672: Wi Hyphen Fi
01 Jan 2026The truth about Wi-Fi 7, the DRAM shortage, the state of Thread and Matter, and two of the worst (or best?) proposals to improve macOS window management.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Comply TrueGrip MAX for AirPods Pro 3
- Follow-up:
- Contacts
- Contact lists are a thing (via Dayton Lowell)
- Some non-obvious complications (via Paul)
- Face ID & Touch ID
- Older folks really do struggle with Touch ID (via Harrison Krebs & Kurt Schwind)
- Strictness (via Rob Sayre)
- John’s Liquid Glass bug in macOS 26.2 (via Gui Rambo)
- Some more about Podcasts.app and background execution (also from Gui)
- RAM shortage
- Data portability
- Git
- Github will still sink its talons into you (via Simon Jodet)
- Xcode 🤝 Git (via Tom Hartnett)
- Android ↔ iOS
- Git
- Display flicker in Tahoe
- What does this even mean? (via Daniel)
- One theory (via Sean Santry)
- Some corroboration (via Philip Hofstetter)
- Contacts
- Wi-Fi 7 is a bust
- Ask ATP:
- What’s the difference between minimizing and hiding windows on macOS? (via Michael Krewson)
- Post-show: What the heck is the deal with Thread/Matter
- Home Assistant
- Nanoleaf Smart String Lights
- Lutron Caséta (former sponsor)
- YoLink
- Members-only ATP Overtime: iMac Pro… phoenix?
Sponsored by:
- Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- AirPods Pro 3 upgrade
- Contact-management follow-up
- Face ID/Touch ID
- John’s Liquid Glass bug
- Apple Podcasts bug
- DRAM shortage
- Git portability
- New iPhone-Android portability
- Tahoe display flicker
- The truth about Wi-Fi 7
- Sponsor: Quince
- #askatp: macOS Hide vs. Minimize
- Ending theme
- Thread and Matter?
AirPods Pro 3 upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, on the eve, right before the eve, where I go to the Fish Concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided to revisit my AirPods Pro 3’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I have really not been wearing much because even though I found that when I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco originally my comfort level with them was awful compared to the Pro 2’s, a lot of people have had similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues, a lot of people, they fit great. The moral of the story is they fit differently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the twos. And so you’re kind of rolling the dice and they might be better on you, they might be worse, they might be no different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had found, and I mentioned on the show, based on a listener’s tip, that if you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wear larger ear tips than you think you should, it makes them more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortable. Well, as is always the case, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you mention, you know, web browsers in the early 2000s some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature, you would inevitably hear from the two people who use Opera. And you and they’d be like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Opera does this really well or Opera’s had this feature forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the opera of noise cancelling earbuds? Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The opera of noise cancelling earbuds and in particular how they fit is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who use the comply foam tips.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they are way more popular than Opera. Probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But whenever you mention however AirPods fit you, you will always hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from two or three people saying, I only use the comply tips. They’re the best. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should just use those. They fix all of my problems. Well, this is the first time I’ve ever tried them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re the best. They fixed all my problems. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John are we just like a history eraser buttoning the thing where you bought
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods 3 return them and then bought them again? Are we just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pretending that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco happen now? Yes, we are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. Because Pepperidge Farm remembers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well done. Reference acknowledged.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I got the comply tips. They came out, I think, a few weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. They came out fairly recently. I’ve been wearing them all day and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are, I think, great. So compared to just wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a a larger set of tips from Apple, they seem to be a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco softer. Compliant even. Yes, and they feel a little more secure. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main downside of upsizing the tips from Apple is that it makes them sit less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco securely in my ears. It does make them more comfortable, but it makes them sit less securely. The comply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tips seem to have fixed that problem as well. I’ll report back if this changes over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. I should also point out that they have a couple of different variants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one I have is the TrueGrip Max with SmartSkin technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which sounds like a condom but isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice, you know, foam finish. It’s a few bucks more than their, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model, but it’s good. I enjoy it. Give it a try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have AirPods Pro 3s and they were uncomfortable for you and you upsized the tips or found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other trick that is not quite 100% working for you, give the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complied tips with the TrueGrip Max SmartSkin a try. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lowell, that does sound very naughty. I’m glad that it’s worked out for you. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we saw each other in October, if memory serves, you were rocking the AirPods Pro 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that point. So is your intention for future concert viewings to wear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 3 then, I assume?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I’m gonna do is so you know I’m going to the fish concert for New Year’s Eve tomorrow first time ever seeing a New Year’s show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live so that’ll be really fun. I hope But what I’m gonna do, I’m not so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confident that I would bring only the air pods pro threes So I’m just gonna bring both I’m gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one in each pocket and just you know I’m gonna start with the three CFR again
Contact-management follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up and let’s talk about contacts. And I’m not talking about lenses. I’m talking about people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you know, in your phone. So Dayton Lowell writes regarding Marco’s request for an archive contacts option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although that feature doesn’t exist, you can go the other way. The contacts app supports lists. I have a common contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list that I always keep selected. It remembers across app, across app launches. The only downside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it’s hard to build this list. There’s no mass select option within the full list. You have to go into each contact individually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and scroll to the bottom and select add to list. That sounds freaking awful to do. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying the end state isn’t worth it, but it sounds awful to do it I wonder and I’m not gonna try while we’re live But I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the Mac contacts app would would allow for this and do a little better Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see these questions and I’m immediately suspicious and like that can’t possibly be true of the Mac app Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John on a QWERTY phone app, but you know these days I wouldn’t put anything past Mac apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know have no support for multi-selection or whatever. So I don’t mean to doubt Dayton But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would try the Mac app to see if it will let you multi-select. And you know, the iOS app should let you multi-select
⏹️ ▶️ John and change things too, but I have an easier time believing that that one won’t. But yeah, that’s a possible
⏹️ ▶️ John option if you can keep things straight and if it really does remember your selected
⏹️ ▶️ John list across all apps in the contact picker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, the downside of those, so we’ve had a few people write in with the solution and the solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically like make a list that is not everyone and have that list just stay selected as the active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list like in the navigation of the contacts app and that will do what we want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for archived contacts when looking at that list but it won’t affect any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the system so you’ll still have contacts that you don’t really want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see all the time you’ll still you’ll still have them show up in search you’ll still have Siri try to call them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you’ll still have like autocomplete show them up in message composition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows and stuff like that So like it it achieves one part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduction in immediate visibility that I’m seeking with an archive contact But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not achieve most of them and it still makes it way too easy to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know place a phone call to You know a co-worker from 10 years ago or an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ex-partner or somebody who has died And it’s just like all these these situations where again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you don’t really want to necessarily delete the contact forever and never be able to contact them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all their past communication just turn into a phone number. Like you don’t necessarily wanna do that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want it to be one tap away or one misheard Siri command away from all of a sudden calling or messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this person. So I still think the need exists for archived contacts in some form.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is a very small step towards that. You can kind of hack it, but it doesn’t go far enough for what I actually want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real-time follow-up, the Mac Contacts app doesn’t need that you take multiple selections then drag them into a list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. Computer’s always better, am I right? Continuing with contacts-related things, Paul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, with regard to harmonizing contacts between family members, there’s also a deeper data privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question that any such system would have to manage. Simple example is a family of four, a mom, a dad, a son, and a daughter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They share their contacts with each other. Are they sharing their MyCard profile? And whose nickname has primacy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The mother usually isn’t mom to the father, but the kids might have different nicknames for each other. So is one kid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kid one or snot-nosed? One solution might be to allow each person to have their own versions of fields.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have some thoughts about contacts data management for single users. Sometimes after, sometime after I got an iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started to archive expired contact info. If someone, including me moved, got a new email or a new phone number, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy their old info into the notes field and then update the appropriate field. Were you and your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey partner or family member to apply this archival technique, you can immediately tell who is up to date because the notes field will have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the older address, email or phone. If no one else has the version you have, but they have a version that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your notes than you have the most up-to-date version. As a quick aside about this, I should have prefaced this and I forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really enjoy this feedback because this is a great example of, oh, surely that’s easy, isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? And so much in computer programming is, well, you would think so, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is a great example. And even something as simple as, what’s my card? Granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one’s fairly simple to figure out, but I think an even better example perhaps is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nicknames thing. Like, do you carry the nickname across cards? Maybe you do for some, maybe you don’t for others.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How does the user indicate that? These are solvable problems for sure, but—and I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off on a tangent. Hi, we’re the Accidental Tech Podcast. But anyways, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought this was a fascinating case study, and it’s never as easy as you think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to make you put a quarter in a jar every time you put the in front of the name of this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also the idea that other people in your life, whether it’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family or any coworkers, whatever it is, the idea that you would trust them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manage and pollute your contact database. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like I’m in good company here, both the two of you and our listeners. We,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect, have better contact semantic discipline than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there. When you see someone else’s phone and you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know the names they’ve given contacts first of all no one has a last name or the last name is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plumber you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Plummer’s calling and they don’t they don’t know how to use the company field at all ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right like it’s ridiculous no one has it’s like it’s like when we would like be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco careful tagging our mp3s back in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like making sure we have like the track number you know all these have everything correct like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one exercises that discipline with contacts and and if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they know how to use these things a lot of times they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it as a form of you know poking fun at their siblings you know their sister would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like you know butt face or whatever like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I still would like a shared pool as I would trust my wife and I to share a pool of like the people we know
⏹️ ▶️ John like extended family because it’s just a frustrating for us to have double the ones and Paul’s suggestion of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially implementing your own revision control system by every time a field changes, copying
⏹️ ▶️ John the field down to the notes field with like, you know, this used to be the last name, colon, right? I mean, it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that will work, but like, geez, like that’s what we have computers for. And to Casey’s point, implementing this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not hard on the backend, but making a UI for it that is understandable
⏹️ ▶️ John people, boy, that’s the hard problem. Like, that’s very often the case. Like, because context,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I’ve harped on many times before, the volume of data is just ridiculously low by
⏹️ ▶️ John modern computer standards. Like no matter how many contacts you have, it’s just a bunch of text fields, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John one photo for each one. Like it is nothing compared to like your photo library, even in these days, your messages library, anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s a small amount of data. We can sync it and have it, you know, like we have the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John to do all that, but how do you present the UI that lets you say, okay, well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John mom’s contact card is shared with the whole family, but the kids call her mom, but dad doesn’t call
⏹️ ▶️ John her mom. So how do you like, how do you provide per field overriding in
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI on a phone in a way that makes sense to people? And to Marco’s point,
⏹️ ▶️ John people can’t even just use the straight up. Like this is a bunch of fields in your own context that aren’t shared with anybody. They don’t even populate
⏹️ ▶️ John those. The worst one is obviously two factor, which I think a lot of tech nerds have like a single contact
⏹️ ▶️ John called like two factor authentication. They add them all to that, right. Versus just a million random
⏹️ ▶️ John phone numbers that are constantly sending you two factor codes. Hopefully this will go away someday if we all move to PASCs
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But like in the meantime, just scroll through somebody’s messages. Listen, look at how many like
⏹️ ▶️ John completely unlisted, uh, two factor numbers are just in there, junking up the list. Whereas you combine them all
⏹️ ▶️ John into a single contact that becomes a one message thread. Uh, again, if messages is able to merge things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never tried this. This is a really good idea. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to do that. Yeah. I, I’m wondering, eventually I’m going to hit the limit. Like context is going to be like, sorry, you can’t add
⏹️ ▶️ John any more phone numbers to the contact, but so far I haven’t hit it. So I have a contact called two-factor authentication
⏹️ ▶️ John or two-factor verification. I forget, it’s got like a lock icon and it’s got a whole jillion telephone numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John associated with it. And anytime I get a two-factor code, it goes into a single message thread in messages under that contact.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I get one that’s a bare phone number, add to existing contact. You’d be surprised how often they reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers. You might think, oh, it’s a different number every time. It’s not. I’ve had numbers in there for like the two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John authentication for some random thing that’s been there for years. And it always comes from the same apparent number.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a really good idea. I feel like we talked about this before and then I forget about it by the time we’re done recording.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to do it on my kids’ contacts, but of course they rebelled and said, please don’t do that to my thing. So, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know, I’m their dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pablo Rodrigo writes, you can display contacts from multiple accounts, iCloud, Gmail, IMAP, et cetera, in the Contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. This creates multiple contacts from the same person, but then you can link them to a peers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. And when you change some info in one of them, it updates every single linked account. This solves John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud, Gmail situation. Also creating a linked intermediary shared account for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and your partner to sync selected contacts can act as a way of keeping contact info and sync between two people’s address books.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, you can create an archived Gmail account exclusively for storing contacts you no longer want in your main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud contacts. They will keep syncing to your devices, but if you select just your iCloud account in the usually hidden left pane,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will remain out of sight and out of mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except with Siri and autocomplete.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. One, yeah. One, uh, the, uh, uh, using like the Gmail, uh, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts along with, uh, iCloud contacts and stuff. The reason I don’t do that, I think I did it way back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the day and decided to undo it, is because Google in the Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ John app, I believe it gets configured by default, and I don’t know if they’re deciding to change this,
⏹️ ▶️ John will add stuff to your contacts for you based on whoever emails you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I like that feature. I want that feature, but it also means my Google
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts are just a giant cesspool of like everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John ever emailed me, right? And again, I like that to be there because I like to have a list of essentially everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who ever emailed me so I can look up like, I don’t wanna disable that, but I would never
⏹️ ▶️ John allow that to mix in with my iCloud stuff for that very reason because it’s just filled with
⏹️ ▶️ John junk. So I’m currently happy with the separation that I have there. Again, as I said, when we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this last episode, doesn’t actually bother me. As for creating the intermediary shared account, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Todd, our friend Todd Vizzieri did this at one point if I remember correctly. Like you basically get a, like you have an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, your spouse has an Apple ID, then you get a third Apple ID that’s neither one of you, and you put
⏹️ ▶️ John the shared contacts in that one. And similarly, like making like a Google account just
⏹️ ▶️ John for your archive contacts. Like these are all hacks of various,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, ways around, like it’s kind of like the photos shared library
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. There were ways to try to hack around that as well, but I’m perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John happy having waited a decade for them to just implement it because it’s so much better when they just implement it themselves. And it does
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less what I want. So, hopefully someday they’ll get to that with Contacts. I can’t believe they did it for Photos before Contacts,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I guess maybe it’s a bigger team on photos.
