Leo [00:00:00]:
Well, welcome back. We are back at it again. So what's, what's new in your world, Gary?

Gary [00:00:20]:
Well, you know, it's that time of year where we've got new announcements from companies especially like developer related stuff. So Google as we speak is doing their, their Google I O conference, you know, their big developer conference. Right. And Apple is scheduled in a couple weeks to do their worldwide developer conference. So basically laying out like for the next year how they expect the developer tools and new features in and operating systems to go. Although things move pretty fast nowadays and a lot of times it's really only laying out the next six months and then there's going to be like stuff that nobody even expected at this point until the next one. Makes you wonder if they're going to start doing these every six months instead of every year now. But, but more on how fast things are moving later.

Gary [00:01:17]:
What I've been tracking mostly is what's going to happen with you know, Apple's next operating system which should certainly include an AI overhaul. You know, Apple's introduced all these little AI features.

Leo [00:01:32]:
Yeah, you can't have a discussion about the future without AI right now.

Gary [00:01:36]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo [00:01:37]:
That's driving a lot of what makes everything seem to be moving so incredibly quickly.

Gary [00:01:41]:
Yeah. And actually if you look at what Google announced so far this week, every single feature was AI related.

Leo [00:01:49]:
Of course it was.

Gary [00:01:50]:
And I expect it to be the same for Apple really just about every single feature either will be the central part of it will be it's an AI feature or it'll be some new feature that's driven by AI that uses AI as a main part of it. And Apple's going to certainly keep the Siri name, which is the name of their voice assistant really not AI at first, but it's gained some AI features and should be later this fall announced here in June. Really an AI assistant or agent of some kind which we know will be powered by Gemini, which is Google's AI.

Leo [00:02:34]:
Fascinating.

Gary [00:02:34]:
Yeah, it's interesting. And also it's very hard for most people to understand what that means because what you think of mostly is that, oh, Google just has Gemini. You ask Siri a question, it then farms that question out to Gemini, Gemini responds and then Siri speaks it. But that's not what's going to happen almost certainly, although the details are still under wraps. What's almost certainly happening here is that Google trains its AI for large language model AI. There's really two big steps. One is an AI is trained. So all this data's fed into it, it's built.

Gary [00:03:14]:
It's this huge thing that exists on servers and then it doesn't do anything. It just sits there. And then you could ask questions that then go into this engine that's built and an answer comes out. Now we only see that second half, that first half happens occasionally. And that's why when we see updates, when we see that ChatGPT version, this changed to that, and there's a new name for it and all that, that's like they've come out with a new trained model. They deployed it on the servers, and now your questions are going there instead of the model from three months ago.

Leo [00:03:47]:
Right.

Gary [00:03:49]:
What looks like what's going to happen is Google's going to basically train Gemini and give a copy of that trained engine to Apple. It may be the exact same one that Google's using, or it may be trained slightly differently, but it's the Gemini, you know, process that's training. It's Google's training process.

Leo [00:04:08]:
It's the technology under the hood, basically.

Gary [00:04:10]:
Yeah, yeah, it's. It's the, the engineering. They're building the engine. The engine, the engineering that goes into building the engine. The engine's produced and then it's given to Apple and then it's being run on Apple servers. So the idea is that it won't be farmed out to Google at all. It'll never leave Apple. It's just Apple just has this engine built by Google that will sit on their servers.

Gary [00:04:32]:
This is where the privacy stuff comes in. The reason Apple's doing it mainly is privacy. When you ask Gemini now, like you can do just by going to Google and just asking question, what sort of privacy do you have? What is being shared with Google, what's being saved in your account, all this stuff. The idea is by giving the engine to Apple, Apple could take this engine and. And Google doesn't know anything about any of the questions being asked of it. It's like they're delivering this thing to Apple and then there's no connection between Google and the engine that's there. So Apple can then be all private about it. It could say, oh, okay, you're going to ask a question, the engine is going to generate an answer.

Gary [00:05:16]:
Then it's either going to forget you ever asked the question, or it's going to encrypt that you ever asked the question and it's in your account, or it's going to forget you ask the question on our server, but your device, your iPhone will remember that you asked the question thus being a whole different level of privacy. And it makes it really hard for most people to understand what they mean when it's going to be Siri powered by Gemini, which I don't know. It kind of like most people misunderstand that actually, most people won't even know it. Right. This isn't a publicized thing. This isn't like it's not going to be labeled Siri powered by Gemini. There aren't going to be like tons of people talking about how Siri is powered by Gemini. It's just developer stuff now where that's being talked about.

Gary [00:06:05]:
When Apple announces, here's our new version of Siri, they're not going to mention Gemini at all.

Leo [00:06:10]:
It's just a new version of Siri. One of the things that I find interesting about having essentially the Gemini AI essentially cloned for Apple's private use is that they can do more than just train it on their own data. They now have the opportunity, opportunity to set up their own guardrails and their own nuances, if you will. My guess is that there will be things that you can ask Google's Gemini that you'll get either a completely different answer for or no answer at all. If you ask Apple's Siri using Gemini just because Apple will have say, you know, these are. These are our rules. Besides the privacy thing, this is how Apple approaches things.

Gary [00:06:50]:
Yeah, well, you know, a lot of us that use AI, even if you just use it casually, you're familiar with the prompt, which is what you write. You ask it a question, and that's the prompt. However, there are. There's more to the prompt than that. First, there, you may have an overriding prompt. If you go into the apps and stuff now, you can set it up. Like, you and I both have done this, where you go into, say, the ChatGPT app and you say, this is what I do for a living. This is how I want you to respond to me.

Gary [00:07:20]:
And all of that. And that's like every time you ask a question, it's like there's two prompts. You're overriding prompt for everything, and then your prompt for this particular one thing you're asking, but there's another prompt on top of that, and it's a big one. And it's the one that the company that controls the chatbot is putting on there. So saying, don't talk about this, or don't phrase things this way, or be casual in your answer or whatever it is. They've got a ton of that stuff. And you hear a lot about fixes to AI when they say that, oh, some AI is misbehaving because it's saying something wrong or it's saying something racist or something like that, and then they fix it. But you notice there's no new version of the engine out.

