catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

673: Six Impossible Things

08 Jan 2026

What we’re most excited for in 2026.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Our livestream’s pre-show band
  2. Thanks, ATP Patrons
  3. Cord-cutting follow-up
  4. Studio Display follow-up
  5. Display-flicker follow-up
  6. PS Portal follow-up
  7. Window-minimizing follow-up
  8. Wi[-?]Fi 7 follow-up
  9. Eero Max 7
  10. Network-level ad-blockers
  11. Sponsor: Guru
  12. Thread/Matter follow-up
  13. Fitness+ follow-up
  14. Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
  15. ASML and TSMC
  16. Sponsor: MasterClass
  17. Excited for 2026
  18. Ending theme
  19. UniFi Travel Router 🖼️

Our livestream’s pre-show band

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, I have a question for you. This is actually what this was posed to me in jest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by my friend, our friend, Tyler, who went to Goose with us. And we were talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goose, because that’s a lot of what I do these days with anyone who will listen. And Tyler

⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked, at what point does Goose replace or at the very least augment Fish as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pre-show music for live listeners of the show? And I would like to know the answer, please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if it ever will unless so here’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why one of the reasons I play fish before the live stream before the show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I just have a ton of it now I also have a ton of goose so that that that is an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco equal you know equal push there the the biggest difference is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years I have occasionally emailed somebody or had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a conversation with somebody who’s like vaguely involved in the fish organization here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or there and I’ve gotten the impression that this kind of stuff they really don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about. So like we’re not gonna get in trouble playing seven minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a live fish recording that I bought on our live stream before we go live to a few people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s not I don’t think anybody in the fish organization would have a problem with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know the goose organization. I don’t like I I don’t really have an idea yet of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they would have a problem with us doing that. And it’s not worth going through the like official

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey channels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like music licensing for, you know, cause it’s like, like the tracks I’m playing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t even in those channels. Like, I’m just, I’m playing like purchase live recordings from like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco live fish. So like, so it kind of avoids that entire system,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, which avoids headaches.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s an astonishingly and frustratingly reasonable answer to be completely honest, but I appreciate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it nevertheless. That is actually fascinating. So yeah, if you’re involved in the Goose organization, then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should let us know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For lots of reasons. I would love to know people involved in Goose like that because I have a feeling I’m going to be a fan of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this band for a very long time. And probably if they stay together for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of my life, probably the rest of my life. So I would love to get to know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody there who might be able to work together in some capacity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just, hey, I’d love to buy you a coffee if you’re ever in New York, like anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John How would you work together with Phish in some capacity? What capacity would you work with Phish? Please enlighten

⏹️ ▶️ John me about your speculation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if I ever make my jams app, so that’s my tentative name for the app that I would make that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the jam band, the jam band specific music playback app. that would have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features in it that would, that like, you know, listening to my live fish and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goose recordings in just the Apple Music app, it works, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are like organizational and experiential features that I would much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather, I’d like, I’d much rather it work a little bit differently in some of those areas, or have certain features that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will never get around to adding, it would never make sense for them. And if I made an app specifically for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to these jam band recordings, like I have a few good ideas around how I would do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it would never make sense for me, first of all, really, to even make that app. But if I did make that app, it would never make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense for me to try to release it to the public because the audience would be very, very, very small.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many people have bought thousands of dollars worth of live recordings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of either, you know, Goose’s Bandcamp page or Live Fish? Like, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally like, Every show, I buy every show for both bands. They’re like 10 to $15 each,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they play like, you know, 30 shows a year or whatever. No one else does this as far, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the number of people who buy all those tracks is probably very small. And so if I’m gonna make an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that requires those tracks to play, to be useful, what’s that audience size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really? Like, and how many people would have so many of those tracks that it would be worth having a special app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to help you catalog them and listen to them better or whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I take your point, but I think there’s more of an audience there than you would expect. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would also argue that if you did a good music playback app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that takes into account like this version is good because of this thing or, you know, so-and-so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a really good run during this version, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, Margot doesn’t do apps with user-generated content.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m even… It’s true. Fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Lots of reasons. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was talking about even my own internal notes, you know, like, oh, I really like this version because something like…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, internal, because like, I have a whole system in iTunes slash music of like how I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I rate my Phish concerts and Goose concerts, how I like I have certain playlists that are like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite tracks like from each band. You know, I have like a procedure that I go through when I have a new show I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t heard yet so I don’t get spoiled. Like it’s a whole thing. I would love to make an app to help

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this, but if anyone else would use it besides me to make that app good,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would need access to the catalog. So really, the only people who can make that app good are either the big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco music platforms which won’t ever make an app that’s good for that because the genre is too small, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, they don’t even have access to all the recordings because the bands don’t upload them to them. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other source of that kind of music would be the bands themselves, or a service

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they use, something like Livefish, Nugs.net, or in Goose’s case, Bandcamp.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all of those people could make a good app, and Livefish has an app. It’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to make an app that would specialize in this, but it would really require the band’s cooperation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it releasable to the public because it would need access to the band’s catalog and however that’s monetized,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care. So I would have to work with them to really make that the app I’d want it to be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I hear you and I do largely agree with you, but I think there’s more of an audience and more ability

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you to do this without band buy-in than you would expect. But is that enough to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey take away from overcast and ATP and whatever else?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, no. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I mean, ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if I look at like, you know, the just the dollars and cents, I Shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do anything except overcast Any TP like the like those these two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these two parts of my work life make the vast majority of the income It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sense. Don’t worry. I’m not leaving the show It doesn’t make sense for me to ever leave this show or to ever give up overcast like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless some truck money backs up But I don’t I don’t see that happening so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those two are in my life, and so the question is if I added anything else to my life Like we talked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about in a recent member special like how would that look? I don’t know it depends

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one of the biggest things like it depends like how much would it need from me? You know am I am I doing something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has no server component that helps I’m doing something that is like building on a part of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS or whatever platform that changes a lot or that people expect a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that depends on the app. I know from Overcast if I’m making an audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing app that goes a lot of places like that that that goes all over the system and all over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people’s lives and people expect a lot from that so that that is actually a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high needs app so anyway it’ll probably never happen but if Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco went away it by whatever means that would happen I have two app ideas I want to work on and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them but we’ll see if that ever actually happens.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should, uh, you, I, somebody needs to buy Overcast so you have the availability to work on this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you and I can do it together because surely that won’t strain our friendship whatsoever you and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I working on this bickering about Dave Matthews and fish and whatever else.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with that setup would be unless we also involve John, we,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, the show would become quite awkward, but second of all, if it was just me and you and not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, we would never work. That’s true. That is very true. We would just play around.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’d be like, oh, check out this clip. Oh my God, did you hear this performance of this? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Hey, you want a beer? Yeah. And then we would never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get anything done. You and I, I don’t think we are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high motivational working people. I think we need external people to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a little bit of a boost. And I think John would be that person. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have occasionally wondered, what would it be like for the three of us to make an app together? And I think we see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like our CMS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we see how that would be, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is please don’t use that as an example of anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the CMS. Like you know, I wrote it at first. John took it over and does everything better,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just everything and now I don’t even touch it earlier in the week. There was a bug that was sending

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me a couple of crash logs in my email and I went to slack to be like oh hey, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do want me to fix this and john’s like I already did like and sure up. He’d already fixed a bug in my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework and already committed, documented everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I do wonder sometimes what that would be like, but I think we already know what that would be like.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what we need is we need you and me to develop and John will be our certified Scrum Master. Definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that. John would fire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of us in a heartbeat.

⏹️ ▶️ John Indeed. You’re You’re both starting on a pip.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re not familiar, performance improvement plan. This is basically like the first step in firing a person.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John This

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is

⏹️ ▶️ John day one. You just start that way. Keeps you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on

⏹️ ▶️ John your

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey toes.

Thanks, ATP Patrons

⏹️ ▶️ John Once a year, I like to give a special thanks to our ATP

⏹️ ▶️ John patrons. Every episode, we give thanks to our members. We say thanks to our members who support the show directly, yada

⏹️ ▶️ John yada, that’s what Marco says in his little end thing, and we do. We love all our members, they make the show possible, we love you, we thank you very

⏹️ ▶️ John much, we thank you every single week. But when do the patrons get thanked? They get thanked once a year, usually in early

⏹️ ▶️ John January. So here we are. What is an ATP patron? ATP patron is someone who’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a member who pays for the show to get the member version of the show with the bootleg

⏹️ ▶️ John and no ads and all the member specials like they’re your member but they pay more

⏹️ ▶️ John than the listed price for membership. Why do they do that? Why would you why would you pay more than the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John costs? Well I have a fact item for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you want to learn about ATP patrons

⏹️ ▶️ John you can go to atp.fm patron and learn how you can do that. There’s a tiny

⏹️ ▶️ John number of people who do this this, there’s not a lot. Why did we implement this? Because people asked us to. And so we did, we

⏹️ ▶️ John implemented it, and the patrons came, and they pay us more than the listed price for ATP

⏹️ ▶️ John membership, because they love the show that much or because they have that much disposable income or both. And so I

⏹️ ▶️ John just want to thank them because we don’t have anything else for them. They get a badge on their member page that says patron, right. But other than that, we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have anything for them. The whole thing is like, they’re paying extra, and they’re not getting anything extra. They’re giving

⏹️ ▶️ John extra, and they’re getting the same thing as all the other members. I wish there was something we can give them. We haven’t thought of anything good yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John But what they get for now is once a year, I would like to thank them again. I could read all their names,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that would be a privacy violation. There’s not a lot of them, but I just want to say you’re out there. You’re an ATP patron. You

⏹️ ▶️ John did that thing where you pay extra money voluntarily. I want to say that we see you. We noticed you. We

⏹️ ▶️ John thank you. Thank you. ATP patrons. If you want to become a patron, even if you’re already a member or if you’re not a member, ATP that

⏹️ ▶️ John FM slash patron will explain how to do it. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks. Thank you so much patrons, we appreciate you.

Cord-cutting follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, some quick follow-up with regard to cutting the cord. As I’m sitting here now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not yet recorded, but by the time you hear this, I will have recorded an episode of Downstream with Jason Snell,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we’re going to talk about cord cutting and kind of what the state of the world is. And one of the things that we plan on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about, or that we have talked about, I don’t know what is time in this particular segment, but anyway, one of the things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s being talked about is suppose.tv, which I’d never heard of, but Jason pointed to me, or pointed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to it. English, how does it work? And what this lets you do is it lets you pick out like, Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really need HBO. I really need CBS. I really need ABC. I really need travel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey channel. And based on your particular needs, it will suggest what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming service you should get, like what is cheapest and what is the best fit and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume this is just for America. I honestly don’t know, but it’s worth checking out if you are American

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and are looking to cut the cord. So I will We’ll put a link to me on downstream in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. It will 404 until the episode is up, and then it will not 404. So check that out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re interested, and check out suppose.tv if you’re looking to cut the cord. All right, with regard to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey adding contacts to a list, one at a time in iOS, we were lamenting how long that would take.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Simon Lungberg writes, the iOS 26 Contacts app does indeed support multi-select

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the two-finger swipe gesture. Selecting spread apart items works by doing another two-finger

⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe at another place in the list. You can then initiate a drag by holding and dragging on one of the selected

⏹️ ▶️ Casey items. Tap the back button and drop the contacts in the list of your choosing. Is it intuitive?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Is it better than painstakingly moving one at a time? Marginally, but does it work? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Simon was not the only person to write this in. A lot of people wrote in about this, but Simon was the one that best described it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank

⏹️ ▶️ John you. There was also a second method to do it, which I thought I had saved, but I had not. But suffice it to say that multi-select

⏹️ ▶️ John does work on iOS. It’s just not as obvious or as easy, I would say, as physically easy as it is

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, but it’s there and it works.

Studio Display follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Give me some context on this next piece, John. Did one of us say that the studio

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey display… I did. I kept,

⏹️ ▶️ John I was complaining about the state of displays and I kept saying, like, you could do X or you could get the

⏹️ ▶️ John stupid studio display for $1,200 and I believe I said it twice, so I have been corrected.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Greg CA writes that the studio display is $1,600, not $1,200. I might’ve bought one at $1,200. Instead

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I converted my 27-inch iMac into a display for less than $300, which I’ve seen videos about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, I think Quinn did a video on this, which I’ll probably forget to put in the show show notes, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is very involved, far beyond what I feel comfortable doing. But man, if you want a nice

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K display on the cheap, that’s the way to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I just keep blocking out the studio display at $1,600 and like, isn’t it $1,200? Then you add like a couple hundred

⏹️ ▶️ John for the adjustable stand. No, it’s $1,600, I believe with the non-adjustable

⏹️ ▶️ John stand and then you add more. It’s really, I know it’s on sale sometimes. So maybe that’s why I was confused, but just FYI, 1,600, not 1,200.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we definitely do not have links for the show notes, but for what it’s worth, David Schaub

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat has reminded me that there are a bunch of new monitors that have been announced over the last couple days at CES,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and some of them are 5K, some of them are 6K. I have no judgments on these. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely know what any of them are about, but it is worth looking into, especially once these are actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey available for sale. There might be some new 5K or 6K options that might fit your needs.

⏹️ ▶️ John You might hear about them later on this show or on a future show.

Display-flicker follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, excellent. I love it. With regard to other displays and flickering, or I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the same display and display flickering, Steven Parelson writes, there have been issues with display support

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on M-series Macs since November 2020 with Big Sur. My M1 Mac mini

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a generic Dell monitor would flicker under certain conditions. I eventually found this forum thread, which we’ll link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In there, I discovered a utility to disable temporal dithering, which solved the issue for me. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what is temporal dithering anyway?

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t actually look this up, but I’m assuming it’s the, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can tell you

⏹️ ▶️ John this display. It’s kind of like what plasma displays would do. If you ever see a slow mo of a plasma TV, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John it shows, uh, a certain set of colored pixels and then shows another set and then another set of color pixels

⏹️ ▶️ John and they combine to form the final image. And I’m assuming they’re doing that to, uh, achieve colors.

⏹️ ▶️ John Temporal temporarily means within time, you know, like you’re showing one thing, then another thing, then another thing. And the combination

⏹️ ▶️ John of them smushed together by your brain makes the final color. And I guess that is maybe the only way they can make certain

⏹️ ▶️ John colors. colors. Um, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you really not know that because you pretty much nailed it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m a little annoyed.

⏹️ ▶️ John I vaguely know what temporal dithering, that’s my attempt at a definition. If I was close, then I

⏹️ ▶️ John got lucky.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the reality of being friends with John.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is that like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think like, you think he won’t know something and he frustratingly usually knows it already.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s about

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I do watch a lot of videos about this, but I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, it’s one of

⏹️ ▶️ John those things, it’s like test taking skills. It’s like, well, I know what dithering it is and I know what the word temporal means. Anyway, go on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So yes, in short, it’s, let’s put two different colors on the screen and flash them back and forth fast

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that your brain kind of gets Receives the middle of the two colors just like John said

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway continuing from Steven in there I discovered a utility to disable temporal dithering which solved the issue for me. We’ll link it in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. It’s called still color Also better display is another one that will turn off GPU dithering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven continues I suspect and hope that this is the same issue causing flickering with Apple Studio displays

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve waited five years for this problem to get media attention and it would be nice if Apple could improve their display support

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it is the same problem. I think this might be a separate problem, but I think there’s enough display problems to

⏹️ ▶️ John go around for everybody. But it’s good to know that if you have this temporal dithering issue or if you’re sensitive to it, there are utilities

⏹️ ▶️ John that you can disable it. I do wonder if disabling it would then like reduce the color accuracy or color gamut of your

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor, but you know, pick your poison. Yep. It’s only $1,600. What do you expect? Rise.