Face ID/Touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Face ID and Touch ID. Harrison Krebs writes, old people’s Touch ID issues are real. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grandparents went through it with their iPhone SE, third generation a week ago. I had to help them go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and remove their fingerprints and re-add them because I stopped working. No idea if they could make it better. Kurt Schwind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I can confirm that old people’s fingerprints stopped working. I spent 40 minutes with my 80-year-old mother trying to get her fingerprint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey login working with her new phone. She got a new one because the old one stopped working with her fingerprints. Don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It didn’t work on the new one either. I tested her out on my iPad and it was the same thing. hit a certain age and these readers just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t work anymore. Finally, Rob Sarah writes, I have to work. I’ve had to work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on stuff like face ID and touch ID before. These things are likely using your habits and purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey history to decide how strict to be. Face ID will accept basically anything unshaven, sloppy, not myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I’ve been to the place many times before, it’s the same as what Stripe does for fraud detection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes sense if you treat the phone login data as part of a fraud detection ML strategy, like what Stripe does online.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Surely not all Face ID logins can have the same certainty score, so it seems like they are looking for other signals as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they’ll never talk about how that works in public, so it’ll be interesting to hear whether other listeners report
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I asked Rob about this. I was like, do you, you’re just speculating based on your past experience? He said, yeah, he doesn’t know for a fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does this. But that would be an interesting strategy to essentially be looser on Face ID if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re Face IDing in like a location or at a time or like, you know, there are lots of other
⏹️ ▶️ John input into the system besides just your face scan. My inclination is to think that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t get any more lenient with face ID and touch ID based on other
⏹️ ▶️ John factors, but I don’t know for a fact either. So anyone at Apple has any inside info to at least let us know whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they do change the strictness of biometric authentication based on other factors. You don’t have to tell us the secret
⏹️ ▶️ John sauce or whatever, but I would love to know if that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, even stuff like Apple Watch proximity, that works in the direction. Does it also work that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way? the answer is like they tried it once. There’s some reason why like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything involving the iPhone security model, it’s super complicated. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super sophisticated attacks all the time that that people try that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to protect against. And so, you know, anything that we’re thinking of, like, Oh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just can. Can they just like reduce the security in this one case? Like the answer probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they can’t because of, you know, vulnerability X like you know so somebody could then do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and this and that would you know weaken your security GPS spoofing or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s all like the iPhone threat landscape is vast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so Apple you know takes it extremely seriously and I think has a very good track record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall you know of keeping the iPhone secure but like a lot of this stuff is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay the reason why it you know times out after a certain amount of X is because if you didn’t then you could have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this you know police thing could break in like there’s There’s all these different attack vectors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple has to protect against with the iPhone. And the risk of getting it wrong for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them is so high that they play it pretty conservatively. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the right move. That being said, I still would love a phone that offered me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch ID and Face ID, and whichever one succeeds first, I could configure it to let me in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way. And even if I accept reduced security, that’s probably still better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than making it so difficult everybody makes the passcodes 1212.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I hope you get that within the next 30 years because this was just two of the many pieces of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John we got saying, oh, people not being able to use Touch ID is 100% a real thing. So it’s not just my parents,
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many people are going to confirm this. Clock’s ticking on all of us and all of our fingers and our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saggy skin. See, in 30 years, I’ll move to a secluded island where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can set my passcode to 1212 and it won’t be that big of a problem because nobody will ever see me enter it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just disable your passcode If you’re on a secluded island yeah, but with no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco path code of the bunch of stuff doesn’t work.
John’s Liquid Glass bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, friend of the show, Guy Rambeau writes with regard to John’s liquid glass bug in Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS 26.2. Guy writes, I have a workaround for the liquid glass issue you mentioned on ATP, but involves overriding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or swizzling a private method on NSWindow with the melting emoji. Maybe there’s a way to do it without this hack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The important thing to keep in mind is that this can be influenced by the configuration of your window or panel, not just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your SwiftUI views or the system. So, uh, John has provided for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes, a link to the PR that Guy opened. Guy continues. It looks to me like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple changed the way SwiftUI materials behave. So they no longer render in an active state unless the app is active
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the window is rendering with an active appearance. This is fine for most regular app windows, but it doesn’t work for helper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps like SwitchGlass. I tried SwiftUI’s material active appearance modifier with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the active option, but that didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as it out of last time, it also doesn’t work for things like the dialogue box that comes up and says, are you sure you want to restart? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that has exactly the same properties of, you know, not being the active window because it doesn’t belong to any specific app,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is translucent and you can see things behind it. So anyway, this is just a bug. They need to fix it. Hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ John no movement on my feedback. The pull request is to my sample project. So I filed feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ John I made a sample project, and I asked Guy to provide a pull request against that sample
⏹️ ▶️ John project that fixes it. And he did, that’s great. I did actually adapt the
⏹️ ▶️ John code that he provided to provide a more targeted fix for my actual app. And so now there is an updated version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Switch Glass that works around the bug in 26.2. The glass is glassing again.
Apple Podcasts bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then speaking of Guy, uh, he also provided some feedback with regard to the podcast app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how it’s like randomly loading stuff. So Guy writes, there’s definitely something weird with how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple podcast does things in the background and everybody three, which is currently in beta, I use the private media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remote API to be able to show now playing information in the apps widgets. I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a few occurrences of the podcast app randomly popping up in the now playing information coming from that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API on my Mac, even though I pretty much never used Apple Podcasts and had not used it recently before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the incident. It happens more often when I have had some other app like music playing, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quit the app. Instead of going back to an empty state, the media remote API just decides that Apple Podcasts is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new now playing app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. Yeah. That the whole audio now playing management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack is it’s full of a bunch of exceptions to things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the, you know, The system has all these different ways to manage different apps and how they’re visible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how they’re running and what they have access to. And how do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you show updates to what is playing? And like, well, you have to update something in Control Center like once a second and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing else can really do that. And so they have special functionality for audio apps that the now playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And so like, there’s all these different APIs around this and all this different system functionality around it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is basically little exceptions the way things usually work for everything else to achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know common audio functionality that people want and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it wouldn’t surprise me if there are little areas like this where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some bug possible because Apple made an exception for one of their apps at some point to achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this functionality now to Apple’s credit the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of audio functionality that hooks into all this stuff is actually public APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s why Overcast and other audio apps can hook into that. Like when Overcast plays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio, it gets the same treatment in Control Center as the Apple Music app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple Podcasts and everything else. There’s not that many areas of those APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are still private to Apple. There are some, but there’s not many.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also all of those areas of code are really old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re all like super old, like, you know, Objective-C based, you know, dictionary based APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a lot of like, you know, casting things to NS number and stuff like that. You know, like there are a lot of that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff going on with those APIs. A lot of old C and C++ code that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might occasionally see in call stacks or have to call into. It’s a very old API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of it dates back to like when Springboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS, like, you know, kind of window system base, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Springboard was like one giant monolith and like, it’s super complicated, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of it dates back to those old days. And so this is very old code that’s full of special cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and exceptions and behaviors that don’t work the same way everything else in the system does. When you combine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this with so many new APIs they’ve added over time, things like NSUserActivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, widget updates even, or things like universal links and how those are handled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure there’s all sorts of potential for like, in some really rare case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this number value can be stuck in this dictionary and can be interpreted by this demon in the system to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean this. Like, I’m sure there’s stuff like that. Working in the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app space, there’s a lot of problems that audio apps don’t have to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for instance, most background execution. When your app is running, playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio in the background, you can just run in the background infinitely. You can do whatever you want in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have a lot of restrictions there, so it’s great. And you can do stuff like integrate with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system in these weird ways, like to show up in Control Center and stuff. Some of that stuff is actually really nice as an audio app author.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The downside of being an audio app author is that the complexity of all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs and behaviors of the system, all of the problems created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by that complexity become your problem, even though they’re not your fault, and even though you often have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control over them. All that, and also, for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple changes the behaviors of those audio subsystems a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like almost every point update to the OS, there’s some change to like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now AirPlay switching is slightly tweaked, and now it breaks in this weird circumstance, or there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird bug in the Control Center Audio Player if you set this value to this, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple tweaks that a lot. And it’s like, kind of at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco random with different OS versions and not like all just at once in the summer version. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of are along for this wild ride that gives you some insight into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the massive complexity of how iOS integrates with audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. So there’s a lot there. There’s a lot of weird complexity there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow the Apple podcast app is finding itself opening in weird ways at weird things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to weird times, weird times, like given that it operates in that environment, I’m not surprised at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I find that the picking what to play next,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like let’s say you plug in your, or not plug in, but do you put in your AirPods and you hit play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sometimes it’ll be like, yes, I will go back to the thing that I, that you were just doing. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it works great. But oftentimes it either straight up refuses or plays something that you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interacted with in like a day I’m being hyperbolic, but you know what I’m saying like it’s just very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s either perfect or the kookiest Selection you can come up with it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that exact problem of like I played overcast an hour ago Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went and did other stuff now I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put my head I just put my air pods back in and I click the stem to play what should play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast should play if it was your last played audio app. But okay, that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, anybody at Apple, I would love any help with this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the big Overcast rewrite last summer, two summers ago now, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that big rewrite, Overcast would be picked to play next in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco context way more often than it is now. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combed over the code before and after the rewrite, trying to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that could possibly have been relevant to that that has changed. I’ve looked at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the IN upcoming media API, I’ve looked at the various intent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco donation mechanisms. I cannot figure out why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast now, post-rewrite, gets way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less invocation that way. Like when you click, when you plug in your AirPods and you click play,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast is very unlikely to be there after a few minutes. The memory usage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app is way lower than it used to be. So I don’t think it’s being jettisoned from memory. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. Again, I’ve gone over all the intent code. I’ve gone over all of the media API code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot figure this out. I cannot figure out what is different. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and believe me I’m getting reviewed for it like all of this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to I don’t want to complain too much but I will say this is an area where it’s hard being audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app developer because again you get blamed for these problems and a lot of these problems are just really difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work around or solve and you’re kind of at the whims of the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea what to do to improve that I just guess I try things and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sometimes it works and And then the next iOS point update, it changes and it breaks again. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no idea why my code didn’t change in that area. Like it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s, it’s tough. I wish I could solve that one problem. That is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one white whale, like wishlist item since the rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, I wish I could achieve this with overcast. I wish I could get it back to when you plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your headphones. It is the one recommended to you. And it is the one that you, if you click play it plays. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no idea how to do that. I’ve tried so many things. If anybody knows, please let me know. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry. That is no fun. Maybe I should use a DTS incident for the first time ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we should talk about this at length another time, but I very, very much think you should. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think anything will come of it, but if you, like me, just let those go to waste every year, you should absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. Sorry for those that aren’t familiar. What is it? Something technical support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Developer technical support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And basically, at least as we sit here now, You get two of these a year where you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can basically sort of kind of cut to the front of the line and say, no, really, I really need a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey human being to look at this radar, this feedback. And I’ve done this once or twice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one time, if I remember right, it worked really well. I’m pretty sure we talked about it on the show. And one time it was like, well, that was a complete waste.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking, anyone I’ve ever spoken to that has done this has positive things to say for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part. So yeah, I think if nothing else, it would make for great hashtag content if you give it a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, you should ask about it and I suspect they’ll say, tough nudes, this is the way it is, you know, there’s nothing you can do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it can’t hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I’ve heard good things about DTS. So yeah, the idea is like, you can actually, it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re filing a tech support ticket with Apple saying, I can’t figure out why my code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your code is doing this. Can you please look at this? And a human will look at it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, as Keith said, you get two per year in the developer program. I think you can buy more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s like, because it’s so limited, and two per year sounds so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scarce to me, I’ve never thought that any problem was worth using it on. In part because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, I’m not good at asking for help, I’ll be honest, but also, the fact that it’s so limited,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like when you get like, the really special sword in the video game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never use it. Because I’m like, I’m gonna lose it. If I use the really special sword,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I go out there and do something stupid and die die and lose it. I’m going to be so upset that I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep it in my storage crate back at my base and I’ll bring it out sometime but I never actually do because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m always afraid of losing it. Stealth Ark Raiders
⏹️ ▶️ John content from Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was thinking more like Minecraft but yeah, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Ark Raiders is the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing. I have so many good guns sitting in my vault. I don’t want to take them out because I know I’ll die with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like that, like I never, when something is as limited as you get two of these per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m always like, well, this problem that I’m facing, what if I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my DTS tickets and then later I need some really important help on something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really urgent? It’s that kind of psychology of loss aversion and limited capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things. You know what? I don’t want to use a special sword. I’m just going to build my base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right on top of the end portal and just build a bunch of stone swords and just fall into the end portal every single time and just keep dying until I
