679: An Adversarial Relationship With Myself
16 Feb 2026Solar and batteries vs. generators, news about Perl (?!), hiding apps as a self-improvement tool, and the age-old debate of “Save As…” vs. “Duplicate”, which we basically only see in Preview now.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Marco beach… and app… cleanup results
- We’re recording ✨from the future✨.
- Follow-up:
- Should Casey look at a used Lucid Air for ~$50k?
- Marco’s
defectionmove to Chrome (via Sarvagnan) - Window resizing in Tahoe (via Jeff Johnson)
- AirTag 2 & speaker tampering
- Cloudflare Open Access (via George Black)
- Fastmail 🤝🏻 Perl
- Another Apple purchase migration warning (via Nick)
- YouTube is on visionOS (App Store link)
- Studio Display 2 to be… 90Hz? 🤨
- New devices not on the latest-and-greatest TSMC process?
- Where are you, M5 Pro MacBook Pro?
- Ask ATP:
- What kind of battery backup should one use? (via Allen Shull)
- Why do we think Ternus is a good idea as CEO? (via Kevin B.)
- What’s the deal with
Save As…,Duplicate, etc? (via Carl Walther)- From back in 2012!
- Post-show: Casey’s Status Board
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apparently everyone is stealing TV
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Chapters
- Leaks and Instagram
- Lucid?
- Non-Chrome Chromes
- Tahoe window-resizing “update”
- AirTag 2 tampering
- Sponsor: Zapier
- Cloudflare auth feedback
- Fastmail ❤️ Perl
- Another purchase-migration failure
- YouTube now on Vision Pro
- Sponsor: 1Password
- Studio Display 90 Hz rumor
- TSMC process rumors for iPhone
- Maybe no M5 Pro?
- Sponsor: Gusto
- #askatp: Generators, solar/batteries
- #askatp: Why Ternus optimism?
- #askatp: Save As… vs. Duplicate
- Ending theme
- Casey’s status board 🖼️
Leaks and Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I spent all day cleaning up water damage. That was really
⏹️ ▶️ John fun. Oh, you went to the beach? I did I meant to send you that Instagram thing that I saw today I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do it because I thought it would be too cruel, but now you’re bringing it up I’m gonna find it and send it gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I was saying last week about so we’re lucky that The the leak at the beach house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was worse than I expected But it only affected like the storage basement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area of the house Not like the finished interior of the house Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God for that because that would be a very different level of damage. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of the things that we store in the storage area are things like bikes, which are mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waterproof. So there’s there’s doesn’t look like there’s too much loss
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Plus is fresh water. It’s actually cleaning the bicycles getting the salt. Yeah. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t only bikes that were rained on for, you know, a day and a half, but it was mostly bikes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s not it’s not too bad. It could have been a lot worse. There’s a lot of cleanup to do, but it could have been a lot worse. But you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram, and that actually gives me a really good opportunity here to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you a little hot tip. It’s not, it didn’t start during my year of efficiency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It started about December, I think. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on the show, at least not more than two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds worth. So I haven’t really been on Instagram very much recently. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a sharp drop-off in my Instagram music starting in December when I made a simple change. I can say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I strongly recommend this. So anyway, what the change was, was I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved Instagram to the hidden state on my phone where it requires Face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID. So here’s what you do. You go to any app on your phone. They added this I think two or three OS’s ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any app on iOS, if you do the long hold to go to delete it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of the options it gives you is require Face ID in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that context menu. When you do that, one of the options you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to hide and require Face ID. And what this does is this puts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app, if you go all the way to the app library, like the rightmost screen on your iPhone, you scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way to the bottom, the bottom right icon is called hidden.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can’t see what’s in it because it’s hidden. And if you hide any app and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require Face ID for it, it will go into that hidden folder. The only way to get to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to go to the app library. It won’t show up in search. You won’t get any notifications for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your phone will act as though it’s not there at all. The only way to get to it is you go to that hidden folder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you tap it, for some reason you have to tap it again. It face ID scans you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the icon will show up and you can open the app. And you can use the app just normally. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you leave the app for more than like a second or two, it will not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show up in the app switcher. you can’t switch back to it. You have to go through that process again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, so you’re not getting notifications. So it’s never being promoted to you on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. So what this does is it creates a situation where you have to think about going to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to want to go to it. And you have to want to go to it enough that you go through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a little bit of friction to get to it. You can’t just search for it in Spotlight. You have to go and scroll to it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the face ID and have it open up. And if you switch away from it, So for instance, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like looking at an Instagram ad and you switch out to Safari to, you know, be able to save that page for later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, and maybe use Apple Pay to buy something, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to switch back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, universal links to that app will stop working. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it does is it makes using the app totally suck, and it makes you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not wanna do it very often, which for Instagram means that the compulsion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had and that many people have, to just idly open it up all the time. I had it on my home screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opening it up is super easy. And then before I knew it, I’ve wasted a bunch of time there and opened up six tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for shirts I might wanna buy. That doesn’t happen anymore, it’s just gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have dramatically reduced the amount of time I use Instagram as a result. And I gotta tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so much happier and better off for it. I don’t have as many shirts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but everything else in my life is better. And it really made me realize quite how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad for me Instagram really was. It doesn’t feel that bad when you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it until you realize you’ve spent a lot of time there and maybe you’re just becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unhappy with your life and you wanna buy a bunch of stuff and not having Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a major part of my life and have it be almost not a part of my life at all, it’s great. I was keeping it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought I was gonna be missing out on not only like, you know, whatever friends are doing. I mean, most of my feed isn’t that anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even stuff like, you know, at the beach, like what restaurants are doing tonight for their specials or, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco special events are happening around town. And the reality is most of that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t miss, first of all, because it wasn’t that important as it turns out. And second of all, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram mostly is these days is a feed full of stuff to keep me engaged, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really a lot of stuff that my friends are actually posting. So my life has been made significantly better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by having it still available if I have to go look at something, but almost never looking at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it cut it down from using it from probably maybe an average of a half hour a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to using it for maybe five minutes a week at most. It’s amazing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly recommend doing this to social apps