
Appleに忍び寄る暗雲、Amazon「Bee Frontier」をめぐる議論、UIとしてのAI
Storm Clouds Ahead For Apple?, Debating Amazon’s Bee Frontier, AI as UI

Appleに忍び寄る暗雲、Amazon「Bee Frontier」をめぐる議論、UIとしてのAI
Big Technology Podcast
要約
Spyglass の M.G. Siegler がロンドンでの収録に参加し、AI投資競争から距離を置いてきたAppleの現状を議論した。データセンター需要によるメモリ価格高騰が粗利益率を圧迫し、サービス成長も鈍化している。折りたたみ型「iPhone Duo」の実機レビュー、Amazonの録音型リストバンド「Bee Frontier」の是非、ChatGPTが回答中にUIを生成する「AI as UI」の可能性も語られた。
この回のポイント
- ●Appleは大手テック各社の設備投資競争の逆張り銘柄とされてきたが、メモリ価格高騰で粗利益率が低下し、John Ternus CEOは初の決算で悪化が続く見通しを示したと述べられた。
- ●かつてAppleはサプライヤーに価格を押し付けられたが、AI需要でNVIDIAなどが優位となり、メモリ各社が価格決定力を握る立場に変わったという見方が示された。
- ●サービス事業の成長は鈍化し、値上げにも消費者の許容度の限界があり得ると指摘された。
- ●Siegler は iPhone Duo を使って約1週間で高く評価し、5〜10年で小型の折りたたみ型が主流に近づくと予想する一方、価格(1,999ドルから)、重さ、画面破損への不安を課題に挙げた。
- ●Bee Frontier は会話を文字起こしして要約や行動項目を提示するが、プライバシーや盗聴関連法の問題が避けられず、Apple Watchの同種機能も含め「録音か聴取か」が論点になると議論された。
- ●ChatGPTやGeminiが回答内に図やスライダーなどのインタラクティブUIを生成し始めており、将来はアプリ自体をAIがその場で作る世界もあり得るという展望が語られた。
章立て
Appleに迫る暗雲:メモリ高騰と利益率
AI投資を抑えてきたAppleの逆張りの構図が、メモリ価格高騰による粗利益率の低下で揺らいでいる点を議論する。Ternus初の決算と供給網での力関係の変化が語られる。
サービス成長の鈍化と値上げの限界
サービス事業の伸びが鈍る背景と、Appleが値上げで利益を支えている現状を整理する。Netflixの例を挙げ、価格転嫁には限界があり得ると指摘する。
Ternus体制の課題:政治と中国
Tim Cookが整えた製品攻勢の一方で、トランプ大統領との関係や関税、中国向けSiri AIの検閲問題などの不確定要素が語られる。
iPhone Duoの実機レビュー
Sieglerが折りたたみiPhone Duoの使い心地を紹介し、Touch IDや右側のレール、2アプリ並列表示などを評価する。重さと価格が主な弱点とされる。
Duoの将来性と画面破損への懸念
スマホは今後も主役だが、小型で折りたためる形に移っていくという見通しを述べる。画面破損の報告やAntennaGateとの比較にも触れる。
Amazon Bee Frontierを試す
75ドルのリストバンドが会話を要約し行動項目を出す様子を紹介する。家族や会議での利用価値と、プライバシー・盗聴法をめぐる懸念が議論される。
AI as UI:AIが画面を生成する未来
ChatGPTやGeminiが回答内に図やウィジェットを生成する流れを取り上げ、アプリそのものをAIが即席で作る可能性とAppleのSiri統合戦略を対比する。
解説記事
Big Technology Podcast のこの回では、テック分野の newsletter「Spyglass」を書く M.G. Siegler が、ロンドンでの対面収録に登場した。Appleの経営環境、折りたたみ型の iPhone Duo、AmazonのリストバンドBee Frontier、そしてAIがインターフェースを生成する流れの4つが主な話題だ。以下は発言者の見解を中心に整理した内容である。
Appleに忍び寄るメモリ高騰の影
Appleは、巨額の設備投資を続ける他のビッグテックに対する「逆張り」の銘柄と見られてきた。Sieglerによれば、時価総額で再び首位に立ったものの、今回の決算では粗利益率が下がる方向に転じた。しかもJohn Ternus新CEOは初の決算で、状況はさらに悪化する見通しだと述べ、改善の時期は示さなかったという。
背景として語られたのが、供給網での力関係の変化だ。Appleはこれまでメモリメーカーに対し、長期契約を結ばず価格を押し付けるような強い立場にあった。しかしAI向けデータセンター需要でNVIDIAなどが優先され、メモリ各社が価格決定力を握っている。Appleは「プライステイカー」になりつつあるというのがSieglerの見方だ。メモリ市場は好不況の波が大きいため、Samsungなどが今は大きく稼いでいても、需給が緩めば損失に転じ得る点にも触れた。
サービスの鈍化と値上げの限界
利益率を押し下げる要因はメモリだけではない。AI開発への支出が増えていることに加え、かつて急成長していたサービス事業の伸びが鈍っているとされた。iPhoneの売上に並ぶ軌道に見えたが、飽和や「大きな数字ほど伸ばしにくい」問題があるという。対策としては、映画スタジオの買収、iCloudへのバンドル拡大、広告などの選択肢が挙げられた。
一方でAppleは値上げで利益を支えている。Netflixが値上げを重ねた末に成長が止まった例を引き、消費者の許容度に壁がある可能性が指摘された。Vision Proの3,500ドルは高すぎた例として挙げられた。政治面でも、トランプ大統領との関係や関税、中国向けのSiri AI(検閲を組み込む必要がある)など、不確定要素が多いという。
iPhone Duoは「最高のiPhoneの一つ」
レビューでは辛口の評価が目立つ中、Sieglerは「レビュアーは間違っている」という立場だ。使用して約1週間で、品質はPixel Foldなどより一段上だと述べる。Face IDはなく、側面のTouch IDで解除する。指紋は5本登録したため苦にならないという。外側の画面は小さめだが、日常の操作は外側で行い、動画や読書など長い画面時間は展開時に費やす使い方を想定している。展開すると2つのアプリを並べて表示でき、ウィジェットが主役になるUIも iPad とは異なる点として紹介された。
課題は価格(1,999ドルから)と重さ、そして画面破損の不安である。Sieglerは、ネット上の報告はあるが規模は大きくなさそうで、AntennaGate のような事態にはならないと見ている。CNETが機械で繰り返し折り曲げても問題が出ていないという話も紹介した。将来的には、折りたたみの小型端末がスマホの標準的な形になり、ポケットの中の「小さなAIデータセンター」のような中核機器になると予想している。
Bee Frontier:聞き続けるリストバンドの是非
Alexが「聞いて回るブレスレット」と呼ぶAmazonのBee Frontier(75ドル)を、Sieglerは気まぐれに購入して試した。会話を話者ごとに区別して要約し、フォローアップすべき項目まで提案してくれる点に、AIの進歩を実感したという。会議や家族の会話で有用で、ホテルの請求の食い違いを巡る場面ではトランスクリプトが助けになったと語った。
一方、プライバシーは大きな論点だ。録音ではなく「聴取して要約するだけ」という位置づけで、盗聴関連法を避けようとする動きがあるが、州や国によって規則が異なり、訴訟や店舗での持ち込み禁止も起こり得るとSieglerは見る。Apple Watchにも類似機能がベータで登場しており、Appleは録音せず、暗号化して処理後に削除すると説明しているという。Alexは、家族関係にAIが介在することへの違和感も示した。社会規範が変わり、受け入れられるのは早くても2029〜30年頃ではないかという見通しだった。
AI as UI:アプリが不要になる世界
最後の話題は、ChatGPTやGeminiが回答の中に図やスライダー、ウィジェットを生成する動きだ。心臓の仕組みの図や、サッカーのオフサイド規則を動かして理解させる例が挙がった。Sieglerはその延長として、AIがアプリそのものをその場で作る可能性を指摘する。ピザの注文でも、質問を重ねる代わりに簡単な入力画面が現れ、ボタンで完了するような体験だ。
AppleがSiriに既存のサードパーティアプリを統合しようとしているのは、アプリが依然として重要だという主張だと読める。しかし、AIサービスがUIを生成するなら、開発者は各OS向けの開発から解放され、ブランドの指針を渡すだけになるかもしれないという。メガネや時計など多様なデバイスにも対応しやすくなる。Sieglerはこの未来がそう遠くないと見ている。
まとめ
日本の読者にとっての注目点は、AIブームの影響が「投資しない企業」にもメモリ価格を通じて及ぶこと、そして端末の高価格化が続く中で消費者の許容度が試されることだ。折りたたみ端末や常時聴取デバイスは、ハードの進化とAIの組み合わせが生活に入り込む例であり、日本でもプライバシーや法制度の議論が避けられないだろう。また、AIがUIを動的に生成する流れは、アプリ中心の開発モデルを変え得る。発言はあくまで番組出演者の見解であり、今後の決算や製品動向とあわせて見る必要がある。
文字起こし(英語・自動生成)
As questions mount about the AI trade, the low-spending Apple has been a safe frontier, but for how much longer? Plus, let's take a look at the iPhone duo, which we have here in person, along with Amazon's very controversial B Frontier. And is AI the new UI? That's coming up with M.G. Siegler of Spyglass right after this. How do you price intelligence as a service? How do you charge for delivering end-to-end work, not just access? Those questions remain front and center for AI founders and operators and getting to the right fit business model, whether that's selling usage credits, outcomes, seats, or a hybrid combination requires constant iteration. Chargebee is the billing and monetization infrastructure that powers just that for ambitious, fast-scaling AI businesses. Visit chargebee.com slash Alex to learn more. That's C-H-A-R-G-E-B-E-E dot com slash out. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, typically we speak with M.G. Siegler on the first
Monday of every month, but it is the perfect time to be together in person, which we are here in London. And the reason why it's the perfect time is because M.G. has not just brought the new iPhone duo, the folding iPhone. He has Amazon's B Frontier, which if you're a regular listener of the show, it is a band that listens and summarizes what you talk about and gives you action items. I'm not a big fan of it, so we're going to debate whether it's a good product or not. We're also going to talk about whether AI is the new UI and, of course, the prospects of that. So, MG, it's great to see you. Welcome to the show. Great to be here. It's awesome. Awesome to be able to do some show and tell time. We'll get to these later. That's right. Yeah, it's cool. We're in a very nice podcast space. It's called Laughing Around. It's at the bottom of a coffee shop slash event space here in central London. Very, very happy. And there's nothing that doesn't – the definition of the way that the big technology podcast likes to show up is hip. So we're doing it.
