620: Mostly Cookies
04 Jan 2025Apple’s in-house radio chips, iOS 18 Photos-app reception, rumors of a new mouse (!), and a good cult to join.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Holiday results
- Casey’s impending mess
- John needs technical support
- Follow-up:
- FotS Spencer found the gas car from the perspective of an EV owner
- On
Recentsin the Finder sidebar- Michael Starke points out it isn’t new
- Odin points out it’s a default
- Joe Lion has complaints
- Possible next-generation Vision Pro displays (via Erich Jurgens)
- Be suspect of iPhone Mirroring on corporate Macs
- Original blog post
~/Library/Daemon Containers/{…}/Data/Library/Caches
- iOS 18 Photos hate (via Quinn)
- Apple’s Wi-Fi & Bluetooth chip, and Magic Mouse update?
- Post-show: Casey has joined the YoLink bandwagon
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Fast Directory Sizing
- WWDC 2016 #701: Introducing Apple File System
- About Apple File System
- Apple File System Reference
dirstat.hdirstat.c
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- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- A mess
- 🎉🥳🎉 HAPPY 50th, JOHN! 🎉🥳🎉
- EV coaching for Casey
- Follow-up: Recents in Finder
- 10,000 DPI screen?
- iPhone Mirroring on corp. Macs
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- iOS 18 Photos.app complaints
- [follow-up from the future]
- Apple radio chips
- New mouse rumored?!
- Ending theme
- YoLiss 🖼️
A mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve been out of town for I think about 12 days. Just got back last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night. Everything in my life is a mess as a result of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, obviously, first of all, like, my schedule is a mess. Like, that’s a given. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you take 12 days away from town, when you get back, everything has to be crammed, you know, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and after that. So, hence why we’re recording at a weird time, sorry, my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My house is a mess, like there’s boxes everywhere, because this was our big Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and New Year’s trip, and there was a bunch of family events that we went to while we were gone for different reasons, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had all sorts of prep to prepare for this trip, plus Christmas stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s boxes everywhere, there’s a couple of returns stacked up, there’s a ton of unpacking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and laundry to do as we just got back last night. My car, a mess also, like covered in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dirt and mud, the windshield washer fluid’s empty, like everything, that’s a mess. I personally, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my body is a mess. Like not only have I eaten mostly cookies for the last two weeks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s the point where like, I don’t know if either of you have a smart scale, but you know, one of the great things about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart scale is that it records, you know, all your entries, you can see them over time. One of the bad things about a smart scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it records.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It records. All your entries, and you can see them over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, this creates an incentive where if you’ve just had a really indulgent week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you get home and you step on the scale for the first time, it can cross a certain point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’re like, whoop, and you jump off. Because it only records it once the data like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settles after like a second. So you have a window of time, if the reading is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something you would rather not be in your permanent record, you can jump off the scale and just revisit in a few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that was this morning’s move. You know, like my face also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mess, like I’m covered in pimples because I don’t have my usual product for the last 12 days. I’m sitting here, my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a disaster. Like there’s mail I have to deal with, like all over the place, different projects all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over my desk. My computer, like the virtual environment of my computer, also a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s browser tabs open from before Christmas that I’m like, well, if I order this thing, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna arrive while I’m gone, so let me wait till after Christmas to do that. Or this thing has to wait till the new year or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So browser tabs everywhere, files all over my desktop I gotta deal with. I can’t even find my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air. I have for the first time ever, I have lost a computer. Like I’m sure I’ll find it in the next day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two, but like I currently cannot, it’s so thin and light, I lost it. Like I- They should have the
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes a noise, like with your phone, where you make the beeping noise. I don’t think they have that for Macs, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should. Yeah, I can’t even find it in my, find my list. I’m like, oh boy. Oh, that’s alarming. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m sure, I’m sure it’ll turn up. I’ve never lost a computer or electronics device before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever. And I currently have lost a MacBook Air. But it’s fine. I haven’t had that much time to look yet. Who
⏹️ ▶️ John who had the story about the original MacBook Air was like in a stack of papers and got thrown in the garbage. Was that Merlin?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I hope that didn’t happen to mine. Although I guess they’re being replaced soon, but I don’t want that to be the reason I replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Real time follow up. Allegedly, it was Steven Levy who told that story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right, yes. Anyway, so even like Overcast is a mess. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided right before the Christmas traveling for our family,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided this would be a good time to start rewriting the Watch app to use the new sync engine. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, you know, there’s like parts all over the floor and then I get up and leave for two weeks. Like that’s, so I’m coming back to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So everything, everything around me is a mess right now, including me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and oh my God, this, I cannot wait to, you know, slowly work through all of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get all this processed and put away and recycled and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locate my MacBook Air and this hopefully will all be behind me by next week’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Vacation, all you ever wanted. How are you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to hear John’s Christmas and birthday results, but I’d also like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to throw in just very briefly, as I sit here, it is what, Friday afternoon?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the weather people are calling for as much as 10 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of snow in Richmond on Monday. Let me assure you, gentlemen, that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can have another argument about whether or not I’m in the South. And I would argue that getting 10 inches of snow would indicate I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the South. but south, but that’s neither here nor there. Let me just tell you that we definitely do not have the equipment to handle 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches of snow. This will be the cluster of all clusters if we actually get 10 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of snow dropped on us. Richmond will be shut down for at least a week, probably more. So I am not currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a mess, Marco, but I am potentially going to be in a very messy mess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime in the next couple of days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Places that get regular snow are equipped to handle it, and the people don’t treat it as like the apocalypse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas a place like where you are, you probably have a lot less salt and plows and stuff. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, and the people I’m sure have cleared out the grocery store shelves and are treating it like the apocalypse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is 100% true. I actually went out this morning, I’ve been running around all day myself, and they already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put the stripes of salt on the road. It’s currently Friday, snow isn’t due until Sunday at the earliest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re already striping all the roads with salt to get ready for it, which is good. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will all quote unquote die for the next week if we end up with 10 inches of snow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although the way it usually works is it’ll cross the mountains west of Charlottesville, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll kind of peter out not too long after that. So it is unlikely that we’ll have an additional week of winter break,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s a possibility. So think happy thoughts, and I’ll let you decide if that means think snow thoughts think
🎉🥳🎉 HAPPY 50th, JOHN! 🎉🥳🎉
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, John, how are your holiday results and birthday results? Because happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 50th birthday, you are now 50 in three days. So happy birthday. How
⏹️ ▶️ John results? John Greenewald 50 and three days, not 50 in three days, just to clarify.
⏹️ ▶️ John know it just sounds similar for people who are listening. I just want people to know that my birthday is already passed. Yeah, I heard
⏹️ ▶️ John in. Sorry. I am now the big five-oh, really enjoying those
⏹️ ▶️ John retirement catch-up savings contributions. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re talking about the tomato condiment or is this like a catch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John hyphen upper? Ah, thank you. It was that Boston accent that got me. When you contribute
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts, the IRS says you can put in a little extra if you’re 50, if you’re trying to catch up for lost time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually did that last year because I was 50 last year as well for one day. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, it was fine. Birthday was good. Christmas was good. Everything here is fine.
EV coaching for Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. We mentioned, was it over time, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week or last episode that we were talking about how Aaron’s car is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Marco was given the hard sell, understandably, on full battery electric vehicles. And I was saying how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really enjoying the plug-in hybrid. And I think Marco, maybe it was John, brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up a really funny post. That’s what I thought. Every time I think it’s you, though, it ends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up being John. So this is the one time I was actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do the opposite of what you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s true. George
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Costanza technique. Right, that’s exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tune us out on Rye.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco brought up this very funny post of what it would be like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you grew up on electric cars and went and test drove a gasoline or petrol powered one for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first time. A friend of the show, Spencer, was able to dig it up for me and I will put it in the show notes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this episode. I will say I skimmed it real quick again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I remembered really liking this post when I first read it several years ago. Skimming it now, maybe it’s my own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey priors, as Merlin would say, that I’m bringing to the table here, but it reads really obnoxious, so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t as good as I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually am not sure this is it, so I went searching for it with every tool I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even tried like chat GPT, like what did ATP talk about? I tried, I could not find, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the version that I remember was a blog post on somebody’s website. Now, I found this version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m not actually sure it’s the same one. I actually don’t think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in this version, if you search for a few of the phrases in it, like in quotes in Google or whatever, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find this version is all over the internet. This has been copied from forums and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all over the place. So this is obviously out there. And there are parts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this that are funny. But the one I remember was not as long, and I think a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit softer written for people like you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, this, anyway, this, I don’t think this was it. And if this is it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was also copied onto somebody’s private blog. And I remember it having like a, I don’t know, like a brownish background or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I cannot find it for the life
⏹️ ▶️ John of me. Live streams, I look for it too and couldn’t find it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, but as some minor follow up to your EV-ness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did want to tell you that I did just take, you know, all this, my 12 days of travel here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was probably a combination of 500 miles, maybe 600 miles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually never had to use a fast charger once because at my in-laws place, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a circular saw 220 volt outlet in their barn. And so whenever I’m there, I just plug into that. It’s about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get about 30 amps out of it. So I just plug into that and my car is full overnight and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, so So I charged up at my house, I went up there, I charged there, drove around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot, and then drove home, and I got home with like, you know, 20% or so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just to give you some idea of like, you know, all of your range anxiety,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m trying to do is, I mean, look, nothing’s going to cure your range anxiety about a full battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EV until you actually own one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m trying to do is kind of just give you, you know, examples of like how much you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need think about it as much as you think you will. And even, like, I am the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of person that I don’t, you kind of have to define, like, what’s the lowest percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge I’m comfortable with getting it down to before I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to plug in or want to be at a place where I can plug in. And for different people, this is different. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m the kind of person where, like, I don’t even let my phone battery ever go all the way to zero. I have never,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, when people say, like, my phone died, that kind of irritates me. is like saying my kid starved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, that implies some, you know, some like nothing, this action just happened. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you didn’t charge it and you used it down to zero. Anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a person who like, my phone has never died. I have, I literally have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drained a phone battery to zero, because I manage it. If it’s getting down low, I’ll stop using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone or I’ll put it, you know, in obviously low power mode or if I’m really desperate, like airplane mode, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’ve ever, outside of like a hike, I don’t think I’ve ever had to do that, like a week-long hike, I’m saying. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where my phone still didn’t reach zero. Anyway, so the point is, so you know, with the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m willing to get it down to, you know, 15% if I’m arriving somewhere that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I can definitely charge, like, you know, a known fast charger, or my house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or my in-laws house, like, I’m willing to let it go that low. And if you are willing to let it go that low, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get a lot of places. Because the thing is, like, even after, you know, suppose you get it down to 15%. well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your car has like 300 miles of range, that’s still plenty of rings that you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use to drive to the next charger if you really had to, like the next one, the next closest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. So the reality of owning an EV is you think it’s going to be so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse, and you think you have to like plan every single bit, and really the margin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of error is pretty big, and the capacities you have are pretty big, and it’s getting better all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time as more stations open up. Like even if you pull up to a charger and it’s broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or full or whatever, you can probably just go to the next one with the range you have left, or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can probably make it your entire trip without even using the fast chargers. Um, so there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a problem that is understandable for you to be all tense about. But again, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get an EV for the first time, which I think should be soon, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re going to be very surprised how little of a problem it really is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, during the way I remember that conversation, and as we’ve established already this episode and many times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, my memory is trash, but the way I remember the conversation was that during the course of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the conversation, I pretty much convinced myself that there are almost no trips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ever go on that would even necessitate a charging stop. So as an example, when we go to the beach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every summer, the place that we consistently go to, Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore, 140 miles away,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and damn near any EV worth with its salt is going to be able to go 200 plus miles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that shouldn’t be an issue. Now, I did bring up that we’re going to a second vacation this summer. That’s like four or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five hours away. I forget how many miles that is offhand. But I think it was far enough that it would necessitate a stop. But in the entire lifetime of Erin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Volvo, her prior Volvo, may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it rest in peace, we took like one trip, I think, that was more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than like 200 or 300 miles away. So I don’t debate that intellectually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are 100% correct, that I would probably almost never need to worry about stopping at a charger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even if I did, it would be so infrequent, it would be near as makes no difference to zero. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still scary. And for the needs that we have today, and easing our toe in the water,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really stand by our choice for PHEV. But we’ll see what happens in the future. And I was actually talking to my father
