Episode 984: AI happenings, and the MacBook Neo effect

Morning Decisions

0:00Morning decisions. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

0:19Unscripted, unfiltered, unafraid, welcome to the Macro Podcast. My name is Michael Simon and I am joined today by my colleague David Price. Hello. And as always our producer Roman Loyola. Ahoy there. This is episode number 984. Roman I did the math all right. 16 weeks from

iPhone Event Prediction

0:41today if we don't take any days off will be the week of September 7th which very well could be the iPhone event. We didn't plan that like 30 years ago when we started doing this but it worked out really nicely. So the thousandth episode we're going to make sure we somehow make it work will be the iPhone 18. Well the Fold. The Fold and you know like a big deal. So we're going to try to coordinate that with Apple see if they can get there. They always take our suggestions. I'm sure

1:15John Ternus would mention that during the presentation. Right. Tell everyone to listen to them. You can listen to the thousandth episode on your new iPhone uh you know. 18 uh Pro. 18 Pro Max. Watch it in full 4k or whatever. That's right. There you go. Um so we're not allowed to take a week off between now and Friday. Well it depends if Apple has the event on the 15th we are. Okay. We gotta see. But we won't know until like the week before which we can't take the week off. I don't know what we're gonna do because we can't take the week

1:46off before so it might just have to be a thousand and one which would be unfortunate. Yeah. But uh we'll we'll see. Well that would be a good start to the next thousand. I guess so yeah. That's good.

Google and Microsoft Discussion

1:55That's a good point. That's one way to look at it. Uh but today we're gonna actually talk about Google a little bit um and Microsoft and how it all relates to Apple and a bunch of stuff happened last week that we're going to um talk about. David wrote a couple stories. Has some thoughts so we'll hear a lot from him. Uh and then we'll have this week in Apple history. We'll close as always with our comments from you. The uh uh see I tried to ad-lib and I screwed up. We'll close us

2:27with our comment corner. Speaking of comments you can contact us through Blue Sky Facebook or threads. Search for Macworld. Look for the Blue Mouse logo. You can send emails to podcast at macworld.com. Send us a personal email. Comment under a video. Comment under a post. Get us your

Google I.O. and Android

2:42thoughts and we will talk about them on a future show. Okay so Google. We're gonna start with Google. Um if you don't follow Android closely and I'm assuming you don't um it's Google I.O. season. In fact it's actually today is like their they're like keynote which is Google I.O. is basically WWDC for Google. It's their developer stuff where they where they set like their their expectations for the for the coming year. So today's Google I.O. last week was they have a thing called the called the Android

3:15show. That's like a I don't know if it's monthly or weekly. It's some some like podcast thing they do but last week was the I.O. version of that. So they kind of talked about like specifically Android 17 a little bit of Gemini. They introduced a new um a new AI kind of laptop like they didn't really like show it but they talked about like like what it's going to be called the Google book which is just a terrible name. But um so naturally like we're Macworld so we look at that stuff from the the the vantage point of of Apple and um it's it's kind of hard not to look at all that stuff as

3:52of response to what Apple's been doing for the last you know six to twelve months uh specifically

Gemini Intelligence

4:00MacBook Neo and um Apple Intelligence. So starting off with Gemini Google renamed Gemini last week Gemini Intelligence which is just hilarious and but beyond the name change it kind of also tweaked and changed and and and retooled like like how it works on you know Android phones and watches and and speakers and stuff. Um just before David starts ranting I want to say so Google describes Gemini Intelligence is a quote. It gets your vibe. It handles the busy work and it helps you focus on

4:37what matters to you and I don't know it just sounds like that's just such marketing nonsense. I mean listen Apple does it too and we make fun of Apple when they do their rhetorical flourishes but the idea of AI getting my vibe is so just disturbingly icky. I don't really like it but David you're not happy at all and um I'll shut up now and let you and let you say some stuff.

Ranting about AI

5:04I don't want to rant. Um no no please this is this is fun. We're we're we're unafraid of of ranting. Have you didn't you hear the beginning? You don't want to be a rump. Um yeah so it's I hadn't heard that quote actually about getting my vibe and that makes me hate it even more. Great. It's like a philosophical change that they've announced that they've said. Kind of yeah. The quote I heard was that Android is not going to be an operating system anymore it's going to be an intelligent system so the idea is that AI underpins everything which I suppose maybe to

5:37an extent it already was under the surface but it's going to be foregrounded whatever you do if you've got an Android device there will be Google Gemini in your face constantly offering to do things. There was a very good article on PC World about how Google Books are going to be uh I think the term they use was an anti-personal computer because it makes decisions for you but it's going to be it's going to be on Android it's going to be here's what I think you want to do shall I go

6:09ahead and do it for you rather than being a tool in which you make the decisions you do most of the thinking you do most of the work and it helps you it's now gonna it's gonna be the agent itself and and that sort of thing distresses me to an extent um because I I think AI should be um intentional and thoughtful and I mean these are not words that you can really use to describe most

6:42AI implementation at the moment but I accept that AI exists I accept that AI has its uses but I don't like AI being used as the default I don't like AI being used without consideration of its costs and its limitations and um I think it's I think it's a troubling development when AI becomes the operating system and yeah yeah I I'm worried about the the idea of it so like Apple intelligence

7:13like obviously Google is kind of taking a page from Apple to Apple has you know been lambasted and skewered over the last couple years for really being late to the party on AI and what that what that really means is that they don't have like a like a chat bot that works well like Gemini so I'm using Chrome right now to record this and back in the top right corner it says ask Gemini like it's they want you to use its chat bot to ask all sorts of things you know we've seen the commercials where