because when people say they’re stuck in their phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’re addicted to their phone or their phone’s the problem or phones in general are the problem, What they’re mostly talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is social network apps on phones, which is different from the phone. The phone is just a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an amazing, the phone is like one of the greatest things we’ve ever invented as a species. The modern smartphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this ridiculously amazing, capable pocket supercomputer connected to the internet at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times that can do amazing things for us. The phone is great. The phone is not a problem. Addictive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social apps are a problem in a lot of ways. So doing steps like that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like increase the friction, Like the best thing is to just delete it off your phone if you can do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you still need it, sometimes that’s a way to keep it still there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have it be very addictive to you. So I can strongly recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I’m sorry. How did we leap from beach cleanup to Instagram? Did I have a brain fart when that happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John sending up the Instagram thing about the burst pipes. It’s in the Slack. If you want to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at it, I mean, it’s not, it’s not ours. It’s just a public thing. So I guess we can put it in the show as you want. Although, Marco, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John glad this change has made a difference in your life. It sounds good. I mean, you made a quitter, the Mac app to help you with Twitter before
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So there’s a long history of you doing these things. But every time I hear you describe these systems,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just am glad I don’t have that kind of adversarial relationship with myself that you do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you are the solution to and cause of all your problems and you’re battling against yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John by writing software to stop you from being you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, I’ve never been officially diagnosed with ADHD,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly because I’ve never really sought that kind of diagnosis. It’s never too late to learn to read. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is, I mean, look, if your brain works this way, you know it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my brain definitely works this way. And we have to develop systems around
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, luckily it works the other way, which lets you devise systems to thwart yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have the other side of that too, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good. The systems I have to do to maintain attention and task doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are ridiculous. Part of the reason why the snooze options on Apple Reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alerts bother me so much, the stupid like, remind me this afternoon and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s 2pm. What does that mean? What time? If it’s already 2pm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it says remind me this afternoon, what does that mean? And when it’s 9am and it says remind me this morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what does that mean? I hate like I cannot tell you how asinine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those reminder strings are like give me a time or give me more hour intervals.
⏹️ ▶️ John what the thing the thing I do with reminders. I mean yes I know there’s a million alternative apps that we should be using instead right but
⏹️ ▶️ John what I actually just use reminders and what I do is I I just go into reminders and I change
⏹️ ▶️ John the time to be advanced by the amount that I wanted to advance is the most ridiculous thing ever. I’m essentially manually
⏹️ ▶️ John snoozing because when I set the time forward I know exactly when it’s going to go off again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah see like this is And I know I should be using do, D-U-E. I know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried it. And we know all the apps. We know. Yeah, I think maybe one of my, we’re not talking about ads episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but maybe one of my vibe code apps will be like, just use the reminders database, but have better alerts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. Like, I don’t, I mean, there’s probably already apps that do that. I’m sure that exists in the app store already. I know it probably does. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want the reminders to be the app because that way, Siri integration works perfectly. A lot of other system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrations work perfectly. But those notification snooze options are just so bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole reason I snooze them is because in my terrible productivity system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my brain, if I’m not being reminded of something over and over and over again until I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it, it won’t get done. That’s DUE. I know. That’s the DUE app. I know, I just don’t like the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app. And if I accidentally dismiss one of those alerts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will never remind me again. I have to be so careful when one of those pops up, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh God, oh no, don’t, careful. Snooze for one hour, okay. or remind me this afternoon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that means. Remind me tonight, that’s great too. It’s like, what does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mean? Like, anyway, I wish those were better and maybe someday I’ll make them better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know the system is ridiculous and the system sounds ridiculous that I get reminded of like four things every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day recurring until I do them and it might take me two weeks to do them. This sounds ridiculous to anybody who is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productive and normal minded and that is so not me. My system needs this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very quickly, I wholeheartedly endorse the app DUE, you know, with do, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I pronounce the word do, nobody knows what I mean. It’s dueapp.com, I’ll put a link in the show notes. I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if my life would, not literally, but figuratively end if this app did not exist, I would get nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. We have gone far longer on this pre-flight immediately after Mark and I both said we don’t want to go long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the result of the beach situation though? Did you get a plumber to come out? Like what, what, where does it stand?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, a plumber came out yesterday and fixed the leak. I went out there today to do basic, you know, just clean up, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, he, you know, cause there was a lot of, a lot of things in the, in the basement that are very wet and waterlogged,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of like, you know, storage containers that are full of water plus whatever they were storing those light fixtures on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ceiling of like nautical themed basement areas that have, it’s like a metal cage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around a glass dome, but it’s all sealed up. Well, there were, you know, the, we have those all across our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basement ceiling and the ones that the water was above are, were full of water, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dome. So I had to like, you know, get a drill, unscrew the dome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and water just poured down. Like, like obviously those light bulbs are dead. Those fixtures I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably be replacing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Then there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So a lot of a lot of that. But and with the added complexity that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 30 degrees, you know, all like as I was like carrying water filled containers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to dump them on like, you know, the patio, I have to make sure I’m not dumping them where I have to walk because it’s all freezing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a a few minutes later. So the patio is covered in ice. Like it’s lovely. And my, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, you know, whatever gloves I’m wearing are instantly soaked with any, everything I’m doing. So I had to keep like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking breaks, going upstairs, just warming up for a few minutes, then going back out again. Like it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, it was a hard day, but, uh, I’m sorry, but at least I didn’t have Instagram bothering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Well, that’s true. I did have a couple of reminders though. Did I do the things? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually have a couple or a related story as I also told John and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I did not want to go long tonight, but here we go. Um, I was sitting in the living room yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it was the day before and I know it must’ve been yesterday. And, um, that’s where our Yolink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hub is. So, you know, the Yolink stuff that had that we have some, uh, leak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sensors. We have some contact sensors, which we will probably talk about in the after show tonight. Anyways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, the speaker hub sits in living room in the entertainment center. It’s an open entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center. And I have, of course, done a bunch of stuff with home assistants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that, for example, when the mailbox is opened out front,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the speaker hub will literally say the words, you’ve got mail, because I’m a child of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco 90s. Does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the old sound effect?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, unfortunately. Why not? It’s more robotic. It’s more like, you’ve got mail,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco or whatever. Oh, you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the sound effect from that awesome announcer who, he just died like last year. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I can actually use the sound effect, but that’s neither here nor But I’m sitting there and I’m watching TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or browsing something on the internet, and all of a sudden, I hear a siren going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. Uh-oh. And that indicates to me, because the only reason that should happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is based on automations I’ve done in Home Assistant, the only reason that should happen if a water leak sensor has tripped.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so sure enough, the siren goes off and it says, there’s a leak in Casey’s sink. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go bombing upstairs, and I tell you what, There was a little itty bitty,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itty bitty puddle of water under there. It must be like a little teeny tiny drip, but over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the span of like a day or something, it was enough to trip the leak sensor because the way it works is there’s a couple of electrodes or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the bottom and a couple on the top. And so sure enough, the water was able to basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey create a connection between the two on the bottom and it alerted me. And so we were able to clean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up lickety split where we got on the horn with our bathroom people and they’re going to come out first thing next week because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a pressing issue. very, very, very minor leak, but I would never in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a million years have noticed this were it not for those leak sensors. So not sponsored by Yolink,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but sponsored by Yolink.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Those things, what’s great about them again, as I mentioned last time, what’s great about them is that the sensors are cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s no like subscription per sensor or anything, so you can, you can get, I think the four pack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like 60 bucks with the hub or something. So it’s, and you can just get, you can get as many as you need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, in my house, I have, I think like 10 of them or something. I have a lot of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically. So I have them, uh, under each bathroom sink trap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. That’s what this one was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually where water tends to collect if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there’s a small leak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and under each toilet of the, the valve that fills a toilet that goes against the wall, whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco valve is called, like where it comes out of the wall and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you have a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sneaking up pipe thing to fill the toilet, those tend to drip over time too. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure enough, there was one day, oh, and the top of the Yolink water leak sensors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have sensors on the top and the bottom. Yeah. So they have these little metal feet that poke down. So if they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting in water, they’ll alert. But also they have these two little sensors up top and they’re shaped like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bowl up top. So that way you can place it under something. And if something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drips, it will fall into that top bowl and alert you immediately before water pools up on the floor. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can it’s good to place them under under things that are most likely to be a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like valves and traps and things like that and sure enough like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last summer we were at the beach and we got a Link or a leak alert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from one of the toilet valve ones and we had somebody go over and look at it and sure enough That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toilet valve had like a little like drip every few minutes kind of leak And that’s the kind of thing like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would never, especially if it’s like under a sink in a cabinet. That’s where ours was, yep. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would never know that until you open that cabinet like two years later and the whole bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it falls out. You’re like, whoa. And then you feel this water damage. Like that’s the advantage of these things is that you could,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re so small and cheap and low maintenance. You can buy a ton of them and put them all over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one like obviously next to the water heater. I have one under the washing machine, anywhere that you might have a leak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And let me tell you, now that I have dealt with the aftermath of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, again, like, because it wasn’t in the finished area of the house, this leak could have been so much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thank God it was not in the finished area, but even just dealing with a storage area leak,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not that destructive, I am not only incredibly happy that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had these sensors, but I’m adding more and I’m definitely getting the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, water main automatic shutoff thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And also when I left the house today, I just turned the water main off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you empty the water lines as best you could as well? Because people will ask you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just like the down… I wasn’t sure… So, okay. So I turned the water… I was in kind of a rush. I turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the water main off and I went up to the upstairs… I went up to the first level sinks and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just opened the cold water until it stopped running. But I also… I’m like, am I going to burn out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my hot water tank by doing this? because if the hot water tank loses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water and it’s still on then the top heating element can burn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself out and I decided so what I did I also just turned off the input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and output valve to the hot water tank so I kind of just locked the water in it whatever was already there and also the hot water tank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being replaced next week so I figured that probably doesn’t matter because it was pretty but pretty badly damaged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was already near it’s it near the end of its life but I figured I’d ask the plumber that when he replaces it next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. I’m like, Hey, by the way, did I burn it out? Or, you know, did I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right thing here? Um, but anyway, there, and we’ve already heard from a few people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are responding saying that either Yolink or there’s also, there’s a Moen, uh, uh, automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main turnoff thing that a few listeners have written in to say like these things basically have saved people’s bacon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot already. Um, and so we can strongly recommend having,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having some kind of like water leak sensing ability and, uh, Definitely look into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the automatic main shutoff things too.