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this morning. We just saw them just a couple hours ago. And I was talking to my dad about it. And I was saying to him that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way, I’m getting a little bit of the itch. I’ve had my Volkswagen for six years now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually, almost six and a half. And I’m kind of getting the itch to get something new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I do that, I think I would get a battery electric, which is what I said last episode. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a couple of problems. First of all, there’s none that I really, really love right now. There’s no BEVs. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery electric vehicles that I really, really love right now. And even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I went for one of the ones that I really think I really like, It’s like 150% of the cost of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. You know, my car, when I bought it six and a half years ago, was $40,000 out the door,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a lot of money. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s affordable for, you know, for, for the person that does the sorts of things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I do, it’s affordable. Whereas to get a approximate equivalent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but full electric is like 60, 65, $70,000. And that, and then you start,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I wanted to go to like the Rivians or the world or the Model S’s of the world, now you’re talking like 80, 90, a hundred, 110. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just, it’s too rich for my blood. Now I feel like John all of a sudden where I, where I’m refusing to spend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, any more money on a car. Um, unlike John, I’ll, I’ll buy cars from different makes, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I just, I, it’s so much money. And so not only do I not want to have my left leg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey atrophy, but I just don’t want to spend that kind of money right now, especially if there’s not one car that I can look at and go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the one, that’s it. I want to, you know, QRS TUV from such and such manufacturer. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. It’s the only one for me. And, and so because of the combination of those two things, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my car is perfectly fine as I sit here today, I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon, but I’m starting to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I think, I mean, first of all, like, I don’t, I don’t think it’s quite fair to compare what you paid six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago to what prices are today, because I think prices of everything will be higher today. But, but, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, even setting that aside, of course, yeah. EVs tend to be more expensive because batteries are still very expensive. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know? So of course that, that is a factor to consider. And of course you can do like, you know, the Tesla configurator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style math where you’re like, well, I’m going to actually be saving this amount of money here and this amount of you can you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as your way into it however you want to do it. But you know, and again, like if your car is working perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, you probably shouldn’t replace it. But you know, next time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a car ending event occurs, you know, whatever that is for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s like, you know, a big expensive repair, you know, or whatever, like, you know, next time a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motivating event happens, it has you, you know, has you looking, I would say, look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EVs first. And because, you know, there is, you know, you’re going to have some degree of hesitation of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fear of the range thing, I think is going to keep, it’s going to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanting to stay in your comfort zone. And of course, you know, you have made a large part of your identity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about things like driving stick shift, like, so that’s, that’s a hard thing to change. And I get that. And I’m not saying you and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to change it, but I think you will benefit from really examining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard when the time comes. Am I talking myself out of an EV for good reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or am I talking myself out of an EV for like, you know, kind of defensive reasons that might not hold up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scrutiny with my own standards down the road? And you know, even like, you know, things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the range question of like, the way you were talking about it last episode, you were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very much as like a, like a prep her dad mentality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which I guess, you know, we I mean look we all do this sometimes. But like it’s like okay I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge up my house and then when I get to where I’m going I’ll be able to plug in to their regular 110
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when I got my first Tesla in the trunk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in the front I think I carried around like a 50-foot extension cord and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these different adapters and I’m like some time someday I’m going to be somewhere, or I’m going to need to plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, and what if the outlet is more than 10 feet away? Well, I’m going to need this, I’m going to need that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I carried around all these wires and things for the whole lease. The next car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carried it over, carried them again for another three years. And I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used any of it. I never had to. So now I just carry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mobile charger, which has the 220 plug and the 110 plug. I use it only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at my in-laws house in their circular saw outlet. I’ve never used it anywhere else because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re a charge over. But again, before you know this world, you’re thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how can I have everything I need with me at all times so I will always be prepared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for every eventuality? And like, yes, some people need to think that way in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conditions. There are people who like, if you’re going off-roading somewhere on the wilderness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a gas vehicle, you bring cans of gas with you. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs for that kind of thing. We don’t have those needs. Like the vast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco majority of the time when we’re living in the suburbs, driving our EVs around, whatever we need to do. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t have the need to carry around a giant extra tank of gas with you all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, you probably don’t need to think that much about your EV charging either. You probably don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carry around a 110 volt cord because you’ll never use it because it’s too slow. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you get somewhere that you don’t have like a place that’s yours or your family’s, like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on a road trip, when you get somewhere, you know what you’re gonna do? You’re gonna go to the nearest fast charger, charge for 20 minutes, and then keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going. Like that’s what, you’ll be fine the whole trip. Like all your local driving, it’ll be fine. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your way out of the town you were visiting for a few days, maybe you’re down to like 40%, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop again at a fast charger the next time you pass one, and you’ll sit there for 20 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a cup of coffee, or you won’t, you’ll get a cup of water or spill it onto your laptop, and then you’ll get back in the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’ll go, and it’ll be fine. You’ll never use all the gear that you think you will need. You will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never use that extension cord. You will never use anybody’s 110 volt outlet, including your own. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will just never do that, and it’s fine. But again, until you experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, your first EV, I guarantee you, you will have those giant extension cords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere hidden in the frunk or whatever, because you won’t know that yet, and that’s fine. We all go through that, but trust me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will go through that, you will realize you don’t need any of that stuff, and then on the other side, you’ll be like, oh yeah, it’s fine. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just better in every other way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To further give you fuel for the fire that you’re igniting right now, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier long trip, the second beach trip that we’re taking this coming summer, the one that I’m presenting as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this insurmountably far away trip, because it is, in my defense, further away than we have typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traveled by car recently, 320 miles. And I’m guessing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your BMW could probably either get there on one tank or charge, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, or just about, if not all the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And it probably could. And I wouldn’t, because what I would do is again, like I would, I would look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the map and like, all right, what, what’s the fast charger that’s closest to the destination.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right. Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the way there, I would stop at that fast charger, you know, 80% or whatever, then I’d have my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vacation. And again, I could drive around freely because I did plenty of range to drive around for local errands. And then on the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home, I would just go and stop at whatever charger I could hit when the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was near 20%. Because there’s probably multiple ones on the route. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s one that is one of my favorites where I know, for instance, if I know that, oh, this one’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the parking lot of a Target and I can go in there and shop for a while or whatever. You get to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chargers that are in your region. So you’ll know, oh, this one has a good restaurant next to it, or this one has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a convenient store. I can pick up some drinks and go to the bathroom. This one has clean bathrooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you learn that stuff, but it’s so much less of a thing than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s so much less of a burden than you think. And you net, like if I have to go on a long trip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it almost doesn’t matter at all how far away it is. It just matters, because it’s in the same way like, well you know, in a gas car, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think in multiples of 350 miles for that’s how much your gas tank holds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or whatever. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey don’t think that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You just go and you look, and if you need gas, you look around and say, oh where’s the nearest gas station? Even if you do the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, just like it’s a little bit longer to fuel up and there’s fewer of them, but it’s the same kind of mechanic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you just go on the trip that you want to go on and you accommodate what the car needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every so often and it’s not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I hear you. I know, we’ll see what happens. Again, I don’t plan on buying anything soon, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have maintained since before we started talking about it in overtime last week, that I do think my next car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure will be a full electric and we’ll see with errands. The EX90, I think we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, The EX90 is supposed to be good but not great, and that is obviously the most analogous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to her current car, so we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, other thing to point out too on that topic too, something that John said a thousand years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you first get your very first EV, it doesn’t even have to be a very good car. EVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just so good, like when you first experience them, like just the feeling of the electric drive. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSDs of the car world, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Yeah, like, so like, and that’s, so like I know a lot of people who, you know, mostly for price reasons, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also maybe just for like testing the waters reasons, a lot of people I know, their first EV was something relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small and relatively inexpensive. You know, something like, there’s that Kia little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box thing, like those are fun. There’s, you know, even just base model, model threes are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly inexpensive. And you know, there’s all sorts of like, you know, smallish EVs that a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of the brands have that are, that seem pretty fun. You know, like the Ioniq series from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hyundai, like those, honestly, I think you should look at an Ioniq 5, I think because it’s very golfy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of ways. But there are lots of EVs that are relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller, less expensive cars compared to the flagships that you’re talking about. You’re talking about these big flagship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SUVs and big flagship sedans. That’s not what most people buy. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are buying the smaller, more affordable ones, just like the rest of the car market. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be a really impressive car in other ways for an EV to be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because EVs are awesome. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you can get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably inexpensive, relatively inexpensive one, and it’s still gonna be amazing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see so many, the Hyundais, the Mach-Es, I see so many around that are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not super high-end cars, just kind of mid-range cars that maybe have a little bit high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features, but are not the luxury cars. And they’re all good. So don’t be thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to get the biggest Rivian SUV out there, or the Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S. You’re looking at, would you get a Mercedes S-Class? Would you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Range Rover? Probably not. That’s what you’re comparing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchases to. Look in the mid-range and even the low end of the EV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world and you’ll find a lot of good value there. And you can even, I mean, I don’t know if you’d ever go this route,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can consider the used route as well. used EVs can be had for very little compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, I think what they’re worth. And you lose some range by the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a few years old but not as much as you think. I mean, again, I know a lot of people, like our friend Jason Stel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people like their first EV was something that had way less range, like under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hundred miles a lot of times. And those are still amazing cars. And for your, literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your express priorities and needs would probably fit just fine. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even then, like, it’s just like driving around a cool, futuristic golf cart. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so fun. I think you’d have a lot of enjoyment out of that, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not like an extremely high-powered one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, because I’m me, I would go for the extremely high-powered one. And if I were to buy one today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I would buy an Ioniq 5N or an EV6 GT, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in many ways the same car and in many ways not. But I mean, I’m looking at the MSRPs for each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them and it’s $62,000 for the EV6 GT, which is the one I was leaning toward and $66,000 for the IONIQ 5N, which is a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying it’s unreasonable money. It’s just a lot of money. You don’t need the 5N.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guarantee you the regular IONIQ 5 is faster than your car. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even looked at the specs. I bet it’s faster. I don’t know. You might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I don’t know. I’m curious now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it while we’re recording. Go test drive one. Oh, I’m sure it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel faster. whether or not it is faster is different. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular Ionic 5, 300 miles of range, 41K. I see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a lot more affordable. I don’t love the look of the Ionic 5.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, I think it looks cool. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, it’s a little too quirky. But then, I mean, honestly, the EV6 is also quirky in just very different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know how to figure out how quick this is without doing some deep dives. So I’ll have to save that for another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also like, you know, certain metrics don’t reflect things like, well, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you step on the pedal, it goes instantly. there is no delay. So like there are different attributes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a performance where like, you know, maybe it might, you know, if you can find something that beats it in like the quarter mile, like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be different from how it actually feels to you to use it in regular driving. Oh, you’re exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. By the way, also the Mach-E, 320 miles, $40,000. Just, just put it out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some very close friends have a Mach-E and despite them choosing a Marco style color,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from everything I can tell, it’s very nice. I haven’t been in it yet, but I’ve seen it many times and it seems very nice.