We did it right here. Let's begin with Apple. We're going to talk a lot about Apple today as we tend to do. And it is a very interesting moment for Apple because there are storm clouds, as there have been, around the big hyperscalers and the AI labs. And throughout this entire time, it's basically been like Apple has spent much less on AI infrastructure. And therefore, if you're looking for a sort of counter bet in big tech, you're looking at Apple. Well, the John Ternus era has started, and we got his first earnings report recently. And if you're thinking about the future of Apple, that tight narrative of Apple not really being exposed to any dark clouds on the horizon or not being impacted by what's going on with AI seems to be fading a bit because there are these big memory costs that they're having to deal with, and it's starting to show up and hit the margin. So take us into your analysis of the Apple business
and where you think the stumbling blocks might be. And then we're going to get your – we have the iPhone duo here, so that's coming. But we want to talk about the picture first. Yeah, so, right. Apple's earnings were interesting this quarter. Obviously, the numbers look good, but as you're alluding to, like there's storm clouds there just sort of hovering. And, you know, Apple's in a great position right now, I believe, currently even. They're back at top of the market cap chart. Some of that is obviously NVIDIA falling precipitously over the past couple of days due to just the various macro events going on with the election and whatnot. But a lot of it is obviously all tied to AI. And, you know, Apple has, I think, situated themselves well, as we've talked about sort of over the past several many months at this point, because, yeah, they are basically a counter bet against sort of all of the CapEx spend that's been going on with their big tech peers. And so they're positioned well. They're maybe the last remaining $5 trillion company as we speak. I don't know where NVIDIA is right now.
But then, again, there's these, like, looming storm clouds because, as we saw in the earnings report, the margins are going the wrong way for the first time in a long time. I think it was two quarters ago they hit over 50% overall gross margin. Their highest margin ever. Yeah, which is incredible, obviously, especially for a hardware-focused company. And a lot of that has been driven by just the growth of services, you know, on down. And a lot of it was also over the years, their great control from Tim Cook on down, on forward, of the supply chain. And, you know, the tables have turned on them because of this AI world that we're in right now. And now, you know, NVIDIA on the top of the hill in terms of, you know, who the manufacturers will work with and who the chip makers want to work with. And so Apple's in this sort of precarious position that they haven't been in where they have to sort of be a price taker in some ways rather than, you know, the one that's dominating and sort of bending these suppliers to their will.
And so, yeah, that margin, it's not just that it went down, you know, this quarter. It's that they're guiding that it's going to go down more. And Ternus, again, in his first earnings report, had to say, like, it's going to get worse. And he didn't sort of indicate when it's actually going to get better because I don't think anyone knows for sure when it's going to get better. Yeah, maybe Apple's only hope is that data centers are actually banned in the United States. I mean, yeah. And they can get that ramp cheaper. That's sort of exactly, you know, the position that we're in right now. And I do think that that's sort of a fascinating counter bet now if you want to go forward with it. Because, yeah, if everything that's happening macro-wise and politically ends up slowing down sort of the AI whirlwind that we've been in, And Apple's probably positioned very well for that because, again, we go back to more of the status quo, maybe not fully, but, yeah, in more of that position where, you know, Apple's in a unique position relative to their peers. Right. So that's the silver lining, and that's where that countersickle bet comes in. But we can talk a little bit about how things have mechanically changed for Apple concretely, right? So Turner's talked about how, you know, the company is going to have these challenges, and we don't really know when they're going to resolve.
And, you know, if you want to drill down another level, the way that Apple has operated in the past, and you can give us more detail on this, is they've basically dictated to these memory makers, right? You know, we're going to take it at this price. Right. We're not locking into long-term deals. Right. And if you think about the way that Apple as a company has changed, one of the things is they've lost that power, right? Yep. Yeah. I mean, he came up again, this guy who's been in stories, always has a funny anecdote. They call him the blevenator. And he's no longer at Apple, but he was there for many years, and he was sort of known as the guy who would be the enforcer of sort of the terms of these deals. And, you know, there's some good anecdotes in some of the recent stories. I think there was a Wall Street Journal one where it's basically, yeah, talking through some of the fun stuff that he would do if the suppliers would try to, you know, So even just do regular negotiations, like as they might with any other company, Apple was in such a position of power that they could say, like, you know, no, no, no, we're not doing any sort of negotiating here.
