609: You're the Oreo Cookie
17 Oct 2024Submerged, the new iPad Mini, getting started with photo editing, and a weird new driver-assist mode.
Episode Description:
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s special: ATP Tier List: Storage Media 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- Marco updates
- AutoSleep
- iPhone leather backs
- HDR photos from big cameras
- Apple laptops can run without a battery connected
- You can soon get Apple TV+ on Prime Video
- Soccer corner
- “Drive to Survive” knockoff is coming (via Devon Dundee)
- On Messi/MLS popularity
- Shipping Forecast (via Antony Johnson)
- Enabling/disabling audio modes on AirPods 4 w/ ANC (via Scott Zero)
- John’s AirPods update
- GPX exports for geotagging photos (via Ryan Mikulovsky)
- More thoughts on global keyboard shortcuts in Sequoia (via Michael Berk)
- Passkey benefits
- Apple says “🤨” to OpenAI claims about reasoning
- Google breakup is a possibility
- Marco updates
- New iPad Mini
- Submerged
- Ask ATP:
- How do you get started editing photos? (via Maxel Amador)
- What’s the point in performance cores if they’re not used? (via Scott Schuchart)
- Members-only ATP Overtime: What is the right product mix for iPhone
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
- Uncommon Goods: Get 15% off your next gift.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Tier List: Storage Media
- Follow-up: sleep-tagging
- Leather phone backs
- Big-camera HDR to Apple Photos
- Sponsor: Uncommon Goods
- MacBooks without batteries
- Apple TV+ on Amazon
- Sports
- Shipping Forecast
- Customizing These AirPods
- GPX exports for photos
- Global keyboard shortcuts
- Passkeys
- AI moats and o1
- Google breakup?
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- iPad Mini (A17 Pro)
- “Submerged” on Vision Pro
- #askatp: Learning photo-editing
- #askatp: Compressing huge files
- Ending theme
- Neutral: BMW Assist Plus
Tier List: Storage Media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really is a miracle that we did not kill each other during the recording of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last member special and that we are here recording a new episode of our normal podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is the closest we’ve ever come to killing each other. Can you think of a different
⏹️ ▶️ John time? I don’t know why you thought it was so contentious. I thought it was very calm and reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John right up until the very end, but still, you gotta count the whole rest of the episode, which was very
⏹️ ▶️ John long, where everything went fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure I agree entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is kind of one of those things where you meet somebody else’s family.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when someone from a family that doesn’t argue with each other all the time meets someone from a family that does, it can be
⏹️ ▶️ John still think despite the fact that you two have known me for over a decade now, you don’t quite understand how
⏹️ ▶️ John I operate normally. And every time there’s any contentious
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco words, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh no, the world is ending. and I’m like, this is just another day.
⏹️ ▶️ John It really depends on how you were raised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I have been more upset with you, John, probably with regard to something car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related and your ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John other past. No, it was never special. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this one reached new levels for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? I really feel like the iPod one. I mean, Marco definitely seemed more aggrieved in the iPod one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Cause I think we are
⏹️ ▶️ John farther apart on those. I don’t want to spoil anything about it, but I think we were actually pretty close together on this one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you two just were united in disagreement about one level in the tier list.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Single level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really honestly think that we need to change the rules of the tier list as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this episode. That’s how bad the voting process was.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it worked out. Remember the connectors episode, where we couldn’t get anything up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to the top, right? I think the connectors
⏹️ ▶️ John was more problematic, but we do what we do. We gotta work within the system. I still feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like we did a good job in the end. In the end, justice was done.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey To the best of our ability.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I’d go that far. It was funny, though. So after we recorded, it was either yesterday afternoon or perhaps this morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was thinking about how maybe we should change the rules. And very briefly, the rules for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tier lists are all three of us have to reach an agreement if something is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be S tier. And remember, it’s S is the best, then A, B, C, D, F. And for something to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go from A to S, the rule has been, we absolutely, all three of us, must
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree. And this has caused some amount of problems in the past. I think I do mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s caused some amount of success, because I think it really does. In fact, what I was thinking is if we did change it, we should change
⏹️ ▶️ John it so F also requires all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey three of us to agree. I don’t think that’s wise. And then we just
⏹️ ▶️ John work in the middle part, because you get to those extremes, then you really need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the logic there. I don’t know if I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it increases the value of S, and you know, the D value of F, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was thinking yesterday or today that all of a sudden, all of Connected’s absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preposterous rules, suddenly they’re starting to make ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sense. You can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John end up chasing your tail and changing the rules all the time when you don’t like how things go, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s true, but nevertheless, at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John same time. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that was the case, I would have been arguing to change the rules after the iPhone episode, but I wasn’t. I accepted, that’s just the way it turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Indeed. So we should probably specify what the heck we’re talking about. So yeah, we said it was another tier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list members episode, but we were ranking a storage medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or storage media, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Yeah. And we were ranking all sorts of storage media. So I had been the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inventor of the topic, the creator of the topic. But all I all I said was, hey, we should do storage media.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then John took it and ran with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You listed a bunch of ones to I like I looked at your list when I came up with the things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John ran with it in a way that I did not expect, but I have no problems with. I thought you ran with it in a very reasonable way. Some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people based on feedback were not as we’re not in agreement that you chose the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right selections. I thought your selections were great. That’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the case. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I as I explained in the episode, I intentionally like I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do all them because there’s too many. We focused heavily on a subset and we ignored lots of other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, you can’t like the thing was two and a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey half hours long. Like we can’t put any more in there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so which ones would you have us drop? And I guess everyone would say, I’m not gonna run up, but there’s, I’m sure everyone would say, you should have dropped all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle. But that was a fruitful area where people on the show had strong opinions. So I thought it
⏹️ ▶️ John was important that we kept it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, I think you made the right choices. But there was a moment at which Marco and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were in devout, just complete agreement about one of the items.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And john was not having it. And I don’t know that I’ve ever been closer to quitting the show than I was
⏹️ ▶️ John you should take the consolation prize of the thing that you were rooting for. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one level different than what you wanted. It’s so close.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s not where it was supposed to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a good, it’s in a good tier. It’s in a happy home. It’s an injustice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s in an injustice. It really is. But anyway, so, hey, John, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you wanted to listen to this- It was an
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, stop it. If you wanted to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to this- Listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to the episode to find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, if you wanted to listen to this, just absolutely out of control tier list, how would you do that, john?
⏹️ ▶️ John I go to a p a tp.fm slash join, you become a member, and then members get access
⏹️ ▶️ John all to all of our member specials, both the current one and all the past member specials, of which there are like 2526. At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a lot of them are tier lists, because I do find that based on feedback, they seem to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most popular, but also they seem to just really be a laser-focused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to get us to bicker with each other, which is nice as an occasional thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, we don’t want to make that everything, but it is quite funny and I feel like we have never been closer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the energy of the good Top Gear. Well, people will take issue with that, but you know what I mean? The good Top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gear than when we do the tier lists.
⏹️ ▶️ John last last year, last we did was in June. So it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey many months. Was it that long? Okay. Yeah, I thought it was more recent than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, if you wanted to see all the specials, even if you’re not a member, you can just go to ATP.fm slash specials, and that just lists all
⏹️ ▶️ John the specials. Obviously, you won’t be able to see much about them except for the title if you’re not a member, but you’ll see where they are, and they all
⏹️ ▶️ John have prefixes. So if you just look for ATP tier list colon something, you’ll see all of our tier lists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we should put like a count on there because we’ve amassed enough that we should be proud of bit. I’ll have to talk to our web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer about that at some point.
Follow-up: sleep-tagging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we should do some follow up in Marco. Hopefully you have some follow up with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really. So everyone keeps recommending the same handful of them. And I assure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, I have seen them all. I have including yes, yours, the one you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just saying. Yes. That one, the one you’re yelling at your podcast app. Yup. That one. I even saw the aura
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ring, which I’ve never even thought about a smart ring before, but actually the aura rings app seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do exactly what I want. I just don’t really want to buy an Oura Ring. So nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against them, I just don’t want to hold the device just for that. I think what’s more likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen is I’m going to stop sleep tracking because I’m just going to eventually find that I’m not getting enough actionable data out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, or at least actionable info through the very limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface of the health app. So I think I’m, you know, I don’t love this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pursuit enough to make this app myself, and None of the apps that I’ve seen out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do what I want in the way I want. Yes, even that one. Yep, you’re yelling right now. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The one you’re writing to me in the email. That one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think a lot of people kept sending you the suggestion for auto sleep because your complaint that you voiced in the show was that they make you make accounts and they
⏹️ ▶️ John track you and they do all sorts of stuff and everybody wanted to tell you that auto sleep has no tracking, no account, no in-app
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase, custom tags with history and filtering. And so your complaint about that one is just despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it doesn’t do all those bad things that you were complaining about, still it doesn’t work the way you want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also, like the way it uses the emoji and not really like customing, like it’s a whole,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at that one, I tried it, and yeah, it wasn’t doing what I want. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only reason I put that in there because people will not stop recommending AutoSleep because they say it fulfills all your requirements
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s clear that there’s more requirements than just not being annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ve seen a million apps and you’ve rocked them all.
Leather phone backs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Do you have any information about leather backs for your iPhone perchance?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see there I have better news. All right, so I have I now have right here on my desk I have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them the Nomad goods leather back Adam Studios ATOM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Studios leather back the Suity one that I described last time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both leather and I also have the suity silicone one the Adam one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only use for like half a day because it’s It’s incredibly thick. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually I took out some calipers and I measured all of these. For reference, like the Bullstrap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular leather case that wraps around the whole phone, that is 2.6 millimeters. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Atom Cactus leather back is 3.7 millimeters. So it’s like almost, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, one and a half times as thick as like a common leather case of the phone. So-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does that come close to leveling out the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no? It comes close, but it still doesn’t. it still has these little ridges that push up that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make little rings around the lenses. But it just, it makes the phone feel very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thick in the hand. It almost feels like you’re holding two phones stacked. Like I know it’s not quite mathematically that, but it just, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very big. So I couldn’t last very long with the Atom, so I ruled that one out. So really for me, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only two that I like are the Sudi leather and the Nomad Goods leather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Sudi one looks way nicer. The Nomad one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works better. Tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re going for looks, the SUTI 1 wins hands down. The texture of the leather is nice. The way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has like a little black cover around the camera, Mesa, that looks nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The edges form like a nice slope up, that looks nicer. The Nomad 1, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is Horween leather, which is a nice leather maker here in the US, even though it’s Horween leather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just looks very flat. Like the Nomad 1 looks cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it is actually a nicer grade of leather, But it kind of looks very cheap and flat. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything special with the camera. It has like a nice You know it has like the hard plastic ridge around the camera So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sudi one the edges slope down into like a plastic gasket around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the edge Which does look very clean and it feels nice in the hand except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it really doesn’t provide any grip around the sides the Nomad one goes all the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the side and then ends abruptly in like a flat side almost extending the shape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iPhone’s flat sides and because it goes all the way to the edge you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel the sides of that leather with your hand you grip the phone and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like lean the phone if you like stand up the phone like lean it back if you’re for instance like propping the phone up on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windowsill the bottom of the leather will touch the surface whereas that’s not true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Sudi because the edges are like are like you know kind of ramped up gradually with a little bezel so the Nomad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one despite not looking very fancy, actually works the best. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially thinner. It doesn’t matter that much, but the Nomad leather back is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only 2.2 millimeters, and the Sudi vegan leather one is 2.6,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the same as that bull strap leather case. So the Sudi one is about the same thickness as a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone case, a common iPhone case. The Nomad one goes from 2.6 to 2.2, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeably thinner. So the Nomad One overall, even though I don’t think it looks nearly as cool as the Sudi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the one I’ve been spending the most time with because it’s the one that works the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Nomad One looks better too, but I know that the marketing photos on case websites are not always representative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and keep in mind also, the Sudi is a fake leather. The Nomad’s a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather. So the Nomad One will probably age better in the sense like it’ll probably develop a nice patina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with certain leather wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey patterns. Get tackier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it immediately got tackier, like within a day of just, you know, having on my hand oils.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is it is getting nice and tacky, but even you know, the way that the way that where will happen on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco natural or you know, real, you know, cow leather tends to wear nicer, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of like little scratches that get kind of like reoiled in, you know, certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, wrinkly patterns that develop with leather as we all know that so the Nomad one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while it looks bad now, I think it will age very gracefully. Whereas the Sudii
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one looks great from day one. I don’t know how it will age but it doesn’t matter because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Nomad ones work so much better.