Follow-up: Recents in Finder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving on. Michael Stark with regard to Recents in the Finder sidebar. Michael is confirming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I thought. See, here’s the thing. We were already talking earlier in this very episode about how my memory is trash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is true but there are occasions where I’m right and I convince myself that I’m wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I know my memory is trash. I knew that Recents was not new despite what we talked about last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could swear it but I didn’t believe myself. Well, Michael Stark writes, the Recents item has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there for many, many years, and it’s even visible in the default installation of Mac OS. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Odin writes, not only is it not new, but, unless I’m misremembering, for years now, when setting up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Mac or a new user, it’s the default folder that the Finder opens to. I believe that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Joe Lion writes, yes, Recents is the default Finder view in icon mode, and it’s infuriating to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure Apple has all of the market research in the world to show that relatively no one knows how to use the Finder, navigate the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file structure, create hierarchies, etc., And I’m sure that they’ve discovered that most people don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and don’t care where their files are, like on iOS. So they just gave in and said, fine, here’s a reasons list. the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey default view if you want, but we know 90% of you won’t.
10,000 DPI screen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric Juergens writes with regard to Vision Pro displays, Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in conjunction with Stanford University has developed a 10,000 DPI screen, or nearly three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times the display density of the current Vision Pro, which is about 3,300, almost 3,400 points per inch. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comparison, the earliest reference I could find of the Sony micro display used in the Vision Pro seems to be an article from 2022,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which notes the display was made in 2021, or about two to three years before the Vision Pro was announced,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ll put a link to that article in the show notes. Given this perhaps the more pixel dense vision Pro could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released in 2027 or 2028 Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe add a year or two to that because if you look at the article about the Samsung and Stanford screen This is less a
⏹️ ▶️ John commercial product more and more of a research effort But hey if they can figure out how to manufacture it affordably,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe this will be the next technology and so to give a reasonable timeline for
⏹️ ▶️ John a Vision Pro with three times the display density, hopefully for the same low low price of $3,500
⏹️ ▶️ John 2028, 2029, maybe those are the years, but keep an eye on it. But it’s good to see some story out there about
⏹️ ▶️ John displays that could substantially increase the the pixel density of a high-end device.
iPhone Mirroring on corp. Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then here’s a PSA for you. This is from a while ago, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s why you shouldn’t use iPhone mirroring on a corporate Mac, writes Mac Rumors. According to a blog post by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey security firm Sevco, the core issue lies in how iPhone mirroring interacts with macOS’s file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system and metadata. When activated, the feature creates app stubs for iOS applications in a specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directory on the Mac. Users, your username, library, daemon containers, data, library caches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These app stubs contain metadata about the iOS apps, including icons, application names, dates, versions, and file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey descriptions. While they don’t include the full executable code, they provide enough information for macOS to treat them as installed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey applications. The problem arises because many enterprise security and IT management tools routinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scan Macs for installed software. These tools often use macOS’s built-in metadata
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system, which now includes these iOS app stubs. As a result, personal iPhone apps can inadvertently appear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in corporate software inventories. Whoopsie-dupsies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s another one of the great advantages of corporate malware that is constantly scanning your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John When something like this comes out, it’s not like the people who make this corporate, you know, scanning software are on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of the latest advances in Mac OS. And so when iPhone mirroring comes out, they’re not like, we’ve got a new
⏹️ ▶️ John version that accounts for that. They probably never even tested it. But users are gonna find out when they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I’d like to use iPhone mirroring on my work Mac. And they do that, and then suddenly they have essentially revealed every
⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s installed on their iPhone to the corporate scanning thing, which maybe is not what they wanted to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside that even if there’s nothing on there that you wanted to hide, now the scanner is gonna say, well, look at all these new
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that this person has installed. And maybe someone comes and pays you a visit and says you shouldn’t be installing
⏹️ ▶️ John personal apps on your work computer and yada yada. Although I do find it interesting that this is, secretly how this
⏹️ ▶️ John is implementing, these little sort of empty app stubs that are enough of an app to be
⏹️ ▶️ John recognized as an app and to have an icon and a creator or whatever, but they have no actual executable code in them. And that’s how they
⏹️ ▶️ John implemented the thing where Mac OS is aware of the apps on your phone, right? Instead of just communicating
⏹️ ▶️ John over the network, they spray a bunch of files into the file system and say, here’s a bunch of apps that are on your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. Interesting implementation, but be aware of that. Yeah, this is a little bit older story, but I thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ John worth noting. If you haven’t discovered this already, maybe don’t use iPhone mirroring on your corporate
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iOS 18 Photos.app complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 18, it’s been out for a while now, and I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard any complaints here in the house ever since like when it first dropped. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of the show Quinn Nelson writes, I don’t know of any iOS update more hated by normal people than the iOS 18 photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app redesign. I don’t love it, but I also don’t hate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a very kind of milk toasty opinion about this to be honest with you. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. I don’t love it, but I’ve gotten used to it and it’s fine. The one thing I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I really genuinely enjoy the trips feature where it tries to figure out when you’ve gone on a trip and it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its own like bespoke section for that, that a plus everything else. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. So Quinn’s Quinn’s read here. This is a thing. This is the first thing that I heard from normal people in
⏹️ ▶️ John my life when I was 18 came out way back when, because I was trying to get people to update, you know, on day one, instead of waiting to
⏹️ ▶️ John the waiting for that time when Apple pushes is the update on everybody. If you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of non-tech enthusiast world, what do people know or think about
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 18? The answer is the Photos app is bad. Don’t update to iOS 18 because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Photos app is bad. Here’s all the reasons that the Photo app is bad. I put this item in here because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we in the tech nerd sphere are not talking too much about that. There was a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John news about that back in the betas when Apple was changing it in response to negative feedback during the betas. but now that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been released, I don’t hear a lot of people in our circles complaining about it. My personal opinion is also
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is not, I don’t think it’s better than the one that came before, but I don’t think it’s that much
⏹️ ▶️ John worse. But let me tell you, if you just go to like, go to TikTok, go to Instagram on someone else’s account, like
⏹️ ▶️ John just get out of your world of recommendations and look at what regular people are saying. First
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, the fact that regular people are saying anything about iOS 18 is probably bad for Apple. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple wants is just like, oh, my iPhone got better and they shouldn’t know the number 18,
⏹️ ▶️ John they shouldn’t care that there’s an iOS update. Maybe they care about the new emoji, which is a big driver for people
⏹️ ▶️ John actually updating their phone or whatever. Regular people fear OS updates
⏹️ ▶️ John because they think it’s gonna break stuff or whatever. So as far as regular people are concerned, no news is good news for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. But that’s not what’s happening. iOS 18, people know the number 18 and they
⏹️ ▶️ John know it because everyone seems to hate the Photos app. And I wanted to talk about here, first of all, to hear what you all
⏹️ ▶️ John think of the Photos app. It sounds like Casey’s kind of where I am, where it’s like, I don’t hate it, but I don’t think it’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade either. But second, to figure out what it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that regular people hate so much about the Photos app. I have some ideas, but anyway, Marco, what do you,
⏹️ ▶️ John before we get into what other people think, what do you personally think about the iOS 18 Photos app, if anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really use any of the new, like customizable swipey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re exploring rows or anything. So I don’t really have a strong opinion. Like I’m a kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos app, you know, light user. I skim through and I usually am looking at my most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent photos. Occasionally I’ll like go back and say, oh, what was that thing I did last week? Let me pull up that picture, you know, my New Year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suit or whatever. Like it’s usually a short time scale. I’m never going into the photos app and saying, make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me a memory for last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I love they have those features for people who do that. I’m not one of those people. So like all that stuff, it mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of gets in my way if it’s in the way. but I find like for my very light use, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I don’t think it’s an improvement for me, but it’s also not a downgrade, so
⏹️ ▶️ John So what I think most people dislike, and I have people in my life, my daughter refused
⏹️ ▶️ John to update to iOS 18 for ages because she had heard that the Photos app was bad. She hadn’t even experienced it herself, but by the
⏹️ ▶️ John time I even mentioned it to her already, and there’s like two days after it’s released already, she’d heard from her friend’s circle,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t update to iOS 18, the Photos app is bad. I think she’s since updated and
⏹️ ▶️ John she still maintains that it’s bad. She hasn’t articulated specifically what it is about it that she doesn’t like it, but I have a few ideas.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first of all, one of the sub genres you will find in the world of Instagram, TikTok,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, or in the teen circles or regular people circles about, here’s how you can
⏹️ ▶️ John fix photos on iOS 18 so it’s not so bad. And what they’re basically telling you to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with a super secret hack is like, did you know things are configurable? Right? So in
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 18 photos, you can configure, I figure where it is probably in settings. You can configure lots of the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to remove things that you don’t care about, to change the order of things, to pin certain collections to the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if the default setup is not to your liking and it’s showing you things you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in, you can change that. So this is a super secret hack that there’s a million videos about telling you, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how you can fix it. Which makes me think that one of the things about the iOS 18 Photos app that people don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John is they launch the Photos app, not to do as Margot was suggesting, to use memories or whatever, but they just
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna launch it to look at some photos they’ve taken. I think that’s what most people do with the Photos app is, I took some
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, let me look at them. Let me show them to someone else. Let me open it up and grab that one photo.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just wanna open the app and get a photo that they’re thinking of from today, from last week or whatever. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re doing. But the iOS 18 Photos app has other plans. It’s like, you know what? Here’s a bunch of carousels
⏹️ ▶️ John with memories and trips and whatever. And they’re like, what is all this? I just wanna get in my photo. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the iOS 18 Photos app got rid of like the bottom tab bar and replaced it with this like
⏹️ ▶️ John half of the screen is this other stuff that’s not your photos. Yes, you can see a grid of your photos, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John have you considered albums and shared albums and media types and people and pets and recent days
⏹️ ▶️ John and memories and like all that stuff. They’re like, that’s not what I want. Why is it taking up half of my screen? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI is like, well, if you just scroll the grid of photos, eventually we make that bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John thing disappear and it becomes like a floating tab bar at the bottom. So look, it’s just like your old photos
⏹️ ▶️ John app. This is one of the things they didn’t bait. was they said, okay, we’re not going to take up half your screen with the stuff that you don’t care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just ignore it and scroll, then you just have a grid of icons like it used to be. And you have this tab
⏹️ ▶️ John bar with, you know, years, months or whatever. But the fact that that big thing is there
⏹️ ▶️ John annoys people, right? The fact that they have to like scroll and it like it behaves unlike any
⏹️ ▶️ John other kind of app, people are kind of used to an app where there’s either a top bar and a bottom bar, like a phone app, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a middle region that you scroll and this whole thing of like, well, half the bottom half of the the screen is a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and the top half of the screen is some other stuff. And then if you scroll, the bottom half, you have to scroll like the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John half of the screen resists you, it’s like, I can’t push it down. But if you push down a little bit more, then it’s like it surrenders
⏹️ ▶️ John and becomes a floating toolbar. That’s not a paradigm that exists like as common idiom in
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone world. It’s something that Apple made up for iOS, the 18 photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not familiar to people. It’s weird. It’s weird that the app like resists you
⏹️ ▶️ John hiding that bottom part. Like you push down, it doesn’t go away. You have to push down a second time. Like try it, go
⏹️ ▶️ John ahead, open up Photos now and see the whole bottom white section below your grid of icons. Push it down with your thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John in a single motion. No matter how far you push in that single swipe, it will never go away. Like push, push, push, push, push.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your thumb will go off the end of the phone and it will never go away. Ah, but push a second time
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it disappears. And so like it’s fighting you, right? So I think a whole bunch of the
⏹️ ▶️ John resentments about iOS 18 Photos is there’s this white bottom section that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John my photos that I don’t wanna see that fights me every time I try to get rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think there’s a lesson in that for Apple. And then the second thing of course is what’s in that white section? A whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of crap. And the fact that you can configure it is one of the features I actually like about the new photos. You can configure
⏹️ ▶️ John it to put the things you’re actually interested in near the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which by the way, just very quickly to interrupt, the real-time follow-up on that is if you scroll all the way down, scroll, scroll, scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the way down, there’s a customize and reorder button, which is what lets you do the, what do you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what order do you want it in on this bottom section?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a super secret tip that you can learn from all these TikTok. Anyway, like the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John set about the recent item, most people will never change the defaults. Like they won’t even discover that or whatever. That’s why this is a super
⏹️ ▶️ John cool tip. Obviously, anyone listening to the show probably knows that’s there and they’ve already configured it. But still, that just lets you sort of minimize
⏹️ ▶️ John the damage of like, well, if I have to endure this white bottom section in the photo screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least I’ll put the stuff that I care about on the top and delete the stuff that I don’t care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s why I say, for me personally, the iOS 18 Photos app, it hasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not better than the previous one because I’m like most people going in there just to find photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing I wish, my personal wish for the Photos app is, first of all, I would get rid of that whole like, hey, you can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of this bottom part until you try a second time. Ask me a second time and then I’ll turn into a toolbar. Like, there’s nothing wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with just having a toolbar. Just have a toolbar, right? I would love if that toolbar is customizable because the
⏹️ ▶️ John main, my main complaint with dealing with photos on my phone is whenever I’m doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with photos, if I am picking photos, like in a photo picker, like the, whatever, the system photo picker, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in some other app and it says, here, pick a photo to put here. If I’m picking a photo or if I’m trying to file a
⏹️ ▶️ John photo away, like put this photo into an album, in both of those cases, I am
⏹️ ▶️ John always, almost always pulling from or putting into like three albums
