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All right, we did it. Between last episode and this episode, we watched Lord of the Rings Return of the King for our bonus member special episode that you can go sign up and listen to to discover if Mike liked the ending of the Lord of the Rings, right? Who knows? Who knows what his experience might be? But we did get him all the way through until the very end. All...

Nine? Ten? Who knows? Many, many hours of it. I think it's closer to 12. It might be closer to 12, you're right. Yes, plus also all the behind-the-scenes content. 60 hours of Lord of the Rings content, which I was definitely very, very happy to rewatch. It's super interesting, and I'm really glad that we finally did this for the members episode, like a thing that we have been talking about for years. Yes.

So all three of these episodes are available now for more Texans. You can go and find out more at getmoretex.com and you'll not only get access to these specials, all our previous specials that we've done, the RPG specials, the Tex Adventure specials, and longer ad-free versions of every episode of Cortex, including an entirely ad-free back catalog. There's a lot of content there for you. And I think this is a perfect time to jump in to go and get our three-part membership special,

I thought about saying something, but I will say nothing about what I thought of Return of the King. And I really think people should go and check it out for themselves. I'm really happy with how those episodes came together and I'm really pleased we decided to do it. Yeah. I feel like we had a really, really interesting conversation again, for me, especially you were perhaps the most interesting person to talk to about this as someone who had just never seen them before, but not only that,

Very little of the cultural osmosis had made its way into you. But so yes, throughout this whole thing, I really enjoyed Mike's fresh eyes on the trilogy. Fresh baby eyes. Fresh baby eyes on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Go listen to us discuss it. Many, many hours of bonus content over at getmoretex.com.

Can I enlighten our listeners a little bit to a question you asked me a couple of days ago? Oh no, what are you going to do? Sure? Yes? I don't know what you're going to do though. You're on a great occasion right now. I think that's okay to say. That's fair. Yeah, we can disclose that. And you said to me, I'm pretty off the grid right now. I have not seen the WWDC keynote yet. And obviously we'll talk about it on the episode. Do you think it would be fun or interesting if I didn't watch it and you tried to explain to me what happened?

And I said to you, especially for this one, couldn't be a worse idea. And now I just, I'm assuming you have seen it because you were like, I will go watch it. Do you understand why I said this? Okay. So for the record, Mike,

It's not that I thought that it would be a good idea. I just wanted to, since you had seen things, raise the possibility. Because sometimes it's interesting to see when people are surprised by things. Like I vaguely knew the rumors sort of that there was going to be like some Apple AI stuff was probably what's going to happen this year.

I guess what I was thinking was, "Oh, there's the possibility that what it will be is... there's not much except for one big thing to talk about." And so I was kind of thinking like, "Oh, if it is just one thing, then that might be more interesting to kind of go in blind about." But, boy, even putting Apple intelligence aside, like watching it, I was like, "I cannot believe this was the year I proposed this to Mike."

Because I even felt like the rest of WWDC, all of the regular stuff, was also very bitty. Some years you feel like there's an overall cohesive theme. And this year for the other operating systems, it was like, we've just changed a bunch of individual things, but there's not a clear overarching principle for all of this. So yes, it may have been the worst possible WWDC to have tried to attempt to explain to me what happened.

Because you would have just had to enumerate 20,000 individual things. So, yes, it's a good thing we did not do that. I've been hearing a lot of people say, like, oh, you know, they had all of the Apple Intelligence stuff at the end.

and then squeezed everything else into 45 minutes, and there wasn't much there anyway, so it was fine to do that. And I could not disagree more. Yeah, that's not my take on it. There were two WWDCs. They had two. I think in another year, if they would have just shown us all of this stuff, I think that that on its own was enough. We may have said, it's on the lighter side, but I have definitely been to WWDCs where they have shown less new features than in the first 45 minutes of WWDC.

this WWDC. Yeah, it could totally have been two different presentations. I mean, I did, I quite enjoyed, I picked up on how many times they use the word intelligence in the first half. And I was like, I see what you're doing, guys. Like, I see you setting things up over there. Don't think I haven't noticed the like, wild uptick in frequency of this particular word. But without a doubt, it could have been two separate events. I'm not sure if you picked up on this, because you mentioned about the fact that there's intelligence and machine learning, but...

in the first half that they showed, none of that is powered by Apple Intelligence. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That was all just like the feature stuff. Which is a good way to do it because they have a lot of stuff in there that's machine learning based like Math Notes, which Math Notes might be my absolute 100% favorite thing that they've shown off in all. Math Notes is my maps, I think. Wow, that's unexpected. Okay. I am like,

freaking out about how much I love math notes. People are like, oh, this is cool. But I'm like, no, you don't understand. This is going to change everything. I'm like so excited about this feature and I think it's incredible. Okay. We have to hold that for later because I just like, I think if you had asked me to rank order everything in WWDC from like, what do you think Mike is most excited about to least excited about? God,

Clearly math notes would have been like at the very, very bottom, like only ahead of like stuff that was just obviously inapplicable to you. I would have ranked the maps hiking trails higher than math notes for Mike. So like very clearly wrong about that. But I guess what I was trying to just think of is...

I don't remember when they talked about it, but the dividing line was clearly when they mentioned like, oh, we've been working on Apple Intents, the behind-the-scenes stuff that allows apps to talk to each other. And that felt like, oh, okay, right. This is everything related to intelligence, is related to the Intents framework. And everything that doesn't have the Intents wasn't. But like I said, I don't think there was an overall...

theme. The only thing that I did feel was very light and I knew straight away felt like, oh, it's not good news is when they said like, first up, Vision OS. That was the only one I can say I was like, ooh, a little disappointed in how light Vision OS is. But all of the other ones, like, yeah, there's just a ton of features. Like I just screenshotted those little slides they put at the end of like the details of all the new stuff just as a, as like an overview. And there's like, there's a lot of things. So obviously,

Whenever we do this every year, which is a tradition of the show, right? That the June episode is some form of WWDC content. We'll either try and talk about all of it chronologically, we'll pick out our favorite features.

And we could do that. But really, I think the thing I want to speak to you about the most is Apple intelligence. Okay. What do you want to talk about? Well, I want to get your sense for it. Like, I want to know overall, what do you think of it? Are there any things that interest you? Are there any things that you're angry about or upset about? Ooh, that's intriguing. That raises the question of what the internet could be angry about. I think my, like, okay.

Obviously, we're always talking about Apple on the show because we're using Apple for our whole production lives. And we have like many things that we complain about with Apple. But obviously, that is overshadowed by the many things that we like about the platform. It's why we've continued to use it over these years. And Apple as a company sometimes has things about Apple.

what I feel like must be its internal structure or its internal ways of making decisions that really shine through in external products. That is the thing I like about the company. I feel like the company is opinionated about the way that it wants to do certain things. And obviously, many times that is annoying, but I appreciate their opinionatedness in many things.

And watching the Apple intelligence section, I was really impressed by how fast it seems to me like Apple has absorbed...

very rapid technology change. Like, no matter how much they said, like, "Oh, we've been working towards this for a long time." It's like, I just refuse to believe that you weren't slightly surprised at the speed of this development like almost everybody else on Earth. I feel like very few people really knew how this was coming. I just don't think Apple really structurally did.

So I was very impressed by this massive change to functionally all technology has happened in the last 18 months. And they managed to onboard it and think about how to do it.

In a way that really felt very Apple. Like the decisions that they were making about the privacy structure of it, how they were thinking about it, interacting between the devices, building on top of the intent system for shortcuts.

Even just like little things about the way the interface worked, the language they were using, I also thought was great. Like I made a note of like they talked about like personal intelligence at the start. And I was like, ah, A plus phrasing for whoever made that.

So yeah, as always with these things, the real question is how does this work in execution? But from a pure presentation perspective of Apple showing about how they are thinking of having AI be integrated onto their platform, I was hugely impressed by how much they had done and also felt like,

they have created something that is taking advantage of all of the stuff they've already done before and integrating it. And also like the privacy focus is like, boy, do I feel like that is paying dividends for Apple over the years of like whatever it was they decided that they really wanted to make this one of the key things. I feel like this is also one of those places where that value is really paying off. So, yeah.