Big-camera HDR to Apple Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what about HDR photos? Oh, this is some important follow-up. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we discussed a few months ago, I was trying to figure out how the heck do we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDR photos in Apple’s Photos app taken by big cameras? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do you get your big camera to be an HDR photo in the Apple Photos app? And we went through a couple apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would kind of set the right metadata fields, and it was kind of hacky and tricky it kind of worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t work great but it kind of worked well I tried again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this past weekend I loaded you know a photo I just take and I loaded into Lightroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and modern and this is like a slight room classic this is like the old style Lightroom before the whole sync service thing
⏹️ ▶️ John before you get to this did you do anything special when you took the picture can you explain the picture taking process
⏹️ ▶️ John was that just like there’s no HDR features or support and your camera, like
⏹️ ▶️ John explain that part to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The pictures I was, I was using pictures from the Fuji GFX 100S, which does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of built-in HDR functionality. It was just a RAW file.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I shot RAW. Just a RAW file and… And so the way I expose pictures, almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, like if I’m going to be shooting RAW and I intend to edit them, I do what I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photographers call exposed to the right. So the idea here is you usually will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underexpose the photo in like the auto exposure control on the camera by at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one EV. If there’s gonna be like a sun or a moon or a bright light source in the shot or near the shot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will darken everything else so that the light source doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blow out the sensor and become all white. So if there’s like some sunlight somewhere, you don’t want that to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all white. Modern sensors on big cameras are very sensitive compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to old ones. And so what you can do if you’re shooting raw is in post-processing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can bring up the level of detail from the dark areas. It’s called shadow detail. And you can usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring that up a lot in editing without amping up the highlights too much and blowing out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making everything just white on the highlight side. So what you do is you underexpose when shooting raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that the highlights don’t blow out the sensor in the brightest parts because you can’t recover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from blown out white. like in editing, like you can’t say, all right, bring down that white and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put back like the nice fine cloud texture that was up there. Like you can get a little bit of that back, but not much. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas you can bring up shadow detail in editing pretty far these days with good modern sensors.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’ll be full of noise, but Lightroom has amazing denoising. And one final question about capture. Do you remember what color space
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using? Were you just using sRGB? What do you have your camera set to?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know offhand. Whatever the, I think I’m pretty sure I use sRGB.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the reason I’m asking is because you’re about to go into HDR stuff, and I always wonder, is there something I could be doing on my camera
⏹️ ▶️ John to help out the HDR? And one of the things I do is I always, like, I have limited choices on my
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras, but one of the choices I have is whether I want sRGB or Adobe RGB.
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe RGB, I believe, is close to the P3 color space, but not quite the same. But anyway, it’s a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John triangle on that big RGB space than sRGB. And so I always want to give the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest triangle to give myself the highest chance of HDR. But anyway, go on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s interesting, I actually have never experimented with that. So I probably am just shooting as RGB, because I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually the default. Anyway, I had the raw file in Lightroom. Modern Lightroom Classic has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over in the exposure area, it has an HDR thing you can toggle. And what that does, basically, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expand the exposure range in the interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give you this big section above where it was before. And so I was able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to edit the picture in HDR in Lightroom. It looked great, I’m so happy with that. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, well, okay, how can I get this picture into Apple Photos and keep the HDR? Well, first I tried the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old, you know, JPEG 80% quality, keep as much as you can. There’s even, somewhere in there, I think there’s even an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option to say keep HDR in JPEG. And I tried that and it didn’t import with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDR into Photos app. But then I tried JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XL, our new friend. And when I export Lightroom HDR in JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XL and import that into Apple Photos on the newest Mac OS Sequoia,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works. It keeps the HDR and now I have real HDR photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shot with my big camera in Apple Photos showing the HDR perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice. What is the JPEG XL? Does JPEG XL support so many things? Are you exporting
⏹️ ▶️ John a RAW with JPEG XL, lossy or lossless compression? or are you exporting a essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John not raw JPEG? Like this is something I’m not clear about about JPEG as an Excel, because I haven’t actually used
⏹️ ▶️ John it directly, but the spec says that it can be, I mean, Apple’s, in iOS 18,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s used for raws. And the choices are you have is lossy compressed raw or losslessly compressed
⏹️ ▶️ John raw, but of course it also does like plain old compressed JPEGs with variable quality. So do you know which
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those things you exported from Lightroom?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using just like the fancier version of JPEG compression in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Excel. So I set them both to quality 80. And so it is lossy, but it’s just, you know, it’s similar to JPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I will say quality 80 on a JPEG, like the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JPEG export versus the JXL export, the JXL one is less than half the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size. It went from 23 megs to 11 megs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they show up as just as JPEGs and essentially in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, They don’t have the raw tag anymore, just to ensure you’re not doing a lossy raw or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it just says, it just, here, I’ll pull one up here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they don’t use a tag for non-JPEG, but they put the little gray raw tag or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has the.jxl file name in the info panel, but then in the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlay in the middle of it, it has a little JPEG badge, and it does not have a raw badge anywhere on it. So it’s treating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like a fancy JPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds interesting, I’m going to try this, although I have zero experience with Lightroom, but I’ll figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll send you one, it’s massive, slow down your computer because you have an Intel. Oh!
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to send me? I have plenty of pictures that I can, I have plenty of RAWs that I can just chuck in there I just
⏹️ ▶️ John defined this magic HDR control somewhere in Lightroom Classic.
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MacBooks without batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, an anonymous Apple genius writes in, all Macs since at least the Intel days are capable of running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without a battery connected. It’s actually used as a common troubleshooting practice in the genius bar. Often swollen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey batteries, such as what Marco experienced, will cause issues like unexpected shutdowns or slow performance and can even cause the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to boot in certain cases. While not very frequent, we tend to see expanded batteries or spicy pillows, most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commonly when the customer has left their Mac connected to power for most of its life, similar to Marco’s situation with his gaming PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PS, I know I said every Mac since the Intel days, but the one exception is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 12-inch MacBook. It is a very strangely built machine and a complete nightmare for us technicians
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work on. If you disconnect the battery and then plug in anything higher than a 5-watt adapter to let it trickle charge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will fry the logic board. Most technicians avoid it like the plague.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, honest question, how many 12-inch MacBooks could there still be in use? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know like because that that keyboard was so short-lived like and the repairs were so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive and they’re all out of warranty now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you just connect an external keyboard, you know, because there’s plenty of ports for you to connect an external keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I suppose. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do you do this to me?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why do you do this to me? Well, that’s right. Did you see by the way? This is an aside. Did you see XKCD yesterday?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the Ravioli shaped things and the entire world has sent this to me. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was recent. I thought that like for years ago one that just reminded people. No. That was an interesting coincidence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Clearly, Randall Munroe listens to the show. That’s the only reasonable conclusion we can come to. or something like that.
Apple TV+ on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Apple TV plus is now available as an add-on to prime video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is somewhat unexpected So you can be in Amazon or in Amazon’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know Prime video client or what-have-you and you can subscribe to Apple TV plus as another channel in there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the same money you would otherwise pay Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you have Apple one in which case you’re probably playing less for it If you can’t like all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John so the streaming stuff is so complicated last time there was another bundle It’s like oh, hey, look there’s a bundle of three
⏹️ ▶️ John services that I pay for separately. Will that save me money? And I had to go through this complex gymnastics to figure out.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it will not save me money. So thanks a lot. Bundles, you’re not quite working
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. This is yet another model that will not save me money, despite the fact that I do, in fact, have Apple TV Plus and also Prime
⏹️ ▶️ John Video. But because I’ve had Apple TV Plus through a bundle already. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you think Apple is getting 100% of that money? I don’t know. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I doubt it, but I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We have to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John the court case to find out
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah right exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I mean and this this makes total sense like you know for apple is trying to get tv plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there into the world, get more people watching it. Apparently, you know it’s not super well watched, which is a shame because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of good stuff there. So they were trying to get it out everywhere and when you’re in that kind of business of like a content service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is in your best interest usually to make that service available everywhere. That’s why they have apple music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for android right. It didn’t isn’t anything that exists now. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John so That’s why Apple TV Plus clients are built into smart TVs now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So they want TV Plus everywhere. And the reality is this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, even though, even if they make less money from the Amazon deal than they would, you know, selling it directly through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other means, it is worth it for them to have that everywhere. The same reason why it’s worth us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having our apps on the iPhone. Like, you know, so if Apple has to give Amazon 30% or whatever, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s, that’s reasonable. And for them, it’s probably worth it. And that’s, that’s why they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see the rankings recently? Like, I don’t know if it was speculative or, uh, or like based on real numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the viewership or the number of subscribers to the various streaming services. I was kind of surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John at how well Apple was doing and how poorly Peacock was doing. Peacock Plus or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple, you know, obviously Apple isn’t at the top, but it was, you know, it’s solidly mid-pack.
Sports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to, and this is tangentially related to Apple TV+, with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Major League Soccer, one of us, might have been John, had said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, well there you go, all right Shaggy. Somebody had said, hey, they should make a Drive to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Survive style thing for Major League Soccer, and Devin Dundee writes in to say, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has commissioned Box to Box Films, the production company behind Drive to Survive, to document
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the season, this season of MLS, and create a quote, eight part panoramic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentary event quote for Apple TV Plus. Apple and Box2Box previously worked together on a pro surfing series called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Make or Break. I had no idea this was a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if that’s all the, you know, the like the 3D cameras that people were reporting, thinking it’s for some Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I wonder if that’s all part of this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey documentary. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John also don’t know what the heck a panoramic documentary event is. Is that Apple Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We’ll find out, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody knows. And then additionally, in with regard to, uh, Lionel Messi. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to have that pronunciation right this time. Um, and, and MLS being not very popular, which we had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about last week. And the consensus that I gleaned from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback we got, there were a lot of, uh, individual perspectives, but the one thing that seemed a pretty solid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreement is that, hey, major league soccer here in the States, just not the same level of play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as over in Europe. It’s just not as good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which we said on the show. Like, we said that, you know, he’s a good player, player but now he’s over here and all his good playing buddies are
⏹️ ▶️ John back over there. So he’s not playing with them. He’s playing with us.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, it’s a JV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, the perspective that people who wrote us had was that it’s the JV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey squad here. I’m not sure that’s true or not. I mean, obviously, these are incredible athletes and are way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more athletic than I will ever be in my wildest dreams. But compared to what’s going on in Europe, that seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the perception whether or not it’s reality. So
Shipping Forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, we have feedback with regard to the maritime report that you were talking about, uh, from a friend of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Anthony Johnson wrote in to say that the maritime port I was thinking report I was thinking of that, uh, I mean, Maryland have
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about in rectus is, uh, called the shipping forecast. Uh, Anthony says it’s a national
⏹️ ▶️ John institution broadcast every night on radio for there’s even a dedicated BBC site that promotes
⏹️ ▶️ John it as a sleep aid. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes, drift to sleep. And so many people were
⏹️ ▶️ John offended by my suggestion that, you know, that’s the the type of thing that could be taken over by AI because it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of affected kind of voice reading just basic information
⏹️ ▶️ John about weather and so on. And it’s such a beloved institution, they couldn’t believe it could.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even suggesting that it’d be taken over by a machine is offensive, and I said, maybe it already has been, you would never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ha ha ha ha. Aye aye aye.
Customizing These AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Scott Zero, I hope that’s your real name, that’s a great surname, Scott Zero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote in with regard to disabling and enabling audio modes on AirPods 4 with ANC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Scott writes, you can change which ANC modes are in rotation by going to settings, your AirPods, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then selecting one of the press and hold AirPods menu items for the left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or right AirPod. And you see a thing that tells you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether noise control or series, what that press and hold will do. And then you can choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their check marks for the different noise control things off transparency, adaptive and noise cancellation.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the UI that I could not find before because it suggested it and then I looked for it
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I had follow up and I said I look for it. I couldn’t find it. I guess it’s not there. Maybe it’s just a pro only feature. No, it was there. It was just
⏹️ ▶️ John cleverly hidden. I mean, one, these controls being split up in all sorts of weird places is
⏹️ ▶️ John not great, but two continues to frustrate me that you can’t even get to these controls unless you have the air pods It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially connected to your phone and in your ears at the time. And the other thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John so this is under like, you have to look at the press and hold thing and then for the left and right AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are separate sub menus for the left AirPod and the right AirPod, because I assume there’s your
⏹️ ▶️ John specific instructions down there, but the noise control selections, whatever you do on the left
⏹️ ▶️ John is mirrored on the right, because I kind of wish that it was the opposite, that you could do them separately, because then you
⏹️ ▶️ John could have the left ear, like every mode would be one click and hold away, know what I mean? You’d have two on the left ear
⏹️ ▶️ John and two on the right ear so no matter what mode you’re in you’d always be one tap away. I guess you could be two taps away. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, doesn’t matter. They’re, it’s a bad UI for multiple reasons and one of them is if you go into the left
⏹️ ▶️ John ear and change some stuff when you go into the right ear, well look, those changes you made in the left ear are mirrored there but only for the noise
⏹️ ▶️ John control section. Anyway, this is all moot because since all the promotion of the adaptive mode I have
⏹️ ▶️ John now, as we stated last time, it is now a mode that’s in my rotation. So I I have them all
⏹️ ▶️ John turned on. Including, including, oh yeah, including by the way, this is my fall update
⏹️ ▶️ John for my AirPods, my AirPods 4 with noise cancelling. One of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John I have all four in my rotation is because I discovered a use for off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Other than trying to save battery when I’m in bed at night at the end of the day and I don’t have my things charged, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Turns out that if you go out to walk the dog and it’s kind of chilly and you put a hat on, the hat rubs
⏹️ ▶️ John against the microphones that are used for noise cancelling and makes a terrible…
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like it amplifies the noise. You get used to it. Yeah, so…
⏹️ ▶️ John Transparency… Transparency, adaptive and noise cancelling are a no-go when wearing a hat.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, OFF has found a very important role in my life now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very happy for that.
