Amazon's Alexa+ vs Siri, iPhone 16e Reviews, ChatGPT Deep Research is Actually Great

People break down into two groups when they experience something lucky: one group sees it as a sign, while the other sees it as luck.

Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. This week, Amazon had a big event to release Alexa Plus, their AI voice assistant. We're going to talk about that, plus the iPhone 16e reviews (which dropped at the weirdest embargo time ever!), iOS 18.4 beta release news, plus Food (big changes to Vision OS 2.4), ChatGPT deep research coming to more plans, and more.

This episode is exclusively brought to you by you, the members who support us directly. So thank you for that! I'm one of your hosts, St. Roz, on a new mic, so let me know how it sounds. Joined by my friend Jason Aon. How's it going, Jason?

Well, I'm very confused because I'm looking through our rundown because I swear I heard you say "News + Food," and I'm not sure—I'm like, "Wait, are we—what are we going to talk about, News + Food?" That's what Apple's—yeah, Apple's News Room article—it's literally News + Food, so there you go. Uh, I'm using a new—this is a—they sent this to me. I like it; it's very cool-looking microphone. And so, listeners, as you… ingest this episode (which is a weird way to say it; I don't know why I did that), but let me know how this sounds because I'm curious. If I want to… listen… consume… I mean, the people who are listening can just tell you what it sounds like; those of us who are watching can give you other types of feedback about the vibe you have going on there. The vibe, yes. Let me know on the vibes, Jason. I… I again missed the movie quote last week, asking if you knew what movie it was from, so let's do last week first, where I said, "All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain." Time to die. That was last week's movie quote. What is that from? Wasn't it *Blade Runner*?

That's exactly right; that's *Blade Runner*. And uh, I did the "Time to die" because we talked about the Humane AI pin last week. I feel like… like that was… a-po… I don't have as good of a connection this week, but this week's quote: "One group sees it as a sign, while others see it as luck." Do you know what that's from? Um, only because you reread it, 'cause I knew it was an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I'm pretty sure it's *Signs*.

That's exactly right, which, by the way, is the worst M. Night Shyamalan movie. I'm going to take a hard disagree because I rewatched it. It may not be the worst one. It is the worst of the original set of them. Are you counting *Lady in the Water* in that original set? No, I'm counting like *Unbreakable*, uh, what's the… the… it was *The Village*. Do you count *The Village* in that? *The Village* is better than *Signs*. I think… listen, I'm just going to say this: I have not seen *Signs* in a long time. I rewatched it with my two older kids; one of them is now traumatized because of the shadowy figure on the roof, but I really enjoyed rewatching that, and I find that to be a good movie. It would have been 47,000% better had they never shown you… 100%! 100%! That's the thing! That's the thing! The rest of the movie, phenomenal, but then it's like, "Oh, this was the reveal." We did not need—if they had not shown the spoiler for this 24-year-old movie—but if they had not shown the alien at the end, it would have been way better.

100% agree! But it's a very good movie. It's a very good movie. By the way, the same thing is true of the new Apple TV+ movie, *The Gorge*, if there's… which is actually three movies; two of which are pretty entertaining, one of which is like, "Why, anyway?" Yeah, I'm surprised how many people… I think this is going to have to be our bonus episode. I want to talk about Apple TV+ stuff because Louis, in the community, gave us an Apple TV show ranking of Apple TV+ original shows, and I have to take some issues with it. So I think that's going to be our bonus episode today. I think he made up three of them, but yeah, anyway. Yeah, it does sound like that. Listen, so many of you showed out because last week we talked about how we dropped from a five- to a 4.9-star podcast, and so many of you rushed in to leave wonderful reviews. So we're going to do a lightning round; I'm going to run through everyone who left us five stars. But still, I have a suspicion—I can confirm this—I think William Gallagher is creating burner Apple IDs just to leave us one-star reviews. I'm not sure; I cannot confirm, but we're still a 4.9 show. So if you haven't yet, if you could go leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts… but everyone who did that this week: Pineapple667 from the USA, Battery Percentage on E, and he thinks the iPhone 16e—it stands for "economic," okay—is that—do you think his—do you think his Apple ID is a *Severance* reference? Pineapple667… that—wait, I thought it was a watermelon. No… P St Waffle Party… have you—are you actually caught up? Are you caught… no… they bob for pineapples. Oh, oh yeah, that's right. Okay. Anyway, TimTom76 from the USA said we're one of his favorite podcasts. DrummerMama from the USA: we're their favorite. Battery Percentage: iPhone in dominant pocket. JC from Germany said, "The other guy is all right, too." That's a—that's a reference. We know he's been listening for a while because he said "the other guy"—that hasn't been around for a minute—like… like that. That's it. Emma07CQC from Buenos Aires says Primary Tech is in their top three shows. Eugene Fry from the USA: mildest piece of technology is an iPhone 2G, would still turns on. Well, that would be an original iPhone, wouldn't it? Unless you meant 3G, but yeah, still turns on, has the old logos for Facebook, YouTube, and the App Store. Yep. And TobyS98 from the USA: Battery Percentage off. I wanted to end with that one. I have two—I have two bones to pick about this list of five-star reviews: we're in the—saying someone is definitely in the top three—like, why—why aren't we the number one? Why aren't we definitely the first? I will—I will settle for top three. Top three is wonderful. So then the other thing is, I—I started to feel like—I always thought that there was like two schools of theology when it comes to all of these things. There's—there's—there's Stepism… oh no… and then there's me—whatever the "other guy"-ism. Sure, right? You have Calvinism and Wesleyanism… whatever. Sure, sure, the "other guy"-ism. So like I felt like all of the thing… what I'm learning though is nobody subscribes to either of our schools of theology when it comes to all these things, 'cause they just mix and match whichever they feel like. You know, it's… I'm Battery Percentage on… good Apple volume in the correct direction… good phone in the dominant hand pocket… oh, forget it; you just lost your… they… we have a very diverse audience. You could do—do whatever you want, even if it's wrong. That's what I say. No, just kidding. That's relativism, I think. Yeah, that's right; pluralism. We're—listen, we're iPhone… Battery Percentage pluralists here. You could do whichever you like, although at Battery Percentage off is better. All right, we have to talk about the news, Jason, because Amazon… I just see how I just roll right past it. You should! Amazon had a big event. They did not stream it, which I felt was very strange. The event was yesterday, Wednesday, and I kept searching for like, "Amazon livestream," "Amazon event livestream"—there was no livestream. They did—there was not—they did not livestream this event. And then I tried to find some live blogs, which I should… did you ever follow like the live blogs back in the day?