We will tell you what we need, and we will get what we need, and you will take it. And as you know, memory chips in particular has been a weird industry over the past couple of decades because it very much, maybe more so than any other industry, just ebbs and flows and has these huge massive spikes when things are going well and then huge troughs when things are not. And so Samsung's a great indication of that because they've been in that business for a while. And now they're, I think, the most profitable company in the world as a result of those memory chips because they have that business. But if and when the tables turn again and sort of the market's saturated by memory chips, they will post huge losses as a result of that. And that's just the way that all those companies have gone. Samsung's probably a little bit more insulated because they have all those other businesses. But the SK Hynix's and the other ones of the world who have been in those positions are now flying high because, yeah, again, they're in the position to dictate prices. They have all these willing buyers. And the fact that they can sort of squeeze out Apple. There was some back and forth about how much they're actually poking Apple in the eye explicitly, you know, because they've been in the –
Payback. Yeah, payback. And, you know, hard to say how much of that there is. But obviously, there's got to be a feeling, a little bit of, you know, like, oh, now we're the ones in charge here. And so let's see how it goes. Yeah, exactly. It's the meme playing out in real time. So it's not just these deals with the memory makers. It is there are other things targeting margin, right? So you also have the fact that Apple is actually spending to develop its AI, right? That's something that hasn't happened. We're starting to show up and hit margin, as you've noted in Spyglass. And another side of it is services. is not growing in the same way that it was. It's still growing, but the growth has tailed off a little bit. So just kind of take us into these other factors here. Yeah, that's all sort of a perfect storm of stuff coming together. It's sort of just the wrong time, I guess, if you're John Ternus, obviously, again, with his first earnings report. In some ways, as we know, Tim Cook set him up perfectly with this just like onslaught of product launches that we've seen over the past few weeks. It's sort of dizzying in a way, right? It's hard to keep track of everything that Apple's launching on a daily basis.
Today, there's, I think, the iPad mini and the touch MacBook Pros, and we get something every single week, it feels like. But on the flip side, yeah, as you're noting, like, there are issues coming to the head. We talked through the margin stuff, but the services narrative is an interesting one because, again, that has been flying high for Apple for a while. Like even when it felt like sort of the iPhone had maybe not necessarily peaked but was at the point where it's just sort of like, you know, it goes through its spikes in the holiday quarter and then sort of oscillates at a new high watermark. But it's not exponentially growing, certainly. And services, though, was basically growing so fast that it was catching up. And you could see a trajectory where it would potentially equal if not surpass the iPhone in revenue at some point. And for a number of reasons, it feels like that has slowed down quite a bit. It's still growing, but it's not growing. I mean, I think that there's a whole plethora of things going on. There's some level of saturation.
I do think that, you know, Apple's been sort of going, pushing further and further into what they offer and sort of upselling these things to customers. And I think, you know, certain customers only want certain services. Other ones, you know, certainly go elsewhere for things like, you know, entertainment and Spotify for music. And, you know, again, Apple's trying to keep people in the ecosystem and continually trying to launch new avenues to generate more revenue. But I'm just not sure that they've done anything that's like super compelling enough to get to sort of move the needle when that needle is, you know, at an upper and upper sort of echelon. It's just the law of large numbers problems, right, where it's just harder to move the needle as you continue to have this massive business. And so, you know, I've talked about in the past, like, what else do they need to do to do it? Do they need to open up a full-on banking arm and sort of run services that way? They tried to in a little bit of ways with financing, and, you know, even now they're doing some of that, but they're doing it with third parties more so than themselves.
They tried to keep stuff on the balance sheet, but it seems like they were a little bit averse to that over time. But they need to find other avenues. So do they acquire, you know, like one of the big movie studios to try to bolster Apple TV itself more? Do they rope more into iCloud? They've been doing that in other countries. I think they roped in Apple TV, maybe even Apple Music into some iCloud Plus subscriptions. Do they continue to do that to create more of just a bundle, you know, the bundle economics of all that sort of stuff? So I think they have stuff that they can play with. But John Turner is probably going to need to start playing with that stuff sooner rather than later. Right. But ads and everything else is sort of, you know, that are there waiting in the wings. There's always advertising. There's always ads, even for Apple. So the interesting thing that we haven't talked about yet is the fact that they can raise prices. Yeah. And, in fact, let me write this by you. The only reason why Apple is seemingly floating above the fray right now is because it has successfully been able to raise prices on its products. Yeah. By a lot. you know macbooks and iphones uh there the prices have gone up but as you point out in your writing
they might find a limit in tolerance from consumers and basically anybody to pay these prices i'll just take one example netflix uh raise prices raise prices raise prices margin went up everyone's like this is a stunning business yeah and eventually people are like no right and it stopped growing and it got into trouble. So maybe there's a wall there for Apple. I mean, in some ways, we'll get to it. The iPhone Duo will be an interesting test of that. But we already saw an even more extreme test in a way. It's a little bit weird because it's a new market. But the Vision Pro, obviously too expensive, right? $3,500. I think that there was a world in which if they launched it, not to say that they would ever do this, but if they launched it for like $1,000, they would have been taking a huge haircut to have to do that. But there's a world in which there's more demand for it simply because of the lower price point, right? And $3,500 was just totally untenable. Now, as you noted, they've sort of updated their pricing, which, you know, they historically,
to their credit, haven't done a ton of, but they obviously needed to do it here, getting ahead of all these component shortages that we were just talking about. And, yeah, I mean, that obviously helped to bolster the bottom line a bit. imagine what sort of the margins would look like had they not done some of those pricing changes that they instituted. And so I do think that they're sort of pushing high watermarks here, though, in terms of what they can do. We now have a $2,000 plus iPhone. We have several models that are over $1,000. We have the new touchscreen OLED MacBook that will be, I think, at the highest end. and they're up to like $12,000 if you fully spec it out. But even a regular one is going to be hovering probably around $3,000 to buy it. Wait, you could be at $12,000? I think that was some of the reporting on the specced out, absolute highest end. If you get all the RAM, once you start to get past sort of 32 gigs of RAM, it gets super expensive in this day and age very fast.
I'm glad I got my current laptop was, I think, top of the line, and it was like three and change. And that was like I really had to hold my breath and just kind of look away when I used the credit card. Yeah, that would probably be $5,000 plus right now. Right. Yeah. So you mentioned the iPhone Duo, right? Yeah. And you talked about like bringing up the average selling price and making the margin higher. And you could just build products that you sell for more. So it could be that laptop. It could be the phone. Yeah. I mean I don know if any people have done obviously teardowns of this so far and I holding the Duo in my hand if you can see it on camera But I not sure if we know the exact margin of the device yet It's obviously super premium, but they're obviously not selling it at a loss. It's Apple. Oh, yes. It's still Apple. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that they looked at the market, you know, as it existed with regard to foldables, and they saw, you know, people were hovering, Google, Samsung, they all hover, I think, around, you know, 1,500. 1600 1700 and being apple they can be like well we can go a bit higher than that and you know i do
think that obviously there's there's a bit uh you know there's premium definitely premium features of the phone uh that constitute a higher price but yeah it's starting at 1999 and uh you know that's for the lowest lowest memory lowest storage and if you go up from there it quickly quickly escalates right okay so before we get into your duo review yeah just to put a bow on this whole moment here. John Ternus has not taken the reins of Apple in a chill time, right? No, not at all. And I think, again, you know, it feels like Apple and Tim Cook moved heaven and earth to try to set him up well to take over, right? We talked about the plethora of product announcements, including the Duo, but many other things. Better AI. Yeah, better AI. Siri AI is now out there in the wild, fully out there in the wild. And so it feels like he set him up to succeed as well as humanly possible, except for the unknown variables, which have come into play with, you know, the these these macro earthquakes that are happening right now.