7:43you know someone punches a hole in their wall and they take a picture and they show them how to fix it Siri cannot do any of that we know that however on the iPhone AI is all over the place it's you know there's writing tools there is you know automate like like a battery stuff where it tells you how long it's going to be uh every day I saw I have the iPhone air and I you know the battery isn't as good as other iPhones and every day at like 11 o'clock it then pops up and it says we're adjusting your

8:14battery uh settings because you're using your phone too much and it's going to run out that stuff is all

Siri and AI Comparison

8:20over the phone yeah yeah so it's it seems to me and you know I we haven't seen it yet and you know it's all just marketing stuff right now but it seems like Google is kind of taking a page from what Apple's doing with AI like a more of a less of uh of our image creation and and and chat stuff and more of a like we're gonna you know look at your emails and summarize them like well you know like not in a privacy way but you know uh here's your notifications they're all bunched together and

8:53these are the most important ones like really using it to you know make make things on your phone streamlined the problem you have and I agree with you is that it seems to be somewhat intrusive on the Google in the Google I don't know the Google mission whereas they're going to really kind of I don't know like put it like in front like Apple intelligence is always there but if you want to ignore it you can like I don't use writing tools I know they're there it seemed as though this Gemini intelligence stuff is going to basically say hey can I help you with that whether or not

9:29you want it or not I think it's the same it's the same idea taken the next step really because I do think I think I think we have to skewer Apple to an extent on this one because I think it has been intrusive okay the writing tools anytime you um select a block of text in notes for example I've several times accidentally pressed the writing tools button because it's it's right there you're right it is there suddenly I'm in this whole mode that I have no interest in using um

10:02it it is it is very present you know Siri it just happens to be quite limited in its in its scope it's just not very it's not very good AI but it is shoved in your face all the time on the iPhone um it sounds from what Google has said that this is going to be the next step it is going to be a bit more intrusive and a bit more capable I mean we we should acknowledge as well that the Gemini is way better than um yeah Apple intelligence and Siri um I just I like the idea

10:34and maybe maybe I am exposing myself as the almost boomer that I am that I think AI should be it should be an app it should be an option it should be a service you you sign up for you go into rather than underpinning everything it should be to some degree compartmentalized and optional rather than being something that you almost have to avoid which is increasingly the case um and you know given how

11:04how unreliable AI is at the moment how prone it is to hallucinations how easy it is to use it accidentally to spread misinformation the number of people I've I've talked to that will tell me something that they got off chat GPT sure really thinking about it and that's and that's with the sort of current um paradigm where they've had to they've had to think about a question and think how can I how can I find out about that I will go to chat GPT and then that's that's one stage of

11:37thought one stage of intentionality that separates them and introduces that uh that thought process of but what if it hallucinates what if it damages the environment what if it's inaccurate you know all the rest of that whereas if it was just I look at my phone and it says do you want me to answer a question and you go yeah sure you've not thought about the fact that it's AI the fact that it's limited the fact that it's harmful it worries me a little bit you remember when um Apple introduced the

12:07uh summary notifications notification summary yeah and they were really inaccurate yeah they had to add in a sort of um standardized boilerplate text around them that would sort of remind you we've created these using AI yeah they disabled them for a bit because they yeah weren't they weren't you know like not part and parcel but you know enough of them were getting things wrong where they said are we're going to turn these off for a bit really regular basis um yeah so they had they

12:41had to introduce that that that that layer between where they would remind you this is AI this is unreliable um and now we're hearing about um a new development that's going to remove all friction all layers and just um and put you straight in touch with the results of the AI you're not even really in touch with the AI it gives you the output of AI and you're invited to um accept it WWDC is in a month

WWDC and AI Rumors

13:09or a little less than a month and we there have been a steady drip of rumors from Bloomberg's Mark over the last I'd say two weeks and I'm gonna say like 100 or 98 percent of them are all AI featured it sounds like AI is going to be like the thing this year that we have to basically come to terms with you can turn it off of course you can turn you could probably turn off Gemini intelligence too I assume but it it there's so many features and there's so many interactions like you're going to

13:46be doing yourself a disservice by turn I think by turning it off Apple intelligence now you turn it off it's fine Siri still works basically the same you you lose the writing and tools and the image creation but I think that's not a big deal the the the way it's going to work going forward I think it's I think you're going to have to keep it on so there's going to be a new Siri chatbot that's like Gemini it's going to be its own app which is which is what you were just saying there you have to like you know in like have the intent to go press the app open the app talk to Siri that

14:19that's all fine but there's a lot of like little things that they're going to be doing um most recently there was one yesterday that writing tools you were just talking about writing tools is going to more now turn into like a like a grammarly type thing where it's where it's always on it's always checking it's always scanning if you enable it and it's you know giving you suggestions I use grammarly I will admit on um with my writing I don't use the grammar contextual grammar stuff I'll just use like the spell check and you know it's good and spell check is a thing that we've

14:50grown accustomed to but um it sounds like it's going to be everywhere now like everything you type Apple intelligence is going to be looking at you know on your phone it's like I'm not trying to expose privacy stuff like Apple is very mindful of that but it's going to be giving you suggestions it's going to be it's always going to be present like you're going to know Apple intelligence is a thing that's on your phone uh I mean this is kind of what you just said but that does that concern you

15:21David I mean I don't want you to repeat yourself because you just said it but um like taking if so Google just took their thing to the next level it sounds like Apple is going to kind of do something similar in a couple weeks I agree and I don't love it what worries me more really is that Apple is going to spend WWDC talking about AI talking about AI sort of features and surface level stuff that isn't needed and not address what it needs to address which is that um Siri is terrible um and that

