Siracusa Says

John
I’m talking about the M2 Vision Pro in 2025. This is old news, I know, but it’s not old news for me. But anyway, you’ve heard people complain that when they demo, it’s hard to demo things because when you try to get somebody to watch video and you’re mirroring what they see on your laptop screen or something, it blacks out because of stupid copyright stuff.

Casey
It’s the worst.

John
It’s so frustrating. Here’s the thing that I didn’t fully understand or have forgotten. when you do that and by the way the reason we’re mirroring what they see on the screen because otherwise try explaining it’s like playing charades. Try explaining to somebody who’s never used vision pro what they’re supposed to do without being able to see what they’re seeing.

John
I’d only use it for like a day before i gave my wife a demo so it’s not like i’ve memorized every pixel that’s going to be on the screen but it really is like describe to me what you see it’s like trying to do tech support over the phone with somebody because they can see stuff but you can’t see it so that’s why apple provides this great feature where you can see a version of what they’re seeing on your laptop screen or whatever.

John
That’s really helpful because then you can see what they’re seeing although you also see their foveated rendering so a lot of times it’s blurry you’re like go look over there look over there anyway as soon as you bring them to like okay go to the tv app go to this thing you know run the play this immersive demo uh you can’t see it on your laptop screen laptop screen goes black because it’s immersive video goes around everything

Casey
which that is that is totally fine and i’m not that aggrieved by that

John
well it’s stupid but okay. But also i mean inside the headset they only see blackness too but it still plays the video so they hear the sound they’re like it took me a while to even realize it’s just like am i supposed to be seeing something i’m like but i could hear the audio playing because she didn’t have headphones using the the speakers and the straps and she’s like i’m supposed to be seeing something.

John
like she just sees blackness but it tries to play it anyway that is insane like i get that you can’t show it on two screens it once showed on one and then as we said in the past when we talked about Apple, it’s your own video.

John
Like, break the law, Apple. This is a rare case where I’m saying, Apple, just break the law. Civil disobedience. Literally implement this thing that violates the HGCP standard. Break the law. See if somebody comes for you. No one’s going to care because nobody has Vision Pros. No one is pirating things by mirroring the foveated rendering of a Vision Pro on a laptop and then screen recording it. We have way better ways to pirate things. Nobody would want that.

John
Just break the law. All right? And see if somebody comes through. You’ve got so much money. I believe you could defend this lawsuit. Maybe we’ll change the HCCP standard. Apple, you need to break the law. Because this is so stupid.

Casey
Do you have any intention on relocating before both kids are graduated from college?

John
No.

Casey
Do you have any intentions before both of you are retired?

John
Probably not.

Casey
To be clear, you’re never allowed to retire because…

Marco
I was going to say, he kind of already is retired.

Casey
Well, I’m trying to take the happy path, but Marco’s not wrong. But I don’t think that I can handle replacing either of you, really. So you two are stuck with me forever. I hate to break it to you.

John
I’m irreplaceable.

Marco
I mean, yeah.

John
don’t worry about it i got uh you know one whole kid to put through college

John
and one one-fourth of a kid to put through college i’m not going anywhere yeah

John
uh growth the hard way so many of things that we talk about are like oh they need apple needs growth and the iphone is leveling off and so they need services revenue because that’s growing and look at the service revenue graph has been going up up up for years and years and years

John
this is the source of apple’s growth and as you know every company needs a source of growth because they’re like cancer and that’s what the stock market loves is cancer

John
constant growth

Casey
wow

John
constant growth in the entire until the entire planet has been turned into paper clips that’s what the stock market wants so they need growth

Casey
There’s a conversation between Patrick Collison and Johnny Ive. I guess it’s some Stripe thing recently. And I’m only about halfway through it so far. But, hey, guess what? It’s really freaking good.

Casey
And for all of the things that I blame on Johnny Ive, of which there are many, including but not limited to the butterfly keyboard, he’s really smart and really good at what he does in the broad scheme of things.

Casey
So both of these, I think, are worth your time.

John
But he’s a slow talker. Oh, my God. He’s so slow.

Marco
He really needs an editor and smart speed.

John
I don’t know. Johnny Ive, obviously, his resume is basically… It will never be equal, probably, in terms of how important… Amazing work, right?

John
But every time I see him talk, I’m like, yeah, this is why I wouldn’t let an unencumbered Johnny Ive anywhere near a product that I wanted to make.

John
Because he’s got amazing talent, and he’s got great ideas, and he’s got good instincts, but he’s also got some really bad instincts and ideas.

John
I feel like, I don’t know if that has changed about him as he’s aged, or it was always like that and he was always constrained, but he is a powerful force, let’s put it that way. And you’ve got to be careful when you’re employing a powerful force to do anything.

John
But yeah, it’s a good interview, and I’m glad he’s not at Apple anymore.

Casey
But anyway, if you have Vision Pro, go check that out. It’s worth six and a half minutes of your time.