Gary [00:08:06]:
They simply fixed the prompt. They went in the prompt and they said, don't talk about this or don't use this word, and they throw that in there. And they could do that on the fly. And now the answer you get is different because they changed their part of the prompt, even though you asked exactly the same question. So it'll be interesting to see what happens and of course, also the actions that can be taken because now we're way beyond the point now where all you get is text back. There are certain things that can be done now. They're very small, gentle things in most cases, unless you go with something like Microsoft Copilot or Claude Cowork, Cowork, that's it where you're actually giving permission to do more. But Apple certainly is going to be giving Siri permission to do simple things that Siri already can do, like add an event to your calendar, turn on an alarm, schedule a reminder.

Gary [00:09:08]:
Things like that that already can be done by Siri will certainly need to be done by the new version of Siri. And Apple's going to have to provide that piece to say, here's the hook into the operating system, to macOS, to iOS, to iPadOS to do that. And here's what you can do, here's what you can't do, and continue to modify that. It's kind of like a bridge between the old technology, the old apps that you still use and rely on, and this new thing, which will be Siri 2 or Siri Ultra or whatever it's

Leo [00:09:38]:
going to be called Siri Pro. That seems to be the thing these days, call everything Pro.

Gary [00:09:43]:
Yeah, so anyway, it's. That's. That's like it's going to be big and, and, well, you know, it's going to be interesting to see what Apple rolls out here in June. Traditionally, Apple does not. They'll announce a bunch of stuff like features A through, you know, or features 1 through 100. And then as we get closer to launch, they'll say, actually, only features 1 through 80 are actually going to be in the launch. Features 81 through 90 are going to be later, and features 91 through 100 are not actually going to happen. And I think that this will be even bigger than that.

Gary [00:10:26]:
Like, I think they're going to throw a lot of stuff out there in June and a huge amount of it isn't going to actually happen by the launch of the next operating systems. And also a big chunk will never happen. It'll be stuff they throw out there and then realize, oh, yeah, there's going to be problems with that, or nobody really wants that.

Leo [00:10:43]:
How much of it is essentially market research. Right. How much of that is just sort of trying to understand what the reaction of the audience is to a specific feature and factoring that into whether or not the feature really, you know, should exist.

Gary [00:10:57]:
Yeah. And discovering along the way that there are complications.

Leo [00:11:01]:
Right.

Gary [00:11:02]:
And sometimes the complications aren't, you know, like, oh, okay, we can't have it control your productivity apps at the level we thought, not because we can't do it, but because doing it would be such a hard thing to do that it's no longer worth it.

Leo [00:11:19]:
Right.

Gary [00:11:19]:
Like, we were going to try to save you five seconds a day and we were going to make. And then it turns out that's going to make your battery suck and other things be slow and it's going to be more complicated. And you know what? We're not going to try to save you those five seconds a day anymore. It just doesn't seem to make sense. So, you know, there's a ton of different reasons, but we are like at the beginning right now of, you know, there's going to be a bunch of changes here in the Apple ecosystem, I think over, you know, we'll see it, people talking about it over the next few months and then we'll get this stuff in the fall.

Leo [00:11:51]:
It will be interesting to see exactly what it turns out to be. In many ways, Apple. It feels like Apple has been behind the curve on all of this. Right. That they haven't pushed nearly enough. I don't want to say enough AI because that implies that there's a correct amount. But in terms of comparison to other producers, like Google, like Apple, like others, they just haven't taken the opportunity to put as much into the os. Part of that, I suspect, is just Apple trying to do the right thing to.

Leo [00:12:20]:
To do it maybe better than everybody else, but it definitely looks like they are dragging their heels a little bit and taking this stuff out.

Gary [00:12:28]:
Yep. And we'll talk more about Google I O here in a bit.

Leo [00:12:32]:
Sure. So one of the things that I don't normally do, breaking news just because I don't. My publication schedule doesn't let me. But there was something that happened last week that I think is worthy of mentioning because it is probably what I would consider to be one of the biggest security gaffes I've run across in, in, well, maybe 20, 40 years. So there is an exploit that can allow individuals access to a BitLocker whole drive, a BitLocker encrypted drive. So BitLocker is the whole drive encryption technology that's built into Windows and it's been around for a long time. Obviously we've been, you know, recommending it for the appropriate audience, like, you know, people that travel or corporate customers, whatever. Whole drive encryption is basically tied to your sign in so that in order to view what's on the hard disk, you have to have been able to sign in.

Leo [00:13:42]:
And it's the traditional thing where, yep, the data is encrypted with a password, you know, an encryption key. And your password, your sign in credentials somehow are related to that. What's frustrating about this exploit, it's called yellow key for reasons that I don't understand. Well, you know, where these names, everything has to have a name. I'm surprised it doesn't yet have a logo and a web page.

Gary [00:14:12]:
Yeah, really, it will. Eventually,

Leo [00:14:16]:
the process to gain access to a machine that has a bitlocker encrypted drive is simply this. You download a specific set of files and put them in a specific place on a USB drive. You reboot your machine into recovery mode, doing the right thing along the way to bring up a command prompt, and that's it, that's all. Once you're in that command prompt, the formerly encrypted drive is now visible in all its unencrypted glory. The current cause, the actual underlying flaw here isn't clear, but people are pointing to the recovery environment that you had to boot into as having a flaw that allows this to happen. Notice that as part of this, there was no encryption key involved, there was no backup key involved, there's no even sign in involved. It's just boot this machine in this way and you can access the contents of the encrypted drive. Now, to be fair, there are a couple of limitations.

Leo [00:15:27]:
It's Windows 11, only Windows 11. And actually it's, what is it, 2022 and 2026 server. But for most people, we're dealing with standalone Windows here. And the drive that you're looking at needs to be in the machine on which it was encrypted. So you can't like remove the drive, take it somewhere else and suddenly access the data. You actually have to have access to the entire machine. So the theory is that this is either a mistake or. And the hacker tends to.

