There's a new now playing bar that appears to kind of float above the UI a little bit um just like Vision very Vision Pro like with the pill shape and everything so I could see one borrowing from the other as has always been the case in apple developing UI iPad gets something then Mac gets something then iPhone so now that Vision OS is out there and again Apple isolates everyone iOS didn't see what Vision OS looked like before it was ready right so they're only just learning themselves and they're like wow that's cool we're going to do that too um and these operating systems coming in June are the first time we actually get to see that implemented so I I'm with Mark Gman I think we're going to see some changes I wouldn't I don't know if we can classified as a redesign but I guess we'll have to see what it looks like but I think there's going to be elements that look like Vision OS but it's not going to be a grid of circle icons on a home screen or anything like that it's not going to look like Vision OS but they could definitely borrow from each other and I think that kind of uniformity is useful we're just into March and already I'm wishing for June let's stop that there so it occurs to me by the way that the next time you and I speak iOS 17.4 will be out and the EV the world will change in the European Union which is next door to me um but quite far away from you be interesting to see what happens yes uh so everyone's waiting for regulation to step in and say this is bad but of course we we don't know what they're going to say because they actually can't say anything until after March 7th um where they're able to give judgments about the provisions that apple and everyone have provided so we'll we'll see what happens there um I'm interested uh we're also seeing movement on uh the United States front which we're mentioning it now but we're years from a resolution but now that the doj in the United States is ready to move in on this antitrust case with apple it means that after a long and Winding Road of litigation probably in 2027 they might arrive at the same conclusion and ask Apple to give America the UN or you know United States users the same Provisions that they gave the EU and bring some of those App Store changes alternative marketplaces and stu stuff to quiet the antitrust complaints um again we'll take a probably will take a long time especially during an election year when we have no idea what the opinions of the possible incoming new presidency might be whether it's the same president or a new one there's too many questions in the air could affect too many decisions all I can say is nothing's happening this year so it'll be a while

In recent weeks, Apple has been quietly working on its upcoming operating system update. The exact details of what these changes will entail are still unknown to most people, but insiders have provided some insight into what we might see in the near future. A notable development that stands out is the potential for new UI elements, which could be inspired by Apple's Vision OS platform.

One aspect that has been particularly intriguing is a new now playing bar that appears to float above the interface. The design bears an uncanny resemblance to Vision Pro, with its pill-shaped layout and minimalist aesthetic. Given Apple's history of borrowing from other platforms, it's likely that these UI elements will be refined and tailored to suit the company's specific needs.

One question on everyone's mind is whether the changes will be enough to justify a major redesign or if they'll simply be incremental updates. While it's difficult to say for certain, one thing is clear: Apple has been paying close attention to consumer feedback and has made significant strides in understanding what users want from their devices.

Another area of interest is the impending release of iOS 17.4, which promises to bring about a range of changes across the board. One major development will be the impact on the European Union, as new regulations are set to come into effect in June. These changes have been years in the making and will undoubtedly have significant implications for Apple's business practices.

Meanwhile, the United States is bracing itself for the antitrust case against Apple. After a long and winding road of litigation, it appears that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has finally moved to take action against the tech giant. While the outcome is far from certain, one thing is clear: the consequences will be significant if Apple is found guilty.

In terms of what this might mean for users, it's difficult to predict exactly how events will unfold. However, one thing is certain: we'll be watching with bated breath as this saga continues to play out over the coming months and years.

If you're interested in staying up-to-date on the latest developments, be sure to check out our show notes for a comprehensive rundown of all the major points discussed during this episode. From new product announcements to regulatory changes, there's always something new to discover when it comes to the world of technology.

In other news, the upcoming release of iOS 17.4 has sparked widespread anticipation among users and industry insiders alike. As we edge closer to June, the wait will become increasingly difficult – but for many, it'll be worth it in the end.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello welcome to the Apple Insider podcast I'm William Gallagher this week's episode is brought to you by notion and more about them later but for now I'm going to admit to you that I am feeling blue about the Apple car being cancelled forever joining me though is where's hu I'm I right where are you less sad about the car going well it's a It's Complicated because we all know if Apple car ever came to be it would be at least $100,000 if not more I mean it could have been a 50 $60,000 car but who are we kidding here um it it was just one of those products that Apple could have been working on definitely a lot of signs a lot of patents a lot of internal buildup a lot of rumors but is it truly dead we don't know it's dead for now they've put it to bed they could always return to it let's not forget this is one of those things that have died about five times before we'll get into that that's true but this one's sounding true and truly dead at this point it's cancelled it's done they're moving everyone off of the project to other systems but for now there is no apple car coming that's weird though when you said that about the price I suddenly thought oh if it actually launched I could see me talking to you about will there be an Apple car SE at some point points and I got interested again then and then I remembered it's all I have a funny thing do you think it would be called car just Apple logo car okay such the IDE well yeah I mean is that better than I car which it would have been oh that would have been awful 10 years ago that does sound like something Volkswagen would release though yes it's F I would have told you I'm not a car person at all but then Tesla came along and I I had a test drive in it and I was so impressed with it I was really really keen on it and then you know along with Tesla comes Elon Musk and it's sort of soured it a little bit for me so Apple was my last hope for this because there are no other uh electric vehicle uh manufacturers out there at all none it was going to be Tess no there are others uh so it's it's kind of a it's wild um pretty much everyone there's it's harder to it's a shorter list to say who's not working on electric right now um because Apple yes Apple's on that list now um but the thing is is electric we we're talking you know everyone's doing it because it's it's the future there's laws coming out in some countries that say no more gas vehicles by 2030 I mean I think that was France there's a couple of others um so electric is happening everywhere Honda Ford um Kia these big guys um imagine if Apple had bought Kia had followed through with that back in 2019 that's yet another thing they could have done right yeah i' forgotten that one but but yes electric is coming but when we're talking about Apple and this car uh this project it's not just an electric car cuz you know if Apple really wanted to build an electric car they could it's you know it's a known entity it's not like they're trying to get to Mars or something um the S it's just you know four wheels four electric motors big battery and a frame you know and then you just add the cushy seats and steering wheel uh I'm simplifying it but you know yeah a little bit even I was thinking about the axle to wheel steering wheel combination going to list all the screws involved but it it's well you wait a minute you are the guy who leaves wires hanging out after you've done things on the car so nothing's caught on fire in my car yet so okay it's just but okay Apple could have done it it it yes it's a it's a it's a like this isn't a un oh no apple just they failed they can't build a c no it's they couldn't build the car they wanted to build and the one they wanted to build would have been so expensive and the margin so like impossible to get like they would have had to have out priced the market twofold to even clear the margins they wanted and then no one would have bought it because no one could afford it and then we're talking about bank loans like this is Way Beyond Vision Pro as far as like it we're being scared by the $3,500 price point so Apple looked at it and said it's time we have to call it this isn't this isn't worth like financially it doesn't make sense let alone anything else there's other reasons but I think the primary number one reason on the list is margins money shareholder value all of that stuff that we've talked about before one of the things I'm quite impressed about is that they did cancel it uh because you I don't know if this is a US phrase as well have you heard of a thing called a sunk cost with things sunk cost uh sunk cost fallacy yes yeah um you would think there are companies having assuming they still had money to spend having invested that much would think well we got to finish it now and Apple's made a very cold sounding decision no so that happened with nfts everyone um you know your favorite washing machine brand you know like everyone made nfts but by the time they were ready to publish the nfts and do their big PR spin about buying a box of cereal with an nft in it or something um they' already gone and died and no one cared anymore but they already spent the money on the nft and the whole you know advertising program so they had to run through with it looking very foolish but that is the sun cost fallacy for sure but Apple car you say that I have I am looking a stack of nfts of a certain political figure in the US across my wall and uh yeah I think they sold out didn't but yes I'd actually forgotten that nfgs existed I'm here to remind you of that every so often just to thanks okay so the Apple car though is not a sunt cost fallacy because see I've I've seen this this rhetoric going around we can I guess we'll just dive in here um so Apple abandoned the project Titan which has been rumored since about 2014 so about a decade worth of work and research um around what would have been an autonomous vehicle uh earlier this year we heard Apple had actually pulled back on full autonomy which is level four autonomous driving which means that you you let go the steering wheel and the car knows where it's going um level two would have is basically what exists in like Hondas since 2016 basically Lane assist that keeps the car centered in the lane Apple uh had basically moved back to level two and where you have to keep your hands on the wheel but the car is helping you stay away from traffic not rear ending anyone there's a lot of sensors at play I've had a car that does this it's actually very nice to have in uh high traffic situations especially stop and go traffic but um Apple pulled back to that I think as soon as January that was rumored uh so was it January this year last year actually I might be missing that timeline someone can correct me I think it was more recent than that so I remember being surprised that they'd made that type of announcement and then just felt like they Lally it yeah a month later if if if I'm right about January this year a month later they're saying uh no we can't we're just we're pulling out this is it there's no there's project Titan is officially shelved and of course officially unofficially because all of this is a leaked uh announcement from internal to Apple none of this has been made this isn't on Apple's homepage you won't find any information there this is all leaked information so take it with a very large Rin assault but it seems to be from multiple sources this the initial one being very sound and sources after that confirming it that this has indeed happened but so a decade of work allegedly about $10 million of investment so about a billion dollars a year um not that much considering Apple's amount of money that they have I mean I believe in 2014 when they started they had something like a hundred billion do in the bank account so this is a drop in the bucket I was surprised to see how much other uh developers are spending like um I think it was a conflation there was Ford and GM between them well it was at least tens of billion that they were spending on Research apple is kind of weirdly out priced in R&D but so so getting back to sunk cost um all of this research and Tim Cook actually commented on this this is one of the rare moments that we got a little Peak inside of apple and how it thinks about things but I can't give you the exact date it's in one of my the abandoned 10 billion doll project Titanic disaster story that's Linked In the show notes um I love that Titanic disaster um but that that that's what the alleged again New York Times reached out to some employees that may or may not be angry about getting fired so who knows what's what's real they do sound a bit upset cuz no well nobody died yet there were collisions but nobody's actually died as far as I know yeah so right how many people died in t Titanic Okay so Tim Cook mentioned uh in an interview let's see what what the date is this is 2017 so Tim Cook was asked um about Apple's car plans they just pretty much directly asked about it and Tim Cook actually answered he said we're focusing on autonomous systems it's a core technology that we view as very important we sort of see it as a mother of all AI projects and it's probably the only time Tim Cook said AI before about 20123 um he said we'll see where it takes us we're not really saying from a product point of view what we will do there's a major disruption looming there you've got kind of three vectors of change happening generally in the same time frame we'll see where it takes us let's see there was one I've lost the phrase that I wanted him to wanted to say but uh he said paraphrasing now because I can't find it again um he basically said that the autonomous research that's being performed isn't just for self-driving cars that can be applied to many different kinds of projects He said this in 2017 not trying to give away that it was self-driving cars that they were actually working on but he's right um and this is where we finally coming full circle that 10 billion dolls of research yes some of it was into how well you can make a break or displaying information on a windshield but a lot of it and really a majority of it probably was AI research because in order to make a self-driving car which was Johnny IV's original vision in 2014 when this started full autonomy full self-driving you need an operating system and an intelligent assistant and full car operating thing AI now we call it um machine learning back in 2014 if it was announced um this thing which they would have called Siri which is really funny uh would have piloted the car without any user interface and they wouldn't