Siracusa Says

John
One, and we think we’ve mentioned this snarkily on previous shows, is there’s various rumors and, uh, supposed tales from the inside saying, uh, recently, you know, as a year ago or a year and a half ago, uh, important Apple executives who are often named, uh, saw ChatGPT and that made them realize Siri sucks. And that’s depressing to say.

Casey
How did you not know?

John
That’s what it took. ([laughs]) Yeah. That’s what it took for you to realize Siri sucks?

John
Forget about the card slots. Just view the Mac Pro case as a thing that can cool something that’s too hot to fit in a Mac Studio. But Apple has never made that, despite all the rumors and the attempts, and they were gonna make it, and then they weren’t. And remember a long time ago, the rumor was like it’s not on the roadmap anywhere until at least after the M7 or something, so tune in in a few years to see if that thing ever comes true.

John
But that was a thing that we mentioned in the show ages ago. But that’s what this case is for. Yes, it has card slots, but it’s, but it’s like it can cool something hot that won’t fit in your small cases. And Apple’s like, “We have nothing. We have nothing that hot.”

John
We could get something that hot. It would do more work. It would be more powerful. It would be faster because the faster you go and the more transistors you put on there, the more heat you generate. And it’s like, “Oh, we can’t handle all that heat. It won’t fit in a laptop. It won’t fit a Mac Mini. It won’t fit in a Mac Studio.” It’ll fit in this case. Those huge fans are begging for something to blow on.

Casey
Continuing on from the newsroom, Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Turnus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including what? Including engaging with policy makers around the world-

John
Oh.

Casey
As the prophecy foretold.

John
This is the thing I didn’t want to be true. It was so clear that it was going to be, but I really wished it was… I want him to go to an island. I want him to retire from public life and, uh, live a, a wonderful life with his billions, and give to charity, and whatever it is that he wants to do. But no, that’s not what’s going to happen for the reasons Marco just cited. Uh, that’s, that’s not, that’s not what he wants to do. It’s not good for the company’s stability. He will continue on as chairman. And what will he do as chairman? He will continue to eat poop from our president and other world leaders

Casey The top of this chart, which is what DRAM is estimated to be at the end of 2027, 900% ([laughs])

Marco
([laughs])

Casey
above what it was in 2023. Now, again, that’s an estimate, but holy jamolies, not great.

John
This is one of those charts where you’re like, “Please do look at the Y-axis.” It is rooted at zero, and you’re like, “Yeah, but these graphs always exaggerate stuff. Yeah, it looks like they go up a lot, but I bet it’s like poi- it’s zero, and then the top of the thing is 0.01.” No.

Casey
Nope.

John
The top is 900. ([laughs])

Marco
([laughs])

John
It’s… percent. It’s, it’s a terrible, terrible, scary graph.

Casey
I think we’ve said many times that John is far and away the person, even when he had a jobby job, far and away the person that puts the most effort into our internal show notes that we run the show off of. And you can tell that, it’s sometimes abundantly obvious that this is the case, because I’m going to talk now, starting now, about macOS 27, and you look at the time that it takes for this chapter or these chapters, and-

John
There’s just lots of images, first of all.

Casey
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John
And second of all, I still, I still bristle when you characterize me having, doing far and away most of the effort, blah blah blah. Just say I do it all.

Casey
([laughs])

John
Just, just say I… I know occasionally you’ll put in an item, I know occasionally Marco puts in an item, but honestly, just say I do it all.

Marco
Yeah, you… I mean-

Casey
I saw that-

Marco
Yeah, we both know that

Casey
… I saw that going a totally different direction. I saw you being like, “No, you know-

John
No, no

Casey
… Casey does this and Marco does that,“ meaning, like, broadly for the whole show. But ([laughs]) John, cheesy peasy.

John
Just because Tim Cook has selected him doesn’t mean the person he’s selecting agrees with everything Tim Cook does and will do exactly what Tim Cook did. I mean, Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook and they were very different CEOs. So our expectation, our hope is that John Ternus will be different than Tim Cook in the same way that Tim Cook was different than Steve Jobs.

John
Now, he could be worse, could be better, could be worse. But like we’re hopeful because the things we hear are good. You know, like we we want to be hopeful. But the real point is, I think we’ve all basically resigned ourselves to the fact that nothing about what we dislike about what Tim Cook is doing is ever going to change until he leaves. So he has to leave.

John
So if you want to think of it this way, you can say, it’s not so much that we’re excited about John Ternus coming, it’s we’re excited about Tim Cook leaving. And we feel like anything’s got to be like, it’s the only chance we have for improvement. And I think it’s a little bit of both. Because again, we have very little info on John Ternus. So that is, we’ve said that before, like we don’t actually know he’s been in, he’s been in presentations for years. We see him on stage talking, but like he’s more of a cipher. We don’t have, he doesn’t have a track record that we know of other than he was in charge of hardware and hardware is great. Right.