GPX exports for photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPX exports. So we were talking about, hey, how can you geotag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos taken with a big camera, and what could you do about that? Ryan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michalowski writes, Pedometer++, written by dear friend of the show, David Smith,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that app is my go-to for recording GPS tracks for photography. I export its GPX and use the macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app HudaGeo, H-O-U-D-A-H-G-E-O, for tagging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To export GPX from Pedometer++, go to Workouts, select a quote unquote workout, then swipe all the way to the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John And I never would have found that I had to actually ask like where the heck in pedometer plus plus is GPX export? You got
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to workouts. Even if you don’t think you’re doing a workout, that walk counts as a workout.
Global keyboard shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a little bit more information about global keyboard shortcuts, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, this is from Michael Burke. He says, the issue with global keyboard shortcuts requiring a modifier other than option
⏹️ ▶️ John shift only seems to apply to apps using Carbon’s register event hotkey API, which doesn’t require the
⏹️ ▶️ John user to grant any special permissions in order to work. There is another method that can be used to track global key presses,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a part of the NSEvent framework, nsevent.addGlobalMonitorForEvents,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’ve used by the way, but it requires the user to grant the app accessibility permissions. Even though the Carbon
⏹️ ▶️ John API has been deprecated, it’s stuck around since there’s no true modern API that doesn’t make you show a dialogue and a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of popular packages for global keyboard shortcuts are based on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes me wonder if like, say anything that’s part of accessibility, I believe is essentially not allowed on the Mac App Store, which I like, MOOM4
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t on the Mac App Store, but I think things are on the Mac App Store that do do the register event hotkey.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not exactly an instance of an issue that has come up a lot recently, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of related. These used to come up, which is a couple of the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of screen sharing APIs, but there’s other things in macOS like this as well, where Apple would deprecate
⏹️ ▶️ John some old API, usually some carbon thing, but even just some older, whatever, some old API, right? They’ll deprecate
⏹️ ▶️ John it and say, you should use the new API. And the problem often is, guess what? The new API doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything the old API can do. And if your app required like that one thing that the old API
⏹️ ▶️ John did that the new one doesn’t do, you literally can’t use the new API. you’re like, so well, so what is my app dead
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Like the old API works, but it’s quote unquote, deprecated. So you’re just like now on a timer, like, OK, how long until this
⏹️ ▶️ John API is gone is removed, you know, puts up scary warnings. And there’s no modern
⏹️ ▶️ John replacement. That’s very frustrating. In this case, it seems like there is a modern replacement, but it requires
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, require accessibility permission seems extreme. Like you just want your screenshotting app to be able to bind to command
⏹️ ▶️ John shift to to take a screenshot like a tech sniper or something. Guess what? You have to ask for access.
⏹️ ▶️ John A, you can’t be in the Mac App Store because you can’t ask for accessibility permission there. B, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John ask for accessibility permission, which is massively powerful. And you’re like, I just want people to be able to hit Command Shift 2 to take a screenshot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to ask for, and then C, you have to guide them. Go to system preferences, go to security and privacy, scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John down to accessibility, scroll to find my app. No, there’s no way to search or filter. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a bad situation on the Mac. Like the way they’re handling, the way they’re handling
⏹️ ▶️ John security and deprecations and Mac OS is really coming to a head here. Like it’s fine to deprecate old
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs and replace new ones. It’s fine to increase security, but there’s these sort of complete sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of cul-de-sacs of badness where it’s like, hey, you got rid of, you
⏹️ ▶️ John deprecated the API that I was using. You didn’t make a replacement and you’re slowly making everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John life miserable. Like I can’t be in the Mac app store. My users are getting more and more dialogues. They’re blaming me.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing I can do about it. And the supposed replacement either doesn’t exist or it exists but I have to ask for accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John permission, there really needs to be some sort of like counsel related
⏹️ ▶️ John to macOS and say, look, before you deprecate an API, let’s make sure the
⏹️ ▶️ John modern equivalent does what people want. And before you require people who used to be able to do something with no permission to ask for the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest permission there is in the entire operating system, maybe consider whether that’s the best thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Frustrating, very frustrating. I mean, I myself have filed a bunch of feedbacks for modern
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs that either do things that used to be possible with old API’s or were simply never possible, but seem like reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John things to do. And I’m like, I just want this one little corner, it should like you can give it a special permission,
⏹️ ▶️ John but make the permissions more granular, the option shouldn’t be you can’t do this at all. Or you must ask for
⏹️ ▶️ John complete access to everything on their system. There needs to be lots of middle ground there.
Passkeys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about passkeys. There are a bunch of benefits to passkeys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we didn’t enumerate last episode as a result of in Ask ATP, if I’m not mistaken. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you want to take us through this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I felt like passkeys got short-stripped because we had a very specific question about passkeys and migrating to them, and we never really
⏹️ ▶️ John said, why the hell would anyone ever? We were asking, have you used passkeys? What are you using them for? Blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. But we didn’t say, why would anybody use passkeys? What the hell is the point?
⏹️ ▶️ John through any kind of process that we were describing. And we’re not gonna go into the technical details of passkeys,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just sort of the, the the F’s and B’s, as I say, the features and benefits. So one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the biggest and first ones is unlike with passwords, no private info is
⏹️ ▶️ John ever sent to a website. So if you log into a website or an app or anything else, with a username and
⏹️ ▶️ John password, your username and password are sent to,
⏹️ ▶️ John in some form or another to the service or they’re sent to the app. They’re given, you’re giving your
⏹️ ▶️ John private information to code that you did not write. You’re giving your private information to the application,
⏹️ ▶️ John to the web page, to whatever, right? And then presumably does something safe with it and checks it if it’s right or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know. It doesn’t even have to transmit it. It could do all the hashing locally or encrypt it locally, but whatever. You
⏹️ ▶️ John are handing over your private information. That doesn’t happen with pass keys. They’re more like
⏹️ ▶️ John SH keys where the private thing is never Ever given to another piece of code you
⏹️ ▶️ John are given a piece of you are given a thing which then you sign with your private Thing and then you check the other thing back. So you’re only ever
⏹️ ▶️ John sending public information to another entity and related
⏹️ ▶️ John to that is You the user don’t make the choice of what to send to where
⏹️ ▶️ John with passwords you make the choice even if the choice is like right-clicking and picking auto
⏹️ ▶️ John fill or like allowing autocomplete or whatever like you are choosing to enter your username and password somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in a web page in an app wherever it is you choose to put it there and when human
⏹️ ▶️ John choice is added to that equation you are vulnerable to phishing because if someone could put something in front of you that
⏹️ ▶️ John you think is a place where you should put the password for service X and you put the password for service
⏹️ ▶️ John X there but it was a phishing attack and really that’s an enemy website you’ve just given you’ve transmitted your private
⏹️ ▶️ John information to this bad party. Passkeys don’t work like that because Passkeys
⏹️ ▶️ John never ask you to send to decide when you should send your passkey to a thing you cannot send
⏹️ ▶️ John the passkey for Apple.com to someplace that is not apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ John right that’s not a choice you have to make that’s not part of the flow Again, if it’s a security problem, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some way that they can trick Ios or Mac OS to send it passkey to an incorrect place
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a security problem But it’s not your fault because you didn’t you didn’t make that choice phishing relies on
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially social engineering Can I trick the user into thinking this is the place to do this? And
⏹️ ▶️ John it happens to everybody. I recently saw a thread I’m asked that I’m or someone said I literally do cybersecurity for a living.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at the end of one day, I was really tired and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I entered a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John my private information in the form that I thought was legitimate because it looked just like my, you know, Internet, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John page. And I totally got fished. It can happen to literally anybody. There is no amount of vigilance and
⏹️ ▶️ John care and expertise that can prevent you from falling victim to phishing. That’s why we want to take the human out of the equation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Passkey says you don’t ever have to make that decision. We cryptographically determine if this is the place we should send this It will never
⏹️ ▶️ John get sent accidentally to the wrong place, right? And then finally We’re talking about transferring
⏹️ ▶️ John and like what happens if my phone goes in the ocean or whatever and we will get the import-export In a second, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was which I mentioned is sort of a thing that had not yet been solved But just to make it clear most of the platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John including apples that deal with passkeys at all have some form of end-to-end encrypted cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John sync So it’s not like the passkey only exists on your phone or only exists on your
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac or whatever. It’s integrated into iCloud Keychain. Once you get a passkey, if you have iCloud Keychain enabled,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s everywhere on all your Apple stuff. So if you create a passkey and then drop your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone on the ocean a day later, you did not lose your ability to log into your stuff. That thing is synced through iCloud Keychain, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John available as long as you still have access to your Apple ID. That’s been there from day one. Cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing, like, hey, but what if I’m, that’s fine if you have Apple devices, but what if I have a Windows PC?
⏹️ ▶️ John What if I have an Android phone? How does that work? That is a little bit more difficult, although Apple does have
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud keychain sharing thing and browser extensions for Windows, but like it’s not a great cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John solution depending on what your platform is. If you’re using Linux, I don’t think Apple has any great integration there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s some way to get the, they’re not like passwords where you can just copy and paste them from one place to the other, so there needs to be some kind of integration.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which leads us to, and I mentioned import, export, what if you don’t wanna use iCloud keychain
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s so Apple-centric or Apple slash Windows-centric. You wonder if you want something that’s, you know, you want to use a different system
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with your pass keys. And it’s, I said that it’s not like one password
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you can just export a CSV or something. That’s because that just puts all your passwords in plain
⏹️ ▶️ John text. They wanted to come up with something that’s more secure. And lo and behold, the Fido Alliance, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is the group that is responsible for pass keys that all the big companies are members of, including Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John recently announced a new specification for doing import export in a secure way. We’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ John a link in the show notes to the 95 Max story about it. Reading from that article, it says, the new specification
⏹️ ▶️ John aims to promote user choice by offering a way to import and export passkeys. The draft of the new specification establishes
⏹️ ▶️ John the Credential Exchange Protocol, or CXP, and Credential Exchange Format, or CXF format,
⏹️ ▶️ John for transferring not only passkeys, but other types of credentials as well. The new formats are encrypted, which ensures
⏹️ ▶️ John that credentials remain secure during the process. OnePassword, which worked with the FIDO Alliance on the new specification, already
⏹️ ▶️ John committed to supporting the new Paskey import and export formats as soon as they become available. Other companies such as
⏹️ ▶️ John Dashlane, Bitwarden, NordPass, and Google also worked on the draft of the new specification.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although nothing has been said about Apple, the company is also part of the Fido Alliance and was one of the first to introduce Paskeys
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2022 with iOS 16. When it comes to the Apple ecosystem, Paskeys are synchronized with their Apple devices
⏹️ ▶️ John via iCloud. Users can authenticate with Paskeys and other devices by scanning a QR code with their phone, which is Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John current janky method of like, But if I can’t use my phone to authenticate because I’m trying to do it on some other system you can
⏹️ ▶️ John make it bring up a QR code and scan it with your phone and it will do some magic, right? But yeah, there’s import export format
⏹️ ▶️ John again, some draft format, people are commenting on it, but once this becomes available, it will essentially make
⏹️ ▶️ John your collection of past keys and other stuff portable so that if you ever decide I don’t want to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple ecosystem anymore, you can securely transfer your past keys from one
⏹️ ▶️ John system to another. People still complaining about this because they’re like, I just want it to be exported into a file that I can deal with. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is sort of like you need like two things involved here, iCloud keychain and something
⏹️ ▶️ John else that understands this. And so you’re never just dumping a bunch of files, dumping
⏹️ ▶️ John all this info to a file that you can just save and store away somewhere. It’s always like the receiving end has to initiate
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing and the sending end has to agree. And there’s a handshake and it securely transfers from one to the other. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no sort of middle way to do it. And to the point where the people who are responsible for the spec are saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John If somebody makes a client that allows you to dump out the info
⏹️ ▶️ John and like doesn’t have it immediately imported into something but allows it just to just sort of sit in a file on disk,
⏹️ ▶️ John they may like disallow that from being part of the system because they don’t think that’s something you should be allowed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this has people up in arms because they’re like, I want a plain text file on my disk that no
⏹️ ▶️ John one controls that has my stuff in it or I want to be able to print something out on a piece of paper
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it in a safe and if I can’t do that, the standard sucks. Everyone has different requirements
⏹️ ▶️ John for what makes them feel comfortable about security. But I think for most people
⏹️ ▶️ John who absolutely do not care about any of the things I just described, passkeys will someday
⏹️ ▶️ John be a superior alternative to passwords. We’re just not quite there yet because they’re still kind of fidgety
⏹️ ▶️ John and weird and every website does it a little bit differently but hopefully we’ll get there someday.
