Does Gen Z Really Hate AI? Android 17 New Features, iPhone 17 is World’s Most Popular

They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Google revealed a bunch of features coming to Android 17 and new hardware, a Google Book is coming. Alexa is coming to Amazon to replace Rufus AI. Meta made some interesting features this week, both in Instagram and in Meta AI Chat. Anthropic is targeting small businesses. The iPhone 17 is super popular and education discounts are no longer an honor system on Apple. This episode is brought to you by Granola, Claude, Nordlayer, and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, joined by developer with an app in the store, Jason Aten. How's it going? I know the Mac app got released like hours after we recorded last week and I've never been more mad about anything in my life. But now it's out there. It is. I said, should I wait? And should I just, and I'm like, no, I'm not waiting. It's going out right now. No, don't wait. That's it. Kicking it out the door, fly a little bird, fly. Fly little bird, we're going to talk about you in a second because it's also available on the iPhone and the iPad. It is. And so we'll talk about that in a second. But a couple of five star review shout outs. Thanks. Podcast 728 from the USA. Yes, has there ever been a five star review that has stuck out? This one did because it was the first one this week. So thank you. Also caseless. His ESR case broke and we've been going caseless. Are you caseless with the 17 Pro Max? No, you have a case. No, I have a Balroy case on it right now. You still rocking the Bellroy case? When I sometimes use the Nomad one. Were you a little choked up about my question about the case? No, I'm I had to take a deep breath. You sounded a little choked up. Got emotional.

So don't know why that was funny to me. So wait, Bellroy. Bellroy Lerner the Case. I have a Balroy case and then I also have a Nomad case that I like but the Nomad one which is good it it ~ gets a little roughed up which is good I mean that's fine It does, yeah, yeah, It's patina. it just looks really nice but I'll say this is the first iPhone that I've gone caseless with, but then I went with the Moft. They sponsored a video months ago, but I actually like it. This is the Moft, like, MagSafe wallet with FindMy. So this thing has FindMy, and because it's, you know, it's a big phone, the 17 Pro Max, I can use it as a little grip thing, and it's a little stand, and I like it. So no case for me, but then MagSafe wallet on the back. So quick check, Yeah. I typically will get a new phone and generally before the end of the first day, it's got scratches on it like every like all the time, like no matter what the 16 pro like just scratched to be Jesus like constantly like Really? That fast?

I don't even understand why 17 pro not a single scratch. Okay, well here's the thing. Here's the check-in. I have dropped mine a couple times. Never on cement, but I've dropped it on like hardwood floor. I dropped it and it hit like a metal thing. The frame of this iPhone 17 Pro Max, the back and the sides, rock solid. No dents, nothing. It's great. And I did drop it pretty hard a couple times. There are a couple tiny, not tiny, you'll never see it on camera. tiny scratches in this corner here of the glass, but that's it. And it, yeah. But I'm not so in the past when I say I scratch it up, I almost never drop my phone like I almost never do. It sometimes falls off the arm of the chair onto the wood floor, but it's fine. Like that's not iPhones have been able to handle that for a very long time. And concrete is the enemy here. Yeah, that's right. Right. Concrete. So just avoid concrete. Period. You're good. But just in general use, That's it.

like inside out of your pocket, like all that kind of stuff, it would just get scratched to heck. And it hasn't anymore. I feel like whatever invincible ceramic duo shield plus max they've put on these things. Yeah. The ultra. Yeah. They finally figured it out, Steven. I think I think they did. My scratches I think came I did drop it on pavers one time and I think that was the time it scratched a little bit. But honestly like It's just segmented concrete, Stephen. Correct and the scratch Listen, I've typically been one in the past where if I have a tiny scratch on my screen I have to figure out how to like finagle the apple care to get a replacement because it'll bother me and I've been I've been okay I've been living with it and Anyway, it's not bad That's right Then you just drop it again with a hammer. You can't tell you can't say that can't say that Listen, I don't understand why I dropped it on hammer, but I did, I'm sorry. I don't understand. I don't know. I don't know why it hit ten hammers on the way down after I dropped it Yeah, the nail puncture, I don't know how that got there.

The nail straight through it. Okay, so one of the five-star review from Barty Burns still the only podcast He hasn't gotten bored of we take thank you so much. I'm glad we're entertaining also important point regarding the Midwest John Steinbeck famously said this is from Barty Burns the Missouri River separating Mondan, North Dakota and Bismarck, North Dakota is the place the US map should fold Which is good to prove as any that North Dakota is the Midwest go team Can I just say Barty Burns definitely sounds like a character in a John Grisham book, just to be clear. Oh yeah, does, yeah, is. Like, I think that's a great name. That's a name. And I think, yeah, you fold it there, that's probably in the middle. North Dakota, Midwest, okay. You're very Midwest, and Michigan's away on that. No, We're east of the Midwest. We're the East Midwest. no, you're East, right. Yeah, okay, so Steinbeck was partial. He wanted more Midwest than there exists, I think. Anyway. Yeah, he was a sad. He was very depressed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. What's not depressing are these apps I want to give a shout out. See like that transition. Great. Thank you. A couple listeners, the virtual boy, thatvirtualboy.com wanted to shout out his app Diddley. You can get it on the app store, Mac and iPhone. It's a fun take on a task app. It looks really cool. And so I'm going to link that down in the show notes. And I'd heard about this app from several different creators. Christopher Lawley covered it on his YouTube channel and others. Beam, which is a web browser built for iPad to work and feel more like a desktop browser. It has a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, which is rare for a lot of iPad apps. It has built-in ad blocking, sidebar tabs. We had talked about vertical versus horizontal tabs. It's a one-time purchase, no subscription for six bucks. But if you're looking for a great browser on iPad, this is made by Henrique, who listens to the show and has listened to the podcast since the beginning, which is awesome. I had no idea that we had a... Just so many cool, no I did know. I know we had a lot of cool developers that listened to the show. Did not know Beam Creator listens and so it's awesome. Also, I just realized I do have this on my iPad. You do have, okay yeah, so Jason's been running this, Yeah. yeah. It's a great app. So that's Beam. That'll be linked down in the show notes. And one other app I wanna give a shout out, I covered this in my video earlier this week with Contextually for a Mac app, but Gnome is a pretty fun app. It's searching and getting GIFs quickly on the Mac, which sometimes is, you know, it could be not seamless. You know, if you wanna share a GIF in Slack and or email. And or some other messaging app. They don't always have great gif search and so gnome It's a seven dollar app. I talked about it in my video, but yeah, it's a fun little fast gif search I put it on a keyboard shortcut shift option command g and my gif search just comes right up. I can get a gif There you go gnome. Do you say gif or gif? I think it's a, I don't know. I don't usually say it out loud. I feel like it should be GIF, but I think I usually say JIF. Hmm. Thank you. Just stop right there. No. But I don't actually ever say any of it.

Anyway, I believe it's GIF. Leave us a five star rating and review I think that's probably true. in Apple Podcasts and just say GIF or JIF. Just put your pronunciation spelled out with no other commentary in the five star review. GIF or JIF. Do you say PNG or ping?

Do say giraffe or go-ra-f? See, my question was serious, but OK. Like a PNG, the image format PNG. Wait, wait, so say it again?

I say P-N-G, I don't say ping. OK. Because ping is like another term. It's like P-I-N-G. I'm gonna ping you. Or whatever. Or like a technical term. Look at that. I'm gonna take a picture of you and make a screenshot of it and I'm gonna ping you Yeah, there's that. and one other shout out to the Medieval Knight riding a polar bear, which I'm wearing on my shirt right now. It actually made its way on a transatlantic cruise. This was ~ Chris Peck, a transatlantic to Lisbon, Portugal. There's a little medieval knight on the polar bear. 12 days. four straight sea days. And yeah, he's brought the medieval night along. Look at that. That is amazing. I went to Portugal and I didn't take it with me. Listen, I left it with my Vision Pro so everything would be safe. How did you?

Wow, man, so this is curious. I I knew the medieval knight had traveled many places in Europe I don't know if I think I might have sent one to Australia, but now it's been transatlantic. It's crossed the Atlantic Ocean I wonder can we get it to all seven continents now? No, Antarctica is going to be a problem. Listen, I just watched Chloe Abrams' huge if true video about Antarctica, which was incredible. I'm actually going to ~ link it in my weekly newsletter podcast, Top 5 Tech. Let me just shamelessly plug that. If you like podcasts and you like hearing me on podcasts, top5.tech. I've been doing an episode every week. But she went there. She went to Antarctica. I made a whole YouTube video. think, okay, here's the thing. We need to confirm that the medieval knight riding a polar bear is reaching all seven continents. So I know we're in Europe. We're in the US. If you're in South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and if there's any possibility that someone who's going to Antarctica listens to this show, email me podcastatprimarytech.fm. Number one, I'll send you a pin if you can somehow confirm that you're in these countries or on these continents, and I will pay the $8,000 to send you a pin. I will, I will send you a pin so we can be at awesome continents. The ideal scenario is if you live in the US and you're going to one of those continents, just let us know. That too, I feel like I want, mean someone who lives, because I know we just had a listener from Japan leave us a five star rating review. oh, Medieval Knight, all seven continents, All right.

that's the goal. And last thing, thank you, Housekeeping for 4K on YouTube. We reached 4,000 subscribers over there, which is super fun. I thought maybe you just meant we're releasing the show in 4k. No, that's every week. That's every week, I just was like, what does this even mean? No, YouTube has had 4k for a long time. no, no, it's every week. All right. Your app is out live. People can download it for free. It's a great app for free. There's a lot of great free things. I'm saying that because of my own PTSD about that. But you wrote it. Claude code helped solve my biggest productivity problem. Jason, how's been the first week of your app? Yeah, it's been really cool. ~ It's weird to have to have made something and then to see it for real like in the it was was kind of like the first time I wrote a story for ink and it was like super surreal to be like, I typed those words. And somebody was willing to publish them. What is happening right now? But it's kind of cool. Yeah. Right.