even have they were so confident that they could do this they weren't even going to include a steering wheel in this vehicle yes and um all of that work may not go to a vehicle but it's still important for apple as they step into releasing AI focused features throughout 2024 and all of these employees not all of them of course you can't have a break specialist working on AI some people probably did have to get let go um or reassigned to different divisions but anyone working on this AI John Gian Andrea the leader of AI at Apple the what what senior vice president is is their title um he is you know taking all of that taking his crew and jumping right into whatever is happening with iOS 18 so I wouldn't say that that was a failed investment and again the car stuff still good they can use that for carplay they can use that for building new systems to attach to the wider vehicle partnering with BMW or something and again if Apple decides later on okay Now's the Time for an electric vehicle they've already got all the groundwork started so I wouldn't go out there saying Apple wasted their time with this I think it was a smart move to at the time to try and build something and they've pulled back at the right time and we'll get into that because the market just isn't there I just I actually remember reading the patent where we understood there was no steering wheel I was pouring over it thinking there's something really key missing here I I think in the last years or so I've easily read a 100 patents to do with the car and there was one I remember clearly one about breaking things CU I was think thinking how can you patent a Brak don't doesn't everybody have brakes and I never quite got to the bottom of that one but everything I can think of was um Hardware specific so the seats could have had lights in them to tell you where to sit down or something weird like that and there was lots of things about Direction finding and taking you to wherever you wanted to go which felt like Apple Maps plus kind of thing I'm not I think I read more Hardware Pats than I did anything that I understood could be used anywhere else although actually the moment I say that I remember what we learned about Apple Vision Pro which is is it there is it 5,000 patents uh were granted to Apple for that headset before we realized that they were for the headset so I think I must be missing a huge amount and I'm trying to imagine what um what AI things could you learn from a car that you could add to an iPhone well one of things that is very important for a autonomous vehicle is realtime operating systems and we're already seeing the results of that research I'm wearing it right now Apple Vision Pro um the operating system Vision s of course is not real time but the R1 chip inside uh doing realtime calculations of environmental information being piped in from multiple cameras while processing hand tracking all of this stuff is realtime um programming and I believe a lot of this technology probably came from Project Titan right like just because they're building it for a car doesn't mean it can't be used elsewhere and yes uh there's probably specific divisions researching this for revision Pro but again these applications can be applied across different things as Tim Cook said researching one thing can benefit the other um and while Apple does like to isolate different divisions to keep secrets it it it's clear that if they reach a Innovation on one thing that it can be passed along to another thing so yes real-time operating systems for one uh you need a smart assistant so you need Siri to be able to actually do things um which uh we're still trying to get there I mean I I personally don't have a problem with how Siri operates today but I understand that it's not everyone's favorite um I have one problem with it and it happened again to me today so it's on my mind let me rant just for one second I keep asking Siri on my watch to set a timer for a certain amount of you know cooking or something and I will ask for three minutes and it will give me 9 hours 27 minutes 16 seconds some insanely different number and you try to pass how did I phrase this that it could possibly misinterpreted and I just can't get it at all so uh tell me take me to Junction 5 of the M4 Motorway and it takes me instead to Sweden uh I could see that being an issue let me uh walk you back in time cuz I remember us covering this I don't have the link um enterprising people can probably find it but uh do you recall the story of Johnny IV and who is the other guy um alen Dy maybe uh I'm thinking design people is Alan Dy not Alan d it might have been alen Dy but I'm thinking more car related engineering um anyway he was he was big at Apple at the time and he's since left to do other things but uh anyway so Johnny I and this other person working on Apple car project and trying to conceive of this thing were taken to Apple's secret facility for driving uh their their uh little racetrack that they bought out in California Sunny Veil um and they were placed in a decked out I want to say Fiat and because that's one of Johnny Ya's favorite cars so I think they just wanted to kiss up to him a little bit and they kind of just I don't know the windows and stuff were closed off and there I think it was just kind of like the interior was like designed differently they might have even removed the steering wheel for effect because it was probably remote controlled and they had an actor sitting in with them reading a script as they drove along pretending this was a self-driving Apple giving them the the concept tour of an Apple car as they drove around and this actor was playing Siri describing restaurants as they passed by and Johnny e could ask queries and they were prepared had prepared statements for different things that could occur while they were in the car and it listen I'm sorry are you sure about you didn't just dream this no this is real this happen um I I'm going to have to find the story now because I know people are going to want going to want to read it but um because uh the reason why I know it's not made up is is a I have a distinct memory of this madness uh and B New York Times actually referenced it in their um diet tribe on Apple car I I wrote the story regarding the New York Times piece which it was fine I just I feel like they um is our good friend trip mckel I feel like he uh misclassified some of the actions Apple took here as like just aiming super negative for some reason but this happens a lot in Apple reporting I think that just that's a general conception when it's like yeah it's not great that Apple car isn't coming out but honestly I agree with long story short the article is about how Apple employees hated the idea of the project and called it the Titanic disaster instead of project Titan and were and they were celebrating that it was being cancelled because it was just they deemed it as an failure from the start there was no way it was ever going to work and I agree that some people like there's absolutely people in the company that have that mentality and I agree that it was a good idea for Apple to end the project but I feel like some of the storytelling around that was a little just a little aggressive for yeah but anyway he did mention he did mention the uh Johnny IV drive around and I thought that was funny Let me let me see if I can find it very curious about that although the fact you say it's a theat that makes me think if Apple had finished it it would have been a fat to come play wouldn't it yeah uh terrible yeah oh okay I was really pleased with that puns are the lowest form of uh comedy oh how dare you agree with John C for example okay H I'm curious about just how this spreads out to other things of AI I really had not thought about the realtime operating system but and now you've said it I should have thought of that because we've covered well they conflicting reports here but people saying that uh there's data saying the pass through effect of um Apple Vision Pro is dramatically better and closer to real time instantaneous than any other headset and things and you know that can't come from nothing so that would make sense that there was a origin bear Bob our boy Bob Mansfield yes Bob Mansfield so let me see there was a prot list of people who've left Apple I thought Steve Jobs okay there's a prototype yes tell me tell me so in this article from 2019 it said a source from the information this is talking about Johnny IV's departure and part of it did bring up the Bob Mansfield and Johnny IV prototype demo of Apple car uh and for the demonstration I've hired an actress to perform a Siri responding to voice commands uh but apparently at the time project Titan the engineers involved at least the engineers talking to IV were very confident this is back in 2015 by the way timeline wise they were they were just like oh yeah we can we can build this uh it's fine like a self-driving car we got this you know so the that confidence um so this is where trip Michel's report comes in as it feels a little bit hard again like they just chose a stance and they they they followed it but apparently Apple watch was launched in 2014 and apple is desperate to find something what what was next what was going to be Tim Cook's Legacy they have to find it oh no and uh someone just said cars and Tesla's doing cars we should do it too oh yeah and then everyone just kind of nodded and greed they rushed out the door and um drove Johnny IV around with an actress pretending to be Ser like it it sounds so silly when you say it out loud I don't think that's the order of events exactly I'm sure um there is uh a moment gosh again this is years ago I this one I can't I have I can't give I don't know the source but there was an interview with someone who had left apple and they mentioned that uh Steve Jobs had talked about a vehicle and I car at some point within the company so I don't think this was just completely out of nowhere but I do think they were looking at what Tesla was doing and the excitement around Tesla in let's you know 2014 and how they were claiming oh yeah 2016 full self-driving is going to happen and here we are in 2024 and they're not even you know that it's not good but um anyway so it's it's such a long and Rich history and I can't wait for the tell all book to come out in 10 years yeah except it suddenly thought I wonder how far they got with prototypes are there mockups I'm GNA have to watch eBay to see if there's a mysterious car suddenly auctioned somewhere you know how it happens with uh prototype iMacs and iPhones and things maybe the Apple car will finally leak out I could I could I think I'm wrong here no so the way the prototyping systems worked is um again the guts of a car are you know don't don't let anyone tell this to the Gearheads but they're all engines and uh you know they do things that's that they're they're all and radios you know steering wheels and pedals and tires you know that that's the part that they can do they they can build a car again it the car isn't the mystery it's the everything else that they had to figure out so the prototyping was basically done with a fleet of uh Vans with sensors attached so they had to train the sensors train the AI and learn streets and give it a level of confidence to drive around so those prototyping vehicles have been photographed and actually registered with the DMV in California um so that was no secret Apple was testing something to do with Vehicles driving around in these Vans with sensors strapped to them uh part of it could have been their mapping of course but more likely it had to do with um like their self-driving stuff because we've seen their mapping cars and it they don't they're different Vehicles so the these were definitely for Apple's project Titan driving around so you no you won't be able to find one of those on eBay I don't think oh well it was a thought I parked next to an Apple um uh liar mapping car once and the two people inside were having a burger each and I was so tempted to ask them questions but I frankly I I wimped out and went and got a burger myself listeners I know we're jumping around a little bit but again there's a decade of History here so please if you are interested in Apple car or want to try and eek out any specific details reach out to us we can jump on the next show and break down a couple of things a little further but we do have to try and move on a little bit I do have one last tidbits sorry I saw what you did there breakdown yeah yeah no no card joke oh come on you're picking on my puns I'm picking on your you have one more thing you want to say about Apple car all right so I do like so they they they apparently got far enough that they were confident in letting their um Vans driving around campuses shuttle buses basically um operate with these systems involved um so if you can find a shuttle bus driver at Apple Park you might be able to learn something about Apple's project Titan well I tell you what to make this and move on we are talking about basically an AI project that didn't work out fully there is also an AI project from Apple that apparently is working out perfectly fine but it's somewhat smaller scale uh what do you know about Apple ask okay so this is actually kind of a weird one um I actually reached out so this was um leaked by Mac rumors and I I reached out to them to kind of clarify a couple things because it's just kind of like um are you sure this isn't just a fancy search Tool uh that's just better at finding information and they clarified some of the text for me so basically Apple's internal support system right now they're kind of privately beta testing with select employees that volunteered for it to have this tool where they enter the problem basically user with 10.9 inch iPad can't you know use Apple pay with IO with iPad Os 17.1 or something but and with all these details in this random parameters it's not just going to do a query where it returns you know a search result kind of like Google search uh where it just finds previously known information and just gives you the page of the document book that it's in no instead it's going to parse that information and generate right that word's important generate a response specific to that query and because of that it's uh possible that this is Apple testing a GPT like system a generative Transformer system where the at the support employees are basically able to get responses uh from what you would call the the modern word Ai and but it's only trained on the internal knowledge based for Apple's support system so it can't it's less likely to hallucinate I won't say can't hallucinate because these are always capable of make they can make up a new support document that doesn't exist for example but they the leaked information also suggests that there are checks and balances occurring before the answer is given and um the the employ always are given are able to vote up or down whether or not this was a useful response so they're they're really trying to police this and keep a tight leash on it right now but if it goes well they might expand it to more places in the company including more support people actually well part me thinks is there any chance it could hallucinate and say buy Android instead or something but every time I spoken to oh you do yeah okay okay so United Airlines I believe so correct me if I'm wrong airplane company it's not important who who but airplane company has an AI chatbot for support and someone says I have a departed family member I must travel immediately is there I don't know why they asked this or how it came up but basically they they got the bot to say there is a bereavement program that gives them a discount on the plane tickets uh which doesn't exist the the the chatbot made it up but United had to honor that coupon and they immediately disbanded the um thing and I think there was some sort of case around it where the United basically