Leo [00:16:04]:
The guy that actually discovered this tends to believe that this might be an intentional backdoor, which is kind of scary. But the fact is that the Windows recovery environment that you're booting into has tools for recovering and repairing and doing things to your machine. Nobody ever expected that it would have tools to blindly get at your encrypted drive. One of the things that this kind of strongly implies is that the encryption keys aren't stored the way people think the encryption keys are stored. Normally we think of our password somehow being used to generate the actual encryption key that's then used on a hard drive. You run a password through a hash of some sort, you know, function of some sort. It generates a nice big random number, and then that's the number that you end up using to encrypt the drive. In reality, what I think is happening here is that when you encrypt the drive, in other words, when you turn on BitLocker, the system generates a random number, usually 128 bits or 256 bits or thousand bits, whatever, something large.

Leo [00:17:21]:
But it is truly random in a way that your password honestly never will be. And they use that number that they've generated to perform the encryption. Your password is what's used to then encrypt that encryption key, which is then stored somewhere secure on a Windows machine that might now be within the tpm. So what it boils down to is your password unlocks the encryption key, which is then used to encrypt and decrypt the drive. The thinking here is that the encryption key is stored presumably securely on the TPM of the machine in question, which is why you can't remove the drive, and that the recovery console has some mechanism to access that key that doesn't involve your recovery key or your password. It's scary because it is a situation where, yeah, it really is that simple. Now people are proposing a couple of different quote, unquote workarounds solutions, whatever it is. This is as published, it's what's called a TPM only scenario, which means that you just apparently this stuff is stored in the TPM and that's where it comes from.

Leo [00:18:49]:
One of the mitigations is to put a pimp on your tpm. So you have to apparently enter a PIN of some sort before anything can be accessed from the tpm. The hacker claims to have a proof of concept that will bypass that. So that part doesn't matter. The other solution is to put a BIOS or UEFI password on the machine, so you can't reboot it without knowing the password. And that's actually going to be pretty secure because again, part of the process here was rebooting the machine somehow. So if you don't have the password to do that, you can't do that. But of course it does add a layer of complexity to people's machines.

Leo [00:19:31]:
And in the corporate environment, suddenly requiring a BIOS password and suddenly deploying a BIOS password across all your thousands of Windows 11 machines, that's a really big deal. The solution that nobody's talking about is to turn off BitLocker and then re encrypt the drive using different technology. VeraCrypt is the fallback that I tend to go to because it's free, it's open source, it's been around forever, and it's very well trusted. That too will solve this problem, right? If you're not using BitLocker, you're not vulnerable to a BitLocker exploit. One of the things that I think is important to point out is that this is not a crack of the BitLocker encryption. The encryption has not been invalidated. It has not been cracked. What's happened here is that there is some kind of a bypass that is allowing someone access to the encryption key and then that key of course can be used to decrypt the drive.

Leo [00:20:37]:
Like I said, this one is big and embarrassing. As far as I can tell. It's gotten a bit of press in a number of places, you know, respected journals, bleeping computer, computer security, a few other places, and I suspect. Oh, the other thing is that Microsoft hasn't said a word. This came to light last week and Microsoft hasn't said anything, which is frustrating, concerning, and I don't know, maybe understandable if they're wanting to get all their ducks in a row before they say anything. These are complicated ducks. This is not something that they want to have a knee jerk reaction to. Anyway, as we'll talk about it later, my article that I'll be pointing people at this week will be the article that's actually publishing the same day that this podcast publishes.

Leo [00:21:27]:
In other words, as we're recording this on Tuesday, the article publishes tomorrow, Wednesday, and it's called has bitlocker Been Broken? What yellow key means to you. It goes into many of these topics in a little bit more detail. But I definitely wanted to raise the issue to people and let people understand that if you are currently relying on BitLocker, you're using Windows 11, you definitely want to be aware that this is happening and you probably want to take some steps that could be as simple as putting a BIOS password on your machine, or it could be as thorough as changing your encryption technology. But, yeah, fun times.

Gary [00:22:10]:
Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Well, speaking of fun times.

Leo [00:22:15]:
Yes.

Gary [00:22:16]:
Have you ever used a. Because there are several models of folding phones out now. Andrew, have you ever used one?

Leo [00:22:23]:
I've not even touched one.

Gary [00:22:25]:
No, neither have I. But it's been a few years now since we got our first ones.

Leo [00:22:31]:
Yep.

Gary [00:22:32]:
They. They didn't succeed in taking over the world and dethroning the iPhone or anything like that. Like, everybody didn't just run to them. But. And I would normally say that, like folding phones are not. They're not the future. Except that apparently they seem like they might be because Apple seems pretty certain now that Apple's going to be releasing one. I don't know if it's going to be this year.

Gary [00:23:01]:
It's probably next year. The. They're not going to release it as. According to the rumors, they're not going to release it as like a. Okay. The new iPhone is a folding phone. They're going to release it as a special model. They're probably going to use their new favorite term, ultra, to go.

Gary [00:23:19]:
So the iPhone ultra is what the rumor is going to be. And they're not going to use fold or folding or anything in the name. And you know, the rumors are all over the place in terms of what it will be. But it sounds like an iPhone with lots of screens. Like you can use it in the fold it up mode where it kind of looks like a current iPhone, maybe just a tad thicker with a screen on one side and the other side, no screen with cameras and such. But you could open it up and inside are two screens.

Leo [00:23:50]:
Right.

Gary [00:23:51]:
Forming an entire surface. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, if they actually do this. But it's looking more and more like they will. A lot of people point to the fact that they came out with the iPhone air was it last year? The year before. But yeah, last year. Super thin iPhone, except for the camera bump.

Leo [00:24:12]:
Right.

Gary [00:24:13]:
But they point out that, oh, this is the perfect, like, size. Like they figured out they've proven that they could create a phone thin enough that you could actually now put two of them.