In the context of knowing nothing about how this was received, I was very impressed with it. I'm completely baffled about what people could be angry about. So I'm curious, but how does that take sound compared to your take and how people are receiving it? So I feel the same as you, except for one part that I'll get to in a minute. So at least what they have shown at WWDC is impressive that they could have all of these ideas and have some level of execution for them within the last...

which I think really is the maximum amount of time that they would have really thought that this was something that they needed to do.

Obviously, our AI tools have been around for longer. You know, ChatGPT has been around for, I don't know, nearly two years now. Two whole years. Yes, yes. And I think it's worth remembering the context of last WWDC, we were impressed that Apple said Transformer when they were talking about the new spell checking feature. So the idea that like then that everybody was on mass demanding that they must have AI in their product.

I really don't think that that was the case a year ago. We were not saying Apple is doomed. However, if they would have, this WWDC not had some AI story, I think there could have been more of an Apple is doomed narrative that played out, right?

And while I don't think that that is accurate, I don't necessarily think it's far off because, you know, we're going to get back to AI in general in a later episode. But I think, you know, like it or not, it is the future of computing now. So if they would not have had a story this year, I think that that would have been telling in a not great way. And, you know, a lot of these features...

They are coming out over the next year, right? And they're being a little cagey about which is which, but some stuff will be available at some point during the beta. Some stuff will ship in the fall. It will only be in US English, but it can be used anywhere. You just have to set your device to US English. And some of these features will roll out over the next year. I don't really know what will be what yet, but there'll be stuff.

And I think that a lot of what they showed is exactly what I would have wanted them to do. And a lot of the stuff around notifications, especially, I'm really excited about. A lot of the stuff they're doing with email, I actually think is fascinating. And there's some good stuff there. The place where I think that they really messed up, and I'm quite disappointed in them, is the image generation. Oh, yeah. I mean, that part, I just felt like it was...

and I hate it, but I just kind of hate that in general. I feel like that's not their problem. It's lame and I hate it. Right, but this is the thing. I agree with you and I think

in general, I would say that AI imagery, especially in the style that Apple showed their imagery, has become kind of gross. Like, the imagery that Apple is displaying on their website and the thing that has become a meme, which is like the woman dressed as a superhero. Oh, yeah. It's terrible. It looks awful. In this, like,

weird, like gross Memoji slash human style where it's like there's a Memoji face, but with like human skin texture. It like looks really weird. So the reason that I'm frustrated at them is these tools, these parts of it is overshadowing, I think, the good work that they have done because lots of people, including me, are a little bit too focused on this because I don't like that they did image generation in the first place.

And I especially don't like it because they didn't even do it well. And so at that point, I don't understand why bother. And the thing that frustrates me and upsets me about it the most is that you are able to, as baked into the system, create these images of other people. I think that that is a huge misstep from them and one that I'm surprised that they made. That like, just because I have pictures of you, I can create these AI art pictures of you.

And I think that that is such a strange thing that I kind of can't believe they will ship

It seems like a very strange feature. It's funny, like, again, the timescales of technological change are so fast, but all of their imagery has a very, like, dolly, a year ago look to it. Like, I did find it very strange that they had, like, picked predefined styles. And yes, that cartoon style, I mean, it's one of the things that I just...

I hate it's like this weird uncanny valley Pixar is the way that it feels to me. It's like, I just, I don't like it. It's like, it's someone's art project of like, what if you took a Pixar character, but they were human and had the same proportions? Like, how would they look? It's kind of what it looks like to me. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but like there was somebody made this thing where they made like a,

A human looking Lego head. Oh, yeah. I've seen that. It's horrifying. And this is what this image reminds me of. Yeah, I could see that. The terribly named Genmoji is as far as they should have gone for me. Like, let me make emoji. Agreed. But like, even some of those just didn't even look very good. They didn't even look like Apple's emoji. But it's like, you know, whatever. But I just think stuff like that, it's just...

I'm not sure what the thinking was behind this. And then as well, the secondary thing, which is making a lot of people in the media industry, which is obviously where a lot of my friends are upset, is that it has come out since like, how have Apple built their models? And they have said it and they've published papers about it.

they scraped the open web. And they also licensed some content, but they scraped the open web. And they said, by the way, you can now just add this tag to the Apple bot search. Because Apple's had this thing for years where they scraped the web like Google does for spotlight searches and stuff like that. Right, right. And to help them with Siri results. And so people put this thing on their website because why wouldn't you? That's great. But now that same bot has been scraping the open web and

to build their LLM. And now Apple is saying, oh, if you don't want us to do this, you can just add this secondary tag. It's like, well, a bit late now though, isn't it? Because you've already done it. Right, yeah. Look, maybe the situation is the only way you can build an LLM is to do this. I'm not sure that's the case, but even if we just presume that, like maybe that is it and that's why they did it. But I just, I felt like with stuff like this, with the image generation and with the way in which they

took data to build their LLM, I think I was just hoping for better from them. And I think that this is another symptom of them being behind, that they did not get the ability

to give themselves enough time to think through the Apple way of doing something. They spent a lot of time when it comes to privacy in doing that, right? And they have built some incredible looking technology. But when it comes to actually the way in which they've built the tools and some of the tools that they've decided to use,

I expected from them a little bit more respect for content creators than what I think they've shown. So that's interesting because when I saw the image generation and why I said like, it looks like an older version.

I automatically assumed it was because they just had a much smaller data set, that that would be the problem. It's not that Apple can't get their hands on the compute. It's that they're limited by data. So that is a very interesting piece of information that they scraped the open web. Again, I'm not like an expert on this, but my understanding is that

like very strongly that like functionally it is impossible to build the LLMs that people want without just, I don't know any other way to say it, stealing the combined work of all of humanity. That's what it is. Yeah. I've been thinking this too, because like I've been seeing people say like, couldn't you just do it based on like,

Creative Commons licensed stuff. And I just think that the data sets probably can't be large enough. Yeah, no, the licensable stuff is going to be incredibly tiny. So like the fundamental problem is like this technology seems like it can't happen without just...

taking everything human civilization has made for yourself. It's kind of astounding to me that companies are getting away with this. I find it quite breathtaking when you really think about the scale of it. But of course, like lots of people disagree and just think it's like, oh, it's...

Well, it's on the web. Like I could have read it. Sort of. But yeah, it's a different kind of thing. Yeah. So I've come to a little bit of a rule of thumb on this because it's like somebody asked me like, you know, because obviously I've been talking a lot about this recently. Someone was like, well, you are a fan of emulators.

isn't that just stealing too? And there are a couple of caveats, which is one, I only emulate games that I do own. Like I have bought these games. So I feel like I have exchanged with the maker of the game, the whole point of doing this thing, which is I gave you money. I have the game like now, however I play, I think could be up to me. But yeah, the thing is in this scenario, like if we say that somebody steals a Nintendo game to play on their iPhone, um,

That's where it ends, right? With this content, so we'll use Apple. Apple have stolen the contents of the internet, which they will then continue to profit from bigger and bigger and bigger. And the people that the data that they took from, they get none of it. Like that is starting to become a bit of a rule of thumb for me. And like, I'm at a very different place to where I was when we first spoke about this stuff.

Some of these things, I'm accepting from what they are. This is just where we are and it's happening. And I'm trying to find what I find interesting about all of this technology.

But that still seems to be like a fundamental part of it is that what you're saying, it's all based on an element of stealing. And I'm just disappointed. I'm disappointed that Apple did it too. I hoped better for them because of kind of their background and the ways that they speak and that they always try to do these things. But no, here we are. They just did the same thing as everyone else. But they also, their results...

Not as good, so I don't really know why, at least for the image stuff, why they bothered with it. And that's kind of the thing that I'm getting stuck up on. I think the answer then very clearly is that it's more evidence of them starting late, despite their claims otherwise. Who knows where ChatGPT5 is currently, but these training runs for these systems can take a year, a year and a half. Yeah.