AI moats and o1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to tell me about AI moats and open AIs? Is this 01 or 01? I always get it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s 01. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s a lower. They make it lowercase to try to not confuse it with zero, but their naming is terrible. This
⏹️ ▶️ John was from an overtime on, I think, last episode. We were discussing if
⏹️ ▶️ John open AI has any kind of quote unquote moat, like do they have any secret sauce that other people can’t copy, or are
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs a commodity, and 01 is their new model that supposedly does
⏹️ ▶️ John fancier reasoning to try to arrive at better answers and it can partially explain its
⏹️ ▶️ John reasoning. In the overtime we were discussing OpenAI’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stern position on people trying to discover how O1 works by doing prompt injection and like, you’re not allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to look inside the box. It’s our super trade secret. If anyone else knew, they’d be able to, you know, compete
⏹️ ▶️ John with us, but we have the special sauce. Anyway, I’m sure completely coincidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple AI’s researchers recently published an academic paper about
⏹️ ▶️ John things like OpenAI’s O1, reading from the Decoder,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not the Decoder podcast, it’s the Verge’s different website, the-decoder.com. A new study
⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple researchers, including renowned AI scientist, Sammy Bengio, calls into question the logical
⏹️ ▶️ John capabilities of today’s large language models, even OpenAI’s new reasoning model, O1.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will put a link in the show notes to the paper. There’s a thread on X from the team
⏹️ ▶️ John leader of the people who wrote the paper. He says, overall, we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language
⏹️ ▶️ John models, including open source models like Lama, Phi, Gamma, Mistral, and the leading closed source models like
⏹️ ▶️ John the recent OpenAI GPT-4.0 and O1 series. Their behavior is better explained by
⏹️ ▶️ John sophisticated pattern matching, so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by up to 10%.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is quoting from the paper. The performance of all models declines when only the numerical
⏹️ ▶️ John values in the question are altered. Like they’re asking in math problems, like word math problems. And if you like change the
⏹️ ▶️ John name of the kids in the word problem, it gets the answers wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes changing the numbers, right? Changing it from like one to five or whatever, it will get the answer right with one and wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with five or whatever. Back to the thread on X. We can scale data
⏹️ ▶️ John parameters and compute or use better training data for 5.4, LLAMA4 and GPT-5. But we
⏹️ ▶️ John believe this will result in better pattern matchers, not necessarily better reasoners. Uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s more on the same paper from Gary Marcus holding to his blog posts in the show as well. Uh, I think anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows anything about how to work would have said, Oh, of course it’s not doing reasoning. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, speaking of spicy, Marco loves the memes with spicy, spicy autocomplete
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the things people call LMS that it’s much more like, uh, compressing data
⏹️ ▶️ John and searching it, compressing textual data or whatever and searching it than it is like any kind of reasoning thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how they work on the inside but you can’t just assume because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how you know well everyone knows that lms don’t think look at how they work on the inside that’s not thinking right
⏹️ ▶️ John if you know in in scientific endeavors even if it’s something that you think quote unquote everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John knows okay then prove it and how do you prove it devise a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John test for the thing that you think may or may not be true run the test and publish
⏹️ ▶️ John a scientific paper about it that’s how this this works and even for things that are like
⏹️ ▶️ John boring, like, you know, making a paper about something that, oh, everybody knows that it’s common sense. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John common sense is not proof. You have to actually test the idea. You need something, you need an ideal that is
⏹️ ▶️ John falsifiable and then you need to test it and then people can argue, did they test what they think they were testing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I do a better paper? This is the scientific process. I love seeing this because it is something
⏹️ ▶️ John that people talk that I’ve certainly talked about is like, oh, well, everyone knows that they’re not really thinking they don’t have any kind of reasoning
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, But you can’t just make that assumption. You have to actually test it. And you have to actually come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John a way that you think correctly tests for the thing you think you’re testing for. And I’m sure there will be follow-up papers that say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, actually, this paper didn’t quite get at the heart of what the problem is or whatever. So you can look at it. It’s very readable if you just look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the examples and look at the things that they did. Like, you know, giving it word problems and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John OK, but if I change the boy’s name from Billy to Timmy, now it gets it wrong? That is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a good sign that it is not logically reasoning about this math problem, but is instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, spicy auto-complete. And because it is just pattern matching and doesn’t understand the significance of any of
⏹️ ▶️ John these different things, changing the name is like, well, different pattern match. And oh, I got the wrong answer because these
⏹️ ▶️ John things have no idea what math is. And that’s just not the way they work internally. The other danger about this, by the way, is they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s not how it works in my brain when I do the problem. Therefore, this thing is not thinking. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always dangerous because even though we think we know how our brains work, we are often very, very wrong. And we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually understand. We don’t actually understand everything how our brains work either. So it’s the example I always give
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, A, it doesn’t really matter how our brains work. Airplanes
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t work like birds, but they still fly really well, right? And B, we don’t always know how our brains work.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can’t just make assumptions like that by saying, well, I know lms don’t think because they work nothing like how I think
⏹️ ▶️ John my brain works. When I think of this problem, I don’t do anything like that what the LM is doing. As far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, Therefore llms don’t think you got to test it. So a plus to apple people
⏹️ ▶️ John to Doing what I think most people would consider a boring and pointless paper, but you need
⏹️ ▶️ John you know You need to do these things. You need someone to actually Test the things that everyone just assumes
⏹️ ▶️ John are true to try to show that they are or aren’t so kudos to apple for uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh Confirming something that I already believed Wow, or try or trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to again more papers will follow i’m sure Oh, and related to this, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John series I always link to whenever we talk about LLMs, the three blue, one brown,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re called courses, I keep looking for playlists, but they’re called courses somehow on their YouTube channel.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a course on neural networks and chapters like five, six, and seven are about LLMs. I’ll put a link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John to I think what is the most recent video in that series called How LLMs Might Store Facts
⏹️ ▶️ John that tries to explore like, given how we know how LLMs work, see previous videos with just bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of numbers and matrices. How do they essentially how does the information in them stored I think the example they give is
⏹️ ▶️ John like Michael Jordan plays blank. How does it come up with basketball? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Where Where is that information stored in this giant matrices of number? How does that even work? Which is an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John question, because we’re like, well, I know how it started my mind. I just know that he plays basketball. Everybody knows that it’s so easy. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now I just look at these giant arrays of numbers. Where the hell is that information in these numbers? This video tries to
⏹️ ▶️ John explain it. And also it’s as you know from the title, how they might store facts.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually kind of difficult to tell because we’re not particularly good at reasoning about giant piles of numbers. So
⏹️ ▶️ John take a look at that if you’re interested.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was a very interesting video, as all of them are.
Google breakup?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally for follow-up, Google breakup may be on the table, says the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Department of Justice lawyers. Reading from The Verge, now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company’s illegal behavior and restore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey competition to the market for search engines. In a new 32-page filing, they said they are considering both, quote, behavioral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and structural remedies, quote. That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eye on the company’s behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android or Google Play.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Google has a response, which we will also link in the show notes, which is exactly what you would expect it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be. Is Google in favor of that? Do they want to be broken up? I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what they think. They do not, John. I know you’re surprised. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John shocking. Their response is like, here’s how the world will end if you make us split off Chrome, Android or
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Play. Yeah, pretty much. It will be bad for business. It will be bad for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone will break out in a rash. Dogs will howl. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I mean, I, it’s so hard for me to tell because these things take so
⏹️ ▶️ John long to wind through the system or whatever. Structural remedies were in play for the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John DOJ case as well. And that ended up not happening and got partially
⏹️ ▶️ John overturned on appeal or whatever. I don’t know how this is going to go down. The environment
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US and I guess worldwide, the environment for these big tech companies is currently
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty negative. You know, the view of how much power they have and what they’re doing with it
⏹️ ▶️ John is pretty negative right now. And so they are, they’re facing cases
⏹️ ▶️ John and laws and regulation. In many cases, they are losing and the people who are on the other side of it
⏹️ ▶️ John are making noises about like, we might break you up. We might say Chrome has to be a separate company or Android has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be separate or whatever. It’s hard to even think about what that world will be like because we’re so used
⏹️ ▶️ John to the status quo. Everybody is, right? It’s just like, how could that ever happen? What would happen if you did that? And Google
⏹️ ▶️ John will gladly tell you all the bad things that would happen. But it’s kind of like the flip side is,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the good things that would happen that we’ve been denied for so long because we just accept the status quo and we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even think about what we’re missing out on and the competition that we’re missing out on. But it is notoriously
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do anything effective or good
⏹️ ▶️ John after you win the trust case, right? You can look at all the ones that have happened. There’s lots of good things that have
⏹️ ▶️ John happened, lots of also terrible things, and lots of backsliding and finding us back at the same place
⏹️ ▶️ John again. So I don’t know how this is gonna turn out, but it’s interesting to see the rumblings
⏹️ ▶️ John revolving around Google here. It’ll be amazing if like Google gets broken up and Apple gets to stay together. I’m sure they would love
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iPad Mini (A17 Pro)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news as of yesterday, I believe it was, there is a new iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mini. It has an A17 Pro, it used to be an A15. It has a five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey core GPU instead of six. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pause right here on this. This is the name of this new iPad mini. The previous one I believe was iPad mini like
⏹️ ▶️ John fifth generation or sixth generation in parentheses, like with the Apple naming thing. I believe the name of
⏹️ ▶️ John this one is iPad Mini parentheses A17 Pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they went fifth generation, sixth generation, A17 Pro. Go look at the comparator.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go look at the like apple.com slash iPad slash compare. It’s called the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini parentheses A17 Pro. So first of all, that’s weird. But second of all, it’s the A17 Pro. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is weird. As a reminder, this is the chip they put in the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max that
⏹️ ▶️ John was made on TSMC’s N3B process, which was super expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John and only Apple was paying for it. And they, you know, immediately wanted to stop and move everything to N3E. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re like, they’re never gonna use that A17 Pro chip in a phone again. The Pro chips never go anywhere. They put them
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 15 Pro because they had to and the Pro Max, but like, we’re not gonna see it next year in the iPhone 16.
⏹️ ▶️ John And lo and behold, the iPhone 16 has processors that use TSMC’s N3E process, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is newer and cheaper than the N3B process. We’re never gonna see that A17 Pro again. Guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like they had a lot of leftover A17 Pros where one of the GPU cores didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John because the A17 Pros in last year’s phones had six GPU cores and these
⏹️ ▶️ John A17 Pros in the iPad mini have five. So maybe they just saved every single A17 Pro where one of the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores didn’t work and they saved them all up for what? The iPad mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s this this was the biggest shock of this like for me because I’m obviously you know we’re nerds about this kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I I was convinced I said on the show of course that first three-millimeter process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was dead of course they were abandoning those chips I I said on the show like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two weeks ago that we would see the a18 non pro chip being used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all across the Apple lineup in kind of lower and less expensive products that somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that nevertheless needed Apple intelligence compatibility. Never did I think that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 15 Pro processor would live on. In the iPad mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, of all things in the iPad mini. Like that, I am blown away. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got to hand it to Apple, they can still surprise me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and it makes sense when you think about like, what do they do with the rejects? I can think of something,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you throw them away, like, because I believe on both Both the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John they all had six working GPU cores. So anyone that came out with one non-working GPU core, what are they gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do, throw it in the garbage? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey save it for the iPad Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put it in a box for a year. I don’t know if that’s enough. Like, was that sufficient to work
⏹️ ▶️ John with the iPad Mini? And did they have to manufacture a bunch of new ones? And a bunch of iPad Minis actually have six working GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they just disable one of them or something. Like, I don’t know how that works, but like, this has gotta be
⏹️ ▶️ John a cost, like a shrewd cost-saving measure, because there’s nothing about the iPad mini, as
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see when we get to the rest of the specs, that is like, this is such an important product, Apple really needs to give it
⏹️ ▶️ John the pro processor from last, no, they absolutely don’t. Like this just has to be a cost-saving measure based
⏹️ ▶️ John on like, you know, binned chips that they would otherwise throw away. That’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John I can think of, that’s the leading theory for this. It makes some sense, but it does make, it’s a total
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook move, like how can we economically make use of what would otherwise be a waste product?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s really weird. The iPad mini is weird and not a well-loved
⏹️ ▶️ John product, not frequently updated. And as we’ll see in a second, not really that well updated
⏹️ ▶️ John this time around either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So continuing along, there is Apple intelligence, which implies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s eight gigs of RAM, but we don’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying, as usual. Exactly. But they did list Apple intelligence as a feature. I guess Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence is now code for portable device with eight gigs of RAM or more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, it sure seems that way. Let’s see, there’s 10 gigabit per second USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is up from five. There’s Wi-Fi 6E up from just plain six.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The cellular is now eSIM only. It supports the Apple Pencil Pro and the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pencil USB-C. It used to be the second gen Apple Pencil and also the Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C. We have a storage bump from 64 to 128 as your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey base is your base with 256 and 512 available. The 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megapixel wide back camera supports HDR 4 for natural looking photos with increased dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey range says one of the websites. And we don’t know if that’s better or worse. That’s a quote
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple, supports smart HDR 4 for natural looking photos with increased dynamic range. Increased
⏹️ ▶️ John over what? I like for the life of me, I was like, is there a new camera on this or not? Because that thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John they wrote, is that just a software thing? And by the way, all the features you read, It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, you know all the stuff the iPhone 15 Pro had because it’s part of the SoC? Well, now the iPad mini has it too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it’s part of the stupid SoC. But like the camera, I’m like, hey, did they replace the camera? They wrote, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s copy, the sentence they wrote about the camera on this new thing. And it has the word increased
⏹️ ▶️ John and it says smart HDR 4, but I think that’s all compute stuff. So it’s not clear to me
⏹️ ▶️ John whether the camera on the iPad mini parentheses A17 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is a different