Leo [00:24:23]:
You slap two of them together and

Gary [00:24:25]:
have like a folding phone. So it's no longer a question of whether they can do that. It'll be interesting to see. I personally, I mean, to me it's man, I, I don't ever feel I need a bigger screen on my phone. I mean I feel sometimes I need bigger text on my phone thanks to my age. But I don't like feel like, oh, I need more screen space because I need to get more work done.

Leo [00:24:51]:
Right.

Gary [00:24:52]:
You know, that I leave up to my other devices. But. So it'll be interesting to see if Apple actually does that, if it actually is successful.

Leo [00:25:01]:
The thing that's always bothered me about folding phones is the crease, I guess we'll call it. Right. There are literal screens that can fold right where the actual. And I think Samsung has done that for a while already. I am skeptical about those. Otherwise you've got like a hard line between the two halves of your screen. Which to be fair is not necessarily a bad thing.

Gary [00:25:29]:
Right.

Leo [00:25:30]:
It's something you can get used to. Certainly people that use dual monitors deal with that all the time.

Gary [00:25:35]:
Sure, yeah.

Leo [00:25:37]:
But I don't know. The only time I've wanted bigger screen on my phone and it's the, you know, it's the bigger Google Pixel. So it's the big screen is when I'm do using remote desktop to a machine that has a large screen. You know, for example, like on my phone I could remote to my desktop machine, but my desktop machine is like 3840 by 1200 or something like that. It's huge. Right. Which means either you're seeing little teeny tiny text on your phone or you're scrolling forever to find the button you're supposed to click. But that's clearly not a common use case.

Leo [00:26:23]:
Right. Even in my case it's kind of like an emergency scenario where I need to do something like that. So I don't know. I mean we've always been playing with, with sizes and form factors on these machines. I remember many years ago I had a PC that essentially was probably about the size of a, of an iPad. Right now one of the smaller iPads that opened up and yeah, you know, it was very thick and it had a PC on the inside, but it had what I honestly value more than a bigger screen. And that's a real keyboard. Right.

Leo [00:27:02]:
Because that's where I struggle on the small screen.

Gary [00:27:04]:
Yeah. I've never had, I've never understood the problem with the line between the screens as being like the big engineering difficulty in creating folding phones. Like that's always been talked about since before they had them. And then as soon as they came out it's like what's the separation between the two Screens. Can it be seamless all that? Maybe because I've been using multiple screens on my computers for so long and it's like I don't. They can get them really close together and I'm fine with that. Like, I think actually your brain filters it out pretty quickly. You know, you.

Gary [00:27:42]:
I don't think it's the. I don't think it's the big problem, but for some reason people focus on that. I would even love to have, you know, two screens. And yes, sometimes the things on it just go between the screens, but sometimes they're logical. Like this has got to be shown on the one screen, the left or the right or the top or the bottom. And it's like not a bit. I'd rather have like a solid device that does never develop any issues because of some special bending engineering, metal or something feature in the middle.

Leo [00:28:14]:
Yeah, certainly if there's literally a bending piece of film or whatever that the screen is on, that's going to fatigue, that's going to break.

Gary [00:28:23]:
You just know it.

Leo [00:28:24]:
So, yeah, I'm okay with a line certainly between them. As thin as possible is desirable, but it doesn't have to be as thin as I think most people are demanding, right?

Gary [00:28:35]:
Yeah, I don't think so either. It's going to be interesting because every time one of these technologies comes up that you think, well, is this kind of gimmicky or is this a niche? And a lot of times Apple ignores these things. And you could say, oh yeah, Apple gets it. This is gimmicky in a niche. They're not going to play there. And then every once in a while Apple then goes in that direction and you wonder what is Apple seeing? Because if it turns out that Apple's R and D department, of course, is huge and they probably have every version you could possibly conceive of of different phones and computers and all sorts of stuff in development just to play around with. And at some point they developed a folding phone and at some point people were looking at it and said, ooh, wait a minute, this is interesting. And they want to come out with it.

Gary [00:29:25]:
I mean, that's like was true of the original iPhone. That was true of the iPad, that was true of the ipod, that was true of other things like, you know, AirPods and all of that. This stuff just did not sound like we really needed that. And then Apple, Apple's R and D team, was like, oh, okay, we developed it. And actually this is really interesting. Once you actually have it in your hand, like we're going to go with this. And Apple's also killed things like the Apple television. Reading David Pogue's 50 Years of Apple History book, you get some insight into the things Apple's killed off too, like the Apple Television, the Apple car, things like that, which were examples of Apple saying, oh, we're going to keep working on this because we suspect there's something there.

Gary [00:30:12]:
And then at the end they say, yeah, it turns out no, there's not something there and they kill the project, even after years of R and D.

Leo [00:30:20]:
So I just dropped a link in the show notes to the Pixel fold because it basically is in a lot of ways what you just described. It's got the large, big screen that appears to be a single screen that literally folds. So we're concerned about fatigue and so forth with another screen on the back of one side. A couple of the examples they have in there definitely show side by side use. They show full screen. My question then is given that, you know, this phone exists, like I said earlier, Samsung has a fold. I've never seen one in the wild. Are these phones, I mean, is this a checkbox item or is it really something that people will buy? I'm not sure that the market is there.

Gary [00:31:16]:
I'm trying to, I can't. It's hard for me to justify it too simply because of the idea of it gets it closer to either an iPad or a laptop having more and more screen. Does it get it close enough that I leave my laptop at home? There's nothing I'm seeing from like looking at the pixel fold or the rumors of Apple's folding iPhone that would make me think that the answer is going to be yes. Like I'm not going to leave my MacBook at home if I'm planning on doing work. And if I'm not planning on doing work, then why exactly do I need this? Like, I could still check my messages, I could still check a few apps and things like that. Stay in touch with just the iPhone. I've now taken two big trips where I've been gone for more than two weeks with only my iPhone. I mean, nothing, no backup.

Gary [00:32:13]:
Like there is no back at the hotel room, there's a MacBook. There's no like, oh, I could get my MacBook in a couple hours if I needed it. No, it's like I am without it and I was fine. Like it would have been, would have been nice to have a fold there. I mean, it would have just meant I would have spent more time trying to do work maybe. So I don't know.