Lucid?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, before we do follow up, John, you had an announcement you’d like to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, obviously live listeners know this, but we are recording this episode early due to school vacation
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons. So if something dramatic happens before you’re listening to this episode, but after
⏹️ ▶️ John we record it, like, why aren’t they talking about the new M5 Max MacBook Pros? It’s because at the time of recording,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t exist. So hopefully nothing will happen and this episode will be fine. But because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John there, you know, so many things are imminent and coming soon from Apple in this spring period of time
⏹️ ▶️ John we find ourselves in. We don’t know when it’s going to happen. If it so happens that Apple releases something while
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re after we record this, but before we record the next episode. That’s why we apologize. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get them next time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right. Last after show, we talked about me looking at cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m getting the seven year itch and we talked about a whole bunch of options. I actually intended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. This happens to me so often I need to take better notes, but I intended to bring up another option that I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgot about and one that I knew would peak John’s interest. And a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people wrote in about this. John, you probably said something to me. I don’t remember what was the first thing that happened or maybe I just remembered, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or the other, I should have brought up Lucid Air because Lucid Air is like 150 grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that brand new, but they’re astonishingly affordable right now if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go used. And there’s one in Richmond that I kind of sort of have my eye on that’s something around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $45,000, $50,000, so cheaper than the Ticons I was looking at. The Lucid Air is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very big, and John has done a little bit of research, which I will let you talk about in just a moment. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like the idea of the Lucid Air. It seems to be doing everything the way I would want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in terms of like car play, and a lot of the switch gear looks like it’s made smartly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do a lot, I can’t think of particular examples, but it just seems like my kind of car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, after my BMW experience, you know, with that car being a disaster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and being a little reluctant about going back to, you know, German super performance car, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t imagine going to like a boutique, very young car company with, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe any particular local presence would be a good choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. Like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened? Like do you, do you have a local service center? Do you trust the brand to be around in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s exactly, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are big questions. And with Lucid, I mean, obviously, I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first Rivian SUV, but first of all, that wasn’t even the first Rivian vehicle. And second of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, that was with Rivian already having their deal with Amazon, with all their fleet vehicles and everything, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were building out service centers. And I still had problems with that vehicle being a version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of its model line and still a relatively young company with too little service infrastructure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I was operating with an order of magnitude better service infrastructure than what you’d be operating at with Lucid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I just looked it up. The nearest place for Lucid is exactly where you would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be. It is in Tyson’s Corner, which is the mega shopping conglomerate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where the original Apple Store opened. So a couple hours north of here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Couple hours. Yeah, that’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you’re looking for a vehicle that is unlikely to generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very expensive or very big pain in the butt service issues for you down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not go for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anything about their service record. It isn’t about that. It’s just about the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the company and the size of their infrastructure and the likelihood they’ll still be here in seven years, I don’t think is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But John, you had done a little bit of research, despite what the song says, about the differences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the Air and the Taycan. Would you like to run through
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t bring it up just because it seemed like you were looking for a sporty car and I wouldn’t call the Lucid Air a sporty car. It’s more of just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big, nice sedan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, but it is astonishingly, absurdly, physics-bendingly fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Which would make me
⏹️ ▶️ John happy. Like any EV, but you’re not going to get the Sapphire one for 45 grand. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the air is actually only about a half an inch longer than the Taycan, but it’s one inch narrower.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for that amount of space, you just get so much more space in the actual car. So cargo room
⏹️ ▶️ John is 32 cubic feet versus 60 in the Taycan. So it’s double the
⏹️ ▶️ John storage space. And the rear seat, I could not find good numbers on it. But having sat in both rear seats, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you the rear seat of the Air is much, much, much, much larger than the rear seat of the Taycan.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like, you know, if the nearest service center is multiple hours away, it’s probably not the car
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because unlike, for example, if you’ve got like, well, who cares? You don’t need the service center. You can just take it anywhere. That’s true if you get a used
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW, you can just find a local garage. But for a very rare EV,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t just assume you can take it to the local garage and they’ll know what the heck you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I couldn’t agree more. But yeah, I don’t know. I might go test drive it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, you totally should.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t think I would ever in a million years buy it. And follow up with regard to the Taycan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically, I still am 95% convinced that it is not the car for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. However, the salesperson, the dealer, emailed me earlier today and was like, hey, what are you thinking? And I was like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was really disappointed with the transmission, but that might be a me problem. And I’m still worried about the garage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’d spoken to her about when I was with her. Um, you know, is there any chance you could give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to me for like a couple hours or overnight or something like that? And, and she came back almost immediately and said, absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me when. And so I think what I’m going to do is sometime next week, I’m not sure specifically when it might not be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we air or before we record next week, but at some point next week, I plan to steal the car for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours, give it a proper run through and see if I can convince myself that the transmission is livable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just want to know. I just want to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like, why are you trying so hard to make a car work? That’s not working.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to get a fair assessment of it. If he was just exciting that he changed that, made the car unappealing and something,
⏹️ ▶️ John he turns it on and it’s appealing, you know, I mean, he’s going to get it. It’s just also true. It’s just a fun thing to do. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the same reason I’m telling the test drive cars that he’s never going to buy. It’s just a fun thing to do.
Non-Chrome Chromes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along. Marco’s moved to Chrome. Sarvaganan writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check out the Helium browser, which is Chromium, but with all the Google stuff stripped out. It also has the bang syntax
⏹️ ▶️ Casey built in. That’s the exclamation mark A for Amazon, for example, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about a couple of weeks ago. If you just want the bang shortcut syntax, you can use the undock.link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website. And that’s also a super fast option. The only thing with this, like this is a very good recommendation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you wanted Google out of your life. But I thought you kind of wanted Google in your life, given that you’re using like Gemini and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so there’s a reason why I don’t really want that kind of option. Number one is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, I basically do just want Google in my life right now, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is more, we’re not talking about AI, this episode, we’re doing great so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we’ve gotten a lot of feedback of like, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet another Chrome-based or Chromium-based browser, why don’t you use this instead?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have used Chromium-based browsers over the years. I used Brave for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never as my primary, but I always wanted to keep a Chrome-based browser around for compatibility stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sites that required it. And I always found those browsers to be not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only more of a pain in the butt, but overall, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better experience than using Chrome. It was more of a sidestep. Like some things would be better, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things would be worse. I’ve never really been that impressed by them. And in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my giving in to Google, I’m both seeking, you know, Google’s direct services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, as I was saying with Gemini, but also I want there to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as few, like, pain in the butt problems as possible. I don’t want a single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incompatibility. I don’t want a single piece of additional friction. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I used a non-Chrome, Chrome-based browser, I would have occasional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bits of additional friction. Something wouldn’t work right, or something would bother me, or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would need to be updated in some weird way. And regular Chrome just has never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t the first time I’ve used regular Chrome. Like I used to have it installed for many years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I kind of know what I’m in for with Chrome. I actually don’t see all those alternative browsers as being a better
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the year of basic and helium is not basic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Bye-bye.
Tahoe window-resizing “update”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to windows resizing in Tahoe, what’s the recap on this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the thing where the edges are super rounded and you can’t actually resize by the edges?
⏹️ ▶️ John they made the corners of the windows much more rounded in Tahoe, but they didn’t move the
⏹️ ▶️ John area of the imaginary rectangular window that you click on to resize
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so the resize, the clickable resize area is increasingly incongruous
⏹️ ▶️ John with the actual outline of the window in Tahoe. And there was a whole bunch of complaints about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right-o. So, Jeff Johnson noted that in the macOS Tahoe 26.3 RC release notes, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a section AppKit, a section Resolved Issues, in which it says, Window Resize Areas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now Follow Corner Radius Instead of Using Square Regions. Then later in the 26.3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release, Norbert Hager, who is the co-founder of Objective Development and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer of LaunchBar and little snitch notes, the release notes have been updated. The problem went from a quote resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue quote to a quote known issue quote. And there’s a little bit of discussion about that, including a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trick sample app that Norbert wrote that you should see like a little gif.