⏹️ ▶️ John and in the little white region thing, you can pin them. So I have pin collections, favorites, recently saved, destiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John profile photos, contact photos, and memes. Those are the ones that I use most frequently. That’s where I’m pulling from
⏹️ ▶️ John or putting into. And that’s great for pin collections on the screen, but in the system photo picker, it’s like, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all your albums, have fun scrolling through them. It’s like 500 albums. And they’re alphabetical sort of, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some at the top if you’ve used recently. And it’s just like, I wish you could just say, look, these five, just always have
⏹️ ▶️ John them be in the top. Like kind of like the, you know, open save dialog box before you expand everything. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John just you always pick from these these ones just these these will always be at the top You will never have to
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll through the list of albums looking for memes We’re looking for the M section trying to remember what the icons where is my destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John folder scroll scroll scroll DS I don’t pass the DS scroll back just always put them at the top photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS 18 does not give me that experience I still frequently in other apps find myself scrolling through my gigantic list
⏹️ ▶️ John of albums Trying to find the destiny album because it’s somewhere in the DS and I scroll past it and it annoys me So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not enough. That was same before and it’s the same after. So it’s not a change. I do like having pin collections, but I hate
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the little white region I have trouble getting rid of. But anyway, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think most people are like into the nuances of user interface. They’re just like, somebody moved my
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I used to know where things were in the photos app and now I don’t. The tab bar that was at the bottom isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John there anymore. This is other thing that I don’t understand that turns into a tab bar. Even things
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I mean, they changed this in the beta. How do I change from showing my personal library or the shared library? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a more esoteric feature, but they have that buried before too and they fix it in the beta. Still,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you two know where it is? It’s pretty well hidden. If you don’t know where to find that, you have to, to
⏹️ ▶️ John get to it, you have to push the white bottom region away because you don’t want that anymore. So one push,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, you didn’t make it right. Second push, you push it away. And then the up and down arrow keys to the left
⏹️ ▶️ John of the years, months, and all thing, hit the up and down arrow keys thing, and then you can pick, And what does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like sorting or something, then you can pick personal library, shared library or both libraries. And it used to be in the upper right and now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in the lower left. So anyway, everything is moved and I think the app
⏹️ ▶️ John is fighting people from the main thing that they wanna do, which is just show me all my photos. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could help people there. I think it’s trying to say, you have too many photos. If we show you all your photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll never be able to find anything. What if we put them into a grid where everything, where we just pick like the ones that we think are
⏹️ ▶️ John important photos instead of showing you them all, like the grid where they’re all different sizes and stuff. What if we do that? What
⏹️ ▶️ John if we show you collections with what we think are the good photos? And people are like, just get that out of my face. Just the people just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to scroll their photos, scroll, scroll, scroll. Maybe they want to go to months and years and that should still be there,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they just want to do that. Everything else in the app is getting in their way. And it kind of amazes me that the
⏹️ ▶️ John backlash of iOS 18 is essentially you change the interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to the photos app. It’s not like my photos are gone or there’s something worse about the
⏹️ ▶️ John photos. is just like, when I go to find my photos, I’m now frustrated with my phone. I do wonder if by the time
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 20 comes along and they change it again, people are gonna be like, why’d they change it? The
⏹️ ▶️ John photos app was fine, they didn’t need to change it. Like a new generation of people get used to the iOS 18 photos and they change it again and it
⏹️ ▶️ John annoys them. But really, I was really surprised by the backlash against this, the continuing
⏹️ ▶️ John backlash against this. Because it’s not like a high profile thing, it’s not like controversial
⏹️ ▶️ John or salacious or whatever, it is just like, you changed my user interface. And it shows how
⏹️ ▶️ John much people treat their phones like cameras because the things that people use all the time are the messages
⏹️ ▶️ John app and I guess also the photos app. You know, they take pictures with their phone, they go and look at them, they send them to people in messages
⏹️ ▶️ John and any change to that app is a problem. So I find this fascinating. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 18 photos, like I don’t give it a failing grade because I don’t think it got
⏹️ ▶️ John much worse than before. It does some things better to some things worse. I’m gonna say it’s a wash, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is an example of like, if you’re gonna change, fundamentally change how
⏹️ ▶️ John a heavily used app on iOS works, it better be either way better,
⏹️ ▶️ John or it better look and work like the old one unless you do something. An example would be the Messages app when they added the pin
⏹️ ▶️ John things to the top. If you didn’t pin anything, it just looked like the old Messages app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you did pin things like I did, and you wanted to pin them, it is an improvement. So I think Messages
⏹️ ▶️ John app has improved over time, getting more capabilities, but also not ruining it for everybody else. But iOS 18
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, not doing well. Again, Apple would hope that they would never hear
⏹️ ▶️ John the word iOS 18 on TikTok, but they will. Ay yi yi.
[follow-up from the future]
⏹️ ▶️ John Should have put this in the regular show because we’re gonna get feedback about it I don’t know if you two tried it in the iOS 18 photos app that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where you can’t push the The white area down on the first try only
⏹️ ▶️ John happens if after you launch the app you swipe up by two millimeters before you swipe Down if you launch it don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John touch the screen at all and immediately swipe down you can do it in a single swipe But if you launch the app like force quit it launch the app
⏹️ ▶️ John Pull up two millimeters Let release the screen and then try to pull down it will fight you
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna get feedback about that but that’s my own fault for waiting too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you were crazy, but I figured I was just misunderstanding what you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John trying to say. Try what I said now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that one more time. So, okay, I’ve just forced quit. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John launched the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Scroll, push your finger upward on the screen for two seconds, lift it off. So you see more of the white area.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now put your finger on the screen and try to push down. You will not be able to do it in a single swipe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see. Yep. You’re right. No, you’re right. But that is not, I was listening, but that is not what I got from what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John were saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought I did it all the time because I guess when I, Like if you have the app like running and you’re looking at that white area, I was just like
⏹️ ▶️ John filling around with it. If you’ve messed with the white area at all, you’re in that mode. But if on a fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John launch, before you’ve done that, if the first thing you do is swipe down, you can do it in a single swipe. So now we have to endure a week of
Apple radio chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We have a handful of rumors from Mark Gurman, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they all kind of interrelate a little bit. But we’ll start with Apple’s new chip for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Mark writes, code named Proxima will replace some components currently supplied
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Broadcom Inc. This wireless chip will launch in some products next year, including this. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that means 2025, including a new Apple TV, HomePod mini and the iPhone 17. The component will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then come to other products during 2026. And this is interesting. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not surprising, but this is not the cellular modem chip that they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fighting against for years now, right? This is something different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The cellular modem chip is also coming and we’ve talked about it before, but this is, yeah, this is the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John so one interesting aspect is how much of both of those things
⏹️ ▶️ John can they potentially build into the package of the SoC? Can you move
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cell modem stuff into the SoC? Can you put some of it on die? Most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time for radio frequency reasons or whatever you can’t, but could it be in the same package? Basically, can
⏹️ ▶️ John you get lower power and smaller footprint by Apple doing this themselves because they can incorporate things into
⏹️ ▶️ John the package? That’s a separate question. I’m putting that aside for now. The reason I’m interested in this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. No one’s super excited about the chips for that. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to work or whatever. but Apple doing it themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they save money. You don’t have to pay Broadcom for those chips because they have their own profit margin. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you do it yourself, you get them cheaper. You can make exactly the wifi and Bluetooth chip that you need
⏹️ ▶️ John for your devices that only has the features that you need. Pros and cons to that, already Apple doesn’t put the
⏹️ ▶️ John latest and greatest wifi standard in all their devices. I think the phones have wifi seven, but the Macs don’t, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If I’m getting that right. and Apple tends to not be a super early adopter
⏹️ ▶️ John on all these things, although they’re usually on time with it for the phones. But the real question
⏹️ ▶️ John is, we just talked about software, but this is a hardware thing. When
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple decides that they’re going to stop buying some hardware component
⏹️ ▶️ John from somebody else and do it themselves, how do we feel about
⏹️ ▶️ John that in terms of, are we excited and optimistic about it? are
⏹️ ▶️ John we fearful? Because I think that’s changed over the years. And
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with hardware, it’s a tough call. I think I was talking about something on Macedon with somebody and
⏹️ ▶️ John they were like, Apple’s never gonna do XYZ because they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they get all their stuff from this other third-party manufacturer and they’re the best. And one of the things I replied was,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, Apple used to buy its CPUs from a third-party manufacturer too. And they were the best
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while. Right, but sometimes when Apple decides to do a hardware thing itself, it knocks
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of the park. Apple Silicon, home run, right? They decided we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the chips ourself for our phones, for iPads, and eventually for our Macs. Previously,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone did not use an Apple chip, right? And I think maybe the first, the first iPad probably
⏹️ ▶️ John had Apple Silicon, I forget. When was the first iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Was it before the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco A4. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, they used to buy the chips from other people for all their products, and they slowly but surely said, no, we’re gonna do that in-house.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they just destroyed it. They, amazing job. So you would think that anytime you hear,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s gonna stop buying some piece of hardware or some hardware component from a third party, and they’re gonna do it themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d be like, you’re an Apple fan. You must be excited about that because Apple’s so good at hardware. And yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I would heard, for example, Apple is going to start making its own,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I was gonna say SSDs, but that’s a complicated issue. I was just discussing the best shows. What if this one, they’re gonna make their own
⏹️ ▶️ John cellular modem. they’re gonna make their own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips. My first thought is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I’m optimistic about that because
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the CPU and stuff where like there’s lots of room for innovation and excitement, you basically just want Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John to work and work with the latest standards. And I worry
⏹️ ▶️ John that the potential for harm is high and the potential for good is low because even if
⏹️ ▶️ John they knock this one out of the park, They saved a few watts of energy
⏹️ ▶️ John and they saved a little bit of space in their phones But if they do anything wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s the the the iPhone 17 That’s the one that can’t do Wi-Fi, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that has even more Bluetooth problems than usual the cell modem they did use Intel cell modems instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of Qualcomm for a while and it was like Did you get the iPhone with the Intel modem or did yours come
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Qualcomm on because the Qualcomm ones were better? That wasn’t even Apple that was just two third parties and
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody knew in the nerd circle You want the one with the Qualcomm modem because it’s better than the
⏹️ ▶️ John one with the Intel modem then Apple bought that Intel modem business and it’s Trying to build not to do their own thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at this Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip and I’m like It could be okay. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the potential upsides. It’s not like they’re gonna pass the savings on to us So don’t forget about that, right? It’s just gonna increase their
⏹️ ▶️ John margins It could be a little bit smaller and lower power, but the downside
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Broadcom’s been making Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips forever. They’re probably really good at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the bottom line is their chips work with everything because everyone knows that Broadcom chips
⏹️ ▶️ John are in everything and so if you use a Broadcom Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, it’s gonna work with all the, you know what I mean? Whereas Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does their own thing, there’s a potential interoperability issue there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I am really nervous about the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip. The cell modem,
⏹️ ▶️ John they said that we’re gonna debut in like the iPhone SE or whatever, like they’re gonna roll it out and like not the flagship
⏹️ ▶️ John products in case it’s a disaster, which makes sense to me. But the fact that they’re mentioning this one with the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 17 would have this chip in it, potentially, that’s the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you put a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip in the iPhone 17, it better be perfect. Like it better
⏹️ ▶️ John be perfect or better than the Broadcom chips and I’m not sure this one will. How do you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys feel about the prospect of Apple doing this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think it’s changed over time. Like, you know, we were all there for the bad iPhone 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Intel modem instead of the Qualcomm modem. Like, we were there for that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the bad one, I had the Intel one because it was most or all, I think, of the AT&T iPhone 7s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we see how this can go wrong. Like, we don’t want there to be a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and we don’t want the Apple version of something that is as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic and required and taken for granted as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. We don’t want that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be bad or buggy. Already today, I hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Bluetooth bugs with my iPhone. Now, I don’t know whose fault that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if it’s hardware or software. It’s part of the Bluetooth spec,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco special section
⏹️ ▶️ John of the spec that says, on flaky problems that customers will never be able to solve. It tells you what you have to implement. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know if that’s the Bluetooth chip, if it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS software, if it’s the stuff between the two. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On one hand, you can say, well, maybe Apple taking it in-house would give them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more control over the process. And maybe that would allow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to build a more reliable one. On the other hand, you can look at that and say, Apple can’t even get the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right for someone else’s Bluetooth chip, how are they going to get the software right for their own? So like it can go both ways. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at the, you know, Apple’s recent efforts, you know, the iPhone 7 was what over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decade ago? It was a while ago. When you look at their recent efforts, their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silicon is solid. Like when they transitioned the Mac to Apple silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whole M1 generation, you would think if you would have said, you know, five years earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna do this. Would you buy the very first one? Most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say no. That sounds like a terrible idea. Why would I buy the very first version of them doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive change? It’s gonna have problems. It’s gonna be unreliable. It’s gonna be buggy. Well what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They switched the entire Mac over to their own chips and as far and I was there and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the very first one and it was solid. There were I don’t I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were any major problems. There were certainly fewer problems than the outbound mature Intel ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they knocked that one out of the park. So I think their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current standards and their recent performance in areas like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of the Apple Silicon transition, shows a pretty good track