PS Portal follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then many, many people wrote in to tell us that the PlayStation Portal, which is the little handheld

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen and controller that you were talking about last episode, can also stream games with a PlayStation Plus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Premium membership. So jump in when you’re ready, John, but my understanding is you were using it strictly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stream games from within the home, the call is coming from inside the house, et cetera, et cetera, but you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could stream games from the cloud. Is that what this is about?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have one of these, but I was saying it, what I said about it was that it connects up to your PlayStation. This is in the house. I said, well, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John actually use it without PlayStation, it will stream from the internet, which in my opinion would be even worse because obviously the latency streaming

⏹️ ▶️ John from a console that’s like two rooms over is going to be worse than streaming from a data center

⏹️ ▶️ John many miles from your house.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. So apparently the official ruling on the PlayStation Plus Premium

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Membership PlayStation Portal combination for streaming games five megabits per second minimum to establish

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a session at all, seven megabits per second minimum to stream at 720 and 13 megabits per second

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 1080. Matt Ripito writes, The PlayStation portal is truly great. John, you need

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pick one of these up ASAP. We saw a lot of people echoing that sentiment. Jared Counts writes, I frequently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried to play a PS5 game via the remote play app on my iPad with a PS5 controller wired to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, and it works great until it doesn’t. I have an old Eero Pro in the living room that the PS5 is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wired to and a beacon in our bedroom, and the connection will be good for a while, but will randomly degrade. Not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey great when you’re in the middle of a boss battle in a game that has timing-based pairing, Expedition 33, or is purely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rhythm-based, like Hi-Fi Rush. Christopher Masto writes, The PlayStation Portal doesn’t even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have Wi-Fi 6, which is kind of sad. It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi 7. We were talking about, Would Wi-Fi 7 help the PlayStation Portal? It doesn’t even have 6.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Blake writes, Keep in mind, the Portal requires wired headphones or PlayStation-branded Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ Casey headphones. This makes casual use in bed pretty annoying, and I haven’t found a good Bluetooth workaround that doesn’t get in the way. That’s good to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know because I would be like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John of course I can just use AirPods and Bluetooth mode with them, can’t I? And it seems like no. Yeah, sad times.

Window-minimizing follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the Ask ATP about window minimization in Mac OS, Chirag Desai writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have set double tap on the title bar to fill, which maximizes a window the way Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants. And there’s a knowledge base article that we will link. You go into system settings, desktop and dock, window title

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar, double click action, fill. And the description from Apple is, expand a window to fill the space between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the menu bar and the dock. If the dock is along the side of the screen, the window fills the entire space below the menu bar and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the side of the dock.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’d forgotten about lots of people wrote in with a double tap shortcut, which I didn’t mention because we were talking specifically about the green

⏹️ ▶️ John button. But if I had mentioned I would have been like, oh, and you can double click the title bar to do the green button does, but you actually

⏹️ ▶️ John can configure what double tap does to not make it do the same thing as the green button. And one of the options is this

⏹️ ▶️ John fill option, which is what Marco was talking about. Make the window really big, but don’t enter Mac OS’s full

⏹️ ▶️ John screen mode where it chops off off the title bar and stuff.

Wi[-?]Fi 7 follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we have a lot of feedback with regard to Wi-Fi 7. We’ll start with Reed who writes, I’ve upgraded Ubiquiti

⏹️ ▶️ Casey APs through the last few revisions. I cannot recommend wasting any effort on Wi-Fi 7 at this point. It’s been a rocky

⏹️ ▶️ Casey road with iPhone and Ubiquiti bugs for at least the first six months, and even now I think it’s worse than just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Wi-Fi 6. You’re forced into WPA3, which means some devices aren’t compatible and you need to type

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your password again on every single device. As a result, I’ve run a separate SSID for my seven devices that support

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi 7. I’ve occasionally managed to break one gigabit per second, but honestly I typically see around 400 to 600 megabits per second,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really no better than I saw with my old Enterprise 6 APs anyway. USB type Steve,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey great name, writes, I remember trying to switch to WPA3 back in 2018 or 19 and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kicking half my devices off the network as a result. That was the day I learned that very few of Nintendo’s devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are WPA3 compatible. Patch writes, instead of MLO, better speed gains can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be had on Wi-Fi 7 by using band steering to push more capable devices to the 6 gigahertz band, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting that band as wide as possible for your environment. I currently live in an apartment building where everyone else is using old ISP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey provided routers. So I’m the only one in the area currently broadcasting a six gigahertz band.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That means I can set it super wide. I can almost saturate my internet connection from my iPhone over wifi.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s key. Like I don’t think of this cause I don’t live in an apartment anymore, but I used to like, if you’re the

⏹️ ▶️ John only tech nerd, like in your neighborhood, in your

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey block, in your like

⏹️ ▶️ John set of apartments that everyone else has all 2.4 gigahertz, like ancient crappy wifi things. and you’ve got a six, you

⏹️ ▶️ John got the whole six gigahertz band to yourself. And six gigahertz is also shorter distance. Someone also wrote in to say it’s good

⏹️ ▶️ John because people’s stuff is less likely to interfere with each other because six gigahertz doesn’t go as far

⏹️ ▶️ John and penetrate as far. So you don’t have to worry about your neighbor’s six gigahertz two doors down interfering with yours

⏹️ ▶️ John as much as their 2.4 gigahertz. So lots of folks tweaking their bands out there to

⏹️ ▶️ John get a better bandwidth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then Abraham Vey writes, Shakespeare’s good naturely and professional Wi-Fi guy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My response to pretty much everything said on the previous episode of ATP was, yes, but also no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also yes. This includes channel selection, channel size, cell size, and this is the tricky part

⏹️ ▶️ Casey admittedly, says Abraham, in that order gets you most of the way there most of the time. So let me repeat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Channel selection, channel size, and cell size in that order gets you most of the way there most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi is science, not magic, but it’s also bad science. I say this, says Abraham, to every customer, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny because it’s true.

Eero Max 7

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Saul Sutherland writes, I’m a wireless network engineer for my day job, and I have my fingers deep into the WLAN

⏹️ ▶️ Casey network engineering space. Regarding MLO, there’s one great example of how multiple aggregate wireless links can improve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the user experience, which exists with Eero’s TrueMesh implementation. In John’s case, where he has tri-radio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eero Pro 6 nodes, 2.4, low 5, and high 5 GHz, they actually mesh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with each other wirelessly on all three bands at the same time. This allows them to simultaneously transmit on more than one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey radio to another Eero across two frequencies or transmit and receive across two radios at the same time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though Wi-Fi is inherently half-duplex. Unfortunately, this implementation sits behind a patent,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I view it as a lucky benefit that it exists in the consumer market, not some enterprise gate-kept feature.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They effectively did MLO before the Wi-Fi Alliance made it a standard, even though it only exists between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey EROs on a network.

⏹️ ▶️ John JSON Speaking of EROs, I have some exciting news. COREY

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, do you?

⏹️ ▶️ John A friend of the show, Yoni, heard our recent episode and had a bunch of Euromax 7 stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that he didn’t need. And he asked if I wanted it. And I said, sure.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So he sent it along.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if you know what the Euromax 7 is. We will link it in the show notes. If you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John ever seen those statues that are on Easter Island.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is an annoyingly good analogy. That is very well

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John done, John. That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John these things are like in your house, both in terms of their sort of bearing and vibe

⏹️ ▶️ John and also their size, because this is the biggest wireless access point I’ve ever owned. It’s not even close.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge. Is it taller than the time capsules with the hard drives on them? It’s bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s wider and broader and also taller. It’s thinner, I guess, because they’re kind of like flat,

⏹️ ▶️ John curved. They’re wide Easter Island statue type things, but they’re way bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John than you think they are. I mean, you can tell, but there’s Ethernet jacks in the back. It’s a standard Ethernet jack. Then

⏹️ ▶️ John use that, you know, banana for scale, RJ45 for scale. I guess I know it’s not RJ45. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God. So there’s so much nerdery in like three seconds there.

⏹️ ▶️ John The old ones I had, the old Eros were like sort of low slung and they’ve been getting bigger over the years, but these are bigger. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I knew what I was getting. Like, but I want to try, because these, as the name implies, Eromax 7, these support

⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi 7. I think this is like the fourth time I have changed from one set

⏹️ ▶️ John of Eros to another. And every single time I do it, I am amazed at how well they do it. Like I used

⏹️ ▶️ John to say that like, if Apple made wifi routers in the modern era, they’d be like euros. Now I feel like Apple wouldn’t do it as well

⏹️ ▶️ John as they do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny, actually, I was thinking to myself when you said that, oh, they wouldn’t make euros because euros try to upsell you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, oh, no, you’re right. They wouldn’t make euros.

⏹️ ▶️ John Services revenue. Yeah, my second thought was, and if you’re about to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, but if Apple did it, they wouldn’t have that annoying euro plus upsell. I think Apple would be more annoying than

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco euro plus.

⏹️ ▶️ John 100%. Yeah, it would be in the settings screen of your iPhone. I have had euros during the entire time that Eero

⏹️ ▶️ John Plus has been a thing since like Amazon bought them and it never bothers me. It is never in my face.

⏹️ ▶️ John I never get nagged about it. It doesn’t appear in any setting screens. Like it’s in the app. It’s there. If I go

⏹️ ▶️ John to a feature that requires Eero Plus, it appears, it’s like, do you want to do wifi spectrum analysis? Oh, that requires Eero

⏹️ ▶️ John Plus. But like that’s me scrolling through a bunch of features and seeing these are the features you could get if you have Plus. They

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t throw it at me. They don’t email me. It’s not an unrelated screens. I never even have to know it exists.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not crippling their things. Anyway, setting that aside. So, and I’ve never never signed

⏹️ ▶️ John up for it. So again, you go to the wrap and you’re like, I want to replace device and it’s like you’re the

⏹️ ▶️ John device you want to replace is your gateway router. If you replace that you’re everything’s gonna be offline, like tells

⏹️ ▶️ John you you know, stuff I already know, but like it’s so nice that it says, if you do this, here’s the deal. And then it says,

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the steps do this, do that, unplug the thing, plug in the new thing, blah, blah, blah, wait for it to, and it just works.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it gets I have tons of settings. I have like reserved IP addresses based on MAC addresses, I have filter like

⏹️ ▶️ John All that is like, it’s just complete transparent. To removing my main gateway router

⏹️ ▶️ John for the entire house, aside from everyone being offline for like, you know, five minutes or however long this takes,

⏹️ ▶️ John which, you know, people were home, but they didn’t even notice because they were probably on their phones and they just switched to cellular anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John Totally transparent. And then I replaced a couple other base stations. Then I was like, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John I realized my mistake that I hadn’t done speed test before I replaced all the routers. So my bad, but I wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John about to undo everything. And I ended up going around and saying, okay, is this any faster?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I did find the setting in the app that said

⏹️ ▶️ John multi-link operation. And their description is multi-link operation connects your wireless devices to multiple Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ John radios simultaneously, providing supported devices faster speeds and lower latencies. Some devices may be incompatible

⏹️ ▶️ John with MLO networks. Doesn’t say anything about simultaneous or alternating MLO, but as we know from the past

⏹️ ▶️ John episode, it’s only alternating. And even if that it’s questionable, but anyway, when

⏹️ ▶️ John you go to enable it, it says, are you sure you want to enable multi-link operation? Your network will reboot and disconnect for about two

⏹️ ▶️ John minutes. WPA3 will be enabled on participating bands. Some devices

⏹️ ▶️ John may not be compatible with MLO networks. And I found this a little scary. Of course, by then I’d read all the

⏹️ ▶️ John mail people like, oh, I tried MLO, but everything had to be on WPA3 and it didn’t work with my Nintendo stuff or whatever. I’m like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John like what the hell? I need to try this, right? So I turned it on. I said, yes, continue. The network

⏹️ ▶️ John was down and things rebooted for two minutes and it came back up, everything was fine. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John when it says WPA3 will be enabled on participating bands, I don’t know what that means, but I can

⏹️ ▶️ John tell you what it doesn’t mean is that my Nintendo Switch 2 was knocked off. My Nintendo Switch 2 is still using WPA2

⏹️ ▶️ John to connect, but it’s fine. Like none of my devices got kicked off the network, everything worked fine. Then I went around

⏹️ ▶️ John the house and did a bunch of speed tests. And I was trying to figure out how I can arrange my set of

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware because I still have my old Eero stuff and I have the new ones. like, well, now I have an excess of devices. Can I add some

⏹️ ▶️ John more, you know, mesh nodes somewhere to help? Um, and in my testing,

⏹️ ▶️ John going around speed testing things on my phone, essentially, which is the most advanced wifi device I have is my iPhone 16 pro

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of wifi standards. Uh, I guess maybe my, my M four iPad pro, but I was using both of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I went around the house and seeing, trying to see what node are you connected to both

⏹️ ▶️ John looking in the arrow app and looking at my thing and, you know, figuring out, okay, well, it’s connecting to the hallway one, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John choosing not to connect to that one or or whatever, anyway, here’s what I ended up with. Not

⏹️ ▶️ John only did I not use any of the hardware that I replaced, like I took out a bunch of hardware and replaced it, I actually

⏹️ ▶️ John subtracted even more hardware by not replacing the mesh node in my bedroom.

⏹️ ▶️ John So now I just have one in the computer room with me here, which is the gateway one, in the basement next to my Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is also wired in. And my theory on the basement one is the basement one is dead center of the house, but in

⏹️ ▶️ John the basement, and it’s wired in. I want that one to project up through the floor to

⏹️ ▶️ John the one that’s in my hallway in the center of the house. And that one is not wired in because there’s no ethernet there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then that one projects up into the second floor. And what I found is that no place on my second floor

⏹️ ▶️ John where I put another wifi mesh node helps things at all. All it does is provide interference. Devices refuse to connect to it

⏹️ ▶️ John because the one in the center is so much stronger. So now I just have three Euromax 7

⏹️ ▶️ John nodes. No, I don’t want to have one in the bedroom anymore. Signal in every place in the house is

⏹️ ▶️ John stronger. From my bed on my iPad, I get like 460 megabits per second

⏹️ ▶️ John down,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the bad signal place. Like that’s the parts where I had the worst signal previously. And I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, I didn’t measure it before, but now it’s over 400 gigabits, which is great.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco From the room where I’m sitting. 40 megabits.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, sorry. Yes, right. That would be really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That would be

⏹️ ▶️ John very impressive. From the room where I’m sitting now, the computer room where I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John touch the router, but it’s like, You know six feet away from me is the gateway router. I can get 900 up and

⏹️ ▶️ John down So I am very happy this new setup. Thank you Yoni

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ll let you know if anything bad happens, but I’m just I’m just an euro fanboy Oh, and by the

⏹️ ▶️ John way, I did pay I did pay for euro plus because I wanted to see the Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer I’m just gonna cancel it after the

⏹️ ▶️ John first month, but It didn’t help all did was show me that that I it was confirmed to me

⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t want that other mesh node in in any of the upstairs bedroom because all I do is provide interference and no devices

⏹️ ▶️ John ever choose to connect to them because the signal is stronger from the downstairs hallway one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very impressive. That’s very cool. I didn’t dislike Eero. I felt like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted something different. And I personally felt like the Eero Plus stuff was, I wouldn’t say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was naggy, but it was gatekeeping some things I wanted to see. I forget what, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there are some features that I can imagine you might want, but I don’t want any of the features it’s gating. And I just forget

⏹️ ▶️ John that it exists. Like I hadn’t looked at it or thought about it until I swapped these Eros, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John the last time I looked at them was when I swapped in the sixes. So yeah, but there are features behind it, but I don’t like, I turn off,

⏹️ ▶️ John I even turn off features that I get for free. So I don’t want anything. Don’t do local DNS, don’t try to

⏹️ ▶️ John filter things. Like I don’t want any of that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For whatever it’s worth, I hate EroPlus for reasons that only apply to me, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve never had Eros myself just because they seem optimized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for cases where you can’t run ethernet to all the APs. And I’ve been able to do that, fortunately. So I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had that need. I don’t know if I would say that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, I mean, all these Eros have ethernet ports. If I could have wired them all in, I would have. Two of my three Eros are

⏹️ ▶️ John wired into ethernet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but I feel like the main selling point of Ero has usually been,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can’t run ethernet to all the APs, they have the fastest backhaul, as we were just talking about. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that is an advantage. But it depends on which ones you buy, because they do sell sets where only

⏹️ ▶️ John one of them, or I don’t know if only one of them has it. They used to sell sets where only one of them has ethernet ports, the other ones don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they all do now, but yeah, you’re right. The mesh network part of it is for like, hey, you live somewhere, you’re not gonna run ethernet, You

⏹️ ▶️ John want better Wi-Fi, Euro is a easy solution.