15:57and that is within the AI remit so I'm happy for the company to address AI but I would like it to focus its attention specifically on Siri becoming more accurate more capable more able to trigger more actions when you when you wanted to yeah yeah I mean it's just on a really basic level like like when you've got a HomePod and you and you ask the HomePod to play a song Siri is so bad at that like it's infuriating and worse than it used to be so now it will

16:34it will play the wrong song like it used to be the case that you would um that you would ask for a song and it would just go well I can't understand you may try again later and some annoying error message but it would at least not get it wrong it would at least have that Hippocratic thing of first do no harm but now it will just play anything yeah and then and then you'll say you know to stop and they will ignore that and carry on playing and when it intrudes like you'll be you'll be watching tv and it will it was somebody's calling for me and it will butt in sure and it's

17:09actively bad just on the level of voice recognition this is I mean I know that is a form of AI but that's that's quite base base level it wouldn't be a fun thing for them to talk about that's the problem you can't spend a whole keynote saying it now understands basic English but that's what that's what we need that's what I want it to focus on as a company rather than adding more AI features which will probably go wrong maybe not you know because we're hearing that Google Gemini is

17:41going to get sort of patched into um yeah yeah we'd be remiss if we didn't say like the underpinnings of at least Siri in iOS 27 will be Google and Google Gemini not Gemini intelligence so much but but the Gemini large language model it's one of them I don't know I gotta know like they're probably coming out with the new one as we speak because that's what these things do they keep updating I don't know if it's that one or if it's the last one or if it's it's some custom version of the two but

18:13whatever Apple finally said after failing to deliver this new Siri for almost two years or basically two

Privacy and AI Concerns

18:19years just said like screw it we don't know what we're doing we can't possibly catch up in time so we're just gonna pay someone to partner which you know they probably should have done from day one but they didn't and that's fine and and they've been sort of using patches before as well with chat GPT yes but I read you mentioned Mark Gurman um just now and and one of one of his articles recently was talking about the impact of privacy on um Apple's progression as an AI company and how

18:53they have this self-imposed rule that they will they will only use user data in certain um specifically defined ways which which inhibits their ability to learn it inhibits their ability to teach large language models um to become effective AI but they they want they will we're going to respect user data therefore we can't make AI better but their solution to that is to buy in AI from elsewhere or necessarily buy in but get in AI from elsewhere which has been created in exactly those

19:26same the same way it's just they haven't done it um impugning ways that they they disagree with and it it it's a real it's a can of worms privacy it's like hiring a hitman it's like I didn't I didn't kill him someone else did it yeah and then keeping the hitman on the premises potentially the other data as well because Google may be using their servers for Apple's data or Apple's users data it's it's all a bit it's really messy frankly yeah I mean this is kind of what Siri got Siri in trouble in

19:59the first place is that way back when when Siri first came out and first started doing its thing Apple they tried anonymizing data they wouldn't text that he had to opt into the data and they fell way behind because let's face it as much as we want these things to be as private as possible and everything to stay on the phone these companies need this data to develop to increase to enhance to keep making these things smarter and better otherwise they're they're you know they're only

20:31as smart as what they are told it's not sentient it doesn't learn unless we give it things that it can learn from so you know I appreciate as an Apple user the the fight for privacy but I can also understand how they can't fall behind another 10 years because they keep all the data private so this is you know in a sense the the right way to do it I guess or but I understand why it's also like you know well

21:04if you're not gonna do it yourself you're not really keeping your hands clean by saying well we'll just let Google do it even though it's the same users the same people the same information like I use Chrome I use Google search all the time you know so it's a it's a tricky area and I think Apple just has to figure out a way I don't know how because they tried the whole Siri anonymous thing and they got into trouble for that and then like there's really no way to collect data unless you're collecting

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22:18impaired driving or criminal offenses but the checks don't stop there every year every Uber driver is background checked again so the person picking you up today meets the same standards as the day they started hey how's it going yeah good annual driver screenings from Uber one more way Uber is putting safety at every turn learn more at Uber.com slash safety yeah it's I wonder I wonder about the bargain people would be willing to make frankly yeah I was gonna ask you would you take that bargain if if Apple

22:50said we're we're gonna largely we're gonna largely abandon the privacy uh philosophy policy but in return you get a Siri that's as good as Google Gemini would you take that so it depends yeah well it depends the the privacy stuff that I care most about are the communications I have with with my family my friends my kids like that stuff is what I value in the sense that I don't want people reading the text I send my son

23:25if I get in trouble with the with the law I don't want them to be able to go do my phone and see all the stuff that I do personally now beyond that so I'll use an example last week um my son plays baseball so I'm I'm in charge of like the the whole streaming part of that so we set up a phone we have a it's a whole thing with with speed speed radar and stuff like we set up a whole thing and last week we were at his um well he's in middle school but the high school he will be attending we were at and it didn't

23:55work like we couldn't get the thing to work there were too many people there or something happened so it was frustrating so I started to look into Starlink for those who don't know Starlink is is Elon Musk's satellite internet provider um it's basically to you know if you're in like a rural area or you can use satellites to get your internet or you can augment your wireless coverage because it uses satellites and not you know wireless towers it's a it's a much more if if you're in an area that

24:26that can that is wide open you can reach the sky you can get you know pretty fast internet I searched it for literally five minutes I wanted to see what the price was and what the equipment was and what it would cost for like three days I got bombarded with Starlink ads all over the place on on x on facebook on and you know so and I said to my wife I said like I said look I literally like a google search read a couple of things clicked on the Starlink website looked at the plans and the