And so knowing that they have all of the data from all of everything humans have ever done, then the answer is obviously yes. They didn't have enough time for their training run. So they're using some six-month-old version of an LLM and they're not using an 18-month-old version of an LLM trained on the same data. But even if the image stuff looked good, I still don't think they should do it.

And just their fundamental ideas for how you will create imagery of other people, I think is just very misguided. I think that that is such a strange thing to do. I don't think any of their competitors are doing this, that like you can say, my friend Gray, make a picture of him in the rain or whatever.

you know i'm like i can do that and send it to you and i find that to be a really weird choice i'm not really sure why they decided to do it and that's the thing that that is kind of getting me down about it like this is the interesting thing about watching something and then just like not knowing the reaction or the follow-up it's like ah right the extra details always really matter or like the little implications that just go by very fast that you don't catch

But yes, a countdown to how fast can people make borderline inappropriate images of other people like with the AI generation stuff. It's like,

Even if it is family friendly, you can still have people doing things they will be very unhappy about in your AI generated imagery. I mean, like, honestly, I imagine a lot of inappropriate stuff happening by accident. Like, and I have no doubt that they have done a very good job with their guardrails and all of that kind of stuff. And they're talking about that too, right? Like they care about these things being right. That's why they've limited access.

the ways that you can create these images that by and large you're selecting buttons and words rather than typing your own stuff but there are a lot of things that you can get wrong in somebody's complexion in their skin tone and in their facial features that could be very offensive if you don't get them right like you've only got to be a little bit off and it could be very wrong and so you know i hope they're ready for this they decided to do this and so we'll see what happens

Yeah, I just did not pick up on the fact that it's like, oh, of course, they make that image of mom because this phone has photos of mom. That has to be where it's coming from. I just didn't really think about it. Yeah, they said that anyone in your photo library is someone you can make genmoji of them and you can create art of them in Image Playground. They're the two art things. But you know what?

I feel like I'm just going to keep spiraling. Okay, but it's like backing up to even though my first impression, like my main feeling of like the thing that is strange here to me is there is something that feels like it's from Bizarro World when I hear the presenters say things in the context of generated content of like, oh, it's helping you express yourself.

This image will help you express yourself or this rewriting of this email will help you express yourself better. I just find that like so odd. It's like, but it really isn't. It's not expressing anything about you. Like you kind of have nothing to do with this. What it's actually doing is taking your content and

And making it more like an average sort of content, which is like what you would want under many circumstances. You want to write a professional email. Like by definition, you're trying to pull it closer to like the norm of what an email is.

But yeah, that's the thing that caught on my brain a number of times. It's like, oh, we're helping you express yourself by writing this email better. And it's like, I don't think that's what's happening, guys. Well, an expression has been had, right? But it's not yours, right? You're not expressing yourself, but you are...

in some way, I guess. Again, language is hard around this because this is literally a kind of technology that has never existed before, which again, I will like in brackets say comma, because we built a terrifying machine that can think comma. So like, it's just different. You cannot analogize this to something else, but it is particularly weird. Like the part I really, it really was like,

of course, is in the email section where they're like, hey, AI will help you write this email. And then, but like on the flip side, when you get the email, AI will help summarize the email so that you don't have to, and it's like, what is happening here? Look, basically, if in five years, nobody sends email anymore and email apps are just talking to each other all the time. It's so clear. That's like where we're going very fast. That's the end state.

And look, I'm going through my own email journey. Kind of want that future. If just email was happening and I wasn't involved, fantastic. But then I've got to wonder at that point, what's the point of it? And that's the thing that we haven't worked out. If the email is written by an AI and the email is read by an AI...

Maybe that just says something different about the way in which we communicate over email, which is that it's too long. Right? Like people say too many words. Like one of my absolute favorite features that they announced was the...

When you get an email, instead of it showing you the first two lines of the email, it shows you a summary of what's inside of that email. Oh, yeah. Great. That is great technology. Because it made me realize in that moment that that preview of the first two lines is absolutely pointless. Yeah. I've had that turned off my entire email life because I felt the same way. It's like I would rather see nothing than see the first two lines of the email. Because there is...

zero help gotten out of, hi, Mike, hope you're doing well, like just over and over and over again, right? Like you can imagine at a certain point in the creation of email apps that did make more sense, that maybe people communicated in a way that that was beneficial, right?

But now it isn't. And so the idea that I could have an email and it's got that, or even just like a really long email and it gives me the TLDR, those features I would benefit greatly from, I think. And this is kind of how I feel about basically all of Apple intelligence. When they are doing something which takes things on your device and summarizes it,

or helps you get something done quicker, I think it's fantastic. But it just falls down for me at any point in which it is making something. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the fundamental problem of what these new AI systems are, is their ability to generate is strange and really changes things.

I think particularly with the email section where it's like, oh, Chatshiept is going to help you write these emails. It's like, I am just aware of in my working life, like more and more coming across messages where it's like, I don't know if I'm right or not, but it just feels more like I'm just getting emails from an AI. And it's like, why is this even happening? And now it's just like, you know, a year from now, we're basically guaranteed that that's what's going to be the case if you just like build it into the system.

but i do think they fundamentally have to because otherwise they just know people are copying and pasting uh out to uh like to other systems to write their messages anyway but yeah there's a thing that happens here which i always feel like some important part of thinking is lost here particularly with uh some of the people i work with quite closely like at the start of chat gpt i was like

real harsh sometimes when i got a list of ideas and it was like did you get this from chachi pt i never f***ing want that ever again like i want to know what you think i have no interest in like what this machine thinks like do not get into this lazy habit of doing this it's real bad long term if the first thing that you turn towards is like the thing to help you think and

But it's very easy to do. I'm even aware of when I'm working on the scripts for my videos...

Some phases of writing, I should be just trying to like write and some phases I should just be trying to edit. And those are two different things. And it's always better, like the more that you keep your mind separate from those two. But even for me, I've been aware of like, oh, there's now a third thing that I have to be aware of, which is when am I ever asking chat GPT for anything while I'm working on this? And like most frequently for me, that's just asking for like to have it function as a thesaurus. Yeah.

But even there, I still feel like something different is happening here when I ask it to give me like a list of thesaurus words. Oh God, so hard to say. Ask ChatGPT for a different word for thesaurus. Yeah, I should be saying synonyms, right? When I ask ChatGPT for synonyms, the reason I would, like I'm using that though, it's like,

I cannot pin it down, but there is something different between using the actual built-in Apple thesaurus versus asking ChatGPT for synonyms. And I'm aware of like, oh, when I am writing, I can use the Apple built-in app for quick alternate suggestions in a way that...

It's like, ooh, ChatGPT is just different in this somehow. And I think that affects people over the long run. So even for this, I've been much more cautious about how much I use it, even for minor typographical suggestions.

Maybe I'm very sensitive to this or maybe I am the vanguard for this, but I do look at a lot of the generative stuff for work and feel a little bit like what is even happening here in the long run? Like when people get real used to the machine just writing an email for them, like what are they even thinking about? What they're thinking about is getting it done real fast. They're not thinking about whatever the message is supposed to be about, right?

