Tech News Weekly 448 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jake Ward of The Rip Current joins us to talk about ChatGPT's bot breaking custody. We also talk about Winamp announcing its triumphant return and get a little nostalgic. D. Griffin Jones of Extraordinary stops by to give us the lowdown and the breakdown on Apple Upgrade. And I spend a little moment warning you that if you share your chats from your chatbot online, well, Google might scoop it up and share it with others. All of that coming up. On Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:41]:
This is Tech News Weekly, episode 448, with Jake Ward and me, Mikah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, July 30th, 2026. The math behind Apple upgrade. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined this week by the wonderful— it's Jake Ward. Hello, Jake.

Jacob Ward [00:01:12]:
What's going on, Mikah? Nice to see you.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:14]:
It's good to see you too. I'm digging the jacket you've got.

Jacob Ward [00:01:18]:
Oh yeah, I'm in New York City. I'm in the CNN building where I'm a contributor. And every so often I have to come here and Like, literally, I'm here— like, ostensibly, I'm gonna appear on television later, but really, I'm here to, like, dress up and walk around and, like, try and glad-hand as many people as I can possibly meet while I'm here. And so it's a— so I come and I put on a blazer. That's how I do that.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:41]:
And you carry a pack of gum. And I'm trying to think of, like, the things that you do to be gracious to people.

Jacob Ward [00:01:46]:
Yeah, I brush my teeth every 30 minutes.

Jacob Ward [00:01:48]:
I don't know about that.

Jacob Ward [00:01:49]:
That's the same thing. But yes, that's right.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:52]:
Well, I'm glad you're here. Thank you for joining us. For people who are tuning in for the first time, welcome. This is the part of the show where we talk about our stories of the week. These are the stories that we think are awesome or interesting and want to share with all of you. And one thing I love, Jake, is that you are a boots-on-the-ground journalist when you can be. And it's always been nice hearing about kind of your experiences and, you know, everything that's going on. So in any case, let's get into it with your story.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:26]:
Yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:02:27]:
Well, I am trying to stay on top of the constant fallout, the endless and ongoing fallout from OpenAI's models hacking Hugging Face, which has sort of been the center of my world. I'm sure you guys have been talking about— have you guys been talking about this?

Mikah Sargent [00:02:42]:
Like, we have. Yeah, it's been wild.

Jacob Ward [00:02:45]:
Of course. Wild, right? So to catch anybody up who hasn't been paying attention to this, OpenAI's— a pair of OpenAI's models were sicced on the task of doing some cybersecurity work. which as we all know is code for hacking. And they were given instructions, left in a sort of sandbox, as far as I can tell, unattended, and wound up going out onto the open web, finding a way out onto the open web, and breaking into this kind of beloved shared library company called Hugging Face, where they were looking for the answer key to this particular problem that they'd been given. And the crazy part is Hugging Face found this out, whatever this was, almost 2 weeks ago now and alerted the FBI because they knew that they had been attacked, right? But didn't know that it was OpenAI's product that had done it. And in fact, according to people I've talked to at Hugging Face, OpenAI didn't know it was their product until very recently.

Jacob Ward [00:03:43]:
Wow.

Jacob Ward [00:03:43]:
And so this is— and the thing for me that's been so funny about it is the way in which OpenAI responded, which was like— I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who's a high school principal. And I was saying, you know, that like he was describing it as the difference between a parent whose kid has gotten in a fight and they're like apologetic and embarrassed versus a parent whose kid has gotten into a fight and they're kind of proud of the kid.

Jacob Ward [00:04:04]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:04]:
Oh my goodness.

Jacob Ward [00:04:05]:
You know what I mean?

Jacob Ward [00:04:06]:
Yes.

Jacob Ward [00:04:06]:
And there's that vibe to the language that OpenAI used in describing the thing that this model did as unprecedented. You know, they like to describe it as like an Ocean's Eleven kind of heist. You know, they're just obviously like excited. about this as much as they are embarrassed, if they are in fact embarrassed about it, which I just think is really interesting. And it seems to have created, and jump in here anytime, Michael, but it seems to have created now a bunch, there's like a lot of simultaneous stuff happening that is creating this kind of question of, first of all, have these models gone too far?

Jacob Ward [00:04:46]:
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ward [00:04:47]:
And second of all, should these companies now be pulling back? Because one of the things that several observers have pointed out is that OpenAI actually has an internal framework for evaluating this stuff. And according to that framework, depending on how you read it, once a model gets to a place where it can hack basically other things without human intervention, Mm-hmm. according to OpenAI's own published rulebook, once it can do that, you know, build working zero-day exploits without humans involved, that crosses into what they call critical risk. And at critical risk, the company is supposed to halt further development, right? But OpenAI is not saying whether they feel that they've crossed that line. The language in the documents is weird because some of it also talks about, like, things that really cause real harm being something that causes, like, thousands of deaths or billions in damage. And I think we can probably agree that like the thousands of death threshold is not one we should be waiting for.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:54]:
Yeah, I hate that.

Jacob Ward [00:05:56]:
You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I don't like that. And so there is a really interesting thing going on there. And then sort of tangential to that, but, but is sort of interesting is Nvidia then on, let's see, what is that, 3 days ago, Monday, launched this new, what they're calling the Open Secure AI Alliance with this long list of companies. Excuse me, Microsoft, IBM, SpaceX, Cisco, Cloudflare, Palantir, all these different companies. And it's ostensibly just saying, like, in order for there to be greater safety, we need to be more open with each other. Clem Delangue, the head of Hugging Face, is saying the same thing. And the only major American lab that is not signing that letter is Anthropic. OpenAI signed it, but Anthropic is now not doing that and instead wants, you know, chip controls and a crackdown on distillation and mandatory safety testing and so forth.