24:56price and then that was it I'm okay with that like I'm not complaining about that I understand if I'm gonna be online if I'm gonna be searching for stuff and using google and not protecting myself like I could have gone to the private uh what DuckDuckGo or something I didn't so I'm okay with that level of it like not everything on my phone has to be private like so apple cloud compute like I'm okay with that so if apple wants to draw a line and say like your

25:28your messages your emails your payments are private but your searches and your chats with Siri aren't I think I'd be all right with that that was a roundabout way to say to say all that but you convinced me yeah I think I agree with you yeah because you know like like I said like if I get if I get in trouble somewhere like I just want to make sure that my son isn't going to get wrapped up in it because I said this to him somewhere or or you know like I want my personal super super personal

26:02stuff private but if they know that I collect marble stuff I don't care sure great like that that doesn't that doesn't affect me so yeah I think that there's a line and I think apple is having a real hard time because people don't necessarily people a lot of people aren't able to to to draw that line because it's become such a such of like their identity ever since the the court case with the San Bernard San Bernardino shooter and that has become so ingrained in their philosophy

26:36I remember like the billboards like privacy is baked into iphone and people kind of associate the the the two things I use an iphone and everything I do is private like that's not even true like if I search google as I just demonstrated I was obviously using my iphone like not everything you do on your iphone is private but it's really hard to tell people that on like a on like a on like granular level so it's it's I understand why apple is having such a hard time with this because ai

27:11you know it's it absolutely needs gobs of data daily to continue to get better because even if it's a week and a half old it's useless like it has to be if you're going to talk to something like you're talking to a person like they have it has to be up to date on everything that's that's that's happening and I I get why siri has been so hard to develop as a tool that's also private unless you have like a

27:42like a 500 terabyte iphone you gotta that data has to go somewhere and to get to that somewhere it can't all be private it's like they need a marketing slogan that doesn't just say right privacy it needs to say we're better than other companies but you're right right it's flawed it's like that chocolate bar company whose chocolate bars say 97 percent um I want to make sure I get

28:16this right I think it says 97 percent slavery free and it's and it's meant to be a way of saying that the that the cocoa industry is is uh is is caught up in forced labor but of course everybody looks at and goes wow there's three percent slavery in your day what they're trying to say is we've done everything we can right to make this free of forced labor but actually you can't get that last three percent out because it's so tangled up in the supply chain apple needs something like that

28:46but more successful that says 97 percent private but I also wonder how many how many iphone users care about that I think there's a lot yeah what's the percentage yeah I wonder it must be a significant thing you would think for them to be doing right if they keep doing it marketing it does its research um its market research they must have made a connection on some level in some research group that people say they're concerned about google harvesting their data

29:23or or meta harvesting their data that there must be some thought process there but it just isn't necessarily as nuanced a thought process on a wide scale as it would need to be for apple to sort of square this circle and and harvest data for teaching its ai models but not allowing the government to access your health data or your you know your private messages right it's yeah it's a it's a

29:56it's a difficult one yeah health health's the other one I think most of them are pretty private when it comes to health unless you like voluntarily feed I don't know chat gbt like your pet scans or something like I think it's pretty private but yeah like there's like that that's another thing like the health app has tons of of health data on just walking around stuff location data like that's the stuff that I care about keeping private but I also do want our phones to keep getting smarter so like they should

30:29when you buy an iphone there should be like a hundred toggles like which one will you be okay with us taking like what what can we look at what what personal data are you comfortable with us taking like messages no emails no like like like dozens of so the more toggles you tick the lower the price you pay for the iphone oh there you go it starts at like two thousand dollars it goes down yeah I think because I'm I'm willing to give up quite a lot of my data to uh to corporations but what annoys me

31:06is giving it away for for free or for very little you know for it for the sake small amount of convenience but you know if if if it would if it reduced the price of the phone then yeah I'd say have at it you know you use any of it you know I don't care as long as I'm paying 200 pounds sure yeah I mean google makes Google makes a fortune every quarter just on on us like I don't own any google not any but I don't

31:39own much google stuff it doesn't matter they're still making money off me just by using google search every day so let's just we'll switch to uh to macbook neo that was a longer segment than I wanted

MacBook Neo Discussion

31:52it to be it's it's that was like 20 minutes along with the gemini intelligence stuff last week google also announced this google book which is kind of a spiritual successor to the pixel book which I really liked that that was it's like 10 years old my actually my son still uses it for school it was a it was just a chromebook in a in a nice package and it was it was really nice and then they canceled it because they canceled everything google can't stick to anything but um this chromebook sounds like it's less about google google making stuff and more about other manufacturers making things

32:28and they're going to supply the operating system and I'm sure they'll have one that's that's there but I think it's going to be made by like you know like asus and dell and stuff and it's like it's it's like a platform the google book platform we'll call it and we don't know how much it's going to cost but we assume it's going to be relatively affordable so at least some of them and it's all ai of course you know like that's the underpinning is going to be gemini and it's going to have this new operating system that's that's like in between chrome and android and it's going to basically it's basically a

33:00new chrome os they didn't come out and say chrome's dead but like that was the implication like eventually it's going to be phased out and this new google book is going to be the thing and it's the timing is a little interesting because apple just came out with this macbook neo about two months ago now march april yeah about two months ago and it's really kind of upended as we as we suspected it might when even back when we heard the rumors it's really upended that budget