It it's been great. So the Mac app released last Thursday, it is free to download. It's free to use forever.

It's if you all you want is a replacement for I will pitch this the free version of this app. If all you want is a replacement for the notes app that stock note Apple Notes app that will sync with your calendar so you can just create notes from calendar events and change the theme like maybe you're just tired of looking at that yellow in the notes app, right? Then this is perfect. It's a free app. You can have up to three notebooks, unlimited notes. It'll sync your calendar. can create notes from your calendar. You can ignore the calendar part like that. If that's not like literally if all you wanted was a prettier version of the notes app, this is a great option for you. It does have a subscription, five dollars a month or thirty nine dollars a year. And for that, you do get some additional features. You get smart summaries, which essentially what it will do is like look at your note, give you a summary of that note and then pull out any action items. So like if you take a lot of notes and along the way you're like should do this, need to do this, have this thing happening, it'll just give you the give you that summary at the top and then it will also pull out action items and then you can just take those action items and send them to reminders or to do as there's things. So it's kind of like bridging the flow between I have a thing I have to do and when I go do that thing I'm going to get more things I have to do and I need a way to keep track of all of that. Steven is using the pepper theme right now which is I like this one a lot. Yes. So that was actually the most fun part was imagining what the themes should be. So there are a couple different themes in here. ~ And so Yeah. that the paid version gets that there is a pretty cool paid feature that will be it's basically ready but I'm waiting for WWDC because I think it will be better after that I'm hoping that they make some announcements I think we talked a little bit about that in the the pre-show so if you want to listen to that you should go subscribe to the show but but I've been asked like why why subscription why not just a one-time thing that's great I'll just say this since the app is released last week I've I've pushed out like Well, I've already pushed out two updates to the iPhone version and I'm pushing out a Mac update today. like, this is not a just push it out into the world and forget about it. So I'm hoping for people who pay for it that it becomes worth it for them and that they were like, yeah, $39 a year. That's not that much money. it's a well-designed, I think it's a very well-designed app. I did not know anything about how to write code. I've learned a ton about CloudKit and iCloud sync. Right? I have learned a ton about the differences between an iOS app on the iPhone versus the iPad because there's a lot more to that. I mean, it's obvious that there's a lot to that, but just having to reimagine, okay, on a Mac, what should the experience be like? On an iPhone, what should the experience be like? And on an iPhone, you just want to quickly be able to take a note, right? Like, and on the Mac, you want to be able to organize it Yeah, there you go.

and get this information out. And the iPad is kind of an in-between, right? You have more real estate, so it should be more Mac-like, but also it's an iOS app, so there's like some in-you-can- I bet is the only one you can rotate the orientation. So you really have to think through what should this interface Right.

be like horizontally versus vertically. So I tried to think about all those things for all of our all the people Mmm.

who are using it. And so far, I feel like a lot of people have really resonated with it. So hopefully I would just encourage you if you're listening to this, That's awesome.

you won't offend me if you just download it for free. Just like download it, give it a try. Yeah, yeah.

And then you can I think it's a two week. You can get a two week free trial of the of the pro features, I would just encourage you try the pro features. Yeah, yeah.

If you hate them, go ahead and just like cancel. won't be mad at you. Yeah, yeah.

This is awesome. What did you use for the marketing images? I love the font that you have in some of these images. Yeah, yeah, just, What would that... well, I just went through and I took screenshots of the app and then I laid them out in the right format in Illustrator and then just exported them and put them in there. So yeah, So you made these like bespoke, like you made the... That's That's nice. yeah, all of that is just, so.

It's great fun. So contextually, I'll put a link to it in the app store down in the show notes. Super fun. iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And as I've been trying to develop my boondoggle of a second app, I have to say it is tough when you start adding things like syncing and maybe sharing things like from the share sheet. it's tough, but great work. It's awesome. It's awesome app. And I do love that theme. Thanks. It's a good theme. All right. News now Sony released a new camera. Uh, we don't have it in hand, but I do want to mention it's the sony a7r6 And so I will link Gerald undone. He retired from youtube and then he posted this video I mean, it's a collaboration. So it's not technically like Gerald's video He just appears in it and talks about rolling stutter and and or rolling shutter. Excuse me uh, yeah, yeah, I I wanted to shout out because I mean I use a sony two totally different things, but yeah.

a7 4 still and i've I've marked myself safe from purchasing a Sony a75 even though I've been tempted several times, but I just have no reason for it. I literally just keep this camera on this tripod, never change any settings, and hit record whenever I make a video. But, you know, Sony releases their series of cameras. The R comes out first, so the A7R6, and then they typically will release the A7-6 without the R, which is more of a hybrid camera where it will have, you know, more video features than typically the R series and less megapixels and then maybe they release an S version which I don't think an A7s ever came out I think they're still on the A7s3 which is kind of the the youtuber camera at least for a long time but the A7R6 it's out there it's like sixty something megapixels it can film 8K 30 which is wild and you know that's if you wanted to And it also doesn't overheat they in this testing I'll link the video with Gerald undone and Mark Bennett They record over like three plus hours at 4k and 30 I think or 4k 60 and it didn't shut off or overheat. It was just it was wild. So yeah a little polar bear in there just running around cooling things down. I mean, I don't know. polar bear with a medieval night maybe I don't Sure. know and you can you say anything about this or no you I don't have any information yet. I'm hoping to try it out though. Okay, very good. Yeah, Like I would love to review this device so. Yeah, you should bring it to an F1 race or something. That'd be cool. That'd be amazing. That is my thing. That is how I test Sony devices is take them to F1 races. That's how you do it. just F1 race. Speaking of someone you have a relationship with, Lego, right? No, I was like, okay, I was like, where are we going? no, no, a brand. I just want to mention, I don't think this is security issue. My Wi-Fi network name is Minas Tirith because I'm a Lord of the Rings fan and I thought that was a fun name. And Lego announced that they are making a Minas Tirith set. It's going on sale June 1st and it looks incredible. And I've not bought a crazy Lego like this, I don't think ever, but I'm pretty tempted. I mean that thing looks awesome. mean, 8,300 pieces is a lot of pieces, Stephen. lot of pieces but i mean i could i will redo my entire studio backdrop over here and just have minas tirith in the background of all my videos i mean that feels like maybe it's worth it and it's a business expense too this is a business expense Yeah. A business. All right. no just kidding i actually bought the well go ahead That's that's gonna be like the third or fourth largest. Like I said, there's a couple over there's like two over 10,000 pieces. Really?

There's like the Eiffel Tower. The Titanic is pretty big. There's like one of the Coliseum and there's like some map that they have. It's like a world map. I think that's the largest with like 11,000 pieces or something. But how many did that thing say? 8300s. It was 8300 but now I just found LEGO's official top 10 list or top 11, the biggest LEGOs ever. I had not heard about this world map. The world map is over 11,000 pieces. It was the biggest LEGO set. The Eiffel Tower. You just knew this stuff off the top of your head. That's wild. 10,000 pieces was the Eiffel Tower. I spend a lot of time with Lego. The company, not the pieces. We have a lot Yeah, yeah. I mean, but if you could spend time with the pieces. of Lego pieces in our house too, by the way. Literally we have a Lego room, Stephen. We actually have an entire room that is just Lego. Really? I should come up and do a video about that. Have I not? We've talked about this for sure. That's wild. I don't know. I don't think we've talked about this. All right, I'll find a picture. A LEGO room? You should let me pick it up. 9,000 pieces is the Death Star. The Millennium Falcon, if you were wondering, was 7,500. I thought the Death Star would have been more. But no, apparently not. Okay, I had no idea the world map. That Titanic. That's crazy. Anyway. Here we go. I found you a picture of our Lego room. Can I show this online or people? Yeah, I don't care. We have an entire room. This is pretty old, so there's probably more newer, but I'll just send this to you. Did you text this to me? Okay, So I just did. Yeah.

I'll wait for it to come through and then we'll pop it up, but I'll use it. It'll come through right now, dude. It doesn't take that long. The internet you're 6000 megabyte per millisecond. It takes a while. It's not me, it's iMessage. It's now dealing with all those end-to-end encrypted RCS messages, which we're going to get to next. so it can't... ~ this... Now, this almost looks like the Lego movie setup, you know what mean? Where Will Ferrell comes down and yells at his kids. This one's pretty, this is a relatively old photo, but yeah, then we have a whole Lego room. then if you go like to the right of this, you can't see is just a lot more Lego sets in those bins. That's pretty sweet. Actually, there's a small Lego area in my parents' house that we've just kept up. It has a castle and stuff, but man. Lego Room. If you have a Lego room, send us a picture. I'd love to see that. That's super fun. All right. Software updates. Oh, before we get to that, actually, I wanted to mention Apple Vision Pro just for a brief minute because iOS 26.5 came out. Software updates for everything. I do turn on my Vision Pro to update the software when the occasion calls.