And email is already bad. So I can see it being significantly worsened by this. But yeah, it's like it's not Apple's fault. I think this is just a byproduct of the generative content at all, particularly for words. And this kind of stuff, especially in business, it's like a weird kind of.

food with no nutritional value, like that's what these messages tend toward over the long run. But nonetheless, I still think Apple did the right thing. It's like, hey, if people are going to do this,

let's try to build it into the system in the best possible way. I don't like how all these AI systems are there to just try to suck out all of your data. That does feel a little bit different knowing that Apple started from like, well, we have to take all the data first, but going forward, we won't. It's like, okay, I guess that's better. I know what you're saying, but the difference is like,

there is just an inherent privacy thing from that. Like when they're making the LLM, if something's publicly available on the web, I think there isn't really an assumption of privacy, right? Yeah. But when you're using these models and you're using these apps, do you really know if and how much information is stored and associated to you, especially if it's free, right? Exactly. Where we can feel very confident, I think, that Apple...

is not going to do that. Yeah. In a sense of, it doesn't make sense for their business anyway. Their business model does not care for your private information. And also they have, I think, gone to great lengths at trying to establish how and why they will be different and having it being like publicly verifiable in a way that people will definitely want to check on because they'll have to catch them. Of course. And I think Apple knows this and so they get the opportunity to do that and I'm really happy about that. But like, look,

I agree with you, right? That like they kind of got to do it. And so fine, right? And the text stuff that they've done, I think, you know, I've not been able to read enough examples of things that they've made to decide if I think it's good or not. But it just doesn't have the same fundamental concerns and frustrations I have about the image stuff, which is mostly around that like they don't look good and it's other people you can do it for. But what I'm happy Apple have done is what I wanted them to do, which is they have...

used this technology, large language model technology, to underpin their systems, right? Their assistant systems. And then also to build it out in such a way that you should be able to use, if it works the way they talk about, Apple's devices to

to operate for you. Like that is the key to me for why I'm excited for what this future could be is if it provides me with a way to be able to have a dialogue with my computer in a way that it can then act tasks like an actual assistant would. That is where I can see where we're going and where I actually do believe at this stage is the,

the real benefit, like it's great that we can have text written for us. That's not enough for me. Like, I don't think that's it, right? Like I don't think this stuff is the huge change that this technology will bring. This is just the first thing that has highlighted its potential. The idea of being able to have the operating system that you use on your device, uh,

actually understand you, communicate with you, and take actions. Because we had a meeting beforehand, right? Before today's episode, we were talking about some products. And I needed to find an image. I couldn't remember where I put that image, but I knew what it looked like. Now, what I want to be able to do is say like, hey, Mac...

I took a picture the other day. It was of this. It looked like this. I think I sent it to Gray, but I don't know where I sent it. Can you just find it for me? That's what it should be able to do in theory, right? And I think they're showing the beginnings of this stuff. That is like, yes. I don't care that it's not going to work great first time, right? But we got to get going on this and they're getting going on this. And for me, that is what I am absolutely so excited about is like,

my iPhone, understanding me, knowing what's on the iPhone and being able to act upon that information and my command. Yes, that's the dream. Yeah, it's like my feeling is this is what...

people always wanted siri and all of these assistants to be and that they have always just fallen so far short of and we know why now right because the technology didn't exist until now yeah i'm not 100 convinced that is the reason but yes like we have a thing now which is extremely flexible and it's going to be i think quite wild to see what

systems that are trained to be like you are the AI for this phone just like learn everything about this phone are going to be able to do yep I'm just so aware of because again I'm on my phone I have the action button set to like talk to chat GPT and I am aware of like boy the number of times I hit like talk to chat GPT versus Siri has got to be like

50 to 1. And when I'm talking to Siri, it is almost exclusively to run shortcuts that I have made in advance. Like that's what I'm having Siri do is really just be a shortcut launcher. And the huge advantage there is like

Chachi PT, even if it could only remember like the previous sentence that I had said would already be so useful. They showed that off at some point here of like, yes, you see everyone do it. Like they start to talk to Siri and then realize halfway through their sentence that like they actually want something else. And like even just the ability to do that to realize like I changed my mind halfway through about what I really meant.

completely game changing for the actual ability to interact with Siri and yeah if I could like a big checklist of items that I'm like working through on like the routine of what a perfect day to look like and here's my like calendar of what do I like how should I block out my time like I've got all of these things but also sometimes I wake up and I'm just like

Today it is not going to happen. I need to take a break today. And I would love to be able to just ask Siri to like clear my daily calendar and tasks of all of this stuff and just like have it understand what I mean. And just like, whoosh, take all of that away. Amazing. Without having to like programmatically say what each individual item is. Or even then I would take that a tiny step further, right? Where you could say,

But tell me, what are the things that I absolutely can't skip today? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Because it's not just like, oh, just perform that action. But like, understand context. Understand me. That's a really good point. You know, I have how many items do I have left on my task list today? How long is that going to take me? Do I have enough time before six o'clock to get this stuff done? Like, this is what I want it to do. How long is it going to take to get there? I have no idea. A long time, probably. But

We at least feel like we're more on a path which would suggest that that time is coming rather than the last 10 years where...

It was like, oh, well, it did this one thing and then it just didn't really do much more. Yeah, it felt like they were just building in individual pieces. Like, oh, now you can ask it about sports scores. It's like, great. Can we add in every other conceivable thing in the universe one at a time? Probably not. And it's also like something like the sports scores thing. It's like one of those things where it's like,

you couldn't do this before. Like it just kind of has always felt like that over time. Like, and now spotlight is better. It's like, wasn't spotlight better last time as well? Like what is going on? You know? Or like how many times I feel like there was an element of like, it felt like for many years, every year they would talk about and Siri will learn from you and recommend apps that you can use throughout the day. And it's like, we've done this before. I have very many times thought like,

Look, I'm not Apple, but I'm convinced if I spent a week on it, I could write a shortcut that would better select for me the things like the button that I most want to press than Apple's Siri suggestions. Based solely on just like do a frequency count of what hour of the day is it and what button do I press most? Like how on earth are you so bad at these recommendations? Yeah.

But yeah, like the large language model stuff does have the promise of actually being able to improve those kinds of suggestions. And I feel that way because of the places where I have seen that already work in limited ways where systems like barely know anything about me, but are already like surprisingly good at trying to predict like what is the thing that I actually want here. But yeah, so.

As always, it'll be like, how does this work in reality? But I do think it just looks so promising as a system. And I feel like because of it being built on top of the intent stuff,

it does feel to me like they're not trying to pull this out of nowhere they have a pre-existing framework that they can point the ai system at and say like learn that like learn this system that is already the underwriting way to like interact with all of these apps and talk with things and figure out what the apps are up to so as is usually the way with like your your closeness to wwdc

There is always the, what do you think it is? What does it end up being? And so the situation to which I understand it now, a few days in, is it's mostly the same system. It will require work from developers to update to a newer form of the Intents system. And there's more that it can do, but of course it's limited. I think Apple said that their model is trained on something like 12...

of intents and this year there are two of those that are available but inside of those two there's lots and lots and lots of actions and this is like

You know, like what type of app are you? Will you be able to work for this system? And then what kinds of things within your app can you do? Like, for example, send a message is one of them, right? Like, you know how it used to be back in the day where it's like, oh, and Siri can do things for you only if you're a banking app and a restaurant app. You know, so it's that kind of thing, but it's definitely more broad. It's not as broad as you'd want it to be, but I would say...

Obviously, we haven't been able to test it yet, but even to this point of more information coming out, I'm still like, oh, okay. This seems promising, but it's like how long into the summer...

Even if it is this summer, is any of this stuff available? Like that's going to be the interesting part. But yes. Yeah, of course. Like I did not think that this was the intent system like as it currently exists. Like of course, there is no way that they're not going to have to like double the size of the API for that system behind the scenes.

To me, it's just more like they're not trying to build a thing out of nowhere just for the AI. Like they have a thing that is a very convenient thing to start from, which gives me a lot more hope in like how is this going to go along? It also just feels like it continues on of like, oh, my favorite Apple acquisition ever is like a workflow is like still paying off now with this AI announcement. It's like goes back to that acquisition. Great.

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Are you ready to tint your app icons? So, Mike, it's not the tinting I'm excited about. A little thing flashed by so fast, but it caused my heart to skip a beat. Did you notice that they have an option to make the app icons larger? But...

When you make them larger, you know it goes away. The words. The words on the bottom go away. That might be one of my top three things for this year. I was like, oh, fuck.