Well, The Verge still does one, so they do one, and I went to The Verge and I clicked "live blog," and I could not find what I was used to. I had not looked at a live blog in years because I watched the livestreams of whatever these events are, and I was looking for just like the chat window with like the ongoing chat, and I couldn't find it. They—I mean, it—it looks a little different now, but they do basically do that, but it kind of looks more like—it looks very similar to like their quick post format, and some of them actually then just like link out to an article that they've written about whatever's happening. Yes, the older formats felt more like in-the-moment live reaction, so like the—the New York Times still does that for things like confirmation hearings where you just see like a stream of people… you know what I mean? Less—less exciting, but no, I know. I was trying to think of the example for it, but like, I—I agree, but like The Verge still does it; there's some other places that still kind of do it, but honestly, like now you—if you really want to follow the live blog of something, you have to follow six people on Twitter, three people on Threads, and then a Mastodon server. Well, and that—that's basically what I ended up doing because I was like—I was frustrated with the live blog situation. I was like, "Well, I guess I'll just see what people post on social media," and people did. People posted, and basically the news is Amazon has announced Alexa Plus, which is their LLM-powered voice assistant. It is $20 a month if you want to actually just pay for it and you're not subscribed to Amazon Prime, but if you pay for Amazon Prime, it's just included. So if you already pay for it, this is just something that you can access. It is on basically the web, Fire TVs, and a lot of recent Echo Shows and even just Echoes without screens if you wanted to use that. And it showed off—they basically showed off a bunch of things that it could do, and frankly, it was pretty impressive. Uh, there's a little demo video; I'll link to this page on Amazon so you can check it out, but you know, it can do things like keep track of your events and tasks and all that, but because it also keeps track of your conversations, if you were at home and you were asking it about some hardware part 'cause you were trying to fix the sink, and then you go to the hardware store, you can basically open the Alexa app on your iPhone and ask it, "What was it that I was trying to remember?" and it will like have that contextual awareness, which is pretty impressive. So it's across all those devices. The demo video—one of the more impressive things I saw—it was like the guy asked, "Did someone let the dog out?" and I imagine if you have your Nest cameras around or Ring cameras, the assistant was able to say, "Yes, it looks like [dog's name] went out," and I was like, "That blew my mind!" Because I'm like, "Of course," like you have all that information. Even Apple Home has that information; it can recognize people through the cameras; there's facial recognition; it knows when there's motion; supposedly recognizes animals, but to be able to ask your voice assistant, "Did someone let the dog out?" and it just know… it looked very impressive. It also went through this like planning-a-vacation thing, which is like what the Rabbit R1 promised and it could never do, and it proba—this Alexa Plus could probably do that, and it was—it looked impressive. Uh, just seeing it from the outside, what did you think when you saw this?

Well, I also tried to find a livestream, and I didn't even try to get an invitation to the event because I assumed there would be a livestream, right? And then I was like, "Oh, well, that was dumb," did not plan that very well. So I—so I spent a lot of time trying to get caught up on what the heck actually happened because it did seem like really they only introduced basically one thing. I think there might have been a new product other than Alexa Plus. Is that true? A website and a new app. The website, the app… yeah, but all the shows and stuff, it's the same. Okay, you're probably right. It was very confusing. And so I do think the demos were really convincing. I was a little bit—I'm a little apprehensive because what I have read of reviews, all of the people who went to the demo area were not actually allowed to do demos; only the Amazon people, PR people, were able to like walk them through a demo. So the thing seems like it was pretty much on the rails. That's not super surprising because I've never been to a tech—like product launch like this where you could—you can walk up and pick up an iPhone, but like you're still going to be limited in terms of the things that you can do on these products because it's just not—it hasn't been launched publicly yet. And so that's great, and they know that in that environment you have people that are just literally going to try to get it to flirt with them, like, you know what I mean? Like that's the only thing you're going to have someone from The New York Times trying to do. So I—I—I thought it was interesting. I think that is, you know, Amazon—I think you could make the argument for a while was way behind—way behind. I mean, Alexa was like—of all of the voice assistants, I think most people generally think that Amazon's is maybe the smartest, but you had to like say the right combination of incantations in order to get it to do the thing you wanted. But if you did that, boom, it would do that, and then it would try to sell you toilet paper. And whatever you just described a scenario where it would remember the part that you needed, and I'm like, "Yeah," and four of them just showed up at your house while you were at the—at the hardware store. Right. Right. But that is like the killer feature of this: Amazon has all of these things already built together, and they've built partnerships with—I mean, there—going to be available on Sonos speakers, right? You'll be able to communicate with Alexa Plus on Sonos devices. I thought, "Oh, was…" Okay. Yep. Well, maybe not all of them, but—but and then you—but it also has integrations with Ticketmaster. Okay, that's good. But you know, Uber, Advisor, OpenTable, all the Priceline, all these different things, and so far we haven't really seen that happen with your beloved Humane pin, Rabbit, the Rabbit, or for that matter, Apple intelligence, right? And so I think that's the biggest difference, you know, the Rabbit R1 didn't have partnerships except, you know, they were basically using Spotify and a browser on some server somewhere because there wasn't that direct integration. So the Alexa Plus service (which I'm sorry if I'm setting off your voice assistant; I'll try to stop saying it), you know, these are actual partnerships, so they actually integrate. So this should, unlike the Rabbit R1, if you want to order some food through your Echo Show, it will actually work, supposedly. But this is powered by—Amazon has said multiple LLMs; they claim to be LLM-agnostic, although a lot of people thought it was more Claude-sounding. Apparently, you know, people who use that one, it seems like that's the predominant LLM, but I think the main thing is if this is as smart as the—the demos say—I mean, this totally wipes the floor with Apple's voice assistant because we'll get to some examples in a moment of that. My biggest thing is, for someone like me, like this is interesting; like I'm almost thinking maybe I get an Echo Show to like try this out and see like how smart is this. Like you can buy the Show 8 for 150 bucks, and that will work with the new Alexa Plus, but in my mind I'm like, the only way this is really useful is if it knows all my stuff, so I—I can imagine I can log into my calendar so it has my events, probably some emails because I think I can do some stuff with that, but then like my smart home—do I—can I even connect all the stuff I have to the Amazon smart home stuff? Will it be able to—I don't know—like I'm not sure how much integration there can be because Amazon doesn't have like a phone hardware that you're signing into all this stuff and has access to it. So I'm curious how that would work. Probably need to get one to just see how easy or difficult it is, but it's curious, and I would love to see like how good is this thing, even general knowledge. Yeah, so I think—okay, I think there's a couple of interesting things happening here. The first one is Amazon has—even though they were probably behind—they have an enormous advantage; they've sold over 500 million Alexa-enabled devices, right? And you can—and people are—the thing is like ChatGPT, great, you can load it on your Mac, you can use it in a browser, you can get the app on your phone, and that's fine, and people are used to typing to it, and people are used to like talking and like to transcribe things, and that's great, but do you know what people are super used to doing? Shouting at their Echo from across the room, right? Like it is a thing—people are—I hear my kids every single morning, "Alexa, stop!" because their alarm goes off, right? "Alexa, set an alarm," "Alexa, what's the temperature?" People are so used to doing that that this is the ultimate like scenario where this becomes like a mainstream feature is when the thing you're shouting at is actually capable of doing something other than just telling you a sports score, especially because you don't care about any of the sports scores, right? So that's—I went to an NBA game last week; that's going to come up in the bonus episode. I can't believe it, anyway. But I—that's—that's the first thing. The second thing is, and I cannot figure this out: Stephen H.—they're charging $20 a month for this if you're not a Prime subscriber. Do you know how much Prime costs? Is it like $150 a year? It's $4.99 a month, and it includes Alexa Plus, or you can just buy Alexa Plus for $19.99. Stephen—I mean, listen, we're not mathematicians—no, but I promise you Amazon does not want anyone to pay for this, right? Yeah, I don't understand. You could pay $20 for this thing, or you could just keep paying us the $14–$15 a month you've been paying for the last 16 years, and we'll just give it to you for free. That—what is going on, Stephen? That is an amazing pricing strategy. I don't get it. I don't… yeah, I don't know how they do that. Would… well, I was going to make a comparison to Apple's—it doesn't even—it's not even like they're trying to convince people to pay for Prime because everyone already pays for Prime. Yeah, it's like Prime Video, which I think we had one person reach out and said, "Yeah, I pay for Prime Video," but it's only because they're like in another country and Prime shipping isn't available, so it's not worth it. So maybe it's that—maybe it's internationally like… but I don't know. I will—this work internationally? I don't know; that's a good question. So I don't know. It—I will say the voice sounds very natural; it sounds—I think—way better than a lot—it sounds kind of like the—the ChatGPT voice conversation; like it sounds that natural. It also did things like—in the video—said, "Billy Eilish is doing a concert nearby; do you want me to get tickets for you?" or something, and it's like, "Wow, that's pretty crazy!" Like if it could just preemptively know—probably because you're playing music through the speaker, it knows the artist you're interested in—like that's very curious. So want to know how smart this is. That's cool, and I—it is amazing seeing if—if this is capable of all the things Amazon says, how behind Apple's assistant really is. And I don't know about you, Jason, I—I use Apple's voice assistant for basically one thing now, which is smart home control, because anytime I ask it something else, it's getting real rough. It's getting rough. And Gruber—actually, he had Paul Kafasis, who is the founder of Audio Hijack (which we're using to record the audio version of the show right now), but he had Paul Kafasis, and they were talking about asking the voice assistant questions about the Super Bowl and past Super Bowls and who won certain games, and Apple's assistant was just wildly off most of the time; like it was just spewing wrong information. And Paul Kafasis has pointed out that there was actually a Newsroom article years ago—from 2018—where Apple specifically stated, "Now you can ask our voice assistant… to [get] sports scores and Super Bowl history information." So it's like Apple said to do this, and now it's just giving wrong information. And I will even say, from my perspective, uh, there's a weird reason why we do this, but I have to find out how many days it has been since a certain date—pretty much daily—is the thing we do with the kids; it's complicated. So I would ask the voice assistant, "How many days has it been since July 14th?" I just would ask it that, and up until recently, the voice assistant would just tell me—like—I would ask my iPhone, and it would just say, "It's been 100-something days," and for some reason in the last couple of months, it refuses to do that anymore, and it literally falls back to ChatGPT. So I will ask my phone that, and then I see the little banner come down, and it says "Asking ChatGPT," and ChatGPT answers me—gets it right every time. And as Gruber and Paul Kafasis were saying, ChatGPT got all the sports stuff right, even asking it obscure like, "What high school football team won their state championship in 19 whatever?" and ChatGPT gets it right. And so it's—it's not looking good, Jason. I don't know what to do.