While I was there. I knew that there were several immersive videos that come out and there was one on Sweden We know Switzerland excuse me. There's a Switzerland one and New York City, and I just want to shout out that they are both Awesome, have you watched either of those? No, but I will as soon as we're done. The Switzerland one is beautiful. You know it talks about the Alps it shows cities and towns the narrator is a actress I believe a Swiss actress is a great one The New York City one, I'm from New York. have, you know, I feel very connected there and I was very curious how they would do a New York City immersive video and they nailed it because there's actually no narration. It's literally just sounds and sights of the city. And if you've ever been in New York City or if you know it well, they really captured it accurately. Like it feels like New York City. And again, if you've been there, New York feels like an organism. Like the whole city just kind of feels like a living thing. And the immersive Applevision Pro thing, show, one of the ~ experience, I forget what it is. There's Boundless and then there's, what's the other one? Boundless is a series of like the hot air balloons and stuff. And then there's the one with the high line and everything. I have no idea. don't I don't use the It's a series. I don't use that. I go into the Apple TV app in my vision, bro, though I was really excited because people kept talking about how what's the movie that was the big the space movie Hail Mary was out on. Project Hail Mary. Yeah, it was out on Amazon Prime, but it's to. Yeah, or you can buy- you should just buy it because it's great. Hold on. I need to find- it's boundless- what is the other one? This is gonna drive me nuts. It's the- it's the one with the high line and... Someone is yelling at you right now listening to this. I'm yelling at myself. AppleVision Pro immersive video, the high line, tell me the sear- anyway. It's the one- it's that one. It's the series with the high line. It starts with an E, I forget what it is. It'll just pop into my head. But anyway, the New York one, if you have AppleVision Pro, I think some of our listeners and viewers, or if you've never done an AppleVision Pro, who knows how long it'll be around. So maybe just go to the Apple Store and try it out. But the Switzerland one and the New York City one are really great. And so I just... Thank you! See, Elevated, is that what it is?

I knew it started with an E, elevated. I don't know how you... I was literally Googling feverishly over here. I'm just better at Google than you. Apparently, apparently, Gemini Intelligence. You have no idea. Apparently so also with iOS 26.5 for your iPhone There is now end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging Apple says it's supposedly in beta But Google made a big deal about this when 26.5 came out earlier this week on Monday. It is on by default I updated to 26.5 on all my devices, but my iPhone like they're toggled on you can go to settings apps messages And you can see it there, but yeah, that's great and also I saw the splash screen for ads in Apple Maps Now I have not seen any ads in Apple Maps yet. think that's coming this summer, which I don't, you Apple considers summer, what, June 21st probably too. Anytime between November. Any time between now and November is summer.

So you will see an ad. If you see an ad in Apple Maps, take a screenshot and send it to us. I'd be curious. I have not seen any yet. There's also suggested places now in Apple Maps. So as soon as you tap the search box in Apple Maps, it will just show suggested places, even if you've not asked it anything. And so right now I'm... showing Jerry's Barbecue, can't see it on the screen, it's too bright, but Jerry's Barbecue and Bob Evans. Those are my suggested places. I would not go to Bob Evans, but anyway, that's that. Also, they featured some developers ~ recently. They had a whole article featuring developers in the community and spotlighting them. The developer of Mercury Weather was included in that roundup. But now they're also apparently forming a team where Apple Ads is courting developers and the team is called the emerging team, the new emerging team group that's going to reach out to developers to see if they want to like, you know, do ads on Apple services. I don't know. I feel like the ads in the app store have not historically been great, but maybe, I don't know, maybe they're going to do new ones. Maybe. Would call me guys because here's the thing when when your app gets released in the app store You get an email and it says welcome to the app store. Yes.

Here's a hundred dollar credit to use for Apple ads. I was like sweet I'll spend it. ~ I'll spend a credit like I mean, whatever so I set it up and When I log in to look at my Apple ads account, Interesting. Yes.

it shows me that I have an ad running Okay. And it shows me that it has been shown exactly zero times and it's been clicked What? on exactly zero times and I have gotten exactly zero. It's like, so whatever, I just don't understand. What does it mean if an ad is running and it's never been shown to anyone? Evan... If a tree falls in the forest... This doesn't, I feel like the definition of running is like. kind of loosely held here because I don't understand what's happening. anyway, call me Apple ads people because I would like to use this. You have thoughts? I will I just would like to burn this hundred dollar credit to the ground. And if that means that some people actually now maybe the problem is that you have to tell it like what your bid amount is and maybe ~ 25 cents was too low. And so they're never going to show it was not 25 cents. But maybe they're just never going to show my ad. I will say I just searched for Markdown Notes, which I guess, I don't know if you have Markdown anywhere in your, you probably have to target that keyword if you wanted that to show up. Hmm. But I saw, I'm seeing ads for Note Plan, which I'm familiar with, and Coco Note, an AI note taker. saw two, I've never seen two ads one right after another in the search, App Store search. If you're watching, there's actually the Note Plan ad bare right in the middle, not an ad. and then Coco Note, which I've never heard of. I've never seen a double ad like that. Coconut, that's a clever name, like coconut. yeah, like a coconut, that's good name. I don't see context in it. You should add Markdown to your description or your things or whatever.

Okay. I'm just gonna have to write this down. Just give Jason more work. You're developer. Yeah, I just don't understand. It's like, ~ wait. Okay, here we go. No, wait, seriously spend zero. So maybe I need to change my target CPA. it has been shown 14 times now. Yeah, change that. okay. So I think that means that my bid is too low. Yeah, yeah, yeah, raise that bit. I'm going to increase my bid to $120 because that's my daily budget. There you go. All right. Well, have fun. you see an ad for context, take a screenshot of that stuff. And then don't click on it, but scroll down and find context and click on that. Please. That's it. That's it. So Google had like an Android event, not really an event this week, but it's like the Android 17 features. It's like a pre-IO. Google IOS next week. Jason's going to be there in person, so he'll be reporting on the ground. But they talked about all the new features coming to Android specifically this week. And I want to get to that. But before we do, I also want to show that the Google book was teased. Now, if you remember... Google has made Chromebooks for a long time. There was high-end Google laptops, namely the Pixelbook. Did you ever have a Pixelbook? Did you ever play around with one? No, mean, well, other than like at Best Buy, they used to sell them. Literally had a pixel book. I was working at a place where I could ask to have a laptop bought for me And I had a pixel book bought I have no idea where that thing went because I might have returned it Because it was not useful in my work specifically, but the hardware of the pixel book was spot-on I really liked the hardware. It was a great keyboard trackpad You know it was like Intel i7 you know it wasn't like the newer silicon you could use now But Google's gonna run it back, and they're gonna try and make another high-end laptop This time, instead of calling it the Pixelbook, it's the Google Book, which I feel like that name is not ideal. It's kind of hard to say Google Book. You know what mean? Yeah, the name is well, I mean, it's very Google. Like literally, it's in the name, but also like Google is not. Every time I try to tell you about this Google hub nest Max Pro home thing I have, Re re re. I I literally have had this thing for years. I have no idea what it's called. So like Which also Google has a product called Google Books, which is buying books from Google. Right. And so now this is just Google Book, all one word, no camel case. Book is lowercase, so it's just Google Book, all one word. But it's now being pitched as hardware designed for Gemini Intelligence. And Google has now started calling their AI Gemini Intelligence, a la Apple Intelligence. And we're get more into some of the features that are coming to Android because of Gemini Intelligence. But they're going to try and do this again. They're going to say, yes, a high end laptop, a Google book is worth it because of Gemini intelligence and all the things that you can do with it, like custom widgets and running Android apps. And of course, it's Chrome and Google Docs and all the Google software and services. They didn't really show it like clearly. We kind of just have teased imagery. There's a teaser video and we see like up close shots of the keyboard, the trackpad. There's like a glowing Google colored light on the outside which looks kind of cool you know maybe kind of like trying to show like how Apple on the logo with a used to glow now we're gonna have a glowing Google book Google line or whatever so we'll see they're not have a ton of information on it but they're gonna try the high-end laptop thing again Google book I don't I do not understand this. I know, Google Book. Now I'm just kind of having fun saying it, but... Google Book. but I. Great, I still don't understand it anymore. You can say it as many times as you want. But so people did not buy Pixel. I mean, excuse me, Chromebooks, because they were amazing and they were premium. They did it because they were disposable. Like literally schools buy these things because when you break them, Correct. Correct.

they cost less than feeding you for a year. You school lunches. Yes, that's correct. That's correct. like seriously, like they are just garbage. They're cheap. They're cheap. We have had so many Chromebooks and and my one of my daughters is using an into the last generation Intel MacBook Air. And it makes the Chromebook look like a dinosaur with arthritis that fell down and can't get back up. Like the Chromebooks are so bad, That's rough. That's pretty rough.

but people buy them because they're super cheap. Super cheap, yeah. And if everything you need to do on a computer can be done in Chrome.