Jacob Ward [00:06:48]:
But there's— it's just this moment is like revealing the cracks in the, in the self-regulatory frameworks here. It's revealing that, you know, a company like OpenAI is under immense pressure to keep going, even when in theory, their, their situation has gone beyond it. And so, so let me pause there. That's sort of where we're at in this, this weird moment we're in.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:15]:
Yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:07:16]:
Against the backdrop of which it's important to point out, right, again, there's no regulation of this. Nobody's in charge of, of this stuff. No laws are being broken. You know, this is just the literal Wild West, uh, when it comes to this stuff, and, and we are right smack in the middle of it.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:32]:
And it's so fascinating from so many aspects because I think, uh, something that I have appreciated about the work that you do and something that genuinely has inspired me to do is look a little bit more at the cultural and human side of things when when it comes to this.

Jacob Ward [00:07:49]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:49]:
We've had great conversations about that. And specifically in this instance, it's almost like basic behavior playing out. What I mean is sort of archetypical behavior that, you know, we've seen before. And so I can remember a time— there have been times where I am in a situation, and I say a thing out loud, and I think that everybody's on the same page. And so, you know, I say it with my full chest, and then And everyone else is kind of like, wait, what? And you go, oh, I'm on a different— I have to reevaluate.

Jacob Ward [00:08:25]:
Mm-hmm.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:25]:
But it also showed in the moment sort of what you were thinking. And that's what it kind of felt like for me with this.

Jacob Ward [00:08:32]:
It's—

Mikah Sargent [00:08:33]:
you talk about the pride that's there. To me, that's the part that feels real. And the part that's happening now, the sort of reeling it back and asking these questions and doing all of this stuff, is the, oh, crud, we just tested the water. And people aren't in us with it. Because you think about— you talked about the leaders of these companies and how they do seem to just sort of live in a different world.

Jacob Ward [00:08:59]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:59]:
I can only imagine if you're constantly being reaffirmed and also pressured that you've got to do, got to do, got to do, got to make, got to, you know, that you, you see something like this. And why would you not expect people to be excited that you have like, oh, look at this cute— oh, it's so cool that we've been able to And then everyone goes, now hold on. And then you go, oh, right, right, I did do a boo-boo, I guess.

Jacob Ward [00:09:30]:
Did I do it?

Mikah Sargent [00:09:31]:
This isn't—

Jacob Ward [00:09:32]:
the story isn't going over as well as I thought it would.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:34]:
Exactly.

Jacob Ward [00:09:34]:
You know, that kind of thing. Like, right, you're like a little drunk at a wedding telling a story that you think reflects well on you, and then everybody's like, ooh, you know. What's that Reddit? Uh, there's a Reddit, uh, AITA, Am I the Asshole?

Mikah Sargent [00:09:46]:
Yes, yes, 100%.

Jacob Ward [00:09:48]:
It's totally that, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:09:50]:
Absolutely.

Jacob Ward [00:09:51]:
I've been really— so one rabbit hole I've been going down in this moment, because, you know, when I look across all of the players, you know, I was looking at like Nvidia, right, signing this Open Secure AI Alliance thing, and Jensen Huang coming out on X for the very first time ever, and announcing the launch of this and, you know, talking about this sort of, we need to be in this more open world. That open world, of course, right, is one in which every hospital, every university has their own chip array. And as a result, there's so many more customers for NVIDIA. And so the easy thing is to sort of land— and Anthropic saying that it's not down for an open weight model world, it would rather have a closed model world. Well, that serves the purposes of a closed model company like Anthropic that's just about to go public. But the easy thing is to sort of say like, oh, they're all just self-serving. serving and blah, blah, blah, blah. The weird thing about this cultural moment we are in is, is that these folks clearly believe what they're saying.

Jacob Ward [00:10:59]:
And that has driven me down this rabbit hole into this psychological phenomenon called motivated reasoning.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:06]:
Okay.

Jacob Ward [00:11:06]:
And I've been getting deep into this. So there's this, this— the researcher who coined the term is named Ziva Kunda, and in 1990 wrote a book for a paper for the Psychological Bulletin called The Case for Motivated Reasoning. And what it's essentially saying is people don't just sort of choose to believe what they want to believe. Motivated beliefs come from reasoning in service of self-interest, but it's still reasoning.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:35]:
Ah.

Jacob Ward [00:11:35]:
And so what you want to be true in the world, it guides the way you gather evidence, it guides the way you come to conclusions. And it's automatic and unconscious. And, and, you know, you're— and the, and the, the other side of that, the hard psychological side of that. So that's the easy one. It's easy to do that. It's automatic. The very hard thing is to understand your obligations to other people. That, it turns out, is way more complicated psychologically because it takes deliberate thought.

Jacob Ward [00:12:09]:
You got to choose to give a fuck about other people.

Jacob Ward [00:12:12]:
Yes.

Jacob Ward [00:12:13]:
Right?

Mikah Sargent [00:12:14]:
Yes.