And as you know, it's just not it's not a quiet time. It's not a calm time to be CEO of Apple. But I think I think he said in one interview that he has not yet at least done a meet an inform a formal meeting with President Trump. And so you have to imagine that at some point he has to do that. It's not all going to be Tim Cook, probably because the president will say, I want to talk to the CEO of Apple, and you're no longer CEO of Apple. And so there is, you know, there's more potential turbulence on the horizon. Right. And then speaking of which, like that meeting just got more complicated. Yes. A lot more complicated because, you know, Apple, you've got to walk a line. You've got both political sides. Now you've got to, you know, appease. We just went through all of the tariff stuff. It feels like that conversation at least is going to be tabled for a time. I'm not sure if that's going to be in the courts now for foreseeable future. So hopefully Apple gets to at least get out of that for a little bit. But still, we've got China in the picture as always.
And that's a very delicate situation for Apple because they're one of the few American companies that not only is there, but is there in a major way. It's a major part of their business. Briefly, where could things get complicated with China? Because, you know, there's been this whole sort of arc of Apple struggling to sell in China, but the numbers went back up. So what's your thought on that front? Yeah, I mean, we'll see with what happens with the Duo because, you know, historically Apple it seems like has done well when they've launched sort of more premium devices there, right, because it's sort of a status symbol thing. And so those have done well, and I think that, you know, the Duo potentially will do really well there. As I'm sure you saw, they just finally got a partnership in place to do Siri AI, but it's going to be a different sort of flavor of Siri AI than the West is used to and the EU would like to be used to, but they can't be anywhere near it for political reasons. And so the Chinese Siri AI is all sorts of interesting, and you could see a world in which that becomes complicated for Apple, right? It's going to have to be censorship baked in.
Of course. And, yeah, what does that mean? does that play out in various different articles about Apple that they don't like because of censorship and all different sorts of stuff. And so, again, they're sort of out there on their own in terms of Western companies that operate at least to the level that they do in China. And so we'll see how that ends up playing out, but it's definitely another sort of X factor that could go any number of ways. Okay. And so that brings us to the duo. The main event. Can the duo save Apple, I think is the way that I would phrase it. Probably a little bit over the top, but, you know, maybe not. And, you know, the reviews have been very mixed. Yes. And by mixed, I mean fairly negative. Yeah. And you came out and said the reviewers are crazy. This phone is awesome. That's how I feel. I mean, so I've had it a little over a week now. I did try to preorder it the second the preorders went live. And literally, I was right there on the page. It's like the afternoon in the UK, so it wasn't like the middle, you know, morning.
Right. I remember talking with you about you were set up. Yeah, I was all set up, and I thought I would – I've always been able to get anything, you know, in the immediate aftermath of that. And immediately the wait times were showing, you know, like one week, two weeks later. Luckily, I got it within a few days of sort of the launch, but I wasn't there on day one. And I was actually in New York, and I went to the Apple store in Fifth Avenue, and it was packed, and I got to see it there. But, yeah, I didn't have one in hand until about a little over a week ago. And like you, I'd read some of the reports of it and some of the negativity around it. And, you know, I had some second thoughts. I was like, well, maybe I should just cancel it and just stick with the regular old good old iPhone, trusted iPhone. But I'm glad I didn't because I do really enjoy it. I think that it's a whole different type of foldable from what I've used in the past. We've talked about it a little bit. I've had a few different variations of the Pixel Fold, which I like and I think is an interesting device. But this thing is just a different level of quality than what Google's put out there.
I've used this Samsung one. I haven't bought one, and I haven't had it as a main phone. People like it, I know. But I think, again, I think that Apple has done a number of smart things here with this device, and I do think there's a few reasons which we can get into why, you know, potentially won't be as massive as it could be, number one of which is price, as we're talking about. But I think all things being equal, this is one of the best iPhones that Apple's ever done. Okay. So we're here in person. It's good timing. We've got some cameras. Yeah. So maybe you can kind of show off the phone and talk about what you like about it and then just describe it for those who are listening on audio. Sure. So here it is, obviously, with the case on it. It's got the folio case, which is different than the sort of just bumper, more bumper-like case. I'm surprised that Apple did like one with adhesives. Right. That's weird. Yeah, it's a little bit not an Apple-like, but this one doesn't have any adhesives on it. Let me ask you a question about the case because I – anyway, I just questioned about the case. Yeah. It's a little bit like – it's a little weird because, you know, you have the front-facing screen and the case covers it.
Yeah, I was skeptical too of getting that because I've never had a folio-style case before on the phone. First of all, I like the way it looks. It sort of looks like a nice – Like a notebook. Yeah, a nice little notebook that you would carry around. In practice, I find it super easy. You open it up just like you would, you know, a book cover, obviously, and then you're right into it. Obviously, a main difference that a lot of the reviewers have focused on is no face ID, which is the difference from many of the past years of iPhones that people are used to. So how do you open it? You have to put a password in? Well, so you can do it that way, but it's touch ID on the button that is right here on the side that we're going to show the power button. Yeah, okay. And see, it already unlocked because I just placed my finger there. Yeah. So the first thing I did after noting the reviews of it, you know, sort of noting how that was sort of problematic, I registered all five possible fingers. You can do up to five. And so I did my thumb. I did index finger on left hand, index finger on right hand. I even did a partial side thumb. Oh, nice. Because, yeah, there was some talk that –
Got to give Apple all those biometrics. Exactly, exactly. These are – they will know where I am at all points at this point. But, yeah, there was some talk that, yeah, it would just be better if there was a way to do it more casually than explicitly sort of using a thumb or an index finger to open it. Honestly, in practice, though, I don't find it that onerous, in part maybe because I also have an iPad mini, which has long had only Touch ID on it as well. And that's on the top, but this one's on the side where the power button is again. I don't find it that bad. They also have a way to sync up if you wear an Apple Watch where it basically can auto unlock. I actually haven't turned that on yet because I'm a little afraid of it just auto-unlocking all the time. And so, yeah, in practice, though, again, you open. I don't have the case on all the time, but when I do, you just simply open it up. Keep it open. And, yeah, you can show folks what the front screen looks like and talk a little bit about the differences between the standard iPhone. Yeah, so the front screen has obviously been talked a lot about because it's, as you can see, If you're not on the video, you can know that it's basically a smaller squatter version of what you're used to from an iPhone.
Passport style has been talked about. I think that that's very apt. It looks sort of like the same exact sort of shape, a little bit smaller maybe than what a standard passport is. But the screen itself is obviously still the main screen. You've got widgets. You've got your notifications that come in. Do you want to show again? The main difference is on the right-hand side is where sort of all of the different indicators come in for battery life. You can see I have no service down here in our vault. And you can sort of trigger other stuff there. And so when you unlock it, which I can do right there, launch me into a great manage of times. But so there's the main screen. Again, it looks sort of standard-ish iPhone screen with the difference being obviously this right-hand rail. Some people don't like the right-hand rail, especially if you're left-handed, because obviously there's reachability issues. Apple has, in the new beta, just launched a reachability feature where you can basically swipe and it will bring it over. They've had that in the older iPhones to get to the top because, obviously, it's the opposite problem on those devices.
