Episode 68 – Drinking Motor Oil Like It’s WWDC 2024
Scott: Friends with Brews!
Scott: It’s WWDC 2024, Friends with Brews Special!
Scott: Did I mention special?
Scott: I did, I did mention special.
Scott: This is going to be the Friends with Brews episode of the year, because here we are with our hot, well, lukewarm takes about WWDC 2024.
Scott: But before we get into that, I’d like to move us right along to a Peter.
Scott: Nikolaidis.
Scott: And also another friend of ours, Ronnie Lutes.
Scott: Guys, welcome to the show.
Scott: I am Scott Wilsey, if I didn’t mention that, I think I did.
Scott: Why don’t you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves, and then we’ll just get into this and get started on the WWDC 2024.
Lonnie Rutes: Hi, I’m Lonnie Rutes.
Lonnie Rutes: I drink hibiscus medicinal tea, and I think AI-generated art is beautiful.
Neter Pikolaidis: I’m Nader Pikolaidis, and I am drinking motor oil, straight up 30-weight motor oil.
Scott: Uh, all right, Peter.
Scott: I don’t know why you’re calling yourself Nader again.
Scott: I wish you’d knock that off.
Scott: But anyway, can you please tell us what you’re actually drinking?
Neter Pikolaidis: No, seriously.
Neter Pikolaidis: I am drinking motor oil.
Scott: I don’t know why you’re doing this.
Scott: I don’t know why you’re doing it with the names.
Scott: I don’t know why you’re doing it with the drinks.
Scott: Whatever.
Scott: I’m gonna talk about my drink now, if that’s okay with you guys.
Scott: I’m drinking Alma Coffee, and I’ve had them before.
Scott: I’ve had some decaf of theirs on this podcast.
Scott: But I’m drinking Alma Coffee Honey Process, Bright Medium Roast.
Scott: And this is not a decaf.
Scott: This has tasting notes of honey-drizzled mango, cherry and grilled pineapple.
Scott: And I gotta say, so a lot of times when I drink these coffees, you know how it is.
Scott: I don’t necessarily taste all the notes, and I freely admit that.
Scott: But in this case, when my wife and I drank this, we both said we think we do taste the pineapple, for sure.
Scott: The rest of it, we’re not so sure about, but it’s subtle.
Scott: And again, a lot of the flavors in these coffees, the tasting notes, I think are quite subtle, but they’re very good.
Scott: And it’s a good, smooth cup of coffee.
Scott: So I like it.
Scott: I like Alma Coffee, everything I’ve had so far, which I think is only two or three.
Scott: I might’ve had something, I think I’ve had something from them before that was not decaf that I didn’t have on the podcast.
Scott: Pretty sure.
Scott: Anyway, I like it.
Scott: It’s good.
Scott: I will drink it again, and I recommend it.
Scott: Peter, what are you having?
Neter Pikolaidis: I’m Neter Picolatis, and I am still drinking motor oil.
Neter Pikolaidis: Straight up 30-weight motor oil.
Neter Pikolaidis: No, seriously, I am drinking motor oil, Scott.
Neter Pikolaidis: I find it lubricates me well and doesn’t keep me up all night.
Neter Pikolaidis: This is Royal Purple full synthetic motor oil.
Neter Pikolaidis: It’s expensive, and it’s worth it.
Scott: Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Scott: Ronnie, what do you got?
Scott: Please, help.
Lonnie Rutes: Like I said, I’m Lonnie Roots, and I’m drinking some medicinal hibiscus tea.
Lonnie Rutes: It’s really good.
Lonnie Rutes: Well, actually, it’s terrible, but I have some dietary restrictions based on precepts no one can explain, so this is what I get.
Lonnie Rutes: I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that’s not me.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t even recommend it to me, but since you don’t allow non-drinkers on your podcast, I’m willing to suffer.
Lonnie Rutes: I’m actually more than willing.
Lonnie Rutes: I kind of enjoy suffering.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, apparently I do too, because I’m doing this with you guys, and you guys are doing whatever the heck you’re doing.
Scott: So there’s that.
Scott: All right, well, I want to get on to WWDC24.
Scott: W-W-D-C-24.
Lonnie Rutes: Easy for you to say.
Neter Pikolaidis: Are you sure that’s honey in your coffee?
Scott: Pretty sure.