⏹️ ▶️ John So basically, in the RC, they’re like, we fixed it. And then in the release, they’re like, just kidding. It’s back to exactly how it was
⏹️ ▶️ John before. So I don’t know if the if the fix I mean, I was all ready to say in this section, you know, I had this whole big
⏹️ ▶️ John spiel about I can kind of understand why they didn’t change the resize region, because moving that region could potentially mess with content
⏹️ ▶️ John in people’s windows and and potentially break apps by making certain things in the window unclickable
⏹️ ▶️ John because they used to not be under the resize area, but now they are because Apple moved it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I could understand why they wouldn’t want to do that. But then it was RSC, it’s like, well, they moved it. So I guess that was a compatibility problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they released, they undid that change. So maybe it was a compatibility problem. Who knows? But yeah, the app
⏹️ ▶️ John that Norbar made is really cool. Like it basically just moves the cursor across the things in like an automated way and maps
⏹️ ▶️ John out a pixel at a time exactly where the resize regions are and then visualizes them. So please do follow this link
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes. Norbert was the person who first posted about this, by the way. We just had to, I didn’t have all this info
⏹️ ▶️ John on him at the time. So anyways, a well-known developer, but just not known to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but very cool work, Very cool app and very cool visualization of the problem in Tahoe.
AirTag 2 tampering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirTags too. There’s been a lot of conversation about whether or not it’s easier to tamper with them, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey removing the speaker, which I guess dirtbags want to do in order to track people and not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them alerted. iFixit did a teardown and a video about it. It’s very short. We’ll put a link in the show notes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they found basically no improvement. It was still pretty trivial to disable the speaker if you have physical access to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the AirTag. Sad trombone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Again, I don’t know. I’m not sure there’s anything you can really do in that scenario unless you like seal the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and encase it in carbonite or whatever, or you can’t actually get any of the parts like seal it into,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know, I guess if the if the battery, you can get the battery and then the rest of it could be encased
⏹️ ▶️ John in acrylic or something. I mean, I can imagine solutions, but it’s tricky. But anyway, it’s not it’s not tricky all of these
⏹️ ▶️ John things, you just open it up and snap the wires to the speaker and you’re done.
Sponsor: Zapier
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Cloudflare auth feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to your journey with Cloudflare and restricting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to stuff, you were talking I think about your vibe coded, we’re still not talking about AI, your vibe coded
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco status board.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re doing a great job. So far I’m batting a thousand, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey two are doing terribly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your vibe coded status board and we actually had George Black write in and say, I work on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the access team here at Cloudflare. While access falls under our zero trust umbrella of enterprise products, it actually works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great as a standalone service for securing personal web apps. This is how a lot of people use the service. I think you’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it surprisingly easy to set up. It takes just a few clicks in the dashboard, no need to install or configure anything on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your machine. I made a quick video tutorial for John in case he’s interested. This was like a 10 minute video, which I watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and was riveted by. George did a great job explaining it. And if you’re interested in this sort of thing, it’s very much
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, very cool. Still isn’t really what I’m looking for, but it’s good to know that it’s there and
⏹️ ▶️ John setting it up is very easy and does not actually require you to get like an open ID connect server or do any
⏹️ ▶️ John weird VPN stuff or whatever. It’s basically just clicking around, like so many things. It’s basically like clicking around in the
⏹️ ▶️ John CloudFlare dashboard a little bit to get things set up and then you’re off to the races. So check out the video. Even though
⏹️ ▶️ John the video is like personally, directly addressing me by name, which is weird, check it out, just pretend your name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, that’s great.
Fastmail ❤️ Perl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In other news, you moved to FastMail, which I believe we talked about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? We did. Okay, right. Okay, good. And FastMail just tweeted recently posted on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mastodon, why don’t you hear about Pearl in the headlines? Because it works and keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working. Something the best technology is sometimes the best technology is the most boring. And this is relevant because FastMail has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey donated 10,000 American dollar-y-doos to the Pearl in Raku Foundation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Raku? Raku? What the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hell is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say Raku. Okay. What is that? Sounds like a Star Wars planet. Uh, that’s, uh, the, the artist formerly known
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They renamed the entire freaking version to a new
⏹️ ▶️ John a long, sad story. What’s the short short? The short short is,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Pearl Six was taking a really long time and it was, uh, because it had the name Pearl and the number one bigger than Pearl
⏹️ ▶️ John Five, it was kind of like stealing all of Pearl Five’s thunder and Pearl Five wanted to go
⏹️ ▶️ John ahead, but it felt like it couldn’t go anywhere because who’s going to pay attention to Pearl Five when Pearl Six exists? And they solved the problem by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Guess what? Pearl six is now they just switched to like their code name, right? It’s like when you get a pet with like a
⏹️ ▶️ John name you think you’re going to change and you don’t change it anyway. So now profile was free to go forward with the pearl name
⏹️ ▶️ John and advance itself without everybody saying why are you working on that? Isn’t it dead? Pearl six is going to replace it now when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John called Pearl and Raku. No one thinks that anymore. Not that it’s really particularly relevant. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the best summary I can give. It’s way more complicated and drama filled than that as as these things always are.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Anyway, yeah, the foundation supports both of them. So that’s why it’s not just the Pearl
⏹️ ▶️ John Foundation. It’s the Pearl and Raku Foundation.
⏹️ ▶️ John are you using for your projects? Just plain old Pearl, Pearl 5, which has continued to
⏹️ ▶️ John advance and does lots of things. And yeah, whenever I see someone writing Pearl code and I look at it and I’m like, that
⏹️ ▶️ John Pearl code has been frozen in amber since the 90s, Pearl has actually advanced as a language and has new
⏹️ ▶️ John features and Raku also exists, which is mostly being ignored by almost everybody, including me, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Pearl 5 is still out there and I’m glad seeing FastMail donate to it. And why would they be donating to it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on, I’m not done interrogating you yet. Is there anything that Raku, whatever it’s called,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brings to the table that you’re enthusiastic about?