Leo [00:32:36]:
I don't know.

Gary [00:32:36]:
Yeah, I don't know.

Leo [00:32:38]:
So I'm kind of sort of with you. If I want a bigger screen, I'm just going to grab my laptop.

Gary [00:32:45]:
Yeah. So the question is, is there a customer there? Somebody between you and me on the one end and the casual user that's like, doesn't need a big screen to

Leo [00:32:57]:
get work done, barely needs a smartphone.

Gary [00:33:00]:
Is there somebody in between those. Enough people in between those that are going to say, yeah, this is the device that solves the problem of like, you know, the problem I have with just having my phone now. So we'll see. And speaking of new devices, we go back to Google's IO. They're talking, you know, the one device that's getting attention now is a device that's not as capable as device Google actually had 10 years ago. It's new glasses. I don't think they've given an official name to it or whatever, but they certainly talked about it and they refer to them at least the class of glasses as audio glasses. So Google Glass previously was, you know, these glasses you wore and the interesting thing was it actually overlaid visual items on, you know, what you were seeing.

Leo [00:33:57]:
Right.

Gary [00:33:58]:
So it was using the glasses as a screen of some sort. Pretty early on stuff. Nowhere near as, you know, the headsets, the virtual reality headsets we have now. But, you know, there was could be some text and graphics on the screen. What they're talking about coming out with now is audio glasses. Basically it's just a microphone built in and a speaker built in, or the speaker's kind of just. I don't know if it's just something you can hear or it's projecting more than that. But you can use AI so you could ask things, so you could talk, ask a question, get a response over audio.

Gary [00:34:39]:
And nothing is visually being shown to you. The actual glasses are just glasses. The only other element that is new, but it's not new because they had this in the old ones, is a camera. But the idea is that that also hooks up with AI. So the camera and the microphone are feeding the AI information and then the feedback to you is audio only. So it could identify things using the. You could ask, say, what is this? And hold something up in front of you and it says, that's a, you know, a pencil case or a water bottle. Just looking at things on my desk, you know.

Gary [00:35:20]:
You know, so it could do that, but it can't actually display anything. Now to be fair, they have said that, you know, that's first gen, second gen will have something going on on the screen. But for what they're talking about they hope to have out in the fall. It's just glass that just do this which is. It seems like a step backwards but I mean sometimes maybe technology needs to do that and say, hey, we had this advanced thing before, but it was before AI. Now we could do AI with it, but we don't need all, we don't need all the stuff that made it really expensive. We could just do it with the mic. Certainly.

Gary [00:35:54]:
We've talked about the pendants that you can wear.

Leo [00:35:57]:
Right. In fact, I currently have on my wrist something called a B B E E and it's audio only. It's essentially a glorified note taker. AI note taker. So I can talk to it and have it record what I've said and save it for me later. They of course have shoveled in a bunch of AI features that I'm not sure I need. But it's. That's like one of the biggest use cases for me has always been I wanted some kind of a pendant that, that I could use for on the go, note taking without needing to look at a device.

Gary [00:36:36]:
Right. Another thing about these glasses that's interesting is it appears that all of the processing is being offloaded to the phone.

Leo [00:36:44]:
Makes sense. App on my phone for this thing. Yep.

Gary [00:36:48]:
Yeah. Which makes a lot. Yeah. You already have your phone. The situations where you want to have your glasses but not your ph. I mean that pretty much doesn't exist and it can use a lot less battery and stuff if it's already doing that. Which is interesting because there's another kind of, not really a rumor, but speculation that Apple may do something like this, but without the glasses. Because Apple already has a huge product that has a microphone that has a speaker and that is already connected to your iPhone at all times and doesn't do anything on its own.

Gary [00:37:23]:
And that's AirPods, right. AirPods are already a successful product many generations in. The only thing they're missing is a camera. And that is kind of what's being rumored that there might be a future version of AirPods that may have a camera.

Leo [00:37:44]:
So peeking around your ear.

Gary [00:37:47]:
Yeah, well, no, because it already, when it kind of sticks out of your ear just enough, there's a little bit of a stem that comes down. So it already has a view of what's going on in front of you. Matter of fact, if there were cameras in both, it would have a really good view of what's going on in front of you. So just by adding the camera, and then the camera doesn't necessarily need to be high quality, nor does it need to actually be regular visible light. Like, it can be more of a lidar kind of system. It doesn't need to show you what it sees. It just needs to feed that into an AI. So if it's a very simple camera that does lidar stuff and is more about mapping out what's in front of you, that actually creating an image and then feeding that to AI, and the AI is then able to use that to answer questions like, what is this? Or to figure out, like, where you are or what's going on or whatever.

Gary [00:38:41]:
Then they might be able to do some tricks with having something very small, something that doesn't use much battery power, something that's not much more than a pinhole really, that doesn't need to have real resolution. It could be really interesting. And Apple could just basically bypass the whole, here's a new product, like glasses and just say, here's the iPods Ultra. And the iPods Ultra look like just regular AirPods, sorry, AirPods Ultra. They look like regular AirPods, but they've got this camera in it and they are basically. Most of the tech isn't actually new in the AirPods. It's just an app or it's just part of iOS on your phone now, that's now able to do a lot as long as you have these AirPods in. Also, AirPods are already extremely accepted as something you wear in public.

Leo [00:39:37]:
I've noticed that. Yeah, I see lots of people with them just in.

Gary [00:39:40]:
Yeah. So it's not a problem for, like, having, you know, these thick glasses or, you know, especially if you're not somebody that wears glasses all the time. And yeah, we're past the point where, you know, it's. Is it polite to take out your AirPods? I don't know. I just, I usually leave them in. Even if somebody tries to talk to me, I think the visual cue of actually touching them is enough of an indicator for them to think that, oh, you've just turned off your music. Now we can converse normally. And they have the transparency feature, which means that you can hear perfectly fine.