⏹️ ▶️ John My tip for this is, I mean, yes, definitely do use DTS for sure. Like I think you should use
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It sounds like a perfect case. I mean, my thought with DTS is always like, oh, they probably won’t be able to help me, but who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they will. And anyway, you should use it. But if that doesn’t work, if DTS is not able to figure it out or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever advice you get doesn’t change things, there’s another option that we have
⏹️ ▶️ John because we know some people in this community who have expertise in figuring out crap like this. If you’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to share enough of your source code for them to like literally debug We know people who you can contract to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, hey, I’ll pay you some money. Your debugging skills are better than mine. Figure this
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And they’ll figure it out. I mean, we just talked about Guy Rambeau, Daniel Jalkut’s amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John debugger who does contract work. There are other names that I could chuck into our Slack channel. Certain people who
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is one of their core skills. Like they know all the tricks with the debugger. They know how to do all this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that in theory you wouldn’t be able to do. Like they, you know, turn off system integrity
⏹️ ▶️ John protection and everything to just get in there and figure out what the hell is going on in this phone that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John causing your app to be the next one that’s played? If anyone can figure out, it’s one of those people. And they’re out
⏹️ ▶️ John there and they’ll take your money. So think about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that as a backup strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I never considered that before. That’s not a bad idea. I’ll think about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, the thing is though, then you’re showing people your source code. And if it’s anything like me, that’s like, you know, coming out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to school in your underwear or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re paying the money and you know, you do it for people that you trust. like, Jocko’s not gonna leak your source
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and he doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care about your source code. Like, you know, find someone you trust to do it. And, you know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s the advantage of us being in this community. We know some people who are really good at this. And this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John very specialized skill that not every developer has or not every developer has to that degree. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, DTS, first option for sure. But if that doesn’t work out, hmm?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I will say it’s terrifying having something like, when I, so after I sold the magazine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At some point, a few months later, Glenn Fleischman had contracted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our friend Guy English to do some work on the code. And so Guy English got to see my code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve McLaughlin That would be terrifying. Will Duffield Guy English is a really good programmer. And so I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mortified. I’m like, oh, no. You had him look at my code?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like the greatest compliment I ever got was later on, Guy told me like, yeah, it wasn’t bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would absolutely take a, it wasn’t bad from Guy Rammus and put that shit on the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of insulted that you weren’t terrified to show me your PHP code for the back end of ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently you didn’t care about that. No, not at all. Well, because the good news is PHP code, it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like writing really good visual basic code. It’s like, there’s really no great way to do this. You can write less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad PHP code, but it’s all going to be a little bit clumsy. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, you’re just free. free to be to run around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco naked in your PHP code because what are you gonna like everyone’s PHP code is a little bit messed
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s crap everywhere and when everything’s crap nothing’s crap exactly it’s very free
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if I agree with that philosophy but anyway gracious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are going so far off rails are bringing it back
DRAM shortage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey An anonymous industry insider had thoughts about the RAM shortage. The Verge article, called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM is ruining everything, was not quite fair to the DRAM makers, implying that we are artificially keeping supply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low. This is simply false. We are in a pure demand overrun right now. Our fabs are running at full max-out mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently, optimizing bit output over all else, even shifting new product introduction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to optimize output on the already high-yielding parts. And why wouldn’t we? Every chip we make is making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey huge margins right now because demand is so high. At the end of the article, they did mention that Micron and Hynix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, in fact, building new fabs, but this understates what’s actually happening. After spending almost 20 years without building any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new DRAM fabs in the world, the next 10 years could nearly double the total DRAM wafer output, at which point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the DRAM companies better hope to God the AI bubble doesn’t burst. Some examples of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were provided by the anonymous person, Micron has six DRAM fabs on the roadmap, all in the US, three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which should be online before 2030. This will increase Micron wafer output by nearly 200%. Hynix just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubled the size of their biggest fab, and if OpenAI’s order of 900,000 wafers a month goes through,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hynix is going to build four more megafabs, each of which is the size of four regular fabs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Samsung is converting NAND fabs into DRAM, which will hurt NAND pricing, but help DRAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to hurt NAND pricing. I mean, my eight-term might have seemed to be cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper RAM in 2030 is something to look forward to after the AI bubble bursts, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ugh. Additionally, this doesn’t help things in the next year, But these things take time to build.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One more final technical note, a major reason consumer and mobile DRAM is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting squeezed so hard is because the AI companies are buying HBM or high bandwidth memory and a lot of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HBM has a 3 plus to 1 trade ratio with normal DRAM. That means to make 100 gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HBM, it takes three to four times more wafers than it does to make 100
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of DDR whatever, LPDDR whatever, or GDDR whatever. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trade ratio is due to both technical reasons, for example, the HBM dies are much larger per gigabyte than standard dies because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have to allocate a ton of silicon floor space for the through silicon via technology used in the chip stacking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well as lower yields due to the very complex packaging. Every gigabyte of HBM that’s being made means three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or four fewer gigabytes of regular DRAM that can be made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, for whatever it’s worth, I really enjoyed last week the Verge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cast did a RAM holiday spectacular episode and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lot of fun and also I learned a lot about the DRAM shortage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now and what what all these you know factors how they all play into it and everything so I can strongly recommend the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Verge cast from last week called Ram Holiday Spectacular. Excellent.
Git portability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Git portability. Simon Joday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Git is very portable, and that’s why GitHub tries to keep you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with other proprietary features such as GitHub Actions. They use their own syntax,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and migrating can represent a significant investment. It’s no surprise Microsoft tried their crummiest changes on this aspect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of their product. Luckily, some open source projects like Gitea, G-I-T-E-A, use a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compatible syntax. For do-it-yourselfers, Gitia is really easy to set up with a Docker Compose file. Now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking my language.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use any of those fancy features in GitHub, but yeah, they do provide value add, as they would say in the business,
⏹️ ▶️ John by providing features above and beyond just what Git provides. But if you avoid them or are willing to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, port from those things, you know, GitHub issues are similar. Like you use those, Casey, like that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John strictly part of Git, that’s part of GitHub, but most systems have some kind of issue tracking thing. So yeah, migration
⏹️ ▶️ John gets more difficult the more you integrate with those platform specific features, but those
⏹️ ▶️ John features are good. So, you know, there’s a reason they call it value-add, it’s not entirely cynical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tom Hartnett writes, John gave me the impression he might be going to github.com, creating the remote repo and then setting the upstream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locally and pushing to it. I wanted to mention that you can create a new remote on GitHub from within your Xcode project,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming you have your credentials wired up. You can even add the repos description and set its public or private visibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was indeed doing it manually for two reasons. One, I had no idea this feature exists, so there’s that. But two,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the features like the Git integration that it provided in Xcode, I just avoid because it’s either been
⏹️ ▶️ John crashy or unreliable for me based on my experience from like years ago. Maybe it’s gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John better now, but for example, I never push from within Xcode because for a long time, every time
⏹️ ▶️ John I pushed, it would like crash and lead stuff in a weird inconsistent state or it would say it pushed, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t really. So I always push from the command line. I mostly do my Git stuff from the command line,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, Xcode does have this feature and this is definitely easier than copying and pasting the commands that GitHub puts
⏹️ ▶️ John up. So the next time I have to do this, I’ll try it. We’re not gonna put these screenshots in because they’re from Tom’s actual thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and have like his username and stuff in there or whatever. But if you go to the little repo thing in the Xcode sidebar,
⏹️ ▶️ John right click on remotes and say new, you can say new remote and it will prompt
⏹️ ▶️ John you and you’ll be able to type in you want it to go on GitHub and blah, blah, blah. And you want it to be public or private. You can do it all from
⏹️ ▶️ John the GUI and Xcode without having to go to the command line. So I will check that out next time.
New iPhone-Android portability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the future, switching between iPhone and Android will get easier with new Apple and Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collaboration. So, reading from MacRumors, Apple and Google are teaming up to make it easier for users to switch between iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Android smartphones, according to 9to5Google. There’s a new Android Canary build available today that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simplifies data transfer between two smartphones, and Apple’s going to implement the functionality in an upcoming iOS 26 beta. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already has a move to iOS app for transferring data from an Android device to an iPhone, while Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has an Android Switch app that can migrate data from an iPhone to an Android smartphone. The new method will apparently replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey existing apps. Both Apple and Google are facing regulatory pressure around the world, with multiple countries scrutinizing practices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that might keep customers locked into a platform. Making it simpler for users to transition from one platform to another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be beneficial to both companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Git portability and data portability. We talked about this before, about things that can increase competition
⏹️ ▶️ John and regulatory things being passed that might force platform owners
⏹️ ▶️ John to make transitioning easier. Again, Apple and Google had been doing something in this area.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure their efforts were not great. This seems to be an improvement on both
⏹️ ▶️ John of those. We’ll see when it ships and I kind of assuming they’re doing it in response to regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure or just makes their life easier to for them to both work. Here’s the thing about this it is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually to both their advantages to have a because everybody wants switching to be easier they just all want the
⏹️ ▶️ John switching to go in their direction and it’s very difficult to make it so that switching is only easy in your direction
⏹️ ▶️ John and hard in the other, cause that’s also extremely anti-competitive and we’ll probably run a foul of all the people currently suing
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and Google. Um, so fingers crossed that this, uh, helps a little bit, but yeah, this is something we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really talk about much in the show because we’re not really, we’re not recruiting people switching
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple platforms from other platforms, nor are we frequently switching from Apple platforms to Google
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms, but people do. It’s a thing that happens. Uh, everyone doesn’t stay on the same platform
⏹️ ▶️ John forever. people switch in both directions and anything that makes that easier is welcome.
Tahoe display flicker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to display flicker in Tahoe, Daniel writes, the annoying thing about display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flicker is that it can mean about a thousand different things to different people, full screen or just some content. Did the screen get all the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to full black or did the brightness level just not change smoothly? Or was it the amount of HDR headroom, et cetera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The public comments are sort of all over the place on how to reproduce it. First party displays only or third party as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only HDR content or SDR as well. Do people realize some UI is now HDR? Do people realize the studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display does some fake HDR tricks? If nobody who can fix the issue is able to reproduce it, and there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey existing radar that seems to correlate, then there’s not a lot that can be done. Unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody can get an iPhone or whatever video of the issue and post it online. That would be super helpful, theoretically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Taking video of screen flicker is going to run afoul of a whole host of problems. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John just taking video in the presence of certain LED lights can cause weird strobing stuff, and you’re going to try to catch flicker
⏹️ ▶️ John on another display by taking video of it? That’s tricky. But here’s the thing about these kind of bugs. because like
⏹️ ▶️ John I get that, you know, there’s a lot of ones that we just avoid or avoid filing a feedback on because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John it happens intermittently. I don’t know how to reproduce it. It’s hard to see blah, blah, blah. But when something like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just it’s so widespread that like I’ve seen enough of these stories all over the Internet that it’s not an
⏹️ ▶️ John epidemic. It’s not crippling everybody’s computers, but it’s also not extremely rare. Like I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say it is more common than the podcast app opening stuff up. This is a thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John people have said that there’s been screen flicker issues with the studio display and other displays, even before Tahoe, but
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone agrees that it’s gotten much worse with Tahoe. I kind of feel like this is on Apple. Like, every one of
⏹️ ▶️ John that company is using Max to do their dev work, right? They’re running Tahoe, presumably.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve gotta be seeing, they probably have studio displays. If anyone’s gonna have studio displays, it’s gonna be people at Apple, right? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John probably seeing this, right? So, are they, is the whole company going, well, I just assume someone else is taking
⏹️ ▶️ John care of this? Like, eventually, they should be just as annoyed as we are. Oh, hey, we all upgraded Tahoe, Now the
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid flickering is happening in all our studio displays. It’s not my department cause I work on the whatever app, but somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John should be fixing this, right? Please. Apple. Like it’s an institutional competency
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to have your, your internal user base. Like all the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are Apple employees who use max all day, if they’re all seeing or some significant portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are seeing a bug like this flickering Tahoe thing, find it and fix it. It’s not going to be any, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John some person who’s working on the notes app, It’s not their responsibility to fix this, but they should be able to raise their hand
⏹️ ▶️ John internally and say, this is the thing, somebody fix this. Because we on the outside can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if we file a feedback, just to go into a black hole, like show me the reproduction, like show me the video
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, how do you even capture this? But it’s a thing that you can see with your eyes. So I really hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John there are folks working on this already, and I hope they do address it. I’m thankful that I haven’t seen it on my
⏹️ ▶️ John studio display, but the Mac it is attached to is not running Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m on Tahoe on this MacBook Pro, and I don’t recall having ever seen this, or if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, I explained it away internally as something else, because I’ve never noticed this that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can tell. Sean Santry writes along the same topic, the studio display flickering introduced in Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens with my M2 UltraMaxx studio, so it’s not just laptops. For me, it seems to happen pretty reliably when visiting YouTube and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Safari, and there’s an auto preview of an HDR video, even though the studio display doesn’t support HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Philip Hofstadter writes, the flickering of the studio display happens whenever any HDR content appears on screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It happened in previous Mac OS versions, too, but HDR was much more sparingly used in the system UI. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in our own follow-up, we’ve gotten that it’s only for HDR, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only in Tahoe, except it’s not only in Tahoe, and it’s sometimes HDR. Like, it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John So I know HDR is used more in the iOS interface. Like, it started
⏹️ ▶️ John with the new Siri surround thing, and then Tahoe does it even more and then any of the ML stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But not Tahoe, iOS 26 does it even more
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the machine learning and the AI stuff that everything being bright, like cleanup and photos
⏹️ ▶️ John does HDR, right? But does Tahoe’s interface use
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR a lot? Like I don’t, I’m sure it uses it somewhere, again, cleanup on Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John will use HDR because it does everywhere, right? In the photos app or whatever. but just for like menus,
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, sidebars, toolbars, buttons, I don’t think any of that is HDR in
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe. So I’m not sure about the idea that, oh, it’s worse in Tahoe because
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI uses more HDR. I mean, I’m willing to believe it uses slightly more,
⏹️ ▶️ John but most of the UI you’re seeing is not HDR even in Tahoe. So I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, but I’m willing to believe that the flicker could be triggered by having HDR content somewhere. And the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Daniel was referencing of like, the studio display is not HDR, like it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get that bright, but it does, you know, I think it does like reserve some
⏹️ ▶️ John portion of it to if you have the screen brightness down to go higher than your brightness setting to do sort of fake
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR. I’m not sure how that works, but I think that’s what he was alluding to. So anyway, this is Apple’s bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s got his weird bug to fix that he
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey doesn’t quite know how to fix.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is Apple’s weird bug that hopefully someone there knows how to fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they should file a DTS incident and see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or just drive their computer over to Craig’s house.
