they're not trained on our show. Yeah, exactly. Mind blown. What final thoughts would you leave our listeners with as they embark on their own pasta-making adventures?
I'd say use this recipe as a starting point, a foundation upon which to build your own culinary masterpiece. Don't be afraid to experiment with different tomatoes, maybe try a mix of herbs or even adjust the simmering time to suit your taste.
So just like he trusts us to find the perfect San Marzano, he's also giving us permission to make this recipe our own.
Precisely. It's about discovering what brings you joy in the kitchen. Cooking shouldn't feel like a chore. It should be a celebration of flavors and creativity.
And on that note, I think we've given our listeners plenty to chew on today.
Indeed. Chew on hot. The nuances of San Marzano tomatoes, the importance of low and slow cooking, the magic of a whole onion, and the empowering realization that even a basic pasta sauce can be a platform for culinary exploration.
Who knew there was so much to unpack in a simple tomato sauce? A huge thank you to our expert for guiding us through this delicious deep dive.
The pleasure was all mine.
And to our listeners, we hope this episode inspires you to approach all your culinary endeavors with a newfound appreciation for the process, the details, and the joy of creating something truly delicious. Until next time, happy cooking. Happy cooking, John.
You're so miserable.
It just like, it makes things worse. It's the magic power of like making anything worse by having those people try to explain it. But see, there is a market for like, talk to me about this thing for a few minutes. Nobody wants that. They just want the recipe. You know, even when they go to the recipe, they don't want to hear the big story. It's like, just give me the ingredients and the directions.