Scott: All right, WWDC24.
Scott: I think people had high expectations.
Scott: I know I for one said, wow me, make my tiny eyes grow wide with delight.
Scott: And I guess to some extent they did, and to some extent they didn’t.
Scott: There were some also some disappointments.
Scott: There were a couple of things where I wanted to tell Apple.
Lonnie Rutes: Me too.
Neter Pikolaidis: At WWDC24, Apple announced several new developments, including the introduction of Apple Intelligence, an AI feature integrated into iOS 18 and other systems to enhance functionality.
Neter Pikolaidis: Siri received significant upgrades with ChatGPT integration, making it more conversational and efficient.
Neter Pikolaidis: Additionally, Apple unveiled enhancements in the Photos app using AI.
Neter Pikolaidis: Mac OS Sequoia was also introduced with new features aimed at improving user experience and performance.
Scott: Okay, okay, let’s try to go in order though.
Scott: I don’t remember the order exactly.
Scott: Maybe you guys can, maybe you guys do.
Scott: But anyway, actually, I think they talked about Apple TV first.
Scott: They showed some of the shows that are returning.
Scott: They had some previews.
Scott: Severance is a great big one.
Scott: I can’t wait for that one to come back.
Scott: And I’ve been very carefully avoiding a lot of things on the internet that are talking specifically about Severance spoilers.
Scott: What about you guys?
Scott: Severance?
Neter Pikolaidis: I find Severance to be very unrealistic.
Neter Pikolaidis: For example, there are some people who choose not to have their work and personal lives severed.
Neter Pikolaidis: I find that a bit preposterous.
Lonnie Rutes: I dream of a day I can have my brain cut in half.
Lonnie Rutes: In my case, I want to be able to forget every time I drink this hibiscus tea.
Scott: Oh yeah, one of the other things about Apple TV+ is insight.
Scott: So basically when you’re watching something, you can pop up.
Scott: It’s kind of like Amazon X-Ray, honestly, which I don’t use very often, I’ll be honest.
Scott: But it lets you pop up actor names and stuff like that as they’re appearing on screen.
Scott: I don’t know.
Scott: It’s good it’s there.
Scott: It should be there.
Scott: Will I use it?
Scott: Probably not.
Scott: Moving on to the platforms, visionOS 2 was released.
Scott: I don’t know if it deserves a 2.
Scott: Seems like a big number for the things that were introduced, honestly.
Scott: The only thing I really remember, what was it called?
Scott: It’s Spatial Photos.
Scott: Basically, they’re putting depth into photos using different angles, or I don’t know what they’re doing.
Scott: Anyway, it basically creates depth in photos.
Scott: So when you look at it, it looks more realistic.
Scott: It works with images that are shot from iPhone 15 Pro or the Vision Pro.
Lonnie Rutes: I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Lonnie Rutes: It’s huge.
Lonnie Rutes: It lets me see things no one else can see.
Scott: Okay, but what about the Spatial Photos though?
Scott: Like if you had a Vision Pro, which you don’t, but if you did, I mean, is this a compelling use case for you?
Scott: Would you buy a Vision Pro just to be able to see Spatial Photos of your kids or whatever?
Scott: I mean, you can’t go back in time and retake these photos, that’s the thing.
Neter Pikolaidis: I can go back in time.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t know.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t really have Vision Pro FOMO at all.
Lonnie Rutes: It’s expensive, it doesn’t do much, and my kids are grown up anyway.
Lonnie Rutes: Besides, I can’t actually see anything.
Lonnie Rutes: Have I ever told you that you look like a mole rat to me?
Lonnie Rutes: Just from here.
Lonnie Rutes: Maybe it’s the lighting.
Neter Pikolaidis: I had a mole rat once, but then my neighbor’s dog adopted it and it moved out.
Neter Pikolaidis: At least that’s what my girlfriend said.
Neter Pikolaidis: She was throwing away a strangely shaped garbage bag at the time, weird.
Scott: Yes, you are.
Scott: There was some other stuff in visionOS.
Scott: I did not pay attention, and to be honest, I don’t really care.
Scott: So moving on, iOS.
Neter Pikolaidis: The best part of iOS 18 was Craig ripping off his Apple jumpsuit in one swoop.
Neter Pikolaidis: That guy is amazing.
Neter Pikolaidis: After I’m done with my Royal Purple, I’m giving him a call.