The truth about Wi-Fi 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do topics, and we might only get to one today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is the disappointing truth about Wi-Fi 7. So, John, you’ve brought this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the table, and there’s a post by Michael John Wood at Ratings, Artings, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s called, and Michael writes, Wi-Fi 7, IEEE 802.11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BE, extremely high throughput, is billed as the next major leap in wireless performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At the center of these claims sits one headline feature, multi-link operation, MLO, a core capability of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi 7 and a required feature for Wi-Fi certified 7 devices, intended to allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simultaneous use of the 2.45 and 6 GHz bands for faster, smoother, and more resilient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connections. The problem is that the 802.11 BE specification defines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MLO broadly, permitting implementations that technically satisfy the requirement while delivering only limited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real-world benefit. Existing Wi-Fi implementations treat 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GHz as separate mutually exclusive pipes. MLO is supposed to let a client device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use multiple bands simultaneously. The 802.11b specification actually defines two very different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modes of multi-link operation. Simultaneous MLO, which enables multiple bands to operate as a single unified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection. This requires precise coordination across radios, keeping them time aligned so that they can transmit and receive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concurrently with microsecond level switching across all links. There’s also alternating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MLO, which is designed for hardware that cannot keep multiple radios synchronized. Instead of true concurrency,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a single radio rapidly time slices across different bands with predictable padding and transition delays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey None of the routers we tested support simultaneous MLO. This gap likely reflects the limitations of current hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not yet capable of achieving the sub-microsecond timing alignment required between different independent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey radios. Instead of implementing true simultaneous MLO, most routers fall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back on the simpler single radio alternating mode. As shown in the results table
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their website, 21 of the routers we tested advertised some level of alternating MLO support, however nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of them report non-physical timing values, specifically 0 ms transition and padding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delays. Such values are not feasible in real operations and strongly suggest placeholder or incomplete implementations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Only one product, the AeroMax 7, advertises realistic physically plausible timing parameters that indicate a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correctly implemented alternating mode protocol. Because Because alternating MLO still serializes traffic through a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey radio, it provides little of the latency benefit that MLO is marketed to deliver. And without proper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey timing and padding, even the theoretical advantages of alternating MLO cannot materialize in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our results highlight how wireless networking terminology and even formal certification can obscure meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technical differences. In current product marketing, three similar sounding terms are often conflated, despite having very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different implications. seven, that’s Pascal case, right? Wi Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space seven, vendor defined marketing label with no formal standing in the Wi Fi allow alliances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certification programs. wi hyphen fi seven is an informal reference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the I triple E 802.11 be generation of Wi Fi technology. While y hyphen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fi itself is a trademark of the y hyphen fi Alliance. Use of this term alone does not imply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certain implies certification. So let me repeat that the difference between the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read and the And the second thing is a hyphen. Then finally, Y-Phi certified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven is a designation used exclusively on products that have passed the Wi-Fi Alliance’s official certification process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and appear in its certified product database. Of the 25 routers evaluated in the study, only three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are currently Wi-Fi certified seven. Certification establishes a baseline for standards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compliance and interoperability, but our results show that it is neither a guarantee of a complete MLO implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nor a reliable predictor of real-world behavior. Notably, the only router in our testing that advertises a technically coherent implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of alternating MLO, the Aero Max 7 is not Wi-Fi certified 7. Cool, cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is our take that it’s best. Like it’s just, you know, they’re digging deeper into a topic,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, instead of just saying we tested a bunch of routers and here are the good ones, they’re like, Wi-Fi 7, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a new thing. It promises a bunch of stuff. Let’s test these to see if
⏹️ ▶️ John any of them are using the big fancy new features. And in particular, they’d be able to use three radios at once,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has lots of advantages that are mostly snipped out of the summary. But it’s like, if obviously using three radios at once,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the advantage of potentially more bandwidth. If you have any kind of interference
⏹️ ▶️ John on one of the channels, the other channels might still be good. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see why it would be better and you’d get more bandwidth and lower latency or whatever and be more resilient to interference
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re using 2.4 gigahertz, five gigahertz and six gigahertz all at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But apparently nobody does that. I mean, they only trust, they didn’t test, they tested 25 routers. That’s not all
⏹️ ▶️ John the routers in the world. But one of these routers was like a thousand dollar router, like ASUS, like a thousand dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless access point. So they didn’t shy away from testing the high end stuff. Ubiquity was
⏹️ ▶️ John in there as well. And literally nobody is doing simultaneous multi-link operations, simultaneous MLO.
⏹️ ▶️ John And only some of them are apparently doing alternating. Alternating is use one connection and you switch
⏹️ ▶️ John from 2.4 to five to six or whatever, as you need very quickly, right? which is still good and interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John and a kind of MLO, but it’s not the simultaneous kind of MLO. So
⏹️ ▶️ John even the fancy Ubiquiti routers weren’t doing that, although they were not the most expensive in the test. And the certification thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John just ridiculous. So we’ll link to the article, obviously, the table they’re referring to is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a table that shows a bunch of features along the top and then along the left side are all
⏹️ ▶️ John the different routers. And you either get like a green check mark or red X or like a yellow half-filled
⏹️ ▶️ John circle to see whether you implement it. And simultaneous MLO, red Xs for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then alternating MLO, red Xs for almost everybody, including all
⏹️ ▶️ John the ERA routers except for one. So it’s not looking great for the standard. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw this article, I’m like, okay, well, but why? Like I likely dug into this, and I can read the article to see how
⏹️ ▶️ John they did it. They had like a Linux computer set up analyzing the traffic to like, they weren’t just testing like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if it goes faster, it must be using simultaneous MLO. they were trying to detect the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol differences and the use of the different spectrum or whatever. And I’m assuming they did a pretty good job, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, well, you did this article, but like, is this actionable?
⏹️ ▶️ John It may be interesting from a technical perspective, but if like, again, they only tested 25 routers, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t buy a quote unquote good one, like then this article is basically like, they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John not good. Like there’s no like, avoid these ones, but get these ones because these ones say Wi-Fi 7, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t do the cool things that these do, even though they also say wifi seven. But this is like, nope, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John does it. So I was like, this is very unsatisfying. Like what, what is the deal here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did some brief searches of my own to try to figure out what I could find here and where I ended up,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you always end up when you Google for things, Reddit. And it was a Reddit discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John of this very post and the top rated comment on the Reddit thing. Again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a person on Reddit. take it for what you want, but I think what they had to say
⏹️ ▶️ John rings true for me. I’m going to find out in the next episode, they’re going to say, oh, this person works on the IEEE 802.11 BE standard, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like the last time it was the person who worked on the USB standard. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I thought this was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Protons and Neutrons on Reddit writes, the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE are two independent bodies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi 7 certified is not the same as the complete IEEE 802.11 BE specification.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, the Wi-Fi Alliance picks and chooses what it wants from the IEEE drafts, yes, drafts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before they’re released. Wi-Fi Alliance traditionally rejects some of the features from IEEE, especially in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first release. Wait, first release? Yes. For the past three generations, the Wi-Fi Alliance has split every Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release into a release one and release two. We had Wi-Fi five and Wi-Fi five wave two. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had Wi-Fi six and Wi-Fi six release two. We have Wi-Fi seven and Wi-Fi seven release two is due
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in less than a quarter. in late 2025, which is over now, or early 2026. These
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are hardware releases. It is unlikely your Wi-Fi 6 Release 1 access point or client will ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get uplinked MU-MIMO, even though that was heavily marketed for Wi-Fi 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi Alliance decided that features needed more time for implementation and, or that feature needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more time for implementation, and pushed it to Wi-Fi 6 Release 2. Wi-Fi Certified 7 was announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the Wi-Fi Alliance in January 2024, but IEEE was still tweaking until August 2024. So the Wi-Fi Alliance jumped the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gun by around eight months. Why? IEEE is, as you expect, just an engineering body, but Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alliance is a marketing and standards body. Some optional features basically never get implemented by some routers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and clients because they’re too complex, too expensive, not reliable enough, too power hungry, etc. It’s usually the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason why we don’t have four by four laptops or three by three smartphones. It costs more, it consumes more power, and the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difference is marginal. For example, I would not be surprised if simultaneous MLO is never widely implemented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in consumer mobile devices, with some high-end exceptions of course. Why? It consumes more power to transmit on two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or three bands at once. We do not get 1.5 gigabits per second transfer rates for free, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The general advice I give to people, if you buy a Release One device, don’t expect most of the marketing for that generation to be true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Wi-Fi Alliance has ensured you will not get all of the marketing features that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news articles actually take from IEEE months or years earlier for that generation. But you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get most, if not all, Release Two features of the previous generation. So a Wi-Fi 7 release 1 access point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or client should confidently get you Wi-Fi 6 release 2 features.” And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mr. Heo Super replied, This is somehow even more messy than Bluetooth and USB.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, at least it maybe works better than Bluetooth. I do think that USB still probably takes the cake
⏹️ ▶️ John for hardware confusion, but this is quite a mess. I mean, I think we’ve all been aware
⏹️ ▶️ John of Wi-Fi, and I guess even before
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi modems, like analog modems back in the day, hardware being released before
⏹️ ▶️ John the standard that they’re based on has been ratified or finalized. You remember that with like 56k modems and
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Like, because people want to get the hardware out there and like people that, you know, these standards bodies are working on standards for
⏹️ ▶️ John some faster way to transmit data over some medium, right? And they’re almost done, but they haven’t really like ratified
⏹️ ▶️ John it and nailed down all the details, but hardware makers like, no, we’re making hardware based on your draft specification and we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell it and people will buy it because it is faster than what was out there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then they said, okay, well when they ratify the standard, like you, you’ll be able to firm or update your modem or whatever, your
⏹️ ▶️ John access point and it’ll become compliant with the standard. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not. But here, in the case of like these standards that have lots of different features, some of which apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John are way more expensive or complicated to implement. I mean, it happened with wifi six, it was happening again with wifi seven.