I know. It is an interesting thing that uh, Amazon first said they were going to do this like what—18 months ago? Two years ago, something like that? And they were able to pull this thing off. Grok xAI—like it took them 18 months to build a flagship LLM for Grok. And listen, say what you want about xAI, but most of the people who have used it say that it's as good, if not better, than any of the other flagship models. They did that in 18 months. Apple is the most valuable company on the face of the Earth, and they made a whole bunch of promises about what they were going to do, and they—and they can't… we got Jen Emoji; that's it. Oh well. And—and it was—a lot of the rumors were that 18.4 would bring the voice assistant integration improvements, the semantic index, all the things that Apple showed off almost a year ago now at WWDC, and we still have not seen any of those. So we're going to talk about 18.4 in a minute, but yeah, it's pretty wild. So you—you have Alexas right around your house?

Well, we have Echo—we have three Echo—Echo Dots—the ones that have the—actually four of them—the ones that have like a clock on them because they're like a perfect little alarm clock. They play a little bit of music; the kids can ask it some questions, right? Um, but you know, we're a—we're a—we're what did you call it? A—uh—a… uh… polytheistic family. We have Echo; we have Google stuff. Poly-assistant family. Yes, we are. The word—at first—the word that first came to mind was "poly"—but that's not—that's totally—totally different—multiple—something else. Apple… poet… is G—give us an explicit rating now. We have Google—we have Google Nest things; we have the Echo things, and we have HomePods. Well, anyway, I—I think I'm going to get an Echo Show. I'm going to try this out. I might break my entire smart home trying to get my devices to work with multiple systems, but I'm—I'm going to do it. I—I don't think—that's an interesting point—I don't think Alexa or Amazon is interested at all in anyone switching over, like because I mean you probably are one of the very few households in America that doesn't have at least—I mean, they will send you an Echo for free if you buy Weet-Bix; they'll just put it in the box. And it's just like—I have—I literally have an E—I have an Echo, but it's like one of the older—just the cylindrical speakers; it's like seven years old now. I did enjoy playing Jeopardy on it; I will tell you that. Uh, but I just haven't had it set up recently. So anyway, Alexa Plus, we'll see how it is when it comes out. iPhone 16e—uh, we have found out how it is because the weirdest embargo ever for an Apple product. I feel like—I don't know if there's ever been one like this: 9:00 p.m. Eastern last night, the embargo dropped, and uh, the iPhone 16e reviews are now out. MKBHD, Brian Tong, The Verge—all the reviews came out, which—I mean, if you have MKBHD wearing a fake mustache, uh, you know, you really challenged him to make an interesting video about your product—a fake mustache on top of a real mustache, you know, 'cause he has a… yeah, he… anyway. And uh, I actually think his intro to his video is very good because he basically pretends to be a customer asking for a phone that's exactly $600 and has these exact features, but not MagSafe and not the other things, because as he goes on to say—I'll just—I link the video in this—in the show notes; you should watch it—but he's pretending to be the customer to be like, "I want an iPhone has a 48-megapixel camera, this and that," and he's like, "Well, great, that's the iPhone uh, 15 whatever," or even like the 14 Pro—like you can find all the different phones that have more features for the same price, and so why would you get the 16e? The only thing—well, even Apple Intelligence, you can still get a 15 Pro likely for 600 bucks renewed, so you just really have to want a very particular set of features that also lack MagSafe and ultrawide, and that's why you would get the 16e, I guess. But I mean, there are probably some Dynamic Island haters out there who would just prefer a notch—that would be something I would love to hear if there—and all three of them are thrilled now that there is finally a phone for them, right? No, that's probably not the case at all. The only other time I can think of a uh, like—no one probably—no one listening to this cares about review embargos, but it is weird that Mo—normally this sort of thing happens like where we'll say, "We will—we're happy to send you something to look at; we would just prefer you not post anything about it until after this time," and that time is usually like in the morning on a given day of the week, something like that, right? And so this one was clearly very different, and I don't—the only other time I can think of when anything similar to that happened was like when they did the—I think it was the MacBook Pros, and they showed that event in the evening. If you remember that—they showed that video like 8:00… yeah, but they had given briefings to everybody earlier in the day, and they're like, "All this stuff we're talking about, please don't write about it or publish it until the event goes live," or that kind of thing. But even then, once the people had the product, reviews that embargo was like back to normal. And so it's—it is very kind of an interesting thing, and I honestly think they like—they're just like, "Let's just—let's just try something different. Like let's just do something different." Yeah, we'll see. I mean, the phone is available to everyone tomorrow, Friday, February 28th. I think I'll actually be getting one, and I'm going to run an experiment to see… uh, well, I don't want to give it away; I won't give it away. So just—anyway, watch my channel 'cause I'm going—I'm going to try something interesting with it. Curious to try it out. It doesn't look real clean. I like the look of that back—like with the one camera—it looks clean. Not that I would ever want to use it personally, but looks cool. Just say—I'm just—just throwing that out there. All right, some other quick news: Photoshop is officially on iPhone. This is like the Photoshop iPhone app. I saw a couple of people on social media—like the developers—saying they've been working on it for multiple years, and it is an $8 monthly subscription plan uh, if you want the premium features uh, in the app, but you know, previously Adobe has a bunch of apps on the iPhone; they have like Adobe Rush, Adobe Spark, I think it is, for different things, but I believe this—you know, this is it—this is the official Photoshop app on iPhone. Pretty… that's great. Yeah, cool. I mean, Adobe is like known for—you stick a word after the word "Adobe," and there's probably an app on the iPhone that includes that combination. Spark—whatever you just said—I'm gonna—like—I've heard that—I have not had a chance to play with it. From what I've heard from people who have it, it's really good. That does not surprise me because the Lightroom app on the iPhone is phenomenal; it is like so much better than the Photos app—like in almost everything. And so it—the only downside is it doesn't—it doesn't allow you to store your things locally if you wanted to; that automatically stores them in the cloud, so you have to pay for cloud storage. But anyway, I—I think it'll be—I think this really interesting; I'm looking forward to playing with it. Yeah, it does look… I don't like that $8 monthly subscription. If you're already paying for Creative Cloud, does it—is it included if you pay for Creative Cloud? At least I imagine so. The only… oh yeah, yeah. All current Photoshop paid plans already include… yeah, so if you already have a subscription, though, you're—you're good; they're not going to gouge you that much. If you're already subscribed to Prime, you don't also have… it's not exactly… we've switched—we've switched… sorry… sure. Uh, another weird Apple release: the betas for 18.4 beta 1 came out last Friday, the day after we recorded our episode. Typically, betas come out like on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—not a Friday—not a Friday afternoon, but we got 18.4, which—there's not a ton of big features. I did a whole video talking about, you know, the big features you—you might see; there's like ambient music, Control Center things, and all that, but the biggest—and this was—this is how I said it in the intro—"News + Food." Apple introduces News + Food, and this—I think—is—is telling in regards to what it might mean for Apple's feature products. And so in 18.4, if you're an Apple News+ subscriber, there's going to be a new food section in the app that basically contains like recipes and stuff, and it's actually very nicely designed. You have like the ingredient list; you have the steps; you can save recipes to your recipe catalog. I'll put a link to my video because I show you kind of like the whole deal. Uh, but then you can share recipes, of course, but one of the cool things is you can actually go into like this reader mode when you're looking at a recipe, and it'll actually uh, give you like the option to set timers right there in the app. And so you could be following along, and this would be perfect on a screen that's like sitting on your counter or whatever, and so it will create those timers; it actually labels the timers as like "Step 1," "Step 2," or whatever, and so you can follow along in this reader mode, set the timers with a tap just right there, jump over to the ingredients and directions. This is like a really nice recipe app uh, that you can curate them, save them, categorize them, and there's even like—you can browse by recipes that take under 30 minutes or recipes that are vegan, and so you have all those categories as well on the recipe catalog. This—I mean, Jason, the long-rumored HomePod with a screen-type device—this is—this is the thing; this is the use case; this is perfect for that.