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s got lots of really cool features as a language. I mean, I used to talk about it a lot in the show when Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John was being developed, I talked about it a lot because Swift actually takes a lot of ideas from both Perl 5 and Perl 6, and what was formerly
⏹️ ▶️ John known as Perl 6. Raku’s got tons of great ideas. The problem is it doesn’t really have like a
⏹️ ▶️ John solid implementation and community and everything. like all the other sort of ecosystem things surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And part of the promise of Perl 6 to me has always been in my mind that
⏹️ ▶️ John due to all the advancements in the language, it should also have higher performance and lower memory overhead and all these great things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that has not materialized either. So it’s mostly just a, it’s not a curiosity, but it’s like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a lesser used language with lots of very interesting features without like a bulletproof
⏹️ ▶️ John production implementation that tons of people are banging on all the time. So I’m not sure what the future holds for RACU. very
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting language from a language design perspective. Lots of ideas that every other language should steal, but I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it has the community or the time and implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of even Perl 5, let alone all the other more modern languages, to show that it is production ready
⏹️ ▶️ John and substantially better than its predecessor when it comes down to just running all the time on a server or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Well, I appreciate it. Remember, we’re not running long tonight. Anyway, Fastmail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey donated 10 grand to the Pearl and Raku Foundation. Reading from the Pearl.com post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. Pearl has served us quite well since, oh, I’m sorry, let me back up a half step. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the Pearl.com post, but this is a quote from Ricardo Cignes, who is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey director and chief developer experience officer at Fastmail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, former pumpkin of the Pearl programming language. If you don’t know what that is, you can look it up. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the thing. The Pearl connections run deep at FastMail is what I’m saying. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Ricardo says, Pearl has served us quite well since FastMail’s inception. We’ve built up a large code base that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continued to work, grow and improve over 20 years. We’ve stuck with Pearl because Pearl stuck with us. It kept working and growing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and improving. And we very rarely did those improvements require us to stop the world and adapt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to onerous changes. We know that kind of stability is in part a function of the developers of Pearl, whose time is spent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figuring out how to make Pearl better without also making it worse. The money we give towards these efforts is well spent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it keeps the improvements coming in the language reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re very, there’s a very strong sort of backwards compatibility culture in Pearl to a fault where like I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John there was just this huge debate years ago over removing EBCDIC support, which I’m pronouncing in a weird way.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I’m talking about though? Like the thing, the thing that’s not ASCII for encoding letters as a bunch of numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John EBCDIC, something like that. Anyway, we’re like, can we remove that from the language? Is anybody still
⏹️ ▶️ John using it? It’s like, what, what century or what, where are we? What’s going on? That’s, that’s the kind kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of dedication that the backward compatibility and then of course, Perl 0.6 overshadowing, it was just making it so it was difficult to advance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, now with that out of the way, slowly, steadily, carefully, always with very
⏹️ ▶️ John careful backward compatibility, Perl 5 has been advancing. Um, and that’s great for a reduction system, uh, because
⏹️ ▶️ John new versions of the language will fix bugs and have better performance and add new features, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not break your existing application.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, also, if you were interested in throwing John a little affiliate revenue, And if you’re interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Fastmail, which you should be, I don’t recall if they’ve ever sponsored the show, but certainly they get our okie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dokie. Where is your referral link, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald, HIPERCRITICAL.COM It’s HYPERCRITICAL.CO slash Fastmail. Now link will be in the show notes.
Another purchase-migration failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have yet another sob story, horror story about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing purchase migration with your Apple account. Nick writes that I purchased Final Cut Pro for 500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Australian dollars and Logic Pro for 300 bucks on a secondary Apple ID. I chose to migrate the purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my primary Apple ID because I was sick of having to sign in and out of the App Store to update the software. Since Apple made it possible to migrate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchases, I thought this was a perfect opportunity. Oh, how wrong I was. Turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out migrating purchases simply allows the new account to access these purchases, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the licenses remain with the previous account. So when I deleted the old account, the purchases went with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple told me that because the purchases were linked to the old account that was deleted, there was nothing they could do. Apparently migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t migration at all. Seems like a useless feature to me, yet still totally an Apple thing to do. Can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confirm. Yes, I am aware now that it does say that if the secondary account is deleted, the purchases go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it in the Apple Knowledge Base. We’ll put that link in the show notes. But I was unaware of that at the time, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably forgot as I deleted the secondary account about a month later. Though this still doesn’t negate the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that migration implies a migration and not simply sharing the purchases. Maybe they should call it purchase sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John I had no idea this existed either. Uh, and I would never assume that it did. And I feel bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just boy, how many ways can they mess up these features? Like a lot of those stories like, Oh, I tried to do it and there
⏹️ ▶️ John was weird bugs and nobody could figure it out. But this is not a bug. This is how the feature works.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think anyone would ever guess if you describe the purchase migration feature at a high level or just hear
⏹️ ▶️ John the name that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John migrate the purchases, it just lets you use them. And if you ever delete the old Apple ID, which of course you wanna do, like the whole point of
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase migration is like, let me consolidate my life and get rid of that old stuff. And now I’ll just delete that so I don’t have to worry about it. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John that will take away all your purchases. And as usual, for with stories where someone doesn’t have a mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John to quote unquote run to the press, Apple just can’t help at all. There was more to the story, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Well, no, we can’t help you with your, whatever it was, $800 worth of software you bought from us. You’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John SOL, sorry. But hey, you want to get a free accessory from the Apple store, which was the same thing they sent to me, it’s probably their big go-to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Nick was like, sure, I’ll take this. And they’re like, no, that’s too expensive. Now you get nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Great, just terrible customer service, terrible feature. Be really careful. There’s a reason whenever these things come
⏹️ ▶️ John up, I’m always so cynical about it. I’m like, yeah, Apple says they have this feature, but anything having to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs or warranties or whatever, be cautious. Because historically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John these features have not been implemented well. And because they’re a big corporation, there’s often very little recourse
⏹️ ▶️ John to get things resolved.