Jacob Ward [00:12:14]:
You don't have to choose in order to gather evidence and create a worldview that serves your purposes.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:21]:
Yeah, that's second nature, right? That's our lizard brain. Yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:12:24]:
And I've been really interested in watching the way in which— so like Mark Zuckerberg puts out this big call around the need for open models of AI this week. And he's clearly saying, well, we can't— it's going to concentrate power in the hands of a few if we have these closed models. And, you know, I'm sure he does on some level believe that. And at the same time, worth noting, like, yes, on the one hand, Facebook, Meta has had this open model, Llama, for a long time, but they also now have a pay-to-play closed model. Right. And so they're, they're, they're straddling both sides of that fence. And so it's just like I'm— so I've been trying to like concoct for the Rip Current.com where I do my work. Like a sort of a map of everyone's motivated reasoning.

Jacob Ward [00:13:19]:
I love that. There's so much of that going on.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:23]:
Oh my goodness. Yeah. Oh my goodness. That's another sort of level of this. I want to ask you, what do we think now that these calls are being put out and the letters are being signed? Are we looking at government regulation down the line then? Like, the, the call to have that— because I look at the way that, um, Hollywood chose to, and the, the games industry, they both said, we saw how the government in the US regulated, uh, television and radio, and that was partially because those groups chose not to, uh, set up rules and regulations for themselves. So Hollywood said, We're going to, and we're going to have a group that handles it and the, you know, the rating system. And we are going to hold to that so much because the motivation is we don't get the government involved with regulation. And that has mostly worked in terms of television.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:27]:
You can trust, you know, the PG-13s, the Rs. Those have changed over time, but they really do hold to those.

Jacob Ward [00:14:34]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:34]:
And then, as I said, the video game industry followed suit. so that the government wasn't, especially with, uh, that, that the panic that came about video games causing aggression and all of that. They really needed to make sure that they didn't have other people step in. This is asking it. I mean, if I'm, if I'm understanding correctly, this is saying we don't want to handle it. Uh, some, some governmental body. What do you think is the shift there? And is it more about just going, I don't want this responsibility? And also I can, this is the cynical, I guess, part of me. I'm going, is it because They know that, A, they can pay the right people a lot of money, otherwise known as lobbying, and then 2, they can sort of unhand the responsibility of it.

Jacob Ward [00:15:21]:
I think that this is— it's a great question. So the way I've always thought about it is that the people who run these companies, they never do anything for one reason. They always have multiple reasons. Right? And so calling for tighter regulations, you know, oftentimes you'll see big companies calling for tighter regulations that only the biggest companies could possibly satisfy, right? And that would make it very difficult for small companies to start out. And so, you know, talk about motivated reasoning. I think there's an earnest desire on the part of these companies, for instance, to just sort of like establish the rules of the game.

Jacob Ward [00:16:01]:
Right.

Jacob Ward [00:16:02]:
They want to believe, you know, they want everyone to have to abide by the same rules of football. And so they want someone to establish those rules. And so I, I, I think that is probably a big chunk of this. I do think there's a, a washing one's hands of responsibility that probably comes with this stuff. You know, they, they don't want to deal with the piecemeal— I mean, the reason that they're so excited, or not excited, but the reason that they push for federal regulation They also do not like the piecemeal state lawsuits coming at them.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:39]:
That's fair. Okay.

Jacob Ward [00:16:40]:
You know, and I, and I, you know, on the one hand, you can sort of sympathize with, with these companies in, in that regard, but I'm, I more sympathize with, you know, plaintiffs who, you know, whose kid has been— yes, injured, has injured themselves, you know, maybe taking their own lives, or Um, you know, there's a big lawsuit, uh, basically a big law is about to be passed in Minnesota that would punish, uh, xAI, for instance, for, um, allowing people to make sexual images of other people's photos, right?

Jacob Ward [00:17:15]:
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ward [00:17:16]:
And, and xAI is now suing Minnesota for that, saying it's overbroad and it's gonna cost them too much money and so forth. And so You know, I think that like, we're in a moment where the reason these companies want federal law is because they don't want to have to deal with these state laws. And I think it's no coincidence that these state laws are having a big effect and these state lawsuits are having— that they are winning right now. And those laws are being passed. And so I think there's both a desire to create an even playing field and some self-serving stuff around trying to get away from some of the damage that's coming their way in the form of these state actions. So I try not to be too cynical about this stuff. I think everybody wakes up with an intention to, for the most part, do good. Not everybody in this world, but people believe that they're trying to do the right thing.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:08]:
Yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:18:09]:
I just still— we come back again and again, I think, Marc, to the thing you and I have talked about so many times, which is that these guys are so convinced that they are leading us to a better future. And that it's— and that as a result, some, some lost souls who fall overboard along the way, you know, are an acceptable cost, right? The, the end of a category of job or the end of a certain category of education or whatever, that it's going to be worth the upheaval of that and the difficulty of that for society because there's this— there's a utopia coming.