33:31the budget pc market which let's face it is probably 80 percent of people who buy pc laptops are buying between the 400 and 800 range maybe not yeah that's probably too high let's let's say 60 percent between like the 400 and 800 range you know you have the really cheap chromebooks and then you have the higher end um pcs for gaming and stuff and you know most of it's in that middle lane met that middle and ever since macbook neo came out at 600 bucks like like pc makers are like what do we do you know

34:05they're trying to be all cool about it and say like yeah it doesn't like we're we'll be fine but it's kind of like the iphone where the iphone came along and palm and and blackberry were like nah we're not worried and secretly they were like you know like what are we supposed to do with this thing because we're nowhere near it and you know that's kind of what's what's happening with the um the pc laptop markets markets so this this google book we you know it seems to be an answer to macbook neo and um we we had a story uh written by uh mamoud attani one of our contributors that

34:42basically said like it's it's like an advertisement for macbook neo because it doesn't appear on paper to do anything better and if it was cheaper if google was planning on making most of these things or other companies were but i i have to assume they would say that starts at 499 it starts at 399 whatever so it's going to at least be the probably the same prices as neo and i don't know i just don't

35:13see it moving the needle i think apple has dropped a bomb on the budget pc market with a laptop that looks great feels great is gonna last and only costs you know a few hundred dollars uh like david where do you stand like is there anything in the google book announcement that you saw that made you think like you know maybe they can uh you know take some of that market share that macbook neo is almost certain to to grab yeah not at all it it felt a bit

35:49almost embarrassing as as a product launch at that time you know they've had just a just a long enough period to just sort of pivot the way they presented it to respond to the macbook neo and it just it came out as here's our macbook neo hope you like it nearly as much as the macbook near um as you said we don't know the price but they've they specifically use the word premium so they said that the uh the

36:20the chromebook will continue to exist this will be a premium product that sits above it um i'm assuming by premium they don't mean 1200 or whatever i'm assuming it'll be premium compared to the chromebook so yeah probably somewhat close to the macbook neo like there are some premium chromebooks well the pixel book was one of them that thing was like 1200 bucks when it when it came out so it's like they they do exist but that's not how people think of chromebooks like they think of them as those cheapo you know

36:51plasticky things yeah and and as we saw with google when we were discussing google gemini google gemini yeah that's gemini yes google gemini and gemini intelligence or google gemini it's going to be based it's going to be ai first it's it's going to be um the operating system will be pushing you to ai rather than giving you the same freedom that traditionally you get with a

37:23with a pc with a non-apple laptop you know this is what people would always say was that if you use apple product you have slightly less user agency because apple funnels you down a particular user experience but um this is going to be constantly railroading you into gemini branded ai interactions that you may not particularly be interested in and i think that could be quite frustrating we don't know a lot about the design there was a couple of um photos um renders i know that they

37:58were photos right yeah maybe i don't think there's any way those are that's a real product maybe but it looks like they're just kind of like designed they somehow looked like the macbook neo even though it was just small cutaway parts possibly because the screen maybe they'd arranged that the screen was showing blue light so it gave it kind of an indigo and obviously slim speak yep it had very much the same vibe as the macbook neo yeah i don't really also there's going to be the

38:32usual issue when you when you move away from apple is it is going to be made by a whole bunch of different companies as you said yeah they they announced uh we're working with industry leading partners like acer asus dell hp and lenovo which is all of them to make the first google books and each google each google book will be built with premium craftsmanship and materials coming in variety of shapes and sizes i don't know what other shapes there could be but um the premium

39:02craftsmanship is interesting because you know the macbook neo is premium craftsmanship as well but it's not a premium apple laptop it's a budget apple laptop the macbook air is a mid-range the the macbook pro is a premium laptop it's they're all aluminum though they're all using you know premium materials so the only thing that google has like spotlighted is this glow bar it says you'll

39:34you'll know it's a google book by the unique glow bar which is like a thing on the outside like i guess it's like a little light up it looks like it's like a light up thing and but who cares like like okay there's nothing about the laptop that is unique or new everything you know they talk about all the stuff inside it and how it's uh it's not an operating system it's an intelligent system the same thing that they did with it with the with the uh android stuff and okay great but um

40:09i don't know we'll see we'll we'll see i guess but i think think it's amazing that you know apple just turned 50 and they finally release a macbook that's actually like a budget like a like a like a lower cost uh machine that's designed for people who don't want to spend a thousand dollars on a laptop that that isn't last year's model or two years old and pc makers don't know what to do well what are we supposed to do now the asus ceo said it it upturned the entire

40:42industry and then in the set in the next sentence said that actually it wasn't a big deal but they can't decide how to react to it we had microsoft as well last week um with its white paper yes which we should we should really ask roman about because i read roman's demolition of the white paper which was absolutely savage and very good um but it just shows how how rattled microsoft actually is

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42:15slash student offer while supplies last ends june 30th terms at aka.ms slash college pc completely rattled yeah so before i ask roman um the um so the white paper which is basically an industry term for like a study that you publish is um like they literally took four budget laptops and they they didn't compare them against macbook neo like per se but they went through like these are the this is the

42:45storage you get and this is the screen you get and they it was it was all very like buttoned up and serious and it was insane because first of all a couple of the laptops are priced way more than neo they don't mention the fact that they're plastic pieces of junk they don't mention the fact that you get all this bloatware with it they don't mention the fact that you know you you you you're not getting the the the the uh service that you get not the service the um the the years of support that you get from macOS like they live out all the things that people would buy a macbook neo for