But for someone who's right-handed like me, though I do use the phone with my left hand a lot, it hasn't been an issue. I like that it's over there. And one of the reasons why I think obviously they did it and so it's so nice over there is when you do open it, and I'll just put the cover on just to be able to open it fully, is that when you do that, there we go, you can see that everything is still over on that side. And so in other words, I don't know if we can capture the actual – Yeah, is any of this like proprietary MG info on the screen or we can show it? I've got a picture of family here. Okay. I don't mind that. Okay. And then I've got just some widgets there for Claude and OpenAI. But here, I'll fold it again so you can see it. And then if you can capture it, it opens up. That's a very cool animation. It is a very cool animation. And so all of this is the same, including that rail. If you did it another way, you might think that that rail would sort of center down here. Because this is an interesting UI to me. Because it's unlike you would think, like, well, this is just sort of similar to an iPad.
except that it's not at all like an iPad in the actual UI because these widgets here, those are still a swipe away on the iPad. So there's like widgets on the left side of the screen for those on audio and then your sort of app icons on the right side of the screen. Yes, and so you can obviously swipe over and get to a full page. Oh, more icons. Yeah, even more icons. But the standard way is that you now have these widgets are much more sort of first-class citizens on the unfolded version or when you're using it unfolded. The other main difference that I pointed out is, you know, I think a lot of times when people unlock an iPad, they're holding it vertically. Right. And so you're using it that way, whereas this, given the unfolding nature, you're holding it horizontally. And so it's just sort of a different experience. You said something in your review that you think most interactions will happen on the front screen. Yes. But most screen time will happen when it's on the unfolded version, which means, tell me if I'm wrong, that you can basically, like, use the folded version as kind of like a phone. Yes. And then the unfolded is like your media viewing. Yes.
I always think when I think about these, I always think about the man on the subway who just like sits on the subway or the tube if we're here. Yeah. Or airplane. Yeah. Or in a taxi. Yeah. And pulls that phone, folding phone out of his pocket and unfolds it and gets this big smile because he's like on YouTube or Netflix or something like that. Yeah. And you could say like, well, you could carry around an iPad or whatever, but you're not going to be carrying around an iPad as you would a phone. Yeah. Yeah, and so that's, you know, it's sort of subtle, but it's a big difference in that you can, yes, take this out. You can be using it as a phone, and then you realize, yeah, I'm on this train or whatnot for a little bit of time, and you just unfold it. And then all of a sudden you have a different experience, which is much more conducive, as you're noting, to either watching video. For me, it's reading, and actually the way I like using it the most is actually holding it horizontally and just sort of reading it vertically and reading as I would on various apps. And it's just a great experience for doing that. I can imagine, yeah, if you're like reading like the New York Times app or the Financial Times app,
to have it unfold and be able to read it like. Yeah, it's great. The screen is nice. Because it is, you know, size-wise, it is basically, it's a little bit smaller than an iPad mini, but it's very similar. And so it's like being able to have an iPad mini. And I think it just points to the absolute future of where this is going. I wasn't sure about it until I sort of had this device in hand. But I do believe that in the next, say, five to ten years, we're going to start seeing many fewer people just having sort of, yeah, the standard big, wide, the candy bar-shaped phone, just glass slabs sitting on a desk in front of you or at a restaurant. And I think we're going to start to see more of these sort of smaller devices folded up, you know, maybe in a case and sort of laying down. and then I think that it plays in with all of sort of the other devices that we're continually wearing. And so you talk about, yeah, the size of the front screen, which is obviously another big complaint that reviewers have had. I sort of like it. In a way, yes, it's smaller. It's not perfectly tailored yet because a lot of the third-party apps aren't perfectly tailored for the screen size.
But the ones that are seem to utilize it pretty well, and I think that it sort of leads to a more focused sort of session. You're not going to be necessarily scrolling TikTok or doing all these other sort of more media-focused things that you've been doing in the past. That would be bad for me, TikTok on an unfolded screen. I would never leave that up. I mean, we say that, and of course people are going to do that. But still, like, I don't know, just in the day-to-day usage of it so far, I found that I like it. I also am really good at typing on this thing because of the form factor. It has a BlackBerry feel. It does have a BlackBerry feel to it. But for whatever reason, the way that my thumbs are situated, like I am flying when I can type on this thing. And so I think it's pretty good for productivity. And that includes, obviously, when you open it up and you can do the two apps side by side. And both – the very smart thing that Apple did with this is that that ratio maintains when you're here. And then when you open this up, there's basically two of that right here, right? The screen ratio on the front screen and the unfolded. Side by side really easily. if I can open a couple things here
and I can just, so I've got New York Times, let's see if I pull it over so now it there and then I can just open another app let see music here I have no Internet connection But yeah you can see side super easy They all just seamlessly look nice. You can't actually resize it. It's just all two apps side-by-side. Okay, so I get it. You like the phone a lot. I do. Talk a little bit, though, about the complaints and where they might have a point. Yeah, so number one, it is heavy. Certainly holding it, it's not too bad. It feels a little bit more heft. Obviously, it's two screens. You're going to naturally get that. Putting it in your pocket, though, is where you really feel that, if that's the way you carry around your phone. It's obviously nicer in that it's not as long, so it's not as tall, and so it can fit in pants pockets in some ways easier. But when you drop it down into those pants pockets, you feel like you're sort of sinking a weight down in there. It's heavy. Obviously, in the bulk of the case adds a little bit to it, but that's something that's going to be changed with time.
Eventually, you can see a world in which these are sort of two very thin, you know, slabs that are connected to one another. Right. Okay, bottom line on this thing, where do you think the potential and the future of the device is for Apple? I do think now, again, having used it with the caveat for a week, so it's not, you know, it's not all the time for years at this point. I feel like this is the future of where Apple is going with their iPhones. I don't think that the smartphone is going away. You know, I think that it will be the main device for everyone for the foreseeable future. I think a decade out, we still have smartphones. But I do think that they will be much more akin to what we're seeing with this, where, again, it's like a smaller, maybe folded up device for most of the time. You open it up when you want to do something with a larger screen. And then it's a centralized hub for a lot of these other connected components to it. But I think that it can stay in the pocket more.
I think that it can be, yeah, you have even smaller screens potentially than this. And it continues to sort of change and morph into almost like, yeah, like a sort of carried around CPU and sort of AI data center in a way in your pocket. Right. Well, Apple has to, I mean, it sort of will depend on the AI that Apple builds into. It depends a lot on that. And Siri is better, and I think that they've announced some stuff with third-party apps coming more into Siri over the next several months that I think will make it even better. But I think Apple is positioned really well with this. Okay. You know, I came into our discussion. I read your piece. I came into our discussion being like, I'm happy with my iPhone 17. I don't need to fold. I'll wait second generation. Now I'm thinking, well, I really am. I'm thinking maybe I do need to get it. Especially, I mean, I'm doing so much business travel. That to me is like where it sort of seems like it will appeal the most is in a business travel scenario. Although I'm sure I would like drop it from my seat in the airplane and then step on it and then have the broken screen.
Oh, yeah. Before we go. Yeah. Before we move on to the next topic. The screen. The breaking screens. The breaking screens. Is that real? Is that a real thing? I live in fear of that just from the headlines. Every time I open it, I'm like, do I hear anything? Do I hear a little creak or something? It has been an issue for me. from everything that you can see on the Internet, it's obviously real. It's a real situation. It seems like it's not that big of a situation. Apple won't say explicitly how big or how small. I personally don't know anyone who's had the issue, but I also personally don't know that many people who have a duo. So I've seen it on the Internet. I've seen videos of it happening. Obviously, it's a real situation. I do get flashbacks to AntennaGate, which you'll remember well. I was there in the audience when Steve Jobs and Tim Cook and everyone else sort of had to give a press conference about that. I don't see that happening here. I don't think that it's going to be as widespread as that would. And I also think in some ways Apple might be helped by the fact that this is so supply constrained right now and not enough people have it. I mean, if they were able to sell 20 million units like right out of the gate, who knows, you know, even if it's a relatively small number that's happening.