⏹️ ▶️ John record. Well, you’re forgetting their most recent effort in this area because it hasn’t shipped. Their most
⏹️ ▶️ John recent effort is their many years long effort to make their own cell modems. They bought Intel cell modem
⏹️ ▶️ John business, the business that made the cell modem that nobody wanted on the iPhone 7. They bought that business and they had
⏹️ ▶️ John plans to make their own cellular chip that they’re going to put in their phones and they are
⏹️ ▶️ John behind schedule and presumably that means because they’re not able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it well. And even though that hasn’t shipped, it’s unfair to judge them on that, like, oh, when they ship it, it’ll be good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is very relevant to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s like they have been been trying for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years to do something very similar, and they’ve essentially been internally failing, not
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping what they had, aiming to get a cell modem with these standards. Oh, now we can’t do it. So now the target
⏹️ ▶️ John has moved. Now we need to make sure we have 5G, but we’re not going to be able to do millimeter wave because you know, like they’re having
⏹️ ▶️ John trouble with it. Maybe we don’t see this internally. Maybe they were, you know, working on Apple Silicon for the Macs for years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John and kept delaying it or whatever, because it was more secret. But the fact they’re doing the cell modem is not secret.
⏹️ ▶️ John knows they’re doing it and everyone knows that they are behind what we what seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to be their earlier schedule. So I mean that’s good and that they’re not shipping something bad. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re not gonna we’re gonna keep buying they renewed their contract as we discussed in the show ages ago they renewed their contract with Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John for several more years just to say look we need to cover our bases we’re obviously not ready with our cell modem
⏹️ ▶️ John Qualcomm still makes the best one even though we hate each other and have sued each other let’s sign a deal
⏹️ ▶️ John and say okay we’ll keep buying stuff from Qualcomm But everybody knows Apple wants to stop doing
⏹️ ▶️ John business with Qualcomm. They just can’t. They’ve been failing to get out of that relationship because their own efforts have been
⏹️ ▶️ John not going well. So that gives me a lot of pause here. So like yes, yeah, part of the recent experience
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Mac transition and they’ve done that transition multiple times. 68K to PowerPC, PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ John to Intel, Intel to Apple Silicon, and they’ve just done amazingly every time. So they have lots of institutional experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John but their their institutional experience swapping out wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John communication chips, I think is far spottier.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the little information we do have is that they’re having trouble. So that is another reason I’m feeling nervous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think there’s, you can frame it like two different ways. Like are they, is it that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do this well enough yet or that they haven’t done this well enough yet? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, look, Apple knows the iPhone is the show. They know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can look at like, how many iPhones have there been? It’s a pretty high number, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you include all the, all like, you know, the non, you know, mainstream, like the non flagship models, when you include
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different, you know, sub models and different, two different sizes of everything, a lot of times. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been a lot of iPhones. How many of them have had significant hardware flaws?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a very short list and they haven’t been that significant. They know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to make really reliable iPhones. They have shown an incredible, like when you consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how complicated iPhones are, the scale that they are produced, it’s remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how few hardware problems iPhones have had.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them was specifically from the cell modem when they did the Intel one and they shipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But even that, I still used that phone for a year and it was still mostly fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t that big of a, they have had little minor things. Yeah, the Intel submodem in the iPhone 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t that good. Yeah, they had the slightly more bendable than usual iPhone 6 series.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were a couple, the antenna gate forever ago, which was also a minor issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re pretty good at making sure they’re not gonna ship something really bad. But part of my nervousness
⏹️ ▶️ John about this is like, I don’t want them to do it and just have it be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much the same, maybe with a few problems. Like as a consumer, that doesn’t benefit me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John It gives Apple a few more cents per iPhone, but I don’t care. Again, they’re not passing that savings on to me. Like what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at this with a little side eye is like, why are you doing this? Like what’s the upside versus the potential downside? And the upside
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like they’re all for Apple and the downside seem like they’re all, we’re exposed to them. And I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John you that they’re not like with the cell phone that they haven’t shipped. If anything that goes into the phone, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John like the flagship iPhone, they’re gonna make sure it is at least okay. They’re not going to ship something terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ John we hope, right, which is why they’ve not been able to ship anything. But they are doing things like
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors for the cell modem of like, they’re gonna make one without millimeter wave support and they’ll only ship it in the lesser phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t excite me. Like, why would I be excited about a cost savings for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple that exposes me to potential risk and that they’re not even willing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John on their flagship phone because they haven’t been able to do that. And why if I’m Bluetooth, I’m still kind of neutral. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the upside? One of the things I fear is that it’s not going to make it more likely that the Macs have like
⏹️ ▶️ John the latest Wi-Fi standard than the current one. Because like, again, someone can confirm this, but I believe the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 Macs don’t have Wi-Fi 7, but the phones do.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple made its own chips, would that make it a higher chance that when Wi-Fi 8 comes out, that it’s across
⏹️ ▶️ John all the lines? I don’t think it does. I don’t think it increases. So like, I’m looking for the silver lining. I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for like, What is the upside for me as the consumer? And I don’t see it and I just see some
⏹️ ▶️ John minor risks. And I agree with you that the risk of the phone is probably low, but other devices mentioned in this room are Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV, HomePod mini. I don’t want my Apple TV to have crappy, well, my Apple TV is connected to the ethernet, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want it to have crappy Bluetooth, right? I just, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not, I put this in here because I’m just, it kind of, it’s notable to myself that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not enthused about the potential for Apple taping over a piece of hardware when
⏹️ ▶️ John in some respects I should be because of Apple Silicon and their recent advances, but when it comes to this specific sub-genre,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, think about like, okay, first of all, there will probably be certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upsides in just things like power efficiency, small size, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like we will see probably some minor advances there. Wi-Fi chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cell modems are big. They take up space on the board. If they can make their own or end or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrate it into the package of the SoC, which I think is more likely, or at least integrate parts of it into that and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe- Or they can use their TSMC deal to fab it at the good fab size, because most
⏹️ ▶️ John of these wireless chips are fabbed at like a two generation old thing, so it’d be cheaper or whatever. Apple can spend a little bit more because
⏹️ ▶️ John of their massive deals with TSMC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and that, given the amount of power, especially a cell chip uses, like that could be substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco savings there. But like, so there’s obviously, there’s like the physical benefits. If they could integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in, put it in package, or at least make it on their process, yes, there’s lots of advantages they could potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do there. But even if you think about too, like Apple does a lot of their own kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom bolting on of functionality onto existing open standards like Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Bluetooth. Look at how AirPods pair and work. Look at all the Wi-Fi stuff they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like peer-to-peer Wi-Fi networks that are temporarily made for things like AirDrop and stuff like that. There’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of features that Apple kind of builds on top of these standards. Well, if they controlled the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet they could do more and better features like that. Now that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a double-edged sword, because you think about, well, is it a good thing for Apple to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more proprietary protocols and standards that can even maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go at the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and radio level? Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry, the EU will make them open it up to all third-party developers, so it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure that’ll be fine with everybody. It could be a double-edged sword
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense like they could use it for further extents of locked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and unfair competition. So, you know, there will be downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this path if they go
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Although you’re mentioning like optimistic, like, oh, here’s a problem that I currently have and they might be able to solve it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I see where you’re going with that, especially like the H1 chip. Like in general, I would say that the AirPods connecting
⏹️ ▶️ John is better than Bluetooth pairing. Like, for example, I added their proprietary thing instead. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the same problem that, or one of the problems you’re describing is like, I try to do airdrop. I’m in a room with like, I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone in my hand, I’ve got a computer in front of me, and I got a computer over there. And sometimes I wanna airdrop something with my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John to the computer over there. And I would love to know what it is that determines whether I can
⏹️ ▶️ John see that computer on my phone. Yes, I have it set to like a contacts only or everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I have, everyone’s in our contacts. I’m doing it among family members. I’ve even done it in a situation where I’ve logged
⏹️ ▶️ John into my account on that computer and I’m on my same Apple ID on my phone and I’m trying to airdrop it to the computer I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in front of, and it just doesn’t see it. that sees the other computer across the room, but not that one. And all sorts of like airdrop issues
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t solved by like banging the phones together, like the iOS 18 thing or whatever. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John that a problem that Apple will be able to solve by doing its own wifi chip? You’re thinking like, oh, they
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like airdrop, they could make that better. I’m thinking, is that a software issue or
⏹️ ▶️ John is that a hardware issue? Like you can pin a lot of dreams on like, well, if Apple made the wifi chip, I wouldn’t have that airdrop problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m thinking that airdrop problem is a software thing, not a hardware thing. And I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to know where the blame lies, but when there’s new hardware, the optimistic take is any problem
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m currently having that involves that hardware could be improved because Apple will have complete control over it. And I kind of feel,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when there’s software in the mix, that’s like 50-50, whether that’s gonna get better or get worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you’re right. Obviously, in most cases, that is kind of a blend of hardware and software, and those lines are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squishy these days with a lot of these very complex protocols. But I think you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are looking at it from the perspective of like touch bar, butterfly keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era Apple. And that’s not the Apple we have anymore, thank God. You know, modern Apple, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is showing like they really don’t ship bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware anymore. They used to ship a decent amount of it. They really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardware across the board is excellent these days. They really do not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have major hardware problems that ship to customers and especially in the iPhone. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am optimistic that probably the reason we haven’t seen these things yet, you know, we’ll occasionally see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a report that, oh, the cell modem delayed. I think part of the reason we haven’t seen them yet is because Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably holding them to very, very high standards and won’t release them until they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know they’re solid. So I’m pretty optimistic. I think this will go well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if and when it ever happens. And I think if it doesn’t happen or it doesn’t happen yet, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably for those reasons. is probably that they just haven’t reached the bar that Apple knows they need to reach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be good enough to ship in their flagship products. And so I actually think this, because like, if you think too, like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else could this benefit us? Well, how else could it benefit us if cell modems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get smaller and or more efficient or cheaper for Apple? Huh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac will finally get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a cell modem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Stop teasing me.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of the rumor and it’s not about cost. It’s just about like that Apple will finally do it because part of them
⏹️ ▶️ John making their own hardware is like, well, let’s make it so it works in all our products. And now Apple uses an excuse
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like, we couldn’t put cellular in our Macs because reasons X, Y, but now that we make our own chip, we totally can. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have before too. But anyway, whatever it takes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, whatever reasons they give, who cares? We just want it there. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, I agree with that, but we’re talking about the WiFi and Bluetooth chip and they already have WiFi and Bluetooth. Yeah, the cell modem
⏹️ ▶️ John chip, if it actually ships and it makes them put it into Mac, I will count that as a huge win. And if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hose the iPhone, that’s good too. But wifi and Bluetooth, Macs already have that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little nervous. Well, but, and what, what about the Apple watch? The Apple watch has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optional cellular. All of them have wifi and Bluetooth. It is a very tight power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation in the Apple watch. If you can make those, and it’s also a tight space situation. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make wifi, Bluetooth and cellular smaller and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power efficient, the Apple watch will benefit substantially from that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it it’s where those are like most desperate resources. So think about, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only can the watch possibly get, you know, slimmer, lighter, whatever, bigger battery, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, maybe if they can make big strides in those areas, maybe the watch can start using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its networking more. Oh my God, what a concept. Maybe our apps wouldn’t be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly aggressively throttled with every single thing they try to do on the watch. Maybe the cell connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch could get reliable because it wouldn’t constantly put itself to sleep. or it could all just get so much flakier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, trust me, the cell connection on the watch cannot be flakier than it already is. But like, you know, maybe the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can start using Wi-Fi for more data transfer instead of relying on slow Bluetooth for as much as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s all, maybe the watch can do more frequent updates. Definitely more upsides to the watch. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you can see, there’s very clear opportunities for like, if they could make Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi, and cellular smaller and more power efficient and cheaper to them, that does benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us in a lot of potential ways. So I, I’m rooting for this and I am confident
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the moment that they, their hardware standards are so high, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because these things would be going in the iPhone and the iPhone standards are so high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think they’re not going to do it until and unless it’s solid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I think that’s really the key is if it ends up in the iPhone, then I’m confident.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only in the Mac. I might be a little bit worried only in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV. Yeah, only in the home pod. That’s the worst. I mean, that’s yeah.