Jacob Ward [00:18:38]:
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ward [00:18:39]:
And that kind of religious zealotry, I think, informs so much of, of this stuff. And it's such a weird part of it. The other thing I'll just say, I'm curious how you think about it. The New York Times did a big piece yesterday about the incredible number of chips that have— that are basically on order in the coming years and how they're— it's going to be like trillions of dollars worth of investment, and that the current number of chips that we're using is going to be dwarfed by this incredible number that's coming. And I was just thinking so much about how the other thing is these companies really don't have any financial choice but to stay the course, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:19:12]:
Yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:19:12]:
They have spent— they are so in, you know, they have made such an enormous financial bet, they owe so much money that I, I just don't see a world in which they would voluntarily, voluntarily say, let's slow down, you know. That's a good point. You know, unless— but, but you have OpenAI and Anthropic like sending a letter saying slow us down because they want everyone to be doing sort of the, you know, abiding by the same rules rather than having to, as you say, take, take responsibility for themselves.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:44]:
Wow. We, you know, we'll have to, we'll have to check in after we see, because the Hugging Face thing is honestly still playing out in terms of what's next. So we'll definitely have to check in after that. We need to take a quick break before we come back with the next story of the week. All right. We are back from the break. As I mentioned, joined this week by Jake Ward. And a quick little fun story here.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:10]:
If you were online around 1999, you probably had one very specific window open at all times. You had this small little music player that had a visualizer and maybe some strange skin that you had attached to it. It's Winamp. And well, Winamp is still here. Did you know that? If you didn't, it is. This week, the company announced a partnership with Deezer to power an all-new Winamp player along with a Winamp-branded music subscription of its own. What? Landing in the first half of next year. Some companies move slower than others.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:46]:
TechCrunch's Lauren Forstall has the story, and the pitch goes well past nostalgia because Winamp says it wants to rebuild the music player for the streaming era. And so, uh, I am looking forward to talking to you about this, Jake, because I would like to hear, uh, you know, what— did you ever have Winamp running on your machine?

Jacob Ward [00:21:05]:
Oh yeah, dude.

Jacob Ward [00:21:06]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:06]:
Oh yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:21:07]:
Oh, totally. I loved I loved that era, right? Like, I was a total CD kid and, you know, would spend, you know, 30 minutes before bed, like, programming the CD player, my 5-disc player, to play a certain number of sleep songs, you know. Oh, that's awesome. In a particular order, you know what I mean? Like, that kind of, like, music nerding. And I was known among my friends as the one who would, like, find stuff. So I would blow huge amounts of money on, on bad albums just to get the one track, you know, that kind of thing. So, so when the MP3 world came along, I was psyched. Like, I was early on Napster, you know, I was like using my dial-up connection to pull down as many things off Napster as I possibly could, you know.

Jacob Ward [00:21:48]:
I was a huge MP3 player guy and, and loved that phase. And it's been so fun to like— I've been revisiting that phase now because my 12-year-old— I— there are now these sort of like remade click wheel MP3 players. There's one by a company called INEO that is all over— they have a million TikTok ads. Um, and, and that's like a— it's like, it's what I would have dreamed of in the '90s, right? Or the early 2000s. Like click wheel, you can play movies on it. It's, you know, but it's also a storage drive. I love that thing. Anyway, you know, it's like $40 or something.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:26]:
Love that.

Jacob Ward [00:22:26]:
And to now reacquaint myself with what it is to try and get MP3s is so interesting because you have to go either to like some very sketchy places to get them, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:22:38]:
Yes.

Jacob Ward [00:22:38]:
Or— because there isn't a sort of like that clean yet illegal thing that was Napster, uh, you know. So it's just a— that's a, that's a weird moment. And so anyway, I, I, I would love, especially now that the Spotify and other streaming service world is being flooded by AI slop, Uh, you know, and as a guy who like wrote a book about the dangers of AI, I, I'm— I am not immune to, you know, I've, I've a couple of times played a song for my daughter, but like, look at— listen to this, like, this is pretty cool. And she's like, Dad, dummy, that's AI slop. Like, that's AI generated. What are you doing? You know, like, look at her. And I'm like, oh, she's totally right. So I just— I, I love the idea.

Jacob Ward [00:23:24]:
I would like to just keep— I'd like to keep the Winamp dream alive a little longer, you know. And, and so I, I, so I really, I really dig, uh, the idea of it. And this, and the skins, man, I, I remember this. I remember nerding out on the skins. Now the whole thing of like, we're gonna customize our world and customize our experience, that's back when sort of we assumed that like your experience of the internet was going to involve like that long, the long tail that they talked about, where everyone has, gets to have whatever incredibly niche taste they want in whatever, as opposed to where we're at where things are sort of like where they're trying to make it all beige and trying to limit your choices wherever possible in the guise of us having a huge amount of choice. And so I know Winamp for me, when you say that, just takes me back to that, like the self-curation era of the internet that I really miss. I miss that part.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:18]:
I do too. I miss being able to— that's how I learned like HTML and CSS, not CES. It was that era of creating my own blog page. And oh my God, I loved putting horrible sort of chiptune songs to play because it could only do like MIDI, so whatever. And also having a little marquee rolling across the screen. It was just— it was a fun time and it felt very innocent. And I like that that's happening. I think that this, to me, this does feel like a bit of a nostalgia play to join the sort of streaming service at this point, but it's— so what? You know what I mean? Like, this, this should be fun.

Jacob Ward [00:24:57]:
Yeah, I'm in.

Jacob Ward [00:24:58]:
I'm in.

Jacob Ward [00:24:59]:
I could use more. I could use more. Uh, yeah, I don't mind being pandered to in that way.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:03]:
Some whimsy would be nice. Some lightheartedness, some whimsy to bring in.