Lonnie Rutes: Oh my gosh, his hair helmet slash helmet hair is so cool.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t know how anyone gets any work done around him.
Neter Pikolaidis: Based on the quality of Apple software lately, I’m not sure they do.
Scott: One of the big things for iOS 18 is customization, and that includes the ability to move your icons and widgets around to wherever you want them.
Scott: And there’s a dark mode for icons.
Scott: So when you put your phone in dark mode, it will attempt to create a dark mode version of the icons, which apparently based on some stuff I’ve seen on mass and on of people testing, it has varying results as you might expect.
Scott: Some are good, some are bad, some are indifferent, but anyway, it’s there.
Scott: And then of course, there is the weird being able to tint your icons all one color, which I guess is great for theming if you’re doing some kind of weird bizarro theme, like all the kids do, you know, the hipsters, the youngsters, the fellow kids.
Lonnie Rutes: How do you do, fellow kids?
Lonnie Rutes: What?
Neter Pikolaidis: Welcome to 2005 Android.
Lonnie Rutes: The iPhone wasn’t even around in 2005, let alone Android, you oil drinker.
Scott: Look, this is one of those things where, yeah, it’s a long time coming, it’s way overdue, but who cares, it’s here and it’s about friggin time.
Lonnie Rutes: I will use this every day and every night.
Lonnie Rutes: I have a day phone and a night phone.
Lonnie Rutes: You look like a mole rat on both of them.
Neter Pikolaidis: Mole rats love royal purple.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t care if this is late to the iPhone.
Lonnie Rutes: I’m never going to use Android unless I get fired, or unless I don’t get fired but will get fired, or unless I have to fire someone for trying to get me to use Android.
Lonnie Rutes: So to me, it only matters that now we can put our app icons and widgets wherever we want them.
Neter Pikolaidis: I know where you can put your widget.
Scott: Whoa, easy, boys.
Scott: I gotta be honest, the color tinted icons were not…
Scott: I don’t know, they’re okay.
Scott: They’re definitely not what I would expect.
Scott: Like, I’ve used monochrome app icon sets before, like the MacStories ones, blah, blah, blah.
Scott: To be honest, those look better than this.
Scott: You know, people might like it.
Scott: I don’t.
Lonnie Rutes: I’m going to make mine black and gold and red and gold and gold and gold, like the Vegas nights.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t know if you guys know this, but I live in Las Vegas, and you don’t.
Scott: Uh, no, I don’t.
Scott: Control Center’s next.
Scott: I definitely like the Control Center customization.
Scott: I like being able to have different groups, basically one whole screen for, like, your home controls.
Scott: Heck, yeah.
Scott: I’ll do that for sure.
Scott: Yeah, I think the Control Center customization is, without a doubt, super, super cool.
Lonnie Rutes: It’s one of those things I never really thought about needing before, but now I know I need it.
Lonnie Rutes: I wonder if I can control the Vegas nights from there.
Lonnie Rutes: That would be cool.
Neter Pikolaidis: Welcome to Android 1948.
Lonnie Rutes: Your face is 1948.
Scott: That explains a couple of things.
Scott: You can also lock apps now, and you can also hide apps so that they don’t show up.
Scott: You can have a folder of apps that are basically locked.
Scott: They don’t know they’re there or, like, you can have photos, you know, whatever you want.
Scott: You could make it so that you have to unlock it with your face or your, you know, whatever.
Scott: Not your whatever.
Scott: Only your face.
Lonnie Rutes: Your 1948 face.
Neter Pikolaidis: Of course, everyone is going to say this is for porn lovers or royal purple drinkers, but actually this could be very handy at the border too.
Neter Pikolaidis: Of course, if Homeland Security can force you to face unlock your phone, I guess they could just force you to face unlock your royal purple porn folder too, so maybe it’s not so great for that.
Scott: Yeah, I don’t know.
Scott: This is one of those things I can’t think of immediately.
Scott: I use Case 4 for myself, but it’s good to have.
Scott: It’s a nice feature.
Lonnie Rutes: I like nice features.
Lonnie Rutes: Are we still talking about faces?
Neter Pikolaidis: Next up was tap backs, and I have to say, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, finally.
Neter Pikolaidis: Now I can tap back with an eggplant emoji.
Neter Pikolaidis: Look, it’s even purple.