New mouse rumored?!
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, speaking of your confidence in Apple making hardware, this next item will test your faith.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. Well, so Mark Gurman writes that Apple’s Magic Mouse, which was introduced more than 15 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, one five, 15 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, they’ve made some tweaks to it, but only minor ones. It moved from AA batteries to a rechargeable system,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swapped in a lighter case with a smoother glide and just a month or two ago, switched from a lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector to a USB-C port. The good news is there’s a new Magic Mouse in the works. Hooray!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m told that Apple’s design team has been prototyping versions of the accessory in recent months, aiming to devise something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that better fits the modern era. Apple’s looking to create something that’s more relevant while also fixing longstanding complaints.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, including the charging port issue. As for when the mouse will arrive, I wouldn’t expect anything in the next 12 to 18 months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you kidding me? What are you doing? It’s been 15 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s another year or two?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco doing, Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you exactly what they’re doing. Do you remember when the butterfly keyboard finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco died? About a year before, a year and a half before that, there was some rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Bono personally called Tim Cook and complained about it, and then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened. I do remember that now. You know what I think happened here? Is the MKBHD question?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I honestly think that MKBHD asking Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the magic mouse, I think Tim Cook went back after that and told somebody, Hey, fix this
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, Do we make a mouse? Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I honestly I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet that’s what happened because, like 12 to 18 months, that’s how long it takes to make a new mouse like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new for Apple. And that’s how long it takes. So I guarantee you it was the M. K. P. H. D. Question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and Tim Cook went to somebody and just said, Take care of this like and before that he never thought
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll try to find that interview. I think it was a W. W. C. But just to be clear, I think he just asked something like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you think of the Magic Mouse or whatever? He didn’t say anything bad about it. He didn’t say, well, it was pointed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook, the Magic Mouse sucks, why? He didn’t say it. It wasn’t like a, it was just merely like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was using this example of a product that maybe people don’t care about too much. Like, how much do you really think about the Magic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mouse? It’s just kind of like an aside, an also ran. And if I was, you know, if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John not Tim Cook, but if I was in Tim Cook’s position, but not Tim Cook, you can usually say, of all the products we make,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Magic Mouse is not one
⏹️ ▶️ John important. Like it’s low on the list, right? It’s good that we make it fine, whatever, but obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, with the iPhone at the top, you gotta go way down that list before you get to the Magic Mouse, right? That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John reality. Like that’s why it’s been around for 15 years. Nobody really cares. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a bad mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people don’t like it because it’s low profile. Some people love it because it’s low profile. Marco loves it because you can swipe on it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have any hatred for the Magic Mouse. I don’t think, there’s no like iOS 18 photos hatred for the Magic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mouse out there. It’s just like, it’s not for everybody, but it’s fine. Right? And it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John around 15 years, so it’s probably due for a redesign. The fact that it was mentioned at all in such a public forum
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe made him say, hey, Magic Mouse, we should update that
⏹️ ▶️ John once every few decades, right? And they said, oh yeah, no, I guess, or whatever. But here’s the thing. Here’s why this is like the Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. I read that very differently, but go ahead. Well, anyway, like the Wi-Fi chip thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. How do you feel, confidence-wise, about today’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple designing a new mouse. Setting aside the fact that you love the current one, Marco, just
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, like, do you think they’ll do a good job on a mouse? Because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John human interface devices that are fit in your hand is not one of Apple’s strengths
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently. Let me, I’ll get to that in a moment, but my interpretation of the MKBHD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question of Tim Cook of the Magic Mouse is that Marques stated the question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget exactly what he said. It was like something like, you know, the magic mouse. He stated the question with an implication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s not well liked and something is wrong with it. And Tim Cook was caught
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off guard by that. You can see in his face that he not only was caught off guard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but he didn’t know what Marques was talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mouse? That’s what Tim is thinking to himself. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Marques probably doesn’t like the magic mouse, but again, I don’t think there’s this iOS 18 photos type hatred
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. There’s just for computer nerds, a lot of people don’t like it, but then you just ignore it and buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John third party mouse. And so it’s not that big of a deal. No, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could you could see in Tim Cook’s face, it dawned on him in that moment that a there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something that a lot of people don’t like about this. And B, I don’t know what it is. I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook does not like being surprised, especially in public like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet he went back after that. And that was a like fix this situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the There’s not a giant movement out there to hate the Magic Mouse. There’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John baseline level of dislike that’s been there since they introduced that mouse 15 years ago. Mostly only among computer
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds and other people are like, yeah, take it or leave it. And the fact that Tim Cook would be unaware of that, like, I don’t think it’s a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John he needs to be aware of. What he should be aware of is like, which products have we not updated in a decade and a half? Maybe put them on
⏹️ ▶️ John a list. But I don’t think there’s like, can you believe Tim Cook didn’t know that everyone hates the Magic Mouse?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think everyone does hate the Magic Mouse. Like, I don’t think it’s actually, You know, even if it was incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John hated, how many Macs even come with a Magic Mouse, percentage-wise, of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John sold? Like, they come with trackpads, which people buy laptops. Like, it is so far beneath the thing that he should be
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned about, but on the same token, he should update it, because it’s 15 years old. What Marques was
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about is what all sort of, like, tech nerd people know is like, oh, well, that mouse is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of enthusiasts don’t like that mouse. They like it more of a Logitech style, more buttons, higher profile, more quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomic, depending on how you, Like it’s not well loved in tech nerd circles, but in regular people circles,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t know it exists because they all buy laptops. Like that’s the story, right? So I think the mouse, to
⏹️ ▶️ John be clear, I think the mouse should be updated. It’s been around for a long time. I personally don’t like it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be updated. It’s time to, 15 years is long enough to say, do you have a new idea
⏹️ ▶️ John about how Apple could make a mouse? Because Apple has done not too big number of
⏹️ ▶️ John mice in the history of all their computers, from the Apple twos to the Macs. there haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been that many Apple mice. There’s been some good ones and bad ones and there’s the hockey puck one, there was the mouse with the little
⏹️ ▶️ John ball that got clogged all the time on the top, right? The mighty mouse or whatever. But there haven’t been that
⏹️ ▶️ John many mouse shapes. So Apple is not hasty about that, but I think it’s time for them to reconsider.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so again, we’re back to today’s Apple, making a new mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you feel that’s gonna go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so as the magic mouse lover in the group here, What I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it is the scrolling swiping. Like, that is everything. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I switched to it in the first place from my previous Logitech, you know, good mice. And, you know, before this I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using that Logitech mouse. One of the first ones, I think it was the MX Master, that had like the wheel that you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like flick hard and it would unlock and spin freely for a little while and then latch back in. You know, and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of them do it now, but, you know, scrolling is everything. It turns out, scrolling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you scroll on touchpads, is way better for me and the way I use computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the way you scroll with a mouse wheel. The Magic Mouse gives you touchpad scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of a mouse. So that is the good thing about it. Everything else about it, I tolerate, or it’s fine, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. But that’s what I like about it. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at the Magic Mouse, this was designed in a previous era of Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their hardware design. Probably almost nobody, or nobody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who was involved in the design of the Magic Mouse is likely to still be at Apple today or still be in the design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco group. Because, you know, especially the design group has had a lot of turnover in the meantime. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, keep in mind, like what we’re comparing this to is really a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past era of Apple. Like the Magic Mouse design, especially if you include the AA version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very old, as you said, like what, 15 years? Like, so I think today’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would do a pretty different version of it, merely, even if no other reason, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of their products are this style anymore. Like this is, this is just a totally different version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they make today. Uh, so I’m interested to see what that would mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think that they wouldn’t go through the trouble of redesigning it because mice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so unimportant to Apple, unless they were going to actually do a more substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change than just changing the port. So, you know, so obviously I think they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to fix the complaints. And sometimes Apple does that. Like when we got the apology, MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything was so much better in that one. They, they gave us back the SD card slot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They gave us back, uh, the HDMI port. You know, they, they, they put the headphone jack back on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right side of the computer, they give us back. Yeah. MagSafe. Like they, they are capable of going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a less minimal, less stripped down industrial design direction when customers demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it enough and when it’s enough of a gain. We’ve seen that now with the MacBook Pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know they can do that. I think the mouse has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent chance, not a guarantee, but has a decent chance of going in that same direction because not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only have we seen that happen with the MacBook Pro, but also who uses mice now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As John said, it’s different than it was 15 years ago. 15 years ago, yeah, laptops were still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dominant then, but I think they’re way more dominant. now. So the people who actually buy and use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Magic Mouse, maybe it’s a more professional set than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe Apple realized now, you know what, most people have figured out right-click, so maybe we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do something a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit better there. Another thing to consider, by the way, is that this weird phenomenon, so obviously all the laptops don’t come with