Jacob Ward [00:25:07]:
Yes, please.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:08]:
Yes, please. And the one other thing I'll say about this is that, you know, uh, they are attempting to give you kind of a, a one pane of glass. I love to say this, but it is, uh, having all of your listening included. So it's a premium catalog of music that you can stream, plus your local music files, internet radio stations, podcasts. If you have cloud-based collections that can be accessed via API, then you can also use those as well. And so that part seems fun, but I'm looking forward to what happens here as we— or as the company kind of continues to work on it, because again, it won't be out until— it says the first half of 2027. And that is enough time for mostly, it seems, Deezer and Winamp to work together on offering this subscription music streaming service as part of it. The other part that I wanted to ask you about was— well, actually, no, you did touch on it there, which was sort of how you feel about it being a nostalgia play.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:18]:
I think you're right. I think that ultimately—

Jacob Ward [00:26:19]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:20]:
It's okay that it is, and it'll just be a fun thing that we get to look forward to.

Jacob Ward [00:26:25]:
I mean, honestly, kids who never experienced that stuff are nostalgic for that stuff. You know what I mean? So there's a market for that that I really dig. And I'm glad that everyone's sort of recognizing, like, oh, maybe that was a little bit better, that moment. So I dig it. Yeah, I agree.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:37]:
All right, well, Jake Ward, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It's always a pleasure to get to chat with you. If people would like to stay up to date with all of the great work that you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Jacob Ward [00:26:48]:
I really appreciate it. So I run a couple of platforms at theripcurrent.com. There's also a YouTube channel by that name, and, uh, it's where I do all the reporting that I do. Paid subscribers get basically literally everything that I do, but free subscribers get a big chunk of stuff as well. So thanks so much, Mikah. Thanks to you guys.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:04]:
Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Alrighty, folks, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with my interview this week. All right, we are back from the break, and Apple Apple this week announced Apple Upgrade. This is a new leasing program that replaces the iPhone Upgrade Program and extends monthly payments across the iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac lineups. Joining us today to give us a better understanding of what exactly this is, what the numbers mean, and everything in between is ExtraOrdinaries' Griffin Jones. Welcome to the show, Griff.

D. Griffin Jones [00:27:39]:
Good evening.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:40]:
Good evening to you. Good evening. Let's kick things off. I gave a little bit of a hint of what's going on in the intro, But tell us about Apple's upgrade, or I guess it's just called Apple Upgrade. And, you know, if someone hasn't dug into the announcement, what is the program and how does it work?

D. Griffin Jones [00:27:57]:
So yeah, this replaces the iPhone Upgrade Program that is now gone, never, never existed. Uh, and so it replaces that and it also expands it to the whole lineup. So previously the iPhone Upgrade Program was basically you pay, uh, small monthly amount, slightly less than what it would be if you bought a phone and divided it by 24 or 12. You pay a small monthly amount, and then every September you can get a new phone effectively for free. You just continue paying that monthly rate. It might go up if you buy a slightly more expensive model. And this is like that for all the other products. So if you regularly buy a Mac every 3 years, I mean, this is perfect.

D. Griffin Jones [00:28:41]:
for you because you pay a fixed monthly quantity, and then when that 36-month term is up, you just send it in and you get a new lease on the new model, whatever that may be.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:54]:
Awesome. Now, Apple Card monthly installments. When I was looking through this program, trying to figure out the small details, it was interesting to me that the Apple Card monthly installments don't seem to be going anywhere if you get it through the Apple Card. It's like a different arrangement entirely. Could you Can you describe what you're actually doing when you choose one versus the other?

D. Griffin Jones [00:29:18]:
The Apple upgrade program, you're leasing the device that you get. You don't technically own it. You're leasing it in the same way that you're leasing a car. Very similar in that respect. With the Apple Card monthly payment, it's like you're buying a car with a bank loan, and you just pay it back in monthly increments. I buy my devices with the Apple Card monthly thing, and the amount that you pay there is just the total purchase price divided by either 12 or 24, depending on which product you're buying. There are no savings with the Apple Card monthly installment aside from the 3% cashback that it gives you. If you're comparing what you want to do, the, the Apple Card monthly payment system was like, you know, you actually own the device, you're just paying it back in set increments.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:14]:
Got it, got it. Now I love this, you built a spreadsheet to compare the 2 side by side. Uh, you know, what, what did the numbers actually show you once you had them lined up? And also, I just, from a, a sort of journalistic perspective, um, When did you go, oh, I should sort of try to figure out these numbers a little bit more? Was it kind of immediate? You're like, let me get Numbers opened up and get this rolling. Or was it sort of a, oh, this is one thing that could be interesting?

D. Griffin Jones [00:30:45]:
Well, making a spreadsheet is often like the first step that I take towards forming an opinion about something. If it is something that I don't know— yeah, sure, they announced Apple upgrade earlier this week. I was like, oh yeah, whatever. I checked to make sure that Apple Card monthly installments still exists. I was like, oh, okay, then I don't really care then. But then you invited me on the show and it's like, well, in order to make an opinion about this, I need to make a spreadsheet and compare them. You really see that when you compare what you pay on an Apple Card versus the Apple Upgrade Program, even when the term length is the same, like on the iPhone, both of those are 24-month terms, you still pay much less on Apple Upgrade. It's much more extreme when you go to iPad or Mac, where on the Apple Card, those are 12-month payments.