⏹️ ▶️ John camera than the iPad mini parentheses, sixth generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knows? But it does have a new true tone flash. That’s camera related, so that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John They put new right in there. So the flash thing, maybe that is new. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s new blue and purple colors that join starlight and space gray. If you have really good vision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you look at the blue and purple colors?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like, you know, kind of like, you know, the, you know, you walk by a can of paint and you kind of smelled it and kept walking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s that kind of color. Like there’s not a lot of the color in the color.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the type of thing, it’s like the gold, where if you see one in isolation, you have no idea what color it is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I need all the other iPad minis here so I can tell what color this one is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need a deck of iPad mini cards. It comes with a braided USB cable. There’s no charger in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the EU. You can pre-order it right now and it’ll deliver on the 23rd, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, a week from today, actually. That’s a weird time. Usually it’s Friday, but it’s this coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing about the iPad mini is ever normal. Not even the ship day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I used to be such an iPad Mini mega-fan years and years and years and years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, and I haven’t had one, oh golly, since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the first or second Retina one. It’s been a long, long time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with it. It is a very neat device, and I’ve understood the new ones in particular, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even before this one, to be really great. But I don’t know, I just don’t have a place for that in my life, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that what killed the iPad mini for me was text input. Once the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started having really good first party keyboards that stuck right on them and were available for them, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me radically improved the utility of iPads in general for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then when I briefly tried an iPad mini last year as an e-reader and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly found I was very frustrated by the lack of good keyboard options for it. So for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my purposes, the keyboard is what did it. But a lot of people do use them. I think the challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad mini has always had is in trying to figure out whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be a higher end device or not. You know, certain pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enthusiasts use it and just wish for more pro features, which I think is interesting that it got the Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro support. That is interesting here. But with that exception, it seems like nothing else here is particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro in terms of iPad nomenclature. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still is kind of, you know, basically a smaller, slightly worse iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air in many ways. And that’s fine. I mean, but even then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t even give it the CPU. It’s a it’s again, it’s weird. It’s always been a weird balance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually it is more low end than people like it is usually more expensive than people want it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a result, I think it has a hard time figuring out what exactly it’s for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re going to talk about this in overtime of like figuring out product mixes spoilers for overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s kind of the situation with the mini is like, there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one, it’s the mini, there’s not like a mini and a mini pro. There’s just one small one. So what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John do with the one small one, the small one can be cheaper because the screen is smaller and the screen is expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t want to make it too cheap. So is it going to be like the air? Is it going to be like the pro is something in between most people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are mini fans are disappointed with this update because although we listed we essentially listed everything that has changed
⏹️ ▶️ John about this device it’s not much it’s basically the previous like everything about it physically is the same
⏹️ ▶️ John same size same shape the cases all work on it before they added two new colors
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not radically different it doesn’t have face ID it doesn’t get any new features other than the new pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John connection thing right which you know granted does give you like the hover and everything so that
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a pro level upgrade to it, but it doesn’t have an M chip in it. Like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a huge update. It’s more like an internal spec bump with a couple of external,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, things like the pencil added to it, but just the fans want more or
⏹️ ▶️ John more significant. And so much so that they’re like, Oh, this is just a temporary holding pattern. One, they just introduced this one cause they needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to update it. But, but you know, pretty soon there’ll be the real iPad mini update. Don’t hold your breath.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this, this is not a well loved product that gets lots of This is the iPad mini update
⏹️ ▶️ John for a little while, I feel like, especially since this one runs Apple Intelligence, it’s kind of important for Apple to get
⏹️ ▶️ John more of its products to be, you can buy this and run the feature that we think is gonna be super important
⏹️ ▶️ John if we ever release it. So, that’s what dissatisfied the A17
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is a weird choice for, but it is kind of like in the, well, you’re not gonna get an M chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re expensive, and they’re bigger, and hotter, and take more battery life, and your battery is smaller, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a mini, And so you’re gonna get whatever we have left over from the 15s and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna like it and it’ll be fine, right? But it’s just, yeah, this is, not all of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s products get the same attention and then Mini has historically not gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of Apple’s love. But this is better than the one that it replaced and it does, you know, I think the,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you really want like a small sketching thing and you wanted to have the new pencil and a better CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John this one does it for you. And hey, you can, you know, watch it summarize your notifications and erase people from pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John with it too soon eventually. But maybe by the time you download this end of October is the rumor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still am getting a decent amount of utility out of the notification summaries. I’m actually really enjoying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you on the beta? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. It’s the rumor is like the 28th or like, you know, basically the end of October 18.1 is
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to come out. So we’ll all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be loving it soon. And ultimately, like, I think this shows the fact that Apple updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad mini. that tells you, wow, they’re really trying to bring everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to Apple Intelligence capable specs. Except for the HomePods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, yeah, that’s never gonna happen. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the things you talk to all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Those ones? Yeah, those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they remain a product in the lineup. But yeah, I think anything that can reasonably have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Intelligence compatibility is going to get upgrades. So I’m expecting, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I don’t think we’ve really seen how it gets into TV OS yet, but I bet Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an A17 Pro or A18 something is probably not that far off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does the Apple TV already have eight gigs of RAM? I forget what the RAM is in the Apple TV these days. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea. I mean, but you possibly, they possibly could ship eight gigs of RAM easily in the Apple TV, I feel like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t think it’s that big of a problem. But you know, we’re gonna see, you know, probably the low-end iPads getting an update sometime soon, I would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors are that’s getting pushed off. I don’t know why, but that was the last rumor I saw.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to me, the biggest question is how the heck they’re going to do it with the watch and the home pod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I guess the home pod is especially if they if they make like you know another big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The home pod is a large expensive enough product that you know you could probably find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get one of these chips in there cost wise. The watch it just doesn’t like that kind of hardware just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t fit in the watch yet. The home pod has a watch CPU now doesn’t it? I believe so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I don’t know if we ever got that confirmed, but that was the rumor that it used a watch CPU here, watch
⏹️ ▶️ John watch caliber. Let’s say like performance wise and by the way, the apple the latest apple TV apparently has four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There you go. But yeah, like I think we’re going to see a lot of updates to products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that kind of that usually kind of flying to the radar. We’re gonna see a lot of updates to them to just bring them up to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimum spec to run Apple intelligence and that’s overall. I think it’s a very good thing. I think we’re going to see a nice refresh throughout the
“Submerged” on Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So, Marco, I know that you’ve definitely done your homework on this. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new, about 15, 17 minutes, something like that, a short film that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released exclusively on the Vision Pro. What did you think of Submerged, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t do my homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I’m gonna have to see you after class.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, I’ve decided rather than continue to insult the Vision Pro as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a platform, I’m going to enjoy it to the degree that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have time and that it can… To the degree that it’s worth prioritizing in my life. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, I’m doing a lot right now in my life. And so it’s just not earning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its time. I’m not sitting around alone thinking, what should I do tonight?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ever. That never happens. I’m doing work. I’m doing family stuff. stuff. I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s always something I’m doing, so this is this is not a product in my lineup right now, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from from what I hear it sounds interesting for you know what’s what’s going on with this with this with this movie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so this is shoot already forgot the director’s name, but he he did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some recent western movie. I think oh this is already going on to a great start, but hey that’s all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically, this is a fifteen ish minute film about a world war two submarine which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, something bad happens. I don’t know. Can I spoil, should I spoil this? I don’t even know what’s appropriate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a submarine movie. Of course something bad happens. Well, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me guess, it fills with water? The director is Edward Berger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Who I think had just won an Oscar or something like that for one
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s an app where you can look that up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, there is, but I’m not looking at it right now. Nice plug though. I appreciate Uh, anyways, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is, uh, it is unlike. It is unlike pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much anything I’ve ever seen. So a lot of the vision pro stuff so far has either been CGI dinosaurs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or let’s tell a three to seven minutes story about something, or maybe 10 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tops. And it was more documentary style than it was anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as an example, I don’t think we’ve talked about it on the show, but they, They came out like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month ago with a four or five minute sizzle reel on the most recent Super Bowl, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey American football. It’s incredible. As someone who enjoys American football,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was an absolutely phenomenal like four or five minute sizzle reel, but again, like a documentary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to my knowledge and my recollection, as I sit here now slightly sick with a cold, I don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any other like scripted thing that has happened on the Vision Pro and certainly not anything that they’ve described
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a scripted short film, which is how they describe Submerged. And this is a 17-minute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short film that is obviously scripted, it’s acted, and it is incredibly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly, incredibly cool. And I think one of the things that I find most amusing about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is trying to understand the language of the film
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how do they leverage this medium to still accomplish the same thing that any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filmmaker generally needs to do. So for example, how do they point your attention at something? And one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ways they do this is with incredibly shallow depth of field, you know, perhaps an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey close-up of somebody’s face with, you know, in very, very shallow depth of field. So even if you try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look around, there’s nothing else to really see. It’s all blurry. And sorry, I don’t know if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually said it clearly, but this is immersive. So you get 180 degrees, you can look around and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tilt your head. And so even though in some cases, you know, the depth of field is as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would expect. And as such, you know, the extras that you really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t focus on in a traditional movie, you can turn your head and you can go see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that extra is doing. You can turn your head and go see what the other extra is doing. And you know, that’s the whole idea. And I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fully work on purpose, which is going to drive Marco nuts when he edits. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco point is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, even the extras have to be acting always in a way that I think is not typical for an extra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they couldn’t, they might not be the extra, they might be the star just because I turned my head that way. Similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the audio in all of the lighting, it kind of has to be on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set because unless it’s behind the camera, you need to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to, you’re going to be able to see it because you can look around. You can look down, you can look up, not a lot, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can look down, you can look up, and you can look 180 degrees side to side. And so all the lighting and all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound pickup kind of has to be there. And in fact, in one of the scenes, I’m not going to spoil the story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much, but in one of the scenes, you’re sitting, there’s two people sitting around a table having a snack basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you end up zoomed in on the star of the film,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the other person is behind you based on the way the set is, right? Because you’re basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camera’s kind of floating above the table, if you will. And you can hear Dude Man eating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind you, right? Because that’s the way surround sound works. And so that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, they could obviously have the pickup behind the camera, but for anything that’s happening in front of the camera, you know, you don’t want to be able to see a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey microphone and you don’t want to be able to see the lights and whatnot. It’s incredibly, incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird in a good way. And it feels like you’re there. Not that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey participating in it necessarily, but in a lot of ways, it feels more real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything I’ve ever done before. A couple of examples of this. They do move the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera from time to time. They don’t have the same problem that that MLS thing did, where there’s just constant cuts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constant, constant, constant cuts. There are cuts, but they’re much better, much fewer and far between, not unlike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the football one I was talking about a minute ago or the NFL one. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasions where they move the camera. And once or twice, they kind of like, just take what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would effectively be a couple of steps forward, although clearly the camera’s on like rails or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there’s a couple of times they’re moving the camera like quite a ways like a solid 1520 feet, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which what is that like three meters or something like that? No more than that anyway, four or five meters. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it feels slightly off putting like John, you would absolutely hate this because your body is telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you you just moved, but yet, or I guess your eyes are telling you you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just moved but your body is saying no, I’m still sitting here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And it’s- John’s out. Yeah, right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not off putting to the point that it was bad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the areas where this, where it starts to diverge from, like, because lots of people have made this comparison, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat apt, but not quite, for everything you just said of, like, watching a play. Because when you’re in the audience of a play,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could choose to look somewhere that’s not where the action’s happening. And plays also do things to guide your attention,
⏹️ ▶️ John like put the spotlight on these two people. But hey, what if you want to look over there? Well, unless they have it in complete darkness,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is one of the things they do, you might be able to look at other people who are in a scene instead of just the two people who are talking.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people can have different seats in the audience. and they might have different perspectives. So you can have visible microphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and visible people holding up props or visible lights and all the other stuff. But even a
⏹️ ▶️ John play, even if you’re in the very front row, isn’t full 180 because you’re not literally on the stage.
⏹️ ▶️ John But obviously with inversive video, I was thinking when you were talking about the two people eating the snack, like you can make artistic choices
⏹️ ▶️ John like, guess what, Casey? You’re the Oreo cookie in the middle of the table. Your disembodied head
⏹️ ▶️ John is literally sitting in the middle of the table and you can look to the guy to your left and the guy to your right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be a weird choice, but you can do that. You can’t do that with the play where your seat suddenly is in the middle of the actors,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So there’s lots of choices you can make, but they’re faced with the same challenges as a play of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, we don’t know where people are gonna be quote unquote, sitting in the audience or looking in the audience.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess they can place the camera where they want, but they don’t know where you’re gonna look. So they have to dress it
⏹️ ▶️ John more like a play than like a movie where if you ever see a movie being made, whatever the camera is seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John is reasonable. Anything that’s a foot off of the camera, It’s like, you know, a guy from craft services is eating
⏹️ ▶️ John a snack, like, or whatever, like this, it can be anything. You can see the whole set, you can see all the light rigs, you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John the tape on the floor, you can see everything. Honestly, these days you can put a lot of stuff in the camera too,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just make someone erase it after the fact, which is, I’m sure, what they did with Submerged. But yeah, it’s an interesting challenge,
⏹️ ▶️ John and part of that challenge is like, okay, but when you’re watching a play, you don’t suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John get up and move 20 feet forward. Like, they don’t do that in a play, they can’t do that in a play, you’re in your seat.