YouTube now on Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have some semi-breaking news. I think it was either earlier today or perhaps yesterday that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube is now available as a native app on the Apple Vision Pro. You get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much full YouTube client. In addition, you can use in a different tab, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get spatial videos as well as 3D, VR 180, and 360 videos. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is genuinely very exciting. It was an extreme omission to not have YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Netflix on the platform when it launched and hadn’t been until, well, at least YouTube hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been until a day or two ago. I haven’t had the chance to plug in my Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last couple of days. I did want to try this before recording, but I was running around like a crazy person today. But my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it’s mostly pretty good. I think the only major complaint that I’ve heard, I think I’d seen on Andrew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edwards’ Instagram or something like that, that you can’t download videos, which is kind of a bummer. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than that, I guess it’s pretty good. John, have you had a chance to try this yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John out. I mean, it seems fine. It’s basically like what you would expect, a very minimal official
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube client. I never tried Juno, the one from- That was very good. Christian Selig, they got
⏹️ ▶️ John booted off the app store because Google was like, no, only we can make a YouTube app, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad they eventually did, but you know, the app seems very basic and bare bones. I did go to the spatial
⏹️ ▶️ John tab and the content there is not suitable for Vision Pro. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very low resolution, blurry. I don’t know if any of it is actually even stereoscopic.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is not impressive. So don’t expect you’re going to get the YouTube app and like finally this world, because they’re all labeled with their
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbnails that say 16K 360 whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a gigantic blurry mess. Anyway, that’s not the fault of the client.
⏹️ ▶️ John All I’m saying is that Vision Pro content is not really available in any capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John that I could find on YouTube. So you’re still stuck going back to the TV app, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John own TV app, and looking at the very limited selection of stuff they have there. And my question about this, like why
⏹️ ▶️ John now? I’m wondering if this is part of the whole deal between Apple and Google to license
⏹️ ▶️ John the Gemini stuff, or is it just a happy coincidence that they finally relented and released a bare bones
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube client for Vision Pro? Who knows, nobody’s saying, but I’m glad it exists because it was silly that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it would be wild. I do not think this is the case, but it would be wild if like maybe the terms of the Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal where, well, you have to put YouTube on the Vision Pro and they’re like, no, we don’t want to bother with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Apple says, well, what if we wrote the app? Because isn’t that what they did for Google Maps?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, they used to do that for all the things like Apple provided the Google, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John provided the map tiles, but then Apple wrote the app and the original YouTube app on the iPhone was an Apple app as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’re saying the same thing. So can you imagine if they were like, fine, we’ll do it. Just let us do it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple would have done a little bit of a better job. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad app, it just seems very kind of, it’s very basic, not, there’s not much to it. and
⏹️ ▶️ John the little player overlay thing that goes in the bottom of the window did not look appley to me. Like I felt like
⏹️ ▶️ John the distribution of white space was unharmonious in a way that I detected. Who knows? It just didn’t seem appley to
⏹️ ▶️ John me. I think Google did this one, but who knows.
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Studio Display 90 Hz rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Apple Studio Display 2 is rumored to have a 90 kilohertz refresh rate instead of 120
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hertz. I just said kilohertz. A 90 hertz refresh rate instead of 120 hertz. My bad. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading from Mac Rumors in November 2024, an anonymous listener of the Relay FM Tech Podcast Upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey claimed that Apple was developing a 90 hertz display technology that could be used for the next studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, as well as future iPad Air and iMac models. Now a Mac rumors tipster has backed up that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey claim based on alleged information from an internal build of iOS 26 that was leaked online. Indeed, they believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next studio display is likely to max out at 90Hz rather than 120Hz. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tipster believes that a 90Hz refresh rate would make sense due to bandwidth considerations. Thunderbolt 5 can support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K resolution at 120Hz without any compression, but they think Apple likely wants to ensure that there will be plenty of remaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bandwidth for connecting other devices and peripherals to the new studio display. The rumor still warrants some skepticism.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The internal iOS 26 build that Tipster cited is from early 2025. So Apple’s plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may have changed since then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not to argue with this Tipster’s logic here, like yeah, you can reduce bandwidth by lowering the refresh rate, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John only have one monitor connected, just run it, use all the bandwidth. Like you’re the only monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John connected. I want 120 Hertz. I really hope this is not true because like how many years have we waited
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to finally break the 60 Hertz barrier on its desktop displays? It’s just, 120
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like, it’s not rocket science. It’s been on all their dinky little phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s on the Macs, the iPads, it’s table stakes. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are they doing? Like, is there some kind of differentiation? I’d be like, okay, well, the studio displays
⏹️ ▶️ John for $1,600 can only go to 90 Hertz. But if you want 120 Hertz, you have to buy the Pro Display XDR2 for $7,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t give them ideas. Don’t give them ideas, please. You can get it, as we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John can get like a PC gaming display. It does like 400 Hertz for, you know, $800, like half
⏹️ ▶️ John the price of these things. It’s ridiculous. So I really hope this is not true. Not because 90 Hertz is
⏹️ ▶️ John so bad, but it’s like under 20 Hertz is better. Macs already have 120 Hertz, just
⏹️ ▶️ John like the laptops, the good laptops. For the desktops, which we know are just never updated,
⏹️ ▶️ John to not get 120 Hertz, like, okay, well I guess I’ll go back to sleep for another eight years and wait for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John finally get to 120 Hertz. It’s ridiculous. Please let this not be true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was chit chatting with underscore. We, we did our monthly FaceTime earlier this week and he was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about his XDR and pointed out to me that that thing is like eight years old or something like that. I forget exactly what we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concluded, but it is astonishingly old. The given, given the fact that it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me like it was, Oh, that’s what it was. We, we realized that, um, we had seen the launch at WWDC 2019
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we had gone across the street from the McHenry or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was to that like concert venue or whatever. I forget exactly what it was called, but then they had like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro display sec, like walkthrough museum sort of a situation where they showed you like, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac pro doing a billion different instruments. And like they had the Toy Story four like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a carnival area being rendered on a Mac pro against a pro display XDR and stuff like that. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s 2019 if I’m not mistaken.
