Stephen Hackett, proprietor of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay (purveyor of many fine podcasts), joins the show. Topics include: IO (or if you will, io), the new joint venture of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s LoveFrom; the sheer fantasy of “Made in America” iPhones; and Fortnite’s return to the US App Store.
Usually May is a pretty quiet time the world of Apple, but this year has proven to be an exception to the rule.
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This week on a roller coaster of an episode:
David has been on a journey with his email setup, and as Stephen offers him a shoulder to cry on, Sparks drops a bombshell.
I love this confession:
One of the Macs my local CompUSA had out on display in its Apple ghetto was a G4 Cube. I had read somewhere that they ran hot, so one day I put my hand a few inches over the Cube to feel the convective flow rising out of the top grille. The machine immediately overheated and shut down to protect itself.
Let me be clear (as clear as the Cube). I didn’t put my hand on the grille—it was at least 3–4 inches above it. But that was enough. And from that day forward, every time I passed that Cube, I put my hand above it and caused a crash.
Pierre Dandumont has saved a long-lost bit of Macintosh history:
If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions. But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM.
I had talked about this mysterious ROM a few years ago. It’s documented by Apple in some old documents, but without much detail. According to Apple, the ROM contains fonts for kanji in 12 and 18 points, and they are loaded at startup by KanjiTalk. On a regular Macintosh Plus, you need a floppy disk with the files, which slows down startup and uses some RAM, whereas on a Japanese Macintosh Plus, the font is in ROM and doesn’t take up RAM. You also avoid loading files from a floppy disk, theoretically saving 6 seconds during startup. That’s a conservative estimate, as we’ll see—it assumes you’re not switching disks manually.
Pierre then went on to order not one but two Macintosh Plus logic boards to track down and preserve the ROM. The entire blog post is a delight, as are the photos:
At Macworld 2004, Apple announced Jam Pack, a collection of additional loops for use in GarageBand:
Jam Pack triples the music content for musicians and aspiring musicians alike with over 2,000 additional loops including many for hip-hop and electronica; over 100 additional software instruments, including a concert grand piano and 12 string guitars; over 100 additional pro-quality effects presets; and 15 additional guitar amps, including surf, grunge, heavy blues and atmospheric.
“GarageBand is like having over 50 musical instruments, a studio of professional musicians and the best recording engineers right at your fingertips,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “And Jam Pack takes GarageBand even further, with even more professional-quality instruments, loops, effects and guitar amps.”
The initial release was compatible with iLife ’04, and was sold for $99. Over time, Apple would add additional products to the lineup, complete with some incredible retail packaging:
That expansion started in September 2004, the same year the initial Jam Pack shipped:
Apple today introduced two new Jam Packs for its GarageBand music creation software, giving musicians and aspiring musicians alike all of the loops and software instruments they need to create music in the genre of their choice. Jam Pack 2: Remix Tools makes it easy to produce compelling dance, hip-hop and electronica tracks; and Jam Pack 3: Rhythm Section offers songwriters a complete backing band to help build a professional sounding foundation for their rock, alternative and country music.
“GarageBand and the original Jam Pack made it possible for anyone, regardless of their musical background, to easily create great sounding music on their Mac,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Marketing. “With these two new Jam Packs, musicians and aspiring musicians can delve deeper into their favorite genre. GarageBand just got better.”
Jam Pack 2 came with “more than 2,000 additional loops, 20 new beat kits (Techno, R&B, House, Trance), new synth and sound effect instruments and classic drum machines from Roland (TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, CR-78).” Jam Pack 3 came with over 2,000 more loops and 50 additional instruments:
New drums (Jazz Brushes, Indie Rock, Warehouse Kit), basses (Motown, Liverpool, Progressive Rock, Unplugged) and guitars (Dobro Slide, Bluegrass Banjo, Bluesy Acoustic, Heavy Metal Electric) are a sample of the professional-quality software instruments that come with Rhythm Section.
By early 2005, all four Jam Picks pictured above were available for sale:
In 2008, a Voice pack was added to the lineup, as spotted by MacRumors forum member AuthumnSkyline:
(It’s been a minute since I’ve seen that much Brushed Metal.)
Here’s how Apple described the Voice Pack:
Whether your song needs a soloist, backup singers, or an entire choir, the talent is on
call. Voices gives you over 1,500 Apple Loops featuring professional soloists and choirs in multiple genres and styles. It also includes over 20 software instruments, including voices, choral ensembles, and amazing drum kits built upon the human voice and body.
By this point, the packaging had been redesigned:
Of course, software in boxes was on its way out within a few years of this redesign, and eventually Apple made these packages available for download for free.
These loops live on today, and can be downloaded within Apple’s MainStage and Logic Pro applications via the Sound Library Manager:
The files are downloaded by the app, and are stored in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple in separate subfolders for each Jam Pack:
I love that there’s a little 2004 on my MacBook Pro over two decades later.
Pocket will no longer be available after July 8, 2025.
You can continue using the app and browser extensions until this date. After July 8, Pocket will move into export-only mode. Users can export saves anytime until October 8, 2025, after which user data will be permanently deleted.