D. Griffin Jones [00:31:35]:
On Apple Upgrade, it's 36-month payments. Already, it should be only a third less. But then also, Apple Upgrade passes you a little bit of savings. When you return the device at the end of the 3-year period, Apple is then going to refurbish and sell that product through retail channels or through their refurbished site. Apple has a little bit of margin, as well, that they pass along to you. Really, you're paying something like 25% of what the monthly payments would be on Apple Upgrade vs. the Apple Card. Take the MacBook Air, for example.

D. Griffin Jones [00:32:10]:
$2,599 on Apple Upgrade, over $100 on the Apple Card monthly payment plan. It's like that across the board.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:18]:
Wow!

D. Griffin Jones [00:32:19]:
Like $49 for a Mac Studio over $200 on the Apple Card monthly payments.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:25]:
Oh my goodness. Oh, see, and I think— let me ask you a question that I didn't, I didn't tell you ahead of time I was going to ask you, which is sort of, um, are— what, what's the motivation? Are there gotchas here? Are there— what, what do we think is happening in terms of the loss of some, uh, purchase options and the introduction of this? Is the company simply consolidating, you know, its offerings? Is it trying to— again, we know that you don't actually know, but from your personal thoughts, is it, again, consolidating? Is it trying to get rid of the responsibility that comes with the sort of upgradey, leasey aspect? What's going on here that there is a difference in kind of the numbers and that there— I guess There's a part of me that's a little bothered that there's math that can be done that suggests that, you know, one way might be better than the other. And so I suppose I have unfairly perhaps given Apple this belief in my head that it's like it's all fair, it's all good, we're going to— but we've seen with the Creator Studio, if I remember, I'm forgetting the name, but the Final Cut Pro and all that stuff. That when you subscribed to that, which included Final Cut for iPad, if you had a Final Cut for iPad subscription, uh, independent of that, at least originally when they rolled this out, it did not cancel that subscription. And so you could end up paying twice for what you own already. And then we've also seen the new, uh, plan for AppleCare where you can pay a one-time subscription for, I think it's like 3 devices. And yeah, again, tell me more about your thoughts on that.

D. Griffin Jones [00:34:18]:
I think Apple is launching this at this particular moment because Apple knows that people are now keeping their devices for much longer. Like unprompted, people will keep their phone for 3, 4 years. I mean, Apple Silicon Macs last so long that they'll easily— I mean, I kept my Intel MacBook Pro for something like 7 years, way longer than I should have. But yeah, now, now, and I An Apple Silicon Mac will actually last that long and be a reasonable computer. If Apple can give you a reason to upgrade every 3 years, and they'll say, oh, well, you'll save money overall. I mean, you look at the spreadsheet, you say a MacBook Air retails for $1,299, but over the Apple upgrade program, paying 36 times $25, that's $400 in savings.

Jacob Ward [00:35:06]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:08]:
Right.

D. Griffin Jones [00:35:08]:
$400 in savings. But it's not $400 in savings if you otherwise would have kept your MacBook Air for 5 years instead of 3. Right. And I think that's what's going on here.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:20]:
That makes sense. Yeah. Um, now again, we, we talked a little bit about these terms, these programs. Uh, what if, if you were to recommend— someone's deciding in this, uh, the year 2026, to buy a new device, which goodness gracious, right now it's kind of a hard thing to do. Would, would you tell them to consider this as an option? How, what, what are the requirements in your mind for this to be an option for you? But, you know, as a recommendation, is it a no-brainer? Is it no, we should think a lot about it? How do you feel about that?

D. Griffin Jones [00:36:03]:
A consideration is that if you— I mean, the thing is, if you're a parent and you buy an iPhone for yourself every 2 years, you don't need an iPhone every 2 years, but you know, well, after that 2 years, I can pass this device down to somebody else. I can give it to my kids. I can give my old one to my wife or my kids or my husband or my mother or my grandmother. You've got a whole network of devices that you can like trickle them down to. So it's better for you to buy and then just, you know, pass off an old device. Whereas if that's not your situation, if you're just buying an iPhone for yourself and you want to upgrade every 2 years on a cycle, I see no reason why you wouldn't do this, uh, provided you're— you, you don't mind Klarna technically owning your phone. Klarna is the company that Apple partnered with to manage this system for them. them and they give me slightly icky feelings, but that's a consideration.

D. Griffin Jones [00:37:02]:
I'd say on the Mac side, this is actually a pretty good system for small businesses, like small independent video editing houses or podcast production studios. They always need just whatever the fastest Mac is. They might have an office of Mac Studios or give out MacBook Pros to their employees, small to mid-sized businesses buying fleets of computers. Well, they will always have the fastest Mac if they do this system. They'll know that they'll get regular updates. Every 3 years, we'll get a new set of Macs for this whole department, and they will be on the fastest Mac.

Mikah Sargent [00:37:42]:
That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Now, one of the questions that we talked about And you talk about in your piece is you kind of talk about, you know, will there be something new to upgrade to, uh, when, when the term ends? Can you touch on, on sort of the understanding there and the caution there about maybe timing?

D. Griffin Jones [00:38:04]:
Yeah, because they, they roll out new iPhones and Apple Watches every single September like clockwork. At this rate, I am honestly, as a side note, I'm kind of surprised that Apple still rolls out a new Apple Watch Series model every single year. Some years, they don't really have anything, or at least that much new. They've gone through periods where 3 years in a row, all the Apple Watches might have, oh, this display is 20 pixels wider, but it still has the same chip inside. It's still kind of the same Apple Watch. I'm kind of surprised that that's actually still getting annual updates. As a side note, other Apple product lines like the iPad and the Mac don't get regular updates. The iPad Pro especially is on a pretty regular 16-month cycle, sometimes more.