That's true, because you know—you know, we don't all have iPhones already; iPad… Listen! Listen! Hold on! First, hold on! Explain to me this… Uh-huh. Apple launches a separate recipe app that could have just been part of the Calendar app, but this is a part of News+. Yeah, that is—what in the world is this, Stephen? Launch a standalone app? You had not explained this to me; I would have never come across this ever. No chance that I would ever look at it. Also, you know what this would be a fantastic app for? The Vision Pro. Oh yeah, why? And the—I'm sorry, but the—the UI on that timer thing is like the most janky-looking thing; it looks like a little—it looks like something my 13-year-old made in Scratch—like that's what it looks like. It's a little—it's a little rough. I mean, the high… but it's beta—it's beta. Well, you know, it could change by the public release. I just don't understand: why is this a part of News+, Stephen? If you can't explain that to me, then… Oh, I can explain it with one word, Jason: subscriptions. Is this a subscription feature? You can only access it if you're subscribed to News+, so which—I mean, I guess they could have

I think it's great to have a standalone app where people can experience all of that for themselves. In addition to that app, there's going to be a standalone Vision Pro app on the iPhone, much like you have an Apple Watch app on your iPhone for managing your watch. This will be an app on your phone where you can save immersive content or apps and send them to your Vision Pro. I love this because sometimes I'll see an app or some immersive content coming up and think, "I'm not going to charge my Vision Pro and put it on just to download the app right now." But if I could use my phone to send stuff to it, then next time I put it on—which is like once every other week or month—it'll be ready. Every day, Stephen? Come on. Still every day? Still every day for you, pretty much? Yeah, pretty much. I bought a stand for the Apple Vision Pro; I'll talk about it when I get it. I'm going to put the Apple Vision Pro on my desk, sitting there all the time, ready at a moment's notice. I'm going to see if that encourages me to use it more. We'll see; you never know when you might need your Vision Pro in a hurry. Hopefully, that's never, because putting that thing on and getting it to boot up is… well, that's the thing, the boot-up process. But anyway, have you gotten the head strap for the Vision Pro? It's fantastic. That's fantastic. It makes a big difference. It's life-changing. It is very… well, I don't know about that, but it is very nice. I spend a lot of time in the Vision Pro; it's a big deal. Hold on, I want you to go back up, though, because I just wanted to clarify one thing. I don't think you said that the spatial gallery includes a bunch more immersive content. I think that part may not be necessarily true, because Apple distinguishes between immersive and spatial stuff. I'm not trying to be nitpicky, but I didn't want to make sure, because it's like spatial videos, which are the ones where you're looking at it and there's depth; it's kind of like a 3D video, as opposed to immersive, which is like you're in an experience. So I just wanted to clarify that part of it because… did you hear anything about more? Because the immersive stuff is what we really want. Please give us more of that; it's what we really want. I don't… new Apple immersive titles include… you know, they talk about *Ice Dive*, *Sharks*, *The Man*… like, I've seen all of these. Yeah, I've seen all… none of that's new. None of that's new. They're releasing immersive content; it feels a little closer to a weekly cycle, maybe every other week, but it's still not enough because they're also only 7 minutes long. Although, did you see that Apple's first feature-length immersive film is coming out? Oh, wait, you mean the submarine wasn't what they considered feature-length, like the 12-minute or 17-minute…? You didn't see this, Jon. I want you to… don't look; I want you to take a wild guess. It has to do with music. What do you think Apple's first full-length feature film is going to be in immersive video on Apple Vision Pro? It is going to be someone tuning Alicia Keys's piano, and he has to overcome obstacles… hours… he has to overcome a lot of life obstacles… and uh… no, Bono. See, I was in the right genre, at least. Bono. So many people were like, "Why can't Apple let this thing rest?" This was… and they're going to preload it on everyone's Vision Pro. That's… you're not going to be able to delete it whether you want it or not. You're not going to be able to delete it. This is going to be a premiere… perfect. It's set to premiere May 30th: Bono's *Stories of Surrender*. It's going to be an immersive first feature-length film available in Apple immersive video. So, you know, I wrote a story this morning about Johnny Ive and how Johnny Ive… Steve Jobs told him, you know, "Don't try to always… don't ask yourself the question, 'What would Steve do?' Don't do that." Like, Tim Cook tells the same story that the day before Steve Jobs died, he said, "Just do what's right. You know, don't worry about what I would do." Right. Someone wasn't paying attention because we're repeating the same mistakes from years ago. Come on! Like, it's… anyway, I like Bono; he's cool. That would not have been my first choice for… that's what I'm saying. But anyway, did you see the… the surfers, the ice surfers or whatever? Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. That was… I mean, the immersive videos look great. It's wonderful to watch them; they're just six minutes long. Uh, but anyway, there's one other part that will come in VisionOS 2.4, which is the guest user experience is going to be vastly improved. You know, right now, you, as the owner of the Vision Pro, have to put it on, unlock it, put it in guest mode, hand it to someone, and then they do their training thing. Well, come VisionOS 2.4, the guest… you can go straight to the guest putting on the Vision Pro, and then you'll be able to manage it from your iPhone to say, put it in guest mode, allow access to these apps. I believe it's even going to save some guest profiles, um, so if you have someone using it multiple times, it'll be easier to, you know, resume that session. So it'll make it easier to share the Vision Pro. I will say having one that is kind of one of the more fun experiences is like giving it to someone and saying, "Like, check this out," and watching their mind be blown in some immersive video. But anyway, that's Vision Pro. Yeah, we still have people… we have people living in my house right now; they're in my family. We don't just have people living in my house, but we have people who live in my house who have still not used the Vision Pro because it is such a pain in the butt to do this guest thing. Do they want to…? Are they like, "Dad, why haven't we finally used the Vision Pro?" I don't… no one has ever asked me that, but they also don't know exactly what they're missing, so they could have… Did you use it on the plane last weekend? The show's over; that's it. That's it. I did not. And not even to embarrass your daughter… I figured at least you want to know… What's the funny thing is I actually sort of planned to take it, but when my wife and I left the house, we also had to take the dog, suitcases for the kids when they got home from school, and all of our stuff, and I just… I forgot. Wow. Anyway, moving on. ChatGPT. Apparently, you can now use ChatGPT as your default search engine in Safari through a weird extension that the ChatGPT app now enables. So I actually tried this. You have to update to the latest version of the ChatGPT app on your iPhone or iPad. You have to go to the settings, apps, Safari extensions, and then on your iPhone or iPad, you can enable this extension. And basically what it does is like hijack the address bar, which… it's like you're choosing ChatGPT as your default search engine in the search engine picker, which, you know, you have like Google, DuckDuckGo, and all that. This is actually… when you type into that address bar, it redirects from the Google search to ChatGPT search and then opens ChatGPT in a browser with your search query, and it just goes that way. It is super janky. I immediately stopped; I turned it off because I couldn't even get to like normal websites where I would muscle memory like type the first few letters of the domain and hit go because I knew the Safari autofill would get it, uh, because I just go to those websites all the time, and this was like hijacking that process and was trying to do like ChatGPT searches with my three letters or whatever. So I turned it off, but interesting that this is like a little closer to… if you want a ChatGPT as your default search engine, which we're going to talk about the Deep research part in our personal tech, because you have that… you've been using that more… it's close… it's close to being able to use it as your search engine. Little easier. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of what it does in Chrome, right? It just… they release it, but this is on your iPhone, and I don't know that extensions for Safari are meant to exist on the iPhone, just to be honest. Some of them work okay. That'll be my… that's my glowing review. One. Let's see… what some of them don't brick your iPhone. Let's play this game, Jason. Go. Let's go to settings together on your iPhone. Great. We're going to go to apps because… so Safari is no longer in that main settings pane; you have to go to the apps down at the bottom. Pane is right… yep. Okay, we go… we go to Safari, and then we go to extensions, and let's see what extensions do we have installed and on for Safari. I will say I have So Noir. I have that extension, although I don't use it as much on my iPhone. I use Noir on the Vision Pro if I ever go into Safari, because if you ever have a stark white page load in Vision Pro and you weren't expecting it, you will be blinded. Uh, but Noir is good for forcing dark mode. I have ATU HTML, which is an extension that allows you to basically see the source code of a website from just by tapping the extension, which is pretty useful. I have Magic Lasso, which is an ad blocker, content blocker. I have OverPicture, which lets you put picture-in-picture mode on videos like on other websites, just… you know, kind of forces that. And Mapper. Mapper is an extension where if you search and there's a business or direction link that by default goes to Google Maps, the Mapper extension forces it to Apple Maps, and so you can tap any directions… like… if you do a Google search for a business and normally you would tap directions and it defaults to Google Maps, Mapper will force it to go to Apple Maps, and so I find that to be useful sometimes. How about you? Um, I have GoodLinks and… and OnePassword, and that's it. All right. I don't use Safari extensions… there… that's not… but I want to… you did make… because you made me open up the settings app. I do want to… this is the next thing I want people to tell us… Uh-huh. Do you have apps on your iPhone just automatically update whenever they feel like they should, or do you go into the App Store, see what apps want to update, and then update them manually? Essentially, right? Because I subscribe to the Gruber method of: let them accumulate, and then every week you kind of go in and you look to see what wants to be updated, and if you haven't used that app in like six months, not only do you not update it, you just delete the app. I just… I… I probably delete three apps a week. Okay, I do not do that. Maybe I should. I have mine auto-update, which… it auto-updates a lot of the time. Sometimes I don't ever want it to do that. I never want to be surprised when I turn on my… I'm like trying to tap on something, and hang on… I'm trying to download… I mean, usually it happens at night while your phone is charging; it's not usually… I will say, though, sometimes there's an update and it won't do it for you; you kind of have to like go to the App Store, go to the app, expand it, and then update. But anyway, no, I have it auto-update. Auto-update the apps. But let us know… leave us your five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. Tell us: auto-update apps or manual? That's… or N… or N… just put N. That's it. All right. Apple and the UK. We have to talk about this. We covered it last week where the UK was trying to… secretly force Apple… and I say secretly because it was leaked through various backdoor means… but uh… ironically, I said backdoor… the UK wanted Apple to create a backdoor to iCloud data that is encrypted… that so Advanced Data Protection on your phone… they basically want a backdoor to get around that, and not only for UK users, but the UK was saying they want it for worldwide, because… not just UK users, but everywhere. So we talked last week, and then a bunch of news came out after it. I think you predicted this; I think you said this that Apple would just pull Advanced Data Protection from the UK, and that's exactly what they did. So Advanced Data Protection: you cannot toggle it on in… if you're in the UK anymore. Didn't you… didn't you say that basically? Although… we… and we'll talk about this… I'm not sure that that's going to be the final outcome of this. So… right, probably not the final outcome. There's also an Apple Newsroom article where Apple goes on to say Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users, and I think it means that if you already had it enabled, it's not like Apple can turn it off for you. Well, that would literally be the backdoor. Think about that: they literally can't turn it off for you because, like, that's literally what they were asking them to be able to do is for Apple to go in and decrypt all this stuff. But if Apple doesn't have a key, they can't disable it. However, they… I'm sure that what they are going to do is to say none of your information will sync to iCloud anymore if you don't turn this feature off. Like, you're going to lose access to all of those services if you don't turn it off. And in fact, I think it says right there: UK users will be given a period of time to disable the features to keep using their iCloud account. So we just… we're just going to make… we're… they are going to force you, but Apple literally can't turn it off because that would… what the UK is asking… like, that's actually what they're asking for, right? Because it would be… imagine like if they're like, "So we're not going to build a backdoor, but what we will do is turn this feature off for all of you," and the UK would be like, "Literally, that's what we wanted you to do." They're like, "Cool, yeah, sure, sure, go do that." So that's… yeah, that was Apple's official statement. I'll put a link to that Newsroom article. So stuff's happening behind the scenes, so much so that 9to5Mac actually saw a letter, uh, from the Trump director of… Trump's Director of National Intelligence, which is Tulsi Gabbard. She wrote a letter responding to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona talking about this situation. And in this letter, Tulsi Gabbard is again saying… I'm aware of the press… I'm reading from… quoted 9to5Mac quoting the letter… "I'm aware of the press reporting that the UK Home Secretary served Apple with a secret order directing the company to create a backdoor capability in its iCloud encryption to facilitate UK government access to any Apple Cloud users' uploaded data." Later in the letter, and quoted in the 9to5Mac article, which I'll link in our show notes, basically says Tulsi Gabbard… "My lawyers are working to provide a legal opinion on the implications of the reported UK demands. Upon initial review of the US and UK bilateral Cloud Act agreement, the United Kingdom may not issue demands for data of US citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents, nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the United States. The same is true for the US. Any information sharing between a government… any government and private companies must be done in a manner that respects and protects US law." So Tulsi Gabbard and the Trump administration going after the UK saying, like, "No, you can't do this." And maybe… apropos… timely… whatever you want to say… the Prime Minister of the UK, his name is Kier… what is his name? Starmer… will actually be… is set to visit the White House today as we record. That's the UK Prime Minister. Likely, this will be on the agenda. So it's actually, as Gruber says in his article, which I'll include in the show notes as well, it's kind of nice to see the US stepping in to one of these matters, unlike kind of what they do with the EU and the Digital Markets Act. The US is stepping in and saying, like, "Maybe let's not… let's not… you can't do