Thank the Lord. Like, I don't have to see these stupid words. I hate them so much. Like, large app icons. That may be the first setting that I flip when I get the new operating system. It's like, words, goodbye. Never want to see them again. Whoosh. I think the phrase for me is, I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth.

where I also want to get rid of the names of apps and widgets. I really don't like the big icons though. What I want is regular sized app icons and no words. Like I want everything, but I don't know if we're going to get that. I just think I've played around with it on an iPad and I've seen lots of screenshots of iPhones. The icons are just way too big. It looks like, you know, you can get those phones for like,

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Where the buttons are really, really big. That's what it reminds me of. The thing is that I'm less concerned about that because at this point, all of my various home screens are 90% widgets anyway. And so I feel like it looks less dumb if you just have a bunch of widgets. It's not even really about the apps. I've seen some examples of...

of some of Apple's widgets that they actually also get a little bit bigger. And I think the weather widget gets one more piece of data on it because of that. It's a slightly larger canvas.

I've just seen that. I think it was on threads. So I don't have details on that yet, but I saw it. So, you know, it must be true. Listen, we can tint our icons now. We can make them giant to smush out the words and we can put them anywhere on the screen. That was the one where I was like, wow, only took what? 50,

15 years, but yes, now I can put the icons on one side of the screen. Look at all these gifts they have bestowed upon us, Mike. How could you be ungrateful? Well, all of this stuff as it was happening, I was like, oh, Gray's going to love all of this.

But I'm not really happy with any of it. So, okay. The tinting only looks good if you want black and white. Like, I have yet to see an example of a tint with a color that looks good. Because as well, you have to tint everything. You can't do the individual things, which I think is very strange. But if you want black and white, which I'm sure you will, that actually does, I think, look pretty good. You don't know me. And they have done.

Eastbourne receding. They have dark mode icons as well, where I'm hoping they will tweak them because they've just taken everything that was white and made it pure black, where I think there can be some shades of gray in here would be not too bad. But, you know, I think dark mode icons, I do like the idea of. But the free placement thing,

In theory is really great, but my home screens are full because I've been so used to filling the home screen. So like, I don't know what to do with them. It's like, I'm so happy I can do this, but like, where does everything go to make the spaces? Like, that's not what I'm sure about yet. No, no. I agree with you. There's like a funny thing that has happened, which it just...

I think this is because like the apps fill in from the top bottom as it was always has occurred. The phones have gotten bigger and bigger over the years. So Apple has basically trained you that the things you are going to use the most you want at the bottom of the screen, which means you have to fill up the whole screen to get them there. And so, yes, it's like,

I have to unlearn 10 years of behavior of like, oh, I might as well fill up this whole screen. Right, because then I put all my widgets at the top, right? Because I can't reach up there. So now it's like, well, where do the widgets go now? Yeah, no, it is totally the case of like, this feature has arrived at exactly the moment where I couldn't care less about it. But I was like, I'm still glad it's here. It is very funny to see. It's like, I won't use it on the phone. I probably will use it on the iPad just because I don't actually fill up my whole iPad screens. But

on the phone it's like apple you trained me to use every millimeter of this space and now you tell me like look at all this free space you could have it's like where were you 10 years ago when i wanted this uh nowhere to be seen i'm not gonna say for me that the jury's completely out yet because when widgets came out

I had a similar feeling of like, well, my home screen is full of the apps that I use. I don't have space for widgets. Like I especially don't have space to get rid of eight app icons for one widget or whatever it is, right? But over time, I did do that. And I have fewer app icons on my home screen and more widgets. So I could imagine a scenario where maybe...

On my first screen, it's just a couple of widgets arranged nicely. And then maybe my second screen has some apps on it arranged. You know, right now I'm like, I don't know what I would do with this, but I'm not going to say that like, I definitely won't use it because I know that my kind of habits have changed over the last couple of years with the introduction of widgets. So I got kind of got used to them. And also the other thing that I was quite excited for was the control center customization. Yeah.

That was also like, oh my God, so good. And legitimately could be one of those things where a lot of stuff that exists on my home screen, it's like, I don't really want that app. I just want to do a thing fast. That's why it's here. So it's like, oh boy, I may be shoving a bunch of stuff into Control Center. But like, I was completely blown away by, it's like, oh, not only are we going to be able to customize Control Center, we have these multiple pages that I thought they had a clever like,

quick way to swipe through the different pages to get to it fast. I was like, wow, look at what Control Center has become. This is very exciting to play around with. I'm not sure if you caught it. I don't know if they did a good job of showing it in the keynote, but you can add more pages. That's what I was figuring, right? Is it look like you could just have more stuff? No, because they have the one that's like the original, then they have media, then they have home, but then you can add another page where you can just

put more controls in it. Like you can just add more pages with more controls if you want to do that. Just controls everywhere. All of the controls. Yeah. I've seen lots of great memes already because you can add the same control over and over again. So like I've seen people just have a page of just the volume indicator and

And every time you change one, they all change. It's like, this is great. You can just keep changing the volume. That's really funny. This is my volume page. Wherever I touch on this screen, I want to be able to control the volume. But you know what? I could actually kind of see that being useful if you want to be real sloppy about it. It's like, yeah, I literally want to press anywhere and just change the volume. Don't worry about it.

And you'd be able to change the flashlight and camera thing on the lock screen. Can they become any control center control? I wasn't sure what that was. So that's what it is. Like anything in control center can go there instead. Any small one. Cause you can get some that are big and I don't know if like maybe some that are big, they're just always big. You know what I mean? Like, but anything that can be like a single unit, uh,

can go there. Right. But only two. Yeah, no, I'll take it. It's like the camera one is the one to go. It's like, I don't really need you. Especially because the rumor is that the next iPhone gets like its own

Camera button? Oh, is that what Rumor Roundup says? That's what Rumor Roundup is saying. Like where on American iPhones they have the millimeter wave antenna for 5G, it's going to kind of be in that. So you would essentially be holding up your phone and it's like a shutter button for a camera, but that it would also launch a camera. So...

You don't need the lock screen thing anymore if you've got its own button. Are you saying the rumor is, I'm looking at the phone now, the same side as it has the lock button, but on the bottom? Is that what you're saying? Yep. Oh, great. That's exactly where I would want a button. Exactly. Imagine if you were taking a picture with your iPhone as if it was a digital camera. Where would you put the button? That's where the rumor is they're putting the button.

Oh, right. Yeah, you know what? If they're going to do that, that also totally makes sense. Like, why have they now done it? That you can change the camera thing on the front? Of course. Because there'll be an even better way to get to the camera. Yep, makes sense. Makes sense. The rumor is as well, it's a capacitive button. So you'll be able to do like the thing where you can press it gently to focus and press it harder to take the photo, which if they actually do that...

Oh, man. Yeah. Although I wouldn't want to be Peak Design trying to design the case ahead of time for a capacitive button. Good luck, guys. Oh, I hadn't even thought of that. What do you do in that scenario? I think you have to have a little cutout. Like, that's what you just have to have. Yeah, but then you've got to be able to squish your finger into the cutout. Yeah, if I was them, and if it is a capacitive button...

I feel like you just have to make a real big section on the phone where it's not covered and you have the thinnest little connecting guardrails you possibly can on either side. That's what they need to do. Man, honestly, if I was Peak Design, I just wouldn't bother this year until the phone comes out. Like, you know, this just seems terrible. Boy, I have never been gladder that Cortex brand

does not make phone cases. We're never making phone cases. We're never making a phone case and this is why. It's like the one thing I am 100% dead set that we will never ever do is phone cases. Right. People go like, oh, will you make a toaster one year? It's like, probably not, but who knows? Are you going to make a phone case? No.

never because the only way that I would make a phone case is in a way that nobody wants it which is it will come out the year next you know just like oh the iPhone 15 we have our iPhone 14 cases ready because it's like how long it will take us to get the phone and then test it and see if it feels good oh man phone case wow what a thing can I just tell you why I love math notes okay hold on why is Mike so into math notes

I have no idea. I just cannot conceive of why you're... I was like, I'm gonna try to come up with my best guess, but I have no idea. So please tell me, why are you so excited about this? I'm not sure what type of learning type this would fall into, but when I'm trying to solve a problem of any kind, I like to write it out. And sometimes this is on incredible paper products.