If you have a bigger number on the top, there's going to be a bigger number on the bottom. And so maybe that's helping them in some ways. But it seems like it's fine. There's other videos you can see on the Internet. You can see CNET has a fun video where they've been doing it for, whatever, two weeks, two plus weeks at this point, and they haven't had any issues. They've been folding it constantly with some mechanical device. How many folds were they up to? 20,000, maybe more. Maybe it's 200,000. I don't even know. But it hasn't had an issue yet. So I think that it's going to be okay, but I do have a little bit of trepidation whenever I open it, worried that, yeah, something could happen to it. Because basically what you're hinting at is, yeah, the main thing, it's expensive. And so do I think that the, you know, mainstream, you know, the masses are going to go out and buy this thing? I don't think that they'll buy it for $2,000 plus overnight. I think that it's something that probably has to be eased into or stepped into. Obviously, Apple did some smart things with some things to get ahead of that. with launching their own program again to take off to be able to pay for it monthly.
And so, you know, maybe some people get into it that way. But it's going to take some time to get used to. I don't think that they'll bring down the price, even if and when we enter a world where memory prices come down. I think they'll sort of have ways to step more into the price, maybe the price of, you know, maybe there's an iPhone Ultra at some point that resides sort of in between these tiers of the Max and the Fold. or maybe there's more premium maxes that get us closer to where this price point is. No, it's kind of crazy. I mean, the iPhone Duo is probably going to be more expensive than, for people who buy it, more expensive than any laptop they've bought in their life. Oh, yeah, especially if they buy MacBook Neo, which by all accounts is selling extremely well, and they had to raise the price of that too. But raising the price of that is from like, I think, $600 to $700. So you could buy two, almost three. You could probably buy three of them if you want to get a slight upgrade for what you would get for this. Totally crazy. I would say that, but this is the main device. This is what's always in your pocket. This is your main usage. I always suggest when people buy smartphones, just buy the best model because, like, it's your most used device.
Yes. I'm very curious how your comment section on YouTube views this, though. Okay. I would imagine that they're going to be fairly anti it. It's one of those things, though, where just like for me, I tell this story a lot, but when the original iPhone launched in 2007, I was sort of skeptical that it would be a big thing, sort of for the Steve Ballmer laugh it off reasons. I'm like, $500 for a phone? I'm not buying that. I had a Razor flip phone, which I was super happy with, super small. Yeah, very hip now, retro. But I walked into an Apple store, and 30 seconds after using it, I was like, oh, my God, this is huge. I have to get this. I'm not saying it's the exact same with this, but there's echoes of it with this. Okay, so you might have convinced me to go out and get a duo. But what you haven't convinced me and you won't convince me, I don't think, is to go out and get a B Frontier. So we're going to talk about Amazon's B Frontier. Again, I call it the listening bracelet. Maybe that's too negative, but it's what it is. We'll talk about that when we come back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Intelligence AI. Is your investment in AI coding tools helping your team ship better software?
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When you ask a question to somebody in your company, do you trust them? And what made you trust them? Do you trust but verify every single time? Russell and I discussed the challenges and opportunities of building production-grade AI and what it really takes to move beyond the hype. Check out the Big Technology Guide To series presented by DXP Technology on my Alex Kantrowicz YouTube channel today. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with M.G. Siegler of Spyglass, spyglass.org. Sign up for the newsletter. One of my favorite reads. And it's, MG, just great to be able to speak with you every month about your observations on tech and go back and forth about the new devices you pressure test and the company's products that you have thoughts on. So thank you again for doing this with us. And I know the audience really loves to hear from you every month as well. Well, thank you, Alex. Yeah, and it's awesome being in person for this show and tell because, yeah, I feel like I – We've got two devices now to talk about. I am not a video person, so I don't get to do, like, these video-type walkthroughs of the devices.
I'm solely a written word. And so, yeah, you want to talk about this one. This demon bracelet. Yes. It's the B Frontier. This is the bracelet from Amazon. Yes. $75, so the price is right. And what it does is it listens to everything. Yes. Everything. and kind of gives you little summaries of your conversations and action items. If you want me to turn it on, are you comfortable with me turning it on right now? Well, we have two microphones here, so I can't really get too mad. You can't complain. So you are able to toggle it on and off. So that's one nice thing about it, which is that it has a very simple interface. Obviously, it's one single button in the center here, which you toggle on or off, and then you can see a little light, the smallest light that Amazon could possibly make, I think, is indicating. And it's also blending into the bracelet itself. The green of the bracelet. Obviously, when my sleeves are down, they're usually right over it. Right covering it. Which doesn't impact the listening, but does impact the ability for anyone to see. You talked about how, like, the liability with these things are that they can be creepy,
and hence the Perv Pods nickname for the Air, I guess the AirPods? Yeah, the AirPods with cameras that are rumored but sort of leaked by Apple themselves. Yeah, and the meta glasses, what are they called? Oh, God. What do they call? I mean, obviously we have the glass hole situation. There was another one about the meta, the Ray-Ban, anyway, they've talked about as also. The perv glasses. The perv glasses, right? Yeah. Yeah, this is our world, you know, that we're entering, surveillance state in a way, and I get the trepidation. I get your trepidation about it. I honestly, I just bought this basically on a whim because, as you know, it is relatively cheap. They have a slightly more expensive version that actually connects to the back of your phone. It's called the Bee Eclipse or something like that. Yeah, I think that's the other version. And that logs all your phone calls and gives you advice? If you have it on, yes. I think that it does a whole range of stuff. Man, I could have used that when I was in junior high school and trying to get a girlfriend.
This? So, I will say that. know if she would have been happy about that. How do you know the right thing to say at all times? Well, I mean, obviously, it's not the bee eclipse attached to my phone. Well, at that point, you also need a little IFB earpiece. Whispering in your ear, whispering like a grandma worm in your ear. Why do you like this thing? Because I think there's so many reasons not to like it. I went in as noted. I went in not skeptical, just sort of ambivalent to it more, thinking like Yeah, I've seen things like that can automatically transcribe meetings. Obviously, phone apps have been doing that for a while. There have been Otter and other startups that have been doing this. So I sort of went in a little skeptical that this would actually be interesting. What's crazy is I guess I just didn't fully recognize of how good the AI has gotten from, obviously, in a day-to-day usage. We all know that. But just from, yeah, this passive background usage, how good it is at actually pulling in every single thing that's being said throughout a day
and then can summarize it in a way that's actually fully parsable, fully readable, and is really, really good. It knows to distinguish between, you know, people talking. And you don't have to do anything on your end to sort of do that. You're not doing a lot of manual, yeah, is this this person, is this that person, did they say this, did they say that. I'm not doing any of that. It figures it out. It figures it out. It's through the app, obviously, on the phone. They also have a desktop app, the B app. And this was a startup, we should say, that Amazon acquired that had been working on this. And there are several other startups that are doing similar things because, again, it feels like the world is sort of coalescing around all of these different devices, which are coming into their own, including Apple, which we can talk about in a second, which is going to be doing this very shortly on the Apple Watch itself at a different scale. But again, what this comes back to you with after you started – so I've worn it now, I don't know, for a few weeks in different settings. I don't have it on all the time. I try to be mindful of telling people that it's on. When do you not have it on?