Gary [00:40:17]:
They're not actually blocking your ears anymore, the sounds coming through them. So it could be an interesting way for Apple to go. Like, Apple could let everybody, like Google just say, yeah, invest all your money in these glasses nobody's going to wear. And then we come out with AirPods Ultra and have all the same features that you have and that works as long as there's no visual element. There's no visual element. Then you don't need the lenses, you don't need the glasses. It becomes a very different thing. Another thing talked about at Google I O that I thought was interesting and I actually had to just do some poking around because I wasn't too, I hadn't thought too much about this.

Gary [00:40:58]:
But people are starting to talk about the difference between AI chat and, or AI assistants and AI agents. Right, right. And the main difference really is supposed to be they're just terms. So there's no like hard and fast, like this is like the definition of it. But AI agents are supposed to be doing things for, for you even when you're not talking to them. So they act more like assistants to you. You could say keep an eye out for a good deal on this product or try make a, you know, see if you can make reservations for this trip or whatever. And then instead of waiting there in a chat while it does it, it basically goes off.

Gary [00:41:40]:
And then a half hour later, unprompted, you get something from it saying oh, I was able to find this for you or I was able to accomplish this task or do this. So the idea is they're operating when you're not talking to them instead of AI chat, which is, it's kind of like a linear thing. You ask a question, you wait, you get the answer, you ask a follow up and then if you stop asking questions, it literally just stops. It's not doing anything for you. We're already seeing a lot of agent activity in various different things. Like in Claude, in Claude Code in Microsoft. Does Microsoft copilot do anything agent?

Leo [00:42:24]:
Like I'm not sure. I believe so. Certainly the folks at OpenAI have released something that absolutely does. I forget what it's called, but yes, Claude coworkers and code are the, the ones getting the most press for people writing up agents that do basically all sorts of random things.

Gary [00:42:46]:
Things. Yeah. So the question is, is it looks like at least companies like Google are trying really hard to say we need to work on this. Like we're going to have like agent stuff right in our AI. My question is, is I think the chatbots are, have been successful so far because they're easy to understand for most people.

Leo [00:43:11]:
Right.

Gary [00:43:11]:
You, you, we already are used to like chatting online and messaging online and stuff like that. And it's just like it feels like you're doing that, you're having a little conversation.

Leo [00:43:21]:
Right.

Gary [00:43:23]:
Everybody does that. Agents are trying to be more like Assistants. And we've had a variety of products over the last 20 some years that, that are supposed to be assistance for us, right? From little personal data assistants, PDAs to voice assistants and all sorts of stuff. And I was thinking about this. Normal people don't have assistance. It's easy to think of the boss in a movie having somebody sitting outside their office on a desk and then they call to that person and say, make reservations or whatever, and it's an assistant. And having a automated one, having a computer one, an AI one, is neat. But what's it replacing? Because most of us don't have assistants who do things for us.

Gary [00:44:19]:
It's like, need to think, oh, cool, I could get that now with AI, But I think there's a huge difference between you've never had that and now you can get it with AI and you have that now, but it's a human and you're going to replace it with AI. And that's like 1% of 1% of the population. But it's overrepresented in the people that make decisions about technology. They can all say, oh, I get an AI assistant. That makes sense because I have four assistants right now. It'll be neat to have to replace three of them or all four of them. But then they're making the products for people that don't have assistants like me.

Leo [00:44:59]:
I think there's a deeper issue with respect to assistance, and maybe I'm speaking too much for my own experience, but I suspect that I'll put it this way. You and I, we enjoy technology. We love playing with it. We're not necessarily, quote, unquote, afraid of it. You know, we are in many ways the target audience for playing on the bleeding edge. I do not trust assistance. I'm never. Well, I shouldn't say never.

Leo [00:45:33]:
I'm certainly not giving one a credit card. I'm certainly not asking it to go do things for me because I don't yet trust that it will do the actual things that I want. Now, part of that is me. Part of that is just the state of assistance right now. But I think that that speaks to a bigger problem. Quote, unquote, normal people are a lot further away from trusting AI assistance. And I think that that a lot further away is a big deal, is a lot further away than the AI CEOs would have you believe, right? They believe that AI assistants are around the corner for everyone. And I think that, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Leo [00:46:23]:
People need a lot more. I'm not even sure what would Gain their trust. But it's their trust that has to be earned in order for these things to proliferate. And we're so not there. We are just so not there right now.

Gary [00:46:37]:
Right. And I think this just occurred to me while you were saying that is, I think there's a difference between an assistant, which can do any. Anything. Like if you, if you actually had an assistant working for you, like, again, think of the boss and the movie that you're watching that has like the person outside the glass wall that is their assistant. You could just ask any random thing and they figure out what it is. And there's certain things they do every day, and there's certain things are going to be like, first time ever asked for that. But there are things that are very specific that apps and our technology can do. That's a single function, like curate a newsfeed for you with the things that you're interested in.

Gary [00:47:26]:
That kind of deal. Come up with specific answers. Like, right now, it's very common. I can get in a car and when I go to pull up directions, instead of my map app being like, okay, where do you want to go? It's going to give me like three suggestions. And a lot of the time, one of those three suggestions is exactly what I want. Why? Because I went to the same place this time last week, or I searched for a pizza place to eat at. Right. Two hours ago, and now I'm getting in my car and I'm like, okay, maps.

Gary [00:48:00]:
And it's like, here's the pizza place that you. You were like, you were looked at on the map. Is that where you want to go? And a lot of times it's right. These are very specific things that are like, here's an exact time. You may need an assistant. And this is the one feature we're going to add instead of just saying, here's an AI agent. Ask it anything.

Leo [00:48:22]:
Ask it to do stuff.

Gary [00:48:23]:
Yeah. So I think the approach of, like just coming up with these little features is maybe the winning approach and certainly something that Apple talks specifically about that it's trying to do. But I think Google's doing it too. And Microsoft, they're also doing the other stuff. And they're not so much talking about the little things. I think the little things will be the things that make a difference and creep into our lives in a good way and not the idea that, hey, here's an agent called whatever. You could talk to it and ask anything.