Sometimes this is with an Apple Pencil and an iPad. But I will try and write these things out, right? Like it helps me work through a problem. Sometimes these are number things. This can be measurements or it can be financial stuff that I will try and write it out. But then what I have to do is get a calculator and add up the numbers because my mental arithmetic, in fact, my

written arithmetic is not good because I went to school a long time ago. Oh, yeah. Math notes does the calculation for me. It's absolutely incredible. It is an incredible system. It also works by typing, by the way. You don't have to use a pencil. So you can do this by typing into notes. Oh, okay. That changes it. Interesting. Okay.

And I've been doing it in the Notes app, but you can do it in the Calculator app too. But this will work on any of the platforms you have notes on. Wait a second. Have you been trying this with the developer beta? Oh, yeah. I have the beta on my iPad and my Vision Pro. Oh, God. Okay. All right. We'll ask you about that later. Well, I put it on my iPad Mini. So my old iPad. I put it on there and I put the Vision Pro beta on too. So I'm taking my Apple Pencil and I'm like writing out sums and you just write equals.

And it will just pop the answer in. And you can go back to the sum. You can delete something. You can change the numbers. It updates it. It's fantastic. It really is just like, it feels like magic. And you can do things like you can make a list. You could write like,

Notebook equals this amount. Pen equals this amount. Hat equals this amount. And then you could write underneath it, hat plus pen plus notebook equals, and it will sum up the amounts that you defined above. It's exactly what I want from something like this, and I had no idea that I could even get something like this. Because so many of the ways in which I...

calculate things are in this way that I will start writing it out in handwriting or in a table or something in notes. Do you remember we were having this conversation about obsidian and calculations a long time ago, right? Cause it wouldn't do calculations in a way that made any sense to me. But this is exactly what math notes does. They, and then some of the things that you can do are like some of the things I've shown in the keynote things I'll never do, but they were just so incredibly impressive and,

I was watching the keynote of Idina and she was like, oh man, would this have been good when I was trying to work out how many balloons could fit inside of a tent? Right. Of course. Yeah. Right. So it's like, it really is like an incredible system. But even for just basic stuff, like I have 25 things in a list and I just want to know what they all are when you add them up. Like,

It's so cool, man. It's so, so clever. And I'm kind of blown away by it. And this is one of these things where like, yep, that's machine learning. This is what it does. And they've found a way to bridge the two things together. And I think I haven't been able to try yet because it's not yet working on my iPad. I'm really intrigued to try their handwriting cleanup that they're doing. Yeah, that was also something that I felt looked real magical in a sense. And it also was one of these features where I thought...

I just never knew that I wanted this. But the moment that I saw it, it's like, oh my God, yes. This is exactly a thing that I've wanted. Because I think of it like for someone like you in your videos, you could handwrite stuff now. Like you could put those on the screen. They don't have to be a font anymore. Like you could just have a version of your handwriting, but it will look nice and clean, right? And I think that that is like such an interesting...

cool thing for people like in any form like they were doing it a lot where they were showing like people using it in presentations and stuff and it's like yeah that would add a lot of personality to a presentation hey you know what a lot more personality than some freaking superhero mom and you could pop into it but like to have your handwriting kind of like cleaned up in this way

It's like, yes, that's fantastic. And would add personality in a way where you're taking something and just smoothing out, making it look better rather than like, oh, just take this text and just create some like random handwriting font. I think this is a really, really nice set of tools. Like, I think this is really cool. This is one of those features where it's like, I didn't even really realize the resistance that I have sometimes with using the iPad handwriting stuff. It's like, I do like to write it out.

But then it inevitably becomes some mess of both my handwriting and also text that I've pasted in. And then at some point I'm like, well, now this note is just like, what is this thing? I hate it.

And so it was just like real interesting to see like, oh, great. It could be made uniform in either direction because obviously like they know all of these words. So I can also just like turn all of this into text if I needed to. Or I can keep it as handwriting and keep moving it around. I found that very intriguing as a thing that I just did not think.

that I really wanted. Like when they first showed, like in the first 10 seconds, I was like, oh, they've made a handwriting of my own handwriting. What a pointless dump. And then there's like mind changed so fast for the potential of that one. Why would you? Oh, that's so good. That was exactly my response. I think that just to like quickly go back to the math thing, the thing that's interesting to me about this is that

You have used it because my, I was looking at that and I think my hesitation was a little bit like,

as is often the case with these things, there's some not obvious way that you have to do it for it to work that like doesn't come across in the demos because you're not aware of whatever the limitations are. So it's real interesting to me to hear that you have used that and feel like, oh, it is useful. Like you can just write it out in the way that you want to and it actually works. Yeah. I think that's like in the back of my mind, I was feeling like,

It's got to be some catch here for this. But if you're not finding that that's the case, then it's really impressive. Yeah, there's some stuff that I think it maybe doesn't do or can't do or doesn't do yet. But it's not stuff that's difficult. Like, for example, what I haven't been able to do is like take two numbers, multiply them and then get an answer. And I haven't been able to reliably then take that answer and manipulate it further. Mm hmm.

Right. So like, you know, a hundred times a thousand then divided by 17 or whatever. Right. It's not like a two-step process probably. But then sometimes I have been, so it's like, it just feels like maybe one of those things that's going to be worked out because I've,

sometimes been able to manipulate and sometimes not and maybe i just haven't learned the right incantations for it or whatever or it's also developer beta one exactly right and so i saw it and thought it looked cool and it was still one of the things i had no idea how much i loved it until i tried it and was like wow that's amazing so it felt really cool this episode of cortex is brought to you by fitbod when you're looking to change your fitness level it can be hard to know where to get started

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beta for Vision OS on your headsets. I gotta just say, Mike, I feel like that might be one of the most risky beta installs in your entire career. I agree. I wouldn't have done it if they would have done more to it. Right. Okay. Really, Vision OS 2 is...

is closer to like vision os 1.5 1.3 yeah no no i there's a lot in here that makes the experience much nicer okay in my experience in what i've been playing around with in the last couple of days and especially when they actually ship all of the stuff that they spoke about because it's you know stuff like the panoramic mac display which looked great that's not coming in the initial release that will be later on in the year um

So there's stuff like that I'm excited about. But look, there's lots of refinements throughout the system. A lot of the animations feel smoother. There's tons of new tools for developers. That's actually where the majority of the story is, but it's a lot of stuff I don't understand. But there is a lot of stuff going on for developers and how you can attach UI elements to objects now. And if you move the objects around, the UI moves with it, that kind of stuff. There's a lot going on in...

the APIs and especially in the way that a lot of like 3D stuff is being done. But there are things like the gestures that you have of your hand now to like bring up the home screen and bring up control center is a vastly better way of doing navigation on VisionOS than the VisionOS 1, right? Where you're either pressing a button on the headset or looking up to the heavens. Like being able to access these things quickly is like really easy and

Keyboard pass-through is fantastic. I wished that it supported all keyboards and not just Apple's keyboards because I definitely think they could have done this, but they didn't do this, at least not yet. But it's great that with my Magic Keyboard, if I'm in an environment, I can see the keyboard, which is helpful for me.

They added a new environment, which is a beach, which is lovely. It's probably the highest quality one. I'm not sure if I want to be working at the beach though. Like that's just not my thing, but like for hanging out, me and Jason had a persona call yesterday and we were sitting on the beach. I think actually the most impressive feature that I have used is the ability to turn 2D images into spatial images. Oh, does that work well? It works so well.

and it is incredibly effective. It works with images that weren't taken on iPhones. This is purely using machine learning to establish the depth. And I have photos that were taken on DSLRs years ago of live shows that I've turned into spatial photos and they look incredible.

Like really, to me, to my eyes, look as good as they do from the iPhone. Like the effect is there. It's actually very cool. The animation and the sound design that they've done is really great when you do that. Like kind of everything shimmers and you kind of see the thing separating and it does these like computery sounds. It's like analyzing the image. It's really good. Like it's really, really good.