⏹️ ▶️ John If like the standard is out and. You know, again, the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ John IEEE, which makes the standard and then the wifi Alliance, which like certifies them being two separate
⏹️ ▶️ John bodies that seem to only, only coordinate a little bit means that like the wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John Alliance is saying, okay, well there’s the standard, but nobody makes anything that complies with the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John standard. So we’re going to make a certification thing that says, here’s the wave one certification. If you do
⏹️ ▶️ John these things from the standard, we’ll give you our stamp that says you are wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John certified seven, release one, whatever, whatever like tag they want to put on it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then later when, if people figure out how to implement more features, we’ll say, okay, that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be released too. And as this person points out, apparently there, there is, they may not
⏹️ ▶️ John ever have a wifi line certification that covers all the features in 802.11, uh, B E right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so glad we moved away from those, but I remember how you said no, all those initials and everything. And they changed, I guess they changed with wifi,
⏹️ ▶️ John wifi five or six. They started using the big number instead of the eight or two 11, uh, a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of letters. Uh, that, that’s an improvement at least, but yeah, it’s confusing because do you have wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John seven? Yeah, I have wifi seven. Oh, well, is it wifi certified? If it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John which, which releases is certified to it? If it’s not, what the heck features does it support? Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of the One of the reasons I thought this was interesting is because I was reflecting on my Wi-Fi 7
⏹️ ▶️ John situation, which is, I ain’t got it. I have Wi-Fi 7, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my iPhone 16 Pro has it. My wife has an iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro that I believe has it. As I’ve complained
⏹️ ▶️ John about in past episodes, I think Apple’s Macs still do not support Wi-Fi 7, which is crappy. The bottom line
⏹️ ▶️ John is in my house, my wifi setup was purchased
⏹️ ▶️ John before wifi seven existed. So it’s wifi six, I forget which variant of wifi six, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not wifi seven at all. And I’ve been thinking about like, well, you know, Kieran Healy
⏹️ ▶️ John just posted about this, I’m asked it on. Like everything in my house networking wise works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one complains that they’re not getting enough bandwidth. No one complains they’re not gonna have signal. Everything I do on my network
⏹️ ▶️ John works. video never stutters, my downloads go fast, like I don’t have any complaints.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yet the number seven is in fact one bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I find myself thinking, when is the right time for me to, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John replace my Eero with an Eero with that supports wifi seven.
⏹️ ▶️ John And after reading this article, I think the conclusion I’ve come to is not quite yet, but I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I, I, you know, I didn’t know any of this, uh, simultaneous MLO versus alternating MLO
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and reading that one random person on Reddit makes me think, I kind of believe that no one will
⏹️ ▶️ John implement that because if no one’s implemented so far and it does take more power and everything like who’s going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but we’ll see. But anyway, what, what, what are your situations like in your house in terms of wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John seven? Um, do you have it? Do you want it? Are you going to get it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, for me, I am starting my unified journey mostly by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bequeathed or secondhand hardware. And no, none of my stuff is Wi-Fi 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compatible, and I don’t expect to go down that road anytime soon. I mean, anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like needs a whole bunch of bandwidth, I have wired. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I even have 10 gigabit Ethernet between my Synology and my MacBook Pro, which is really freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. And so for me, I don’t think I’m going to be jumping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this bandwagon anytime soon. If it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real, like everyone keeps saying, or I feel like the nerds keep saying, oh no, Wi-Fi 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will make Ethernet obsolete and leaving aside latency, which I know this is supposed to help with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but even leaving aside latency, I’ll believe it when I see it. And nothing that I’ve read today has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made me think it’s closer. In fact, this makes me think it’s a long way out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you had 2.5 gigabits between your Mac and your Synology because of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the CalDigit TS5 has onboard 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabit Ethernet. And that, I think there’s some things I lose out on by not having Thunderbolt 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can, I have definitely pushed like hundreds of megabytes per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second between my Synology and my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, because it’s all spinning rust in the Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it usually will peak for 500, 600, 700 megs for a few seconds. Then it will drop down to like 200 or 300 megs a second. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still pretty freaking great nonetheless. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, what you’re referring to is the Ubiquiti brand
⏹️ ▶️ John networking hardware. Again, some Ubiquiti stuff was in this test. I don’t know. I’m sure they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John test every possible thing Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey offers. Again, it was only 25 routers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But buying a fancy, expensive brand is not a guarantee of the lose. In my Googling,
⏹️ ▶️ John I also found a bunch of Cisco presentations and they were talking about their Wi-Fi 7 hardware rollout
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever year they started it. And they had specific slides that said basically, yeah, we’re not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John simultaneous MLO because it’s too hard and too expensive. Maybe we’ll have it in the future, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of high-end fancy enterprisey or like prosumery things like Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ John are not usually the first ones to jump on the bandwagon of a new thing and they’re taking a more cautious
⏹️ ▶️ John approach because it’s more important. especially for like enterprise stuff. It’s more important for their stuff to work reliably
⏹️ ▶️ John than for it to get to just a little tiny bit faster or whatever, because being flaky is worse than going a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit slower. But yeah, I do think like for,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially for home wifi, like I’m trying to think of a scenario where, it depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on what the power, like this thing is saying, oh, it takes more power. It takes more power to run radios at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there a scenario where I would make that trade off? Where I would say, okay, well obviously it doesn’t matter for the access point. The access point is plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John into the wall. can use as much power as it wants as long as it doesn’t have obnoxious fans. But are there any devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that use Wi-Fi that I would be willing to make that trade off to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the increased bandwidth? And I’m not entirely sure. Again, everything in my house is not Wi-Fi seven now, and I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any bandwidth complaints, which every time I think about upgrading stuff, I think, what are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything works. Don’t touch anything. Yeah, just just leave it alone. But speaking of that, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John how’s Wi-Fi seven going in your house?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I my policy for my Wi-Fi gear is when I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting up a home network I buy whatever is pretty good at that time from Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I just leave it because I don’t know if I’m unusual here I don’t think I am in this case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi speeds are not my limiting factor to almost anything now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s very important for people to realize also that whenever there’s some new Wi-Fi standard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They always brag about a certain speed capability that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice no one ever gets. Like in practice you would have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like standing next to the router in an environment with perfect conditions and no interference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get most of the speeds that are advertised by the Wi-Fi specs. These are like speeds in ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases not speeds that you will get when the router is you know in your living room and you’re upstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know not not speeds you’re you’re gonna get if there’s like a wall anywhere in your house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or if there’s anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else using the Wi-Fi at the same time. And so what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually experience with Wi-Fi is am I using my phone or laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and does it seem to work, yes or no? Like it’s more of a Boolean. Does it work or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does the Wi-Fi connect? And if the Wi-Fi is connecting, odds are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is going to offer enough throughput that I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to notice the Wi-Fi being a problem. Now, my internet in each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place is gigabit ethernet, which is wonderful. I love gigabit Fios, thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much Fios for existing. All the wiring, all the hubs and switches I use everywhere, those are all gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. I’ve been at gigabit speeds for my internal and external networking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for many years now, and I’ve never really felt that was a problem either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything is fast enough for my purposes of like, do I notice the networking? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing frequent, large, multi-gigabyte file transfers between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my computers and my Synologies or whatever, different storages, but if I were doing those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, it would be over wires. I wouldn’t really be subject to the whims of Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the Wi-Fi in my house, so at the beach, I have, I think, a mix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Wi-Fi five and six, that’s the oldest equipment I currently run. At the restaurant, it’s all six,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when I was setting up the restaurant, everyone was saying like, eh, it’s a little bit shaky maybe. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here on Long Island, it’s a mix of Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6 gear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s just whatever I bought. I bought a few and I’m like, oh, I need one or two more, that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t really matter. Nothing I do with Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing ever matters. I never look like, am I connected to Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 6?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Am I on the right frequencies? Am I using all the channels I can use? Like I never look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I let Ubiquiti auto manage the channel spreads and everything for me. And all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I care about really is, do I have a signal in this room or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s much more to do with the placement of the WiFi APs and how many of them there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are and what they’re going through to get to you. And every new WiFi standard that comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t do anything to meaningfully make that more robust. It’s more like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have great conditions, this is what we’ll be able to do for you. But what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of us are battling with our WiFi issues is like, yeah, this bedroom over here is getting 15 megabits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s like a little bit weak on the signal and it’s a little bit far from the thing because it’s going through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two walls instead of one wall or whatever it is. That’s real WiFi problems that real people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have. No one is actually going to notice if their Wi-Fi goes from 600 megabits to 800 megabits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a gigabit, that’s so far beyond what anyone’s actually getting in real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life and what they would actually notice in almost any usage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the new standards do have things for battling interference, one of the average features of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they all say that, but that one bedroom, you still can’t get that good of a signal unless you put an access
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but I’m saying, I do think that if you upgrade your Wi-Fi, in particular, if you upgrade your
⏹️ ▶️ John access point hardware, even if you leave it all in the same place and the new hardware is both newer and also
⏹️ ▶️ John uses a new standard, you do have a chance of potentially getting slightly better signal.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not going to make the room that’s really far from an access point suddenly be perfect, but it could improve matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw that when I upgraded whatever my current one is, like Wi-Fi 6E or whatever, whatever old ERO I had before,
⏹️ ▶️ John the access points are in exactly the same place. I just removed the old access points and put in the new ones from
⏹️ ▶️ John the same company. I did get better signal everywhere. It’s not as measured by like bandwidth,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m not doing like speed tests or trying to download huge files, but the signal strength is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John And thinking of applications where it would make a difference for me, I’m also not transferring huge files and the video stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have. I mean, I get, one thing I don’t do because I don’t have a disk space. Someday when I,
⏹️ ▶️ John when my Synology finally dies, knock on wood, and I upgrade to like modern
⏹️ ▶️ John storage and I have much more space, maybe I will revisit the idea of putting Blu-ray rips on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I experimented that when I first got my Synology, but Blu-ray rips are huge. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe I would run into Wi-Fi bandwidth problems trying to play
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially like, you know, the original quality in Plex or whatever, like, you know, playing a Blu-ray rip directly
⏹️ ▶️ John from my Synology in a distant bedroom that has bad signal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like onto an iPad? Like what’s the device here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, an iPad or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. Like you wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wired, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying? Yeah, I’ve had television watching in bit. And I do it all the time and it’s fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not watching 50 gig Blu-ray rips. I’m watching much more compressed content. And it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John for the lower bit rate compressed content, but I did experiment with doing Blu-ray rips and everyone’s like, oh, you gotta do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I have all these Blu-rays. I would love to rip them at original quality, like no recompression at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that might stress my current Wi-Fi. Now, would a new Wi-Fi thing help with that? Or to Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John point, what would really help with that as better access point locations. But part of the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is part of the dream of a new Wi-Fi hardware for me is like, it’s not that easy for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John add new Wi-Fi access point locations. Like I don’t have, my house is not plumbed
⏹️ ▶️ John for any kind of wiring and the places where I can put access points are pretty limited.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the places where I would want to put an access point, like in terms of the not being an eyesore
⏹️ ▶️ John is also very limited. And you know, my house is filled with a hundred year old plaster and
⏹️ ▶️ John lead in the walls or whatever the hell stuff I’ve got going on. It’s like, it’s a challenging situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another scenario that I thought of, again, reading this artings or ratings.com article
⏹️ ▶️ John about the promises and dreams of the Wi-Fi 7 thing. One of them is about
⏹️ ▶️ John the simultaneous multi-link operation, which nobody has, was about latency. And I was just
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioning this to my wife the other day. We were in Costco and I looked at this, I look at it occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John when I go by, There is a extremely stupid Sony device that they sell that looks like,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, like a Nintendo switch, but by, uh, by Sony, the PlayStation games, but it’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, is a PlayStation five controller cracked in half with the screen stuck in the middle,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t have any, like you can’t play games on it. All it is
⏹️ ▶️ John is a remote viewer for your actual PlayStation five console in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s basically, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a, I’ll put a link to it. in the chat room. It’s called the PlayStation Portal
⏹️ ▶️ John Remote Player and you need a PlayStation and this wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John connects to your PlayStation and lets you play it like a Nintendo Switch. Now I like it because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the PlayStation 5 controller handles are much more comfortable than Switch. Like I don’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John handheld games because of RSI issues but I do use my PlayStation 5 controller all the time and I find it ergonomically
⏹️ ▶️ John way better than holding a Switch and also I find it better than the Switch Pro Controller, both the original
⏹️ ▶️ John and two. But anyway, and it’s got a not very good screen in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do occasionally on my iPad launch the PlayStation Remote Play app because there’s an app for iPadOS that lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you wake up your PlayStation and then just use it from your iPad with like on-screen controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do it when I like forgot to do something in one of my games or something and so from bed with