this." So yeah, I mean, it's interesting because if the… if the… not specifically speaking about the current Director of National Intelligence, but I think that there was reporting that the Biden administration was aware that this was happening and did zero about it. It was… and so it was not until it actually became public that anybody did anything. And one of the things to think about is there's this coalition of major powers called the Five Eyes, and they all share data. So the UK, the US, Australia is a part of it, maybe Canada… I'm not sure who the other players are, but the point is if the UK can do this, essentially the US can also access that information. And so there's a little bit of a… "Well, we would never do this, but we would benefit if somebody else did it" kind of a thing. And so it's… it is not entirely surprising to me that the previous administration, regardless of politics, didn't make a huge stink about this when it wasn't made public because there would be a benefit to US lawmakers if this would have… if… if Apple had been forced to actually do this. And so it's only really become a thing now that it's public. Now, I'm just going to… we'll give people the benefit of the doubt that in the current administration… let's just pretend for a minute like they really do think this is terrible and they think that Apple should definitely not back down and they're going to have their back. In that case, I think you're right; like, that's good. We need… that's one of the things we need the US government to do is to have the back of US companies when those US companies are standing up for principles, right? Like privacy and… Yeah, exactly. And so I… and I especially think we should stand up for US companies when they're like… like… now… y'all can't get US citizens' information just because you ask. Like, it doesn't matter how nice… we're just not going to do that. You're not… you're not the US government. Like, Apple will follow the laws of the company… of the countries that it operates in; it has to… it has to follow laws. It gets very complicated when those laws are contradictory, which is what happened in this case, right? The US says you can't do this, and the UK is like, "No, you have to do it." I'm not sure that we've reached the end. You know, one of the… one of the surprising things is how little outcry there was from people in the UK when they found out that their government wanted to do this, and I think Apple was counting on a lot more outcry. And the fact that there wasn't kind of makes me feel like that would encourage the UK government because technically what Apple did is not what the UK requires; they just turned off Advanced Data Protection, but that is not what the UK is asking for. The UK is asking for the ability to access information of anyone in the world just because they ask for it, and that is not… that is super not what Apple did. That is not what Apple did. So I… I would not be surprised if there's more to this where the UK is like, "No, like we… this is essential; we're going to ask for it," and if that happens, I think things get really interesting. Like… yeah, yeah. People stop working in the UK for Apple; that would be wild. We're going to see what happens. You said the Five Eyes; I've never heard of this before. Apparently, it is the thing… the Five Eyes… like eyeballs… Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council. It is Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I got four out of the five; that's pretty… four out of five; that's pretty good. Sorry, New Zealand. I did not… I had never heard of that… Five Eyes. Okay. Well, we're going to keep following up. Have you now watched *Slow Horses*? We're going to get into this in the bonus, Jason. I'm just… I'm just trying to pull the thread… all the way through… the threads throughout the episode. That was very good. I… I have not… basically… but anyway… except for the first episode. Anyway, a couple of quick stories, but yeah, before we get… before we get to uh… personal tech in the bonus episode… Apple's going to spend $500 billion in the US over the next four years building teams and facilities to expand their operations in Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington. Uh, it includes a new factory in Texas, doubling the US advanced manufacturing fund. So basically, Apple's going to spend a bunch of money here in the US building facilities and hiring teams to do more hardware stuff in the United States. I think this picture is amazing… amazing, because it's a guy wearing AirPods Max, uh, working on the line in this Apple factory. I want to know if that's the Lightning or USB-C version. That's what I want to know. That's what I… I can't tell by the color in this picture. I can't even tell if that's supposed to be white and it's just dingy or if those are the green ones. I think it's the mint green ones. Uh, I will say what was kind of interesting about this is Trump, in some video from the Oval Office or something, basically, like, said this before Apple announced it, and he was like, "Yeah, Tim Cook… they're going to spend billions… millions of dollars on whatever," and then Apple basically had to like put this Newsroom article out, I think quickly, because it was like, "Okay, well, Trump just announced this for us, so let's…" Yeah. But anyway… yeah. Well, and just to also be clear, Apple had already committed something like $430 billion over the next period of time. So I just want to be clear, this is not 500 new… new billion dollars… five… 500 billion new dollars. This is just… they're like expanding some of what they had already committed to do. And I… I think the point… like the real thing that they did is they said we're going to hire 20,000 employees over the next few years, right? Uh, I don't know if there's any specific significance to the whole four years thing. I mean, like, seems like that's a… that's a uh… period of time to which the government of the United States might care a lot about. And so… do all these things… you can now… um… I'm especially interested about what they're… they're going to do some stuff in Detroit, so I'm looking forward to hopefully trying to go see what they're doing in Detroit. They're going to build sort of like an innovation campus type… so Apple… build… build one of your battery station type things in Miami… do… do something in Florida so I can, you know, go to some events so you have a reason to go to places other than just the biophilic zone on top of the Apple Store. Did I even get the word right? Think… oh yeah, biophilic. Okay, biophilic. It's either bolic or biophilic. I think it's biophilic. Anyway, I wanted to shout out MacRumors. We use their articles a lot; mention them a lot. They turned 25 years old. They were coincidentally founded on February 24th, which is also Steve Jobs' birthday, but in 2000… the year 2000. So they are 25 years old. Yeah. And that's the same time they last updated the design of the homepage. I'm just kidding. I like MacRumors a lot. That is… that is underhanded. I love MacRumors, but it is too easy of a joke because like… it does… their website does still look 24 years… 25 years old, just to be honest. Fair enough. Not… I'm sure there's plenty of people visiting it. I will say one of the coolest features of the MacRumors website… designed or not… is their buy guide, which tells you how many days it's been since… I do like that; that is pretty good. Although they're saying the iPhone 16… they must do it since the announcement, not the release, because they're saying days since last release… the iPhone 16 is 6 days, although it's only publicly available tomorrow, so it should be negative one days, but I'll let it slide. I'll let it slide. Okay, let's… let's… let's find the oldest. So what they do is on this page, uh, which I'll link to it in the show notes, you can basically go to any device in Apple's lineup and… and they'll tell you like should you buy it. So like the base model iPad, they have a caution warning because it might be approaching the end of cycle, cuz the last time it was updated was 863 days ago, which… I think… check out the Pro Display XDR. All right, so let's go up, which is clearly the oldest thing in the lineup, right? This is… can't… there can't be anything older. Let's see… under… would it be under… a watch? Other… yeah, I was just trying to see… hold on… the AirPods… the HomePod mini… almost 1,600 days old. Yeah, but that's the last time that the… I don't know if they have… I don't think they don't even have it on there. They don't even have it… they have the Mac… they don't have the displays on here. MacRumors, if anybody from MacRumors is listening… where's… where's the displays? You got to put the displays on here; that's… that's the oldest stuff. Anyway, it says… ChatGPT can tell me… okay, yeah, you ask ChatGPT. Let's find out. The Apple TV says don't buy because that's 863 days old. Okay. Anyway, this is a fun page to play around with. You can see how long Apple's been… Apple Vision Pro… why does it say just updated? Says days since last release: 405 days ago. I don't know. I take issue with that Vision Pro rating as well. All right. 