put out the chatbot we employed is not authorized to give um actual advice or what it was so silly very silly but again this is the this is the issue you have with systems like this being put into place and how Apple tackles this is going to be wild I've had some tedious experiences with chatbots on support things I mean maddening stuff but every time I've actually spoken to an Apple support person they've been superb actually they've sorted out things so well so quickly um that's a clever thing to because they'll know if the results are right right or that's I I agree with your your point here a human using the tool to get me support 100% A+ love the idea but if I call and I'm talking to a robot no longer no like it hang up the phone give up level of because I think that's that that's a very good distinction here I this these tools can be useful but there needs to be a human element to ensure that something isn't broken along the way giving the employees resources like this can speed up support can give better answers because you can't expect um average Apple employees to know everything about Apple we're the Nerds here okay you go to an Apple store and you're listening to this podcast there's a good chance that you know more about Apple than most people in that store they're just they're just employees it's not like you work at McDonald's and know the history of McDonald's right like you just know how to flip the hamburger but when you're working at an Apple Store you might know a few things it's a requirement in fact if you're on the floor to be able to describe certain products a certain way but they're not going to know about the secret hidden menu that you have to click on to do this thing like that's that's nerd stuff um if you if you don't believe me go to an Apple store it's it's just the fact of life they're just people they're not you know Genies I I want to say that everyone I've spoken to an Apple Store once they've learned that I'm um basically did I write for app Insider once they've learned then the kind of degree of nerdness has crept up but not all of them there is one who I thought was spectacularly ignorant in one store and it put me off that Apple Store there are two reasonably equidistant from where I am and so I tend to just go to the other one because of one person uh for it and what I had but um I guess to bring this back around so apple is testing an artificial intelligence tool GPT like tool but apparently a couple I think literally a day later um it came up that so I think uh Apple Insider did some digging itself so I don't think this was from the same Source just different Source same ask Tool uh but it looks like this might be more than just a support tool and it's being tested more around the systems but uh the source described it as not an llm or generative AI like some people think it's actually more advanced than that is what the person says uh that it's actually more of a let me find the exact phrase cuz it's it's interesting well I'm thinking you can't be right here because we all know that apple is years behind the rest of the industry yeah yeah machine learning is existed since the I exactly they went the wrong route with machine learning they should have been on AI from the start but would they listen no this episode is brought to you by notion notion combines your notes documents and and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed and it's this idea of one space that's key notion is so expansive and so capable that you can do everything in it which means you have one tool one place to go to do all you need and it's your place it's your space too your notion looks different to mine and to everyone else's too because as you work in it you make a change here you customize there and it becomes an extension of you and your work Al so you know this there is no shortage of helpful AI tools out there in the world but using those means switching back and forth between yet another set of digital tools so instead of simplifying your workflow in the end it just becomes more complicated unless of course you're in notion and the fully integrated notion AI it helps you work faster write better think bigger actually doing tasks that normally take your hours in just seconds right there in your work for instance you could ask notion to research your projects you can set up automation so that you concentrate on the work you want to do while notion does the organizing that you used to have to try notion for free when you go to notion.com slapple Insider that's all lowercase letters notion.com slapple inssider to try the powerful easy to use notion AI today and when you use our link you're supporting our show notion.com slapple Insider thanks to notion for its support at the Apple Insider podcast do you know one thing that that that really stood out for me from that trip mckel New York Times report just to pick on him a little more machine learning a type of AI technology that just no machine learn they're they're they're not they're not it's not a subset they're similes they're they're the same thing anyway I just thought that was just a terrible way to define it machine learning basically becomes I understand what he's trying to convey because artificial intelligence implies something bigger but that's the problem with the term it's it's not it's just better machine learning it's just more anyway moving on um this is I found the phrasing in the article so ask is not an llm or other generative AI like some instead the source is leaning into this saying that because the support knowledge database and the front end to that database for support members are constantly evolving and these more intelligent than an llm or G generative AI it's actually intended to be an advanced natural language search engine um so it's kind of a mixture of the two it's not exactly a chap so the problem with calling it a chatbot like a GPT or um a large language model in llm is that that implies that it's trained on a large data set um and that data set's increasing but when those data sets change or evolve it requires the thing to be updated right that's why you keep hearing about gpt3 GPT 4 the data sets are getting updated the way the query strings are being run is being updated like the intelligence is getting better but what this is suggesting is it doesn't need an update it's just getting more intelligent on its own because as the database evolves it's taking in that new information on the Fly which is an important difference and I think that's really interesting I was uh it's probably chat GPT whichever version I was using say actually said to me that it only had knowledge up to 2021 or 2022 and at the time I thought how unusual check gbt telling me something useful and not just pretending it's made it's got things right they um required to say that because and I you you probably know this but um the reason why GPT and stuff isn't up to date with 2024 February is because they don't want it to be used for modern political um manipulation so you wouldn't so you can't go in there and tell it to be like make up something about this that's happening today and get horrible results and posted all over social like it would just lead to a lot of issues so they they try to keep it it's intelligent about things like say you got uh memory loss and you forget your name and who you are and your occupa but for some reason like you still know how to drive a car like that core information about how the world works is still there but the information about What's happen today is not so that's I think that's uh that's interesting too that makes sense wonder how Apple would uh distinguish that too yes not that anybody would use AI for improper purposes in a election year oh Absolut at all obviously not no uh I I think I've resisted long enough um for weeks and weeks now even before you had Apple Vision Pro I kept asking you in more details cuz here I am in the UK unable to get also it's out of my budget and I vacillate between I listen to you and I want one I listen to Mike Worley from up cider and I don't it's just back and forth I don't but Joanna Stern this week wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal that basically said yeah very nice but she's put hers in a drawer somewhere just like she has um meta Quest or elus or whichever other ones the she had uh you surely have now given up and just gone back to your iPads as normal well I said it earlier I'm wearing it right now I'm in yosee it's a little cold here um I lost my microphone in the snow a couple times but yeah yeah no yeah so Vision Pro yes guys we have a another short Vision pro segment this week uh you think it's short when I go want the details we would we would we would hope that we can keep it brief anyway but um in any case yes so Janice Stern I don't I don't know this there's been a lot of narrative and we've covered this last couple weeks around uh Vision Pro the Nerds don't care they're returning it in droves and uh someone's eye exploded and yada yada and it's what is like the truth and the truth is we don't nobody knows um it's almost mostly made up a conjecture based off of heay um a couple of guys at 9o5 Mac and a couple of prominent other Publications um returned their Vision Pros because their eyesight isn't good enough or they just have issues with nausea um and then that turns into everyone's returning their Vision Pro right um there was a crack this whole crack gate nonsense um did we covered that last week didn't we um I think so I mean certainly I've heard about it before but it seemed to sort of Come Away excuse me it started and then seemed to go away again so like it wasn't to yeah don't repeat crack gate I'm just exaggerating please don't make this a gate um it it it appears that there's a handful that have this issue it doesn't seem to be widespread we haven't heard we got uh we asked for emails and responses in the article on the podcast on social uh everywhere we could and um we've talked with TechCrunch and these other Publications and I've gotten one email um from a person who had this happen so take take that again anic data right we don't know um but going back to the returning in droves and people losing interests we we don't know yes joern is a big figure um in the tech sphere covering news and stuff but Jon's also um a different kind of nerd very old school classic Mac nerd right respect everything that she does as a journalist she's great I have huge amount of time for her I think she's excellent she makes awesome reviews for the iPhone and I and I sympathize with her for putting it in a drawer because this thing is a very personal very specific device it's not for everyone and it's just not for her that I don't think we should read into it as oh no this thing sucks it's just oh no this thing isn't for Joanna Stern that's all you can learn from her putting it away but I do find it funny that that became a story on its own but um we have learned from more rumor is leak data analytic type stuff that isn't from Apple so again Grandin assault but it looks like the return rate for Apple Vision Pro is on par with iPhone 15 Pro uh which is about 1% of those sold have been returned um which is a far lower number than I guess what people were guessing I didn't have a number in my head but I don't know 1% sure why not um and if you do the math I guess 1% of 100,000 is am I right is that a thousand yeah so if that's you know a th000 2,000 returns so if you see 2,000 returns across the United States maybe that looks big but out of the amount sold it's a actually relatively small number and comparable to other Apple releases um seems to be fine and again this whole crack thing we just still haven't really been hearing from like we have contacts we've been talking to and stuff and just haven't really heard anything about like big support like there hasn't been a big wave of people and people have these headsets I'm wearing one and yes Tech crunches um I believe it was Tech crunch uh their review unit did have the crack issue but that's the only major publication that we've heard of that with this issue so again this seems to be isolated uh the returns are also limited so I just find it funny when it comes to Apple products the the littlest bit of news can blow up very quickly and it turns into everyone's returning Vision Pro and once we get the actual data those same Publications just kind of stay silent on the subject and don't correct or retract or anything well there's a story this week uh circulating that demand for the iPhone 15 is so low in China that uh third party resellers are dropping the prices but um they're dropping it slightly less than Apple has dropped it in China and they do this in China about this time every year because I was shocked to realize we're kind of midcycle now almost six months in when's Chinese New Year uh good point not very long ago um 618 Festival coming up yeah so there's a lot of Chinese holidays in the spring that Americans I think just forget uh happen um so there's a lot of discounts around that Apple doesn't generally discount things but um the resellers do uh just like sales at Best Buy you can go get BOGO deals on iPhones in America all the time um Apple doesn't they authorize hang on I've got to check BOGO right in England that used to be known as bog off uh buy one get one free kind of thing and I kind of liked that I don't know does that travel very well yours is yeah sounds like you're saying mug off yeah exactly I like it okay all right so there are lots of offers and things but they're being interpreted as disastrous again it's just this Tea Leaf reading gets exhausting because people want to take the smallest amount of data and blow it up into the largest scope that they can and it's just that's just not how data works I mean go to take a problemin stat class guys I mean a one week a one day class is all the information you'll ever need to know about statistics and it's uh that the first sentence out of the teacher's mouth should be this is all made up um because it's true uh I I'm not joking my problemin stat teacher in high school the first thing out of their mouth was this is pretty much all made up but we have reason to believe these patterns lead to statistically isolating results that can be true but not necessarily true so yeah again it's fun um anyway so back to Vision Pro and sales and all of that do you know how much it costs to if you take all of the pieces of the Vision Pro part and you know you go to Radio Shack and needed to buy all the parts how much it would cost to get all the pieces of the Vision Pro the bill of manufacturer materials bill of materials yes I'm trying to judge from your voice here I'm thinking it's probably not low is it it's significant enough okay but there's got to be a profit margin uh so base price is three and a half thousand um I'm going to go high I'll say $3,000 $54 $2 okay because I mean I have a problem with B stories because that's the price of the second uh head set the first one cost all of those years of work and effort and things but right okay so the bill of materials doesn't really tell us anything that we didn't know it's uh very expensive OLED displays I think those are the most expensive individual component in the entire headset um but just to remind everyone I'm sure people listening already know this but the build of materials does not account for research development employees being paid um the janitor cleaning the hallways uh at Apple park outside of where they're building The Vision Pro right there's so much that goes into everything the cafeteria running 24 hours a day while these uh guys live in Apple Park trying to build it's so weird to but it's true like anytime anyone hears about a budget think of the military think think of what it takes to run a military base 24 hours a day now apply that to Apple Park these people have to work they have to eat they have to sleep you have to pay them