Leo [00:48:59]:
I think the little things will build over time into bigger things. And you're right. That's probably the way that trust, if it's going to be earned at all, that's the way it's going to be earned.

Gary [00:49:10]:
And this kind of. My last point on this is that this kind of goes right into it. I was looking at a summary of the Google I O stuff and where my brain was is I was just also reading about like, what's Apple planning on introducing at the Worldwide Developers Conference? And then I'm reading what did Google say at Google I O today? And the list is exhausting for someone like you or me that covers this stuff. Reading through all the new stuff, I know some of it's not going to come true. I know it's not going to all happen like the second week of July. Here it all is. It's going to be gradual, releasing this and that and all that. But the list seems exhausting of all the new stuff.

Gary [00:49:52]:
And it made me think about times when technology companies have intentionally slowed things down because they don't want to overwhelm users with new features. This only works when a company really controls something. Like an example would be maybe Microsoft with Word or Excel. It's Word Processing, it's not rocket science.

Leo [00:50:15]:
Right.

Gary [00:50:16]:
I'm sure new features that still have not been introduced in Word and features that introduced over the last 20 years were all really obvious that to engineers 20 years ago that these are things they could include. And I'm sure Microsoft could have said, let's throw a hundred more engineers at this and let's put everything into the next version of Word. And they didn't do that on purpose because they said, oh, we have the luxury of being able to introduce features slowly. Let's get this feature right, let's make sure people are using it, let's make sure people understand it and then move on to the next feature. I think it's happened with the early days of the iPhone when iOS was pretty much the only thing out there before Android, when Apple could say, we don't have to move fast, we could take our time. And it's happened with lots of Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop also had a period where it was pretty much the only game in town, right. And you know, third party apps weren't gaining any traction and they didn't have to throw 5,000 new features into the next version.

Gary [00:51:14]:
They could throw a nice selection of features, hold back some of the features and let's, you know, let's see how things go. But we're not there with all of this stuff because there's so many companies out there that are coming out with AI apps and AI gadgets now, and they're trying to all trying to leapfrog Microsoft, Google and Apple and of course Anthropic and OpenAI at the same time with new things. And it's happening so fast that these companies can't ignore it. Like, for instance, I was looking at ideas. Google's got some things coming in their photos like app, and there are other companies that are coming out with things in their graphics apps that'll basically just make it like you don't need graphics apps anymore at all. You just ask AI make my picture look better or make the sun shiny or make the people smiling, whatever, and it'll just do it right. So it's like, oh, this blows up all, all of the different graphics apps. Like, if you really wanted to go and focus on what's next, what's the next version of your big graphics or photos app? It should be some huge, totally different thing than what's available now.

Gary [00:52:30]:
But you say, no, let's not do that. Let's introduce these features slowly. Let's come up with a few new things and see what people think and if they're using them. However, the danger is if you don't, somebody else is going to come out with that app that just totally throws everything out and starts new. And I think a lot of this is happening with these AI chatbots, the agents, the apps, all these AI tools. Both our feeds are just flooded with new AI apps coming out all the time. And the problem is you just can't. No company is going to be able to say, let's slow this down, because everybody else will say, sure, you slow it down.

Gary [00:53:08]:
We, we're full speed ahead.

Leo [00:53:10]:
I think that your choice of word as an example was a really good one because if anything, they've done the opposite of late. But it's all within the scope of AI, right? Microsoft has been like so many companies and so many startups shoveling AI into everything they possibly can, and they've gotten a lot of backlash for it. Right, because nobody was asking for these features. Nobody trusts. Well, I shouldn't say nobody, but, you know, there's not a lot of trust in these features. And as it turns out, supposedly they're actually backing away from some of that stuff right now and starting to do exactly what you're suggesting, that maybe, maybe the right thing to do is to slow down with the feature introduction and focus on what people actually care about and use and that kind of stuff,

Gary [00:53:59]:
which is it Must be hard to know that you can implement a feature and it's like, oh, it's right here. I could press this button and this feature is in the app.

Leo [00:54:08]:
Right.

Gary [00:54:09]:
But we're not going to do that for other reasons. And the reason isn't because it's not a finished feature. It's for other reasons. It's tough. Then, of course, Microsoft's going to have to deal with the fact that they're probably. I don't know what the deal is with other word processors, third party word processors besides Word and Pages, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's something out there that's like, oh, we have all those features now. And there are people saying, wow, why is Microsoft so far behind in this?

Leo [00:54:35]:
Well, of course they're saying that that's nothing new. The other apps have always had different features. There's always been a crowd that says, well, this app has this feature. Why don't you. This app is better. It's smaller, it's less bug, whatever. Microsoft is operating from a very, very enviable position when it comes to all of its Office apps. And that is, it's the market leader by a, you know, by a mile.

Leo [00:55:03]:
Right. And that, unfortunately, that gives them the freedom to do something they're not doing, and that is to be slower and more intentional about what it is they do with those apps, rather than, you know, using them as a. A platform to shovel AI in everybody's faces.

Gary [00:55:23]:
Yeah, I just. I don't know. I fear that it's. It might, with AI, not only AI does two things to accelerate everything. One is it can be used for a ton of different features. Right. It's just like, oh, there's all these different ways that different apps can be enhanced by using AI features. The other thing it does is it brings about, you know, the vibe coding.

Gary [00:55:50]:
Not only can it be used, but instead of a bunch of engineers saying, well, it's going to take 30 of us a year to get this done, suddenly they're like, oh, we could have a demo of this this afternoon. It's moving things too fast. I have my little app, my little clipboard tool app, and sometimes I think it's like, I could add features so fast to that. If I was doing nothing else by just vibe coding, I could go in and just features that I could just think of off the top of my head that I'm like, all right, I need to come up with a plan how to implement this. I no longer have to come up with a plan. I could Just point Claude code at my xcode file and say, add this to it. And it would add it. Then I could just do that all day and then double the number of features, triple the number of features, and just keep adding things.