1,966 days since the Pro Display XDR came out. Is that… that was more than the HomePod mini, right? Home mini was 1600… it was more… it was more… Anyway, it's a fun… it's a fun little game here. But anyway, congrats MacRumors, 25 years. All right, let's talk about personal tech. Maybe tell me about this Tesla charging station real quick, and then we can talk about ChatGPT. Oh, so we were in Texas, uh, for soccer in the cold. It was very cold, and we were in Texas. Those two things are seemingly unrelated, but anyway, we… we drove up to Waco. We were… we were in Austin; we drove up to Waco because my wife really wanted to see the silos. You familiar with the silos? You know, the… like the Apple TV+ show…? No… the *Fixer Upper* show from HGTV… Jo Gaines have this thing in Waco… yeah, she wanted to see it. So we drove up there. On the way home, we had to stop… well, actually… so we were really excited to see the silos, and then we were just as excited to go to a Buc-ee's because we've never been to one before. So we stopped, got gassed. Anyway, you go in… it's bizarre, but nice bathrooms, though. That… that's the selling feature, they do. Yes, Buc-ee's bathrooms that Mom would love is I think their tagline… they're tagline… Did you… did you get any like food items? Because we did not buy anything the first time… You walk… I've been to like Buc-ee's now in the recent years… it was my first time a couple years ago… walking into a Buc-ee's is the most… one of the most overwhelming experiences… always a thousand people… it was bigger than a Walmart and had more stuff in it than a Hobby Lobby. It was just completely insane. It was… yes, and it had probably a… I don't know… this is probably not true, but it seemed to have at least 200 gas stalls. It was like two towers; like it was like insane. But we noticed that wrapped all the way around the edge of this parking lot were Supercharger stalls. There are 68 of them. It's the… by far the largest Supercharger I've ever seen. Most of them, I believe, are Version 3 Supercharger stalls, which are like the max of 250 kW, I think that's the case, um… or 150… I don't know, it doesn't matter. But then you get to the end, and they have a bunch of Version 4s, which… I've never charged under a… those are still Version 3… like it's still going… we're like… this is… we weren't even driving a Tesla. We have a Tesla, but we were driving a rental car, um, and uh… you… it keeps going… it's still going, and if you're listening, this is not all that interesting, but there was just a ton of… and then there's the Version 4s, which are the ones that charge like 325 kilowatts or something like that, which I would never use because my car doesn't charge that fast. And then there were still… even after that, which is not on this video… a bunch of like Mercedes ChargePoint chargers or whatever that are like CCS or something like that. It was… it was amazing. Like I was like, "Wow! Like, this place is…" And now they do have to… they have to keep all of the Supercharger stalls far away from the gasoline. That is true. Yeah, right. Right. It says… this is like the website for that… it says 68 Superchargers, up to 325 kW. So those are those Version 4s. It was pretty amazing. So that was exciting. I don't know… most of our listeners probably don't care, but it… it was pretty cool. Like, if you're a person… I've been to a lot of Superchargers, right? Because we drive a Tesla, and it is kind of fun to see. And a lot of times Superchargers are tucked away and… actually, Tesla does a pretty good job, but they're… they're just, you know… you might find one at a grocery store; you might find one at a whatever. But like this… like it was Buc-ee's… you could spend all day there if you had to. You could… you could… breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Uh… most… I think all the Superchargers I've ever done here in Florida, they've been at Wawa gas stations. Okay, that's where all the Superchargers are; they're at all the Wawas. And up here, they're at Meijer, which is a grocery store chain up here, so like they have a lot of them, so which is nice because you… if there aren't restaurants around, you can just walk into the Meijer. So right there you go. Oh, and there's one also by Mellow Mushroom. It's a restaurant; I don't know if you've ever heard of that. That sounds like a legalized drug facility place. It's a pizza… pizza place… Mellow Mushroom. But anyway, the last news and then… SLP… personal tech is that… so Deep Research, which was previously exclusive to the Pro ChatGPT plans, which was $200 a month… OpenAI announced it's going to be available on the Plus plans as well. You get 10 Deep Research queries per month on the Plus plan. If you were on the Pro, $200 a month, then you… they're raising the monthly limit to 120 Deep Research queries per month. But you've been using the Deep Research. Yeah. So the day before they announced this, I upgraded to the $200 subscription. I was going to just do it for a month to try this out. I'm not going to keep paying $200 a month, and then the next day they made it available on the… on the Plus. I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" And since I subscribed up through the… through the app, and there's no way to get a refund… there just… I'm… oh yeah, you… yeah, just pay. But I will tell you, if you have the ChatGPT Plus, which is the $20 a month plan, I highly recommend you not use this because you will instantly start paying $200 a month. Like, it is that good. It's that good; you will want to use it a million percent of the time. I… this week has been kind of chaotic because of the Alexa stuff; also Nvidia had earnings this week; there were several other things that happened. And so I mentioned earlier that that the Alexa event was not streamed. Okay. Catching up on all of the different things is kind of crazy. So I just asked ChatGPT's Deep Research, and I said, "Research what Amazon announced at its Alexa event today," and this was probably 45 minutes after like the news coverage stopped, right? Like it was pretty… pretty recent. "Explain the product, services, and features of each that were announced, then find analysis from respective news sites, summarize the reporting, create a comprehensive briefing so that I can do the research," and it gave me like 3,500 words of everything that was announced. All of the information in each paragraph of information has links to all of those sites… like just constant sources of stuff, so I knew exactly where to go to find all of the best information. I will say ChatGPT's sources that it prefers are tiny bit questionable, really, compared to Gemini's Deep Research, which is like… you get the results from all the sites that you expect to get. I got some results from places like nets.com… I don't know what that is… what in the world… but then there's like… but usually what those… what I found those sources were are like… they are kind of like the equivalent of how in the Apple ecosystem there's like five websites that are entirely just based on reporting what Mark Gurman reports in Bloomberg. So all of these articles just linked to like… in *Gadget* or *The Verge* or whatever. So I was able to easily find the information. That's kind of weird; it should just link to those. But the information… super solid. I did the same thing last night because Nvidia announced its earnings, and I was wanted to think about writing something, but I was headed to soccer practice, didn't have time to read a bunch of stuff, and I just said, "Give me a comprehensive report on Nvidia's earnings," and it asked me like, "What are some sources that you want to refer to?" Which I wish the