they also have to have parts to research with they have to have things that they can set on fire explode blow up give up on because uh they need to do materials testing they need to do every sort of thing with every piece of equipment over five six years as they develop this product and we know that this is taken at least 5 years to develop yeah you say this but really they just copied our Ulus and Quest something so that and maybe a sandwich at lunchtime what more could they possibly want with a $1,500 bill of material oh I just erased something with a um $1,500 bill of materials honestly not bad considering the price is $3,500 um I I I honest it could Apple could have definitely gone higher this is about 40% 44% of the price of the headset um itself so it's taking in those margins um and it's accounting for the price of everything else involved in building it but I just find that all very interesting um people love to bicker about this as like oh it's overpriced it's like actually for $1,500 Apple could have probably charged 5,000 for this thing and got away with it the thing that interests me is you just casually threw in that you're in usem and that very evocative thing of it's cold you've dropped your microphone a couple of times is youe the place you go to when you want to work now in the headset I change uh I maybe not a daily rotation but I I move around every couple days just to have a different view I think um I'm going to butcher this because I still don't know how to I haven't heard a person actually pronounce it halaka I think um the Haw it's a Hawaiian mountain range it's beautiful uh it's one of the it's one of the things you're looking over a Cliffs side at a sunset with swirling fog and clouds it's very beautiful that's my favorite just cuz it has a lot of it feels like there's a lot of depth there and uh my the windows can kind of just go anywhere anyway it's really cool uh that and Mount Hood are my go-tos but every now and then I'll I'll go to Yos the White Sands are fine like just some of these feel a little empty I think it'd be cool if Apple had some animations playing in the background like if a deer just poked its head out of the trees every now and then but um there's no sound is there yes for any of these you can there is if you so you can actually control that volume um you can set the environment volume to be louder or quieter but yeah depending on where you are and what time of day you've selected there is different sounds um good Mount Hood will have birds chirping it'll start raining and you'll hear the the water Rippling across the lake um in yosee it's it's kind of it's windy but there's uh you can hear animal like birds and stuff in the background um but yeah mostly just bird noises and stuff uh Crickets at night time stuff like that uh nighttime does I I'm thinking they assumed it was the same visual all the time is there actually are there seasons in these things no but that's something interesting that could come later I think um we've only seen the tip of the iceberg uh for immersive environments and that brings up a good uh Point Mike uh asked us all about what our favorite environments would be for Cinema we're going to do a separate one I think on like n natural environment so this one's focused on theaters and specifically because Apple vision Pro only has technically one theater view but two if you want to be super technical because um when you're viewing media and Apple TV you can watch it from a movie theater with different seatings you can be in the front row um in the in the base or the front row the balcony of detail left side right side you can choose different things like that in the theater that's cool you don't see the theater seats but you see that you're kind of in a theater shaped room um that's all very fun I'm I I'm a balcony front row guy which is a seat that doesn't exist but you're kind of hovering midair suspended in front of a you know very large screen whatever size a movie theater screen would be but that's good I think my favorite way to watch 3D movies but for the shock and awe effect there is another environment just for viewing media inside of Apple TV and it's hard to find and no one explained this and so anyone listening to Vision Pro if you haven't tried this yet go do it cuz it's amazing be in Mount Hood at night and then start start media and go to the theater selector but instead of selecting the theater select Mount Hood at night again inside of that and it will Zoom your screen out over the lake and have a reflection of the screen over the water and a 150 foot Apple did give us that number a 150 ft display at least it appears so at night in the mountains it's really really stunning effect and the 3D movies work in that environment as well it's really fun but those are the only two available today right yeah um so you're saying about Mike he's asking uh everybody what they want and Disney does have its environments and other apps will have some too but right now Apple's environments there's only two from viewing media so the question to you William is where would you like to watch movies inside of Vision Pro in a fully immersive environment goodness the thing is I don't care about the environment well no that's not true when I go to cinema I do my level best to get a seat dead center uh of it for the optim I think the optimum effect U so I obviously care about that and the positioning of it I just I'm if the film's any good I'm concentrating on the film but I wouldn't mind pretending to be in I don't know uh the Symphony Hall is a place near me but me city of Bingham Symphony orchestra's home Symphony Hall here is a gorgeous building with other I think they've ever shown films there but they could something an impressive piece of architecture would been asked what's Radio City Musical like I've never been inside I'd like to see inside places yeah what about you I I could imagine it would be fun to like watch a movie in the cinee chapler or something um that wouldn't that feel just slightly you know wrong wrong little bit um no but but actually my pick was Drive-In and I don't think it was included but um I think it'd be fun to be at a not just any Drive-In but a 50s Drive-In with the old vehicles around you and you could even have a mode where you turn it on so it sounds like it's coming from that silly speaker next to your car um just ah you do that that thing of yawning and stretching and putting your arm around your partner and yeah okay you're either on a picnic blanket in the car or on top of the car you have to choose you're either on top of the car or on the front hood you have to choose which one you're on um I think there's a lot of potential here but I'll take it even further I personally like the environments but I'm I'm with you they feel a little distracting unless I want them there I'm probably going to just watch in the movie theater because there's nothing there to distract me I'm just focused on the content um but if you were going to do something cool make them into kind of an interactive video game make them aware of what movie you're watching and have things happen based on the movie that you're watching like if you're in the Disney environments and you're on Avengers Tower and you get to that scene where they're fighting in New York have the aliens flying around New York in on Avengers Tower or if you're watching ingame have one of the alien spaceships breaking through the atmosphere in the corner like have things change or Monsters Ink like that floor there's Easter eggs in these and they're it's great you can look around at Monsters Inc and you can see the guitar from Coco and you can see photos of different things like it's cool that they put these Easter eggs but it's not interactive and they don't nothing moves nothing happens but I think it would be even more interesting even if it's on a bit of a loop and maybe it would get annoying I don't know but like if there were interactions or or pre- playing video or if you were to look over your shoulder to have a monster poking its head around at you at the cubicle and then it ducks behind it or something right like has have a little bit more entertainment value and variety to it and I think that would be fun uh as an addition to the movie you're watching again I wouldn't want to watch a new episode of Mandalorian this way because I want to focus on the content but if I'm if I'm revisiting Finding Nemo for the h hundredth time wouldn't it be fun to have like a shark swim by while you're in the uh in the coral reef watching a movie or something I don't know I've been reading a lot of interviews with film editors recently talking about um they will take out 16 frames from a film and radically improve the scene because the timing and the rhythm is perfect none of them allow for taking out 16 frames but oh look the audience is going to be looking over there off the side of the screen for it I no no none of this at all I'm with you I am definitely a purist when it comes to cinema that's why like the first time I'm watching something I want silence I want to focus on the T TV I don't want anyone talking about it cuz I will if if a conversation goes on long enough I will pause it I am that guy and be like look guys we need we're watching this please let me watch it you can rewatch it later um but yes it's one of those things but if it's something I'm rewatching I'm a little bit more Loosey Goosey and I like the idea of there being an entertaining element to it um like well I do like directors and writers audio commentaries and things after I've seen it the first time um imagine imagine if you are Disney again I keep going back to Disney but or even Apple like so these are companies in control of larger media things with software so they're I think they're both in that sphere where this is capable I don't I don't see HBO doing this for example but imagine if you're one of these companies and you're developing For All Mankind or you're developing the next Pixar movie imagine building an immersive environment around a project you're currently making so that it is part of what you're watching and it and then suddenly the screen in front of you things are happening around you as if you were that aren't part of the media but it's as if you're there like imagine if you're watching Ted lasso and you're suddenly watching the game but you're in a seat watching the game right just ways that you could really make this crazy is like imagine again Ted lasso they jump to the the the soccer field I know that show has five minutes of soccer across the entire three seasons you wouldn't know this William uh they don't really focus on the I'm sorry the football but um imagine if you're sitting in a stad like they they go to a game and now you're sitting in the Greyhound stadium and the show is playing on the giant replay board or whatever but you look down and you can see the field around you that kind of stuff like just I'm not imagining enough to to to think of it but imagine programming a show around immersive environments and using them and moving you between them and stuff like that kind of giving you this in video games it's called 2.5d when you take a old 2D game and add 3D elements to it it's the same kind of concept where you're you're keeping the 2D the show the movie the same but you're bringing more of the external 3D environment in with it and just adding to the immersion I think fun I think uh there would be two ways to watch it again without or with and I think that having the environments and stuff involved could be fun or interesting but probably a little gimmicky I can see that too I saw a Wonder Woman in cinema here in the UK the the first I forgotten who wrote it but uh gil g version of it um and it was shown in what they called 4D which meant the chair move they blow air on you and splash maybe some water every now and then exactly that there's one moment when one character is walking through the rain for probably 16 frames and a little dot of water appeared on my head and all I thought was yeah right okay the story yeah uh I think for immersive drama and things like that write better films there you go all right and on that bombshell I have one thing one more thing I've got to ask you as an a apple Vision Pro headset user are you pleased or displeased with the rumor that iOS 18 is in some way going to make iPhones more like Vision Pro and I don't fully understand how well that one's totally made up and not true so we don't have to worry about it yeah okay um well that was a shorter conversation than I thought yeah I believe that comes from Majin Buu which probably just got it from a random concept artist off of WBO and yeah uh that leaker is fine as far as and there's a reason why we cover him just to break into it sure um we cover him because we have the rumor score if we didn't have the rumor score we'd probably ignore him but um because we can kind of give readers a gauge of what's true and what isn't it lets us cover more rumors and this person does find sources and again sometimes maybe from their own internal sources I don't know uh but usually just from WBO wandering around I guess finding things it's a Chinese social media website um internal sources sounds like a euphemism for they made it up it was in their own head also possible uh this seems more like a character than an actual leaker a lot of these leakers do turn into characters we if you've been following this long enough we used to have um loves to dream and it would propose every leak as if they had just woken up from a dream um like there's there's always a personality to it but Majin Buu is just kind of uh H and the and the problem is they always reply to whatever post they make and say don't take this too seriously and just to kind of cover their own anyway this one was just this one feels made up this one doesn't feel real um but no I but Mark Garmin did come out with a report saying there is a redesign coming in iOS 18 which is exciting I think we'll see a little bit more Vision Pro like elements um we're already seeing it in the podcast app in iOS 17.4 uh there's a new now playing bar that appears to kind of float above the UI a little bit um just Vision very Vision Pro like with the pill shape and everything so I could see one borrowing from the other as has always been the case in apple developing UI iPad gets something then Mac gets something then iPhone so now that Vision OS is out there and again Apple isolates everyone iOS didn't see what Vision OS looked like before it was ready right so they're only just learning themselves and they're like wow that's cool we're going to do that too um and these operating systems coming in June are the first time we actually get to see that implemented so I I'm with Mark Gman I think we're going to see some changes I wouldn't I don't know if we can classified as a redesign but I guess we'll have to see what it looks like but I think there's going to be elements that look like Vision OS but it's not going to be a grid of circle icons on a home screen or anything like that it's not going to look like Vision OS but they could definitely borrow from each other and I think that kind of uniformity is useful we're just into March and already I'm wishing for June let's stop that there so it occurs to me by the way that the next time you and I speak iOS 17.4 will be out and the EV the world will change in the European Union which is next door to me um but quite far away from you be interesting to see what happens yes uh so everyone's waiting for regulation to step in and say this is bad but of course we we don't know what they're going to say because they actually can't say anything until after March 7th um where they're able to give judgments about the provisions that apple and everyone have provided so we'll we'll see what happens there um I'm interested uh we're also seeing movement on uh the United States front which we're mentioning it now