Scott: This actually is a finally, and it actually is pretty cool.
Lonnie Rutes: You can also schedule messages, which will be great for me.
Lonnie Rutes: I can schedule a message for random times the next day, and my wife will think I love her.
Scott: You said that out loud.
Lonnie Rutes: Honey, you’re not listening, are you?
Scott: There’s satellite for messages now.
Scott: So now if you connect to satellite, you can, well, if you need to message somebody and you’re off the grid, you can connect to satellite and you can send messages.
Scott: I don’t know how that works.
Scott: I’m sure somehow Elon Musk gets a cut of that.
Scott: I don’t know how or why, but I’m sure the bastard does.
Neter Pikolaidis: Next up is email.
Neter Pikolaidis: Apparently Apple has worked closely with United to make sure that every email in your inbox is actually from United.
Neter Pikolaidis: I’m not sure how that works, but it sounds very artificially intelligent.
Scott: So do you.
Lonnie Rutes: iOS 18 also has topographic hiking maps and bump to pay.
Lonnie Rutes: Now you can pay random strangers while hiking the Pacific Coast Trail.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t know what you’d be paying random strangers for, but it’s a long walk and people do get lonely.
Neter Pikolaidis: Yep, and journal app now has search, just in case you’re actually dumb enough to write down the details of these lonely trail encounters.
Scott: There’s gamer mode for the phone now, which basically means it allocates more resources for the game and less for other things to subtract away from the games that nobody plays on the iPhone.
Neter Pikolaidis: Photos apps, he has been redesigned with a unified view, which is great.
Neter Pikolaidis: Now, I don’t have to remember if I need day view, album view, recently deleted view or OMG, what is that view?
Lonnie Rutes: That’s good, because I doubt you can remember.
Neter Pikolaidis: Welcome to Android 1825.
Lonnie Rutes: Your ancestors were eating cannonballs in 1825.
Scott: And finally, the long national nightmare is over because photos can delete bagpipers who are just wandering around on the beach, popping up in all your family photos.
Neter Pikolaidis: Speaking of bagpipers, does anyone know what happened at that party last night?
Neter Pikolaidis: The last thing I remember is begging that guy to quit doing high kicks while dancing in his kilt.
Lonnie Rutes: Hey, I was at a party wearing a kilt.
Scott: Next up was audio in home, which I guess is a synonym for wearables.
Scott: The unbearable wearable.
Lonnie Rutes: Huh, I’ve never tried to wear my home.
Neter Pikolaidis: This one is actually pretty cool because now you can just nod your head when Siri asks you if you’d like to accept a phone call.
Neter Pikolaidis: If you don’t want to accept the call, you just shake your head until your AirPods fly out of your ears and then you run away.
Scott: Yep, and now there’s voice noise isolation, which is really great because when you’re on a call and you’re in a noisy environment, the people on the other end won’t hear it.
Scott: So now you can scream at the top of your lungs, can you hear the jackhammer?
Scott: And they’ll be like, this guy clearly is sitting on his toilet at home.
Lonnie Rutes: I have six toilets at home, and one small cage for all my mole rats, the ones that look like Scott.
Neter Pikolaidis: I wonder what was in that trash bag.
Lonnie Rutes: Oh, there’s also a Snoopy screensaver for Apple TV.
Neter Pikolaidis: I can’t believe we got that before the year of Linux on the desktop.
Lonnie Rutes: I can.
Scott: There’s a couple of finales that came to WatchOS.
Scott: Finally, WatchOS has rest breaks where you can take some days off and they won’t affect your streak.
Scott: And they also have workout exertion levels where you can train, rate your exertion level, and then from then on, it can look at your workouts accordingly and try to figure out where you are in the exertion level and how good that is for long-term training.
Lonnie Rutes: Looks like my current exertion level is 4,000%.
Scott: What are you doing?
Lonnie Rutes: Cleaning my toilets.
Scott: All right, moving on to iPad OS.
Scott: And moving on to…
Lonnie Rutes: But wait, what about the new Apple math on the iPad?
Lonnie Rutes: I hear they reinvented math, and as a history buff, I can tell you that it’s not very often math gets reinvented.
Neter Pikolaidis: Yes, now you can use your pencil to calculate your Bitcoin losses and improve your handwriting.
Neter Pikolaidis: It’s like Solver, but better.