⏹️ ▶️ John mice, they just have the trackpads, right? But at this stage, I think, was it
⏹️ ▶️ John most of Apple’s desktops also don’t come with a mouse? The mini doesn’t come with one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the iMac comes with one. Oh, that’s right, the Mac Pro does come. I forget because I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the iMac and the Mac Pro both come with one and you can configure them to come with a trackpad instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes in addition, but I think usually it’s just instead now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t come in the box. Like the Mac Pro, I had forgotten that the Mac Pro does come with one in the box. Like of all the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John to not come with a mouse, you would think it would be the Mac Pro, but it does actually come with a mouse in the actual box, which again, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you can configure to the trackpad. But like- The iMac does too, it’s in the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s next to
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard. Mac makes the most sense because it’s color matched and it’s like, it’s all, it’s an all, the whole point is it’s all in one. You get everything you need.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Mac mini and Mac studio, no mouse, right? Correct. It’s a separate, I mean, you can attach it. You can,
⏹️ ▶️ John during checkout, it will ask you to buy one, but the Mac mini and the Mac studio box do not have a place for a mouse or a
⏹️ ▶️ John trackpad inside them. So that’s, that’s half of Apple’s laptops. Desktop. They didn’t even put,
⏹️ ▶️ John put a mouse in the box because it’s bring your own. And arguably the Mac pro should also be like that. Although I guess the box
⏹️ ▶️ John is so big that they have plenty of room to put a mouse or a trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco inside. They just put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it inside the Mac Pro, like in a bay somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, it is odd that back in the day, if you bought a Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t in a laptop, it came with a mouse, and today, 50-50. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that. I mean, that’s obviously which one you buy and which one’s selling more
⏹️ ▶️ John you go into percentages of people who buy the things. But it is interesting. And again, with the option, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even know what the default is, if there is one, but I bet a lot of people do choose the trackpad just because like Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they like that better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, but I think if they’re gonna go through the trouble of designing a mouse now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think there is a non-zero chance they will aim it a little bit more towards people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who actually care about mice and use mice, and are experts in using mice, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is now so often that is like people are choosing to do this who are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power users now. So I’m not expecting this to look like the latest MX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Logitech Master whatever with 17 buttons and I’m also not expecting it to be super ergonomic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because one thing I also can’t imagine Apple doing is making a left or right sided mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think they’re gonna make one mouse that is symmetric So I would not expect the curvature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you get on like modern ergonomic gaming mice and stuff where it’s like made for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a right hand or only a left hand so what I can guess is is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be largely similar to what we see, but maybe they’ll make it a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit taller and a little bit boxier to be able to accommodate a charging port somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on the front. Hopefully, that’s what I’m guessing they’re most likely to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you really hate the current one for reasons other than the charge port location,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t hold your breath that they’re gonna make a mouse that you like. But if you use the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and are inconvenienced by its design in a couple of ways, maybe they’ll make that better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there was another rumor report from Korea that actually did make a somewhat direct comparison to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Logitech mouse saying that Apple’s new mouse would be more ergonomic, more like the Logitech mice. But using
⏹️ ▶️ John the example of the laptops, here’s the thing. Fixing what was wrong with the laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, it kind of sort of required them to make the laptops a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit boxier. They got rid of the, I think, more attractive Johnny I have design case that had the shallow
⏹️ ▶️ John curve towards the edges and everything because they just needed a little bit more room and that was the change we wanted them to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, practically speaking, if you show these laptops to just an
⏹️ ▶️ John average person who doesn’t know the minutia of Apple stuff, they’re not going to think they look radically different. They
⏹️ ▶️ John change. They had to change the MacBook pros in such a subtle way that is
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe obvious to us because we’re obsessed with the fine details of them, but it still basically looks like a laptop. It’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John much thicker. It’s not that much more slab sided. It does have more holes in the side of it. But other than that, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have to change it a lot. They can’t make a change that fine to the Magic Mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John and make any substantial difference. Even if they just do what you said is like make it a little bit taller,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to make it taller enough that it’s going to be uglier,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And look a little bit more like I think their problem with the mouse is they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to look like a beautiful object when no one is using it. The current one does. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John change, you can’t just do a change of a few millimeters like they did in the MacBook Pro and say, see, we solved it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s if they do that, I guess they fix the charging port location and people stop complaining. But if they do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John they haven’t really changed the Magic Mouse. And the rumors seem to be that they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it, quote unquote, more ergonomic. So they can’t add one millimeter to it. They have to add substantially. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John once you start adding substantially, you’re into that situation. You highlighted it very well. You come to this question real
⏹️ ▶️ John fast, which is symmetrical or not symmetrical. Because once you start making it bigger, you’re making it bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John so it can fit into the negative space of someone’s hand. And then you have to ask, which hand? You could always
⏹️ ▶️ John make it right and a left model. That’s the thing Apple could do. It’s not a popular thing that people do, but it’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they could do it, right? But once you start making it bigger, you’re like, what am I raising this mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John up into? You’re raising it up into a hand and hands are not symmetrical, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if you make a larger symmetrical mouse, which Apple did, the original Mac mouse was much larger and also symmetrical,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a problem there. Like when they did the ADB mice, they were lower profile. Both
⏹️ ▶️ John the original ADB mouse that was like two flat surfaces and the rounded one, they were starting
⏹️ ▶️ John to get low because a tall mouse should fit into the space of
⏹️ ▶️ John a single hand, which means it’s going to be, even if you do like my Microsoft mouse that I have now, it’s mostly symmetrical,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s got that thing on the side for your thumb, your right thumb to be on, right, and your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John of your right hand go, like, it’s not symmetrical. Like, it’s very difficult to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a mouse that is both ergonomic and also symmetrical. So I don’t, I feel like they
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t have the, they won’t be willing to make their mouse unattractive
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it ergonomically good. And merely making a tall mouse that’s symmetrical
⏹️ ▶️ John will not satisfy anybody, because the people who wanted a more ergonomic mouse are gonna say, well, this isn’t it, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t even recognize the fact that my hand is not symmetrical. It’s just as big, it’s like the, you know, a big,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the original Mac mouse, a big box in my hand. How is this better? Like, might as well just go back to the low
⏹️ ▶️ John one because at least when I lay my hand flat and use it, my hand becomes more symmetrical than when it’s gripping, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is an interesting test of their industrial design. How ugly will they
⏹️ ▶️ John be willing to make this mouse as an object to make it better as an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John input device? And I think with the MacBook Pros, they were able to make it like a
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny bit less attractive for a massive functional benefit. And I don’t think they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to make that trade because if you make it a tiny bit less attractive, you’re not getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a massive functional benefit. So my current theory is it’ll be almost,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll still be low profile because to make something that is symmetrical, it has to be low profile. Otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John it just becomes unsatisfying to everybody. It’ll still be low profile. They’ll just find a better solution to the charging port.
⏹️ ▶️ John My main hope for it, mostly for Marco, is because I don’t even use this mouse, is the things underneath the
⏹️ ▶️ John surface that you swipe are very low resolution and crude. 15 years later, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can essentially increase the DPI and sensitivity of the swipey area on top. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that will result, especially with like 120 Hertz screens, I think improving that resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John will make the mouse better for people like Marco who like this mouse. And if Apple refuses
⏹️ ▶️ John to give up on this being a beautiful object as it sits on the table, then the best design
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to be the current low profile mouse just with higher DPI of the tracking, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another thing that Apple is like decades behind on in terms of like how well it tracks surfaces and
⏹️ ▶️ John how, you know, the granularity of the updates and how fast it can handle things. You don’t have to make it a gaming mouse, but it’s been 15
⏹️ ▶️ John years, right? And then the sensitivity and resolution of the swiping
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on top. I don’t think they’re gonna do a second right button, but who knows? I mean, the Magic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mouse has a right button, it’s just a weird one that’s like capacitive and you have to not touch the left side when you’re touching the right side. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another thing. Can they bring themselves to make a two button mouse? As in like a hairline
⏹️ ▶️ John split in the top surface. Making, you know what I mean? Can they do that or will they continue to do, make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John your finger’s not touching the left side of the mouse when you push down on the right side, otherwise we’re gonna register it as a left click. Are
⏹️ ▶️ John they gonna still be doing that? So this is something I definitely have my eye on. Not because I really care that much, because I have
⏹️ ▶️ John basically zero hope that they’re gonna make a mouse that I like, which is fine. I have this third party mouse that Microsoft no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John makes that I should really have bought eight of, but didn’t. And that fails all the time. And I’ve already had like three of them die on me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m just interested, it’s like a good test of Apple’s industrial design. How do they solve this problem? How,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s low stakes, because who cares? Like if they mess up their mouse, like nobody cares. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the headline for this item in the notes is, save the turtles. Save the, harpooning the turtle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone wants to flip that mouse onto its back and harpoon it. And yeah, the turtles, the turtles will no longer be harpooned.