⏹️ ▶️ John But with immersive video, they just take that, whatever weird camera rig, and they walk down the hallway with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And as you noted, Casey, you’re not walking down the hallway, you’re sitting on a couch, right? But the camera’s moving down the
⏹️ ▶️ John hallway, and you may think, well, what’s the big deal? I see that all the time in movies. I’m watching a movie, the camera does in the hallway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t feel sick. Well, you’re not wearing a headset that wraps the image around your entire field of view.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I feel like does make a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it really, really does. And another moment that was just incredibly striking to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, okay, slight spoiler, water enters the submarine. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marko was guessing you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John surprised. Oh my god! Never would have predicted this. Who made this submarine?
⏹️ ▶️ John Never would have guessed. They should make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so water doesn’t come in. Yeah, they should work on that. But water enters the submarine and at some points the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets a little bit submerged and
⏹️ ▶️ John watched it. Ah, Leonardo DiCaprio gif.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I watched it the first time and I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice this and I re-watched it this morning just to have it fresh in my mind for today. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed in myself that as the camera was about to go underwater, I kind of took a breath.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like not a kind of breath, but like a, you know, it was just subconscious that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt like I was about to be underwater, so I should breathe in a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s version two where water actually falls out of the mask and goes into your mouth. Waterboard yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just indicative of either how gullible I am or how incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Immersive it is and the story like I’m a sucker for submarine movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure in the story I can’t there’s not a lot you can do in 15 minutes ish and it was good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a 15 minute story But I think like I was listening to upgrade and Jason and Mike I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were more Impressed by the story than I was but in terms of an exemplar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know an example of what media in film could be. Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so cool And it’s and I’ve hung around Todd Vizzeri enough that like I was saying earlier like the vocabulary of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I think very Fascinating and how do you accomplish, you know directing attention? How do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accomplish? Keeping the the the visuals clean so you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey craft services hanging out, you know, just barely off-screen You know, how do you accomplish all that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was incredibly incredibly cool and the story wasn’t that moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me but the experience was really moving. And I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple is letting people watch this at an Apple store, I would presume not. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s such as, or if you have a friend with a Vision Pro, you know, which said differently, if you have a friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with more money than sense, then you should definitely watch it. It is very, very neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even if you don’t have a Vision Pro, there’s a five minute-ish making of, which I think is on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube. I’m not 100% sure of that. I will try to remember to put in the show notes, but I might forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there’s a like five minute making up, certainly it’s on Apple TV Plus, and that is not immersive. That is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a straight up regular old video. And that was incredibly cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too, to see how they did it. And this is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want Apple to do. I want them to, I presume,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write a blank check to say, say, go do some cool shit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s what this is, you know, like, they just went and did some cool stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they apparently built like a gigantic submarine set. I’m probably exaggerating,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I thought they said that they built, like half of a submarine or something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does look like the making of is on YouTube. So we’ll put a link in the show notes. But it is incredibly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly cool. And, and really unlike anything else. And again, I think I started to make this point. I got myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sidetracked. But all the other stuff that I’ve seen, even though I’ve really liked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, the sports stuff, the nature stuff, like the elephants and the rhinos and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatnot, the flying around Hawaii, all of those documentaries were incredibly cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in some ways moving in their own way. But this is so wild to me because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is 100% synthetic in the sense that it is constructed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s scripted. And I think so much cool stuff could be done with this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope so very much that Apple continues to pull this thread and continues to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this is the kind of stuff that to me, and maybe a MetaQuest could do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any experience with those, but to me, the only device I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can experience something like this is the Vision Pro. And it’s these moments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that make the otherwise occasionally silly, otherwise stupidly overpriced,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro just seem so very worth it. And so, Marco, even if you don’t watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole 17 minutes, you know, after you find the Vision Pro and then charge the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and then start the Vision Pro and do software updates on the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after you do all those things, as much as I’m snarking, I really do mean it, it is worth giving it a few minutes of your time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it is really, really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and this, honestly, this sounds great and I do wanna watch it sometime soon because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro desperately is starving for good content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is good, this is it. So, you know, the more of this, the better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re going from nearly zero. So every single additional bit of good content helps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, please, more of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. And they’re learning, right? Because like that MLS thing, granted that was a documentary, but the MLS thing, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that was, you know, the quick cuts all the time and it was terrible. and the NFL thing was way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. All these documentaries are getting really, really, really good. And this is, again, like another step above. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Another tech angle on this is related to something that we talked about at length before and
⏹️ ▶️ John shortly after the Apple Vision Pro was released. Casey was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the ways that they were drawing your attention in this narrative fiction
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the Apple Vision Pro with immersive video is based on depth of field. What’s in focus, what’s out of focus
⏹️ ▶️ John to make you look at the thing that’s in focus. That’s a thing you can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John as easily or really at all with the stage play, because with stage play, there’s someone standing close to you, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John standing far away. If you choose to look at the person standing far away, you will refocus your eyes and they will
⏹️ ▶️ John be in focus because you control your own eyes and you can look wherever you want. But the Apple Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and most other headsets have a fixed focal distance. So you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey can’t look away from the main character, look at the background, refocus his eyes, and suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes in focus. That’s not how it works. It is essentially a video
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at. They chose the depth of field when they recorded the video, and even though they’re playing it back in a fancy way,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way for him to focus on that. And that’s interesting when it comes to narrative, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of directors, especially anyone who’s worked in traditional video, would say, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a feature. I need to be able to control what’s in focus and what’s not in focus, that’s one of the tools in my tool
⏹️ ▶️ John chest to making video content. And if you take that away from me,
⏹️ ▶️ John how am I supposed to do anything? And then they’d have to talk to playwrights and play directors and say, okay, well, how do you do this
⏹️ ▶️ John in a play in a play? The audience can focus wherever they want. There are different techniques they’d use to
⏹️ ▶️ John direct your attention because they can’t really control your focal distance. But if they did that in a movie, you’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this movie looks like a play. Why are there spotlights on people? Why, why are they suddenly in the dark when they’re not talking anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ John the person gets sad, their head goes down, and now I can’t see them anymore because they’re in dark? That’s not how the real world works.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is weird. Is this a play or is this a movie? Obviously, we don’t technically have the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to make affordable, high-fidelity headsets or AR glasses that allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to change your focal distance. We talked about that Meta was doing a bunch of, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have like two or three different prototypes of how to do that with motors and with other clever things that allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to change where you’re viewing your focal distance. We also talked about the thing that I can’t remember the acronym for, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ John not being able. What was that thing called? Like, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you guys know what I’m talking about, right? But the thing where, because you can’t refocus your eyes, it can cause discomfort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Convergence, convergence, conflict.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. There’s some, there’s some acronym. VAC.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s some, there’s some acronym we talked about, which is, which is a, like a thing when you’re inside these headsets, you, you feel like you
⏹️ ▶️ John should be able to look over there and refocus your eyes. And when it doesn’t happen, it
⏹️ ▶️ John can cause eye strain or discomfort or all sorts of other stuff. And there’s there’s an acronym for
⏹️ ▶️ John that we talked about in the past, right? Like, this is this is interesting. We’re in an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John time here, where we currently don’t have the technology to do that. But if we did have the technology to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John would we want to do it? Or would we disable that, for example, when watching an immersive movie, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so it’s such an interesting time for this type of media that we should just try all the things right
⏹️ ▶️ John just in the same way that when movies were first made they were very much like we just put on a play and stuck a camera in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of it and eventually filmmakers said you know what we can do different things in movies than
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do in place and let’s do them and we’re at that point again or close to being at that point again with headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s stuff you can do in a headset that you can’t do in a quote-unquote regular movie and if we can get to the point where we can also
⏹️ ▶️ John support variable focal distances well that’s yet another step
⏹️ ▶️ John so very exciting stuff I’m glad to see them experimenting with this. And then finally, with AR glasses, that’s another interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John place where it’s like, well, with like AR glasses, you can change your focal distance when you’re looking at the real
⏹️ ▶️ John world because they’re just glasses and you’re looking through them to the actual room, right? But you could put
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that is projected in a single plane. And so you do have to refocus
⏹️ ▶️ John your eyes on the floating window in front of you. That’s always two feet away. And then when you want to look at the thing that’s 20 feet
⏹️ ▶️ John away, you have to refocus, right? So we already kind of have that variable focus distance by cheating, by saying the real world
⏹️ ▶️ John is all the focal distances. And then the stuff we project is fixed focal distance. So I do
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like we’re taking baby steps towards essentially more like the live theater experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of you can focus on anything you want. But yeah, I would love to see this this video. You mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John them having a blank check or wishing they could have a blank check at 17 minutes. I don’t think this check was very blank,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, it’s better than nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple other very quick things. The first time I watched it, I watched it with my AirPods Pro 2. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not the ones with the instant audio or whatever it is, the lossless audio, I forget what, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m thinking of, the one with the USB-C case. My case is still a lightning case. It sounded incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you would expect. However, this morning I just watched it with the audio pods, whatever you call it, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straps of the Vision Pro. Still sounded phenomenal. Those things are stunningly good. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey granted, if I was watching a two-hour movie, I would probably feel over time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, OK, maybe this isn’t as bassy as I would want or something like that. But for just quick stuff like that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot overstate how good the audio pods are. It’s really quite surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then also very quickly, in that five-minute making up video, I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call out, and I think I did this on Mastodon, but I wanted to call out here, I’m curious if anyone who’s listening happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know. I’ve seen a lot of conjecture, but I’d curious if anyone knows that whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they show people like watching back what they had just filmed on the Vision Pro which they do a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this making of video every Vision Pro I saw which maybe I missed one but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every provision pro I saw had the developer strap but none of the developer straps were plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into anything at the time so is this were they actually using the developer strap the whole time and they were just you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know not showing it for the purposes of this making of was it was it just that the Apple happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hand them developer strapped equipped Vision Pros. Like I’m really curious what that was used for. So if you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t need conjecture. I’ve heard all the theories. But if you know, you can tell me I’m not going to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a conjecture. What have you heard my conjecture?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve heard it from you. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably have heard that same conjecture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John somewhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ John We think that like, you know, there are things you might want to do with the Vision Pro on a movie set in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of connecting it to other devices that aren’t supported by the vanilla Vision Pro. And they’re like, Oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John hack in support for that. But you have to use the developer strap to do so connecting it to monitors, connecting it to video
⏹️ ▶️ John things, all stuff like that. That’s my guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, and I’ve heard similar guesses before. And just the most common one would be like file transfer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, like could you get file transfer onto this thing faster that way? And I don’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the thing that we were trying to think of, VAC, Vurgence Accommodation Conflict
⏹️ ▶️ John for the probably fifth time we will put that in the show notes.