43:20and just say oh well look it's it's 600 bucks and you're getting more storage it's like okay great but i don't know it just it seemed very short-sighted and and and like ridiculous that someone at microsoft thought it was a good idea to commission and then publish a a study to prove that its laptops aren't awful where should i start with this so this is a funny thing so mike asked me to look into this and write it up and i kind of went all right fine you know it's i i the thing that stumped me at first

43:55i didn't know where to start with it um because you know it portrays itself as a white paper which is you know if if people who are familiar with what term white paper there's like an academic association with it so it's supposed to have some sort of credence to it some credential to it but in this sense and it happens frequently in this sense it's it's marketing so and it's funny that microsoft paid this external firm essentially to perform a marketing function uh and it's but it's

44:32being you know portrayed as this as a study uh but it really wasn't anything that like say we would have we could have done or pc world could have done right you know what i mean in terms of like comparing specs or anything like that there was no deep research done in this article except for maybe benchmarks so i started writing it thinking all right i'll just do the usual thing and then i and then as i was going through the study i went i thought oh i wonder if pc world reviewed this

45:07laptop and then i looked it up and i saw what i did and then i thought oh wait a minute this would be brilliant if i could use pc world's words right against this study and it ended up working out that way so it was just it wasn't even a lot of us defending the mac just as right it was a lot of pc world which is very pc centric using their words to kind of um tear down this this this white paper which

45:39kind of like goes to speak about how i guess it talks about it it it it's it's like a statement about this this market so to speak how it's just it's it's clearly obvious what's going on with this market this paper kind of like was finding a way to kind of disguise that right exactly right uh it was all it was all deception like the upshot is pc world pc well i'll say pc users like they hate these things

46:10yes like nobody is looking for them nobody would recommend them it they're they're strictly made for the mass consumer who doesn't have or doesn't want nine or a thousand dollars nine hundred or a thousand dollars to spend on a laptop that's it they're not good machines they're flimsy they're bloated they're slow in in in a year they're going to be um you know yet two hours of battery life and and and take you take you a day to open chrome like they're not good yet microsoft presented this

46:46thing as is like look we have we we have four macbook meal type computers too and like when i saw it i like i immediately said all right roman's gonna have some fun with this because man this is crazy i can't i i did a double take to see like you even uh messaged me like like are you sure microsoft commissioned this thing right like it's crazy to think that someone at microsoft thought it was a good idea to publish this thing like i can see commissioning you larry let's let's pay this company and see what they can come up with but that when you got the bet when you got the thing back like all right

47:19let's keep this at a draw somewhere because this is not we can't publish this david i'm sorry i've been we've been bogarting this whole conversation do you have any we're at like 50 minutes i don't want to um end this segment without hearing your thoughts pleasure to listen to you the one question i have is has apple accidentally released a laptop that isn't sustainable that it can't keep selling at this price that's yeah and that's a whole nother show yeah is it even a loss leader um because we we keep hearing that the the bin ships that it's relying on have run out so it's

47:54having to actually buy chips instead of being able to use essentially free ones that would just produce defective in the as a byproduct of the manufacturing um it would be an absolutely brilliant um sort of strategy to release this product knowing that it's way better than any rival product just to mess with them and then well we're not making very much money on each of these but but it acts as sort of a a seed uh it gets people in its entryway as you said people use these things

48:29they think this is great and that introduced them to the apple ecosystem um right there's a there's an old um business thing whereas uh uh the costco warehouse stores sell these rotisserie chickens for 4.99 they're like a pound and a half to two pound big giant rotisserie chickens and people flock to them and costco loses money on every single one they sell but they don't care because they sell memberships and they sell other stuff in the store i don't think apple's losing money

49:03apple does not generally do that but i also i i wonder if its margins are the same 35 that it gets on other products because you know you're right it once you you get that neo in front of you and you start using it like dang that's it you got an apple customer for life it's different than an iphone because the mac in my mind is more of a of a lifestyle thing like people go buy iphones they'll

49:34use a pc they'll use a chromebook but that mac is the halo product that connects to everything yeah that actually a good that was a good wrap-up to jump into apple history apple history so an apple

Apple History

49:50history on may 19th 2001 so 25 years ago the first apple store opened in tyson's corner which is a shopping mall in tyson's virginia yeah which is about i think 20 to 30 minutes from washington dc in the united states um of course yeah i did say car fights in the united states because david's here but not that he wouldn't know that but we do have international listeners i when david david

50:22is going to come on the show is like oh yeah we have international listeners i should i should make sure i'm fine anyways um so before the store so actually they opened two stores that day later on because of the time change uh difference uh later on that day uh apple opened a store in glendale california um we actually have a first person's account of that glendale opening on our website i'll

50:53put a link to it it's it was written by serenity caldwell who's now at apple uh doing developer relations so it's an interesting how how far is um glendale from like san francisco or la i don't know much about those oh yeah so it's it's it's like 400 miles south of it yeah it's pretty far california is big so i know yeah yeah it's like six hours away okay um do you know why it chose those two it sounds like relatively would it be fair to say obscure locations i i have a thought unless roman

51:31does no go ahead um i think that they weren't sure this would be a success and the rents in in tyson virginia and glendale california are a lot less than san francisco and new york city so they wanted it's kind of like a beta you know they had to see back in 2001 they were shutting down pc stores gateway stores were huge and then they weren't and everyone said that steve jobs was nuts for opening brick and mortar shops right when the online boom was happening and you know he doesn't get enough

52:02credit for the genius that was an apple store in 2001 opening the first apple store in 2001 because um you know buying apple products before that you would go to comp usa or micro center or something and they would have like a little section off to the back sometimes they would be working sometimes they were and sometimes they were nicely manicured sometimes they were just a mess controlling that experience and the the product and the and the light that they presented their products in