but we're years from a resolution but now that the doj in the United States is ready to move in on this antitrust case with apple it means that after a long and Winding Road of litigation probably in 2027 they might arrive at the same conclusion and ask Apple to give America the UN or you know United States users the same Provisions that they gave the EU and bring some of those App Store changes alternative marketplaces and stu stuff to quiet the antitrust complaints um again we'll take a probably will take a long time especially during an election year when we have no idea what the opinions of the possible incoming new presidency might be whether it's the same president or a new one there's too many questions in the air could affect too many decisions all I can say is nothing's happening this year so it'll be a while I think really what you're saying is stay tuned I think that's a good point to on where's hel thank you very much for this um you you're actually back sooner than me we're here most weeks sometimes you and the guest sometimes me and the guest but usually it's you and me we'll back in a week but people will be able to hear and see you much sooner on Mondays with the new hit Insider podcast you and Andrew do you know what's coming up this week or is it all an exciting mystery for us it's mostly a m homid Insider funny enough there's not a lot of news uh that that happens there so it's more difficult to get topics so we tend to focus on a couple of new products that have been announced stuff like that I'm not entirely aware of what we're going to be discussing this week but uh it should be entertaining as usual and one last one last note one last meta note um if you ever pay attention to the show notes I'm pretty sure Williams William does this but go look at the show notes uh I put these together um most weeks and I usually include everything we want to talk about but we don't necessarily get to everything especially this week there's usually a grab bag of topics at the end under just a miscellaneous headline uh go go look at the show notes there's a lot of good stuff in there this week we didn't get to there's just too many big topics this week to get to the smaller stuff um and pay attention to that every week because uh there's usually a lot of things that you might have missed if you're not on Apple Insider every single day so right good point in that case let's W and I go right next week's news yeah we may have to wait for Apple to do things I grant you while you check out the link for this week's news and in the meantime thank you very much for listening thank you as well to our sponsor notion for supporting the Apple Insider podcast see you next timehello welcome to the Apple Insider podcast I'm William Gallagher this week's episode is brought to you by notion and more about them later but for now I'm going to admit to you that I am feeling blue about the Apple car being cancelled forever joining me though is where's hu I'm I right where are you less sad about the car going well it's a It's Complicated because we all know if Apple car ever came to be it would be at least $100,000 if not more I mean it could have been a 50 $60,000 car but who are we kidding here um it it was just one of those products that Apple could have been working on definitely a lot of signs a lot of patents a lot of internal buildup a lot of rumors but is it truly dead we don't know it's dead for now they've put it to bed they could always return to it let's not forget this is one of those things that have died about five times before we'll get into that that's true but this one's sounding true and truly dead at this point it's cancelled it's done they're moving everyone off of the project to other systems but for now there is no apple car coming that's weird though when you said that about the price I suddenly thought oh if it actually launched I could see me talking to you about will there be an Apple car SE at some point points and I got interested again then and then I remembered it's all I have a funny thing do you think it would be called car just Apple logo car okay such the IDE well yeah I mean is that better than I car which it would have been oh that would have been awful 10 years ago that does sound like something Volkswagen would release though yes it's F I would have told you I'm not a car person at all but then Tesla came along and I I had a test drive in it and I was so impressed with it I was really really keen on it and then you know along with Tesla comes Elon Musk and it's sort of soured it a little bit for me so Apple was my last hope for this because there are no other uh electric vehicle uh manufacturers out there at all none it was going to be Tess no there are others uh so it's it's kind of a it's wild um pretty much everyone there's it's harder to it's a shorter list to say who's not working on electric right now um because Apple yes Apple's on that list now um but the thing is is electric we we're talking you know everyone's doing it because it's it's the future there's laws coming out in some countries that say no more gas vehicles by 2030 I mean I think that was France there's a couple of others um so electric is happening everywhere Honda Ford um Kia these big guys um imagine if Apple had bought Kia had followed through with that back in 2019 that's yet another thing they could have done right yeah i' forgotten that one but but yes electric is coming but when we're talking about Apple and this car uh this project it's not just an electric car cuz you know if Apple really wanted to build an electric car they could it's you know it's a known entity it's not like they're trying to get to Mars or something um the S it's just you know four wheels four electric motors big battery and a frame you know and then you just add the cushy seats and steering wheel uh I'm simplifying it but you know yeah a little bit even I was thinking about the axle to wheel steering wheel combination going to list all the screws involved but it it's well you wait a minute you are the guy who leaves wires hanging out after you've done things on the car so nothing's caught on fire in my car yet so okay it's just but okay Apple could have done it it it yes it's a it's a it's a like this isn't a un oh no apple just they failed they can't build a c no it's they couldn't build the car they wanted to build and the one they wanted to build would have been so expensive and the margin so like impossible to get like they would have had to have out priced the market twofold to even clear the margins they wanted and then no one would have bought it because no one could afford it and then we're talking about bank loans like this is Way Beyond Vision Pro as far as like it we're being scared by the $3,500 price point so Apple looked at it and said it's time we have to call it this isn't this isn't worth like financially it doesn't make sense let alone anything else there's other reasons but I think the primary number one reason on the list is margins money shareholder value all of that stuff that we've talked about before one of the things I'm quite impressed about is that they did cancel it uh because you I don't know if this is a US phrase as well have you heard of a thing called a sunk cost with things sunk cost uh sunk cost fallacy yes yeah um you would think there are companies having assuming they still had money to spend having invested that much would think well we got to finish it now and Apple's made a very cold sounding decision no so that happened with nfts everyone um you know your favorite washing machine brand you know like everyone made nfts but by the time they were ready to publish the nfts and do their big PR spin about buying a box of cereal with an nft in it or something um they' already gone and died and no one cared anymore but they already spent the money on the nft and the whole you know advertising program so they had to run through with it looking very foolish but that is the sun cost fallacy for sure but Apple car you say that I have I am looking a stack of nfts of a certain political figure in the US across my wall and uh yeah I think they sold out didn't but yes I'd actually forgotten that nfgs existed I'm here to remind you of that every so often just to thanks okay so the Apple car though is not a sunt cost fallacy because see I've I've seen this this rhetoric going around we can I guess we'll just dive in here um so Apple abandoned the project Titan which has been rumored since about 2014 so about a decade worth of work and research um around what would have been an autonomous vehicle uh earlier this year we heard Apple had actually pulled back on full autonomy which is level four autonomous driving which means that you you let go the steering wheel and the car knows where it's going um level two would have is basically what exists in like Hondas since 2016 basically Lane assist that keeps the car centered in the lane Apple uh had basically moved back to level two and where you have to keep your hands on the wheel but the car is helping you stay away from traffic not rear ending anyone there's a lot of sensors at play I've had a car that does this it's actually very nice to have in uh high traffic situations especially stop and go traffic but um Apple pulled back to that I think as soon as January that was rumored uh so was it January this year last year actually I might be missing that timeline someone can correct me I think it was more recent than that so I remember being surprised that they'd made that type of announcement and then just felt like they Lally it yeah a month later if if if I'm right about January this year a month later they're saying uh no we can't we're just we're pulling out this is it there's no there's project Titan is officially shelved and of course officially unofficially because all of this is a leaked uh announcement from internal to Apple none of this has been made this isn't on Apple's homepage you won't find any information there this is all leaked information so take it with a very large Rin assault but it seems to be from multiple sources this the initial one being very sound and sources after that confirming it that this has indeed happened but so a decade of work allegedly about $10 million of investment so about a billion dollars a year um not that much considering Apple's amount of money that they have I mean I believe in 2014 when they started they had something like a hundred billion do in the bank account so this is a drop in the bucket I was surprised to see how much other uh developers are spending like um I think it was a conflation there was Ford and GM between them well it was at least tens of billion that they were spending on Research apple is kind of weirdly out priced in R&D but so so getting back to sunk cost um all of this research and Tim Cook actually commented on this this is one of the rare moments that we got a little Peak inside of apple and how it thinks about things but I can't give you the exact date it's in one of my the abandoned 10 billion doll project Titanic disaster story that's Linked In the show notes um I love that Titanic disaster um but that that that's what the alleged again New York Times reached out to some employees that may or may not be angry about getting fired so who knows what's what's real they do sound a bit upset cuz no well nobody died yet there were collisions but nobody's actually died as far as I know yeah so right how many people died in t Titanic Okay so Tim Cook mentioned uh in an interview let's see what what the date is this is 2017 so Tim Cook was asked um about Apple's car plans they just pretty much directly asked about it and Tim Cook actually answered he said we're focusing on autonomous systems it's a core technology that we view as very important we sort of see it as a mother of all AI projects and it's probably the only time Tim Cook said AI before about 20123 um he said we'll see where it takes us we're not really saying from a product point of view what we will do there's a major disruption looming there you've got kind of three vectors of change happening generally in the same time frame we'll see where it takes us let's see there was one I've lost the phrase that I wanted him to wanted to say but uh he said paraphrasing now because I can't find it again um he basically said that the autonomous research that's being performed isn't just for self-driving cars that can be applied to many different kinds of projects He said this in 2017 not trying to give away that it was self-driving cars that they were actually working on but he's right um and this is where we finally coming full circle that 10 billion dolls of research yes some of it was into how well you can make a break or displaying information on a windshield but a lot of it and really a majority of it probably was AI research because in order to make a self-driving car which was Johnny IV's original vision in 2014 when this started full autonomy full self-driving you need an operating system and an intelligent assistant and full car operating thing AI now we call it um machine learning back in 2014 if it was announced um this thing which they would have called Siri which is really funny uh would have piloted the car without any user interface and they wouldn't even have they were so confident that they could do this they weren't even going to include a steering wheel in this vehicle yes and um all of that work may not go to a vehicle but it's still important for apple as they step into releasing AI focused features throughout 2024 and all of these employees not all of them of course you can't have a break specialist working on AI some people probably did have to get let go um or reassigned to different divisions but anyone working on this AI John Gian Andrea the leader of AI at Apple the what what senior vice president is is their title um he is you know taking all of that taking his crew and jumping right into whatever is happening with iOS 18 so I wouldn't say that that was a failed investment and again the car stuff still good they can use that for carplay they can use that for building new systems to attach to the wider vehicle partnering with BMW or something and again if Apple decides later on okay Now's the Time for an electric vehicle they've already got all the groundwork started so I wouldn't go out there saying Apple wasted their time with this I think it was a smart move to at the time to try and build something and they've pulled back at the right time and we'll get into that because the market just isn't there I just I actually remember reading the patent where we understood there was no steering wheel I was pouring over it thinking there's something really key missing here I I think in the last years or so I've easily read a 100 patents to do with the car and there was one I remember clearly one about breaking things CU I was think thinking how can you patent a Brak don't doesn't everybody have brakes and I never quite got to the bottom of that one but everything I can think of was um Hardware specific so the seats could have had lights in them to tell you where to sit down or something weird like that and there was lots of things about Direction finding and taking you to wherever you wanted to go which felt like Apple Maps plus kind of thing I'm not I think I read more Hardware Pats than I did anything that I understood could be used anywhere else although actually the moment I say that I remember what we learned about Apple Vision Pro which is is it there is it 5,000 patents uh were granted to Apple for that headset before we realized that they were for the headset so I think I must be missing a huge amount and I'm trying to imagine what um what AI things could you learn from a car that you could add to an iPhone well one of things that is very important for a autonomous vehicle is realtime operating systems and we're already seeing the results of that research I'm wearing it right now Apple Vision Pro um the