#askatp: Learning photo-editing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Maxell Amador writes, your recent member special episode about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo workflows inspired me to take a look at my own photo editing pipeline. Hopefully you use the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us as cautionary tales. I shoot with my own iPhone 16 Pro camera and a Canon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rebel SL3 and sometimes an old film, Canon AE-1. I’d like to get good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at actually editing my photos. Me too. Especially the ones I take on the Canon. The problem is I don’t know where to start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Me too. Searching for quote, how to edit photos on YouTube was overwhelming and most of the videos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about Lightroom. In general, should I be editing every photo I take, even the heafs with the iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like casual photos of my friends? Should I shoot JPEG and RAW on the Canon or even the iPhone? Should I try something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Pixelmator Pro or stick with Apple Photos Editor? Should I avoid RAW completely since I’m such a noob?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How does one get good at this? I missed the auto-enhanced feature on Apple Photos and generally, excuse me, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey messed with the auto-enhanced feature on Apple Photos and generally like the results, but that is is a big no-no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with photographers, as it can overexpose or make some weird edits based on machine learning, maybe? Question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mark? I do generally enjoy photography as a hobby, but it seems daunting to me. I appreciate any tips for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very basic start to taking photos and editing them. This was genuinely written by somebody named Maxell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amador, but it could have been damn near word for word written by me. So, gentlemen, I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which one of you it is. Maybe we’ll start with Marco, but tell me, what do I do? What does Maxell do? What do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so Maxell says, in general should I be editing every photo I take? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely not. You will never take photos again if that’s the restriction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re putting on yourself. So number one, I think you have to ask yourself, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are you trying to get out of it? Are you trying to be a professional photographer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you trying to become a person with a large following on something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram? If the answer to both of those is no, then what you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is just make your photos nicer for yourself and your family and whoever else you’re sharing them with maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that dramatically lowers the bar and removes a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stress angle from a lot of it. Because if you’re just editing photos for mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for yourself, not for public sharing, which by the way, that’s what I do. I hardly ever share photos anymore on public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social networks but I all the time will take photos and I’ll either enjoy them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as myself, just, you know, like part of the, one thing I decided to do recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve talked about how part of the reason I have big cameras is just to shoot pretty landscapes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I see. And what do I do with those landscapes? Not much, I usually just make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them my desktop wallpaper. Like that’s it, like it’s my desktop wallpaper. And I recently decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I like having photo printers, and we have all these blank walls in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new house. Why don’t I fix this problem? why don’t I get a couple of frames and put my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own landscape pictures in them and hang them in my office? Nice and easy. And so now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have like another goal, like I’m gonna pick out a few pictures to hang in my office.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this takes editing. But the editing that I will do to those pictures is literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like, what will make this look good as a printed picture to my own eyes, and what will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this make me happy to look at? That’s very different from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, What how should I make this photo perfectly edited so that people will like me on tick tube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever like there there is no if you’re going for like public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honors and and you know praise that way that’s a very different thing from just make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this the way you like it. So I’m going to focus the rest of us on making it the way you like it because frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have the skills to do the public phrase praise side of it. That’s that’s not at all anything. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything about so first of all, should you be editing every photo? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t even be keeping every photo you take. You should take it. So I once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard that the secret to good photography is large amounts of bad photography. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea is, yeah, you take a bunch of shots because some of them are going to work, some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t. If you’re going to start searching how to improve your photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing is kind of down the list from other things like composition and lighting. Those matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more, but we’re talking about editing in this question, I get that, you know, this is a song about Alice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shoot JPEG plus RAW? Hmm, depends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Should you be using, you know, Lightroom or Apple Photos? I mean, it depends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you’re dealing with the very early days of editing, most of the edits you’re going to want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fairly subtle changes to what the camera or the iPhone will be doing automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t want to get into like really ridiculous stuff when you’re getting at the gate. You want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtle changes and you want to just play with some sliders and see kind of what is going to be pleasing to you. Where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would suggest you start is exposure and white balance. Now exposure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes multiple things. That includes, that isn’t just like the main like you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, minus one plus one kind of control. It’s also things like highlights, shadows, and contrast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of lump that all in with exposure. I know it’s probably wrong, but I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you wanna do, you know, start out, number, the very first edit you should do is get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the white balance right. Now, iPhone photos usually will do this for you pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. You normally won’t have to adjust much. If you are shooting with an external camera and you’re shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indoors, you will almost certainly have orange pictures. The cameras have gotten better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or blue, depending on if you have the wrong setting. But if you shoot with auto white balance, indoors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a camera, your pictures will probably end up orange, and you should probably adjust the white balance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat. And that’s, what you’re looking for is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtlety, subtle tweaks. The advantage of shooting raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that a lot of these tweaks become lossless. And so you can then later on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you realize that you’re terrible at editing now and everything you did now is garish, you could go back and re-edit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your favorites and kind of tone it down a little and use your new
⏹️ ▶️ John skills. I wouldn’t call that the main advantage of RAW is because if you use Apple Photos, all your edits are reversible.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to worry about messing things up in that way. RAW gives you more latitude for the things
⏹️ ▶️ John you can change, but if you’re using Apple Photos, which it sounds like Maxell is, don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John your edits. Edit fearlessly, you can always revert to original.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good point, yeah, fair enough. So anyway, yeah, RAW basically gives you a lot of headway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think, so Maxell asks, should I avoid raw completely since I’m such a noob?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think maybe yes, I think maybe avoid raw at first simply because raw files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, you know, by definition, less processed. So they start out in a much worse state usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and need a lot more in editing to look good. Also, they are huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are cumbersome and they are more slow to edit. They take up more resources. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that might do is discourage you from editing or shooting. And that’s the last thing you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, what I do, I mean this is, let’s see, Maxell you say you have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Canon Rebel SL3 and the iPhone 16 Pro. I don’t know anything about these. Does that have a dual card slot by any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance? Can you do my trick? But anyway, my trick is JPEG on one card, RAW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the other, and mostly never even use the RAWs and just import the JPEGs. You can do the same thing on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one card, just a little bit more work. But anyway, I strongly suggest just deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the JPEGs at first. And it’ll make everything faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lighter weight and smaller and lower impact. And that’s what you want as you’re getting into this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna make a lot of bad choices. And the last thing you want in the learning process is to slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down your iteration and the cycle and you don’t wanna discourage yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically you get good at it by learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what each of the controls do in the editor. So, the best thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say is just kinda start sliding some around and look at what they do with the picture and you can see. So like, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you move the highlights up and down, you can see, oh, it blows out the sky versus trying to unblow it out. You move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the shadows up and down, oh, all the dark areas get lighter and you can see more detail, but it raises the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise floor. You know, you can play with the exposure, you can play with the contrast, see what looks ridiculous, see what looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know more calm. Can just play with it and and I would say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just try to. Yeah, try to learn what each of those sliders does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by experimenting with it and then however you think you might want to edit a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dial it back a little bit afterwards like yeah, go nuts with the contrast make it look really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then dial it back to like half of what you did and that that’s probably better. So anyway, all right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John where am I wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so yeah, let me, uh, I mostly agree with the things you said, especially, um, that you shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John editing every photo. Like that’s madness. Um, what you should be doing is going through every
⏹️ ▶️ John photo and chucking the terrible ones and finding the ones that you really think are good
⏹️ ▶️ John and the ones that you really think are good. Edit those. My last time I checked, I’m about at,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, 10% of the photos I take, I edit, uh, and that’s after throwing away the terrible ones. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s obviously less than 10%. Right. terrible ones. What’s left out of those? 1 in 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John I essentially fave and that is one that I will edit.
⏹️ ▶️ John In terms of raw, I mostly agree with Marco except I will say you should
⏹️ ▶️ John have some raws somewhere. If you have a dual card thing and you can put the raws on one card and mostly ignore them, great. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a single card, every once in a while, take a raw. Once, just
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you a feel for what does raw give me that other things It would be ideal if you could take both JPEG and RAW
⏹️ ▶️ John and do what I do which is just deal with the JPEGs Except for for the for the 10% that are your favorites pull the RAWs
⏹️ ▶️ John for those Because that will teach you when you’re doing any kind of editing. Oh, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get this photo to look right Which I’ll talk about in a second When you face that situation you might say
⏹️ ▶️ John let me look at the RAW and if you use a good app You’re like, huh? I couldn’t get this JPEG to look decent
⏹️ ▶️ John But this RAW I can get it to look good and it will teach you the advantages of RAW, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would say don’t ignore raw, but absolutely do not shoot everything in raw. Don’t import everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll be overwhelmed with data It’s just a waste of time that makes your camera slower, right? But don’t totally ignore it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John every once in a while get a raw just to start to get a feel for it I’m only
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit farther on my photo editing journey than Max L So I can’t tell you like
⏹️ ▶️ John how to go all the way to be super duper expert And by the way super duper experts who are as Marco says
⏹️ ▶️ John putting trying to become famous for their photography They also don’t edit every photo. Nobody edits every photo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Take a lot of everyone takes a lot of photos Only some of them are gonna be good
⏹️ ▶️ John what I would say to focus on first with the editing is The simple things
⏹️ ▶️ John like when you look at this picture, is there some part of that you wish you could see that you can’t This is
⏹️ ▶️ John there something that you wish you could see that’s like either completely black or too dark
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you fix that with editing? Is there something in the picture that you wish you could see that’s too bright or
⏹️ ▶️ John completely white? And can you fix that? If you have overexposed something
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t be able to fix that and you might be able to check in the raw if you can but like that’s undesirable but if the
⏹️ ▶️ John sky is the thing that’s overexposed and it’s completely white and you don’t care about that because the person’s face is correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John exposed like just those two things of like is there something in this picture that I wish I could see that I can’t?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does this photo look bad because oh I can’t see that person’s face. The dog looks like a silhouette and I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean it to. The sky doesn’t look the way I remember it. Figure out which controls
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you essentially recover from the edges. When you captured this photo, it you know what we say about blowing
⏹️ ▶️ John out the highlights, that’s when something is completely white and you can’t get anything back from it. You’re like I wish I could see
⏹️ ▶️ John that. White tells me nothing. It’s 100% white. I see nothing but there was actually something there. Like there was texture
⏹️ ▶️ John to that clouds. It wasn’t 100% white. Or this this thing is too dark and I can’t see the person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John face. They just look like they’re silhouetted, but when I was there, I could see their face. Can I fix that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where I would start with photos. And I guess that includes white balance too, because that’s when you get into like, do these colors look weird to you?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Does this picture look weird? That’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell better sometimes when you’re looking at all your thumbnails, like in the
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbnail view, we got this giant grid of thumbnails, especially if you have a bunch of outdoor pictures than a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John indoor ones, then you really see the yellowness of the indoor ones because lots of our indoor lights have a color temperature
⏹️ ▶️ John that is warmer than the sun. And a lot of people like that, which is why we keep doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it on purpose. I certainly do. But if you see the thumbnails together, you’d be like, oh, all these pictures look like someone peed
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. They’re all yellow, because they’re indoor. Maybe when you’re looking at them in isolation, you might not notice, and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you even want to keep them that way, but be aware that’s a thing, right? So those are the places I would start. What’s too bright?
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s too dark? What looks like someone peed on it? That’s a good starting point. The
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing that I will add to this discussion is part of the process of finding the 10% or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever pictures that you like and trying to edit them is that you’ll look at them and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, this is such a great picture or whatever, and you’ll try to do some edit to get it to look
⏹️ ▶️ John the way you want. And that process of editing will teach you how to take
⏹️ ▶️ John better pictures. Because you’ll be like, oh, this picture, this picture would be so good, but I cut off this person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John head. Or there’s some obnoxious person in the background that I can’t AI erase that ruined this picture
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. If only I had taken it from a different angle, or I didn’t realize that the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John background where someone’s garbage can is would be in focus in this picture. And it would be such a good picture if that stupid garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John can wasn’t in focus, right? The act of editing, the act of trying to rescue these pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is almost a good picture. What can I do to fix it? Can I crop this? Oh, I wish I’d taken, I wish I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John stepped back two feet because I’m missing something here. I it looks like a light pulse coming out
⏹️ ▶️ John of this person had the process of editing will teach you what to do next time
⏹️ ▶️ John to capture a better picture. And I know you’re asking about editing and Marko touched on this as well. But in the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, editing, it’s too late. You can only do so much with editing. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John to capture good pictures. That is this most important skill of photography is knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John when and where to point your camera. That is the most important skill. And I know you’re asking about editing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the process of editing, The process of trying to take a picture that you think is almost good and make it better
⏹️ ▶️ John and realizing what you can’t do in Editing even with AI you can’t get you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t reframe it. You can’t point in a different direction You can’t decide to use the flash or not use
⏹️ ▶️ John the flash Every time you encounter that in editing that will teach you the next
⏹️ ▶️ John time you’re out there with your camera what you want to do Differently so that I feel like for me is one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John most important parts of editing is not the process of taking a picture and trying to make it better.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the process of learning what you did wrong when you were capturing the photo that you will avoid next
⏹️ ▶️ John time so that the next time when you go to editing your job will be so much easier. You won’t have to crop as
⏹️ ▶️ John much, you won’t have to lose as much resolution, the lighting will be better, you won’t accidentally put the garbage can in the
⏹️ ▶️ John background and focus, the light pole won’t be coming out of the person’s head. That I think is one of the most important
⏹️ ▶️ John benefits of doing editing. And it might, it feels disheartening because you’re like, I’m doing all this
⏹️ ▶️ John editing and all I’m learning is that I can’t make these pictures good. It’s nothing that my editing skills aren’t good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, even if you get it to a pro, sometimes you’re like, there’s no rescuing this one. It was framed poorly.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t exposed correctly. You cannot make this a good picture. That seems
⏹️ ▶️ John disheartening, but that is the process that will teach you to make a better capture next time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those are great answers. Thank you, gentlemen.
#askatp: Compressing huge files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, we have Scott Shuchart who writes, I’m trying to compress three large-ish files,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 20 to 60 gigabytes each, using the Finder, and they’re taking forever. According to Activity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Monitor, Archive Service, which I assume is the compressor, is running six threads, but only using between 95 and 140%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU. This is in a MacBook Pro M2 Pro with 10 cores. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else significant is happening, and it’s plugged in with no fan noise. Why can’t it spin up at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three performance cores to get this done faster? What are these chips for? I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s an interesting question because a lot of the times in people’s regular computing lives, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using phones, there’s this question that I always ask, make people think about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there anything you do with your computer that makes you wait? And a lot of people will say, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, like unless I’m waiting for an animation to complete, like I don’t do anything like my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John where I’m like, come on, come on, this is taking too long. Like the magic of modern technology is a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of times does not know. People will say, they used to say, waiting for a web page to load, or
⏹️ ▶️ John like if cellular is bad, waiting for something to load, like lots of network related stuff. But like, if you really want to
⏹️ ▶️ John get down to it, like, is there anything you’re waiting for the CPU for? Gamers would say, yeah, I’m waiting for it to draw
⏹️ ▶️ John the next frame faster because I’m getting 20 frames per second on this thing and I really wish I could get 60 or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are answers to this question. It’s not like we have infinite performance. And this is another interesting one. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing I think a lot of people who use just, you know, Macs and PCs find themselves doing, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I asked my computer to do a thing and because of the size of the data involved, like trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do something with a 20 to 60 gig file, I’m waiting for it to be done. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why, I see a progress bar, I have to wait several minutes. Sometimes it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John network related, but sometimes even just on a local thing, you’re like, what’s the bottleneck here? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it, as we would say in the business, I-O bound? Am I waiting for things to be read off of disk or written to disk?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it CPU bound? And Scott is asking, my computer seems like it’s doing nothing. It’s chill.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, the fans aren’t running. It’s not using all of its resources. And yet, here I am looking at a progress
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. Here I am waiting. I’m waiting for my computer. And I don’t understand why, because it seems like it’s got more resources
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be putting towards this. If you are a computer science major or ever studied this at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will inevitably run into Amdahl’s law, which is, we’ll put a link to the Wikipedia page.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s often used in the context of parallel computing, which they used to call it back in the day when you had more than one processor, although now everything
⏹️ ▶️ John does. To predict the theoretical speed up, when I’m reading from the Wikipedia page here, when
⏹️ ▶️ John using multiple processors. For example, if a program needs 20 hours to complete, you can tell how long ago this was written.