which unfortunately is what most of us have to tolerate, then a Chromebook is fine for that. It's like fine if all you need to do is Gmail and Google Slides, which again is a depressing way to live. But a Chromebook is fine for you, but you didn't buy it because you're like, gosh, you know, this is a great machine. I just I really love this thing. And using Chrome is not a great experience. Like none of those things are wonderful. So now they're like, well, what if we just said that this is a AI laptop, which Then there's this weird dynamic where didn't Microsoft try that? And everyone was like, we don't want that. Copilot PCs was a real thing. And nobody cared. Yeah, that's real thing. Yeah, that is true. That is true. Literally nobody cared. I mean, I would maybe Google has a better shop because it's Google. But one of the big issues is to sell a premium laptop. I imagine this is going to cost over a thousand dollars. People expect it like when they buy an iPad that costs a thousand dollars to do computer things. And historically, from my time working at Riverside, one of the issues we had is anytime someone was trying to do a Riverside recording and Like, you would go through the questions and be like, what browser are you using? We're using Chrome. Okay, great. Are you using a USB mic? Yes. Like, all the questions seemingly would be correct, and then they would say, ~ well, I'm using a Chromebook. And it was immediately like, ~ shoot. And... Or even a Windows PC, Yeah, throw it away and go buy a MacBook Neo.

because even those, you could connect a USB mic and Riverside could do its, like, recording to the browser cache and all of that. So, it remains to be seen if you buy this expensive Google Book. Will be able to do computer things like connecting an audio interface and recording a podcast You know people like doing Jason recording podcast people love recording podcast people like doing video calls and using fancy microphones and stuff And so like can this expensive laptop do that stuff so that remains to be seen? Yeah, I don't feel like Pitching it as an entire like an AI device Okay You know you can do a lot of AI stuff on your Mac now to like Claude You can give Claude cork full control of your Mac Right. And I don't know what Gemini intelligence, what advantage it's going to have on a Google book as opposed to cloud code or co-work on a Mac. But we'll see. I'm interested in the hardware. Yeah, I just don't understand what they think the market is for this because there has not been any other than like nerds. There's not an abundance of people out there like I would like AI on my computer, right? Like, in fact, we just talked about like the younger people are like, get the AI the F away from me. Yeah. Like it's just I don't want any of this. And so I don't think that this is going to be the direction that makes a lot of sense. I think that we the Apple has proven that what people really want is an inexpensive computer that is not garbage. And so they just make Chrome, and this isn't even gonna run Chrome, it's gonna basically run Android.

Right, they say Chrome OS, but I'm not even sure what Chrome OS is today. I don't know, but it's like it'll just run your Android apps that are on your phone if you if you don't even download them. And I'm like, I don't know what that even means. I mean, it could be like iPhone mirroring, But like, yeah, and which is fine, like on the Mac now.

but it's not the primary way I want to use any app. No, I will say anytime I see a notification on my Mac and I click it just reactively and it opens iPhone mirroring, I immediately quit and I say, no, stop. I don't want to do that. I actually don't. Do you ever use iPhone mirroring on your Macs? ~ Yes, the only time I use iPhone mirroring is when I'm too lazy to find my phone and I need the two factor code and I open Microsoft Authenticutter. from the Microsoft Authentic? ~ I Yep, that's it. It's only time I do it.

don't have to have that use case, but if I did, I would get that. That's it. That's the only time I ever use it.

This is not iPhone mirroring, but the other feature I do like is if there's a live activity, like an Instacart delivery, and I can get the live activity on my Mac in the menu bar, that's cool. Correct, that's not iPhone mirroring. but you don't have open the app to do that. It just does it automatically. It's just a continuity feature. just, yeah, it just does it. The main, well, the reason I don't think this is gonna be like a great experience for people is if you've used iPhone mirroring, it takes like 45 minutes for it to open and to boot up and to do its thing. And I understand the reasons why it's like, Yeah, it's streaming video. whatever, but I'm just like, I'm like, by now I could have gone and found my phone. Yes, yeah, it is not a seamless, and that's why I can typically quit it before it even loads the home screen, Yeah. because it's trying to load. I should see if I could turn that off. There's probably a setting to turn off notifications. I will say building and running an app in Xcode in the simulator is faster than iPhone mirroring. It's pretty close. I don't know about that. Well, it depends. On the Mac Mini that I'm screen sharing too, it's slow, but that's a slow Mac Mini, anyway. All right, so we're gonna talk more about the reaction to AI because I found a video on social media of a college commencement and it's pretty telling. And plus Meta is trying a bunch of other weird features, both AI and Instagram instance, which is weird. But anyway, we're gonna get to all of that. But before we do, we have some friends to thank. And the first one is talking about meetings and maybe recording them, transcribing them. Granola. Granola is the way it's an AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings. So if you have to do a ton of meetings, you know the struggle, you're trying to take notes, whether there's actually valuable information or not, but there's probably an action item that you need to take away from the meeting, and granola is going to help you do that. It's an AI powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet, and here's how it works. You take rough notes, you you could take your notes in bare, contextually, that's what you should be doing. You should be taking your notes in contextually. course. But granola will transcribe the meeting. turns everything into a clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part, and this is what really sets Granola apart from lot of other services, it works with your device's audio. So it's not something that has to integrate with Google Meet or Zoom. It's just going to work seamlessly into whatever video conferencing tools you already use. If it's something proprietary, if it's something weird like WebEx, it'll work with all of that. There's no setup, no awkward bots. And you can actually listen instead of frantically typing every word and still walk away. knowing exactly what was decided. I've tried a lot of different apps that maybe record your meetings and do all this kind of stuff. Granola is one of the best and especially because it works on that like system level recording the audio, you don't have to think about whether it's compatible with whatever other virtual meeting platform you're using. So if meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai slash primary. That's granola.ai slash primary to get your time back and you get three months. for free at granola.ai slash primary. And thanks to Granola for sponsoring this episode and our friends at Anthropic, the makers of Claude. Yes, they're sponsoring this episode. They've not sponsored any other part of this episode where we're talking about them, but they're sponsoring this part. And I will say it is how, I mean, Jason literally wrote how Claude code help them build an app. Yeah, and by the way, I paid for it just to be clear. That's right, yeah. I paid for the Max whatever super version. Jason paid for it to help him buy up his app I want to talk about something I recently built with Claude namely a Lincoln bio site on my website I've built several parts of my own website now with Claude asking it to build like YouTube video Carousels on my home page asking it to redo my smart home web page I do a ton of stuff with Claude and I do a bunch of stuff with Claude co-work Which now has a great MCP for bare notes and fast mail I now have scheduled tasks in cowork where it looks through my email. It can read and not write. You you can choose what kind of permissions you give Claude cowork. And so it can look at my email and I tell it every day it runs a scheduled task. Find any email that looks like a sponsor. And because those are kind of hard to find in that mess of emails, draft an email to that. And now I can just go to my drafts folder in the mail app on my iPhone and I can see all the sponsors that have reached out that day. There's a draft email there from Claude and then I can You know edit the email attach whatever and it works great so schedule tasks and cloud co-work have great MCPs plus it can just natively connect to things like Gmail Google Docs I actually use it now to even crop the photos of the chapter artwork So I save a bunch of photos and now the way we do the show with Apple video in Apple podcasts I have to crop the photos as squares, but I wanted to focus on the subject I asked Claude Cork to do that. I literally pointed out a folder with a bunch of images I say hey crop all these images as a perfect square And Claude Cowork just does it. And I haven't looked at the script once this whole time, so I'm not... I think that was all personal experience and it's all features that you can do. Claude Cowork, Claude Code, it has all of that. Plus, I've been using Dispatch, which is pretty cool. You can basically message your Mac at home from the Claude app on your iPhone and say, hey, run this thing, do this, and Dispatch works great too. So that's all we've been doing. We just use Claude all the time. And so what you do is go to Claude.ai slash primary and check out Claude Pro. which includes access to all the features that I talked about in today's episode. I think Jason and I both pay for Macs, but that's just so get the higher token and you get more usage. But Pro has all those features. So if you're ready to have an AI that can tackle real work, try Claude. Co-work today, Claude.ai slash primary and check out Claude Pro. That's Claude.ai slash primary. Our thanks to Anthropic and Claude for sponsoring this episode. And one more, we want to thank our friends at NordLayer. Look at this landing page, it's beautiful. It has primary technology listeners right there. promo code real big. NordLayer is network security platform for modern teams across different work environments. It enables secure access to company systems with centralized control over users, devices, and network activity without additional hardware or complex infrastructure. Teams get fast encrypted connectivity with full visibility across their entire network. So who is this for? If you're a business owner, you're a decision maker, or you're an IT admin in your company, or you're just really cybersecurity conscious, You can block malware, phishing, risky domains, detect unusual activity across users and devices. And I will say just personally and in the business, like there's a lot of phishing scams going on. Scams are getting harder and harder to ascertain from the email. If you work a small business or large, your employees might need some help of figuring out what is risky and what is not. Well, NordLayer can help with all of that. Plus you can have secure access where every connection is encrypted. You get high speed performance, dedicated secure gateways for traffic routing. site-to-site connectivity between offices and cloud environments. So if you have a multi-location top business, you have all of that. Plus, users are verified by a single sign-on and MFA, and any unhealthy or non-compliant devices can be blocked. So block malicious sites, risky downloads, dangerous domains, and more. So here's what you do. We have an exclusive offer. You can get up to 22 % off NordLayer yearly plans, plus 10 % on top with our coupon code, PRIMARYTECHNOLOGY10. So 22 % off NordLayer yearly plans, plus 10 % on top with coupon code PRIMARYTECHNOLOGY10, all one word. That link and the promo code will be in the show notes. Try it. Risk free, 14-day money back guarantee. Now thanks to NordLayer for sponsoring this episode. Hey, guess what? Hey Stephen, guess what?