I don't have it on, honestly, in most situations. I put it on mainly for testing purposes at this point. If I'm in a meeting, I will ask if I can put it on, and it does a great job transcribing the meeting. For business, it makes a ton of sense. But the more interesting use cases are with, like, say your family. So we're in a car, you know, traveling in New York, as mentioned, and I was wearing it. And just, you know, my two kids are talking about something. My wife's talking about something else. And I'm talking about, you know, something. And we're all interacting. And it just does an amazing job parsing what everyone is saying. And then it goes through and proactively gives you action items based off of what was said and what it thinks that maybe you should follow up on. And they're actually really good. Again, do you want a device that's always listening? A lot of people will say absolutely not. It does feel to me like one of those things where it's absolutely not in 2026. It's probably not in 2027. It's maybe not in 28. It's maybe in 29. It's perhaps, yeah, that sounds cool, in 2030.
It's one of those things that's, you know, just societal norms will shift. I think that people will become more at ease with it. I think there will be some more structured rules or etiquette even in place around what to do or whatnot. I think that before we get there, though, we're going to see a bunch of lawsuits, a bunch of pushback against it. And bars that ban the B Frontier. For sure. That's happening. For sure. Just no one knows what this is right now. People see me wearing it. I was getting a haircut the other day. Like, oh, is that a Fitbit? What is that thing? Yeah. People think it's a Fitbit. People think it's some other type of wearable. It's super small. You can also wear it as a clip. You can take it out of this thing and just clip it on anywhere. So it like very unobtrusive and people don recognize what you actually doing with it So let me run this by you because Marissa Meyer gave an interview to the New York Times former Google executive former Yahoo CEO Yeah. And she talked about this new app that she's working on and it was very good. It's like basically AI for your personal context. Your photos. Right. And good at like, you know, there was a school essay where they asked her like, name three
special things about your daughter. And it just printed it out for her. And she's like, oh, that's good. And there was controversy about online. Now, I understand, like, working parents have a lot going on. You know, and these schools are always asking things. So you need the help. Right. But, like, the controversy was you've now taken, like, these kind of special moments of, like, being in relationship with other people and your family and stuff like that. And you've allowed basically AI to kind of step in and take over. And so, like, that's one of the things that I wonder about. And I'm curious what your perspective is. Because, like, if you're wearing it around your family, like you're talking about how it can pick up your wife and your kids and stuff like that, like, do we really – and I'll say for fairness, I forget stuff all the time that I'm supposed to be doing around the house. But do we really want AI to be, like, mediating those relationships or inserting itself in the middle? I would say I totally hear that point. The one – the nice thing about a device like this is that it doesn't have a screen. it's not something that you're actively using, right? It's something that's in the background.
And so to the point of like, yeah, you can live your life, you can be with your family without worrying that it's being obtrusive in some ways. The flip side of that is that, yeah, it's recording everything. And so maybe there's some level of like worry that not only for privacy stuff, and that's a whole other can of worms, which we can talk about if you want, But like there's obviously the privacy angle of it, which is a big one. But just from a pure product, pure use case situation, I do think that there's compelling reasons to say want, like you noted, like a backup memory for your own memory. Like it's like, yeah, we had a great conversation. It's not like I'm going to forget that conversation because I have it now in on, you know, recorded from my wrist or whatnot. It's just that if something happened, maybe I'll revisit it, you know, later in the night after the kids are asleep or something. And I'm not saying I do this, but I'm trying to come up with a hypothetical reason for why people might want to use it in their lives. And you can say, like, oh, yeah, so-and-so child wanted this or so-and-so child asked me for this.
And I would have normally forgotten that or time, you know, everything else comes in and you lose focus on what was talked about. Yeah, I feel like it would be fun for a game that I play often, which is why did that person get mad at me? Maybe the B Frontier could help me out. But, I mean, we were joking about it on the Friday show recently. Just like imagine like you're like wearing it to a party and you're like having it like the scenario was imagine a single person is wearing it to the party and they're having a good conversation. They're vibing with somebody. They get home and the person's not texting back. And the echo show puts on screen and it's like, you know, a little too personal for the first interaction. That is absolutely going to happen. I gave the example in the piece that I wrote about it. But I used it in a dispute over a bill at a hotel that I was staying at because they basically said, oh, yeah, I went over the itemized list. And it was like, yeah, and one night you ordered this glass of wine and this beer. And I was like, no, no, I didn't order the beer. And, you know, they would obviously just say, like, okay, that's fine.
But I actually did have it in the transcript saying, like, what I ordered that night. And it's like I'm not saying that, first of all, there's legal, you know, is that legally admissible? Come back to the bar. Hey, I got it on the B frontier. But it's good to know that you're not insane. That's true. It's actually gaslight insurance. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I like that. Amazon should use that as a selling point. But the legal thing is going to get a whole thing because there's states where there's wiretap laws and things where you can't. Yeah, consent and all that. And so some states have different laws. Some states have other laws. Some countries have other laws. It's going to be a can of worms. They interestingly are kind of trying to not qualify it as recording because it's just hearing and synthesizing. So this brings Apple into the equation, which is, yeah, Apple now, people I think know, has talked about that they're going to launch a feature on the Apple Watch, which is very, very similar. And they actually just rolled it out in beta. I don't have it on my Apple Watch right now. But it basically allows, yeah, the Apple Watch to serve the same purpose as what the bee serves here,
where it's listening in the background. You can double tap, I think, the crown to reverse 15 seconds in any conversation to see what was said. They give the example of, like, a waiter giving the specials and, you know, not remembering. By the way, they would never let any app developer do that. Oh, of course not. Only Apple. Only I can save you. No way you're going to get that data from Apple's perspective. But to your point, Apple's stance, because obviously when they even first talked about this in a keynote, everyone came out and was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? like this seems like a little bit extreme here. And Apple's saying we're not recording anything. We can debate the definition of recording, but they're saying it's basically it gets transcribed to, you know, secure elements of your phone. It gets encrypted in transit. And basically, it gets deleted after they do whatever they do to parse the data and give you the summary or whatnot. Again, there's all sorts of wiggle room and gray area about what it means to record, I think. And And some of this will probably be legally challenged at some point.
But, yes, both Apple and Amazon and everyone else who's doing this is going to say, yeah, we don't – it doesn't skirt like wiretapping laws because there's no recording going on. It's just listening. So what's the difference between listening and recording and what constitutes the level of which it can be transcribed? And if you explicitly take an action to sort of save everything, because with Apple's version, I know that they have a way where at the end of the day it pings you with everything that it basically transcribed and gave you a summary. and then you can save that, I think, to notes. And so we're going to come into this, like, very weird gray area. And, yeah, I wouldn't be shocked if we start to have signs up on, you know, restaurants and bars saying, like, do not wear a B, do not have the Apple Watch with that feature on in there. Yeah, hang your B Frontier up on the coat rack. Take it up back when you're done. Yeah, I'm curious what the B Frontier will tell you after this show. It'll probably just be like a demented podcast host makes bad arguments about revolutionary technology devices.