Ming-Chi Kuo has weighed in on OpenAI’s future hardware. The analyst wrote a long post on X about the hardware he expects to see out of the new partnership between OpenAI and Jony Ive:
My industry research indicates the following regarding the new AI hardware device from Jony Ive’s collaboration with OpenAI:
- Mass production is expected to start in 2027.
Assembly and shipping will occur outside China to reduce geopolitical risks, with Vietnam currently the likely assembly location.
The current prototype is slightly larger than the AI Pin, with a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle. The design and specifications may change before mass production.
One of the intended use cases is wearing the device around the neck.
It will have cameras and microphones for environmental detection, with no display functionality.
It is expected to connect to smartphones and PCs, utilizing their computing and display capabilities.
Just as a reminder, this is what that original iPod shuffle looked like when worn:
It was exciting to cover the breaking news live on Connected yesterday, but the truth is that Ive and company have a huge challenge ahead of them.
Ive’s previous hits — the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch — all came to market later than products by other companies, and were all better than existing products. It was easy to see why the iPhone was better than other smartphones, or what made the iPad special. Even though the iPod and Apple Watch were slower out of the gate, they were impressive alternates to what already existed.
Today’s world is far different. No one has shipped an AI product worth buying, and unlike computers and MP3 players and smart phones and tablets and smart watches, the market hasn’t said this is a category that deserves to exist.
To be clear, the presumed failure of the Rabbit R1 and outright failure Humane AI Pin does not mean that there’s no room in the market for an AI-powered device. However, people really like their phones, and creating a product that will compete with the smartphone is a hill no one has successfully climbed to date.
If OpenAI’s future product is meant to work with the iPhone and Android phones, then the company is opening a whole other set of worms, from the integration itself to the fact that most people will still prefer to simply pull their phone out of their pockets for basically any task.
I’m still excited to see what Jony Ive and his team are working on, but just because he’s involved doesn’t mean that the product we will eventually see will be a winner. Joe Rossignol said it well:
It remains to be seen if the device will be a success, or if it will go the way of the AI Pin and other attempts at going beyond the smartphone. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is certainly confident, as he has tested the device at home and believes it will be “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” Quite the claim.
The guys discuss Fortnite’s return to the App Store, cover Google IO, and are interrupted by huge news from Sam Altman and Jony Ive. They then talk about feelings.
Wild news just broke: the company Sam Altman and Jony Ive started to build AI-based hardware has been purchased for a cool $6.5 billion, as Mike Isaac and Cade Metz report:
The deal, which is OpenAI’s biggest acquisition, will bring in Mr. Ive and his team of roughly 55 engineers, designers and researchers. They will assume creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and build hardware that helps people better interact with the technology.
In a joint interview, Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman declined to say what such devices could look like and how they might work, but they said they hoped to share details next year. Mr. Ive, 58, framed the ambitions as galactic, with the aim of creating “amazing products that elevate humanity.”
“We’ve been waiting for the next big thing for 20 years,” Mr. Altman, 40, added. “We want to bring people something beyond the legacy products we’ve been using for so long.”
In their announcement post, the pair write:
Two years ago, Jony Ive and the creative collective LoveFrom, quietly began collaborating with Sam Altman and the team at OpenAI.
A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition. Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs.
The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile. They reminded us of a time when we celebrated human achievement, grateful for new tools that helped us learn, explore and create.
It became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company. And so, one year ago, Jony founded io with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan.
We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing. Many of us have worked closely for decades.
Through this deal, LoveFrom “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”
I have no idea what will come out of this, but it’s going to be fun to watch.
The Macintosh Plus was Apple’s third version on the all-in-one Mac, and for its time it was a veritable powerhouse. If you don’t have one here in 2025 there are a variety of ways to emulate it, but should you wish for something closer to the silicon there’s now [max1zzz]’s all-new Mac Plus motherboard in a mini-ITX form factor to look forward to.
As with other retrocomputing communities, the classic Mac world has seen quite a few projects replacing custom parts with modern equivalents. Thus it has reverse engineered Apple PALs, a replacement for the Sony sound chip, an ATtiny based take on the Mac real-time clock, and a Pi Pico that does VGA conversion. It’s all surface mount save for the connectors and the 68000, purely because a socketed processor allows for one of the gold-and-ceramic packages to be used. The memory is soldered, but with 4 megabytes, this is well-specced for a Mac Plus.
This project is still in the prototype stage, but seems really cool, even if the Mac Plus isn’t the most popular — or powerful — compact Mac.
Yesterday, in a late-night post on X, the billionaire wrote:
Colossus 2 will be the first Gigawatt AI training supercluster
Samuel Hardiman, at The Daily Memphian earlier today:
MLGW’s maximum electricity demand of all time is about 3,500 megawatts, or three-and-a-half gigawatts. Its power use is weather dependent: In the summer, MLGW uses 2,800 to 3,000 megawatts, while during the winter, it’s 1,700 to 1,800.
It remains to be seen whether MLGW and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides energy to the region, have enough electricity to serve the new xAI investments. It is also not clear how many semiconductors, known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, the site would use to run the data center.
It’s unlikely that MLGW and TVA will have that sort of power available by the time the second site is operational, and there’s plenty of evidence to back that up.