52:33was just a total stroke of genius yeah prior to that like apple had sections yeah big box stores like remember i don't know if anyone remembers comp usa yeah sure i i yeah yeah um before the tyson's corner store opened uh they did a apple did a video actually i don't know if apple did the video or if it was done for a news i think it was a news program i know i know which one you're

53:06talking about in tyson's corner with steve jobs doing the tour and the one thing that was remarkable about that is that the apple store is kind of not changed very much over the years in terms of its basic structure the furnishings has changed the tables and stuff yep yeah that's changed but the and you know they used to actually have this was kind of surprising to see they used to actually used to have like a bookshelf you can buy computer books yeah but that's totally gone now uh the big

53:38thing they had was they had a uh a movie theater in the back of the store yeah with like plus sheets and stuff the way they showed like um well i think they actually showed maybe keynotes here and there but they would show like right demonstration videos and product videos and stuff yeah um but the basic structure like you know like a table of some sort and that style has changed over the years but the apple products are there and you can you know pick them up and look at them you know and then like like

54:09the uh the store clerks don't really they're not really intrusive they're like don't reach you yep yep but they won't pester you like in some other stores so like the whole basic philosophy of the store the whole basic structure of it hasn't changed very much since it's true i think they've gone back and forth with the genius bar like that's come and gone like they took it away they took it away for a while but then they brought it back to some stores yeah yeah um so i remember when uh the

54:43apple stores were first starting to sprout up if i was in vicinity of apple store because of what i did for a living i felt obligated to go visit it even though there was you know what i mean on opening day they used to give out t-shirts i don't think they do that anymore they did that for a while where they gave out uh my first the first apple store i went to first one that was near me was in um tice's corner oh yeah strip mall in woodcliff lake new jersey uh it opened on november 3rd 2001

55:18and what's interesting about that is it was a week before the ipod hit shelves i think it hit shelves on the 10th or the 9th or something and while i was waiting online some like an apple guy came out and showed us all like let us use the ipod it wasn't available for sale for another couple days but he let us all kind of touch it and put the earbuds in and stuff it was the coolest thing that ever happened to me at the time my life my wife my life's gotten better since then but um like it was

55:52like oh my god i got to use an ipod before you know my friends um i go into i agree roman going to an apple store like it's not so much anymore but 20 years ago like it was a big freaking deal when an apple store opened within shouting distance david what was the first one that you i'm assuming it's a bunch in london or or or near you now but do you remember when they opened the first one i think there's about five now yeah um i i can't remember when they opened the

56:22because there was two for a long while there was the two regent street and covent garden and i went to the one um on regent street for the launch of the first iphone in 2007 not the actual launch people on macworld uk were covering that i was on pc advisor at the time so i went there for the briefing uh and i wrote about it on on the site afterwards about the experience of it and it's a little bit like um that that architectural or that medieval stonemasons were going for with

56:58cathedrals i went there and i was fighting so hard to be objected because it was so intimidating and so glorious almost going into this so you had the regent street store and then they had the headquarters behind which has since moved to battersea uh i don't know if you've seen be familiar with but battersea power station yeah it was big he's flung up to the sky it's even more intimidating and amazing now um it's just this amazing experience and it's amazing as you said

57:31um conceptual leap to think um everybody's closing their stores they're not making money what if we had stores right and be able to buy them up quite easily because everybody else is closing down theirs sure is this community hub is this um way of um materializing what the company means and sort of and then showing you know showing it as a sort of idealized apple users home almost or like a like a gentleman's club or yeah yeah we we really should mention ron johnson who

58:07was brought in from target he's the guy that basically invented the idea steve jobs said we should do this and then ron johnson was brought and dealt with all the details and he wanted to make them like public buildings like libraries um like theaters he that was what his his influence was it wasn't other shops it wasn't a commercial experience that's what he said the employees should not be selling they should be helping right just there as a comfortable experience it is amazing and

58:42yeah a very smart move to think so far you know so much against the tide of popular thinking at the time they still don't feel like stores in the sense that i go to a grocery store and there's the shelves of stuff and you pick the thing it's just like you're walking into someone's living room and they just happen to have a bunch of macs on the table so just to wrap up the apple store stuff uh i actually did an interview with a guy named gary allen who used to run a website called ifo apple store.com

59:16ifo stood for in front of and this was back in the day when apple stores were opening up and people would you know gather at the apple store there'd be like a couple you know a thousand people sometimes at these openings and he would go and actually cover them yeah he passed away a few years ago um but so the funny thing is when i was prepping for this apple history thing i thought oh yeah i did that interview with gary that must have been like what five years ago it was actually

59:48during the 10th anniversary so it was 15 years ago when i interviewed him yeah so i'll put a link to that in the uh show notes in the description if you want to check that out uh check go to your apple store and wish them a happy anniversary yeah today no not when you're listening to it but when we're recording it uh let's go on to comment corner we've got a few comments on uh one is from christopher via spotify he said i find it hilarious how people are comparing the macbook neo to chromebooks

1:00:24in retrospect i can see why they are comparing both of those machines even though they are not the same thing i agree they're not but it's inevitable to compare the two because right it's this it's a similar audience that apple is targeting yeah dark fairy one two three four on tiktok said that nobody wants ai on their phone i don't know how true that is but yeah i mean we just talked about 45 minutes about