⏹️ ▶️ John If a program needs 20 hours to complete using a single thread, and a one hour portion of the program cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John be parallelized, then only the remaining 19 hours of execution can be parallelized. Therefore, regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of how many threads are devoted to a parallelized execution of this program, the minimum execution time is always more than one hour. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically saying there are some things that you can do in parallel and some things that can’t. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you make the things that can be done in parallel happen instantaneously, which you’re not going to, but if you can make them be done instantaneously
⏹️ ▶️ John because you deploy 7 million processors and there’s no overhead to distributing the work to them, which also doesn’t happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re never gonna get it faster than the time it takes for those serial portions. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John running a particular compression algorithm has parts of it that are parallelizable and parts of it that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not. and you’re never going to make it run faster than the parts that are not. They are the long
⏹️ ▶️ John pole. They are the thing that you can’t shrink. No matter how many more threads you throw at it, there are certain portions of it that you can’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John on at the same time. Now, this particular task, compressing this, is this compression
⏹️ ▶️ John algorithm parallelizable? If so, is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that is running it in a parallel not devoting enough threads to it? This can happen, especially in macOS. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things, and I’ve complained about this before, where it’s like, there’s a task, and there’s a portion of it that
⏹️ ▶️ John are parallelizable, but it is intentionally run by the program or the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that it uses fewer resources. It’s run at low priority. It’s run at a low number
⏹️ ▶️ John of threads so that it doesn’t make your computer feel unresponsive. But sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the only thing you want your computer to do and you want it to do it right now. I talk about like, you know, the photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John please recognize faces now, please analyze my photos now. It’s literally the only thing I want you to do. I’m gonna walk away,
⏹️ ▶️ John use all my resources to do it. and Mac OS and Apple’s apps in particular are terrible at that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to guess in this case, the main problem is the like right click finder thing that compresses
⏹️ ▶️ John files has a cap on how many threads it will ever use, and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John is never gonna go faster than that. Now, it may also be the case that this algorithm is not parallelizable sufficiently,
⏹️ ▶️ John so more threads wouldn’t help, I don’t know specifically, but these are the potential scenarios. One of them is just like
⏹️ ▶️ John theoretical, like if you pick an algorithm, you can’t break into like 75 chunks, you can only break it into like four
⏹️ ▶️ John chunks, right? There’s, you know, there’s not parallelizable past that because there’s interdependent, data interdependencies
⏹️ ▶️ John between the tasks and they need to communicate and synchronize with each other and there’s serial portions, then you’re stuck.
⏹️ ▶️ John But specifically in Apple platforms, Apple is good slash bad about
⏹️ ▶️ John making choices for you that ensure that the system remains responsive under all circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ John by limiting the amount of parallel work that can be done. And you would like more options,
⏹️ ▶️ John like for example, past sponsor, Backblaze, that I use on my computer to back it
⏹️ ▶️ John up. It actually has a pop-up menu in the little like settings that says, hey, when Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ John is running and backing up your stuff, how many threads do you want it to use? And the default is pretty low, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t like, as we say in the ad reads, you don’t even know Backblaze is running half the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John The default is like, just do your work, it’ll back up your stuff behind the scenes or whatever. It’s using a small number
⏹️ ▶️ John of threads to not disturb you, right? The way I personally run Backblaze, on one of my computers
⏹️ ▶️ John is because I have a million backups running all day, every day anyway. I make Backblaze run only
⏹️ ▶️ John at 3 a.m. and I give it like 99, whatever the maximum number of threads is. Obviously there’s a point of diminishing
⏹️ ▶️ John returns. You shouldn’t give it way more threads than you have CPU cores, but I have a lot of CPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John I give it a huge number of cores. So it wakes up at 3 a.m., runs my Backblaze thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it runs it using every resource on the system. So much so that if I was to come downstairs at 3 a.m.
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to use my computer, I would notice that Backblaze is running because I’ve intentionally said, use it all, peg
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, go as fast as you can. And believe me, it makes a big difference because I have a fast internet connection,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just the process of like finding all the change files, reading all those change files and sending them up to
⏹️ ▶️ John fill my one gigabit upwards pipe, I need to be reading
⏹️ ▶️ John and sending from as many files at once as I want. Backblaze gives you that option. The
⏹️ ▶️ John right click menu in the finder for compressing files does not give you that option. So the answer,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, in this case, without knowing anything about the compression algorithm or how parallelizable Zip is, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is doing this to try to help you. And in this case, you do not want this help from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our sponsors, Squarespace and Uncommon Goods. And thank you to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overtime. This is a bonus topic that we do every week. This week in ATP overtime, we’re gonna be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what is the right product mix for the iPhone? Like what models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should we have in the iPhone line? So we will talk about that in overtime. Join how to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atv.fm slash join. Thank you everybody. we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental Check podcast So long
Neutral: BMW Assist Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve discovered a feature on the BMW iX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I didn’t even know it offered and is quite interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So most high-end cars these days have some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Tesla called auto steer back in the day, some kind of like lane keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus radar cruise control so that if you’re driving on the highway and you just want to stay in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lane that you’re in and stay you know an appropriate distance from the vehicle in front of you the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will drive itself for you in that context as long as it can you know see the lane markers and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that so I knew going into this car that BMW had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of system that was very similar to this and that it worked pretty well I tried to briefly during the test drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was fine so I now have more time with it and I I learned it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was driving I kept seeing as I would engage the system that works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar to Tesla auto steer I would engage it in you know you keep your hands on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wheel and everything and then it kept saying in little text below the indicator assist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus ready and I thought well that’s interesting what’s ready that I’m not already doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eventually I figured it out. Assist Plus is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla Auto Steer, however, you take your hands off the wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just leave them off. And so it’s hands free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, it seems to be using cameras or something to look at me to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure I am paying attention to the road. But it is otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hands free. And so you can just like, you know, put your hands in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lap. I mean, you know, insert joke here, but like you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you just put your hands down.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the reason it’s looking at you, presumably, I don’t know if he’s like IR cameras. The reason it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at you to make sure you’re looking at the road is because although it allows you to take your hands off the steering wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s trying to tell you is that at any moment Marco, the driver of this car, we
⏹️ ▶️ John may ask you to take over. We may throw up our hands and say can’t do it. Driver human.
⏹️ ▶️ John Europe and by the way, if we do that, it may be because something catastrophic has happened
⏹️ ▶️ John that we can’t deal with. So you better be looking at the road
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because in any
⏹️ ▶️ John second we may ask you to make a life or death decision. But anyway, for now, put your hands in your lap. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be fine. See, you may think like I thought when I first learned that I could do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, well, how different could that be from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you know, the Tesla auto steer version of it is just like what you have to have your hands on the wheel because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like sensing whether you’re applying kind of resistance or touching the wheel or anything but if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you take your hands off for like you know more than you know a few seconds it’ll start yelling at you saying put your hands on the wheel. I’m like well how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different can that really be because when you’re doing that you’re kind of you know loosely resting your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hands on the wheel but letting it steer itself so you know you’re not really applying any pressure you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of loosely resting your hands there. Let me tell you it’s very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you don’t have your hands on the wheel at at all. I don’t think I like it and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think it should be legal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean for one thing it is ever so slightly decreasing your minimum possible
⏹️ ▶️ John response time because now you have to move your hands to the wheel in a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ John something is emerging that’s saying you got to take over right now and at least with Tesla if it is correctly policing
⏹️ ▶️ John you and saying keeping your hands on the wheel at least your hands are hopefully already on the wheel but if they’re on your lap
⏹️ ▶️ John or in your pockets or or you’re picking your nose or whatever you’re doing, up time to take over. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John there is some fraction of a second where you have to correctly find and grip the steering wheel before you can
⏹️ ▶️ John begin to do the steering that you need to do at that moment. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not a good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and you’re going 70 miles an hour down the highway when this is happening. How many feet have you covered during that fraction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a second? Right, exactly. So like, let me tell you, it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unnerving because first of all, okay, So you take your hands off the wheel and it activates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it lights up and everything. And you’re like, OK, well, what do I do with my hands?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s a joke, but like what, like there’s not like you have to keep looking at the road. If you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away too much, it’ll go boom driver scratching detected. And then it’ll start yelling at you. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume it will disengage after a while if you keep doing it. But I haven’t gotten to that point. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and honestly, the funniest thing about it is that the first time during any drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you take your hands off the wheel and therefore engage assist plus it shows up this it shows this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant disclaimer like this two paragraph thing on the screen you die it’s on our fault you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just that you have to dismiss but it’s like well I have to look away from the road for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dismiss this tremendous wall of text that you show me every time it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the tutorial level that teaches you that it’s watching where you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah it was so like it’s really unnerving Because like the Tesla auto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steer and the Rivian to some degree, Tesla was a little worse. But like what those taught me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is these kind of systems mostly work, but occasionally make mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, where they might like, you know, steer me a little too close to a divider or, you know, like the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front of you might merge into your lane and it might react a little slowly or a little bit harshly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And so what I learned is sometimes you give little corrective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feedback with the steering wheel while using these. But when your hands are in your lap, that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do that. And so even though the BMW system so far, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my hands are on the wheel or not, has not given me any reason to doubt it, like it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good so far. I’ve only done, you know, local Long Island highways so far. I haven’t been off the island yet with it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems very good so far. So I trust it so far, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of trust you have to have to just put your hands in your lap is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher than having your hands still on the wheel. Because like, suppose it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tries to jerk the wheel really hard, you know, left or right. If your hands are on the wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll catch it really quickly and possibly even physically prevent it from doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If your hands are in your lap, it’s gonna make that full movement before your hands even get there again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I kind of want, and like, what it’s gaining me is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I’m not sure what. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you’ve mentioned that you have to have so much a higher level of trust. You Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have so much higher level of trust, but I think a lot of the average people, what it will essentially do is
⏹️ ▶️ John make them so much more likely to zone out in daydream. And the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John is looking at their eyes will say their eyes are still on the road, but what they actually have is a thousand yard stare
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re not looking at anything. Their eyes are pointed forward ostensibly to the road, but they’re thinking about what they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make for dinner. Like these type of things, the more it allows you to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John paying attention and zone out, which you can totally do while still quote unquote looking at the road,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more likely it is that you’re going to be in a bad situation when they suddenly ask you to take over. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John even though you’re thinking like with your tech brain, like, Oh, I need to trust this and so on and so forth. People are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, the car wouldn’t let me do this if it wasn’t safe. And it’s just human nature. You’ll be on the long trip
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll be looking forward because the thing will have trained you. Hey, if you don’t keep looking forward, the thing is going to bing at you and whatever. So you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. And you’re next just going to be pointing your eyes straight at the thing. And you’re going to be like staring straight forward like that cat
⏹️ ▶️ John with the newspaper saying, I should buy a boat. And then you’re going to, you know, go underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the truck and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kill yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Like that’s that’s the this is the dangers. And I talk about a million times. Don’t ask humans
⏹️ ▶️ John to maintain vigilance when there’s nothing for them to actually do until a split second later when they have to save everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John life. Right. Either make them do stuff enough to pay attention or remove the steering wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it’s all on the car to steer. And these in-between things, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible in-between thing that I don’t know if they should be illegal, but I would never recommend anybody that I cared
⏹️ ▶️ John about to use whatever system makes them stop being vigilant.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, Marco, you’re probably still vigilant with this because already you’re like, I gotta trust this thing and it’s wigging me out or whatever. So you’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John vigilant at this point, but like, don’t push that line, right? Like use the thing that helps you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John more relaxing drive while still paying attention and whatever level allows you to zone out
⏹️ ▶️ John Crank it back one right and that’s an individual thing But honestly, I think from the manufacturer’s perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be more responsible for these car manufacturers to Not to like skip that middle
⏹️ ▶️ John part to say driver assistance nothing in the middle and we figured out
⏹️ ▶️ John You know full self-driving no pedals. No steering wheel, right? But in that middle gray area, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John automakers would avoid it They’re not gonna because the competitive pressure isn’t because people do like it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it just seems like such a terrible idea I mean there’s ongoing in this country Nitsa investigations of Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John auto steer and all sorts of higher accident rates based on driver assistance or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John this varies from brand to brand and everyone will argue that their brand does it better than other brand and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it is a fluid thing But like this is something like you don’t want to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John beta tester with your life life. If you can possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John even if the features ship, even if they don’t have a beta label on them or whatever, you don’t have to use
⏹️ ▶️ John every feature that your car has, right? Just, you know, be safe out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, you know who is even more weirded out by this feature? The passengers of the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re using it. Yeah, let me tell you, they do not like that at
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because because this is like this is like a train, know, what he called trust
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple times removed. You have to trust the car and they have to trust you trusting the car and they don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about the car and maybe they don’t know anything about you if it’s a stranger. Right? So it’s like, can you imagine taking an Uber and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a BMW and the person takes their hands off the wheel. Now you have to trust, trust both this BMW and this Uber
⏹️ ▶️ John driver you’ve never met in your life. I mean, you have to trust them anyway when they’re driving, but like, you know, at least,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least your, their hands are on the wheel and you hope that they will do something sensible to save their own life, whereas they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John zoning out while they’re quote unquote driving you somewhere it’s like maybe I should just take away Mo.