Gary [00:56:44]:
But should I. You know, that's the question. It's like, what point does it become, like, a horrible app because I added so many features to it? It's just impossible to really get your head around now. And at what point does it become an irrelevant app because I didn't add the features to it? Somebody else comes and does, you know, not added to mine, but added to theirs or to create a new one, you know, so.

Leo [00:57:09]:
Interesting times, for sure. Mm. So what's cool?

Gary [00:57:14]:
What's cool? Well, you know what's not cool?

Leo [00:57:16]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:57:17]:
This is the last week for Stephen Colbert, so for the Late show and watching these final episodes as they air and stuff, I just. It's just really sad. It's a show. Everything else aside, you know, what the. What the show, the. The ground, the. The show is broken and the things that have been on the show and all that stuff, it was just a show. I really enjoyed watching it.

Gary [00:57:44]:
I felt it was had enough, just enough satire that I could take it. Like, I could watch news events, like, you know, them joke about news events, and. And it didn't bother me to make me depressed. If the news event was depressing, I could get a little bit of humor from it. I enjoyed the interviews with the guests. I enjoyed watching the show. And it's sad to see, basically, it come to an end because it's a talk show. It's not the kind of thing where it's a series where it's like the story's coming to an end.

Gary [00:58:19]:
This could have gone on for a long time and then even had a new host at some point, as it did when Letterman left and it became a Stephen Colbert show. And it's just really sad to see it gone, but I'm enjoying the. The last episodes of it, and I'm hoping that Stephen Colbert's got something new planned that perhaps he cannot talk about.

Leo [00:58:41]:
I was. Yeah, I was just gonna say I'm hoping that there is something in the wings that will keep him in our. In our minds. Interestingly, isn't he writing a Lord of the Rings sequel?

Gary [00:58:58]:
I don't think. I thought that was just a. A joke.

Leo [00:59:01]:
A joke? I don't know. Yeah, it sounded like it was pretty serious, but I don't know.

Gary [00:59:07]:
You know, I mean, he's. He deserves the right to do Whatever he wants. If he just wants to retire, if he just wants to, like, act. To act or to write Lord of the Rings books or whatever he wants to do, he deserves to be able to do. But, you know, I. I kind of hope it is something where, you know, it's. It's. It's more.

Gary [00:59:28]:
More like what he does so well.

Leo [00:59:31]:
It's. I mean, if all he did was, you know, pack up his things and move to YouTube. Yeah, that would be fantastic.

Gary [00:59:37]:
And that's something I've thought of is like. Sure. Especially with the news that YouTube will be airing the Oscars starting, I think, in two years now, something like that. So. And YouTube already does a lot of sports and Apple TV and Netflix do sports. Then there' lot of move like that, and it would be pretty easy to almost continue the show. Matter of fact, I kind of get the feeling that the show could be pretty much continued with just a change of venue, considering it seems like they were able to post whatever they want online.

Leo [01:00:09]:
Yes.

Gary [01:00:11]:
Which makes me think the agreement is that they kind of own most aspects of the show, and then when CBS officially is done with it, they'll actually be free to do what they want with it.

Leo [01:00:24]:
I hope so. Let's just say I hope so. And he's certainly. There are plenty of places for him to land that. That would allow him to do that. So. I think we have mentioned Murderbot.

Gary [01:00:35]:
Oh, yeah.

Leo [01:00:35]:
On the show before. I don't recall if we mentioned the books, but we definitely mentioned the TV series that I think you and I both enjoyed quite a bit. Turns out there's a new Murderbot book, Platform Decay, came out a couple weeks ago. So I've been picking that up and reading through it and having fun with it and getting back into the Murderbot universe. It's. It's kind of fun.

Gary [01:01:00]:
Cool. Yeah, I am in that series somewhere. I'm not sure. I definitely haven't read through all the books. I'm. I'm three books in, I think in that series.

Leo [01:01:12]:
I think this is book seven or something like that.

Gary [01:01:16]:
I try to avoid series just for this reason because they get so long and it gets so hard to get through them. So I'm in the middle of Murderbot. I'm also in the middle of Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is now eight books long and has two more to come. And it gets to be the point when you find out there's a cool new book you want to read, and it's like, yeah, I'll be able to get to that next July, right. I've got a lot of other books I need to get through. Speaking of things you need to get through, a video that I will promote this week is 10 reasons why you should be using icloud photos. I love icloud photos for reasons that really apply to just about any cloud system of photos. So most of the reasons I think I love icloud photos also apply to Google Photos or Adobe's version of that.

Gary [01:02:12]:
And I'm often shocked when I talk about icloud photos and I get comments from people that are not using it for one misguided reason or another. So I just decided I'm sick of actually saying, well, here's why you should use it. I just made a video listing that. And of course there's some pushback in the comments for the same reasons as before, but it's. It's actually done pretty well and I know it'll be a video I'll be pointing people to for years.

Leo [01:02:45]:
It's pretty funny. Every time I post anything related to cloud storage, right? Storing things on there, I get pushback from. People say, I would never use anybody else's cloud. I don't trust them. They're using all of my stuff for whatever their nefarious purposes are, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, yep, yep, that's predictable. You kind of know that those are the responses you're going to get for that class of.

Gary [01:03:07]:
Exactly. Well, and I think one of the comments I got somewhere was, well, can't you just store your photo? Isn't there a way to store your photos on your own server and you know, do do it that way. And I thought about it and I looked and literally almost every One of the 10 reasons I gave wouldn't work if you did it on your own server. So I said, I responded, yeah, you could, but you will still be missing out on just about everything I'm talking about here. So it doesn't solve any of those problems.

Leo [01:03:43]:
Right? All righty. And I mentioned earlier that the article I'm featuring this week is askleo.com 192620 it is the article. Has Bitlocker been broken? What yellow key means to you? I think that anybody using BitLocker probably wants to take a look at that article or the companion video that's going to get published at the same time.

Gary [01:04:07]:
Cool.

Leo [01:04:08]:
I think that indeed wraps us up for another week. Thank you everyone for listening and we will see you here again very soon. Take care everyone. Bye bye, bye.