1:00:56that stuff and yeah yeah i i don't think it's true that nobody wants ai i think a lot of people want ai in their phones it does feel like you know is it something that people want or is it something that these companies want to work on and they're pushing it onto the customer i i don't know because i always hear people say i don't want ai but it's maybe it's just because they're the most vocal people do you know what i mean they're the ones everyone you only hear the complaints you never hear the compliments

1:01:27kind of thing sure so i have met a lot of people who insist on telling me all about their ai experiences yeah um despite the fact that i make it very clear very very that i don't like it um i think there is a lot of people out there that want ai on their phone i don't and i i think there's quite a few people like me who don't um but the companies at the moment are trying to walk a tightrope i suppose between those two potentially quite vociferous camps and as you said roman their own

1:02:02sort of agenda of of needing to be seen to make ai in order to make um shareholders happy right yeah i wouldn't agree with nobody warwick howell via facebook said that what apple has done is kind of genius they've let other companies spend billions on developing a infrastructure come along a couple of years later and just licensed that tech no risk in owning developing and maintaining the infrastructure just a license fee i don't think apple planned it that way i don't either but i think that they also

1:02:35didn't i don't know it's we could talk for a whole nother show about this i said it at the time when they announced apple intelligence at wwdc in 2024 i felt like they were forced to do it earlier than they wanted to because it just didn't and then that was you know we obviously realized quickly that it wasn't even done but i do think they were developing it but they always were developing it i think they were forced to brand it as something that that wall street and shareholders could

1:03:09like like like a tangible thing that they could grasp on to i think all of these things were in development regardless of the ai boom because apple didn't like they always did little ai things like it's always been there or they called it machine learning at the time but but it's been part of the iphone part of the mac and part of the devices for for for years i think that what they were forced to do is was branded into a suite of products that are kind of cobbled together and they got lucky

1:03:42in the sense that there's so many competing ai companies that are moving so fast the public face is chat gbt and x and or x ai and and open ai and they're the ones that are taking all the hits while apple kind of sits in the background and says okay well we're not going to do that we're not going to do that we're not going to do that and it could it could have been a big black eye for them i don't think they planned it that way but um they it's it's definitely worked out but um the the macalope writes about this far too often but he uh hey can i say he is it is is it a gender specific

1:04:20thing roman i don't i think i think i think the macalope is a he i edit the macalope i should know if macalope is a here or she i believe the macalope is a he they usually refer themselves in the third person right they always refer themselves as the macalope or like the like the the the horned one or something but um anyway um they they they write about this often in the sense that you know you know apple missed the boat but that's totally fine because the boat didn't go very far and the ones

1:04:53that did are sprung a bunch of leaks so it's it's cool i think it was a bit of a black eye maybe it is a bit of a black eye yeah i think there was a quite a long period where people were regularly taking uh pot shots at apple for not having initially for not having any ai contender and then for having a half-baked poor ai contender um i think it's it's kind of worked out now but um i think that i mean they go for a while they're they're worth four and a half trillion dollars and

1:05:29sold more iphones than ever last quarter it appears that it worked out but yeah i i hear what you're saying uh we'll wrap up the comments with one from danny via spotify uh danny says we get comments on spotify yes you get comments on spotify so feel free to comment on spotify if you're listening to spotify i know i say it every week but i never actually thought people used to uh danny said all i want is ios and mac os to get fixed uh the 26 os has killed all my devices my m1 air and 13 pro worked

1:06:04fine before that after upgrading their hot garbage you know we always encourage people to update as soon as you can because the security fixes uh the other side of that is we i often do hear some somebody always comes up to me here in the office you know it's like i updated and now am i so and so won't work so it does happen so and i don't know if it that if it is the uh os update that's causing that

1:06:37uh it's hard to say but yeah particularly when you're dealing with five or six year old devices like right it's tough because you want the security and you want the new features and but with this particular one with tahoe and ios 26 there were so many like graphical updates upgrades rather it it did it did wreak a little bit of havoc on some some older phones um we're hoping that ios 27 mac os 27 fixes that that's the word around the street but um you know so hang in there

1:07:12with your uh hot garbage phones uh that does it for comment corner all right that does it for this episode of the mac world podcast episode number 984 16 away thank you jason oh my god jason thank you david look at me i changed everything about this except the stupid name thank you david i appreciate it despite the fact that i called you jason i do appreciate it when you come on this was a lot of

1:07:43fun um we we always seem to have you on for like these like serious discussions like we should have you on for something that's more fun than gemini i think the last time was something ai or something related you oh you probably remember david what did we talk about last time do you remember the 50 50 most important people wasn't it for that one right so that was also like very like we need to have something where we just talk about something that just like like a new iphone or something

1:08:13thank you and uh thank you to the audience to oh my god roman

1:08:22you don't have to thank you i get paid to do this so you don't have to thank me

1:08:28all right good thank you listeners and viewers for tuning in you can subscribe to the macro podcast and a podcast app on spotify which now has video and comments apparently so watch and comment um on youtube at the podcast channel or through any other podcast app if you have any comments or questions contact us to contact us through blue sky facebook threads search for macworld look for the blue mouse logo send an email to podcast and macworld.com send a comment under a video comment under a post comment

1:08:59on spotify and we will talk about them on a future show and you can join us

1:09:08uh so next week we're going to talk about we're going to start a wwdc preview i think roman is that correct yes yeah yes so we have a couple weeks of that before the um before the keynote so you can join us in the next episode of the macro podcast because if you talk about everything as you talk about everything let's talk about wwdc stuff see you next time

1:09:50okay uh my mouse has been malfunctioning so hopefully i can stop this let's see it's interesting

1:10:04is it because you updated mac os

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