Right. We're sending notes to Andy Jassy right now to never talk to Alex again. Thomas Penae is his next appearance on the show. Okay. Lastly, I want to end with AI as UI. You picked this up, and I don't think many other people have, which is that ChatGPT is moving from a chatbot slash agent to something that will, like, as you ask your questions, build smart user interfaces within the answer. And people have started to see this. I don't think there's, like, a full recognition of how important this is going to be to the AI experience. But, for instance, like, here's one example. I was just speaking with the head of the consumer product lead at OpenAI about this, where he was like, I asked it to show me how the heart worked. And it built a diagram just live in the answer, JCPT. Or I asked it to explain the offside rule in soccer for our American listeners or football for our listeners here. And it will, like, give you a slider and show you if the player goes this compared to the other players and they're offside and otherwise they're not.
So this is, I think, a pretty big deal that the user interface is coming within the chatbot. And you wrote about it. So talk to us a little bit about it. Yeah, I definitely think this is sort of the future of where things are heading with AI. I think that this is an extension of moving beyond that sort of just text-based chat. Google did some early work here, too. We should give them credit with Gemini where they were able to build these like – this was several months ago already that they were able to build sort of these really cool interactive widgets. widgets in a way. I remember I asked it to explain the plot of Interstellar, the movie, to me, and it made this nice interactive widget that you can play around with and do time dilation and all this sort of fun stuff. And now OpenAI, I think, has taken it to another level with what they're doing within ChatGBT, which is that, yeah, like you're noting, they sort of proactively go in. They know what you're asking for. They'll know if it's easier just to explain via diagram or interactive element that they can answer your question more easily than just with text. And I I think that that's actually the future of the way this is going.
And I do think the extrapolation of that will be that they end up building sort of apps on the fly all of a sudden. So say, you know, I want to order a pizza tonight or whatever. And obviously you can do that right now via agentic stuff and either computer use and or APIs. But what if it did it, you know, where instead of being like, okay, well, what toppings do you want? And sort of all the standard stuff, it just gives you like in real time, it just pops up sort of this display of like a little mini widget basically saying like, yeah, input what you want here and then just hit a button and you're off. Because I don't think like, I feel like a lot of the talk around sort of the future of where this is all heading is more like with the assistant stuff, for example, as we've long talked about. It's like, yeah, the assistant can come back at you with a bunch of questions, then you go back at it and you can come back. But wouldn't it just be easier if it could sort of, yeah, build you sort of some sort of simple interface on the fly where you can then tap a button and tap a couple buttons and say, like, you know, that's it, and then that's done. And I think it's not a, you know, everything fits all model here. I think there will be use cases for voice.
I think there will be use cases for text. But I also think increasingly there will be use cases for, yeah, this dynamic sort of UI, and it could point to a world of the future of all of software in a way. Yeah, so that's where I was going. I'm curious when it's something like this because it seems that when I've seen it show up in Chachapete, it's been great. so I always wonder who does it leave behind you mean like in terms of who's not using it or you mean who gets taken out right because it's like all these experiences and UIs that people's companies spend a lot of time building and researching so yeah this is something I was thinking about actually the other day with the Apple news that I sort of talked about briefly but it's basically so Apple with the news theory They just launched, like, with developers. They just started to talk about the way to bring in third-party apps into Siri AI. And I think that that's super interesting because it's basically, in my view, Apple trying to say, you've heard all this stuff about the future is all AI,
but we're saying that apps are still important and apps are still the central part. Because what they're saying is, look, you have your apps on your phone already. What we're going to do is layer Siri on top of them so you can use any app via Siri, say, you know, talking about Uber or ordering pizzas, we just were. And if you have a Domino's app or whatnot, you can just say like, yeah, order me Domino's and it has the app and it has all the hooks into it. And that's nice because it's super simple. It's a paradigm. People already know. They already have the apps. But there is another world in which the stuff that we're talking about now where you just don't need apps anymore because basically OpenAI or whoever it is, whatever AI service it is, basically builds the equivalent of apps. It's like there's long been this thing dating to the earlier days of the App Store and whatnot. It's like, does everything need to be an app, right? Like all of this stuff feels like overkill. But in some ways it did need to be an app because that was the paradigm that Apple instilled on everyone, right? And it's like if you don't have an app, you might as well just not exist, you know, as a service. And so it feels like we're in a time where that could be moving the other direction.
And we could be entering a world where, yeah, you don't need an app. You launch a service. You basically allow AI to build a UI on the fly for you. And it knows what you like and the things that you need. It knows your own. Yeah, and imagine that for different devices beyond just a smartphone, right? Like obviously glasses, watches, any type of sort of dynamic UI it could build. And all of a sudden that takes the onus off of the developer to have to do that and have to build for Android and iOS and Windows and Mac OS and Vision OS and all these other platforms out there. And again, they just say, like, you focus on sort of the service that you provide and give us some guidance of, like, what you want from a, you know, sort of like a brand guidance perspective, and we will build the UI on the fly for you. I don't think that that's, like, even that far off from happening right now. Yeah. Can I tell you, I'll just end on this. It's crazy how many, like, pie-in-the-sky moonshot ideas that we've been hearing about from the tech industry for, like, forever
and never seem feasible are, like, all starting to happen. Holding iPhone, a dynamic listening device that gives you, despite my reservations about it, that gives you, you know, pointers about your life, UI that adapts to your needs and just sort of is built on the fly. Yes. A chatbot that knows everything. I totally agree with you. And actually, I have notes currently for a piece that I'm working on, which is basically like I've been taken during certain travel times that I feel like this year alone, there have been like five, for lack of a better phrase, holy shit moments where it's like, again, using the iPhone for the first time was one of those. But this year, it's like I took a Waymo for the first time. And it's like, you know, many people have done that by now. But here, they're not currently live yet. They're testing on the roads in London. But I was back in the Bay Area and took one for the first time. And it's like, I mean, obviously I've written about, I wrote about the self-driving project way back in the day at Google before I even went to Google. And then I saw it there. But, like, I'd never written in one as an end user and just, like, been there using it as you would a regular day-to-day user.
And it's just such a mind-blowing experience, right? It's like, of course this is the future. Of course this is the way it's going to happen. And I feel like you're seeing that there. You're seeing that with a lot of things, a lot of aspects of AI. it feels like, yeah, we're sort of in this moment in time where there's all of these, yeah, mind-blowing moments happening at once and sort of this confluence of events. A lot of it is driven, I think, by AI and sort of that unlocking a lot of our unshaking the sort of chains that we've had around the old technology that we've been using for a while and people just being more open-minded. Yeah. Well, MG, it's always great to speak with you. I started reading your writing a long time ago, but especially dug in deep when I was writing the Apple chapter for my book in 2018, 2019. It's just been cool to be able to get a chance to speak with you every week. I know the audience loves it, and it's a joy for me, so thank you for coming on. Thank you, Alex. Awesome being in person. Good to see you. All right, good to see you, too. All right, folks, the website's PyGlass.org. Our guest is M.G. Siegler, as usual. He comes on once a month. Thank you all for listening and watching, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
Thank you.
番組の概要欄(原文)
M.G. Siegler is the author of Spyglass. Siegler joins Big Technology Podcast in London to discuss whether Apple can keep its distance from the AI spending race. Tune in to hear how the data center boom is driving up the cost of memory and squeezing Apple’s margins even as its rivals foot the bill for new infrastructure. We also cover the foldable iPhone Duo and what happens to apps when AI can build an interface on the fly. Hit play for a show and tell episode, including a debate over whether you’d want Amazon’s Bee Frontier wristband listening to your conversations and telling you what to do next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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- 番組
- Big Technology Podcast(Alex Kantrowitz)
- 元の回
- Storm Clouds Ahead For Apple?, Debating Amazon’s Bee Frontier, AI as UI
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- 公式サイト
- www.bigtechnology.com
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