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad with terrible on-screen controls I will fumble my way through doing some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of chore in Destiny or ArcRaiders or something and then turn the thing off but I could fully
⏹️ ▶️ John play my PlayStation in bed with this thing except do I want to be playing
⏹️ ▶️ John a real time like sort of you know reaction time is a factor
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of action game like Destiny or Arc Raiders over my current
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi setup from my bedroom which doesn’t have the best signal maybe Wi-Fi 7 would help like I’ve resisted
⏹️ ▶️ John buying this thing because it’s $200 for like a controller and a screen. Although I think you can buy an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John controller with no screen for $200 from Sony as well. Um, and also because I think my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John would not tolerate me using this thing in bed next to her because, uh, the, whether you know
⏹️ ▶️ John it or not using controls makes noise, like the buttons and the joysticks actually make noise. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John notice when you’re playing, but certainly if someone was trying to sleep next to you, it makes noise. What doesn’t make noise is me watching
⏹️ ▶️ John video with my AirPods in, uh, on my iPad because because I’m not doing anything with my hands,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think she would be annoyed by this. But this is the one application I could think of. Maybe Casey’s case would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like transferring to Synology without wires from somewhere if you ever need to do that. But mine would be, could I play
⏹️ ▶️ John the hypothetical PlayStation Portal remote player, let’s say from my
⏹️ ▶️ John couch or something, because my PlayStation is not connected to the television, it’s connected to a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor. Could I do handheld gaming within my house with my current wifi setup? and would that be improved
⏹️ ▶️ John by a theoretical simultaneous MLO Wi-Fi 7 setup?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess stay tuned because I mean, Artanis usually does a good job of following up on this. If hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John ever is released that supports the simultaneous MLO, I’m sure they’ll do a follow-up story on it and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John try to cover it here as well. It does seem like Wi-Fi 7, it’s not brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new. Like there’s plenty of hardware out there. Apple is shipping in a lot of their devices. That’s the other part of this that I didn’t mention. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter if you buy an access point, Like say they found an access point. This one supports simultaneous MLO. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have any client devices that support simultaneous MLO? Because I’m assuming nothing Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John sells does. Like their Macs don’t even support Wi-Fi 7. Phones almost certainly don’t for power reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, the iPad doesn’t. Does the PlayStation Portal remote player support
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Probably not. Like, you need, it takes two to tango here. So it just seems like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a standard that’s like ahead of its time. And like the advice at the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Reddit post thing of saying basically like maybe when you get your Wi-Fi 8 release one thing it
⏹️ ▶️ John will support all the features from Wi-Fi 7 release one and two. Kind of depressing but it
⏹️ ▶️ John does have some historical precedent so I guess the moral of the story is that networking is always
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated and if it works don’t touch it. Although I’m kind of shocked that Marco does that honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No because again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like my Wi-Fi is fine so for whatever it’s worth I looked up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is the the bitrate of like the highest UHD 4K Blu-rays?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer seems to be somewhere around 130, peaking at 150 megabits per second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, but it’s around 130 megabits per second, you know, sustained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I opened up the Ubiquiti Wi-Fi Man app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my phone, to just like, how fast is my phone currently, you know, connecting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the access point that is maybe 10 feet away in my office closet? and it’s telling me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s connected via Wi-Fi 6 mode, even though it is a U7 access point, but whatever, because I don’t think the phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are Wi-Fi 7, right? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phones are Wi-Fi 7 now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, well, it’s not using it for some reason. I don’t care why. So anyway, my phone’s connected via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi 6, currently sustaining a transfer rate of approximately 460 megabits per second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s almost four times the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data rate of a 4K UHD Blu-ray. So to give you some idea, if that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your stress test for how can Wi-Fi handle this, my pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern Wi-Fi setup handles it just fine when the access point is close.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s sad, but my bedroom is not, is one of the worst case scenarios for access point
⏹️ ▶️ John locality. Like obviously if I did it from the room with the access point, I would have no problem, but if I get distant
⏹️ ▶️ John in my very wireless, unfriendly house, that’s where it gets harder. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like, I did see an improvement in terms of data rates when I upgraded to the, from whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John I had before. I think I had a Wi-Fi 5 thing before I upgraded to 6E. I did see an improvement in the bedroom
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of, no, it sounds bad. I saw an improvement in the bedroom when I upgraded to Wi-Fi 6E.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Were you using a TrueGrip Mac, the smart skin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John technology? That’s right, yeah. Geez, easy. Using the comply
⏹️ ▶️ John tips. Oh. And so I have hope that like
⏹️ ▶️ John a place, because I can play Blu-ray rips, but they would occasionally stutter, right? And I’d be like, oh, just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever. The rats are moving the lead inside the walls. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, it’s such a bad, I would hope that it would get better. And same thing with the PlayStation portal. Like that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a bandwidth thing. It’s because the bandwidth, I’m sure, massively compresses the signal. It’s all about latency. You want it to be the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ John possible latency. And again, that’s one of the advertised features of the fancy Wi-Fi 7 is they can reduce
⏹️ ▶️ John latency by essentially routing around any weaknesses in the signal
⏹️ ▶️ John by using three radios at the same time instead of switching between them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, six milliseconds, the answer to the current latency of that same connection I was just talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. So it’s really not, like, this is Wi-Fi 6. It’s just with good reception.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Being close to the access point matters so much more than what protocol the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access point is speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John need to run an ethernet wire up to my bedroom, but just, there’s a lot of walls between me
⏹️ ▶️ John and that. Just run it out the window and pop it back in. So the people who had this house before
⏹️ ▶️ John us, like their coax for like their cable television. They had cable television in many
⏹️ ▶️ John rooms because, you know, I don’t know, they did it in the 90s or the 80s or whenever. It was the style at the time. And how did they get it
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the rooms? They ran it, they drilled a hole through the house to the outdoors,
⏹️ ▶️ John they ran the coax outside the house, up the outside of the house, and then drilled another hole into the room they wanted to go to,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did that in every room in the house. Oh my God. So why don’t you get mini splits? What are you waiting for? Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, when I got the house resided, all that crap went away.
⏹️ ▶️ John are no longer 500 holes drilled through my house with coax stuck to the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of it. You didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fish some cat six through there instead? Or use mocha
⏹️ ▶️ John bridges. It’s all gone, no, it’s all gone now. Well, unfortunately when I got a new side of my house, I also filled
⏹️ ▶️ John the walls with insulation, which was a massive improvement in the comfort of the house, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also made it one more extra difficulty to try to route wire. I’m sure an electrician could do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I mean, with plaster walls, it’s always just such a mess. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ll see if I can figure it out. I do have a, if people say, you should have a mesh network, I do. Eero is a
⏹️ ▶️ John mesh network. But mesh networks are no match for running ethernet wires
⏹️ ▶️ John to your wireless access points. That is just so much better than mesh networking, if you can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, in both latency and throughput, it’s no contest.
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#askatp: macOS Hide vs. Minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Michael Crusan writes, what is the distinction between minimizing versus hiding Windows in macOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As somebody who uses Command-Tab to jump between my applications, I pretty much just hide my Windows using Command-H, but find it confusing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the two are very similar UI concepts with different consequences. Why doesn’t Apple merge this concept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into one? Not a fan of Windows, but they at least have a single concept of minimizing application windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In your opinion, should macOS be updated to have the same behavior? Now, John,
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I don’t know how windowing works exactly on Windows. I am familiar with minimizing with a little
⏹️ ▶️ John like underscore minus whatever button thing, but here’s the thing. Mac OS X introduced this distinction
⏹️ ▶️ John between hiding windows, which existed for, I guess the entire history of the Mac, maybe, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t know where it was added, but ever since multitasking has been around, it’s existed in classic Mac OS, let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Hiding windows has existed in classic Mac OS and continued on in Mac OS X. Mac OS X added
⏹️ ▶️ John minimizing windows and minimizing means hitting the little yellow widget and that means
⏹️ ▶️ John the window leaves where it was and goes down into your dock. Now how it manifests
⏹️ ▶️ John in your dock is modifiable. Like I think there’s a setting
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can have your minified windows sort of tuck into the application that they came from. You can also have them as separate
⏹️ ▶️ John items on your dock. This is all new to Mac OS X because the dock didn’t exist before Mac OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS. Classic Mac OS did not have a dock, Mac OS X did have a dock. It’s still there. Minimizing
⏹️ ▶️ John windows are still there. It’s totally different than hiding hiding means leave the window where it is
⏹️ ▶️ John Just make it invisible and you can hide and show with all the various windowing commands and there are other
⏹️ ▶️ John ways you can do it But anyway, the window hasn’t moved. It’s just either it’s visible or it’s not Minimizing says
⏹️ ▶️ John take it from where it was and put it into the dock somewhere somehow if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John minimized windows I believe this is the default Visible in the dock as separate items you will see
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny little version of your window with a little badge for the app icon And current version of Mac OS like you
⏹️ ▶️ John can recognize your window from its tiny tiny thumbnail in the dock And so then you can visually
⏹️ ▶️ John scan and say where was that window? It’s not you don’t have to wonder where it is and go to the app where
⏹️ ▶️ John it is and do show all or anything Like that you can see it in your dock Click on it and then a little genie
⏹️ ▶️ John effect will go or the scale effect or whatever you picked We’ll make it leave the dock and go back to where it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how you could confuse these two things because they’re just so incredibly different, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why they’re both there. One of them lets you optionally continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John see tiny thumbnails of your windows while taking them off your screen, and the other one does not and just
⏹️ ▶️ John hides them in place where they are. And I wouldn’t like them to replace either one of them because
⏹️ ▶️ John people like both of them and you can mix and match them. If you, like I have a window minimized right now, but just one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have a thousand hidden windows, right? Why did I minimize that one window? Because I wanted to remind myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a window I had open, but it was like really big and I didn’t want it to like cluttering up my stuff. I’m like, I gotta remember to get back to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I just hit it, I know I would just forget that I was in the middle of that big thing. So I minimized it before
⏹️ ▶️ John this podcast. So now I see it sitting in my doc there and it’s gonna remind me, oh yeah, I was in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of that thing and I will unminimize it because I’ll see it in my doc. That’s just one example of me using
⏹️ ▶️ John minimization. And I use minimization very rarely, but I do use it for that one purpose and I use hiding all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. So again, I don’t know how Windows works, but I think having both of those concepts in macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is an advantage and they should keep them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, as far as I know, the Windows model is there’s just minimizing. But what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes the Mac model powerful, which also makes it confusing for a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially newbies to it, but what makes it powerful is that you don’t hide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows, you hide entire apps. And you don’t minimize entire apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you minimize single windows. And so you actually have those different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layers of management. You can hide individual
⏹️ ▶️ John windows. You can? Yeah, option click away from it, right? What,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really? I don’t think I’ve ever done that in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, that hides everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me see, let me see if I can find an example. I believe you can with certain arrangements that just hide one
⏹️ ▶️ John window but leave the others visible. I gotta, front and center is thwarting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco me here. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, all right, so while John does that. So basically, to me, when I hide an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, I am done with this entire app right now. I don’t need to see this entire app right now. Minimizing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I very rarely use minimizing. The only thing I use it for is Safari. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea basically is Safari, I tend to have not a John level of Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not a small number. Like right now I have, Oh, geez,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, two, three, four, five, six. I have about, looks like about 12 Safari windows. I got a lot of stuff going. Gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ John one, two, three, four, five, six. I have six. You have double the number of Safari windows. I have a lot of tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows. I mean, so do I. But for whatever it’s worth, like six of those windows are minimized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have been minimized for months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I think like many of those. Oh my gosh, you’re killing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, you two. But it’s like, here’s something, Because Safari is like, there’s so many times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have to open something up in Safari and like, oh, I want to deal with this. I can’t deal with this right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should make an app that deals with this problem for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s like, I should, I want to deal with this thing in this window. I can’t deal with it right now or I’m not ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to yet. I’ll come back to this. And then at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey point, like you can start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And clearly that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John working well. It’s like the badge on your mail that says 10,000 unread messages. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is exactly like that. I am equally bad at doing this for all of my applications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the way I do it with Safari is like, if there’s some project or something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, I’m not ready for this right now, I don’t wanna lose these tabs, I can’t deal with it yet, but also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I open Safari, I don’t want all of these windows popping back into view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and crowding my entire screen. That’s a good case for, I’m gonna minimize this window. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the clutter near my dock should remind me of it over time. like
⏹️ ▶️ John the badge on your mail will remind
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the thing I was thinking of with single windows is the option double-clicking a folder in Finder window and it will open the new
⏹️ ▶️ John folder window but it’ll close the one behind it. So it’s not actually hiding, it’s closing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so to answer Michael’s question back from a thousand years ago, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t Apple merged these concepts into one? Well, honestly, they’re different concepts. But that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of thing that like today’s Apple, if you look at like, you know, what do we have like on the iPad, like the newest windowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system that Apple has made. Granted, that’s still very much in flux, and that’s fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’re making progress overall. But modern Apple, I don’t think, would ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have created this system from scratch this way. But this is something that came from legacy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think we’re better off for it, because the idea of the Mac in today’s computing ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, yes, this is the computer that everyone can use, asterisk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is the power user’s platform. If you are a desktop computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or laptop, if you’re like a PC or Mac power user, chances are you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a Mac user in a lot of cases. And if you are a power user on the Mac, it rewards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you in a lot of different ways you can manage things, including all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window management styles and techniques and different options you have. Regular people who are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expert users never hide anything. They quit apps or they minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. That’s it. And that’s why regular people have way more minimized windows usually than I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Safari windows in my little minimized dock area. Or they just close apps with the red