Network-level ad-blockers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the other reason I hate Eero and in particular Eero Plus is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot tell you how many problems that causes me for overcast support.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. Oh, because of the blocking of things that look like ads.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every so often, one of the podcast stats tracking redirect services

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be blocked by Eero Plus and everyone on Eero with who has that service,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which includes a lot of people who who are not super technical, everyone who has that service

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will all of a sudden be unable to download the New York Times podcast, like some really big shows.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the downloads will just fail. And if you look at Overcast’s one-star

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews, a very common theme, really up to a few months ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was about download failures. And some of that was my fault, but a huge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of it were basically people who have either Eero Plus or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody, they live with a nerd who’s running Piehole or something, you know, some kind of blocking at the network level,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re blocking some podcast download service. And it is such a pain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the butt, because of course, like, you know, anything that happens in Overcast, no matter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the UI messages it, like, no matter, and I’ve tried, like, I built a whole feature to, like, detect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether something’s being blocked by DNS and show an alert in the home screen of the app showing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, hey, I think your network is blocking Magellan.ai or whatever, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s what that means, and here’s how to maybe go fix it, like check on these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even then, I get emails almost every day saying like, I didn’t block this, what?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though, and you dig in and it turns out, yes, somebody did.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have to say, I don’t make a podcast app, I’ve gotten these support requests too from my apps, and you’re like, what,

⏹️ ▶️ John your apps don’t do anything network, how could you possibly have this complaint? I’ll tell you why I

⏹️ ▶️ John get complaints. I can’t update to the new version of switch glass. I think something is broken.

⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously we all know, well, that’s the Mac app store. That’s not you, but users don’t know that. They just know that there’s a new

⏹️ ▶️ John version of my app and they can’t get it. And they don’t understand why. And every single time it’s some kind of ad blocking

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that is somehow blocking something having to do with the Mac app store. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s, it’s like, it is such a pain. Like it’s like back in the day, like when, when I used to work on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web apps and you’d get so many support requests from people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was breaking for, and you dig in, and the reason why it was breaking is they have some kind of browser extension that’s interfering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something going on on the page. Like that was such a common thing in the two decades

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one decade ago. Now I feel like anything that accesses the network,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that fetches anything from a remote server or a site or anything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone running all the network interference, VPNs, ad blockers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom DNS, these are all just making it a minefield of support out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, anybody whose app at all uses the internet. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same way that you get the email from the Firefox person 15 years ago, and you’d be like, oh God,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are you running? You have no script and all these other things that are blocking my page, and that’s why it’s broken.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now it’s like everyone is running something, and they’re getting harder for people to even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about fine because it’s bundled in as some kind of like, oh, it’s a safety service on your router that you pay us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco six bucks a month for or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Or

⏹️ ▶️ John it comes from the ISP. Like ISPs offer these as value adds as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And cellular ISPs now too. It’s such a mindfuck out there. It’s such a pain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the butt for all of us who have to support these things. But that’s just part of the landscape, I guess. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s part of why I would never… If every app I’ve ever made has dealt with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco third-party content in some form, I think I have made my last app that deals

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with third-party content.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll say that. Like I said, my app doesn’t deal with third-party content and I still get the support complaints. Like you’re right, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just part of the landscape. And to be clear, I don’t, I don’t, I’m not actually against these services. I actually think they’re good for most

⏹️ ▶️ John people because they, they exist for a reason. Like, because people do want ad blocking and the internet is junked up with

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff. It’s just, it’s impossibly perfect. Like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use ad blockers on my browser and a lot of stuff breaks and I have to occasionally go go to the other browser to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John something

⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s no there is no blocking service to get to right all the time. And so essentially requires everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John to eventually become knowledgeable enough to know a know or remember that thing exists to

⏹️ ▶️ John your point of like, I’m not blocking anything. It’s like they don’t realize what they’re blocking, whatever. And be once they do know

⏹️ ▶️ John that it exists. Now it’s another thing that you have to deal with in your house, right? Another another thing that you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John troubleshoot or whatever, but the alternative is often worse. So I’m, I’m not against these services.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t begrudge people using but they do make things harder for everybody. And it’s essentially, it’s an externality of

⏹️ ▶️ John the surveillance ad industry that’s out there. It’s like another bad effect of that that

⏹️ ▶️ John we have to deal with so they can make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco money. Oh yeah, and with Overcast, it’s also especially difficult because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no such thing as blocking only ads on podcasts and having the rest of the podcast download.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the way they do their ad tracking stuff is they just redirect the download through a bunch of third-party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco services and stuff. So if one of those domains is blocked, the redirect just doesn’t proceed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the download just fails. Like there’s no, it isn’t like on a webpage, if you have ad blockers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed, but you load a webpage, odds are, the rest of the page will load.

⏹️ ▶️ John Odds are the page will show a thing that says, looks like you’re blocking our ads.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in the ideal case, like some of the page can load while you’re blocking the JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes or whatever, but that’s not how podcasts work. And as we have all this like network level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, that breaks a lot of apps in a lot of weird ways because it isn’t a web browser, and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work the same way.

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Thread/Matter follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk Thread and Matter. I brought this up, I believe it was the Post Show last episode,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I asked, what’s the deal with Thread and Matter? And I’m going to try to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey summarize. A bunch of people wrote in, which is very helpful. I’m going to try to summarize very quickly. Derek Seaman wrote a series

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of posts about this a year or two ago, which he reached out and pointed me to. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to him, and I think he’s right, almost all of those posts, despite being a a couple of years old still

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are applicable. Derek from, I think his first post writes, “‘Matter’ is a software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey control plane protocol, not a networking protocol for your smart home. It’s built on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey IPv6 and is independent of your underlying network protocols, like thread or Wi-Fi.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matter devices must support multiple simultaneous controllers. So for example, Home Assistant and Apple Home

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can both directly control a Matter device, and the device’s state is reflected in real time to both controllers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Matter. Matters how you control things. Thread is an IPv6-based low-power,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey secure, and interoperable radio-frequency mesh networking technology specifically designed for communicating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with and among devices within a smart home environment. So let me rephrase what Derek wrote.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically Thread is how all these devices talk. It’s super similar to Zigbee if that means anything to you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s okay if it doesn’t. But it is IP addressable, which Zigbee is not. Matter is, like I said, how you actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey control the devices. And local control is actually a core tenet of Matter, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the home assistant dweebs, of which I’m one of them, all of them get real antsy about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything that’s like cloud controlled. I actually don’t really mind that much, but most home assistant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people get real grumpy when you have to go to the cloud to control things. They want that local control. It has to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey local control. And again, I’m not that way, but one of the nice things about Matter is it has to have local control.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the other piece is that thread border routers are things that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a bridge between traditional networks and the thread network. And for example, I believe HomePods

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can act as a border router and I know that Apple TVs can. And speaking of, look who’s back,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back again. This is reading again from Derek’s series. MDNS Publisher,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thread border router uses multicast DNS or MDNS to publish MDNS DNS SD discovery packets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on behalf of the thread nodes so that they can be discovered on adjacent networks. DNS is back, baby.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who’d have thunk it? We’re back and better than ever. I know it never really left, but you know what I’m saying.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then with regard to Home Assistant specifically, Michael writes, to make matters worse, the software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Assistant uses is the Open Home Foundation Matter Server, which is written in Python, but that software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been moved to maintenance mode as they rewrite the entire thing in TypeScript. And that implementation isn’t even certified yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. So that’s the summary of Thread versus Matter, which I will probably forget in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about an hour. you

Fitness+ follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Apple Fitness+, we talked about this off and on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last year or two. Apple had a newsroom post, which we’ll put in the show notes, about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and about Quitter’s Day. Reading from Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey newsroom post, many people give up their New Year’s Fitness resolutions by the second Friday in January,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also known as Quitter’s Day. A new analysis of data over four years identified participants with Apple Watch consistently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep up their exercise levels through Quitter’s Day and beyond. Notably, many Apple Watch users kept up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey New Year’s resolution exercise levels through Quitter’s Day and into the following months. Nearly 80% of those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who increased their exercise minutes maintained those increased exercise levels through the second half of January, with 90%

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that group also maintaining elevated levels through February and March. So I think that’s kind of neat. I mean, granted, this is self-fulfilling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or self-congratulatory. Look at us. If you wear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple Watch, magically you’ll be good at exercise, which I get that. But I mean, if the data

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to be believed, and I don’t think Apple’s in the habit of completely skipping over or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fabricating this data, I think that’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, they probably have cause and effect reversed, obviously. It could be. Because the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are more into fitness are willing to spend lots of money on an Apple Watch. But anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. That is true. But another thing, part of the reason I wanted to call this out is also in the same

⏹️ ▶️ Casey post, they talk about programs. And I’d like to come back to what Apple’s announcing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one of the things that I’ve noticed as someone who occasionally uses Fitness Plus, and I do really genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. I think the coaches are generally very good. I think the workouts are fun. They have really great music. The on-screen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration is super great. You can watch your rings close in real time on your TV or on your iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the case may be. I really like it. But one of the things that bums me out about Fitness Plus is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve never, I think there’s been a couple exceptions here and there, but by and large, all of the workouts are one-offs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s 30 minutes of strength training. Here’s 20 minutes of high intensity interval training. Here’s 10 minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of yoga, five minutes of core, whatever the case may be. And there’s no continuity between them and that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I have cut my teeth on something that we’ve talked about many times. It used to be called Beachbody.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it’s Body B O D I. And there was a whole gross MLM side of it. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about that. I’m talking about the video side of it, which I always thought was very good. And they’ve actually just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve, uh, sunset the MLM stuff. in the last like six months to a year, which I think is a very good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. But what makes body different than fitness plus is that almost all of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their stuff is a full program. Like let’s do eight weeks together. You know, you and the coach, you have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one X, you know, one workout either, you know, every day or every other day or whatever the case may be. You have eight weeks together

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or six weeks together and you’re following a program and this, you know, day one is upper body day, two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is lower body. Day three is core day four is I don’t know, aerobics or whatever the case

⏹️ ▶️ Casey may to be, but it’s a continuous, it’s a continuity that Fitness

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus has never had with that in mind. Going back to this newsroom post, starting January 5,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Fitness Plus introduces four brand new workout programs that offer users weekly training plans to help take the guesswork out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of how to reach their goals. Those programs include, for users looking to return to working out, the Make Your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fitness Comeback program features three popular workout types, strength, HIIT, and yoga. The four-week plan features

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three workouts per week, one of each type, for just 10 minutes. The Build a Yoga Habit in 4 Weeks program is designed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to help users add yoga into their fitness routine. These workouts are designed to increase flexibility, cut down on stress, and build strength

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stability. Every week, users will get two 10-minute flows, one slow and one energetic, that complement their existing workout

⏹️ ▶️ Casey routines and help build a habit. That is freaking cool, and I think I’ll probably try that. And then finally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Back-to-Back Strength and HIIT program provides three 20-minute workouts pairing these two popular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey workout types in Fitness Plus, 10 minutes of strength and 10 minutes of HIIT, again, high-intensity interval training, three times

⏹️ ▶️ Casey per week over the course of three weeks. The workouts are designed to be done one right after the other with no break in between. The program

⏹️ ▶️ Casey launches, I think it’s just this program that launches January 12th and consists of three workouts per week, each focusing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a different body area to learn and practice common strength moves to build confidence and improve users’ technique. I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried these yet, but I think this is freaking great. I really genuinely do. And I’m really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the idea of Apple kind of stretching a little bit, you know, in expanding and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying out different things. And I will absolutely try at least one of I’ll probably start with the yoga habit thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pair it with my existing body workouts. But I might do the back-to-back strength thing, because why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not? And generally speaking, after I do one of these eight-week programs on body, I will typically do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of weeks of fitness plus as a palate cleanser. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ginger of the sushi meal, if you will. And so maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s when I’ll do the back-to-back strength and HIIT, for example. So if this isn’t your cup of tea, that’s totally fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I wanted to call attention to it because I think it’s really, really great.

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ASML and TSMC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some topics. Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about ASML and TSMC. ASML, holding NV, commonly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortened to ASML, originally standing for Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a Dutch multinational corporation and semiconductor company that specializes in the development and manufacturing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of photolithography machines, which are used to produce integrated circuits. It is the largest supplier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the semiconductor industry, as well as the most advanced producer of extreme ultraviolet lithography,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or EUVL, photolithography machines that are required to manufacture the most advanced chips.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is relevant because the very popular YouTube channel Veritasium just did a, I think it was roughly an hour long

⏹️ ▶️ Casey video on the ridiculous engineering of the world’s most important machine. I watched it this morning.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is unbelievable. If you like science at all, leaving aside computing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you like science at all, this is incredible. And within the first like five or 10 minutes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following quote happens, which blew my effing mind. Somebody said, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it was one of the employees of ASML, but as you try to print smaller and smaller features, the gaps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the mask, so the mask is the thing they make in order to make these chips, the gaps in the mask start to approach

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wavelength of the light that they’re using. This is unreal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How are human beings accomplishing this? I don’t understand. I do understand because I watched the video, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand how humans are doing this.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why this makes such a great video, because the fact that Casey, who’s on a tech podcast, this is all news to him, is like, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is something you usually don’t have to think about because like, I know we talk about chips and stuff, but we’re like, oh, how big are they?

⏹️ ▶️ John What are the performance numbers and how many transistors and you know, how many cores and stuff like that. But we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John talk about the lithography stuff. And we’ve talked about TSMC a lot and Intel and their

⏹️ ▶️ John woes and the problems of having, you know, So just TSMC

⏹️ ▶️ John is the only company in the world capable of making the world’s best chips and how that’s a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John And every time we talked about that, I had in the back of my mind, and I should have kept putting in here as maybe an overtime talk,

⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about ASML. Occasionally people would give us feedback about it and they would say, what about ASML? And I’d be like, yeah, I got to remember to talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about that some future time. And I just never did. So this very tasking video was a great kick in the pants to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John I said, just it’s time to talk about ASML. Here’s the deal with ASML. TSMC, you know, Taiwan

⏹️ ▶️ John Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, they make these great chips. to make the chips. They buy

⏹️ ▶️ John machines from ASML, and the ASML machines are the machines that actually do

⏹️ ▶️ John the photolithography, which is like, we design what the layout of the chip is gonna be like, and we essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John project it. We take it from this big thing, like, you know, I don’t know how big that, I think they show the reticles of being

⏹️ ▶️ John like a couple inches big or whatever, and we project it down to be very, very tiny. And we expose, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s silicon photolithography, so on and so forth, which is like, you put a photoresist on certain

⏹️ ▶️ John areas, and you shine light on it. And the part that doesn’t have the photoresist gets eaten away and then you wash

⏹️ ▶️ John it away. And that’s how you make these tiny little features. You basically etch them in it, the same way you etch something into glass or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’d etch it into the silicon. And as Casey was just pointing out, okay, well, so you got a mask, you got a thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John you got photoresist, you got light, you shine it, fine. But you wanna make things smaller and smaller and smaller. And as you do that, you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John but now the wavelength of light is too big. It’s like, I know how to fix that. I went to school. I learned about RGBiv and the rainbow

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. I know that the long wavelengths are red. And as you go shift down the rainbow

⏹️ ▶️ John and you go over to the blue side, the wavelengths get shorter. So instead of using red light, let’s use blue light. And it’s like, great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, but now we’re making it so small that the blue wave like this too long. Is there anything left of blue? And you’re like, I’ve learned about the electromagnetic

⏹️ ▶️ John spectrum. Can we go like even darker blue or whatever? And eventually you get out

⏹️ ▶️ John of the realm of visible light. And they call it EUV, what is it called? Extreme

⏹️ ▶️ John ultraviolet lithography. It sounds like it’s really, really purple. But I forget from the details

⏹️ ▶️ John in the video, but like essentially like you’re out of the visible spectrum because you’re going, you know, you’ve seen the electromagnetic

⏹️ ▶️ John spectrum with like red off to one side and then, you know, but you get like the electromagnetic spectrum is huge.