John
How did you miss this one? The link that I just put in there. They also are doing some kind of immersive documentary film based on Bono’s autobiography book thingy.

Casey
Cool.

John
You’re watching people Arctic surfing and doing a rodeo, but you’re not going to listen to Bono do his weird narration of his own life?

Casey
I’m sorry, John. U2 has never done anything for me.

John
It’s not. I guess there probably will be some music part of it. All the stuff you’re watching, you’ll watch anything except for something that you might have some familiarity with.

Casey
I’ll watch it. But, I mean, again, I have.

John
This one has a narrative, supposedly. I don’t know. I guess they will play U2 music. I don’t know if you’ll survive.

Casey
No, I mean, I’ve seen U2 in concert. They were fine.

John
But they’re no rodeos or Arctic surfing.

John
Your Apple ID is an email address. Is it an Apple email address? Sometimes, but not always. It’s like, ooh, it’s rough.

So, but why is it Apple ID? Well, it’s always been Apple ID, and it’s just easy to be consistent. And at a certain point after several decades, I think it is wise. Again, I’m not even putting any stake in this rumor. I don’t even know if this is going to happen.

But I think it should happen because Apple account is so much better than Apple ID, especially since now they’re all forced to be email addresses. And Google account is also an email address, and so is an Apple account, and so is a Microsoft account.

And you see how it works here? And Apple ID has always been weird. So much so that I, you know, as a developer of software in the Apple ecosystem, way too many times I have tried to communicate with a customer about something, and they’ve said to me in response to me asking them questions to help debug a problem, I’m not giving you my Apple ID because it sounds like a secret thing, and it sounds like I’m trying to pump them for secret information.

It’s like, no. it’s just your email address. Why Apple? Why do you do this to us?

John
It’s one of the things that always worries me about hybrids and we’re so worried about Marco’s i3’s range extension is like, if you don’t ever use the gas engine, A, you’re just, you know, wasting electricity hauling this big heavy thing.

Casey
That is true. Yeah.

John
And B, if you don’t run a gasoline engine for long periods of time, it gets cranky. Like you do have to occasionally start it. And you are like you’re it’s clearly turning on. And although I auto stop start also makes me have empathy for the engine.

Casey
Yes.

John
I know they’re designed to auto stop start. I know all the things they did to change the engine so they can do that and more robust starters and yada yada. It’s still not good for the engine still.

Casey
Right.

John
So I do worry that I mean, you’re at least answer who cares. But like it’s one of the strange compromises about hybrids is, you know, depending on how you use them in like the quote unquote best case scenario where you’re basically on EV almost all the time. It’s inefficient to hug the line, lug the engine around and be that engine is having a sad, difficult life.

John
That’s probably not being run enough. It wants to.

John
It’s like, you know, you know, a thoroughbred horse. It wants to get out there and run. And you’re just like, nope, electric motors got it.

Marco
So when you are logging in to Safari with, you know, to App Store Connect or something with a developer account, and it sends you the 2FA code, it shows the 2FA box on the Mac exactly centered in your screen.

Marco
You know what else is exactly centered in your screen? The input boxes in Safari that you have to type it into.

Marco
So every single time I have to drag the little window out of the way so I can see it. It’s always on top, of course. So I can type in the code. And it’s like, doesn’t this happen to everyone inside Apple?

Marco
How has this not been fixed after all these years?

John
Maybe everyone’s using their windows like I am. I’ve got a member special video you can watch so you can learn how to arrange your windows so they’re not always dead center on your giant screen.

Casey
Oh, my goodness.

Casey
I get the bad feeling all of our good content happened before we went live

Marco
Don’t worry i’m using some of that for the pre-show in the in the release version all right good deal yeah bootleg people go listen to the release version of like the first you know five minutes and you’ll hear everything that just happened not even 45 seconds yeah listen to the modem sound

John
How many people i i guess in our audience it’s fine but we always refer to it as the modem sound just the number of people who know what that is or will recognize it when they hear it or know what we’re talking about just shrinks every day

Marco
Yeah but but i think among our i think it’s shrinking in the world but i think in our audience is staying about the same possibly even growing

John
We need some more period like period piece movies that are that capture that little slice of time when the internet was a thing but most people were getting onto it with modems like that that was not a very long period of time but for the people who lived through it it was significant and no one has really done like a period piece.

I mean setting aside like war games and the acoustic coupler and all that this is i’m talking about the like you know 2400 baud and on normal people are on the internet but they’re using modems to do it era

John
If you get the M4 Mac mini, your maximum is 32 gigs of RAM and your maximum is two terabytes of SSD just because Apple says so. Right. There’s the RAM. Maybe that’s a limitation based on the SOC on which ones they want to manufacture. But the SSD doesn’t make any sense.

And the M4 Pro. Imagine this. It starts at 24 gigabytes of RAM.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine? How is this even happening? It starts at 20. The base RAM on the M4 Pro model is 24 gigs.

It’s like, it’s just, it’s Ram Christmas around here.