Gives you the result whatever the result is, and then it actually just shows you all the links completely, like an appendix or a bibliography; you just list them all and you can just start clicking on them. But the results from CAD GPT, I think, are far superior right now. Interesting, interesting.

Now, if you do follow-up questions within a deep research prompt, those don't count against your like limit per month. Oh, that's a great question, and I have no idea. I think the research is no because I think then you're just—it's just chat GPT right, CH referring to itself, foring whatever you came up with. Foring is that a verb? Can you say that? That's funny. Um, okay, that—well, that's fascinating. I've yet to try deep research. Now I'm going to try it on something and see.

I've actually been trying—I've been building this one shortcut for the last 3 days, trying to get it to work, and I've been down a rabbit hole of Python. So I've been asking it Python things, and it's been—I've been sending it the errors. But I'll also have ChatGPT; I'll ask it, like, "Help me build this shortcut," and I would say like 80% of the time it's really good at doing that. It tells me what actions to use. A lot of times I'm using API things, and so I use the "get contents of URL shortcuts" action, and it tells me what to put in like the header categories; it does a good job with that. And then some—there was one time it was like, "Well, use the something-something mail action," and so I'm like, "I don't think that's an action," and so I'll search and I'm like, "That's not an action." So go back to ChatGPT, I'll say, "That's not an action in shortcuts, what else can I use?" And ChatGPT will be like, "You're right, that's not a shortcut section; instead you should…" And I'm like, "ChatGPT, come on!" Like, but I mean, it is amazing.

I asked it to make me an AppleScript that I can use, and what it does is it opens an audio file, puts it into Whisper transcription, transcribes the audio file, copies the transcript, opens ChatGPT in a browser, pastes it with a prompt, it then closes the browser because I don't want to be interacting with ChatGPT in the browser, and opens the ChatGPT Mac app and gets—and then I have the result right in front of me. And I just—I literally said, "Do this thing for me." Actually, the part with the browser I had to finesse because what was happening is I wanted to just open the ChatGPT app on the Mac, and for some reason—I don't—maybe it's the sandbox app—and it just wouldn't do it; like I just couldn't figure it out. So I was like, "Fine, do it in the browser, then close the browser, and then open the Mac app." I'm not doing any steps; it just doesn't—all these screens flash in front of me, and it literally said, "Here you go, copy this and open Script Editor, paste it, and then you're good to go." And I'm like, "It is—it is—it is amazing." I even think Parker Orinni, he was saying like he's—he's—I think releasing an app, and he's like, "ChatGPT or like these large language models basically made him a developer," and it's like, it is—it is pretty—it is pretty amazing.

Before we get to our bonus episode where I want to talk about Apple TV+ content, I will—I will have my sportsball story here. I'll put it here. Okay, I went to a sportsball game real quick. Do you know which type of sportsball you went to? Listen, I'm not—I'm not a total trog or whatever, like—my two boys were actually dancing in a halftime show for an NBA Orlando Magic game. Uh, so it was pretty—it was really fun. We got to see the game; they danced the halftime show. So I—I went to the game; I went to the Kia Center in Orlando, which is—you know, it was a newer stadium; I think it was built in the last decade or whatever. But Jason, I talked to Nate about this in "Movies on the Side," so I won't belabor it here; you can listen to that episode. But I don't—I haven't—it hasn't come out yet, so if you're wondering why you haven't seen it yet, it's because I have to edit that episode. But I do not understand how anyone can withstand going to those live sports games more than like once a year. The amount of people that has to like funnel through the tiniest aperture of a small security thing, and then leaving a game—like the amount that everyone has to squeeze through—like there's one escalator in the arena that goes from the second floor down, and so it's just this mass of people, like Time Square on New Year's Eve, trying to get down one escalator. And I'm like, "What's the weight capacity of this escalator because there's 1,000 people on it right now, and this seems a little," you know… So that—I mean, sitting there watching the game, I can enjoy that as much as I make fun of sportsball; like it's fun watching a live basketball game and seeing—making the plays or whatever. Apparently, the Washington Wizards are not a good basketball team right now, as Nate informed me, and so maybe it wasn't that good of a game anyway. But anyway, it was fine. All I will say is, after experiencing that, if somehow Apple can make Apple Vision Pro a real, like immersive, watch an NBA game courtside from the comfort of your own home, and you don't have to deal with all that craziness trying to get into and out of an arena to watch a game, I totally get how that would be a huge selling feature. And maybe people love it; maybe people love just being sardined with a thousand other people on an escalator, but I do imagine there's another segment of people that's like, "If I could watch and it feel like I'm sitting courtside, but I am at home, and I can literally get up and go to the bathroom whenever I want and it's 10 ft away instead of 3 floors away, like that would be compelling." So anyway, I think—I think I see that—like that would be—that would be cool.

Yeah, I think it would be cool. I don't know if it'd be the best way to experience it because there are three types of people who go to sporting events like this, Stephen. Okay, there are people who just—who go to the sporting events with a group of people all the time, like we have friends who have season tickets to Michigan State basketball, and it's the same six people that go all the time. Right, the game is amazing, but it's like the social thing they do with that group of people. Right? Then there are people who are like diehard fans, and they just love the sport so much that they want to be there in person. Right? And then the third group are like—kind of you fit into that category when you went to the game—it's like, "No, like I have a reason to come to this particular game," like we often—for Christmas—will buy basketball tickets for like my father-in-law, that kind of thing. It's like—and so it's, you know, or when I've—we've taken our—our kids—a different—we don't take them all because there's four of them, so it's expensive—but we've taken different numbers of them at different times to things because for them it's an experience and it's really like great. Which of those people, though, do you think would be better served by the game on Vision Pro? I don't think any of them. So I'm gonna—I'm going to add a fourth group to your diorama there and say my father-in-law fits into a fourth group where he is an uber sports fan that's literally every night just watches hours of sports. Yeah, but that's not one of those groups I'm talking about—the people that were in that room. Oh, no, yeah, yeah, those—those groups, as you stated—no, none of them would benefit from Apple Vision Pro. But from the uber sports fans who 90—99% of the time watch sports from home but are also super into it—like that is their thing—they would be able to maybe have a cool experience in a headset. And so probably the smallest of all those groups—like the social aspect, totally get—the once-a-year go for the experience—but for someone who just loves to watch sports, if you can make that watching sports feel a little bit more like being at the sports, I think that's—that could be—that could be compelling, maybe. But I think for most of those people—because we probably fit into that category—we love to watch like Michigan State basketball, sure, we love to watch the Lions play football, whatever—we like people who just love to watch sports would have watched it on the Humane AI pin with the laser projector; they don't care; like they just want to watch the game. And honestly, if you're used—that's—if we did headlines there you go—if—if we—if you used to watching a particular type of sport on your 65 or 75-inch television, sure, it's actually disorienting to watch it in person because you're like—you don't get the replays in front of you; you can't pause it; you can't do those things. So for you, you're just like, "I actually just want my—my 16 by 9 format." So I don't know—like I—I do think it would be cool; I'm just not sure who the real market for that is, and I don't know how—they'd be able to monetize it well enough to make it worthwhile. So I mean, if—yeah, I mean, part of NBA League Pass, if there was like a higher tier for immersive games or whatever, maybe that—but listen, sport—if anybody can monetize anything, the sportsball people will be able to monetize it; they'll figure it out; they'll—they'll figure it out. So all right, I want to talk about Apple TV+ original shows and ranking them because Louis Tool had a—had a rank—want to talk about…

So listen, before we go, leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast. You can tell us whether or not you have—what was it in the—oh, do you have apps auto-updating or not on your iPhone? Auto—probably not interesting to anybody else, but I'm just curious; the other guy's curious. You can also leave all the other things—battery percentage dots on on your Mac, all that kind of stuff—and helps get us back to five stars. And if you want to support the show, we have a sponsor next week, but then we have some openings later—if you're a developer, you know, we had someone sponsor the show last week who is a developer—the Virtual Boy—that Virtual Boy U made the Bento Craft app, so we'd love to hear from you. Uh, but also you can support the show, and then you get access to the bonus episodes and ad-free versions of shows in the future. And so thank you for listening; thank you for watching; we'll catch you next time.