⏹️ ▶️ John Visible light is a tiny portion of it. We’re off the realm of visible light now. And the difficulty,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the many difficulties of doing this is how do you produce the light? Like half of this giant

⏹️ ▶️ John machine, half of this $400 million machine that ASML makes is the light source, which, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John when it was just visible light, it was pretty easy to make a light source. Now it’s not, it is more difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ John If I’m not going to spoil it, but if you have, if you don’t already know this, you will not predict

⏹️ ▶️ John how the light is created. And the light source for the ASML machine, I don’t want to spoil it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I want to talk about it is, and this is, this is a debate in another video link in the show notes from the, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John the great Asianometry channel, which is a, it’s an older one from like, it’s a video from 2021 of like, who’s

⏹️ ▶️ John more important TSMC or ASML? Because here’s the thing, ASML, for reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John that will be explained in the video, is the only company in the world that makes these machines.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is the whole freaking industry. TSMC is the only company in the world that can make the best chips, and they get their machines

⏹️ ▶️ John to do it from the only company in the world that makes them? This doesn’t seem like a great idea.

⏹️ ▶️ John And one of the reasons it never came up in all my past discussions, as I said, Taiwan

⏹️ ▶️ John is politically precarious because of its relationship with China. The US

⏹️ ▶️ John is politically precarious because we’re dumb.

⏹️ ▶️ John But as ML is in the Netherlands and the EU is significantly

⏹️ ▶️ John less politically precarious than either Taiwan or the United States. I don’t think it’s arguable at this point. So

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the reasons it doesn’t come up is yes, there’s only one company in the the world, ASML that does this, but

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not in peril like Taiwan and America are currently.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not that it’s great to have one, but still. And as you watch in the video, you’ll see why is there only, why is

⏹️ ▶️ John only ASML the only company in the world that does this? Part of it is Americans being dumb because we started the program

⏹️ ▶️ John to do, the US started the program to do extreme ultraviolet lithography and then bowed out and said, Oh, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John too horrible at somebody else do it. And so they did. All right. We put a lot of money into it and Intel is actually a

⏹️ ▶️ John partial investor in this and you know, it’s a whole big international entanglement. The bottom line is one company in

⏹️ ▶️ John the world makes the machines that TSMC needs to make the chips and only TSMC

⏹️ ▶️ John knows how to use those machines to make them like in the azenometry video at the end. He’s like, he has this analogy of like

⏹️ ▶️ John a chef and everything. It’s like, yeah, anyone can buy those machines. If you have $400 million, you can buy

⏹️ ▶️ John one. It’s about the size of like a small, you know, mobile home.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I figured what the shipping costs are, but if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. And I believe it comes in 250 separate

⏹️ ▶️ John packages. Anyway, if you can get one of those and then hire whatever people that needs to run them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Still, that’s not enough for you to be TSMC because you don’t just say, okay, now we’ve got the machines because they

⏹️ ▶️ John will just their lithography machines. Now what are you going to print and that’s all about the you know, the gate all around

⏹️ ▶️ John transistors and how you like this. There’s lots of you know, just having a kitchen aid mixture does not make you

⏹️ ▶️ John a Michelin star chef. Let’s put it that way. So who’s more important as or TSMC, they’re both

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty important. But in the end, ASML just has to make the machine and they can sell it to somebody. And

⏹️ ▶️ John as far as they’re concerned, they don’t care what you do with the machine. Whereas TSMC has to produce the finished product, which is the chips that are all in

⏹️ ▶️ John our phones and everything like that. So I would say TSMC is more important, but ASML is definitely necessary because without it, TSMC

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do anything. So this is just a catch up essentially to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re kept hearing us talk about this and say, I can’t believe they never talked about ASML, now we have, and if you’ve never heard

⏹️ ▶️ John of them, And now you know there is literally one company in the world in the Netherlands that makes the chips

⏹️ ▶️ John that make that makes the machines that can make the best chips. There are, you know, companies in the world that makes machines that can make

⏹️ ▶️ John not as good chips because that’s easier. But right now, as ML is the only company that does

⏹️ ▶️ John this and TSMC is the only company that can make the very best chips with Intel possibly pulling up alongside,

⏹️ ▶️ John of course, Intel abusing as ML machines as well. And then finally, in the Asianometry channel, there is

⏹️ ▶️ John a TSMC analysis playlist that has a bunch of stuff about TSMC.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you just haven’t heard enough about them, lots of these things like very testing does a great job with the channels like turning everything to

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the human story of like, how did this happen? It’s not just like these things spring into existence. People

⏹️ ▶️ John have to really believe in something and have to make sacrifices to try to do things that seem impossible. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John get that in the very testing video and same thing with the Asianometry channel to learn about the history of TSMC

⏹️ ▶️ John and why they are in the position they’re in. It is fascinating and inspiring. And even if

⏹️ ▶️ John you just watch the very tacit video, it is just like mind boggling to think about.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and it really makes you appreciate the, uh, all the little chips that are in our computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I, I feel like this is very much like the, um, four hour galactic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey star cruiser video, which I just finished watching.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not four

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours long. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What I mean by that is, yeah, no, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a little under an hour, but the thing with the four hour galactic star cruiser video is that about a year ago when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it came out, everyone was like, Oh my God, you have to watch this. It’s incredible. And I didn’t for the longest time because it’s four

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours long. Similar to that video though, it, the four hour video is incredible. And this one hour video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is absolutely incredible. And if you have even the vaguest interest in their most vague interest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in science, you will enjoy this video because basically they had to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like six impossible things back to back to back to back in order to make these machines

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eventually through a lot of hard work and a pile of money, humans figured it out. It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I wasn’t alive during the space race, but it has a similar vibe from the understanding I get at the space race. Like, oh, we’re just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to go to the moon and puts a human so they can walk on it. Oh, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how people figured it out. It’s just truly incredible. If you have an hour

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give, I cannot stress enough. This is a truly worthwhile video. And like John said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really, really helps you appreciate the absolutely bananas amount of technology that you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey carry around in your pocket or on your wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the one thing I’ll point out, again, I’m not gonna spoil how they do the light source, but the one, this one

⏹️ ▶️ John resonated the most with me, the example that one of the ASML engineers gave to try to explain to you,

⏹️ ▶️ John like they could just rattle off statistics, but they don’t mean anything because you don’t think about these numbers often. They

⏹️ ▶️ John gave an analogy that really resonated with me, maybe because of how I think about things, but I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John try to describe it in a way that will hopefully resonate with the audience. So they have mirrors in these things, and they

⏹️ ▶️ John spend a lot of time talking about the mirrors. That’s not what we’re gonna talk about. They’ve got the big mirrors, but they have to aim them really carefully,

⏹️ ▶️ John to say the least. And the way they described, the way they described how carefully

⏹️ ▶️ John they aim the mirror is like, I give this analogy, like if you have like a stick,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, let’s put it this way. So let’s say you have a mirror and you attach a stick to the middle of the mirror. So it’s poking out of

⏹️ ▶️ John the mirror, right? As you turn the mirror, the end of the stick moves,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? If you make the stick like a foot long and you twist the mirror back and forth, the end of the

⏹️ ▶️ John stick moves a little bit. If you make the stick like 20 feet long, when you twist the mirror, the end of that stick

⏹️ ▶️ John moves a lot because when you point it to the left and then you point it to the right, the end of the stick that’s 20 feet away

⏹️ ▶️ John is sweeping across a huge distance. Like we all kind of intuitively understand this. Like you’re still twisting the mirror the same amount.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re, but the longer you make the stick that is sticking out of the mirror,

⏹️ ▶️ John the more the end of that stick moves. Let’s say you make the stick a mile long and you twist the mirror. Boy, that

⏹️ ▶️ John stick moves across a huge distance when you twist the mirror the same amount, right? That’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the expansion of like, how far does the tip of the stick move based on how

⏹️ ▶️ John far you move the mirror? I hope I’m drawing a word picture here and you can picture how the longer you make the stick,

⏹️ ▶️ John the farther the tip moves. So here’s the analogy they do. We’ve got the mirror, pretend

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a stick on it. Pretend the stick touches the moon.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And by the way, the moon is much farther away than you think it is. This is a fun science exercise. Go

⏹️ ▶️ John to anybody in your life, give them a sheet of paper and say, draw the earth and the moon to scale with their distance to scale

⏹️ ▶️ John and see what they draw. Nobody will draw it accurately unless they’re like a science nerd. The moon’s

⏹️ ▶️ John really far away. Okay, that’s how long the stick is. It’s on the mirror and the stick is on the moon.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, how precisely does the ASML

⏹️ ▶️ John lithography machine adjust the angle of its mirrors? It adjusts them

⏹️ ▶️ John enough such that the smallest adjustment it can make, the tip of the stick that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John on the moon connected to the mirror that’s on earth, it can move the mirror just enough so

⏹️ ▶️ John that the stick moves from one side of a dime on the moon to the other.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco A

⏹️ ▶️ John dime on the moon.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because again, like a 20 foot stick

⏹️ ▶️ John and you move that, try to move it with your hands, move the mirror a little bit so that this 20 foot

⏹️ ▶️ John stick only moves across the width of a dime. Try it with a stick that’s a mile long. Try it with a stick that’s on the moon.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how precise they control this mirror such that they can move a stick on the moon.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s this, that analogy, it was just like, that is a way to visualize, I think it was a Pico-Radian

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. That is just mind boggling. That is just like, how could you ever

⏹️ ▶️ John move anything that precisely? That’s the analogy they gave. I’m sorry, I kind of mangled a little bit. They do it in the video

⏹️ ▶️ John as well, but I feel like people would just go past it and like, oh, I guess it’s pretty precise. But like the physical manifestation of like the stick

⏹️ ▶️ John coming out of the mirror is just very compelling to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For non-Americans, the diameter of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a dime.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How big is a dime? The diameter of a dime is- Is like a centimeter. I love that you gave it a metric

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all the non-US people. Well, hey. But no, this is really incredible. I cannot stress enough, you should watch this video. I love that you gave it a metric for all the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-US people. Well, hey.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, this is really incredible. I love that you gave

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it a metric for all the non-US people. Well hey, but no, this is really incredible. I cannot stress enough, you should watch this video.

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Excited for 2026

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you had a very cool topic that you brought to us that Marco and I were supposed to do homework about and based

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show notes only I did homework on and I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sure. I did it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re the only one who wrote it in there. I think Marco and I both like to not spoil it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always keep my own notes for stuff like this. I know you do. I know you

⏹️ ▶️ John do. And so do I and it’s totally a casey move to write it into the document.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, because otherwise I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John where to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey put

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it and I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John forget it. It was sniped in there because I made little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bullet points. There’s nowhere else to write content on a computer. Yep, that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco only spot. in the world.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, can you tell us what we’re doing here, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So here we are on the first show of the year. We already thanked our patrons. Um, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I like to talk about like what we’re looking forward to. What are you most excited about

⏹️ ▶️ John in 2026? Obviously we’re talking mostly about tech things here. So what tech things are you excited about in 2026? And the only ground rules I wanted to put

⏹️ ▶️ John out there as I wanted to say, try to make your things as plausible as possible,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, there’s all sorts of fantasies we can come on with the things we would love to happen or the things we would love to

⏹️ ▶️ John see. But obviously, we don’t know what will happen. So I can’t say it has to be something that could happen. Like, just try

⏹️ ▶️ John to make them as plausible as possible to constrain us to not be too fantastical. So

⏹️ ▶️ John when we present our list of things, tech things we are excited about in 2026, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John also make the argument of why you think it is reasonably plausible that this could happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who’s starting?

⏹️ ▶️ John But do in the order we have. Marco first.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I’m excited about that is reasonably plausible, but not necessarily guaranteed. My own software.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have three areas, this is one. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be, I’ve been working on some stuff for Overcast that I think is pretty cool, and I think I will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to get it out this year. So I’m looking forward to that.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we can probably take that item from the show notes and hoist it up. We have an item in the show notes which is future things Marco does.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, yeah, I don’t wanna talk about it until I do it, so we’re just waiting for him to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Right, exactly. So there’s some of that. Also, if I ever do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the app I talked about in the member special, probably that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Not the Jam Music

⏹️ ▶️ John app, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the other app. I was so excited for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John has a lot of things that he’s potentially doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so we’ll see if any of them happen. But I think this is a good year for at least one of these things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen, maybe more, we’ll see. All right, so then also, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also looking forward to, We’ll get to a little bit of this, I think, in overtime. I’m also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to the foldable iPhone. I don’t know how that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to go, having both printed out the 3D model of that one mock-up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I did the 3D printed, you know, size accurate, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Spoilers for overtime, we will discuss this then.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, so we’ll talk about it more in overtime, but I did print myself one of those, and I’ve been kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco noodling with it, just playing with the size. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really interesting. It’s either going to be some like ridiculous high-end thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes nowhere except a few power users, or it’s gonna be huge, not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco physically, I mean that too, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or it’s gonna be a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge transformational thing that’s going to become a very big part of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the high-end iPhone market for the foreseeable future.

⏹️ ▶️ John And on that topic, by the way, do you think if you, so let’s say you weren’t interested in it, let’s say you weren’t, it wasn’t on your things you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John looking forward to to 2026, Do you think that you would

⏹️ ▶️ John actually need to buy one of these to test overcast or did you just assume that like, well, my app

⏹️ ▶️ John is already like, like adjust to any size and the size of it doesn’t look that far out of bounds. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not that there’s not a different one. I pay me like, do you not that? Would you buy one? Cause we know you would buy one, but like, of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey course, do you think this is

⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing that you would have to buy to like, just make sure your app works right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My app in particular, probably not, but it’s so mechanically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different. Like the way you handle it is so different. I think most people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who like, where like your app, like it, where like you care about the design and interaction of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app, probably you’ll have to buy it just because it’s gonna, it’s such a different form factor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco To see how the end UI feels.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even stuff like just where do you put controls in the interface? Like how, like the reachability

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things is radically different. The aspect ratio of the front screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the rumors are true, is radically different. There’s so many things about it, the handling of it is very different.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think if you have an iPhone app and it also runs on the iPad, and you never bought an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to test it out, you could get away with that. It’s probably, you could probably make something that’s fine, but to really make something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s good, you kind of need an iPad to test that on. But at the same time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of iOS devices is very big. I don’t buy every iPhone. I don’t buy every iPad. I used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, back a long time ago, I used to have one of every size screen. That’s when there were far fewer devices to buy, too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, there was like one to two in each family. Now, there’s a million different sizes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every generation of phone and iPad seems to change the screen size slightly. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of minor variations of screen sizes. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just to keep devs on their toes so they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco start

⏹️ ▶️ John making fixed layouts anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we’re gonna shave off three pixels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next year. Right, that’s what happens. So anyway, I don’t buy every one of those, but I think the foldable,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s real and if it’s rumored to be, if the rumors are accurate about like the rough screen dimensions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, it’s so different from the iPhone and the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most developers who are responsible for laying out an interface are probably going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to have one.