John
But I’m, I’m personally optimistic, mostly because a transition, a departure, a change in leadership is the best opportunity for things to potentially get better. And I’m currently choosing to believe that they won’t get worse. We’ll see.

John
the chicken hat. the chicken hat is back. did you miss out on the chicken hat before are you disappointed that you didn’t get one are you still wanting a chicken hat? well i mean so here’s the news

Marco
you too could you can miss out on the chicken hat again!

John
listen oh this is on us we’re bad at estimating how many chicken hats we need to to order and it’s because we have to like we have to pay for these up front so

Marco
No, it’s because there’s not a lot of data to base our decision on and how many chicken hats we should order

John
yeah so and so we have to buy them all up front so we’re like oh these you know it’s expensive and you gotta outlay this money and what if we buy all these chicken hats and nobody wants them now we’re just stuck with it right?

so we kept ordering them in increasingly large amounts uh and then our sale ended right and we told people like we’re gonna try to get more as soon as we can.

so we got some more chicken hats this is not part of our regular sales so there’s no member only discount code. like it’s not this is just a one off special things we felt bad because like even after we sold through all our chicken hats more wanted them so we ordered a bunch more that we thought would satisfy the demand of all the people who signed up and said hey tell me when the chicken tell me when the hat is back so i can order it.

we may or may not have done that because i put them on on sale earlier today and i posted on it uh posted about the hats to mastodon i posted to mastodon first and i gave those people first crack at it so uh you’re welcome if you’re following me on mastodon um then i posted on twitter anyway

i feel like we’ve already sold through half of the hats in this episode is just being recorded now. So maybe by the time you hear this, they’re not there.

John
This whole thing is a good example of the limits of Apple’s strategy, because Apple’s strategy with the Trump administration both times has been essentially appeasement. Try to make nice with them. Try to make them not mad at you, because when they’re mad at you, they they are. You know, it’s a corrupt administration and they will do things to harm your company individually in a vindictive way because they because they’re just, you know, mobsters and bullies. Right.

They will specifically hurt your company and we want them specifically not hurt our company. So we’re working within a corrupt system to try to get favors, blah, blah, blah. The problem with that strategy is the strategy is not to make them mad. And you can blow that whole strategy. Appeasement stops working and becomes pointless the second you push back at all and make them mad at you. Because then it’s like, well, what did you do all that appeasement for?

So it leads to like the sunk cost fallacy of saying, well, we already made nice with all these things. We already did all this stuff. When they ask us to pull the ice block out, if we say no, they’ll be mad at us. And it’s like, well, then what did we do all that appeasement for? What did we sell our souls for before? And so you’re inclined to say yes and say yes to the next thing and say yes to the next thing. And it’s a slippery slope of appeasement.

The word comes up in the context of World War II all the time. Appeasement looks great right up until you have the rise of Hitler. And then it doesn’t look so good anymore, does it? Because you’re like, anyone who is on board with that appeasement thing tends to look bad in the eye of history of saying you are appeasing this monster.

John
In particular, like setting aside when they screwed up the GPU thing by under-resourcing some buffer or something, the fact that they insist on building their Ultras out of two Maxes is, it’s a clever idea if it had worked out for them, but I think that hurt the scaling more than anything else. Whereas if they had made a dedicated chip, it wouldn’t.

But if they made a dedicated chip, they can’t justify the expense. That’s been the whole thing with the Extreme, you know, with the Quad thing. They can’t justify the expense. We’re not going to sell, we’re going to sell this many of them and it’s going to cost this much to make. It’ll be our most expensive, you know, like Intel had this problem to some. degree but not really because they were sold to server farms and everything like this chip this whatever this high-end chip is going to cost the most and be the most complicated chip that we make and we’re going to sell a tiny tiny fraction of the number we sell of our other chips like why are we doing this again?

and i would point them to my case for a true mac pro successor article and saying you’re you know mount everest you’re climbing because it’s there blah blah blah but apple doesn’t apple doesn’t have that they don’t they don’t have that in them they can’t justify it someone comes down and says cost benefit no

Marco
I am not confident enough to be Mr. AirPods translation before it becomes commonplace for people to do this while traveling. So I’m hoping, hey, everyone else go do this, please. So then I can feel more comfortable doing it when I need to.

John
I feel like you’d have to wear a T-shirt or a sign or something that says, this is what’s happening here. My AirPods are trying to translate you, but there’s a time delay and it’s muting your actual talking, which I can’t understand anyway. and then it’s playing back what it thinks you said after some delay. So if it looks like I’m just waiting after you talked and saying nothing, I’m waiting for my phone to like, it would be a long t-shirt. But like…