Spark, my personal email app of choice now has a CLI and it works with Cloud Cowork. ~ So you don't have to only use your fast mail or your Gmail accounts. You can just use them all. That's pretty good. Listen, I'm using it a lot. I use it a lot. I'll just be real. I do a lot of scheduled tasks, too. But we'll get to the website I built in a minute, which is bio site. But I do want to mention the other Google I.O. Android 17 features. So MKBHD posted a video about the new features. I'll link his video. The Verge also had an article kind of running down all the new features. But Android 17, it has more Gemini intelligence. There's that word again. So there's going to be a lot more, like a redesign of Gemini intelligence. There's a lot more task automation. I did a video with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra talking about task automation where you can literally use apps for you, like use the Starbucks app, use the DoorDash app, and it was actually decent. Well, there's going to be more of that task automation coming in Android 17. There's AI widgets where you can literally ask Gemini to make a custom widget. Curious how many... things you can ask it to do so that'll be, remains to be seen, maybe you'll see some on Google I.O. next week. They also have a thing called Pause Point. So trying to help people with their digital well-being. Pause Point, can literally tell Android 17, listen, these apps, whether it's Instagram or TikTok, these are distracting. And so whenever I go to open it, start a timer, and you can even tell it to like show you nice pictures of your kids, your family, or your pets or whatever. And it'll be like, do you really want to open this app? And do you really want to do a scroll right now? So you can have your Android phone basically, like, ~ not bully you, not coerce, but gently guide you away from the app that you just tried to open, I guess. That seems funny to me. That's that's great. The things that we have That's great. That's pause point. ~ built on top of our inability to just have self control. You said it, Jason. That should be your book title. I, that's a very long book title. That's it. Well, I mean, listen, I got one of your headlines over here and it's a very long, well, sub headline. Totally, okay, It's totally different. It's not printed with ink on a cover of a book. sorry. That is true. ~ you know, I got Joanna Stern's, ~ I'm Not a Robot book and I started reading it. It's I should have brought it with me, but it's on my nightstand because I was reading it. Screen reactions, another feature. This is something that TikTok and Instagram like lets you just do as you record in the app. But Android 17 will let you do just on the phone where you can kind of have yourself as a cutout picture and picture over whatever else is on your phone. Kind of cool that you could just do that because then you can post it to all the social platforms and you don't have to like make it in TikTok or make it in Instagram. So that's screen reactions. AirDrop is coming to more Android devices. Supposedly easier switching from iPhone, although some of the parts of that switching requires an Android 17 device. And so that will be coming once Android 17 comes out. And, you know, Google has all the AI stuff like Gemini, including that transcription type stuff. And so they have a new feature called Rambler, which is going to let you transcribe to your Android phone, but then it's going to clean up the transcription by removing filler words like, or ~ So you will have a clean transcription versus kind of the raw thing, which is interesting. It's an interesting thing, I guess, you know, but if you wanted to write an email or maybe write a blog post, but you want to like dictate some of it on Android, you can. Start it here, it'll clean it up so you don't have filler words and then yeah, there you go. That's cool. Yeah, it's cool. mean, I'm looking forward to seeing how some of these things roll We'll see.

out next week. A lot of times at Google I'll they'll have actual devices you can play around with and stuff. That's true. So we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, I'm excited to... Are we going to... We should probably talk about this offline. Are you going be able to record next week? Yeah, it'll be fine. You record from the plane?

I will record from somewhere. Listen, I have recorded a lot of places for this show, That is true. That is true. Thank Stephen. I will not let you down now. you. Thank you. I've recorded in several hotel rooms, one over when I did the NASA launch and podcast conferences. I think I've recorded twice from Portugal, once from Denmark, once from CES live with Stephen. There you go.

Yeah, we did. Live from the show floor. We finally did it. We did that and then we also did live from a table in the hotel room. in the hotel room, but we didn't release that video because it didn't look great. ~ that's right. Well, we still recorded there. We did record that video. We did, Yeah. yeah, we still recorded it. All right, that was all the Google news. Now, some other small AI things. Amazon is moving Alexa into its Amazon shopping experience. If you've gone into the Amazon app or shopped online, you know that there's like the Rufus AI, which is like the dog, which I'm not sure the history of that. There's like a lot of dog-related stuff in Amazon. if you don't, if a page doesn't load, there's like the dog, sorry, come back later or whatever. but they're replacing Rufus by Rufus with Alexa, which makes sense. mean, Alexa is Amazon's AI, just put it there. But it can also do some cool things, like if you want to watch the pricing of an item, the Alexa in the Amazon app will be able to give you price alerts. And you can even tell it things like add this to my cart when the price falls below a certain amount, which that feels like actually useful AI tools. don't know if calling it AI feels like a little, a little gracious. I mean, it's basically computer watching the price and then adding to cart when it hits a number like Yeah. if this is artificial intelligence, I mean, okay This is I wrote this article three years ago. It's just computers doing computer things. It's computer doing computer things, but a cool computer thing and yeah great that it's actually built in and Yeah.

so yeah I mean I've been using like change detection.io with push cuts to do this kind of stuff But now you can maybe do it directly in Amazon, so it'll be a better AI experience Yeah But for real, actually think, so I just had this experience recently, right? Putting out an app. My app is not on par with amazon.com. Yes. Yeah.

Let's just be clear. But well, Design wise, I would say it's better. Just throw that out there. that 100%. But it's like, what does Casey list is things like IMDB, but made by somebody who was some self respect or something like that. That's like, which is a great like conception. That's right. Yes. Yeah. But it's like, I actually was thinking there are features in the app. There's at least one feature in the app that uses Apple intelligence. And the only reason I tell you that is so that you know what's happening to your information. And it's happening on a device. And there is the option to opt into using OpenAI for that feature if you have like really long notes that would just be better handled by something more powerful than Apple intelligence. But, and that's opt in, it won't send in your data unless you choose that. Yeah. But my point is I try to not make a big deal about the fact that there's AI happening because it's like, Right. no, this is just something that this app should just do. It's not like a marketing buzzword. So it's like, wish that companies would just stop trying to push the AI and just be like, no, you know what the logical feature here is? You're looking for a thing. We could just ping you when it's available.

One of the things in Joanna Stern's book, The Intro, she talks about how tech CEOs were talking about AI from like 2018 to 2021, kind of before the Chachapi tea revolution came out. And all the CEOs were extremely bullish. And even after Chachapi tea went wild and all of that, mean, Satya Nadella and Microsoft, Bill Gates, obviously Sam O'Neill, they were all talking about how like, oh, 80 % of jobs will be gone in five years. And Sam, you know, they would talk about artificial general intelligence a bunch. And in retrospect, just looking back at those comments just a couple years later, it's so clear like, no, I don't think that's going to happen. And I even, I found this ~ Instagram account. It's this guy basically asking the voice assistant Chachapiti to do things and realizing how silly it is. It would ask it like how many E's are in the word 17. And it would get it wrong. It would say there's three E's when there's really four. But then he would go further and he would say, you know, actually I just counted them. There's actually five E's in the word 17. And ChatGPT will just agree with him. And then sometimes it'll try to correct. you And then it would ask it like, say the word click 65 times. I need to click a button 65 times. I don't want you to count it out for me. ChatGPT voice mode will like refuse to do it. I asked it too. And it was like, I'm not doing that. That's too repetitive. It's like, oh, excuse me, ChatGPT. I didn't know you're too good for that. did it. Yeah, I didn't know that standard. I didn't know you had standards.

I asked Claude. To be honest, Claude did it. He just said the word click 65 times without any pushback, so there's that. But just like sometimes when you hit the edges of what these things are capable of, you realize like, ~ I think we're still safe for a while. I think we're good. I think we're good. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like the I don't know. We're safe for a while. But I just think about like, why is watching when an item is available an AI feature? Amazon knows when an item is available. It has a big giant database that says items available seven. Right. And like, it's like, as soon as that number is not zero, just send me an email. Like, that's not an AI feature. Right, computers have been able to do that for a very long time. It's not a complicated thing. You don't need something quote watching this. Why do I keep doing the fake? I'm so sorry. But it's like, why would I? Look, That's it.

I don't need this is not an AI features. What I'm trying to say. And if they're making an AI features just because they want Yeah, yeah.

to say they have an AI feature, this is just a database monitoring feature. Absolutely.