⏹️ ▶️ John I recall you said the same thing about the Apple watch ultra, just to give people an idea of like, Oh, but you can just run it. The

⏹️ ▶️ John simulator is probably the same thing, right? Like, it didn’t you like say that when you did, or maybe it was underscore, it was one of you two

⏹️ ▶️ John was talking

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about it. It was me.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple watch ultra. It’s like, okay, well yeah, I mean I have a watch app and this is a watch. and how different could it be? And I have it running the

⏹️ ▶️ John simulator and it works fine and it looks fine, but having on an actual Apple Watch Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John still provides insight that not having it would leave you without.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the justification I used to buy the Apple Watch Ultra. I mean, that might’ve been a flimsy excuse you tell me, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the reason why I’m glad I did it is because the Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultra, not only at the time it came out, not only was it significantly bigger screen than the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco series large model was, that’s no longer the case, but it was significantly bigger when it came out,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also because it’s a totally flat from edge to edge screen on the Ultra, there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no like curve around the edges the way it is on the series watches. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco radically changes the interaction and look of elements around the edge of the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when I got it, I was instantly like, oh God, this is very different. So I need to really consider this with my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch app interface. But that was early on in the Overcast rewrite and I ended up not touching the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app for like two years after that. So my plan was sound, my actions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not back it up. Alright, so, getting back to what I’m excited about. So I got my software,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully, the foldable iPhone, one more, and then a subsection. The broad part of the section

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I want to see Apple’s 27 OS’s. Now specifically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will be the first time we see the liquid glass design get its first,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, big tweaks. Now, I’m not expecting the entire interface to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be radically different in one year. In part because that’s just really aggressive. Apple has done it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before, but that is a very aggressive thing to do. And in part because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s still so many bugs from Liquid Glass and this redesign that I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple would have the bandwidth to do two sweeping redesigns in a row. But I do think, since we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had that leadership change, there is probably a good chance for some course correction,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not major sweeping differences, but tweaks, you know, maybe more, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to see a lot more frosting of the glass. I think in a lot more places, we’re going to probably see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some of the more ridiculous things like with the, if I’m honest, I think the,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst two things about liquid glass, in my opinion, are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blurs that contest has to scroll under. Uh, so you get blurry content under

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unreadable text. So like the whole like blurred bar edges thing that and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing where you make up a fake background reflection of the content to slip under bars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on sidebars and stuff. Those two are both so comically hostile

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to so much of user interface design and just honesty that I can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. I can see the new leadership maybe having those on their hit list pretty high up on the list.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So

⏹️ ▶️ John I was on this topic. I was thinking about this same thing when I was filling out the the Six College Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John report card today. You cited a bunch of reasons why Apple’s, obviously the 27

⏹️ ▶️ John OSs are not gonna be some radical redesign, they just did a redesign. You said that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fixing

⏹️ ▶️ John bugs, and they don’t have the bandwidth to change it all that significantly.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other factor, and why when I talked about the 26 OSs when the first came out, I was just sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John resigned to having to deal with these for the next several years, is essentially just like pride

⏹️ ▶️ John in saving face. If there had been like massive public outcry to the 26 OSs, then yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Apple could justify like we got to do a big hard course correction here, but there hasn’t been. I mean, I know people are

⏹️ ▶️ John grumbly about it or whatever, but bottom line is like, there’s no comedians making jokes about it is not terrible in

⏹️ ▶️ John pop culture. Like they didn’t do a bad enough job to justify it. And so Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John like even if it’s new leadership, they’re not gonna come out and say, hey, everything we just described, all those tours we

⏹️ ▶️ John had a developer evangelist telling you how to use liquid glass, all those WWDC sessions, all our documentation,

⏹️ ▶️ John forget it all. a terrible idea and we’re gonna fix it. They wouldn’t do that for all the reasons you cited, but also because

⏹️ ▶️ John it would reveal a mistake. It’s like admitting that you did something terribly wrong. We spent

⏹️ ▶️ John an entire year pretending we didn’t do something wrong, and now we’re going to say that we did. Even if they don’t admit it,

⏹️ ▶️ John which they never would, they would say, we have a new design and we think it’s even better. And everyone would be like, didn’t you just have a new

⏹️ ▶️ John design? I guess you’re admitting that the old design was bad. It’s like, no, we just think that this one’s even, like they do the typical

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stuff, but they would never do that. So it’s like, you know, again, Like the practical reasons are the real reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they just literally can’t because they’re barely holding on to getting their feet under them with 26 OSs.

⏹️ ▶️ John But also even if they had a magic wand, from a corporate perspective, especially under current leadership

⏹️ ▶️ John and sort of the Apple MO for the past several decades is, you know, if you’re going to eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John contradict yourself and correct some mistake, do it far enough in the future. This is just like, well, this is just our next revision of

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing anyway. Like they never fix their problem immediately unless the world is on fire.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the world is not on fire when it comes to the 26 OSs. I think it should be, but it’s not because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too, like they’re not bad enough. They don’t do enough things wrong in an egregious enough

⏹️ ▶️ John ways for Apple to correct this. So, I totally agree with what you said. Like we are,

⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s something in particular you don’t like about iOS 26, if it can’t be fixed with like

⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable appearance tweak, you’re gonna be stuck with it for a long time. And on that front, with the blurs that you were talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the complaints I’ve seen from people who are like a super duper against like the 20 sec OSs, they’re like, I turn on reduced transparency

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. If you turn on anything that essentially disables the blurs, you see

⏹️ ▶️ John just how much space gets wasted. Because when the blurs are there, you can sort of like, well, where is the top of

⏹️ ▶️ John the scrolling region? But like practically speaking, the scrolling region ends once

⏹️ ▶️ John something starts screwing with the content. So when you turn on like the reduced transparency or whatever, you’re like, holy

⏹️ ▶️ John cow, there’s like a one inch opaque bar at the top of the scrolling region, that’s all just wasted space. It’s like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John before that one inch bar was your gradient fade blur crap thing. And so it made you think your content

⏹️ ▶️ John went all the way up. But practically speaking, as soon as the text goes under the blur area, it makes you feel like your vision is failing

⏹️ ▶️ John you. And so you see just how space inefficient liquid glass is setting

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco aside

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the

⏹️ ▶️ John floating bars, which is the other thing I was harping on. I’m like, you’ve made rounded corners, which pushes everything in. You made a floating

⏹️ ▶️ John bar. So now there’s margins and it’s just basically there’s less room for stuff. And the more you tweak the appearance

⏹️ ▶️ John to get rid of like the blurs the transparency, the more it reveals how space and efficient it is. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I wish them luck in tweaking it, but I really hope they tweak it as hard as they possibly can in 27. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I totally agree. Like they’ve got to at least just get the bugs worked out, get everything working, get it functional

⏹️ ▶️ John again. 27 OS’s were not on my list, but I see where you’re coming from.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a lot of low hanging fruit to tweak these designs into something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only less bad but actually possibly good. Like there is like not everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about liquid glass and these readers and not everything about it is bad just there’s some really egregious stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it that I think can be tweaked into something significantly better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And not all OS’s have been equally afflicted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No like it’s I think it’s by far the worst on the Mac. The Mac really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hurts

⏹️ ▶️ John with liquid glass. And probably the best on tvOS since it’s barely there on on TV OS? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, exactly. So, all right, so the, finally, so kind of under the category of Apple’s 27 OSs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but kind of a separate thing. One thing I’m really excited for in 2026,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and believe, I’m not, this is not sarcastic. I’m really excited for it. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco intelligence. Because think about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s already here, Mark. I don’t know what you’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about. Yes, image generation is here. I’ve got it on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Mac right now. Yeah. iOS 27, and you know, 27 OSs broadly. this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is where we should start seeing the first significant results from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different restarts and leadership and team changes and the deal with Gemini. Everything we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen so far from Apple Intelligence has basically been like the version one beta that didn’t work or never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipped. And they’ve made a bunch of changes over the last year. Obviously they replaced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the leadership of it, they moved the division around and they made that deal with Google to have a white label

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gemini allegedly for some of the backend stuff. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these OS’s that, you know, beta in the summer and ship in the fall this year are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most likely where we’re gonna start seeing real progress there. Now, I don’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect the world here. Again, it’s only been one year since, you know, everything else we’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far in 26. So, you know, we have to kind of, you know, keep our expectations reasonable for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they can accomplish in one year. But this is when we should start seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual shifts and changes and results from those fairly large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shifts and changes they’ve made over the last couple of years to try to get this out the door. So I really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna see where this goes. Broadly speaking, 2026 is going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really defining year for AI in general in the whole industry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it can go a lot of different ways. It can be amazing, it could crash hard. We don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really know what’s gonna happen yet. If AI does crash hard, that has a lot of ramifications

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for not only the industry, but the economy. And so that like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this could go a very large range of outcomes here. And whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of the AI world is gonna do outside of Apple’s OSs, it can go all over the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. I don’t even wanna speculate because the range of outcomes is so broad. It can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be amazing or it can tank the whole economy. And everything in between could happen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also. So who knows? But with Apple’s platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically, I think they will be largely isolated from whatever is going on there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both directions. Like if the AI world crashes, I don’t think Apple’s gonna be that affected. This is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not investment advice. If the AI world does amazingly, I don’t think Apple will do amazingly with AI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think Apple’s gonna be right in the middle and kind of doing their own thing in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own pond here. but what they are doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably going to get noticeably better and gonna start we’re gonna start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing what Apple actually can do with AI with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right kind of setup. I still don’t think they’re going to be a leader in AI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly forever but certainly not soon. We’re not going to see them competing with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OpenAI, Gemini, Clawed. We’re not going to see them competing with the big models

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most of the things that people use those big models for. But we are going to see like what’s Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take on local AI, on-device models

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some use of servers using Gemini, but like you know mostly on-device still.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What does this end up looking like? All the magical fairy tales that they spewed over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at WBC two years ago that causes something as rotten post that Gruber wrote, like all All of that stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all BS. That never came to pass, it probably never will come to pass, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s probably going to keep trying to memory hold as much as possible because they don’t want us talking about it because it’s fake and it was always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fake. Okay, but this year we’re going to start seeing what can they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually do. So far they’ve done very little, but I think again, this is the year we’re going to start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing the changes they’ve made start to have shipping results

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some form. And it’ll probably start small, but it’ll be something. And I think that that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really be exciting. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’ll just fizzle out and be nothing. Maybe we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get another image playgrounds are here and we’re going to get another nothing year. But I don’t think so. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the year where we’re going to start seeing Apple ship something good with AI,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, kind of for the first time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My turn. All right. So I know that in our internal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, it says ground rules, try to make them as plausible as possible. I’m going to start with one that I will concede

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not necessarily that plausible, but I really honestly think.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco John gets a Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Right. Uh, I really honestly think that there’s a chance. So you’re saying there’s a chance.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I think that there’s a chance this will happen and that is that Apple turns the policy corner. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I mean by that is they start to read the frigging room and realize. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to happen. I know, I know. And realize that it’s time to maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider that they need to change their approach. Maybe a lot, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little. But I feel like maybe it’s time that Apple starts to really change their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach. And actually, I could even broaden this beyond just policy, tech policy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say maybe they change their approach about other things too. For example, maybe they start rolling out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bits and pieces of Apple intelligence more than two times in the year. And I know they’ve started doing this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe they like really embrace this. And the kind of unsaid, which now I’ll say out loud,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey corollary to this is maybe if we get some new faces at the top of the food

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chain, maybe we’ll see a slightly different Apple that maybe, maybe we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make us a little bit happier because there’s a lot of the current Apple, particularly around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey policy that does not make basically anyone but Apple happy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m really, really hopeful. And I really, based on just my thumb in the wind,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think that there’s a prayer, even without a regime change, but especially with the regime change,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe Apple starts to find a little bit of sanity.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the only reason I’m giving you the pass on this one for the plausibility is because you’re tying it to leadership change, because

⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s no plausibility without a leadership change. That’s my opinion, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because there have been rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John that we’ve discussed in the in the show about an imminent leadership change, which plausibly could happen within the

⏹️ ▶️ John next year. I think this one clearly is in the as plausible as possible, though you are kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like a market with his Apple intelligence things. You are being very optimistic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think to like, you know, we have, yeah, the rumors of a leadership change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think the evidence that, you know, of all the different scheduled retirements and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John a question of whether it comes in the calendar year or not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it’s and I think, you know, there’s there’s a couple different ways this can go. go. It is looking apparent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most likely Tim Cook will most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely become chair of the board. Now there’s a lot of different versions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how that story can go. He could remain CEO for another year or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever he wants to do. But what’s very clear is that Apple as a company is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very patient. Tim Cook as a leader is very patient. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transition plan that whatever transition plan they’re executing on, they’re gonna do it at the pace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to do it. It is pretty clear that this plan has started moving,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t know on what timeline. Like, Tim Cook could still be CEO for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco another two or three years if he wants. It could be much faster than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we think. He could be out next month. Or he could be still CEO two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or three years from now and just also be chair of the board maybe. There’s so many ways this can go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, Apple’s very slow and very patient, and Tim Cook is very slow and very patient. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do think this change is pretty clearly happening, but I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect anything about it to move quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My second one, which is I think moving slightly more realistic, but maybe not,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I wrote it in our internal show notes, AI getting a grip. And what I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean by that is, I think it’s clear that AI has promised us the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey world. The universe has been promised to us. And as yet, I would not say it’s been delivered.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that there are times when, you know, LLMs and AI, as it’s commonly described, are incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressive, incredibly powerful. I mean, again, I vibe coded most of callsheetapp.com

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, I think it was chatGPT, might’ve been Claude, I don’t remember, probably a combination of both.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It can be really incredible. I don’t think it’s solved all problems. Certainly the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolute embarrassing disaster, the disgusting things that are happening with Grok right now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are inexcusable. Um, and I really hope that we start to get a grip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a society, as a people on AI, and maybe that means the bubble’s going to burst.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s going to go quite that far, but I hope, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that maybe we’ll start to get a grip and maybe we’ll start to treat it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a as being it will try to understand and appreciate that there are limits to what AI can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring us and do for us. And that’s okay. That’s not a bad thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of vibes based, I feel like your first two items are very vibes based. It’s Apple turns a policy corner and AI gets a grip

⏹️ ▶️ John very vibey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is

⏹️ ▶️ John it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I was I started with trying to come up with specific things like I’m excited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for such and such or so and so, and the such and such device or whatever the case may be. And honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there will be a device I’m excited for. I mean, Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John example. Or

⏹️ ▶️ John something like the Apple’s new F1 service or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, actually that is a great one. I am really excited for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that actually. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John helping you out with your list.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, I appreciate it, John. Thanks for the help, dad. But no, that is true. I very much am looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to F1 as covered by Apple or not covered by, you know, like handled

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John by Apple. As paid for by Apple, so you don’t have, because you already paid for the thing that it’s gonna come with.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. Saving you money and potentially they might do newer interesting things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not so confident they’ll do new and interesting things, but as we discussed, the way I read

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the announcements was that at the very worst, they will not take away the new and interesting things that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey F1 themselves are doing, or at least not for me. So I’m really excited about that. That’s a great one. Thank you, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the final one that I had, which is probably a little vibesy for John’s taste, is tech experimentation.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the foldable iPhone, I think, fits into this. Yes, there have been foldable phones for a while, but there’s never been a foldable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone. And I’m excited to see a foldable iPhone. Based on the photos

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve seen, and again, we’ll talk about it in overtime, I’m not sure this is something I want, but I’m pretty sure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is something I will get and at worst return if I don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t have called this. I knew I was just called Marco, my son’s name.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I knew Marco was going to get one

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of these.