operating system Vision s of course is not real time but the R1 chip inside uh doing realtime calculations of environmental information being piped in from multiple cameras while processing hand tracking all of this stuff is realtime um programming and I believe a lot of this technology probably came from Project Titan right like just because they're building it for a car doesn't mean it can't be used elsewhere and yes uh there's probably specific divisions researching this for revision Pro but again these applications can be applied across different things as Tim Cook said researching one thing can benefit the other um and while Apple does like to isolate different divisions to keep secrets it it it's clear that if they reach a Innovation on one thing that it can be passed along to another thing so yes real-time operating systems for one uh you need a smart assistant so you need Siri to be able to actually do things um which uh we're still trying to get there I mean I I personally don't have a problem with how Siri operates today but I understand that it's not everyone's favorite um I have one problem with it and it happened again to me today so it's on my mind let me rant just for one second I keep asking Siri on my watch to set a timer for a certain amount of you know cooking or something and I will ask for three minutes and it will give me 9 hours 27 minutes 16 seconds some insanely different number and you try to pass how did I phrase this that it could possibly misinterpreted and I just can't get it at all so uh tell me take me to Junction 5 of the M4 Motorway and it takes me instead to Sweden uh I could see that being an issue let me uh walk you back in time cuz I remember us covering this I don't have the link um enterprising people can probably find it but uh do you recall the story of Johnny IV and who is the other guy um alen Dy maybe uh I'm thinking design people is Alan Dy not Alan d it might have been alen Dy but I'm thinking more car related engineering um anyway he was he was big at Apple at the time and he's since left to do other things but uh anyway so Johnny I and this other person working on Apple car project and trying to conceive of this thing were taken to Apple's secret facility for driving uh their their uh little racetrack that they bought out in California Sunny Veil um and they were placed in a decked out I want to say Fiat and because that's one of Johnny Ya's favorite cars so I think they just wanted to kiss up to him a little bit and they kind of just I don't know the windows and stuff were closed off and there I think it was just kind of like the interior was like designed differently they might have even removed the steering wheel for effect because it was probably remote controlled and they had an actor sitting in with them reading a script as they drove along pretending this was a self-driving Apple giving them the the concept tour of an Apple car as they drove around and this actor was playing Siri describing restaurants as they passed by and Johnny e could ask queries and they were prepared had prepared statements for different things that could occur while they were in the car and it listen I'm sorry are you sure about you didn't just dream this no this is real this happen um I I'm going to have to find the story now because I know people are going to want going to want to read it but um because uh the reason why I know it's not made up is is a I have a distinct memory of this madness uh and B New York Times actually referenced it in their um diet tribe on Apple car I I wrote the story regarding the New York Times piece which it was fine I just I feel like they um is our good friend trip mckel I feel like he uh misclassified some of the actions Apple took here as like just aiming super negative for some reason but this happens a lot in Apple reporting I think that just that's a general conception when it's like yeah it's not great that Apple car isn't coming out but honestly I agree with long story short the article is about how Apple employees hated the idea of the project and called it the Titanic disaster instead of project Titan and were and they were celebrating that it was being cancelled because it was just they deemed it as an failure from the start there was no way it was ever going to work and I agree that some people like there's absolutely people in the company that have that mentality and I agree that it was a good idea for Apple to end the project but I feel like some of the storytelling around that was a little just a little aggressive for yeah but anyway he did mention he did mention the uh Johnny IV drive around and I thought that was funny Let me let me see if I can find it very curious about that although the fact you say it's a theat that makes me think if Apple had finished it it would have been a fat to come play wouldn't it yeah uh terrible yeah oh okay I was really pleased with that puns are the lowest form of uh comedy oh how dare you agree with John C for example okay H I'm curious about just how this spreads out to other things of AI I really had not thought about the realtime operating system but and now you've said it I should have thought of that because we've covered well they conflicting reports here but people saying that uh there's data saying the pass through effect of um Apple Vision Pro is dramatically better and closer to real time instantaneous than any other headset and things and you know that can't come from nothing so that would make sense that there was a origin bear Bob our boy Bob Mansfield yes Bob Mansfield so let me see there was a prot list of people who've left Apple I thought Steve Jobs okay there's a prototype yes tell me tell me so in this article from 2019 it said a source from the information this is talking about Johnny IV's departure and part of it did bring up the Bob Mansfield and Johnny IV prototype demo of Apple car uh and for the demonstration I've hired an actress to perform a Siri responding to voice commands uh but apparently at the time project Titan the engineers involved at least the engineers talking to IV were very confident this is back in 2015 by the way timeline wise they were they were just like oh yeah we can we can build this uh it's fine like a self-driving car we got this you know so the that confidence um so this is where trip Michel's report comes in as it feels a little bit hard again like they just chose a stance and they they they followed it but apparently Apple watch was launched in 2014 and apple is desperate to find something what what was next what was going to be Tim Cook's Legacy they have to find it oh no and uh someone just said cars and Tesla's doing cars we should do it too oh yeah and then everyone just kind of nodded and greed they rushed out the door and um drove Johnny IV around with an actress pretending to be Ser like it it sounds so silly when you say it out loud I don't think that's the order of events exactly I'm sure um there is uh a moment gosh again this is years ago I this one I can't I have I can't give I don't know the source but there was an interview with someone who had left apple and they mentioned that uh Steve Jobs had talked about a vehicle and I car at some point within the company so I don't think this was just completely out of nowhere but I do think they were looking at what Tesla was doing and the excitement around Tesla in let's you know 2014 and how they were claiming oh yeah 2016 full self-driving is going to happen and here we are in 2024 and they're not even you know that it's not good but um anyway so it's it's such a long and Rich history and I can't wait for the tell all book to come out in 10 years yeah except it suddenly thought I wonder how far they got with prototypes are there mockups I'm GNA have to watch eBay to see if there's a mysterious car suddenly auctioned somewhere you know how it happens with uh prototype iMacs and iPhones and things maybe the Apple car will finally leak out I could I could I think I'm wrong here no so the way the prototyping systems worked is um again the guts of a car are you know don't don't let anyone tell this to the Gearheads but they're all engines and uh you know they do things that's that they're they're all and radios you know steering wheels and pedals and tires you know that that's the part that they can do they they can build a car again it the car isn't the mystery it's the everything else that they had to figure out so the prototyping was basically done with a fleet of uh Vans with sensors attached so they had to train the sensors train the AI and learn streets and give it a level of confidence to drive around so those prototyping vehicles have been photographed and actually registered with the DMV in California um so that was no secret Apple was testing something to do with Vehicles driving around in these Vans with sensors strapped to them uh part of it could have been their mapping of course but more likely it had to do with um like their self-driving stuff because we've seen their mapping cars and it they don't they're different Vehicles so the these were definitely for Apple's project Titan driving around so you no you won't be able to find one of those on eBay I don't think oh well it was a thought I parked next to an Apple um uh liar mapping car once and the two people inside were having a burger each and I was so tempted to ask them questions but I frankly I I wimped out and went and got a burger myself listeners I know we're jumping around a little bit but again there's a decade of History here so please if you are interested in Apple car or want to try and eek out any specific details reach out to us we can jump on the next show and break down a couple of things a little further but we do have to try and move on a little bit I do have one last tidbits sorry I saw what you did there breakdown yeah yeah no no card joke oh come on you're picking on my puns I'm picking on your you have one more thing you want to say about Apple car all right so I do like so they they they apparently got far enough that they were confident in letting their um Vans driving around campuses shuttle buses basically um operate with these systems involved um so if you can find a shuttle bus driver at Apple Park you might be able to learn something about Apple's project Titan well I tell you what to make this and move on we are talking about basically an AI project that didn't work out fully there is also an AI project from Apple that apparently is working out perfectly fine but it's somewhat smaller scale uh what do you know about Apple ask okay so this is actually kind of a weird one um I actually reached out so this was um leaked by Mac rumors and I I reached out to them to kind of clarify a couple things because it's just kind of like um are you sure this isn't just a fancy search Tool uh that's just better at finding information and they clarified some of the text for me so basically Apple's internal support system right now they're kind of privately beta testing with select employees that volunteered for it to have this tool where they enter the problem basically user with 10.9 inch iPad can't you know use Apple pay with IO with iPad Os 17.1 or something but and with all these details in this random parameters it's not just going to do a query where it returns you know a search result kind of like Google search uh where it just finds previously known information and just gives you the page of the document book that it's in no instead it's going to parse that information and generate right that word's important generate a response specific to that query and because of that it's uh possible that this is Apple testing a GPT like system a generative Transformer system where the at the support employees are basically able to get responses uh from what you would call the the modern word Ai and but it's only trained on the internal knowledge based for Apple's support system so it can't it's less likely to hallucinate I won't say can't hallucinate because these are always capable of make they can make up a new support document that doesn't exist for example but they the leaked information also suggests that there are checks and balances occurring before the answer is given and um the the employ always are given are able to vote up or down whether or not this was a useful response so they're they're really trying to police this and keep a tight leash on it right now but if it goes well they might expand it to more places in the company including more support people actually well part me thinks is there any chance it could hallucinate and say buy Android instead or something but every time I spoken to oh you do yeah okay okay so United Airlines I believe so correct me if I'm wrong airplane company it's not important who who but airplane company has an AI chatbot for support and someone says I have a departed family member I must travel immediately is there I don't know why they asked this or how it came up but basically they they got the bot to say there is a bereavement program that gives them a discount on the plane tickets uh which doesn't exist the the the chatbot made it up but United had to honor that coupon and they immediately disbanded the um thing and I think there was some sort of case around it where the United basically put out the chatbot we employed is not authorized to give um actual advice or what it was so silly very silly but again this is the this is the issue you have with systems like this being put into place and how Apple tackles this is going to be wild I've had some tedious experiences with chatbots on support things I mean maddening stuff but every time I've actually spoken to an Apple support person they've been superb actually they've sorted out things so well so quickly um that's a clever thing to because they'll know if the results are right right or that's I I agree with your your point here a human using the tool to get me support 100% A+ love the idea but if I call and I'm talking to a robot no longer no like it hang up the phone give up level of because I think that's that that's a very good distinction here I this these tools can be useful but there needs to be a human element to ensure that something isn't broken along the way giving the employees resources like this can speed up support can give better answers because you can't expect um average Apple employees to know everything about Apple we're the Nerds here okay you go to an Apple store and you're listening to this podcast there's a good chance that you know more about Apple than most people in that store they're just they're just employees it's not like you work at McDonald's and know the history of McDonald's right like you just know how to flip the hamburger but when you're working at an Apple Store you might know a few things it's a requirement in fact if you're on the floor to be able to describe certain products a certain way but they're not going to know about the secret hidden menu that you have to click on to do this thing like that's that's nerd stuff um if you if you don't believe me go to an Apple store it's it's just the fact of life they're just people they're not you know Genies I I want to say that everyone I've spoken to an Apple Store once they've learned that I'm um basically did I write for app Insider once they've learned then the kind of degree of nerdness has crept up but not all of them there is one who I thought was spectacularly ignorant in one store and it put me off that Apple Store there are two reasonably equidistant from where I am and so I tend to just go to the other one because of one person uh for it and what I had but um I guess to bring this back around so apple is testing an artificial intelligence tool GPT like tool but apparently a couple I think literally a day later um it came up that so I think uh Apple Insider did some digging itself so I don't think this was from the same Source just different Source same ask Tool uh but it looks like this might be more than just