Yeah, and when it can parse long strings of whatever, of what I'm saying, like I saw, think one of the things that talked about Gemini intelligence, like you can say, remind me to do this at this time and add this thing to my calendar and it can do both things. And I'm like, okay, well that's feels like a low bar, but sure. That's cool. That's cool. Yeah, exactly. Feels like a very low bar. guess. Speaking of low bars, here's some new features from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg posted on threads. just couple days ago, they're launching incognito chat with Meta AI. And so you can download the Meta AI app, which apparently I had never downloaded I guess. You need the Meta AI app if you use like Meta Ray Bans and stuff. And so you might see like your favorite creators uses Meta AI. It's probably because they have the glasses. I don't think they're just using this app like ChatGPT. But Meta AI is there and now you can do incognito chat, which Mark Zuckerberg says, your entire conversation is end to end encrypted if you go into incognito chat, not even Meta. can see the conversation and nothing is stored, which apparently if you do like incognito chat in chat GPT and or Claude, those chats still sit on servers from seven days to 30 days depending on the service. So Zuckerberg is trying to say like their privacy focus like these chats, we can't see it at all and then encrypted and we don't save them on our servers at all. So have your incognito chat with Meta AI. What could go wrong? I do feel like there's been several court cases where there's been unfortunate situations where a young person has used chat GPT or other chat bots and ended up hurting themselves because of what it said. I feel like having this incognito chat, one, maybe it's like for meta side, they would not be liable because they're like, we don't have access to the chats at all. But I also feel like this is not for good reasons, right? I feel like this is like a new bakery opened up and they're like, we have the best donuts. In fact, they're so good and we want you to have them that you can come in and we'll close our eyes and you can just take whatever you want. It's like, why are you doing this? ~ It seems that, Like this is like the only reason they're doing this is like. the donuts taste really bad and no one was coming into the store to use it. So like, well, what if we just pretended like you weren't here while you were here? The most annoying thing is when you open Instagram and it's like, you have some notifications and you tap on it and it's like, Steven Robles is using Meta AI. I'm like, Steven Robles is not using Meta AI. I'm not. If you see the notifications. I know Steven Robles and I promise you he's not. I am not. Did he download the app? Maybe, but I guarantee you he's not using it. I doubt it.

And if what you're saying is he used it, is you open the search on Instagram and type something in, which is by the way, now an option for MetaAI, you're making a leap that's too far here, Yes.

buddy. He's not using it. And so they just are so consumed with the idea that people That's exactly right.

have to be using their AI. And the only reason is... They just, all of these companies think of our attention as a zero sum game. And in some ways it is, but as a human, I don't want to spend all of my time in one app. I'm okay with the fact that I have, I go outside every once in a while. I go outside every time I walk from my office to the house, You touch grass. That's it. That's it. right? And it's like, I don't need meta AI for that. And the example that Zuck uses in this image, someone's asking Meta AI in incognito mode, how do I talk to my roommates about splitting household costs? I don't know why that's so private that you don't want Meta to ask. Although, to play my own devil's advocate, it is sometimes creepy when you have these kinds of conversations with, I feel like Gemini does it the most. where it will use past context and conversations to then like throw in random facts in later requests and ask like, as someone who uses a Sony a7 IV, did you want, like it'll just throw that in to like kind of prove that it knows me well and I don't like those. And so maybe it's trying to get around that aversion but no one's using MetaEye Yeah, maybe maybe for this. you open it one the next time and you're like, let's you're sitting down with your roommate and you're like, let's see if we can find a Mac mini because they're super hard to find right now. And it's like meta eyes responses like, I found one and maybe you can get your stingy roommate to front half of the cost. Exactly. Yeah, And you're like, shoot, sorry. yeah, yeah, probably would do that. So that's the Meta AI incognito mode and then Meta also introduced Instance for Instagram. This is both a new feature and an app. It is a whole standalone app called Instagram Instance. If you download the app, which I did, along with Meta AI, just so I could talk about it on this podcast, Instance are like, I'm actually going to do an instant of me recording this podcast right now. You basically take a picture and you send it and it disappears. It only goes to friends, meaning people you follow on Instagram that also follow you, and it is... whatever. It's like a Snapchat thing because it disappears as soon as someone sees it. People can react to it and like heart it or whatever. It's in the DMs of Instagram, which I know Meta has said that like Instagram DMs is where a lot of the activity on Instagram happens, which as someone who uses many chat automations and people comment asking for my shortcuts to download. There are a lot of messages there, a lot of messages that I don't look at because it's all automated, but they're there and I know a lot of people do the mini chat stuff. I don't know. I don't know why. I guess this is Snapchat competition play, like, ~ Well, and the announcement was something like people are no longer focused on their grid. And it's like, well, that's because you stopped making it possible for people to post stuff Right? Yes. to their grid. You go to the hit. First of all, you move the post button around all the time because you think what you really came to Instagram to do is shop or something stupid like Right.

that. It's like, no, stop moving the button around. Right, right.

The reason no one's posting to the grid is they can't find the button to post to their grid. Maybe maybe that makes me very Gen X fine. Right. But the other thing is you tap the button and it's like you wanted to post a reel and you're like, no, post a post, you definitely wanted to post a real. No, I just want to share this video on my grid. Right, right.

it's a video that's a real. So we're to post it as a real and then we're going to share it beyond your scope of people. It's like you created this like you set this house on fire and you're like, Right. Right.

we have an idea about putting out this fire like just stop messing with the app. This is stupid. I told you I was going to do this. I told you I was gonna be grumpy about it. You said you were gonna be grumpy. This is so dumb. That's fine.

It is a problem of their own creation because they're the ones, Meta, pushed so hard on Reels that everything became Reels. Like, when you reward the creation of a kind of content, which Instagram rewards the creation of Reels, Reels are gonna get more views, they're algorithmically driven, there's a greater possibility that your following will grow because of Reels that you post versus a static image. People are gonna post more of that. Instagram changes the home tab to just show you reels now, and you rarely see a post or carousel. And so like, yeah, it's what they rewarded is now what's popular. And to say they're solving the problem by adding something in the DMs, I just don't know. Well, and here's the thing. They're like, well, we have all this data so we can see how people are using it. like, but you are putting your finger on the scale of how people use it. Right, exactly. So you can't, you can't look at that as a self-reinforcing. It's like, I locked all the doors to my house and everyone's coming in this one door.

So we should like do something about that door. Right.

Like that should be the door. We should make that the entrance to our house. It's like, no, you just locked all the other doors. And so that's the only one people can use. Yes. The fact that people are using it doesn't mean that that's the one they want to use. It doesn't mean that that's the best door. It doesn't mean that there's anything good about it except for it's the only one that's unlocked. And so I feel like you are interpreting signal that That's right.

you have put out into the world as confirmation of what people want. Yes.

when really what they want, and again, I'm not arguing that DMs isn't the way most people use Instagram, that's fine. I almost never use DMs in Instagram because similar to you, it's either just like total noise, right? Or I forget and I just don't want people to message me on Instagram. Right, yes.

That's not the best way to do that. And so, but I get that teenagers, fine, DMs, that's the way that they do things. This though, is literally Mark Zuckerberg woke up a couple weeks ago, looked over and he's like, wait a second, Snapchat's still a thing? We gotta burn it to the ground.

And that is something Instagram has been historically great at, which is stealing features from other things. Reels were because of TikTok. Stories were originally because of Snapchat. know, Snapchat had stories first and then Instagram did the stories. So yeah, but they have the scale and teenagers will just keep going to Instagram because that's the app. That's where everybody is. And so just people go to it. I don't know, friends, I mean, not my friends, my children mostly just interact in Snapchat now. Yeah. Really? That's interesting.

I think that that's true. My daughter made me install Snapchat because she thought it'd be really cool if she could send me snaps. And I'm like, I don't even know what any of those words mean. I used Snapchat years ago and I was like, this is clear. I'm too old for this. But then it's like, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, here's all these people that you might know. And it's like, how do you, why do think I know these people? It's like, well, they're near you. I'm like, why do you know where they are and where I am? Right, right. The Snapchat map. Like, hold on, you've gone way too far. Which is another feature that Instagram stole was the Instagram map. And like if you don't turn off your location, when you post stories, it has the location attached to the thing. Yeah, I don't like any of it. Yeah, yeah. anyway, speaking of people not liking AI and some of these features, I've been, you know, I hear Neil Ipatel talk about Joanna Stern's new book about the reaction to AI, especially from younger generations. And I... came across this video this is from Cable Sasser from Panic Software he posted this video and I quickly realized this is actually the University of Central Florida commencement which is a university I've literally been to it's in Orlando near me I've been to their library got to do research there when I was in college and so this is one of the commencement speakers I just want to play real quick the reaction that the audience has is the graduating class to the speaker talking about AI so I'm going to try and play this clip so we can see it So that clip was so interesting to me for a couple reasons. One, I didn't expect booing at a commencement. Like you have to have some strong feelings if you're going to boo at a commencement speaker. And it doesn't seem like it was a guest speaker. Like the person seemed like they were someone at University of Central Florida, whether it was a faculty or administration or whatever. So that was interesting. And second, the total shock that she seemed to experience at that reaction, as though she had no idea that it might happen.