I think stuff like swiping around the app screens is in a higher frame rate now, so it feels more natural. There's lots and lots of little touches throughout the operating system. Safari profiles has been added, which is amazing for me because I can finally use Safari properly on VisionOS. I'm glad to hear that because I was really aware of the lack of them saying that. It was like,

I'm not hearing the word profile anywhere, guys. So I'm happy to hear that that's there. It's not listed anywhere. I just found it because it's the first thing I look for every time there's an update because it's so important for me because I jumped on that bandwagon and I couldn't use Safari in my Vision Pro effectively. And then also guest mode, it saves the last person, which is like a great idea. That is a great way of solving...

the technical issue, I think, to just have it saved. It's like, great. Because also as well, realistically, outside of like a bunch of people coming over, really, it's just the other person in your household that might want to use it. You know, whoever's using it most, they will just also be able to use it. There's lots of little touches and improvements throughout the OS, which is what I will say is as a minimum,

Good. Basically, what's happened in the last year is VisionOS went from being the next thing to not being the next thing because now AI is the next thing. So I could have imagined a scenario where VisionOS got nothing, and I don't think that's the case. It still feels like they're putting effort into it. It has mouse support now too, which is good. So when I'm sitting at my Mac, I can use my mouse to control everything.

It's not getting any of the Apple intelligence features. Yeah, I did find that quite interesting. I don't really know what to think about that, but it was something after it was over. I was like, oh, it's quite notable that it's not present in this system. So for everything I've been able to work out, it's technically capable. And from the things that I've been told is it would be...

Silly if Apple wasn't bringing this stuff to all of their platforms. Yeah. But where I'm getting that information is maybe the important thing. And also that they are planning to bring this stuff everywhere. They have prioritized. Yeah, and that makes sense. But it's good to have actually been told that information, right? Rather than it can't do this. Rather than speculating it, yes. My concern was at first, it's like...

Is there a technical limitation? Because Apple is being pretty particular, right? Like if you have anything older than an iPhone 15 Pro, it will not work. Like it won't. None of these features. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's M series, Macs, all of them. M series iPads, all of them. And iPhone 15 Pro, that's where it cuts off. Wow.

That's got to be one of the most aggressive cutoffs ever for a feature. Yes. And this is, again, another scenario where you can see this isn't the way Apple likes to usually do things. They seed this stuff for years so they don't have to do this stuff. And the best theory I've heard is that it is a RAM issue. Oh, huh. That's very interesting. I was wondering...

because what i was kind of speculating is oh they're doing on-device training stuff so they must be doing some kind of version of a training run on the device kind of like how uh photos does all its machine learning when the the phone is real sleepy and the conditions are just right and then it will like churn through all of that stuff i figured like oh they're probably doing something like this but that makes much more sense because if it was a cpu issue it could be like

Oh, this will just take two weeks until you can have this feature. But if it's a RAM issue, yeah, then that's different. No, it is the amount of RAM needed to hold the model. And I believe in Apple's papers, they said that they've been able to compress their model down to three gigabytes. It's pretty big though. So apparently you need about eight gigabytes of RAM as like a minimum. And if you kind of like...

Look across the products of where they're cutting things out. That actually looks like that's how they've done it because they don't talk about RAM, right? But where does the RAM change? And that seems like... Where does the RAM change, yeah. The iPhone 15 Pro is the first iPhone to get 8 gigabytes of RAM. And all of the rumors are suggesting, which makes obvious sense, that the iPhone 16 will run this. Yeah, they'd be crazy not to. And so all iPhones, right, will get it, but...

Because as well, the other thing that the actual device, which I think maybe needs it maybe more than Vision OS and isn't on here, and I have no idea what they're going to do, the Apple Watch. Much bigger product, right, than Vision OS and the Vision Pro. That's not getting any of this either. And I'm keen to understand how that's going to work.

Because they did so much on untethering the watch from the phone, and now I can't see a scenario other than they have to tether the watch back to the phone more again to get this stuff to do anything. Yeah, they're just going to have to. Yeah, it feels like this goes back to the early days of the watch. Like, for the intelligent stuff for a few years, they'll have to re-tether it. Or...

Maybe the watch just communicates with the cloud all the time for this stuff. Because you can maybe do that, that maybe the watch goes up to the cloud when it can't get to your phone. And also as well, because the way Apple's doing this with their cloud stuff, which is all really interesting, and we haven't got the time to get into the security aspect of it today, but it looks good. And I urge people to go and look at the information they provided because it is quite fascinating what they're doing.

they're apparently not going to be clear to the user what is happening and where. Like if something goes to the cloud, you're not necessarily going to know that, which I actually think is the right way to do it. I don't need to be involved in the decision making, right? The device should just do it for me.

But there doesn't even really seem right now to be like a set features that will go to the cloud or not, which I think is interesting. Yeah, or it could just be like there isn't a set feature list that goes one place or the other. It's just like it's dynamically about what's happening in the moment. But yeah, I mean, look, all the Apple intelligence stuff is real interesting. But I too also feel like I'm happy for them to prioritize these little like

quality of life improvements for vision os because boy having been on the road i have been spending a a ton of time in vision os just like a huge portion of the day that's why i was real keen to see like what do they have for vision os and a little sad was like vision os is up first it's like okay it's not gonna be a lot uh but i'll i'll see what they have better than the ipad got you know

Yeah, no, better than the iPad. And like, honestly, I will take a new environment over all of the Apple intelligence features just because like this is the way that I'm using the headset.

I think the thing that I check every time there's a settings update. So I'd love you to look through the developer beta for me. It's like in the settings, is there somewhere in the keyboard to turn off that stupid predictive hover thing? I hate it so much. I always have to move it. Like go away. I just don't want to see you. That's the thing that I'm always like looking for straight away. Like,

Please, can I get rid of this? I don't even understand how it's supposed to be helping me when I have this keyboard in front of me that I'm typing on. It's the worst. I don't know. I don't like the quick type bar, I think they call it. I haven't looked. I'll take a look for you. Saying about the environment, though, my favorite thing is that Bora Bora, which is the beach environment, was one of the coming soon environments. The other one is still there and it still says coming soon.

And I find that to be so hilarious. Why did they not take it out? Why is it still there? But it's still there. I don't mind the coming soon stuff. I know a lot of people were saying that's silly when it first came out, but I don't know. I kind of like it. Well, it was indicated to me that it shouldn't have shit like that.

The thing when I saw the Bora Bora environment listed as a feature on Vision OS, it kind of made me think about how Apple has used the new emoji sets as an encouragement to upgrade. I was like, oh, that's what they're going to do with the environment. It's like they're going to hold an environment until they want to really encourage people to upgrade. That makes total sense.

But I am a little bit disappointed because of those two little images that you can just barely see. It's like, I was more interested in the other one, which looks like this swampy one. Because my one complaint is I do feel like

I mean, this is just Apple's design aesthetic, but everything is always too bright. It's like I want things darker. And so I was looking at that other one. I was like, oh, this foggy one might be a more dark environment. Have you tried the night modes of the environments? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, of course. Like that's how I'm using things most of the time. But like just think about it for a second. Even the night modes, most of them have a lot of brightness to them.

Or they're a night mode for a thing that was white during the day. And I just like, I don't love that. So it's like the Yosemite one and also the beach sand one. Like both of those are functionally white environments that you're in. So like even at nighttime, I just don't visually like it. So those two are just like straight out for me. I just will never use them. But so anyway, I'm happy to see all these little updates, of course, again.

I will just perhaps die of happiness when that bigger Mac virtual display rolls out because that's, again, that's what I'm doing like 90% of the time in the headset itself. I also like, I thought it was just interesting how much they focused on that because I just kind of wonder...

I would suspect if they have any kind of analytics on how people are using it, like that is the actual answer that for the people who are finding it useful to spend multiple hours a day using the headset, the thing they're doing is mirroring their Mac display. Like that feels like that just has to be true. So anyway, yeah, I'll be curious to see that roll out, but yeah.

I told myself like I'm not going to install Vision OS, but like maybe I will when the public beta comes out if there's like a bunch of little improvements because it does feel like the system could use that. So we'll see.