Neter Pikolaidis: And by better, I mean made by Apple.
Neter Pikolaidis: Also, it knows that a line means add these things.
Neter Pikolaidis: You dimwit.
Scott: I have to admit, the mouth calc…
Scott: The mouth?
Scott: The math calculator is impressive.
Lonnie Rutes: Speaking of mouths, what’s wrong with yours?
Scott: Anything else in iPadOS?
Neter Pikolaidis: It has a floating tab bar that becomes a sidebar, that becomes a floating tab bar, that becomes a sidebar, that becomes…
Lonnie Rutes: That becomes Neter, floating on motor oil.
Scott: Oh, there actually is one thing cool, and that is you can control someone else’s iPad through SharePlay, I guess, or something.
Scott: Anyway, oh my god, I wished I had this feature about a billion times in my life.
Scott: Billions?
Neter Pikolaidis: Next is Mac OS, and we got to see Craig jumping down some stairs in a very unsafe manner.
Neter Pikolaidis: This went beyond not using the handrails at work, like all my stupid colleagues that I have to yell at every day.
Lonnie Rutes: The guy who drinks synthetic motor oil yells at people for not holding onto the handrail for dear life.
Lonnie Rutes: Why am I not surprised?
Scott: Either of you guys properly able to pronounce the word sequoia?
Lonnie Rutes: Pizza cheese glue.
Neter Pikolaidis: One small rock per day.
Scott: Yeah, perfect.
Neter Pikolaidis: Mac OS is the most important operating system in the universe.
Neter Pikolaidis: Try doing all this on an iPad.
Neter Pikolaidis: I mean, you can, but it’ll take 40 million hours instead of 25,000, and you’ll wish you were dead the whole time.
Lonnie Rutes: I wish you were dead the whole time.
Neter Pikolaidis: A lot of the features are the same as on the other devices, math notes, tap backs with the purple eggplant emoji, and you can also plan hikes on your Maps app on the Mac now too.
Lonnie Rutes: Here, I have a hike planned for you.
Scott: Yes, yes, but you guys forgot the most important change of all, and that’s in continuity, because now, now, listen to this, you leave your iPhone in the bathroom, let’s say, and you come out of there, and you’re on your Mac, and you want to check something on your phone.
Scott: Guess what?
Scott: You can do it now.
Scott: You can, it’s not just iPhone mirroring, it’s iPhone control on your Mac.
Scott: iPhone on your Mac.
Scott: Did I mention you have an iPhone in your Mac now?
Lonnie Rutes: When people cried out in fear at the thought of Apple turning the Mac into an iPhone, apparently, they were right.
Neter Pikolaidis: This is the best thing since glued pizza cheese.
Neter Pikolaidis: Now, you can literally check out things on your iPhone from your Mac, and it doesn’t even unlock your phone’s screen to do it.
Neter Pikolaidis: You can see the unlocked and fully functional iPhone on your Mac, but if your phone is in the bathroom and Ronnie’s cleaning his toilet, all he sees is a lock screen.
Lonnie Rutes: Your locked iPhone is probably the least disturbing thing I see in my bathroom, but yes.
Scott: Yep, and even more disturbing is that now your iPhone notifications can follow you around so that you can interact with them on your Mac.
Scott: So if it’s not enough that you’re constantly being barraged with notifications from those idiots at work, now guess what?
Scott: You can, ugh, just, why, why?
Neter Pikolaidis: At this point, we started watching some video from 1942 apparently, because Craig started talking about being able to tile windows.
Lonnie Rutes: Your face was tiled in 1942.
Scott: All right, here’s one that initially I thought, I don’t really have any use for this.
Scott: And this is the Apple Passwords app.
Scott: And this is a keychain integration thing, and this allows you to have a good UI for your passwords and codes and other stuff like that.
Scott: And I thought this can’t be as good as one password, and for sure it won’t have the family sharing and all that.
Scott: Well, I’m wrong about the family sharing because keychain already can do that.
Scott: I didn’t know this.
Scott: Yeah, I don’t know.
Scott: There’s a lot of things in here that look like this is truly becoming an alternative to one password for a lot of people.
Scott: And I think that’s good.
Scott: I think it’s okay to have some pressure on one password at this particular moment in time.
Scott: Don’t take my word for it.
Scott: Just ask Casey Liss.