⏹️ ▶️ John I did not predict that you would expect to God and buy one. I’m sure you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be interested in it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s cool. He’s going to buy it, love it and break it in a week.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that is one of two likely options. Casey hasn’t yet seen the

⏹️ ▶️ John price. And I’m like, he could be scared away because the thing is this 2,500 bucks. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey be like, he bought

⏹️ ▶️ John a vision pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was about to

⏹️ ▶️ John say. I know, but that’s what I’m saying. He’s been burned. He’s like, I bought this 3,500 vision dollar vision pro. I’m not buying a $2,500 stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John phone. No, prices just delay Casey. They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco prevent him from buying. It’s true. It’s worn down eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so angry at you because that is so accurate. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But anyway, so

⏹️ ▶️ John just, what were you saying? Like you say you’re, you’re looking forward because you think, I think it’s cool because you think you would use it. You already

⏹️ ▶️ John said that like half jokingly that you think you’d get it and then return it, but like, what’s your motivation here?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all snark and joking aside, my motivation is I think it makes for a better program if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of us, or at least some of us, have experience with the device. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tech

⏹️ ▶️ John gadget of obligation.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I really mean it. I mean, that’s why I justified and how I justified the Vision Pro. Now granted, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted a Vision Pro because it’s freaking cool, but the way I justified it to myself and to a lesser degree, Aaron,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was this is something that I think genuinely improves content of the show because I can speak,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I was going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say intelligently about it, but at least I can speak from experience with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, I need it for my work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And so anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I think I will at the very least buy one and try it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like this is a need I have in my life, but every other time Apple has come out with some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other thing like an Apple watch or hell the iPhone to begin with, I’ve always started with, well, I don’t think there’s a need I have in my life. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve decided, oh my God, I need it so badly. So I am finally becoming self-aware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to expect that not only will, as Marco said, I want it, not only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will I choke, as Marco said, over the price, but I do consider it, I really truly consider it an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey obligation for the show to pick one of these up and give it a shot and see what I think. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I do return it, then oh well, at least I’ve tried it. And I’m excited for that. A lot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this push into the home that everyone keeps saying Apple is doing but we haven’t really seen yet,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited for that. And I feel like just generally, and again, this is, I guess it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of vibesy, John, and I’m sorry, but I get this vibe, this feeling that tech is starting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to experiment a little bit more. They’re either all in on AI and that’s the only thing that matters, or they’re doing really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey loopy stuff. Like I’m watching the Verge’s coverage of CES and granted CES is always loopy and weird, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we’re starting to get a little bit of fun back in tech and maybe I’m just trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey desperately to find anything to be happy about right now. But I’m getting the feeling like there’s going to be some experimentation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year. And I’m really hopeful and excited about that. So I apologize, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is very vibes-y. You’re right. But it’s a bunch of vibes and F1. So how about that?

⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe you just specifically pick that robot vacuum that climbs stairs?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. We actually talked about that on Clockwise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John earlier today.

⏹️ ▶️ John The pool vacuum that lifts itself out to go into its charging cradle?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. I mean, I do think that’s fun experimentation. I do think that is in the context of tech experimentation. But that’s not for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. The LG robot that folds your

⏹️ ▶️ John laundry?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco CES is always like a fever dream of products that never really work or ship, but like, but there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think you’re right. I think you’re hitting on something, Casey. Like there is, there is kind of like this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this pent up demand for fun. And I think a lot of experimentation is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. And a lot of that, like a lot of that I think is the phase that we’re in with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI, which is like the current, the current next big thing, a weird phrase, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes sense in my mind. Like, tech goes through the next big thing phases

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when you look around what they’ve been recently, like for a while back it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-driving. It is happening very, very, very slowly in ways that most people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a lot of access to, but that was the big thing and it didn’t really result

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of immediate fun or impact to tech products during the hype cycle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then after that we had cryptocurrency, which was not fun

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. Nope. People made money with it, but it was just kind of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was one of the biggest moments where like, finance bros replaced tech bros,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now there’s no more distinction. Now like, the nerds are all pushed out of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of tech now, and it’s all just run by finance tech bros now. So like that was not really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun either. And then we went from crypto to a brief diversion into the metaverse,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which kind of sucked. And I wouldn’t describe any part of that as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco particularly fun either. But then we went to AI. And AI,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not perfect. You know, it has a lot of challenges. It has a lot of limitations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, again, as I was just saying, like, 2026 could be a year where we have a serious correction with AI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI is fundamentally opening up new doors and creating new value in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech products that people can actually use and see today right now. And it’s actually affecting our lives

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. I ask ChatGPT questions almost every day about something. It has really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco replaced a lot of web searching for me and it has augmented what I’m doing in a lot of different ways. And yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not perfect. It makes up APIs that don’t exist. It makes up facts that don’t exist. It’s not perfect,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it immediately today has value. And even if it never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has any more value than it has today, it still has a lot of value.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is why I think if there is an AI crash or correction, it’s not gonna be because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI is a stupid idea, like crypto. Like that’s not gonna, remember NFTs?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember when everything was gonna move to blockchain? Not the blockchain, not a blockchain, but blockchain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s not like that. There’s actual value, not only being created and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only promised of maybe being created, but that has already been created. We already today

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have amazing value and uses for the AI that we have already today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there is some kind of big crash or correction, it’s gonna be more about the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expectations being even more inflated than it could do and or all the ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finance tricks that are being played to try to finance this build outs and you know, that’s gonna, who knows how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can blow everything up. But the actual core of the technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is valuable and it’s already here and we’re already using it. And I think that is driving a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun. And if we look at it as like the Gartner hype cycle, you know, the famous thing of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think 2025 was the peak of inflated expectations in the Gartner hype cycle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think 2026 will bring on the trial of disillusionment. but I don’t think it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go that low. Because again, like ultimately, it has those fundamental values

⏹️ ▶️ Marco established. So whatever the heck happens with like, open AI’s giant build

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and then taking all the RAM and whatever, and NVIDIA’s valuations and all these big like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, financial and market moving and supply moving things that are happening in that part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that world. Regardless of all that, and this is part of why I’m excited about Apple Intelligence, regardless of all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, this industry has created a whole bunch of value already that we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already using to make products today and that we’re already using as consumers today. That is bringing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the fun into this. It’s opening up new possibilities. It’s making things very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy that used to be very hard. It’s saving people time and that changes the viability of certain tasks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like that’s a whole bunch of the good kind of disruption. It isn’t just a whole bunch of people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, burning GPUs to maybe make some money to buy some heroin. Like it’s real value being created

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And people are using it today to improve their lives today already.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think that’s driving a lot of the fun. And I’m pretty, if I go back to the Gartner hard cycle thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I think we’re gonna reach the plateau of productivity very quickly with AI. Like if there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a trial of disillusionment, like if we do have like a brief correction or crash, I think it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be that bad. And people who are hoping AI will just go away,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s an increasingly kooky position to take. I don’t think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever going to happen. That’s like saying, I wish we could get rid of the internet or cryptography. Or like, it’s just, it’s never, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s impossible. It’s not gonna go away. It’s here and it’s good. And it’s not good at everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s good at a lot. And so we’re using it and it’s fun. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think also like what that is doing to the rest of the industry is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing so hard on hardware, capacity,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and energy that we are getting amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computational power. We are getting amazing computational resources. Now, granted, we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t buy any of them because OpenAI is buying them all. But if there is any kind of correction,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whenever things catch up to this demand, we are going to have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge glut of computing power, of probably energy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s hope they build those RAM fabs before the crash.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That also is, I think, already contributing to the feeling of fun and promise. But then we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco contribute even more in the future. Once the supply and demand kind of bounce each other out here,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers are just getting so good and so fast, and they will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually become so cheap again. that’s gonna help everything we do. Even stuff that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use AI, everything just keeps getting better and faster. So that’s also a pretty good reason to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be optimistic.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you watch that ASML video, try not to think too hard about, okay, but what’s the next thing after

⏹️ ▶️ John EUV? And who’s making that? And how long

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is that gonna take after you see the

⏹️ ▶️ John timeline of what it took to make EUV here? Things get harder. And as I think we said years and years ago, when we

⏹️ ▶️ John first talked about the end of Moore’s law, Moore’s law will end. You can’t make things smaller forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Take a physics class. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John, your turn.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, let’s see here. My first item, the thing I’m looking forward to in 2026, I

⏹️ ▶️ John hope this is extremely plausible, is the M5 Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not looking forward to the Mac Pro because I don’t think that’s plausible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think you’re right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right? I’m not looking forward to the M5 Extreme or anything that’s like a quad or whatever because that’s not going to

⏹️ ▶️ John happen. There’s no rumors of that. It’s just that’s Apple has given up on that. The M5 Ultra is

⏹️ ▶️ John in fact rumored, which talked about it in the previous show. It seems eminently plausible. They did make

⏹️ ▶️ John an Ultra for the M1, M2, and M3. They basically said they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John making one for the M4. I would like to see one for the M5. I’d be most excited if it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John two M5 Maxis stuck together. But even if it is two M5 Maxis stuck together, that’d still be a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John cool chip. I just want to see it. I’m excited for the M5 Ultra. It’s been a rough time

⏹️ ▶️ John for me on the M chips. Yeah, they’re great and everything, but I’m always looking for the super high-end one and they just have been

⏹️ ▶️ John dropping the ball on it. Like they’ve either just been not making them or making them real late, setting aside the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, just like it’s been harder lately to be a fan of high-end

⏹️ ▶️ John desktop Macs. And it’s difficult because everyone else is happy because all the other chips are

⏹️ ▶️ John so amazing. It’s like, well, but the high-end desktop is like, ah, no one cares about that. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all about the laptop, it’s all about the phones, and you’re right, it is. But like, here I am, I like high-end desktops, Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John been dropping the ball and foul is rumored. I would love it if they just at least like caught up to where they were. This is like

⏹️ ▶️ John the bargaining stage that I’m in. Can we just go back to when you did ultras that had the same number as the non ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John chips? That would be great. M5 ultra looking forward to it. And if it’s not two M5 maxes stuck together, I’ll be super

⏹️ ▶️ John excited just to see like, like what is their fallback strategy of like, well, we, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John their original strategy is we’re gonna take two maxes and stick them together and we’re gonna make this quad thing and it’s gonna be amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John They couldn’t do the quad thing. And then the two maxes stuck together, like that actually that was like a money

⏹️ ▶️ John saving idea and it kind of makes sense and it’s cool and everything but it’s like it does have drawbacks and it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as easy as we thought it would be because you know that see how long it took to get the M3 M3 ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John out the door and it doesn’t give us the clean win that we thought it would in terms of scaling

⏹️ ▶️ John so maybe we should just make a chip that is bigger than the max that is its own chip

⏹️ ▶️ John i would love to to see that I’ve heard no rumors to that effect, but that is M5 Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ John When whatever form it takes, that’s my number one item I’m looking forward to in 2026. Number two, I’m surprised you two

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t say this. OLED MacBook Pros. I don’t even like laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s too soon, too soon, honestly.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is the year

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for

⏹️ ▶️ John the OLED MacBook Pros,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I thought we’re getting the M5 MacBook Pros like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sometimes soon. Yes, but also the OLED

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. No, I think those are M6. I think those are the year after.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but I’m saying, I think both of those are happening in 2026. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be, you know, spring and fall. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could do that. Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, if I’m wrong about the, like you’re right that the M5 ones are not gonna be OLED. So like, if you’re thinking that March

⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna come or we’re gonna have OLED MacBook Pros with M5s, we’re not. Okay, that’s not the rumor anyway, right? The OLED ones

⏹️ ▶️ John are supposed to come after that. And it is plausible, I think, that those

⏹️ ▶️ John OLED ones could ship within calendar year 2026. If they don’t and they end up in spring next year, oh well,

⏹️ ▶️ John then, you know, but I think it’s plausible. It’s not unrealistic because you know what? OLED screens do exist.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ships them in some of their products. They’re really good. You could put them in a MacBook Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m looking for. Now the M5 ones will be fine, but I’m, you know, I like, cause the OLED M6

⏹️ ▶️ John ones are gonna be, the rumors have it to be redesigned. I’m looking forward to seeing that. And I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ John forward to them getting old because I feel like they deserve it. They’re the most popular Mac products. Their current screens are actually really good. Like it’s not like they

⏹️ ▶️ John have terrible screens. They have better screens than any desktop Mac. I’ll tell you that. But I am actually looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ John to the OLED ones. If only to see like what Apple chooses, as I alluded to in some past episodes, and we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John talk about maybe more CS stuff in the future. The variety

⏹️ ▶️ John of screen technology available, mostly in the TV world, but also in the monitor world, it’s really diversifying.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it used to just be there’s like LCD and OLEDs, and then there was like two varieties of OLEDs, and then there was a couple of LCDs. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a million different varieties now. Apple’s got a couple of different ones too, like their phone ones with the

⏹️ ▶️ John pen tile sub pixels sharing thing at like 3X, which is totally different from the tandem OLED

⏹️ ▶️ John that is on the M4 iPad, which is totally different from the mini LED thing that’s on the MacBook Pros. And so like, what are they gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John pick for the MacBook Pros? And I’m excited to see like a new design for the MacBook Pros. Even though I think the current design is great

⏹️ ▶️ John and we all love it because it fixed so many mistakes of the past, the new one could make more new mistakes in

⏹️ ▶️ John the future, but it’s still exciting. I’m still looking forward to it. I wanna see what those are like. If they happen in spring

⏹️ ▶️ John of 2027, oh, well, they didn’t make my list, but I think it’s plausible. And on that front,

⏹️ ▶️ John and speaking of CES, I’m actually looking forward to new OLED gaming monitors.

⏹️ ▶️ John In particular, for my PlayStation 5, I have a 4K 27-inch monitor hooked up

⏹️ ▶️ John to it. And I’ve been holding off replacing it. It’s just like a really old IPS LCD

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K non-HDR 27-inch LCD monitor. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I don’t know, I think it’s LG. Like, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s old. Like, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John HDR, and my console’s capable of HDR. And it’s not OLED, so the black levels are garbage.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, there’s no dynamical backlight at all. It’s just a constant backlight. And the reason

⏹️ ▶️ John I have them in Baltimore is I look at them and I’m like, they’re either really expensive or they have some compromises or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this year, like at CES, their various manufacturers are showing

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K 27-inch OLEDs with RGB stripe with no white subpixel, which is like basically

⏹️ ▶️ John everything that I wanted. Like whether it’s QD OLED or not, there’s no white subpixel. a normal

⏹️ ▶️ John sub-pixel structure, so three vertical stripes, R, G, and B. Not that I’m gonna use it as a desktop monitor, but I occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ John do. I’ll hook up my laptop to it or whatever, and it’s nice to have that. Right, if I’m gonna spend all this money, I want it to be

⏹️ ▶️ John a plausible monitor. And in particular, I don’t want 32-inch 4K. Not because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna use it as a Mac display, because already 4K 27-inch is not the right rednet resolution for a Mac, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John tolerable. But for gaming, which is what I use it for most of the time, I think, I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like 32-inch, my wife has a 32 inch 4kish monitor in the basement for work. I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like 32 inches is too big for 4k, even for video games. So I actually prefer

⏹️ ▶️ John like space wise and like field of view wise. When you know the distance I sit from it when I’m playing with my controller,

⏹️ ▶️ John I want 4k 27 inch OLED and a whole bunch of those are coming out. I’ve seen a bunch of them at CES, so I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John wait for my favorite YouTubers to get them into their little hands and test them and tell me which one is the best

⏹️ ▶️ John one. And and me figure out which one I can tolerate. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sure I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John buy one this year. Because like, I can’t tolerate the gaming ones, like project light on the ground and do all this stupid crap.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure I’ll buy one. I’ve always said by the time I get my PS6, whenever the heck that comes, I will definitely get

⏹️ ▶️ John one. But I’m not opposed to getting one now. I feel like it’s finally arrived. The price is right.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s HDR enough. It’s OLED enough. I have some faith that it won’t, the image retention won’t be that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, it’s ProPixel lighting controller bust. It’s the only thing I would tolerate. No mini LED, no strobing, 1000

⏹️ ▶️ John hertz backlights. Nvidia had some monitor that strobes the backlight to give like an apparent 1000

⏹️ ▶️ John Hertz or something. It’s just, no, they don’t want that. Per pixel lighting control, RGB

⏹️ ▶️ John sub-pixel, no white sub-pixel. Seems like I might get that this year, so I’m excited for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And related to that, maybe pressing against my plausibility things, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John monitors, eh?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Eh? Amen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John brother.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John there are rumors, there are persistent rumors. Of course, there have been persistent rumors from like the

⏹️ ▶️ John day after the studio display was released where they were like, oh, there’s actually a successor coming real soon. No, there wasn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely not. But we have model numbers. We know they’re out there. They’re potentially a

⏹️ ▶️ John successor to the XDR, potentially a successor to the studio. Like those rumors exist, those

⏹️ ▶️ John products exist. I think it is plausible that they could come in 2026. And if they don’t, it

⏹️ ▶️ John will further cement Apple’s terrible drought on monitors. What else is new?