⏹️ ▶️ John button. Yeah, because they just they just wanted to go away. And like once they learn that yellow button makes it go away
⏹️ ▶️ John to the dock, they just do that. That’s why you see so many people with their docks that are just filled with just a huge amount of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can’t even tell what anything is anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like 1000 minimized windows or a million
⏹️ ▶️ John application icons because they find that one system. They’re like, oh, every window has these
⏹️ ▶️ John red, yellow, and green buttons. And I kind of recognize them, and I learn what they do, and I learn the yellow one makes the window small
⏹️ ▶️ John and go away, and that’s the tool I’m going to use to manage my windows. And if it works for them, it works for them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are many more tools at your disposal besides just that, and just using that yellow button can overwhelm
⏹️ ▶️ John things very quickly, especially if you don’t understand the concept of, you know, that app is still running, and unlike iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going to quit it for you, because so many people didn’t adopt auto termination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. Well, that leads me into my next point, which is I think there’s actually two things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple should steal from Windows in this area. Number one is auto termination.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think number one that they tried when when the last window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an app is closed, the app should terminate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just madly disagree. That is wrong. I
⏹️ ▶️ John agree that is optional in Mac apps and Mac. If you’re running a Mac app, you can choose whether you want your Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. And I’m glad that’s a choice because some apps like say calculator, you do want that
⏹️ ▶️ John or dictionary you do want that to happen. But other apps you absolutely do not. So the Apple way is better. It
⏹️ ▶️ John should be a developer choice developers, unlike automatic termination, develop, I thought you were talking about something else,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’ll get to in a second. But this thing, I believe most Mac developers, including Apple make
⏹️ ▶️ John the right choice for when they do this. Again, this is a developer choice, you can decide how you want your
⏹️ ▶️ John app to behave. Apple has guidelines on it. They had guidelines back in the day, they still are basically the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John This should definitely be a developer choice because both modes of operation are important. And you don’t even think about it. I bet you don’t like Casey. You’re like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John disagree. I don’t like that or whatever, but I bet you never even thought about the fact that when you open dictionary and close the window, the app quits.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was probably
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it just works the way you expect. If what you expect is sanity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow. So I think it breaks enough people’s expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that’s why it is the the wrong behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the other one, the auto termination that I’m referring to is there is there’s an API
⏹️ ▶️ John that a developer that was introduced years ago back when I was reviewing Magos 10 Apple introduced an API that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, Mac developers, you know how iOS if your app is not being
⏹️ ▶️ John actively used and we feel memory pressure or whatever, like we just kill your app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then like, but we launch it and has to resume and restore its state. You know how that works on iOS and everybody loves it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t we do that on the Mac and they introduced a suite of API’s that you can opt into that say, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, you can kill my app if you need memory or whatever. And when I relaunch, I’ll restore my
⏹️ ▶️ John state so people won’t even just like iOS and Mac developers mostly did not adopt those
⏹️ ▶️ John API’s. Is it because it’s not the Mac way? Is it because Mac users
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t want it? They still exist, you can still implement them. And I feel like good Mac apps should
⏹️ ▶️ John relaunch to their previous state, but very few Mac apps have opted
⏹️ ▶️ John into allowing Mac OS to kill them when it feels like it. And I kind of don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John as a developer of a Mac app, I kind of don’t blame them. I know that’s just the way things are in our iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and it always has been that way on iOS. So it’s like the culture there, but the culture on Mac OS is no
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS don’t kill me. Don’t kill my app. I could opt into it, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna. I think that’s very different, though, because that’s like the user still has content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a window open of that app. So that makes sense. Yeah, I know, I know, but it is called automatic termination.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, anyway, okay. So we disagree on that, but hey. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, as a power user, I appreciate the fact that I have Command-W and Command-Q
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing different things, but I also know that no one else who’s not power users ever manages that correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think termination after the last windows closed, which is something windows does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that is the right move for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to do if they ever want to. I think you should be cursed, Marco, to have your Mac suddenly enable that feature for every
⏹️ ▶️ John app and it will drive you insane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. All right. All right, and then secondly, the second thing Apple should bar from windows, John’s gonna kill me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the green button should maximize the window to the entire screen bounce. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, everybody wants that. An option green button will almost always do that. Here’s what I want the green button to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. I don’t remember if it ever did this, but like there was a button in classic Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was kind of the natural analog to the green button. They didn’t have stoplights, it was on the right side of the window or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was a window, the button looked like a small square inside a big square, like there was a square and then there was a
⏹️ ▶️ John square in the upper left corner. So it was like little square, big square, right? It was basically like minimize, maximize.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s what that button did in classic Mac OS. And it is the thing that I wish buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the window control buttons did on Mac OS X and modern Mac OS, but it doesn’t and never really did,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is automatically size this window to be appropriately sized for the content that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. So for example, if you’re in the Finder and it’s an icon view window and you have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of icons and you’re like, I just want this window to be big enough to show all the icons. Right
⏹️ ▶️ John now there’s a bunch of empty space all around them. Just shrink to fit, just shrink it so it fits
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things without scroll bars. That’s useful in lots of apps, like an image editing app
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like a preview and you know, and you want, I just want to see this window at one X, I just did
⏹️ ▶️ John a crop or whatever, but now there’s a bunch of gray empty area around it. Just shrink this window to be
⏹️ ▶️ John just big enough to show all the content without scroll bars. None of the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John apps can implement that. You can do anything you want in response to the window widgets, but that is not a standard feature of
⏹️ ▶️ John the window widgets in macOS, and that’s what I miss. I do get what you’re saying. I don’t mind the
⏹️ ▶️ John green thing go full screen all the time. Most apps do that. If you option green
⏹️ ▶️ John click thing and the app doesn’t do that, the option click will usually make it do that. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of confusion with the green thing because some apps will size to fit and
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t want that, they want it to go full screen. I don’t actually object to that one too much because I do feel like most people
⏹️ ▶️ John see the green thing and they just expect it to do full screen all the time. And I think the culture in macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John these days is most apps do, can you think of an app that you use frequently that doesn’t do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never use like the option thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John used to back when back when the recommendation was slightly different. The option thing was like, okay, and that will force
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But again, you could programmatically you can, you know, as a Mac developer, you can make the button do whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ John want, which is insanity coming from iOS, but you can make it do whatever you want. But the defaults and the recommended approaches
⏹️ ▶️ John usually to do full screen. But you said what you want is for it to do full screen all the time. It’s also I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John asking, is there some app that doesn’t do full screen with the green widget by default that you use frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me see what Safari does. See
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I don’t want is for it to go into full screen mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s all you just
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to make it the size of the I get what you’re saying. You want it to just make the window big enough to fill the whole screen. You don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to full screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But on Windows it goes to full screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John There’s no menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does. But full screen mode on Windows by maximizing a window on Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full screen mode We can call it that, but like on Windows, it’s just, okay, now you have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big window. On the Mac, it’s a whole show. It’s like you maximize, you
⏹️ ▶️ John woo, here we go. But it does the same thing on Windows in that it doesn’t leave any
⏹️ ▶️ John gaps or seams. Like it gets rid of the window chrome at the edges. It just, it pushes it off, like it’s full
⏹️ ▶️ John bleed in the print sense, right? Where it’s as if you had printed it and then cut, like Windows does the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing and so does Mac OS. But you’re right, the animations in Mac OS and the whole flashing and everything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course on Mac OS it hides the menu bar as well, which is not a thing on Windows in the same way. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s much more disruptive to the Mac experience to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of full screen mode. And yes, and it is slower because of all the woo animation. So it’s like you’re getting sent along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a ride. You’re like, oh no, I accidentally am in this ride now. And then, oh, let me get out. Woo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way back. Like it’s such a heavy operation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, try option click in Safari, by the way. All right, hold on. Although you will ruin your window when
⏹️ ▶️ John you do this because I don’t know how to undo it. Let me see, option shift click. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s no way. Oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just get a, option click just gives me the move and resize menu
⏹️ ▶️ John No, option click the green widget. Yeah, that’s what I’m doing. When you’re not in full screen mode, get
⏹️ ▶️ John out of full screen mode, get a safari window and option click the green widget. Nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you talking about nothing happens? I just did it. I mean, I’m not on Tahoe. Are you on Tahoe? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why would I be on Tahoe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s hideous. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, I’m, Casey, can you confirm? Go to Safari window and option click the green. I just did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. It expands vertically to fill the space. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey does not expand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John horizontally. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already vertically filling it.
⏹️ ▶️ John expands horizontally
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and vertically. Yeah, mine is only doing. No, I’m sorry, you’re right. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could depend on what webpage you’re on. Like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on a webpage. Yeah, I think that’s right. Try ATP.fm. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco programming, John. Great programming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That we may be familiar with. It only is adjusting the
⏹️ ▶️ John height. Yeah, it expands horizontally and vertically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horizontal but only the teeniest little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, this is the problem though. A button like that should do the same thing every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to every window. Like the red button does, the yellow button does, the green button is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna randomly make this larger but not probably what you expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, there’s developer control over all these things. Most developers don’t mess with the close button
⏹️ ▶️ John or the minimize button, but the green button, as you noted, it’s got a menu that comes from it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John option click thing far predates the menu. And the option thing that I used to in most
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, do what you want to, which is make this window big enough to fill the whole screen, but don’t enter full screen
⏹️ ▶️ John mode. Because that existed before full screen mode was a thing on Mac OS, because Mac OS X didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John always have full screen mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what I’m saying, that’s what it should do every time. Like it should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the window the full bound to the screen minus the menu bar and the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think a lot of Mac users really love full screen mode though. I think the current default is probably right.
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. Like I don’t, I’m not a fan of full screen mode and I would be just as happy to have it like
⏹️ ▶️ John make the window big enough to fill the whole screen with an option or something. But I mean, I’ve always said, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John my complaint forever, there should be public APIs for the windowing system. And things like stage manager should have
⏹️ ▶️ John been possible as a third party app. That’s absolutely not the case now. And it’s even less the case than
⏹️ ▶️ John it used to be. Cause Mac OS X used to have all sorts of like hacks and everything, but you know, system integrity protection, everything stopped all that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? but there should be public APIs for the windowing system. Kind of like there was back in X Window System.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure Linux people are, you know, if you want a configurable window manager,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey X11 is sitting right there. It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is in Wayland or whatever. But, and there’s lots of cool utilities for the Mac, like Hammer Spoon and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can hack together stuff that does this, but there should be public APIs from Apple with full access to
⏹️ ▶️ John the windowing system above the layer of an application. So you can, if you want a tiling window manager,
⏹️ ▶️ John third parties should be able to implement one. If someone has an idea that’s like stage manager, third party should be able to implement it. If
⏹️ ▶️ John someone wants to do what, make a window manager that behaves the way Marco described, third party should be able to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The wrinkle is that Mac apps can override some of this stuff, but again, that
⏹️ ▶️ John would have to be part of the public API, the public API said I’ll provide for this. That is a super duper
⏹️ ▶️ John power user feature though. Like on an X11 back in college, I had my window manager configured,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve described before, in very on Mac like ways, because I had just, I had come up with a workflow
⏹️ ▶️ John that worked for me and X windows on the X terms. It was very different than the way I worked on Macs, like doing, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a focus follows mouse, but without auto-raise, so I could be like, move my cursor into
⏹️ ▶️ John a background window and not have it come to the front, but have the input focus be there and stuff. Like I was doing really
⏹️ ▶️ John weird on Mac-like stuff, you know, experimental time in college. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey prefer it all the time, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John great to be able to configure all of that and use different window managers and stuff. And the Mac, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of that experimentation has gone away and iPad and iOS, it never existed to begin with, although there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of experimentation back in the jailbreak days. But that is definitely, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John someday when we do the John Ternus’s to-do list or insert Apple new CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John here to-do list, adding power user features like this to the Mac specifically does
⏹️ ▶️ John make a lot of sense after they shore up all the crappy stuff that’s broken with the existing functionality. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, maybe that’ll be their new Apple 2030 plan. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you to our sponsor this episode, Quince, and thank you to our members who support us directly. you can join us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at atp.fm.com. One of the perks of membership is exclusive bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content. We do an exclusive content topic every single week called ATP Overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week, we’re gonna be talking about the rumor that Apple is making a iMac Pro again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an M5 Max chip sometime soon. We’re gonna talk about that in overtime. You can join the list at atp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much, everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, check the podcast so long.