I was like, that, maybe that's the picture right now. It's like the AI makers and one generation or multiple generations thinking like, AI is it. Like this is gonna be the thing. And then everyone on the other side, namely graduating class, Gen Z, maybe younger, they're like literally booing the idea of AI. And like to say that AI is the next industrial revolution, if you would have said that like three years ago, Maybe you could get away with that and it sounds reasonably smart. I feel like now in 2026 that we see what AI is capable of. AGI is becoming less and less of a thing. Microsoft and OpenAI literally changed their deal and took AGI out of the deal because it's probably not going to be a thing. Feels like less of a reasonable thing to say in 2026, but I don't know. That was surprising. I think the most compelling thing about this is the point that Cable Sesser was making when he shared this, which is just the complete inability to know your audience. if you are going to go and give a commencement speech, your number one priority is to inspire the people in front of you, which means you should have some understanding of who these people are. Now, this speaker was not from the she was like a vice president of development at some development, like a strategic alliances at some development company. Okay. Okay. The point that he's making is like, if you are so inside the bubble that you don't understand what people on the outside of the bubble are thinking, then you probably first of all shouldn't be giving a commencement speech to the people on the outside of the bubble. Like if you don't already know that college students with a burning passion hate everything about AI, then first thing you probably should not be giving commencement speeches. You could have talked, she could have talked about this in a way that was like reaching them at their level, like acknowledging the fact that like, look, this is a thing that's changing a lot. And a lot of you have a lot of anxiety about it. And there's there's going to be opportunities, there's going to be changes that we haven't anticipated. And it's a very scary world. And let me tell you how you should be inspired. Like, you know, like, there's a way to address this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is so interesting. It's one of the things that you and I talked about, our audience is probably leaning, and biased towards enthusiasts of technology. But if we get so focused on what people who spend as much time with technology as we do, then there's a whole lot of people out there. Like my kids have Macs, they couldn't tell you what they are. Like I think it's a Macbook, you know what mean? It's a tool that they use, right? sure, Right, right. And so, I don't know, I just think this is really interesting because it shows you the divide between the people who have a financial interest in this stuff working out and the people who have a financial interest Yeah, yeah.

in it just going away so I could get a job.

Okay, so my next question for you is why such like, averse feelings towards AI from the younger generation? Because in my mind, I think back to when I was in college, the iPhone didn't exist, the iPad didn't exist, I was carrying a bunch of heavy books to classes. There was so much of the technology today that I feel like would have made my college experience easier. From everything just simple ebooks to... being able to summarize or record an entire lecture on my phone and then get a summary in bullet points thanks to AI. Whether that's complicated AI or not, it's a feature you can do today that I couldn't do back then. And I would have thought as a college student, you could see those benefits. Is it because that's not really what they're reacting to? What do you think that, what am I not getting here? I think that there is a sense in Gen Z, I think, I'm just throwing this out there, that one, they value authenticity and they don't like artificial stuff, right? And so they are being deluged Yeah, it's right in the name, artificial.

by what's real and what's not real. And that line has become increasingly difficult to determine where we're at. And then I think also there's probably a sense of like, this stuff is just gonna make us dumber, right? There's a lack of critical thinking skills. Hmm.

If you can just pump stuff into AI and be like, make me a paper. Yes, on the one hand, it's like, this is amazing. I can just pump this into and get a paper out of it. But I don't think that the value of that exceeds the idea that like, okay, I can see the logical conclusion here, which is, am I gonna be able to get a job or are they just gonna deploy AI agents? And if you are a college student, let's be honest. The thing you care about the most is, am I gonna be able to get a job? Right, because suddenly you have reached the point where the safety of I'm in college, so I'm on my own, but I have a meal plan and a dorm, and so I'm sort of in this in-between world between completely independent adult and independent adult that I feel like I get to make all my own choices, but I have this like structurally designed safety net that like I don't have to worry about all of these things and just. just you realize, but tomorrow I got to figure it out on my own because they're going to kick me out of the dorm because I've graduated and I've got to get a job and I've got a whatever. So I just think that there is this. I don't know. I think there's a combination of it. Also, college students tend to be a little bit countercultural, right? Most revolutions. And when I say that, Sure.

I just mean cultural revolutions begin with young people because they don't have Yeah. Right. the established their incentives are different. They don't have anything to benefit from AGI making a couple people billionaires, trillionaires. So number one, if you're Gen Z or younger or younger millennial and like you would have booed at that commencement, like in the clip we just played, I would love to hear from you. Like if you have that averse feeling towards AI, if you could articulate why, like is it the fear of not being able to get a job? Is it just the doom scrolling-ification of everything? The in poopification, I will say, because we don't have an explicit tag on our show, which is term you hear a lot. I'd really love to hear from you. Email podcast at primarytech.fm. I'm really curious your thoughts on this. If you would have booed at that commencement speech, tell me why. I really want to know. And I also want to, I'm going to link this in the show notes. Casey Newton of Platformer, he did an interview. ~ The title of the article slash interview is the best argument I've heard for why AI won't take your job. It's with Box CEO, Aaron Levy. But they talk about, I didn't listen to the whole thing. I've seen clips of it, but basically that AI can do maybe 80 % of what humans are capable of, but there is still that last 10 to 20 % of synthesis or analysis or just task completion that AI is still nowhere near as good at as humans. Like it can do a lot of the work as good as humans, if not better, but there is that like, you call it the last mile, which is like using like internet cable running, like the last mile of the box to the house that humans are still much better at. that because of the human experience and either years of working in a field or just years of being a human that you just understand things better that that's the reason why AI won't take a lot of jobs. I do feel like there's a bit of a counterpoint there where some jobs where the job literally was taking notes and summarizing things for people and keeping track of people's calendars those could be namely like executive assistants or data entry Feels like those jobs, maybe closer to 100 % of those jobs, could be done by AI pretty soon, and so there probably are jobs that will go away because of it. I also understand that there's the environmental impact of AI. do have people, every time I talk about AI on social media, there's usually somebody that's like, you boiled an ocean for this? It's like, I don't know, man. Maybe. I think the Atlantic is still there. I'm going to the beach this weekend. Yeah, we still have a few of those. I'm going to go to the beach this weekend. It's I'll let you know if it's still there. Well, the okay, you just actually said something I think really pinpoints it. Executive assistants, I don't think are going anywhere. Because the people who have executive assistants only care about one thing. And that's that they don't ever have to think about it. Right? If you have a human being that you can yell at, if they get it wrong, they're not going to get it wrong very often. And you can have a conversation. And so now if you don't have an executive assistant AI can be great. Cowork is great for like Show me all the things that are supposed to happen next week because I can't even figure out all the conflicts, right? Now, that's a thing you could ask a human, but it would be expensive if you have to pay a human to do that. So if you can't pay a human to do it, great. is fantastic. I don't see AI being, you know, replacing a whole lot of executive assistants for the people who can afford to pay them. And I think that that actually summarizes why Gen Z is so frustrated by what they see happening, which is that they are going to absorb all of the disruption for the benefit of a few people. who basically run these companies, right? Everyone above them are gonna capture all of the gains and they're gonna be the generation that gets disrupted. And I think that the executive assistant thing is actually a perfect example because I don't think like there's probably not a whole lot of people who just graduated from University of Central Florida who are like, what I really wanna do is take notes in meetings for a living. They're like, no, I kinda wanna be running the meeting. Sure.

Right, yes Okay. Well, I'm really curious email us comment if you're watching on YouTube and ~ Yeah, I think that the first part of the title of this episode is gonna be does Gen Z hate AI I think the answer is yes, but We'll see I know my kids though Like they use it to ask questions think you're right.

But they don't feel like a particular affinity for it or that it will somehow Change their lives for the better. Like it's not that big in their minds. I will say Anytime they asked me a question, and I'll recall, I don't know how you were with your parents, but when I was a kid, like AI, anytime I asked my dad a question, he would have an answer. He would always give me an answer. Yeah. How true the answer was or how accurate it was to actual information, there was no way to know. There was no, I would ask him like, how does this work? And he would just tell me whether it was true or not. I believed it and I was happy. I guess we went on our way and maybe that was better. We were better for it. But now, whenever my kids ask me something, like the other day we were trying to figure out some world fact, I just immediately went to Claude and asked him a question. And so, again, I'm not verifying that. I assume it's more accurate than just trying to make up something off the top of my head. And so at least I can know that when my kids have asked me something during this era, I've told them hopefully more accurate information, but I don't know. I just want to say, while we were doing this, texted my two Gen Z daughters. I just said, do the teens hate AI? yeah.

And one of them was like, yes and no, it depends. Sometimes I do, but not when I'm doing my homework, which that seems about right. And my other one goes, Ha ha! dad, what are you actually talking about? I just said, do the teens hate AI? Hahahaha Dad, what are you talking about? And so I said, people say that Gen Z hates AI. So I was wondering if that's true. And she stopped responding. So they're supposed to be in school, right? They said they tend to respond when their father texts them in the middle of the podcast. That's good. Now see now I'm gonna text my kids and see if we get an answer live on the show kids does do Jenzy does Jenzy hate AI Do the teens hate AI? That's the question. right now. I'm recording a segment right now. I'll do a real-time follow-up if my kids text me back. All right. So I think one of them is still asleep. So speaking of AI, I will mention there are use cases that you can use AI. you I just like to mention the things that I do with Cloud that are fun. I Jason built a whole app for the Mac and the iPhone. Three abs basically. Three apps, basically. Anthropic is trying to court small businesses by adding more like small business features into co-work. There's now like a small business toggle, and it'll have things like payroll. and accounting type tasks, and you'll be able to do more stuff like that in Cloud Cowork. I just wanted to say I've had, I wanted to redo my link in BioSight, the link that I put in all like TikTok and Instagram, which is the other thing I wanted to say about Instagram. Like the reason why many chat and DMs are where all the action happens on Instagram is because you can't link anything in an Instagram post. You can't link anything in the caption. You can't make a link clickable or in the comments. And so everybody has to do this many chat automation like I do too. But anyway, I wanted to make a new BioSight, the link in Bio. And I just asked Claude to do it for me. I still have my site on Squarespace. I had thought about changing recently, but then now that I've been doing more with Claude, I'm like, wait a minute. It doesn't matter where I host my site because I could just ask Claude to give me a bunch of HTML code and I could just put it wherever I want. So I asked Claude to strip the header navigation and the header bar off the page. He gave me a bunch of code to paste in the code injection part of Squarespace. And then I told him to just give me a bunch of HTML. I want my bio site to look like this. I want it to link to my like podcast, YouTube and Instagram at the top. I want to have these buttons that say this and I wanted to show my last YouTube video and here is where I will say the memory part of Claude or these other AIs comes in handy. I had already asked Claude to help me build a part of my website on the home page that always shows the most recent YouTube video and it walked me through building a worker in Cloudflare. I don't even know what those words mean but I did that and walked me through it and because I had that worker Claude was able to hook into it. And then just show the latest one video embedded on his bio site. I was able to use that worker I already built. I didn't go back to Cloudflare for this. I just pasted this code in Squarespace, blocking I have a new bio site. And it's pretty good. So you know, that's a nice use case. You could do that too. Nice.