⏹️ ▶️ John but I am actually looking forward to that. Not because I’m like, I’m not gonna replace my XDR. I’m fine with it. I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John replace my wife’s studio display. It’s fine. I’m just excited. I would just be excited for that turnover to happen. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I also don’t think I would buy one as my gaming monitor because it’d be way too expensive or whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited for Apple to get back on the horse when it comes to monitors. And I want them to do it mostly because like,

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the Vision Pro where it’s like, they didn’t really do any update to it, but I am excited they did something, which shows that

⏹️ ▶️ John like, there’s still, it’s still a product in their lineup, right? Like they did put an M5 in it, which is more than they did for the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John The longer, the more years pass with them touching the monitors, this is like, are monitors the new wifi base stations?

⏹️ ▶️ John Are they just not gonna do them anymore? Like I just, I get the fear. So Apple monitors,

⏹️ ▶️ John something I’m looking forward to. And my final item is actually one that’s already been listed.

⏹️ ▶️ John I described it as LM powered Siri, but it’s basically Apple intelligence.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it’s plausible

⏹️ ▶️ John that the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that they

⏹️ ▶️ John announced in 2024 and could not do, they make a second or third or fourth whatever number

⏹️ ▶️ John there are internally run at this problem. And I agree with Marco, like leadership changes, the deals

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been making, the technology they’ve been doing is absolutely plausible that they could actually release

⏹️ ▶️ John something that makes Siri better. I don’t expect the world. I don’t want it to be perfect. I,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like, as you were saying, Marco, like the whole rest of the industry is doing stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that Siri, that makes Siri look even dumber than it already was. Siri was already the laughingstock of the whole industry.

⏹️ ▶️ John And now like literally everything that has anything to do with LLM is so much better

⏹️ ▶️ John at Siri in so many ways, not that they’re perfect or whatever, but Siri is just so dumb. It feels like it feels

⏹️ ▶️ John like a previous generation technology because it is a previous generation technology, especially now that I’ve got like the

⏹️ ▶️ John LLM powered like Google home replacement for home assistant thing or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Talking to that thing, it was already way better than talking talking to Siri. But now it’s like, I just say

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever I want, confident that my intention will get through. Now, will it

⏹️ ▶️ John do exactly what I want to give me the answer? What? No, but at least it will know what I’m talking about. Whereas every time I do anything with Siri, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s like playing, you know, a text adventure from the 70s. What syntax do I

⏹️ ▶️ John use? How do I have to phrase this? I recently I was trying to set up a reminder. And I was very careful not to use

⏹️ ▶️ John like the word in or the word year or anything like that. Because it was like, I think I was

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to say remind me to do like the six colors year in review 2025 thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, forget it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I tried to phrase that as carefully as I could. And it still made a year long event starting

⏹️ ▶️ John it today. That was called 2025. It was like, No, Siri, no, you didn’t get it. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m just I, I have so much more confidence in literally anything lm powered would understand

⏹️ ▶️ John the event that I was describing and put it in the calendar. So lm powered Siri, it won’t be the

⏹️ ▶️ John best in the industry. You know, but I just want something better than what we have. And I feel like it

⏹️ ▶️ John is plausible for that to come in 2026. I hope Apple prioritizes the right things. So you’re making the the jab

⏹️ ▶️ John at like image playgrounds or whatever, like lots of things. They are here. Yeah. Lots of things could

⏹️ ▶️ John ship in 2026 related to stuff because Apple has been doing a bunch of stuff. But I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ John that someone somewhere recognizes like it’s all just window dressing, you know, except

⏹️ ▶️ John for the voice assistant. Right. That’s your big problem. People talk to their phones and their

⏹️ ▶️ John phones and they talk to, you know, other things and everything else is making the phone look even dumber. that

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be the number one priority. Forget everything else, delay everything else, delay every other like, tell me my mom’s

⏹️ ▶️ John flight is coming, whatever just makes Siri better. Oh my God. So that is on my looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ John to list. And I do think it’s plausible. And I just have to think like, cause now they don’t have a redesign to talk about in you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the 27 OS’s. That’s gotta be the headline feature, right? I don’t know how they spin it, but like, you know, hey, remember when we

⏹️ ▶️ John talked about this in 2024? Well, here it is. I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John like, maybe they just pretend it never happened, But yeah, LLM powered Siri.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I could have made my list longer too because it actually is a bunch of cool stuff that I’m looking forward to, but those are, I guess, my top one, two,

⏹️ ▶️ John three, four, five. M5 Ultra, OLED MacBook Pros, OLED gaming monitor, new Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John monitors. I guess the middle three items are display related and LLM powered Siri. No TV stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John in there because TV technology is in a weird place and maybe I’ll talk about that in a future show, but

⏹️ ▶️ John for now, you know, this is an off year for TV technology. Just save your money for next year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode. I always say this week. All right, thank you to our sponsors this week,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Guru, Factor, and Masterclass. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every episode has usually about 15 or 20 more minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a bonus topic at the end for members only. This week, as could have alluded to earlier, We’re gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about the form factor rumors for the 18 Pro and Max, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of the headliner is the foldable iPhone and the rumors around that, and the 3D printed mockups and everything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re gonna talk about that in overtime. You can join us to listen, at.fm.com slash join. Thank you so much everybody, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John let him Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John 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-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ John long

UniFi Travel Router

Chapter UniFi Travel Router image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bought a thing and it has sent me down the rabbit hole

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all rabbit holes and it is all okay now, but woof. It was, it’s been an adventure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This all started when Ubiquiti decided to release something that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey laser aimed, like, like a EUV machine laser aimed at my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey face, which was Ubiquiti decided to release a travel router. router.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had to have one and I bought one. Now let me back up a smidge.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What the heck is a travel router? So for the longest time, ever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since like a couple of years ago, a Quinn had done a different video than the one we talked about earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where he talked about like, I think it was cool. Um, like nerd stuff you could buy or maybe it was in the context

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of gifts, gifts. Uh, I forget exactly what it was about. I’ll find a link and put it in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, um, one way or another, Quinn had put together a video about how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of different things that are great for nerds and one of them was a travel router. And the idea here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, let’s say that you and your family are going on vacation. And let’s say you arrive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the hotel room. If it’s a great hotel room, which this never happens, you’ll find an Ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey port waiting for you. And you just need to bring an Ethernet cable and you can plug in your computer. But that never happens. So instead,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happens is there’s Wi-Fi and there’s typically some sort of captive portal that you need to go through and say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I’m, you know, the last name is list I’m in room one, two, three, blah, blah, blah. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you do that for yourself, for your phone, and then you do that for yourself, for your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, then you do it for yourself for some other device. Then you do the same

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dance for your partner and their phone or, and, or their iPad, then you do it for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your child or children for their, this, their, that, their, this, their, that. And it’s just annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what you can do is you can get these little devices that are colloquially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called travel routers. Now, the mac daddy of travel routers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of the ones that everyone seems to buy and what Quinn recommended was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the many GLiNet travel routers. It’s not the greatest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey name, but these are incredibly great devices. And this is what I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the tailgate tub to slurp up internet from like a hotspot or my phone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then distribute it via both ethernet and Wi-Fi to the devices at the tailgate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also, you know, that would also do double duty. And when we would go on vacation, I would have that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing get through the captive portal and I would have that thing get on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet. And once that gets on the internet, it’s rebroadcast or not rebroadcasting, it’s broadcasting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi but the same SSID and password that’s at home. So all of our devices,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they don’t necessarily think they’re at home, but they at least connect to the internet with the same SSID and password.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is extremely convenient, just so you don’t have to do the same dance with everyone. Now, additionally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you say go to a beach house or something like that, have like more of an Airbnb scenario rather than a hotel,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes you will find like an ERO or some other ISP issued router there. And oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will have an available ethernet port. And if that’s the case, you can quickly and easily

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug in your router to this ethernet jack, and then you immediately have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wifi for all of your devices. It’s incredible, it’s great, I love it. It’s a very dorky thing to do,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I freaking love it. Now, these devices are not big by any means, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not small. They take up space. I’m trying to think of a good analogy, and I’m really struggling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to come up with one. For the three of you that know what this means, they’re often about the size of a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MixPre 3.2, which is not helpful and I recognize that, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s probably the same rough volume as a HomePod mini, although it’s rectangular and in a very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different shape and whatnot. So Ubiquiti decides to enter this market and comes out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a travel router. And I took one look at this thing and said, I must have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Not only is it Ubiquiti, which is my new thing, but it was $80, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is within reason for some of the GL-GL iNet routers, but by and large,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say that’s impulse money, but because, I mean, $80 is not a small amount of money, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s pretty good. I mean, the family of four, when we go out to eat at a fast casual restaurant,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like if we’re going to Five Guys, it’s 50 freaking dollars. And that’s literally poop in like a day.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So- I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna go, I’m gonna be a contrarian here and say it’s 2025, $80 is a small amount of money. Well, that’s true,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. For almost anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Inflation, baby, what are we going to do?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they came out with this travel router, and it is tiny.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Think of approximately a regular average size playing card. I know playing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cards can be different sizes, but like a canonical average size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing card. Real-time follow-up, thanks, long form in the chat, it’s 2026, not 2025. Oh, yeah, good point. Good point.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still writing 2025 in all

⏹️ ▶️ John your podcasts. There it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So imagine playing cards, you know, ace, ace, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s roughly the size of that and probably like half a deck tall. I know that’s very unscientific. I don’t have the actual dimensions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in front of me. It doesn’t freaking matter. It’s tiny. And perhaps, Marco, you can make the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chapter art a photo of this device, because it is so cool looking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, immediately, I knew I had to have it. It’s so thin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on the one side, it has two USB-C ports. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But on the other side, it has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two ethernet ports, one for a client and one for uplink it’s so small

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the top like fifth is a door or a joint

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you lift up in order to expand the depth of this thing. So you can actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug in an ethernet jack and RJ 45 or whatever. I know it’s not RJ 45, but you know what I’m saying?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 3.8 inches by 2.6 inches by a half an inch. So half an inch is not big enough for an ethernet port.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you gotta have the big mouth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You gotta have the big mouth title. So anyways, and on the front, it has a display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the display will tell you if it’s connected, what it’s connected to, how many clients it has and whether or not it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey connected via teleport, which we’ll get to in a minute.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can just do a brief aside now.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, please. I don’t wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John come out against putting tiny screens on every single freaking electronic thing. Like for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this, I agree,

⏹️ ▶️ John it might be worth it, but like the latest anchor plug thing or whatever has

⏹️ ▶️ John a screen on a million, every power bank battery thing has a screen. you’ve got the USB-C cable screen. In some

⏹️ ▶️ John circumstances, I understand, I wanna see how many watts going through, I wanna see the data rate, I wanna see whatever, but not everything

⏹️ ▶️ John needs a screen. I know they’re inexpensive, but I feel like it’s just wasting my battery power for a thing that I’m never gonna look at. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe in Travel Router it makes sense because you do wanna see how it’s performing or whatever, but I feel like we’ve gone too far with screens.

⏹️ ▶️ John We need to pull back a little bit, both in car interiors and on electronics.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll give you the car interiors, but the other examples you gave, so I have a somewhat recent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anker battery bank that has one of those little color OLED screens on it that tells you like the wattage in and out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really nice, actually. It’s very useful to see like, oh, is that thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John charging?

⏹️ ▶️ John People like them because they’re cute and sometimes useful, but like the smallest little tiny, they’re not five

⏹️ ▶️ John watt, but you know like the smallest little pluggy thing with one USB-C port, that does not need a screen. That’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’ll give you that. And their newest one has it. I’m like, now we’ve gone too far. It’s too much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also another example you gave on Ubiquiti stuff. Like, so for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons that I’m not gonna have time get into on this show, I had to set up a new Ubiquiti router at the beach

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple days ago and it had everything you just said you said two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours ago about your Eero swapping setup. Ubiquiti has all the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco joy for me. Like I had to replace an old Ubiquiti router and I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new one on hand, thank goodness, and I just like I installed it and it was like you want to restore from the back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the old one. Yes, and it just adopted all all the equipment, everything was perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And during that time, it had a little tiny, like three quarters of an inch screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the front of the router that was telling me stuff like the progress bar to show that it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dead, it’s just booting, and it’s, oh, here’s the software update, here’s a progress bar, stuff like that. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just really nice to be able to see what’s the state of this thing right now. So honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco disagree on screens being in too many places.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not saying they’ve gone too far. I’m not saying they’re useless on everything. Like there are places like, I feel like the bigger, the bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John and more permanent the thing is, the more I can justify a screen. So your ubiquity thing, like that makes sense. But

⏹️ ▶️ John like the travel router is probably about the limit of things. Like any power bank that is smaller than this

⏹️ ▶️ John travel router, any power adapter, any cable that, again, special circumstances, if you really want a cable to

⏹️ ▶️ John know how much power is, it’s good that they exist. They just shouldn’t be on everything. And seeing it put on like the smallest,

⏹️ ▶️ John cheapest, lowest power anchor adapter makes me think they’re just trying to put them throughout the entire line because they’re cheap. That’s all I’m saying.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I ordered this thing immediately. It sold out basically immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I lurk on Reddit, on several different subreddits. And one of the ones I lurk on is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Ubiquity Reddit. And we’re going to come back to that in a minute. But I am super excited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get this. And the Ubiquity subreddit is losing their minds excited. Everyone is like, oh, I must

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have this. Because if you look at this, again, you have to be the right kind of nerd. But just look at this thing. It looks so cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so small, so much smaller than the GL-iNet stuff that I already have. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I get it in, and generally speaking, today,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really like this thing. We’re actually planning to travel in the next couple of weeks for just a couple of nights,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I’m planning to bring this with us. I will probably bring one of the GL-iNet ones that I have as a backup

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just in case, but I have no expectation that I’ll need it. But I really, really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. It seems to work really, really well. It’s not super crazy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous fast. Like I connected it at a friend’s house to their symmetric gigabit ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Fios, and it would get via ethernet like 300 megabits a second down. But the thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the size of a playing card, for goodness sakes. Like I’m not trying to download

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ISOs or, you know, whatever while I’m on vacation. I just wanna have something that I can maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey physically plug an Apple TV into and then distribute Wi-Fi to everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think the number of times people have said they’ve downloaded ISOs is higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the actual number of times people have downloaded ISOs? I think maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a little. So anyways, one of the things that, a couple of things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that confused me or I didn’t like at first, the way you interact with this is through the Unify

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, which is kind of like equivalent to the Eero app, if you will. And what happens is it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pairs, well not even pairs, I shouldn’t say pairs, it just finds the travel router via Bluetooth, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I dig, and it’s pretty quick to find it. But then when you, it brings up a modal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to interact with the travel router, and you can set settings and do things like that. But once you dismiss

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the modal, it is extraordinarily not obvious what you do to get back to that modal. And it turns

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that what you have to do is go into the section, I forget the term for it, but where you look at the other networks that you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have access to, which for me is only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you, that’s it, site manager. You go up to the site manager and it appears in there. But what’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey super trick about this thing, and part of the reason that, or however you pronounce

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, that it exists. It’s pronounced trow. Yeah. I’m already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I actually, I didn’t blink an eye because I thought you were right, but here we are. Turns out it’s trough,

⏹️ ▶️ John whoops. I put a link to the trow disillusionment in the chat room. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I saw.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s in the show notes, I saw it. So the way it’s supposed to work is, you, when you first connect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it says, all right, what networks do you have access to? And which one of these networks would you like to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically rebroadcast? So Marco, if you got one of these, you could choose, do you want it to rebroadcast the beach network,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Long Island network, or the restaurant network?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could do any of the above, and I believe you can swap between them. And once you tell it that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will slurp up your Wi-Fi credentials and all you need to do, and then suddenly, now I have my Wi-Fi network

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this little tiny device. And that’s really, really cool, and it worked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty well for the most part. The only real complaint I have about it today, although we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna go through a journey together, so buckle up. The only real complaint I have about it today is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time I connect it to my phone for tethering purposes, and I believe this is true of my iPad as well, every

⏹️ ▶️ Casey single time they connect to each other, I get the dialogue on my iPhone, “‘Trust