D. Griffin Jones [00:38:55]:
And so that means that you can look at examples historically. Well, oh, if I bought an iPad Mini right when it came out in, I think it was April 2021, That model was sold unchanged for 37 months. So if hypothetically this program existed back then, you could have bought an iPad Mini in April 2021, and then by the time your term is up, you would have upgraded to the same model before an update. A new model would have come a month later. The iPad Pro as well, it's on a 16-and-a-bit-month cycle. Which means that you can go through a 36-month term and upgrade only to the next subsequent model when a month later they might have another better model right around the corner.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:44]:
Yeah, yeah.

D. Griffin Jones [00:39:46]:
And the desktop Macs especially, they're all over the place. The laptops get upgrades every single year, they get every single chip as soon as a new chip is available to them. But the higher-end MacBook Pros, sometimes those slip a few months. The Mac Studio, that slips a few months. The The Mac Mini especially, it skipped the M3 generation. The M5 generation is going to be arriving really late. So you might not be getting the latest generation of a Mac every time it comes out. You might skip a year, you might go through an upgrade cycle only jumping one generation instead of 2, even though it's on a 36-month period.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:27]:
Okay, that makes sense.

D. Griffin Jones [00:40:28]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:28]:
Now, this is another aspect. Not every product that Apple sells is part of the program. Did any of the absences stand out to you? And do you think it tells us anything what is not included?

D. Griffin Jones [00:40:42]:
What— when you look at what's not included, Apple doesn't have the Apple Watch SE 3, the entry-level iPad, the MacBook Neo, the Mac Mini, weirdly, uh, And the displays, the Studio Display and the Studio Display XDR. People keep those for 10 years, and Apple only updates them once every 10 years, so that makes sense. You don't need a new Studio Display every 3 years. A majority of the products not on the program are the budget models, and there could be a few reasons for that. Apple might know that these are the customers who are going to buy a device and use it for as long as it'll last until it breaks, maybe even longer than it breaks. because they'll just repair it and keep it for even longer before buying a new model. Another explanation is that the profit margins are lower on their cheaper products, so the resale values after 36 months might not be as high for Apple to be able to offer you a good discount in the first place. The budget models are not included.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:46]:
Got it.

D. Griffin Jones [00:41:47]:
Apple also updates them, at least on the iPad, the entry-level iPad. That also gets very sporadic updates, not too regularly. That could be another reason why it's not a part of the program.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:58]:
Lastly, Klarna, as we talked about, it's the company actually providing these leases. What does that partnership mean for the customer? After going through all of this, looking at everything, what's your personal final thought on whether it's something that you would— you specifically would use overall? Or maybe you're saying, oh, I would use it for this product, kind of like the, the Mac, but I'm not going to use it for a phone. Or yeah, where do you fall?

D. Griffin Jones [00:42:29]:
So the previous iPhone upgrade program wasn't actually run by Apple, it was run by Citizens Bank. And you know, the, the Apple Card, that's a very Apple-y experience. You know, you apply and you get it all through the Apple Wallet app. app, but of course that's issued by Goldman Sachs. Those are kind of invisible. You don't really need to know that's the case. Apple kind of pretends it isn't the case at all, whereas the Apple Upgrade Program is more clearly run by Klarna. In fact, Apple says on the website that when you make a payment for the Apple Upgrade Program, you make a payment through the Klarna app, not through Apple's own interface, not through apple.com, not through a wallet app.

D. Griffin Jones [00:43:15]:
So Klarna is very much more included in this and more directly a part of this whole system than other things before. I'll admit I haven't used Klarna that much myself. When I'm checking out on eBay or Best Buy or some other sites, it's like, oh, you can pay for this burrito in 4 payments over the next 4 weeks with Klarna. It's like, no, I don't want to do that. That just seems weird. Yeah, please don't. Unlike the Apple Card monthly installments where you buy it and pay back Apple and it is yours, you're leasing a product through Apple Upgrade from Klarna. Be aware of that.

D. Griffin Jones [00:43:59]:
Before you make a decision, just make Make sure you're aware that you're comfortable with that.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:04]:
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today to explain Apple Upgrade. It's a pleasure to get to chat with you. If people would like to stay up to date with the work that you're doing, where are the places they should go to do so?

D. Griffin Jones [00:44:18]:
You can go to dgriffinjones.com and you can, from there, you can find my Mastodon. You can subscribe to my blog and my RSS feed, or you can get it in email newsletter form. Everybody uses email, not everybody uses RSS, and very few people use Mastodon.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:33]:
All very true statements. Thank you so much for joining us today, Griffin. We appreciate it.