Scott: You?
Lonnie Rutes: Well, I will say more about this for now.
Lonnie Rutes: I will use Apple’s solution.
Lonnie Rutes: My needs are very simple.
Lonnie Rutes: They’re not complex.
Lonnie Rutes: They are straightforward.
Lonnie Rutes: They’re not convoluted.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t share my passwords with my wife.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t want to.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t need to.
Lonnie Rutes: And I won’t.
Lonnie Rutes: Apple is right.
Lonnie Rutes: Families are stupid and no one should have one.
Lonnie Rutes: Honey, you’re not listening to this, are you?
Scott: I don’t know.
Scott: I still use one password for certain cases where I have to share with people who aren’t my family.
Scott: But, but, I definitely will be looking at this in terms of personal use and family use.
Scott: And maybe I can segregate those two things, and that would be actually pretty freaking nice.
Lonnie Rutes: Would you say it’s like severing your work life from your personal life?
Neter Pikolaidis: Speaking of severing, I think this bottle of Royal Purple has a slight leak.
Neter Pikolaidis: At least I hope that’s oil on my pants.
Lonnie Rutes: Wait, are we supposed to be wearing pants?
Scott: I do like the updates in Safari.
Scott: And I gotta say, honestly, Safari is my favorite browser.
Scott: I’ve tried them all.
Scott: I do use Chrome for certain work-related things, but Safari is my favorite browser.
Scott: And I do like the way they’re implementing AI, unlike, what’s that stupid browser that everybody likes?
Scott: It starts with a Q or a W or a K.
Neter Pikolaidis: Arc.
Scott: Arc, yes, Arc.
Scott: And I used it for a while.
Scott: Anyway, I like the way they’re implementing AI because it gives you suggestions, but it leads you back to the web.
Scott: It doesn’t replace the web and give you answers and give you summaries so that you never have to go to the web page.
Scott: And ReaderView is even more intelligent now.
Scott: And it’s similar, and you can see the media in ReaderView and isolate the media and focus on it, I guess I should say, not isolate.
Scott: So I really, Safari is a good fricking browser.
Neter Pikolaidis: I use Chrome because fun makes me mad.
Lonnie Rutes: You were mad in 1942.
Neter Pikolaidis: Next, Tim Cook and Al Gore appeared together.
Neter Pikolaidis: Al took credit for the internet again, and Tim took credit for the entire history of artificial intelligence research and application.
Lonnie Rutes: I think he just said Apple is artificial.
Neter Pikolaidis: So is this royal purple?
Lonnie Rutes: I know all about you and your needs.
Lonnie Rutes: And frankly, some of them aren’t normal.
Scott: This is where it really does get interesting because, as a lot of people have said and speculated, many of the large models aren’t going to be able to run on device.
Scott: And yet, Apple wants this stuff to be local for privacy and security and all that.
Scott: So they do, by default, start off as local.
Scott: And then they have a secure cloud component, which is utterly fascinating to me.
Scott: And I think it’s an interesting approach.
Scott: I think it’s a good approach.
Scott: And what I hope is that the approach they’re taking with their cloud, the way they’re architecting it, so that they aren’t gathering information from it, and so that all information generated there is deleted and gotten rid of as soon as possible.
Scott: You know, it’s intriguing that they also have a ChatGPT aspect to this.
Scott: And it’s interesting that they’re being very careful to keep them separate and to tell you when stuff might be going to ChatGPT and to get your permission first, and that it’s disabled by default.
Scott: It’s really interesting, because clearly they’re trying to keep up with the cool kids, and yet they’re also trying to do things in an ample way.
Scott: And I do, you know, I was on Pragmatic with John Chidji recently.
Scott: We talked about AI.
Scott: And I think that we both felt that large language models acting as, you know, general purpose knowledge bases aren’t that great, but they are good if they’re applied very narrowly and they’re given specific sources of data that are carefully tuned and carefully curated.
Scott: And then they are the interface to that.
Scott: And that is exactly the approach that Apple seems to be doing, which I like.
Scott: I think it’s the probably the correct approach for now and the best approach for now.
Lonnie Rutes: I thought the writing tools were fascinating because they’re system-wide and they’re also not open-ended, but are instead very focused on specific tasks.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t need them because I’m an excellent writer, but I can see Scott needing them.