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So you teased before that you've got some thoughts about email. Do we have some follow-up from your email, I don't know, crisis of faith two episodes ago? What was going on? Tell me what's going on with that. So,

As a refresher, I was frustrated with email, frustrated with notifications. I wanted to talk to you about them. It ended up being an entire episode a couple of months ago, right? It was April's episode, I think. Because the problem wasn't with email or notifications. The problem was with your life. Yeah. It felt like that's why that episode exploded. And...

Essentially, the key things that came away was no email on my phone anymore, right? Like the email app has to go and notifications off. And I did all of those things. Really? Yep. And I will say...

The combination of notification management and email changes is maybe one of the best things I've done for my work life in like half a decade. Ah, I feel so victorious at this moment. Great. I'm loving it right now. So I want to start with the Slack stuff because it's smaller. So what I've done with Slack is I've set that from 7 p.m. on work days and all weekends, I don't get notifications. And you can do that inside of Slack itself. You can set that.

At first, I was frustrated because while it doesn't send notifications, it does still increase the badge count. Oh, I didn't know that. So if people are sending me messages, the badge count goes up. And at first, I was like, oh, I don't like this. But I have actually, it's turned out to be a pretty good thing because I'm not getting the notifications. So they're not disrupting me.

So like people can't blow up my watch or my phone if I'm like having dinner or whatever. But if I'm checking my phone and I can see that the count is pretty high, maybe that's something that I want to dip into and check. So like I actually think that that balance has actually worked out pretty well for me. I wanted to give it a little bit of time and see. My assistant listened to the episode and she recommended that I use downtime, which is like a hilarious term.

to consider that's come back around again. Huh, okay. But downtime would solve this problem. Like downtime can remove the application badges completely. But the problem with downtime for me is the same as it was, which was, you know, what they've never done with downtime is do what they did for focus modes, where with focus modes, they swapped it so you could say, you know, like, explore.

exclude these where we downtime you have to add everything that you want to get notifications about what I would want is the opposite but I thought about it but I decided let me just see how it goes and it's actually turned out for me to be pretty great because the thing that was bothering me the most was getting the notifications as opposed to seeing that something was happening and I think that that balance has been pretty good so I can like if I can see I have 20 notifications in slack maybe I should just peek

And that tends to be like I'm already on my phone. I'm doing something. So that's been fine. So I think it's something that the people in my life that I work with, my colleagues, are all trying to get used to in their own way. This was one of these things where I was aware of the fact that

that the first anybody heard about this was listening to the episode so i appreciate my colleagues um you know we're all getting used to it what a what a funny way to softly notify all the people in your life about a change that might be happening yeah that's very funny i don't think that's good behavior but it was the behavior and everyone's kind of work but the good thing about doing it in slack though actually is that slack does tell the person

So like if someone's DMing me, it's like Mike has his notifications paused. Would you like to notify him?

And so I think people are aware of that. And then they can make the choice. They can make the choice. Or if it's in a group chat, like sometimes someone might text me and say like, can you just pop in Slack? And I think that that's fine because that's how I'd want people to treat me. If they think there's something I desperately need to see, I can go and look at it. And then I can make the decision as to whether I want to engage or whether I want to say like, I will come back to this. I think, yeah, the Slack thing is a good boundary. It actually sets good boundaries for people.

By making it clear what I think if I could make a suggestion to Slack, one of the many suggestions I have for Slack, I think it would be good to make it clear to people inside of a group chat that somebody has their notifications paused because they do a really good job of it in one on ones, but not in groups.

So there could be like three people and they want to know what I think about something, but they don't know that I'm not getting the notifications. Oh, right, right. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. There could be a way to do that, which could be cool. But, you know, otherwise this feature is very simple, hasn't had really any ramifications to it from my perspective. And I'm fine with it. The email has been

as I have written in my notes here, a huge, massive, incredible change. Oh, I'm so glad to hear that. I'm so glad to hear that. Listeners, let me tell you, to not get push notifications for every email that comes in is really good. It's a really good thing. I don't need to see or want to see them in my notification list in the morning when I start my day. I don't want to get bothered by notifications when I'm working on something else and that's all gone away.

Email has a significantly weaker hold on me than it has ever in my working life. I check it periodically through the day. And it's usually, for me, if a thought just pops into my mind, I'm like, oh, I haven't checked email. And that's usually how it is now. It's like, oh, I haven't checked email. Like two months into it, that's how I'm still feeling. Let me go check it. And that will happen a few times a day. I took the Spark app off my iPhone. That's been fantastic.

One of the harder things for me here is from the day that we did this, the next day, there was then an email that I was waiting on that was very important to me, which was like a real trial by fire. And I got myself into a little bit of a habit of just opening the mail app and peeking, not doing anything, but peeking. Yeah. And so then I was realizing that it was appearing for me in spotlight, like in the suggested apps. Yeah.

And so I turn that off, which is a thing you can do. You can go into certain apps and say, like, don't suggest this anymore. So that's been pretty good. And what I'm finding now is a few times a day, if I'm not at my computer, I might just open the mail app, see if there's anything that I'm needed for and close it again. And that is actually great for me. Like, I need to be real about who I am. The idea that I would never look at email on my iPhone is not realistic, right?

But I am so much closer to that than where I was before. And like the biggest thing is I do not get any notifications at all for my email and I don't manage my email on my iPhone. Like those are the two things that's happening. I periodically check to see if there's anything that I need. And it's usually around when there are things that I'm waiting on. Like, for example, the thing that it was is Apple had their event at Battersea.

and I wanted to go, and I was hoping to get an invite, and I did, but I very quickly got over the feeling that something bad could happen. You know, that was the first couple of days. I was like, oh, what if something bad happened? And it's actually fine. What I have learned is that it is incredibly rare that something bad is going to happen that I need to immediately know about through email.

Usually bad things happen, but they don't need my immediate attention. And so let me spend a little bit longer in my life not knowing that thing and not being distracted by that thing before I eventually find that thing. So it's been amazing, man. Like the impact on work distractions in the evening as the combination of these two has been fantastic. I've often felt, had this feeling of like, feels quiet. Like that's like a thing I've had in my mind.

not even really peening to what I'm referring to but just feels quiet and I'm not even necessarily thinking that like oh it's work that's quiet but just in general quiet right yeah you

You have some space in your brain for, oh, I don't know, the whole rest of your life. Or nothing, right? You know, like in a combination of anything in the middle. This has been such a huge change for my work-life balance and my general happiness. Like I feel more in control. I feel like I'm doing things more on my own time and like my attention is not being like demanded anymore.

I'm so happy that I brought this like throwaway topic to the show because it has made my life so much better. I could not be happier to hear that. I felt like it was like I was really giving you a hard sale last time on a thing that was like a big change. But I mean, again, like a huge thing. It's just like how much your life and the nature of your work has changed over these many years. Like I think that's

that's the whole thing like if your job was still what it was 10 years ago you couldn't do this but like the role has completely changed and yeah now you like you need to have brain space you need to have periods of time where you can just be looking at a sheet of paper and thinking about how to arrange dots on it like for uh like the product that's coming out like all of these things you need to have and i

I am forever convinced that people dramatically underrate how disruptive to thinking even minor notifications are. That's why, like, people who've listened to the show over the years, I know I sound like a lunatic for all of these times. I'm like, I'm trying to make downtime work with me. I've made myself my own child accounts, right, to try to eliminate all this stuff. But it's because, like, I just think people don't appreciate it and...

It's very hard to even see how valuable that is until you actually experience it directly for a little while. So I'm like, I'm so glad that that's what you're doing right now. And you're, you're seeing like,

Oh yeah, my brain feels different. What is this feeling? It's quiet. That's what that feeling is. So good. I'm so happy, Mike. I really, really am. I couldn't be more pleased and more proud that you did it. Well, look, thank you for pushing me. I appreciate that you heard what I had to say and you gave me the tough love that I needed.

to actually do this. Like I needed it. And I genuinely hope that people maybe can hear this, go back to that episode and re-listen to it and then do what I've done. Because I am convinced and I would like to convince others this is a better way to live. Like we should not be getting notifications for email. It can wait.