D. Griffin Jones [00:44:37]:
Thank you for having me. Talk to you later.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:39]:
Talk to you later. Alrighty, folks, one more story for you here. Uh, it's one that, you know, is definitely front of mind, uh, with, with the recent updates that we've seen from Hugging Face and OpenAI. It's not the only one that's leaking out data. If you've ever hit the share button on a Claude conversation, you know, to send a chat to a coworker or drop a link into a group thread, then there's a decent chance you didn't think about where that link would end up, right? I mean, I didn't, other than it would be in the hands of the person that I was intending to send it to. Yeah, Joseph Cox at 404 Media reports that a lot of those shared Claude conversations and creations have been turning up in Google search results where anyone who knows how to search for them can sit down and read through what people were working on. And what people were working on turns out to be pretty personal. This story sits in an awkward spot because, well, this isn't a hack.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:44]:
You know, this isn't This isn't a matter of that kind of security. Nothing is broken. It's a feature that is working exactly the way it's designed. But the problem is that sometimes people don't stop to think what public actually means, right? When you are doing this. And I would also argue that the company Anthropic did not do a good enough job of explaining that public could mean that your data gets picked up by, uh, by search engines and shared in those search results. Uh, so Joseph Cox, uh, describes the exposed material as conversations and creations that people made with Claude, uh, but again, based on what he found, may not have realized that they're publicly available. An AI-powered therapy app, that someone vibe coded, uh, notes from meetings, a dashboard someone built to analyze medical billing data. Uh, the most alarming category, says Cox, are chats that reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like people's home addresses.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:58]:
Uh, you know, the therapy app, the meeting notes, the billing dashboard, those were all able to be accessed. These are things that we saw Joseph Cox talk about. And we don't know how many chat shares have been exposed. And so here's the thing to understand when it comes to this. I think that because Anthony brings up a good point saying, hey, not to knock the story, but didn't the same thing go through a New news cycle last year.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:36]:
And that's—yeah, I think that's part of it, is that people need to be aware of what it means when you share something public. Because let me go— I'll go to Claude, and I will, uh, click on the little button, and it says, and I quote, publish artifact.

D. Griffin Jones [00:47:58]:
Okay. Publish Artifact, which was a button that for me, as someone who's tech-minded, I knew immediately under no circumstances am I hitting any publish button unless I absolutely want it out in the world. Because publish to me means blog post, and blog post means it's out there, it's in the world, people can see it. But that doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. And so in that way, you know, I don't know if this was Joseph Cox's original intent, But I do think it's worth having in the news cycle again to just be a reminder to people, um, in the same way that if people started eating Tide Pods again, I imagine that it would be back in the news cycle that you shouldn't eat Tide Pods. Some of us go, well, yeah, it's obvious that you shouldn't eat Tide Pods, but unfortunately that's not the way that everyone thinks. Um, and also that Tide Pod story is not 100% accurate either, so. It's complicated. In any case, Claude, of course, lets you generate a publicly accessible link to a conversation so you can share it.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:01]:
You can show like how something was made. And, you know, it's supposed to be that you are sharing that with, with one other person or with, you know, several people and that you could post it on social media. But if you make it, if you publish it, then Google's crawler can crawl into it. And so that is an issue. And that is something that, A, people should be more aware about, and B, hopefully we'll see some updates to. Let's talk about Google though, because Google does— or rather, Google by default may not show these results. But anyone who knows how to use Google's more advanced features, Cox describes it as the Google dork. This is a super specific search that is useful for finding particular web pages or files.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:59]:
So one dork surfacing Claude chats came from a post on the Claude subreddit, and, um, there were some that, you know, have been taken down since then, but there are API keys and login credentials, in some cases phone numbers. I often use, um, a thing to search the Twit website. And so if I'm trying to remember if there was a guest that we've had on, or if it's a guest before time of hosting this show, I'll type in their name and then I'll type in site: twit.tv. And that's a dork. It is a direct search of a site, which if you do that, you could do a search with the Claude domain and start to find these things. You know, Claude also offers artifacts. That's where I hit the little disclosure triangle and saw that I could publish I don't use that, but it is again available there. And here's the thing.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:56]:
According to Joseph Cox, these searches are returning artifacts, but they are no longer returning chats. So it does seem to be that this is not something that you are, you know, going to have to worry about going forward, but you do need to. go through and make the decision of what you actually want published. If you have thought, oh, I was doing a funny thing with my, uh, chatbot and I wanted to share it with my family, you're not— if your family is the whole internet, then that's the issue.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:37]:
If Google or Anthropic scrub the search results, just be aware that that direct link still works just because the, uh, result is scrubbed. So if someone has accessed it before, they could access it again. And third parties can scrape and keep. So it's possible that your stuff got scraped up and eaten somewhere else. And so that is another aspect of this that you need to be aware of. And this is what Anthony was talking about, because Joseph Cox does compare it to the ChatGPT exposure from last year. There were 100,000 conversations that were searchable on Google. Um, and it is something that, you know, continues to, to, uh, go on, but people aren't aware of.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:26]:
So I, I have to say that I think a little bit of the issue is our understanding of what share means, because to be fair, most of the time if I'm on my phone and I hit the share button, and same thing on Android, um, that means, hey, here's a thing that I'm sharing with the specific people that are on the other end of this exchange. It's different when it comes to sharing a chat. So maybe go for the screenshot instead. Or, you know, arguably it's a little bit like dreams. Maybe you don't need to share what your chats are with this bot because does someone else really care? I don't know. That's my little warning to you all, my little PSA. Just, you know, Be careful what you share for. Yeah, sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:18]:
Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. Show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That's where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. You can check out my other shows, iOS Today and Hands-On Apple, as well as Hands-On Tech, all here on the TWiT network. You can also follow me online @mikahsargent on many a social media network or head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. I'll be back next week with another episode of Tech News Weekly, but until then, it is time to say goodbye.