a support tool and it's being tested more around the systems but uh the source described it as not an llm or generative AI like some people think it's actually more advanced than that is what the person says uh that it's actually more of a let me find the exact phrase cuz it's it's interesting well I'm thinking you can't be right here because we all know that apple is years behind the rest of the industry yeah yeah machine learning is existed since the I exactly they went the wrong route with machine learning they should have been on AI from the start but would they listen no this episode is brought to you by notion notion combines your notes documents and and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed and it's this idea of one space that's key notion is so expansive and so capable that you can do everything in it which means you have one tool one place to go to do all you need and it's your place it's your space too your notion looks different to mine and to everyone else's too because as you work in it you make a change here you customize there and it becomes an extension of you and your work Al so you know this there is no shortage of helpful AI tools out there in the world but using those means switching back and forth between yet another set of digital tools so instead of simplifying your workflow in the end it just becomes more complicated unless of course you're in notion and the fully integrated notion AI it helps you work faster write better think bigger actually doing tasks that normally take your hours in just seconds right there in your work for instance you could ask notion to research your projects you can set up automation so that you concentrate on the work you want to do while notion does the organizing that you used to have to try notion for free when you go to notion.com slapple Insider that's all lowercase letters notion.com slapple inssider to try the powerful easy to use notion AI today and when you use our link you're supporting our show notion.com slapple Insider thanks to notion for its support at the Apple Insider podcast do you know one thing that that that really stood out for me from that trip mckel New York Times report just to pick on him a little more machine learning a type of AI technology that just no machine learn they're they're they're not they're not it's not a subset they're similes they're they're the same thing anyway I just thought that was just a terrible way to define it machine learning basically becomes I understand what he's trying to convey because artificial intelligence implies something bigger but that's the problem with the term it's it's not it's just better machine learning it's just more anyway moving on um this is I found the phrasing in the article so ask is not an llm or other generative AI like some instead the source is leaning into this saying that because the support knowledge database and the front end to that database for support members are constantly evolving and these more intelligent than an llm or G generative AI it's actually intended to be an advanced natural language search engine um so it's kind of a mixture of the two it's not exactly a chap so the problem with calling it a chatbot like a GPT or um a large language model in llm is that that implies that it's trained on a large data set um and that data set's increasing but when those data sets change or evolve it requires the thing to be updated right that's why you keep hearing about gpt3 GPT 4 the data sets are getting updated the way the query strings are being run is being updated like the intelligence is getting better but what this is suggesting is it doesn't need an update it's just getting more intelligent on its own because as the database evolves it's taking in that new information on the Fly which is an important difference and I think that's really interesting I was uh it's probably chat GPT whichever version I was using say actually said to me that it only had knowledge up to 2021 or 2022 and at the time I thought how unusual check gbt telling me something useful and not just pretending it's made it's got things right they um required to say that because and I you you probably know this but um the reason why GPT and stuff isn't up to date with 2024 February is because they don't want it to be used for modern political um manipulation so you wouldn't so you can't go in there and tell it to be like make up something about this that's happening today and get horrible results and posted all over social like it would just lead to a lot of issues so they they try to keep it it's intelligent about things like say you got uh memory loss and you forget your name and who you are and your occupa but for some reason like you still know how to drive a car like that core information about how the world works is still there but the information about What's happen today is not so that's I think that's uh that's interesting too that makes sense wonder how Apple would uh distinguish that too yes not that anybody would use AI for improper purposes in a election year oh Absolut at all obviously not no uh I I think I've resisted long enough um for weeks and weeks now even before you had Apple Vision Pro I kept asking you in more details cuz here I am in the UK unable to get also it's out of my budget and I vacillate between I listen to you and I want one I listen to Mike Worley from up cider and I don't it's just back and forth I don't but Joanna Stern this week wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal that basically said yeah very nice but she's put hers in a drawer somewhere just like she has um meta Quest or elus or whichever other ones the she had uh you surely have now given up and just gone back to your iPads as normal well I said it earlier I'm wearing it right now I'm in yosee it's a little cold here um I lost my microphone in the snow a couple times but yeah yeah no yeah so Vision Pro yes guys we have a another short Vision pro segment this week uh you think it's short when I go want the details we would we would we would hope that we can keep it brief anyway but um in any case yes so Janice Stern I don't I don't know this there's been a lot of narrative and we've covered this last couple weeks around uh Vision Pro the Nerds don't care they're returning it in droves and uh someone's eye exploded and yada yada and it's what is like the truth and the truth is we don't nobody knows um it's almost mostly made up a conjecture based off of heay um a couple of guys at 9o5 Mac and a couple of prominent other Publications um returned their Vision Pros because their eyesight isn't good enough or they just have issues with nausea um and then that turns into everyone's returning their Vision Pro right um there was a crack this whole crack gate nonsense um did we covered that last week didn't we um I think so I mean certainly I've heard about it before but it seemed to sort of Come Away excuse me it started and then seemed to go away again so like it wasn't to yeah don't repeat crack gate I'm just exaggerating please don't make this a gate um it it it appears that there's a handful that have this issue it doesn't seem to be widespread we haven't heard we got uh we asked for emails and responses in the article on the podcast on social uh everywhere we could and um we've talked with TechCrunch and these other Publications and I've gotten one email um from a person who had this happen so take take that again anic data right we don't know um but going back to the returning in droves and people losing interests we we don't know yes joern is a big figure um in the tech sphere covering news and stuff but Jon's also um a different kind of nerd very old school classic Mac nerd right respect everything that she does as a journalist she's great I have huge amount of time for her I think she's excellent she makes awesome reviews for the iPhone and I and I sympathize with her for putting it in a drawer because this thing is a very personal very specific device it's not for everyone and it's just not for her that I don't think we should read into it as oh no this thing sucks it's just oh no this thing isn't for Joanna Stern that's all you can learn from her putting it away but I do find it funny that that became a story on its own but um we have learned from more rumor is leak data analytic type stuff that isn't from Apple so again Grandin assault but it looks like the return rate for Apple Vision Pro is on par with iPhone 15 Pro uh which is about 1% of those sold have been returned um which is a far lower number than I guess what people were guessing I didn't have a number in my head but I don't know 1% sure why not um and if you do the math I guess 1% of 100,000 is am I right is that a thousand yeah so if that's you know a th000 2,000 returns so if you see 2,000 returns across the United States maybe that looks big but out of the amount sold it's a actually relatively small number and comparable to other Apple releases um seems to be fine and again this whole crack thing we just still haven't really been hearing from like we have contacts we've been talking to and stuff and just haven't really heard anything about like big support like there hasn't been a big wave of people and people have these headsets I'm wearing one and yes Tech crunches um I believe it was Tech crunch uh their review unit did have the crack issue but that's the only major publication that we've heard of that with this issue so again this seems to be isolated uh the returns are also limited so I just find it funny when it comes to Apple products the the littlest bit of news can blow up very quickly and it turns into everyone's returning Vision Pro and once we get the actual data those same Publications just kind of stay silent on the subject and don't correct or retract or anything well there's a story this week uh circulating that demand for the iPhone 15 is so low in China that uh third party resellers are dropping the prices but um they're dropping it slightly less than Apple has dropped it in China and they do this in China about this time every year because I was shocked to realize we're kind of midcycle now almost six months in when's Chinese New Year uh good point not very long ago um 618 Festival coming up yeah so there's a lot of Chinese holidays in the spring that Americans I think just forget uh happen um so there's a lot of discounts around that Apple doesn't generally discount things but um the resellers do uh just like sales at Best Buy you can go get BOGO deals on iPhones in America all the time um Apple doesn't they authorize hang on I've got to check BOGO right in England that used to be known as bog off uh buy one get one free kind of thing and I kind of liked that I don't know does that travel very well yours is yeah sounds like you're saying mug off yeah exactly I like it okay all right so there are lots of offers and things but they're being interpreted as disastrous again it's just this Tea Leaf reading gets exhausting because people want to take the smallest amount of data and blow it up into the largest scope that they can and it's just that's just not how data works I mean go to take a problemin stat class guys I mean a one week a one day class is all the information you'll ever need to know about statistics and it's uh that the first sentence out of the teacher's mouth should be this is all made up um because it's true uh I I'm not joking my problemin stat teacher in high school the first thing out of their mouth was this is pretty much all made up but we have reason to believe these patterns lead to statistically isolating results that can be true but not necessarily true so yeah again it's fun um anyway so back to Vision Pro and sales and all of that do you know how much it costs to if you take all of the pieces of the Vision Pro part and you know you go to Radio Shack and needed to buy all the parts how much it would cost to get all the pieces of the Vision Pro the bill of manufacturer materials bill of materials yes I'm trying to judge from your voice here I'm thinking it's probably not low is it it's significant enough okay but there's got to be a profit margin uh so base price is three and a half thousand um I'm going to go high I'll say $3,000 $54 $2 okay because I mean I have a problem with B stories because that's the price of the second uh head set the first one cost all of those years of work and effort and things but right okay so the bill of materials doesn't really tell us anything that we didn't know it's uh very expensive OLED displays I think those are the most expensive individual component in the entire headset um but just to remind everyone I'm sure people listening already know this but the build of materials does not account for research development employees being paid um the janitor cleaning the hallways uh at Apple park outside of where they're building The Vision Pro right there's so much that goes into everything the cafeteria running 24 hours a day while these uh guys live in Apple Park trying to build it's so weird to but it's true like anytime anyone hears about a budget think of the military think think of what it takes to run a military base 24 hours a day now apply that to Apple Park these people have to work they have to eat they have to sleep you have to pay them they also have to have parts to research with they have to have things that they can set on fire explode blow up give up on because uh they need to do materials testing they need to do every sort of thing with every piece of equipment over five six years as they develop this product and we know that this is taken at least 5 years to develop yeah you say this but really they just copied our Ulus and Quest something so that and maybe a sandwich at lunchtime what more could they possibly want with a $1,500 bill of material oh I just erased something with a um $1,500 bill of materials honestly not bad considering the price is $3,500 um I I I honest it could Apple could have definitely gone higher this is about 40% 44% of the price of the headset um itself so it's taking in those margins um and it's accounting for the price of everything else involved in building it but I just find that all very interesting um people love to bicker about this as like oh it's overpriced it's like actually for $1,500 Apple could have probably charged 5,000 for this thing and got away with it the thing that interests me is you just casually threw in that you're in usem and that very evocative thing of it's cold you've dropped your microphone a couple of times is youe the place you go to when you want to work now in the headset I change uh I maybe not a daily rotation but I I move around every couple days just to have a different view I think um I'm going to butcher this because I still don't know how to I haven't heard a person actually pronounce it halaka I think um the Haw it's a Hawaiian mountain range it's beautiful uh it's one of the it's one of the things you're looking over a Cliffs side at a sunset with swirling fog and clouds it's very beautiful that's my favorite just cuz it has a lot of it feels like there's a lot of depth there and uh my the windows can kind of just go anywhere anyway it's really cool uh that and Mount Hood are my go-tos but every now and then I'll I'll go to Yos the White Sands are fine like just some of these feel a little empty I think it'd be cool if Apple had some animations playing in the background like if a deer just poked its head out of the trees every now and then but um there's no sound is there yes for any of these you can there is if you so you can actually control that volume um you can set the environment volume to be louder or quieter but yeah depending on where you are and what time of day you've selected there is different sounds um good Mount Hood will have birds chirping it'll start raining and you'll hear the the water Rippling across the lake um in yosee it's it's kind of it's windy but there's uh you can hear animal like birds and stuff in the