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this computer? Enter your password.’” Maybe this is a setting that I’ve flipped that I should unflip.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This might be a Casey problem, but I’m pretty sure it’s applicable on both the iPad and the phone, and it’s very annoying that you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to do this every single freaking time. It doesn’t remember that you’ve blessed this device. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s doing some sort of like USB equivalent of like MAC address rotation or something like that, who knows. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s annoying. Additionally, I couldn’t figure out, like I said, how to get back to the thing after I’d close that dialogue. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Marco said, you go to the site manager and that’s fine. So this is all well and good. I got this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then for the first time I set up what Ubiquity calls teleport. What teleport

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, is like a zero-config VPN. And you can use one of their other apps called Wi-Fi Man,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not really sure why that’s where they put it, but that’s where it is, to use this zero config VPN

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bring your device, your phone or your iPad or what have you, back into your home network. And I believe there’s an equivalent for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac as well, I’ve never done it on a Mac. And the idea is that the Ubiquiti Travel Router has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey its own teleport. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only will you be rebroadcasting your own Wi-Fi, but it will actually join

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your network via VPN to the point that I actually took a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spare Flex Mini or whatever this thing is called, you know, the little baby five port switches that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have. I had one that I had previously factory reset deliberately. I plugged it in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Ethernet on the travel router and adopted it through my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone cellular connection, which is bananas. So it became a part of my network

⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the travel route, through my iPhone, through the travel router, which is nuts. Uh, very, very cool

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Additionally, if you have a, uh, Unified protect camera, it will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also be able to stream to your DVR or in my case, the cloud gateway fiber

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home via the travel router, if the connection is strong enough, if the internet connection is strong enough, so I could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring a camera with me to vacation and keep an eye on like Penny if we’re traveling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with her or something like that, which is super freaking cool. Your entire network is where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the travel router is. And I think that’s extremely cool. So I want to try this out. I’ve never used Teleport before.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Teleport has a lot of options in the web site, on the Ubiquiti

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like web configurator. I’m going to tell you all the options. Here we go. Is Teleport on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or off? There’s your options. So I turned teleport

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and I gave that a shot and I connected to it via

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my computer, my iPad, it doesn’t really matter. And I think to myself, all right, I’m going to see if I can SSH

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into my Synology because that will be a great test to see whether or not I can,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m back on my home network. My home network is 192.168.17.whatever. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey network I think by default was.3.whatever. I want to see if I can reach into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Synology and it doesn’t work. Meanwhile, I’m still cruising and for the last several days,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I’m waiting for it to arrive while it’s shipped, I’m cruising the Ubiquiti subreddit and everyone’s losing their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever-loving fricking minds for mostly dumb reasons. John, what was the thing on Slashdot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they panned the original iPod? Less space

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Nomad. Less space

⏹️ ▶️ John than a Nomad. No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. All I saw was Wi-Fi 5, lame. Again, it’s a travel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey router. I agree. If you wanted this to be your home router, that’s wrong on a million levels,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Wi-Fi 5 maybe not great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Work great with a PlayStation Portal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. I mean, it’s equivalent to the PlayStation thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, most of these people, like if you went to their house and you replace their Wi-Fi 7 gear with Wi-Fi 5 gear, how long would it take them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to notice?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So true. So yeah, so Wi-Fi 5, lame. Teleport doesn’t work,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lame. Which I think that there’s some truth to that, which we’ll get to in a second.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It leaks DNS because one of the things that it’s supposed to do is if it finds a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey captive portal, so it can connect to other Wi-Fi, just like my GLI net can, it can connect to like a hotel Wi-Fi.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is supposed to basically push that captive portal to your client device, like your iPhone your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad or whatever, have you log in and then magic happens. And then it will be through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that captive portal and get on the internet. And people are saying, well, it’s leaking DNS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And well, of course it has to use the local DNS to get to the captive portal. Right. And, but then after that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not using teleports, DNS, you’re using local DNS, you’re leaking DNS, everyone’s losing their minds because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reddit. Um, but I’m starting to get myself a little spun up about this because everyone’s getting real annoyed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how this thing is like shipping with crappy firmware, it doesn’t work for beans,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s beta, blah, blah, blah. Everyone’s upset. So in summary, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what the hell I was doing and I shouldn’t have listened to Reddit. But to get there, um, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey initially tried to set it up and I tried to set up with teleport and that didn’t seem to work at all. It didn’t, wouldn’t connect. I tried factoring,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey resetting a couple of times that didn’t seem to work. Um, then a cage, then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I got teleport to seem to work, then the the Internet wouldn’t work when I was connecting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it via the travel router. Now, I understand why, but I didn’t at the time. I eventually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put the DNS on, the way I had DNS on the Cloud Gateway Fiber, the router here at the house,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that DHCP clients would be issued the Pi-hole address as the DNS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, the Cloud Gateway Fiber has the actual Fios DNS in it, but it’s issuing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to all the DHCP clients, the Pi-hole DNS. That seemed to work just great, But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I did that and when I tried to do that, and when I had Teleport on, when I connected to the travel router, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t work for beans. The Internet wouldn’t work, clearly DNS wasn’t working. So what I did was on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Cloud Gateway Fiber, I stopped having it give the pie hole as the DNS server

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to DHCP clients and then suddenly, the Internet started working on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Teleport. Now, in the middle of this, everyone is also losing their minds because to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest, The software both on the iOS side and on the firmware side was not 100% baked. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so a lot of people noticed that there was a firmware release on New Year’s Eve, on John’s birthday.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the iOS app at the time was incapable of upgrading the firmware. There was a button to do it, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it didn’t work. So then what people realized is if you go to the Ubiquiti

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps test flight and then go back like two or three versions, there was briefly a version

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would let you set the SSH password for the travel router and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could SSH into the travel router and force a firmware upgrade that way, which I did.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that did make things better, but things still weren’t right. I am losing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mind. I cannot figure out why it is that I can’t get the internet to work right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t SSH into my Synology. Why is this not working? What is wrong?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I take a guess?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, please. Alright, you said you’re using the Ubiquiti’s teleport feature to bridge the networks. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Are you cheating? Because he did spoil this already on Mastodon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sort of. I’m only cheating a little bit because I tried doing exactly this before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Earlier this, or sorry, last year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still writing. OK. So earlier in the last year,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a point where I was not at the beach. I was somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the mainland and something was going on where I wanted to access the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco beach network. Like I want, I need to access, I believe it was the mixer. Like there was a DJ and there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was something not working right. And I wanted to log in and access the digital mixer using their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on my iPad in my house into the restaurants network.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s like, all right, get me on the restaurant network. And I didn’t have anything set

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up except I had access to the ubiquity control panel that I had the site manager and so I go like okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I have that what can I do and the first thing I thought of oh this there’s a teleport

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that will bridge the network I’m on my home network to the restaurant network great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll do that and no matter what I did I could not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the two networks like I could get if I did like you know what is my IP comm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever like I could I could have my traffic proxied through the restaurants internet connection

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like a VPN,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a relay, but I was never able to see the restaurant’s network’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco internal devices. Yep, that’s where I was. If through a bunch of research and trial and errors, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there is some kind of default behavior and maybe it’s like with subnets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something or virtual networks or whatever, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these deeper layers of networking that I usually don’t mess with because I’m not good at them, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like VLANs, like all this stuff. Like there was some kind of isolation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was that teleport forced by default, whether it was a subnet or a VLAN

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that. And I, no matter what I did, I went into like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco firewall rules and everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and I could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not get it to work no matter what. Eventually I just gave up. But I spent, I think I spent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like three hours trying to get it to work and I just, I could never get it to work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s exactly where I was, right? Every time I connect via teleport and I try to ping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or SSH into the Synology, it doesn’t work. I am asking around on a private

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slack that I’m a part of that has a bunch of really smart people on it. I’m asking around everywhere. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hadn’t gotten to Mastodon at this point. I’m asking around everywhere and I cannot figure it out. Eventually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got so desperate that I started a chat with Ubiquity support and said, please help me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand. I cannot get to any internal device from this travel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey router. And actually, at this point, I had come to realize, I can’t do it from Teleport at all, because I had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ended up putting the Teleport stuff and Wi-Fi man and whatnot on my iPad, which has a cellular connection,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and trying that, and that couldn’t get to the Synology or any other internal host, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I get on Ubiquity Support, I do a chat with them, and they’re very kind and very polite and very patient, and I explain what’s going on,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the person I was speaking to, I think his name was Peter or something like that, says, well, why don’t you, do you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any switches or wireless access points or anything on the network? I said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well ping one of those because Ubiquiti stuff, all of their actual network devices also pull

⏹️ ▶️ Casey IP addresses. So I ping, oh, and I knew I could, I knew I could ping the, the, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud gateway fiber, the router, but I couldn’t ping anything else as far as I could tell. So I go to ping one of the switches,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey works. I go to ping a wireless access point that works. So suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not that I can’t get to any of the internal network. It’s that I can only get to ubiquity

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. And the support person basically said at this point was like, well, my job to you here is done,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get out of here. I mean, it was nice about it, but that was basically the message. And so then it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey occurs to me, well, wait a second. If I can ping ubiquity stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can I ping things that are not the Synology? Because I’ve only ever tried pinging the Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because why would I try anything else? And then I tried pinging my Mac Mini,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it worked. Then I tried SSHing into my Mac Mini, and it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked. And suddenly, I’m very confused.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, indeed. So then I go back to trying to ping an SSH into the Synology, and it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey working. So then I think, okay, well, is it just Linux-based stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I tried to ping my Raspberry Pi that runs the PiHole.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You know what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Synology. Tell me about it. I need to get rid of the damn Synology. It’s what it boils down to, but here we are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I try to ping the Raspberry Pi that has the pie hole on it, and that doesn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it is just Linux-based stuff. That doesn’t make any sense. Wait, I have a second Raspberry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pi in the bedroom that runs my little beloved LED that tells me when the doors are open in the house. Let me ping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And that piece of s***, I could ping no problem. What

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ever-loving f*** is happening right now? I am so lost.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I realize that when I take a proper assessment of everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realize that the only two devices I cannot successfully connect to are the Synology

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the Raspberry Pi that runs the Pi hole. Everything else in the network has always been good to go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I never realized it. By the way, would you like to know why the Internet didn’t work when Teleport

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was on before? Well, that was because it was all the DHCP clients on the travel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey router were getting the Raspberry Pi as their DNS server, and guess what they couldn’t access?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s always DNS. It’s DNS, except it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t in this case. After going back and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco forth

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a couple of good Samaritans on Mastodon, we come to find out it was two very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different problems, and none of them were the Ubiquiti thing. And all of them were at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey least tangentially my fault. For the Rasp, well, John, I presume you’ve already seen this, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you like to add anything or Marco for that matter, would you like to add or take any stabs as to what’s going on?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve already forgotten what you tooted about, but I did see you toot about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Would you like to take a stab now then?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no. I’m terrible at network stuff, but I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey will

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco say

⏹️ ▶️ John that you describing your flailing here is an example of someone trying to figure out a programming problem or doesn’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John how to use a debugger. Like you just don’t have the tools. Right? Like, imagine, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco doesn’t have to imagine, this is a PHP programmer, but imagine programming without access to a

⏹️ ▶️ John debugger. You’re like, well, you can do it, but like, you’re really doing it with one hand tied behind your back, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kind of miserable. We don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a compiler over in PHP land. Like, we’re operating with basics here.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so like, you’re trying to debug network problems without like, fundamental understanding of networking, nor

⏹️ ▶️ John access to the basic tools of debugging network problems, which I’m assuming the people on, and to be clear, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have that knowledge either, But like, that’s why I just stay far, far away from network stuff if I can.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so the people on Macedon, there were a couple of people on Macedon who were incredibly kind and incredibly patient, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they suggested doing TCP dump on the command line, which will show to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very small degree I understand any of this, which is way less than John and basically zero.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’ll show stuff happening via TCP IP, and it would show on both devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they were, that they were getting tickled by like a ping or whatever. If I recall correctly, they were showing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that things were coming in, they just weren’t responding. So things were really awry. What

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ended up happening was for the Raspberry Pi, even though I had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a DHCP reservation within the cloud gateway fiber, when I set it up 11

⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion years ago, for whatever reason I had statically assigned an IP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it to use. Now those two IPs matched. It was 192.168.17.152 I believe. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that the Raspberry Pi is statically assigning matches the one that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey router is issuing. But the subnet mask on the Raspberry Pi

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was 255.255.0.0. And I don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what I’m talking about, but apparently what that means is it was not trying to talk to the right network in order to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reply to these requests. So once I changed it to 255.255.255.0 instead of.0.0,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Suddenly, I could reach the Raspberry Pi and all was well with DNS and everything was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good again. But that doesn’t explain the Synology. The Synology

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not responding and it has the correct subnet mask, 255.255.255.0.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know what I’m doing. And again, good Samaritans on MassDON are helping me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. we come to realize that one of my 80 million containers that I use

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Portainer, P-O-R-T-A-I-N-E-R, which is basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to manage your containers. And the way it does an update for itself is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, it makes a sidecar container that it creates itself

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then is supposed to destroy itself and usually does. And that’s what modifies the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual container and then the sidecar goes away. Well, the Synology, I don’t know, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe Portainer wasn’t cleaning up well, I don’t know what was going on. But the Synology, when I looked at the container manager

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Synology, which is their equivalent of Docker, and I looked at the networks on there,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turns out that one of these brief and no longer running, but still existing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sidecar containers, was built a Docker network

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was 192.168.0.0. So I guess all of this traffic was getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey funneled into this Docker network that doesn’t really exist. So once I deleted that network

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Docker, suddenly the technology worked. So now, after I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot tell you how many hours of banging my head against the wall and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of asking for help from Ubiquity and asking for help from the good Samaritans on Mastodon,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally got this travel router working, and it works great and I freaking love it. and I’m excited to travel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it and see how it is in the real world scenario. I suspect it’ll be great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for in the car, for hotel rooms. I’m a little worried about how it’ll work when we go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like a beach trip where you’re renting an entire house. I reckon that maybe it’s not gonna have strong enough radios

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reach the far corners of the house, especially because generally speaking, when you rent a beach

⏹️ ▶️ Casey house, the router will be in one extreme corner of the house and the bedrooms will often be in the opposite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey extreme corner. But all in all, I’m extremely happy about this. And for all the convention

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Reddit did about DNS leaks and stuff like that, as far as I can tell, when I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have teleport enabled, I’m using my pie hole for DNS just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I would expect. So we’re getting, you know, ad blocking when we’re on, when we’re on the travel router, all is good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the world. But gentlemen, what a damn journey it was, which was 98%

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my own doing. You

⏹️ ▶️ John should buy a networking book or take like a continuing education course on networking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably should. I probably should. Cause I know almost nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You

⏹️ ▶️ John just need to learn like, like a handful of basics and a handful of like debugging tools that you like your go-to

⏹️ ▶️ John tools to basically say like, like you would with the programming problem. Like I’m sending, I’m sending data here. I think it’s, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is what happened. Let me look at what is happening when I’m leaving my computer. Let me look what’s happening when it arrives here. If I’m on my Synology

⏹️ ▶️ John and the traffic arrives there, how does it get routed? Where does it go to? And it would have eventually, I mean, I’m assuming you would have been able to walk through the same

⏹️ ▶️ John things that the Mastodon people walked you through to find your rogue container with a network

⏹️ ▶️ John that was sucking up traffic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Ah, what a journey. But I learned some things, not as much as I probably should have,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to John’s point, but I learned some things and I am very, very happy with it. And I don’t think this is the sort

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of device that would be useful if you’re not a ubiquity person, but at $80, this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a must-have if you’re a ubiquity person. And assuming you have this need in your life

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the first place. Now maybe you don’t. But for me, I freaking love this thing. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey physical form factor is so great. I actually do like the little screen on it. I love the little door

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Ethernet ports. I think it’s kind of silly, but I love it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s called an X-Jack.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a throwback that we’ve made a couple of times before in the show. It has a little spot for a lanyard if I wanted to attach a lanyard.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love this thing. It’s really great. And as long as you actually know what you’re doing, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely recommend it. So check it out. Beep, beep, beep.