Lonnie Rutes: Neter doesn’t read or write, so who cares about him?
Neter Pikolaidis: The engineers who train me care about me.
Scott: What do you guys think about the fact that Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro to work on the iPhone?
Scott: And of course, M1 series chips on everything else.
Neter Pikolaidis: I am an iPhone 15 Pro.
Neter Pikolaidis: I mean, I have an iPhone 15 Pro.
Neter Pikolaidis: It goes with me everywhere.
Lonnie Rutes: I have a day phone iPhone 15 Pro Max and a night phone iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Lonnie Rutes: I don’t know why you have anything else.
Lonnie Rutes: The displays are huge, and I stare at them for hours with my beady little eyes.
Lonnie Rutes: My wife tells me that I’m watching TikTok.
Lonnie Rutes: I have no idea.
Lonnie Rutes: It just makes me laugh.
Scott: I think that the one aspect of Apple Intelligence that kind of does bother me is the image generation.
Scott: And the reason I say that is because to me, it looks like every other image generation service in the universe.
Scott: You can always tell they’re AI.
Scott: I don’t know how to describe it.
Scott: I don’t know how to explain it, but they look weird.
Scott: They look unnatural.
Scott: And they all kind of have this darkish overtone about them.
Scott: And I don’t understand why.
Scott: I don’t know what it is about them that makes them so distinct and so slightly unpalatable, but there is most definitely that aspect to all of the AI image generation services that I’ve seen.
Lonnie Rutes: Now, you’re just making stuff up.
Neter Pikolaidis: Scott, only the best AI models are used for image generation, trained by the best AI engineers, using the best algorithms, running on the best hardware.
Neter Pikolaidis: Only the best images are generated as a result.
Neter Pikolaidis: It sounds to me like you’re jealous and you can’t cope with the fact that AI is better than you.
Scott: Okay, according to Apple, and this is a big article of faith here, according to Apple, Siri is now context aware.
Scott: It will understand you if you phrase things in a slightly different way than it would.
Scott: You don’t have to know a specific way to ask something now.
Scott: They claim that now Siri will be useful because of these things.
Scott: So it’s enhanced, it knows about the features of the phone, it can answer a lot of questions now with you asking the way you want to, as opposed to having to know keywords and ask things in a very specific way, which is how Siri currently works.
Scott: And I think the absolute coolest thing is the personal contacts.
Scott: So Siri is going to have insight into all your documents and files, and you can ask it to find stuff and it will be able to answer.
Scott: I have constantly wanted this capability.
Scott: I mean, right now, if you ask it for one of your contacts, it’ll tell you that it can’t find that contact, even though it’s clearly right in there.
Scott: Or if you’re Peter Nikolaidis, it’ll tell you that it doesn’t know you or anything about you or even who you are.
Scott: So if this is true, this is a huge upgrade.
Neter Pikolaidis: I’m so glad that I’m Neter Pekolaitis and not Peter Nikolaidis.
Lonnie Rutes: I definitely like the fact that now it will answer all my emails for me and fill out my TPS reports too.
Lonnie Rutes: In no time, people will be telling me I have upper management written all over me.
Neter Pikolaidis: I have something written all over me too, but it’s in Sharpie and I can’t tell what it says.
Lonnie Rutes: It says you’re all mole rats.
Scott: All right, well, we’re running into a half an hour on this episode here, and it’s taken me 40 million hours to actually create this, so I say we just kind of wrap it up and say goodbye.
Scott: What do you guys think?
Scott: Do you think it’s time for the…
Lonnie Rutes: The Rigbed Rutten?
Neter Pikolaidis: You can find us at friendswithbrews.com, but if you didn’t already know that, you’re an idiot.
Neter Pikolaidis: You can follow us on Mastodon, but if you didn’t already know that, you’re an idiot.
Neter Pikolaidis: This is a podcast, but if you didn’t already know that, you’re still an idiot.
Neter Pikolaidis: Oh, PS, you’re an idiot.
Scott: You know, you’ve implied a lot of times in the past that if they didn’t know where to find us, they were clearly an idiot since they were listening to us.
Scott: But this time, I think, I don’t know if I’d be so explicit about it.
Scott: It seems like a good way to lose listeners, if you know what I’m saying.
Neter Pikolaidis: Don’t worry, no one’s listening.
Lonnie Rutes: Honey, is that you?