background um but yeah mostly just bird noises and stuff uh Crickets at night time stuff like that uh nighttime does I I'm thinking they assumed it was the same visual all the time is there actually are there seasons in these things no but that's something interesting that could come later I think um we've only seen the tip of the iceberg uh for immersive environments and that brings up a good uh Point Mike uh asked us all about what our favorite environments would be for Cinema we're going to do a separate one I think on like n natural environment so this one's focused on theaters and specifically because Apple vision Pro only has technically one theater view but two if you want to be super technical because um when you're viewing media and Apple TV you can watch it from a movie theater with different seatings you can be in the front row um in the in the base or the front row the balcony of detail left side right side you can choose different things like that in the theater that's cool you don't see the theater seats but you see that you're kind of in a theater shaped room um that's all very fun I'm I I'm a balcony front row guy which is a seat that doesn't exist but you're kind of hovering midair suspended in front of a you know very large screen whatever size a movie theater screen would be but that's good I think my favorite way to watch 3D movies but for the shock and awe effect there is another environment just for viewing media inside of Apple TV and it's hard to find and no one explained this and so anyone listening to Vision Pro if you haven't tried this yet go do it cuz it's amazing be in Mount Hood at night and then start start media and go to the theater selector but instead of selecting the theater select Mount Hood at night again inside of that and it will Zoom your screen out over the lake and have a reflection of the screen over the water and a 150 foot Apple did give us that number a 150 ft display at least it appears so at night in the mountains it's really really stunning effect and the 3D movies work in that environment as well it's really fun but those are the only two available today right yeah um so you're saying about Mike he's asking uh everybody what they want and Disney does have its environments and other apps will have some too but right now Apple's environments there's only two from viewing media so the question to you William is where would you like to watch movies inside of Vision Pro in a fully immersive environment goodness the thing is I don't care about the environment well no that's not true when I go to cinema I do my level best to get a seat dead center uh of it for the optim I think the optimum effect U so I obviously care about that and the positioning of it I just I'm if the film's any good I'm concentrating on the film but I wouldn't mind pretending to be in I don't know uh the Symphony Hall is a place near me but me city of Bingham Symphony orchestra's home Symphony Hall here is a gorgeous building with other I think they've ever shown films there but they could something an impressive piece of architecture would been asked what's Radio City Musical like I've never been inside I'd like to see inside places yeah what about you I I could imagine it would be fun to like watch a movie in the cinee chapler or something um that wouldn't that feel just slightly you know wrong wrong little bit um no but but actually my pick was Drive-In and I don't think it was included but um I think it'd be fun to be at a not just any Drive-In but a 50s Drive-In with the old vehicles around you and you could even have a mode where you turn it on so it sounds like it's coming from that silly speaker next to your car um just ah you do that that thing of yawning and stretching and putting your arm around your partner and yeah okay you're either on a picnic blanket in the car or on top of the car you have to choose you're either on top of the car or on the front hood you have to choose which one you're on um I think there's a lot of potential here but I'll take it even further I personally like the environments but I'm I'm with you they feel a little distracting unless I want them there I'm probably going to just watch in the movie theater because there's nothing there to distract me I'm just focused on the content um but if you were going to do something cool make them into kind of an interactive video game make them aware of what movie you're watching and have things happen based on the movie that you're watching like if you're in the Disney environments and you're on Avengers Tower and you get to that scene where they're fighting in New York have the aliens flying around New York in on Avengers Tower or if you're watching ingame have one of the alien spaceships breaking through the atmosphere in the corner like have things change or Monsters Ink like that floor there's Easter eggs in these and they're it's great you can look around at Monsters Inc and you can see the guitar from Coco and you can see photos of different things like it's cool that they put these Easter eggs but it's not interactive and they don't nothing moves nothing happens but I think it would be even more interesting even if it's on a bit of a loop and maybe it would get annoying I don't know but like if there were interactions or or pre- playing video or if you were to look over your shoulder to have a monster poking its head around at you at the cubicle and then it ducks behind it or something right like has have a little bit more entertainment value and variety to it and I think that would be fun uh as an addition to the movie you're watching again I wouldn't want to watch a new episode of Mandalorian this way because I want to focus on the content but if I'm if I'm revisiting Finding Nemo for the h hundredth time wouldn't it be fun to have like a shark swim by while you're in the uh in the coral reef watching a movie or something I don't know I've been reading a lot of interviews with film editors recently talking about um they will take out 16 frames from a film and radically improve the scene because the timing and the rhythm is perfect none of them allow for taking out 16 frames but oh look the audience is going to be looking over there off the side of the screen for it I no no none of this at all I'm with you I am definitely a purist when it comes to cinema that's why like the first time I'm watching something I want silence I want to focus on the T TV I don't want anyone talking about it cuz I will if if a conversation goes on long enough I will pause it I am that guy and be like look guys we need we're watching this please let me watch it you can rewatch it later um but yes it's one of those things but if it's something I'm rewatching I'm a little bit more Loosey Goosey and I like the idea of there being an entertaining element to it um like well I do like directors and writers audio commentaries and things after I've seen it the first time um imagine imagine if you are Disney again I keep going back to Disney but or even Apple like so these are companies in control of larger media things with software so they're I think they're both in that sphere where this is capable I don't I don't see HBO doing this for example but imagine if you're one of these companies and you're developing For All Mankind or you're developing the next Pixar movie imagine building an immersive environment around a project you're currently making so that it is part of what you're watching and it and then suddenly the screen in front of you things are happening around you as if you were that aren't part of the media but it's as if you're there like imagine if you're watching Ted lasso and you're suddenly watching the game but you're in a seat watching the game right just ways that you could really make this crazy is like imagine again Ted lasso they jump to the the the soccer field I know that show has five minutes of soccer across the entire three seasons you wouldn't know this William uh they don't really focus on the I'm sorry the football but um imagine if you're sitting in a stad like they they go to a game and now you're sitting in the Greyhound stadium and the show is playing on the giant replay board or whatever but you look down and you can see the field around you that kind of stuff like just I'm not imagining enough to to to think of it but imagine programming a show around immersive environments and using them and moving you between them and stuff like that kind of giving you this in video games it's called 2.5d when you take a old 2D game and add 3D elements to it it's the same kind of concept where you're you're keeping the 2D the show the movie the same but you're bringing more of the external 3D environment in with it and just adding to the immersion I think fun I think uh there would be two ways to watch it again without or with and I think that having the environments and stuff involved could be fun or interesting but probably a little gimmicky I can see that too I saw a Wonder Woman in cinema here in the UK the the first I forgotten who wrote it but uh gil g version of it um and it was shown in what they called 4D which meant the chair move they blow air on you and splash maybe some water every now and then exactly that there's one moment when one character is walking through the rain for probably 16 frames and a little dot of water appeared on my head and all I thought was yeah right okay the story yeah uh I think for immersive drama and things like that write better films there you go all right and on that bombshell I have one thing one more thing I've got to ask you as an a apple Vision Pro headset user are you pleased or displeased with the rumor that iOS 18 is in some way going to make iPhones more like Vision Pro and I don't fully understand how well that one's totally made up and not true so we don't have to worry about it yeah okay um well that was a shorter conversation than I thought yeah I believe that comes from Majin Buu which probably just got it from a random concept artist off of WBO and yeah uh that leaker is fine as far as and there's a reason why we cover him just to break into it sure um we cover him because we have the rumor score if we didn't have the rumor score we'd probably ignore him but um because we can kind of give readers a gauge of what's true and what isn't it lets us cover more rumors and this person does find sources and again sometimes maybe from their own internal sources I don't know uh but usually just from WBO wandering around I guess finding things it's a Chinese social media website um internal sources sounds like a euphemism for they made it up it was in their own head also possible uh this seems more like a character than an actual leaker a lot of these leakers do turn into characters we if you've been following this long enough we used to have um loves to dream and it would propose every leak as if they had just woken up from a dream um like there's there's always a personality to it but Majin Buu is just kind of uh H and the and the problem is they always reply to whatever post they make and say don't take this too seriously and just to kind of cover their own anyway this one was just this one feels made up this one doesn't feel real um but no I but Mark Garmin did come out with a report saying there is a redesign coming in iOS 18 which is exciting I think we'll see a little bit more Vision Pro like elements um we're already seeing it in the podcast app in iOS 17.4 uh there's a new now playing bar that appears to kind of float above the UI a little bit um just Vision very Vision Pro like with the pill shape and everything so I could see one borrowing from the other as has always been the case in apple developing UI iPad gets something then Mac gets something then iPhone so now that Vision OS is out there and again Apple isolates everyone iOS didn't see what Vision OS looked like before it was ready right so they're only just learning themselves and they're like wow that's cool we're going to do that too um and these operating systems coming in June are the first time we actually get to see that implemented so I I'm with Mark Gman I think we're going to see some changes I wouldn't I don't know if we can classified as a redesign but I guess we'll have to see what it looks like but I think there's going to be elements that look like Vision OS but it's not going to be a grid of circle icons on a home screen or anything like that it's not going to look like Vision OS but they could definitely borrow from each other and I think that kind of uniformity is useful we're just into March and already I'm wishing for June let's stop that there so it occurs to me by the way that the next time you and I speak iOS 17.4 will be out and the EV the world will change in the European Union which is next door to me um but quite far away from you be interesting to see what happens yes uh so everyone's waiting for regulation to step in and say this is bad but of course we we don't know what they're going to say because they actually can't say anything until after March 7th um where they're able to give judgments about the provisions that apple and everyone have provided so we'll we'll see what happens there um I'm interested uh we're also seeing movement on uh the United States front which we're mentioning it now but we're years from a resolution but now that the doj in the United States is ready to move in on this antitrust case with apple it means that after a long and Winding Road of litigation probably in 2027 they might arrive at the same conclusion and ask Apple to give America the UN or you know United States users the same Provisions that they gave the EU and bring some of those App Store changes alternative marketplaces and stu stuff to quiet the antitrust complaints um again we'll take a probably will take a long time especially during an election year when we have no idea what the opinions of the possible incoming new presidency might be whether it's the same president or a new one there's too many questions in the air could affect too many decisions all I can say is nothing's happening this year so it'll be a while I think really what you're saying is stay tuned I think that's a good point to on where's hel thank you very much for this um you you're actually back sooner than me we're here most weeks sometimes you and the guest sometimes me and the guest but usually it's you and me we'll back in a week but people will be able to hear and see you much sooner on Mondays with the new hit Insider podcast you and Andrew do you know what's coming up this week or is it all an exciting mystery for us it's mostly a m homid Insider funny enough there's not a lot of news uh that that happens there so it's more difficult to get topics so we tend to focus on a couple of new products that have been announced stuff like that I'm not entirely aware of what we're going to be discussing this week but uh it should be entertaining as usual and one last one last note one last meta note um if you ever pay attention to the show notes I'm pretty sure Williams William does this but go look at the show notes uh I put these together um most weeks and I usually include everything we want to talk about but we don't necessarily get to everything especially this week there's usually a grab bag of topics at the end under just a miscellaneous headline uh go go look at the show notes there's a lot of good stuff in there this week we didn't get to there's just too many big topics this week to get to the smaller stuff um and pay attention to that every week because uh there's usually a lot of things that you might have missed if you're not on Apple Insider every single day so right good point in that case let's W and I go right next week's news yeah we may have to wait for Apple to do things I grant you while you check out the link for this week's news and in the meantime thank you very much for listening thank you as well to our sponsor notion for supporting the Apple Insider podcast see you next time\n"