Or you could pay, you know, Linktree, $15 a month, whatever you want to do. So our last couple quick things, Bye. and then we'll get to some personal tech. iPhone 17 apparently is super popular. This is a report showing just kind of the sales of the different iPhone models. In quarter one of 2026, the iPhone 17, far and above, it is the world's best smelling smartphone in quarter one, capturing 6 % of global unit sales. And after the iPhone 17, it's the 17 Pro Max. And after the 17 Pro Max, it's the iPhone 17 Pro. And then you have the Galaxy phones. And then the iPhone 16 is number six best selling phone. iPhone Air didn't make the list of this top 10, unfortunately. Yeah, I'm gonna set aside the fact that I'm pretty sure you said it's the best smelling phone, but I'm pretty sure Listeners, Did I really?

let us know if that's we heard Stephen say Okay, Hold on, let me test something real quick. That doesn't smell like anything. is that a 17 or 17 Pro see Have you got a 17? Oh, that's true, this is 17 Pro Max. you would think that max would smell better, but apparently not anyway We're gonna just set that as we did not set it aside, for the best.

but we're gonna set that part aside. This is not surprising at all It's like the best is the most affordable one with basically all the features That's the thing. That's the thing. But it's harder to get a cheaper Apple product now because the education store on Apple's website, which has historically worked on an honor system, is no longer an honor system. You need verification now if you want to have an education discount on any Apple product. This is using the UNIDASE verification system, which I have a couple friends who work in the Polk County Public School system, and I asked them, do you guys know what this UNIDASE verification is? And they're like, No, and so I don't know like how widespread this is or how easy it will be to get I think if you have like a dot edu from a university email address, it'll be easier but Apple has gone through this kind of thing before Where the education source on an honor system and then they'll try some verification method and then they'll take it away So who knows how long it will last or if this is permanent, but yeah, it's harder to get the education discounts Jason Well, and I wrote about this. did link to it because essentially my theory is that the MacBook Neo ruined this, right? They did try this a couple of years ago and people pushed back and it just was not worth the hassle. And it's not worth the hassle when you're absorbing it in a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro or Mac mini or whatever it is. But with the Mac Neo, there is less room for taking out margin, right? It's just that the cost of the device just means that there is less room Yeah.

for that kind of thing. And so They wanna make sure that only people who are qualified. And my take was like, this is like the, why is it show these things like so ridiculous? Apple News is not formatting your articles very well, I have to screenshot that so that I can send it to my editor again. Jason, I'm just gonna say.

That is insane. Anyway, that is. You can read Jason's articles from ink.com in Apple News and you don't get all the paywall stuff but... But it basically just shoves everything into the deck. It's like ridiculous. Anyway, it's not even the first one. Is that like the first paragraph of the article or something?

It's like, maybe it's like it combined the deck with some other stuff. That's bizarre.

Okay, well, there you go. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But it was like the worst kept secret. Everyone knew you could just go to the education source, save 100 bucks, right? But when they're offering an extremely popular Mac for what, 599? The hundred bucks, there's not as many hundred bucks to take out of it. And so they want to make sure that they only are giving it to people. Right. Now this verification thing, does not surprise me at all that no one knows what it is. It feels to me like it's the exact same thing. Like if you go to a government website and they ask, do you want to sign in with ID.me? You don't have to know what that is. It's just a, it's just a verification service that they're using. And that's what this is. Like, this is just a way for Apple to embed a, it's kind of like an app could use login with Apple. This is like login with your school ID. Right.

this is the people that do that. You don't need to know what it is. So they're just gonna make you prove that you're a college student or a college professor. And I believe this essentially means that they're eliminating it for, can't just be like, well, my kids are in school, but they don't have a college email address. Yeah, you can do Can't So they're on a lot. do that, yeah. There is also a ~ way for like homeschoolers and others, know, different ways of schooling you can get the education discount, but it is a process. Like you do have to have it verified and all that. You have to send in a kidney and you have to get a letter. That's right, blood test, yeah, It says it's your kidney, yeah. all that. Let's save the AirPods with a camera for our bonus content because there's a rumor that AirPods are gonna have a camera soon. And I think that would be interesting. Yeah, another dumb idea. boo. So we can talk about that. But I wanted to share a personal tech thing before we go, which is, you're gonna love this. I still use Magic Mouse, okay. Is this the stupid thing that Neelai was showing? Yes it is, Jason. Yes it is. I bought this silly $25 Magic Mouse Charger Base. You can get it Lightning or USB-C, comes in white or black. And it is basically a 3D printed thing for your Magic Mouse. It fits the Magic Mouse perfectly. It has a little USB-C port that sticks up so it plugs the mouse in. And here's the kicker. It's got a MagSafe charging thing on the bottom. So you can literally just place this on a MagSafe charger and charge your Magic Mouse. And you can use the mouse in the case if it's not charging. It has a little hole for the optical sensor and it'll just, you you can move it around or whatever. It is very chunky when you're actually using it that way and I don't recommend it. I have it right here. And I will link it in the show notes, but here it is. And there's a little MagSafe puck on the bottom. But the thing is, Jason, here's the... You can't use it when it's charging, which by the way, That's the thing. you couldn't do when it was charging before. This is also stupid. Now this of all the things that are stupid in this episode this might be I don't know It doesn't actually solve the problem. if it's the most stupid is this more stupid than in an Instagram instance Just so you in your opinion ~ I don't know what problem Instagram instances solving, It's a call.

so I don't know. I know exactly what problem this is trying to solve and they're not solving the problem. Yeah, I know, I know. Steven. The problem is you can't plug in the mouse and keep using it because you have to turn it on its side like a dead turtle and give This is...

it an umbilical cord. And here all you do is leave the turtle the way it is and give it another shell and you still can't use it if you're charging. That's the thing. To be clear, I've tried this multiple ways and you can have even the thin MagSafe puck. You can put the mouse in this little shell, charge it with the MagSafe puck, and you cannot use it because whenever the Magic Mouse is charging, your Mac just says, ~ you're not using the mouse right now. You cannot use the mouse right now. And what's crazy making is it's still connected via Bluetooth because if you have the widget, you can still see the percentage of it charging on your Mac widget. So it's still connected to your Mac via Bluetooth. It's connected right there, but you literally cannot move the mouse when it's charging. Yeah. Well, the reason is because of the orientation of the mouse when it's charging, they've essentially using telemetry just turn that off so you don't have accidental inputs. Like you don't have it sitting on its side and bump it and accidentally you clicked on something that says send to Stephen $10,000 from your bank account or something like that. Yeah, You don't want that to accidentally happen. You only want to do it on purpose. And so this doesn't solve the problem. Sure.

No, it does not solve the problem. I was really hopeful. I knew it wasn't going to work, but I wanted to try it anyways. And now I'm like... Literally, Just like the Rabin R1.

at least this was only 25 bucks. And I don't even know if it's worth it to put it in here just to charge it easier because, I mean, I think it might be faster to just plug in the USB-C cable if I can't use it anyway. So... I'm also... Have you found, like, your mouse lagging a little bit in macOS Tahoe?

like it kind of moves a little slowly sometimes. I mean, I'm using this MX Master 3 and no, I have not had that problem. So real time follow up though, yes, he... Yeah... Anyway... the daughter who said, dad, what are you actually talking about? Said AI has ruined. Interesting see now my son takes my son takes me back my 17 year old I asked kids does Gen Z hate AI And my oldest said I don't believe so at least according to their grades. I Think that is implying that they are using it and their grades are reflecting it so We want to know I want to know listeners and viewers email me podcast at primary tech.fm Comment under the YouTube video does Gen Z hate AI if you're Gen Z. Do you hate AI and if so why tell us? We're going to go record a bonus segment about AirPods with a camera. If you want to the bonus episode, our pre-show, primary tech daily, Monday through Friday, the top headlines in a few minutes, you can subscribe. There's going to be a link in the show notes. You can save 50 % off so you get $2.50 a month or $25 a year when you support the show. And we would love to have you. Add free version plus all the bonus content. You can get Jason's app contextually. That link is down in the show notes. You can listen to my show, top5.tech. You can just go to that website. You can listen to the show. Watch the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or get the newsletter. And thanks all for listening and watching and supporting. We'll catch you next time.