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely they will fix that. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they have a totally new, completely redesigned mouse, but the charging
⏹️ ▶️ John port’s still dead center on the bottom? That’ll be an amazing troll. But anyway, this is the thing I’m keeping my eye
⏹️ ▶️ John on. It is much lower stakes than the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a good bellwether for the Apple of today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I was gonna make the same point about how the laptops have gotten a lot better. You can make an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argument since Johnny left, maybe that’s related, maybe it’s not. But I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re convincing me with it, not with being symmetrical being bad, even if it’s taller,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that argument you made a moment ago really has convinced me maybe this isn’t so great after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I was really looking forward to it just in principle because, you know, again, the magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse is not well liked from an ergonomic standpoint, from a general standpoint, because people aren’t using mice anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but now you really got me worried about the whole, them not being willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it ugly enough to be useful. So, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a lot of these mice in my attic if Margot wants to,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey he needs replacements
⏹️ ▶️ John the new one is not to his liking. Although you’re probably gonna have to get my black Mac Pro one because that’s still sealed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’ll probably be fine. But I think if anything, they will err on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the side of not changing enough. I don’t think they’re going to change too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially, you know, like you were saying, like to make it taller, you know, to make it better. Look at Apple’s keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their keyboards are all super flat, which is not good
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s actually-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than them being tilted up though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they are actually slightly tilted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John up. They’re tilted up by like one millimeter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, Apple’s keyboards are also not very good ergonomically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but tons of people use them happily and they’re fine. They could be better. Apple has said, okay, this is as far as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will go for ergonomics and no further. And that’s currently the design of the mouse. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I’m thinking like, if they do change the mouse, Again, I think it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be in relatively subtle ways. I’m not expecting a major redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m expecting minor tweaks to lift up the front edge just enough that they can put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB-C port under there and call it a day. And I think that’s probably gonna be what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And honestly, that would be fine. It would be exactly as ergonomic as their keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are and it would fix an annoyance. And I think that’s by far the most likely outcome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you don’t know, you guys remember this, but Apple did actually ship actual Apple mice with side buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember those? No. The Apology mouse was a mouse with side buttons. They were terrible side buttons, but they existed, like actual
⏹️ ▶️ John physical buttons. Yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squeezed it for something. What was that? What was the squeeze gesture? Yeah, yeah, there
⏹️ ▶️ John the side. Every sort of third-party mouse, even my Microsoft mouse has three side buttons. It has like a
⏹️ ▶️ John forward, middle, and back type thing. I don’t even know what I have them mapped to because I never use them, but side buttons on mice are definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. And Apple did ship a mouse with physical side, multiple mice, I think the Apology Mouse had it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t the one with a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny track ball on the top, didn’t that one have a squeeze
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was the Mighty Mouse. I don’t remember if that had it. The Apology Mouse definitely did. It was the one that was a thick, clear case
⏹️ ▶️ John that they gave to everyone as an apology for the iMac puck mouse. That had side buttons. They were bad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John all I’m saying is Apple, long ago Apple was not above
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping a mouse that had more than one physical button, including a side button, which is like, side button is
⏹️ ▶️ John so kind of like outside the mainstream of what Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. Like they still didn’t, that mouse still didn’t have a right button on it, like a physical right button, but it did
⏹️ ▶️ John have side buttons. So I don’t know, maybe they’ll be, maybe they’ll surprise us and ship a mouse that has
⏹️ ▶️ John two top buttons and a side button, or one top button and two side buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turntables and a microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could call it an action button. Yeah, exactly, there you go. The innovation, oh, they should, they’re gonna put the stupid digital crown
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. That’ll be, I don’t know. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They put it on the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’d be pretty cool, hit the button on the side of your mouse to turn the flashlight on. That’d be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the best change I’ve made, was making the action button the flashlight button.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I told you, it’s great. It’s so good. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so good. I still use it for the Whole Foods app. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. And thank you to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on ATP Overtime, we’re talking about, well, John is talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about fast directory sizing in APFS. This is an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tidbit of how APFS, how one of its features works, and how it might influence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s app that he’s building. So you can hear that and many other benefits of joining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by joining at atp.fm slash join. Thank you everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that’s Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t mean to You’re so
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental. Accidental. Check the
YoLiss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John I’ve joined the cult. Oh, I’ve joined the yo link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I don’t remember if I said this to you at all be that privately or on air but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Heard you talking about your yo link. Well, how did you describe it? They’re like low
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long long range maybe low voltage Transmit low
⏹️ ▶️ John ra is the standard I forget what it stands for I’ll have to look it up in the show notes for an old Rex News episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like low frequency radio communication. It’s not Bluetooth. It’s not Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’d asked Aaron for a starter pack from Yolink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that included one of their hubs. This one does not have ethernet, which I don’t love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think there is another one that does, but that’s neither here nor there. And it has a couple of, I’ll call them contact sensors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there’s a better name for it. But basically, when you have two magnets that When they’re next to each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sensors registers is closed, and when you separate the magnets, the registers is open. These are the same kinds of sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have in the garage door for my Rube Goldberg garage door alert system. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I asked for that from Erin for Christmas. She got it for me. And since the last time we spoke,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have put one contact sensor on the stationary portion of my mailbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other contact sensor on the door of the mailbox. And now I am getting alerted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whenever my mail is delivered. and it makes me so happy. Erin has made so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun of me for this. She doesn’t understand why I need to know this. And honestly, I don’t need to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but it makes me happy that I do know exactly when the mail was delivered. Do I need to go check the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail? Let me look. No, I don’t. But you know, 20 minutes later, do I look? I can go look. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do need to check the mail. There’s no checking, actually. I know it’s there. It’s magical. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other thing that Erin has pointed out numerous times, and she is 100% correct, is that it is a miracle we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting our mail. because if you look at my setup, it’s not only homely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but 100% looks like I’ve installed a bomb on my mailbox. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should take a picture. I haven’t taken a picture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I apologize. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, I will. I will take a picture and I will send it to the boys and we’ll put it in the show notes. But imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the contact sensor, the actual magnet on the part of the sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is on the door of the mailbox, The magnet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portion is approximately the same width as the mailbox door itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, there’s also a little bit of extra plastic with a couple of screw holes so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can mount it on things, right? Well, the screw hole section is totally poking out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past the end of the mailbox door. And then if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portion of the mailbox that the mail carrier generally doesn’t see because it’s after they’ve passed, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely the other contact sensor with wires that are going into the place that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mailbox is mounted on. Like it’s not wood that our mailbox is mounted on, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so happen to have like a plastic one, and you can take off a little cover and there’s just a hole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. And that’s where I stuck the transmitter. It looks shady as hell, gentlemen. It looks so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shady. But the good news is it has been working very well. And for those real nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I’m sure I could do this through the YoLink app directly, What I’ve done is I’ve added
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a integration for Yolink to Home Assistant, and then I have an automation on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Assistant that will then use pushover to send me a push notification when the mail arrives with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the exact time the mail has arrived. It makes me so happy. It’s so stupid, so unnecessary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it makes me so happy, and I’m so glad I’m in the Yolink cult. And now, as with all things, when I find something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new and exciting, see also Raspberry Pi, now it’s like I’m smacking my arm trying to figure out, okay, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else can I do? What else do I need a sensor for? Maybe I do care about the fridge. I didn’t think I cared about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I care about the fridge. Maybe I should get a sensor for that. I am already losing control and it’s no good. So John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all your fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the freezer one, the refrigerator one is just gonna let you learn how often people stand in front of the
⏹️ ▶️ John refrigerator with the door open and causing the temperature to go above the safe area.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s me all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you’re doing, yeah. But once you have the sensor, you’ll suddenly know that. And it’s a little bit troubling. In fact, I’ve had to
⏹️ ▶️ John raise the threshold of my refrigerator one just to try to, try to say, look, I’m just gonna have to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s gonna be 41 degrees in there when people open the door. So maybe I’ll set the thing at 42 or 43. Basically what
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna know is, hey, did someone leave the door open? Like they went to bed and they left the fridge
⏹️ ▶️ John door open to crack? That’s what I wanna know, not did another person spend 10 minutes in front of the open fridge door on a hot
⏹️ ▶️ John summer day and make the temperature go up. So I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that one unless you have a problem with it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you as your kids get older start leaving the fridge open by a crack and destroying everything in your fridge more often or your freezer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Great. Freezer is a little bit easier because it maintains temperature a little bit better and you just put it at the freezing point and you probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get any bad alerts. But the one thing I will tell you that you might wanna do, well, maybe not, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the water leak detectors. If there’s any place in your house that you think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there could ever be a leak that you wanna know about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t get any false alarms from that one. They’re like 17 bucks, the batteries last for like three years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say put it next to your water heater, but that’s in your garage, so if it floods, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Put it like between every toilet and the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under every sink, like anywhere that you have a, I don’t have any of this stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for insurance reasons, I had to get myself a home alarm system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from SimpliSafe recently, not a sponsorship. It’s like, pick whatever of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensors you want. And they have WaterLeak sensors for some relatively tiny amount of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, all right, I’ll get six of them. Like I put them everywhere, like under each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sink and in every bathroom. And also, of course, the water heater.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do they communicate? Are they like the Yolink things where it’s this low frequency RF thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I believe it’s custom because there’s like a base, there’s like a simple safe home base thing that all their stuff talks
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s how the Yolink things work too, by the way. You get a quote unquote smart hub, which gets on your Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John network, but then also communicates over the proprietary RF thing to the sensors. And that’s why the sensors
⏹️ ▶️ John can be so cheap and last so long because they don’t talk Wi-Fi. They’re not on your Wi-Fi. They have no idea Wi-Fi exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just talk to the hub from like a quarter mile away or so they claim. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then the hub talks to your Wi-Fi. So you can just put the hub right next to your Wi-Fi thing and put these sensors anywhere in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m assuming in three years, they’ll start notifying me on the app that their battery’s getting low, but the battery’s
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to last a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so I’m digging this. I, like I said, I’m looking for reasons to install this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all the places, but so far so good. I’m really pleased with this. I had no idea that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a thing, not only Yeolink specifically, but this whole LoRa thing, Hoorah, no, the low-raw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that you were talking about. This has made me very happy and is giving me an outlet for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever more nervous energy, which I’m good with. So thank you, and also no thank you, because now I’m gonna spend a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money on damn water leak sensors too.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re cheap, you can buy, like, you know, 17 bucks for a water leak detector. Just buy a couple of them, chuck them around your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing, it’s like, it’s like once you are in the system, like, you know, once you have their hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have their app set up and you have their alert set up, you might as well, like, you know, because you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like paying a monthly fee per sensor or anything, so you might as well spend an extra 17 bucks to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few more of them and chuck them around the house. Anywhere that that could be useful, anywhere that like, yeah, a water leak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, that’s useful information to know. And it’s part of the advantage of, I think one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lessons we’ve learned with smart home gear so far is, Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is bad. Smart home gear can be very useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The less that’s on Wi-Fi, the better. The most reliable and most useful smart home things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to be ones that have some other kind of protocol they speak that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi. And that usually requires a hub somewhere in your, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is part of the promise that Thread is trying or purporting to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to unify all these standards into one new standard XKCD style.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why every single stupid Apple device comes with a Thread radio. We don’t even talk about it anymore, but
⏹️ ▶️ John every Mac that’s introduced, every HomePod, Everything that comes with a Thread Radio. What good is that doing us? Someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this may at some point be a good thing. It seems like it’s pretty lightly used now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although I actually, I have some Eve sensors that have Thread support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure if they’re using it, but they have it. So I don’t know. But anyway, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not Wi-Fi, smart home, is almost always better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is usually, like, usually the devices themselves are cheaper per device. Usually they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more reliable. They usually have better battery lives if they are battery powered. They usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have longer ranges or in the case of these things, like if you’re not speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wifi and going on wifi frequencies, you can probably use lower frequency radio waves which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco penetrate walls better, have longer range. So basically getting off of wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better in almost every way for smart home devices that are not cameras. Cameras unfortunately need the bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of wifi but everything else usually doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why wifi is bad for home things. It’s not like wifi itself is a bad protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything. It’s just designed for higher and higher data rates for things like computers. But a home device that’s telling
⏹️ ▶️ John you the temperature and humidity has such low bandwidth requirements that using a sophisticated,
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated, high frequency protocol like wifi is just a waste. It’s a waste of battery energy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the standard’s not made for that. These other standards that have incredibly low bandwidth but
⏹️ ▶️ John can penetrate walls and go from a quarter mile away on a single AA battery. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a better fit for the application. So we’re not saying like, why did they make wifi if it’s so bad? Wifi is good
⏹️ ▶️ John for what it does. It gives you like wireless data to your phone and your laptop and even maybe your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV. It’s bad for a thing that’s telling you whether there’s been a leak or not. That literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost nothing. Yeah, it’s like, I need to send this one, it’s like, you know, one byte of transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to my home. Has
⏹️ ▶️ John there been a leak since the last minute I asked? Yes or no? No. Good, done. And that’s over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Problem solved. Anyway, so thank you, but no thank you, because I’m going to go broke putting sensors in a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different places that I don’t need them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I mentioned the water heater, by the way, is I already had, before I got the Yoling things, I already had a Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor on my water heater, because twice now, living in this house for 20-something years, twice my
⏹️ ▶️ John water heater has gotten old enough that it’s sprung a leak. Luckily, not a catastrophically,
⏹️ ▶️ John because water heaters, just a hot water tank heater, or whatever, they eventually, corrosion eats away at the inside of them. There’s a big sacrificial
⏹️ ▶️ John anode, see the Rectives episode where I talk about this, that gets eaten away. Once that gets eaten away, guess what? The tank
⏹️ ▶️ John gets eaten away. And if you’re not on top of replacing it exactly when the warranty expires, because they put the anode
⏹️ ▶️ John in there that’s big enough that they think as soon as the warranty runs out, the anode will be gone and then it will fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re really good. They could just put a bigger anode in it. Like I think when they sell you like
⏹️ ▶️ John a 15-year-old one versus a 10-year, the only difference is bigger anode in the 15-year-old and they charge you 300 extra bucks. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, when they leak, If they catastrophically leak, your basement fills with water and it’s terrible. But
⏹️ ▶️ John usually what happens is corrosion makes a little tiny hole that starts spraying out or dribbling
⏹️ ▶️ John out water. And it’s still an emergency. You’ll be like, oh, turn off the water and plumber come or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s something you want to know about ASAP. I’ve been lucky enough both times to be home and we
⏹️ ▶️ John go down to the basement enough because the laundry machines are down there to notice it and say, you know, and that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought the sensor. Like I don’t want to be away from home when that happens because even a small leak
⏹️ ▶️ John could flood my basement. I should really just replace my water heater more often, but you know, you do what you can. My current
⏹️ ▶️ John one is still less than 10 years into it, supposed to 15 year lifetime. So I’ll