Thread and Matter?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I have a question. What the hell is the story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with thread and matter? I feel like an idiot. I feel like I am capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of understanding what all this is and means and does, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t get it. And I need someone to write up like the, uh, idiots got,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was that? A thread matter for dummies. I need somebody to write this post and send it my way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please. It might already exist for all I know, but this is all brought on because a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year ago now, I bought a, I believe it’s nano leaf set of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christmas lights of LED Christmas lights. So you can program them and you can make them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dance and react to music and do all sorts of stuff. Most of which we don’t bother with, but they were incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on sale after Christmas last year. And so I thought, you know what, I’m going to get these. I think they were at, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey James Thompson’s recommendation. I I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think that’s true. And so I got this set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m mostly happy with it. And it said that it works with HomeKit. And so I was like, oh, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, perfect. That’s all I really need. Then this year, when I went to put it on the tree, I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh no, I have now somehow joined the Threadmatter, you know, Threads slash matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem. I don’t think I really wanted to be here quite yet. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I did eventually get it on Apple Home, but that meant I couldn’t get it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Home Assistant, uh, which may be user error, or at least not at first. at first anyway. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I found a Home Assistant add-on, plug-in, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would work with it. And so I did get them eventually into Home Assistant, which is good, so I can automate stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatever. But when looking at how to get something over –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s matter over thread or thread – I think that’s right. I don’t think it’s thread over matter, but something like that. Lyle Troxell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chief Information Officer – Google Mind over matter, Casey. Yeah, right, exactly. But when I went looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at, okay, how can I get this connected directly to Home Assistant and then bridge from Home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Assistant into HomeKit like I do with so many other things? And one of the things I discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really quickly was that apparently either thread or matter, one of them, requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IPv6, which is all well and good on my physical network, but is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking nightmare to get working in a Docker container on a Synology. And so now I’m wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if maybe I need to get like physical hardware for home assistance so I don’t need to bother with that whole dance. It’s all a mess,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey y’all. It’s all a mess. And most of the reason it’s a mess is because I have no friggin’ idea what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would love it if someone could point me to the Idiot’s Guide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Threads-slash-Matter and help me figure this out. And I’m assuming that you two are also clueless.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it sounds to me like what you need is a guide for getting IPv6 networking working in Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey containers. That would also work, specifically on a Synology, because my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limited understanding after having looked at this very briefly is that doing it on the Synology is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uniquely crappy, whereas in general it’s not, I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever great, I don’t think, but it’s apparently particularly crummy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it on a Synology. But that would also be an acceptable answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You engage in smart home stuff a lot more than I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because your tolerance for futzing with it when things are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy or break over time is way higher than my tolerance for it. Like, the extent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my smart home stuff has actually, I believe it’s gotten smaller over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s because you’re a smart person. I, however, am an idiot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like literally all I have now is Lutron Caseta light switches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even then, I only command them via push button switches on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wall or on my desk. I don’t even use voice control with any smart assistants anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some very basic routines like for the outdoor lights, turn them on after sunset, stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But I have very little smartification going on here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have a lot of sensors that I can check from yo link. Thanks, john. A lot of sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like reading data that I can like, you know, look at if I want to know like, hey, is it getting too cold in the house while I’m away on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vacation or whatever, like, that’s worth, you know, having that kind of stuff, like, actual like automation with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrations between different systems. I’m doing almost none of that. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much happier for it. Because every time I would try to set up some kind of automation, it would last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a a year before something about it would break and I had to set it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. And I’m just like, I’m so tired of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech wheel spinning. Like I’m just reconnecting things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that broke that already did at some point work. I have no time for that anymore and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no tolerance for that anymore. And I gotta say I’m a lot happier for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I get and not to be that guy, but, uh, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my experience, home assistant is one of those things where you have to, and I’m sure I’ve made the speech before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to be able to like see through the matrix, so to speak, but once you can, and once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you wrap your mind around home assistant, which is not approachable in my personal opinion, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very weird to set up, but once you can wrap your mind around it, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible. And the stuff that I’ve set up, the automations I’ve set up in home assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are bulletproof. Whereas in Apple home, I feel like I ran into similar circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they would work when they wanted to and occasionally, and it’s pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bulletproof and home assistant. And that’s why for me, home assistant is the kind of system of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record. And then I will bridge things into home kit if necessary, but, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I shouldn’t even say if necessary, I’ll bridge like, you know, lights and switches and stuff like that into home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit, but I don’t do any automation unless absolutely necessary in a home kit. And it’s worked out pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well for me. But yeah, I can’t make heads or tails. And I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really sat down to figure this out. I’m sure I am smart enough as much as I joke. I’m smart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough, I’m capable enough and gosh darn it, people like me. I’m sure I am capable of figuring this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. But I was hoping that someone… You’re smart enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it. You’re not smart enough not to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. But in any case, if someone has a primer on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or John, if you’re just going to swoop in and save the day for me, that’s also acceptable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I use very limited home stuff as well. And by the way, on the Yolink thing, I just had to change my
⏹️ ▶️ John first Yolink battery. So we look back on past ATP episodes. When I first mentioned that I got
⏹️ ▶️ John my very first Yolink device, one of the batteries just needed to be changed. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how long the batteries last in these things. It’s pretty good. Anyway, yeah, I do limited stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John with home stuff. And like, what do I have? I have one set of lights
⏹️ ▶️ John that I control with voice assistance, and it’s hooked up to both my Google voice assistant and
⏹️ ▶️ John and my Amazon one and my Apple one. They can all turn the lights on and off. I also have physical buttons because it’s Lutron.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do use voice to do those lights a lot. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a smart thermostat from what do you call it? Not euro. What’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco other one? Nasty. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could be think I use the you could be app. It’s also connected through
⏹️ ▶️ John HomeKit, blah, blah, blah. but I don’t use that. I just use their app for the Yolink stuff. I use the Yolink app. I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know if there’s an option that probably Home Assistant does it, but I just use the Yolink app, but I don’t spend that much time interacting with these things
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m happy that they all just work. And I also have another pre Yolink
⏹️ ▶️ John leak detector in the basement, which also has its own app. And I just let that be in its own app.
⏹️ ▶️ John For your question about thread matter, blah, blah, blah. My understanding is someone who has really no interest
⏹️ ▶️ John in this and just has a few things in the house that I’m happy they they just work and I just don’t need to touch them. Is that the promise
⏹️ ▶️ John of this one back when we originally discussed it was thread is basically a wireless networking thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John is not wifi that is lower power and is more suited to home stuff. And based on, you know, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous standards that are, but I’ve experienced miniature versions of stuff like that. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yolink uses a wireless communication protocol that is not wifi. Luchon Caseta uses a wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol that is not wifi. But I don’t think any of those things are thread. Thread was an attempt to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody let’s standardize on this home wireless thing that is not wifi, because
⏹️ ▶️ John as we all know, having home devices on wifi is just a formula for tears.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s just the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to this particular problem. So I don’t know how that’s going, except that Apple has been shipping thread radios in all of its devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s thread. And then Matter was like, oh, you know how you can buy these devices? And this one works with HomeKit, and this one works
⏹️ ▶️ John with Google thing, this one works with that. And like, they’d have to, some devices work with all of them, but then they’d have to write,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, different software stacks to say, okay, when you’re integrating this into an Apple home, it should do this, but when you’re integrating into a Google
⏹️ ▶️ John home, it should do this. It’s like, why are people writing multiple software stacks and potentially also multiple different hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John to support all these different things and some devices support one and not the other? Why don’t we come up with one standard
⏹️ ▶️ John that we can all agree on? And if you make a device that conforms to this standard, it will work with Apple’s home, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John work with Google’s home, it’ll work with the Amazon thing. And that is supposed to be what matter was. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who is not into this field, I was waiting for like the day when finally everything comes a Thread radio and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s standardized on Matter, and you could buy any device and it would have reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John Yolink or Lutron style non-WiFi wireless communication
⏹️ ▶️ John with low power and great reliability, it never falls off the network, and it doesn’t matter which device you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John because every home device is a Matter device. And listening to Casey talk about using Home Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ John and bridging things into HomeKit makes me think we have not arrived at that world. So the only help I can
⏹️ ▶️ John give you is my vague understanding what Thread and Matter are supposed to bring, And then you telling the story
⏹️ ▶️ John and me thinking, it has not arrived.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it has arrived. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you know, It hasn’t arrived in your house anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Certainly not. But I mean, I’ve also been actively avoiding it. You know, I wouldn’t, I probably wouldn’t have bought these Nanoleaf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lights, which I otherwise mostly enjoy. I don’t think I would have bought them had I realized they were thread and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or matter or whatever. And I have a couple of friends in my life that I’m sure could set me straight on this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had the time to talk to them about it and we needed an after show. So here we are. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I feel like as with all things, and I could turn this into an entire different after show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe we should make this an overtime some at some point, but I feel like I was talking with my friend, Johnny writes channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier today about this. I feel like everything is getting more complicated. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the world is getting more complicated, which I think is a pretty common trend through all of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet, as I get slightly older, I feel less and less equipped to handle and roll with those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changes. And I feel like your fingerprints still work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID. Well, that’s true so far. Although I don’t actually have any Touch ID devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the house, but that’s either here or there. But anyways, I lament that as I get older,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not an instant understanding. You know, maybe 20 years ago, I would have instantly understood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by magic what thread and matter
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t instant. You just had a lot of free time with which to bang your head against the wall and to understand it. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed instant because time flies when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coincidentally, that’s pretty much what John said to me, is that back in your 20s, you had all the time in the world, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, again, we can explore this and pull on this thread another time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I feel like the world is getting more complicated. And what used to be, oh, just drop something on your Wi-Fi network,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which not to argue with what you were saying, John, I agree with you. But it used to be, oh, all these things, a Belkin Wemo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is now dead, or whatever the case may be, just drop it on your Wi-Fi network, it’ll be fine. And maybe it wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, but at least it was understandable. now I have to figure out thread and matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because of my own potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John poor choices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to figure out IPv6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on a Docker container on a Synology. So. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Cloudflare could help you. I didn’t have IPv6 support from my website until I went to Cloudflare and they just gave it to me automatically. Done and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, honestly, I’ve been kicking around and now we’re really off on another tangent, but now I’ve been kicking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around getting like an Intel NUC or something like that to actually host my Docker containers. I have no particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue with what’s going on on the Synology, but as I think I might migrate we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have talked about this, I might migrate away from Synology over the next several years and perhaps just get like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ubiquiti UNAS or something, then I need somewhere else for those smarts to be. And the obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer for that is my Mac Mini, but I’ve had really crummy experience with Docker
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know if the Mac Mini is the obvious answer. That is the not the right tool for this job. But like a Raspberry
⏹️ ▶️ John Pi or like you said, an Intel Nuc was much more appropriate than a very fancy, expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John way overpowered Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini. Well, sure. But in either way, I say the Mac Mini because it’s going to be always on and here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, because that’s what I like to use for some other things. So logically it makes sense to put, you know, my Docker containers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on there, especially because my containers, you know, I’m not going to list them all, but suffice to say that they’re generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty low need. They’ll occasionally get bursty, but they’re generally low need. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it would make sense to put them on the Mac Mini, but I personally have had awful experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Docker on macOS. I know that there’s some virtualization thing that came with either Tahoe or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was whatever preceded Tahoe Sierra that was supposed to make all this better, but I haven’t really tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since then. Steve McLaughlin I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John using Docker all the time on my Mac and it’s fine. So your mileage may vary. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, my Mac is an Intel Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trevor Burrus Well, fair. It seems like it’s very much the Tahoe Flickr that we were talking about earlier this episode that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s either perfect for you like it is for me and it seems to be for you, or it happens all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the freaking time. but like it’s similar, you know, Docker either works perfectly or it doesn’t work at all. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John was, I mean, my struggles with Docker are just because of my lack of understanding. But I think the, the Mac implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, I haven’t had any bugs or issues with it. It’s updated frequently. It does what I want it to do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John once I switched my main Mac to arm, maybe that will all change. But yeah, I use Docker containers for
⏹️ ▶️ John all my dev work for ATP. I use Docker. I have my, my website is in a Docker container,
⏹️ ▶️ John two versions. I have my Cloudflare version in a Docker container. I also have my non-CloudFlare,
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap shared hosting also in a Docker container so that I can, you know, listen. You know how
⏹️ ▶️ John we used to write, people used to write CMSs back before static site generators. I always feel like static site generators are kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like just a side door to laziness because it’s like, oh, well, if you want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John your own CMS, of course you have to have a login system and a web interface and you can edit your entire, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John WordPress. It’s like you go to the web, all you need is a web browser and you can go to your website and write a post
⏹️ ▶️ John and post it on your website. People said, you know what? That seems like a lot of work. How about I just have a thing I run from the command
⏹️ ▶️ John line that spits out a bunch of files and then splats them onto my website. And I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John pretend that by making a markdown file in this Dropbox folder that triggers a bunch of scripts to
⏹️ ▶️ John run, that’s the same as having a web interface, right? Well, it’s certainly a lot easier, but it also means, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if you wanna post to your website, but you’re away from your setup? What if, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t just go to your website to do it. It’s like, oh, well, all I gotta do is put a markdown file on my Dropbox. but what if you can’t get access
⏹️ ▶️ John to your Dropbox? What if, what if, what if, what if you just have access to a web browser, what can you do? And
⏹️ ▶️ John Docker is kind of my side door to that. It was like, worst case scenario, if I have no access to anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I get somewhere where I can run a Docker container? Because if I can get there and I can, you know, go there and do
⏹️ ▶️ John a pull request from a Git repo and have things up and running in Docker, and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s my solution to that. Sorry for the long sidebar there, but yeah, making a real
⏹️ ▶️ John web-based CMS would certainly be easier, but that wouldn’t be easy to deploy in different locations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here, back over here at the ranch, somebody explain thread matter to me, please, because I don’t know what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, yeah, I mean, I think my future might be like the easy way to solve this problem is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get either IPv6 working on the Synology or, or both on Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Synology or just getting a NUC or Home Assistant sells their own hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s either Home Assistant Green or Home Assistant Yellow. I don’t recall the differences between them. Like a Pokemon game? Yeah, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it, they are themselves either like Nux or Raspberry Pis by another name, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, um, I could do that, but my thought is I could just get, you know, a NUC and start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using that as my Docker host, and that would take some of the pressure off the Synology. Again, not that the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is having problems yet, but, uh, I’m trying to potentially divorce myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Synology as I really don’t like the direction they’ve gone recently with their hard drive requirements and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ll see, but someone explain it to me please and thank you because I’m lost.