TSMC process rumors for iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s another rumor from MacRumors, Hartley Charlton at MacRumors writes, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is expected to use TSMC’s base 2nm N2 process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than the newer N2P variant for its upcoming A20 and M6 chips, according to the China Times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TSMC previously said that its base N2 process would enter mass production in 2026, followed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by enhanced variants including N2P and A16 in the second half of the year. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pause here for a second and just really applaud for the just massive namespace pollution
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC naming its next process A16. Oh, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John That won’t be confusing at all. Not good. Especially since what are the Intel ones called? Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they have names with A in them?
⏹️ ▶️ John remember. No, those are called like 18A. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they have 18A. But this is A16, which is going to be used to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the A21 processor, but it follows N2P.
⏹️ ▶️ John Guys, guys, let’s get together on this, please. They should name Sony headphones. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John These are short, but that’s the problem. Everyone wants to call their thing A and then a very short number, but like coordinate, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from Hartley, N2P is positioned as a higher performance version of N2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while A16 is designed for high power and high complexity chips, particularly for AI applications,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn it, and data centers. The performance difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N2 and N2P is expected to be modest. N2P offers roughly a 5% performance gain at the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power level, but comes at a higher manufacturing cost, which helps explain why Apple is expected to remain on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N2 for its A and M series chips this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit weird because the whole deal with Apple’s last several rounds
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple would pay through the nose for the very most expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John process that no one else wanted to pay for simply because they had to have the very best of the best for their phones. I
⏹️ ▶️ John forget the last time they did that. I was like the three nanometer one where they I have already forgotten the names. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John the original M3, no M3B or something. I’ve forgotten. See past episodes of the show. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple paid for the one that nobody else wanted to use because the yields were just not good. So it was so expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like, look, if you want if you want to have these three nanometer chips ready for your phones, you know, you’ve designed
⏹️ ▶️ John them around the idea these are going to come. You just gonna have to pay through the nose and they bought up like all the capacity of that and as soon
⏹️ ▶️ John as Apple was done with that they just never used that process. Well actually I think they did for some of the later M series but the point is it
⏹️ ▶️ John was expensive and Apple paid for it and now this is a more frugal Apple saying
⏹️ ▶️ John do we need the most expensive fanciest one or can we just go with the cheaper one. It also may
⏹️ ▶️ John be because they have to make literally millions and millions of iPhones and they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make millions and millions of them on N2P so they have to go with the cheaper one but it’s either unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ John timing or Apple being wisely frugal because honestly I’m sure it’ll be fine either way like it’ll be a jump
⏹️ ▶️ John from the 3 nanometer node either way and it’ll leave the door open for them to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John better N2 and A whatever processes for their later chips.
Maybe no M5 Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we mentioned at the beginning of our 30 minute, but don’t worry, it’s a short day today, pre-show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we weren’t going to be, or that we didn’t know of any M5 MacBook Pros or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we wanted to focus specifically on some interesting rumors with regard to the M5 Pro, the chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there may not be an M5 Pro chip at all. So reading from Julie Clover at MacRumors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iOS 26.3 release candidate includes references to a pair of of unreleased chips that are in the M5 family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to information found by Nicholas Alvarez. Chip one in the beta is T6051, T6051H17C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we believe to be the M5 Max. Chip two in the beta is 6052H17D,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is assumed to be the M5 Ultra, but not mentioned in the beta is the T6050H17S or M5 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not clear why we’re only seeing signs of an M5 Max and M5 Ultra chip, but rumors suggest that the new MacBook Pro models with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey higher end M5 chips are set to launch in the next few weeks. Now Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, a new report suggests that the M5 Pro and M5 Max might not be two distinct chips, but rather variants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the same one. So with that in mind, 9to5Mac back in December of 2024, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this past December, but the one prior, writes the M5 Pro Max and Ultra will use a 2.5D packaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called SOICMH, or molding horizontal to improve production
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yields and thermal performance, featuring separate CPU and GPU designs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally, Vadim Yuryev, who is the host of the Max Tech YouTube channel, tweeted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just figured out why Apple’s M5 Pro chip did not show up in the recent beta code leak. Apple is using the new 2.5D chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tech, allowing them to use a single M5 Max chip design for both the M5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro and M5 Max models. This saves Apple lots of money on SKUs and design.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if Vadim has any inside info or if it’s just spinning fantastical ideas. But I thought this
⏹️ ▶️ John was very interesting. First, to rewind to the chip code names, we talked about this on a past episode, but
⏹️ ▶️ John these numbers have been very consistent. The H and the 17 and then the letters at the end.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that this MacRumor story has the list of code names and we linked to it at one point as well. But if you go back through time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what the offset is, but the H17 is the M5, H16 is the M4, H15 is the M3, like all the way back.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the letter suffixes have mostly been consistent. The Cs are the maxes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Ds are the ultra, but also I think that the ultra can sometimes be a G. The S has always been the pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, as they say in stocks or whatever, past performance is not necessarily an indication of future things. Apple can change the codenames
⏹️ ▶️ John at any time. But whether or not there’s gonna be an M5 Pro, there were only two chips
⏹️ ▶️ John listed here. And there should be three, because we expect there to be a Max, a Pro, and an Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not seeing, only seeing two chips and having the two existing ones look like they,
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the world, that they are the Max and the UltraCose names, where’s the Pro? We talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about like the 2.5D chip stacking thing and separating the CPU and GPU and the potential to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, finally divorce the CPU power from the GPU power to sort of mix and
⏹️ ▶️ John match in a way that hadn’t been possible before. I still don’t think that’s likely just because Apple doesn’t wanna have a million
⏹️ ▶️ John variants. They’re not gonna build to auto your CPU. They’re just gonna make a few variants they think are appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John for their machines. But maybe it means they’re having second thoughts about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pro chip where it lies in their product line. And historically, again, I wish I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John written down the details of this, but the Pro chip has been weird in many generations where sometimes it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Max with a little bit cut off. And other times it’s more like the base, no suffix chip
⏹️ ▶️ John with a little bit thrown on. And other times it’s been as weird middle ground. It’s been all over the place. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Apple doesn’t know if the pro chip has a place in it’s like, maybe, I mean, Apple would know and we wouldn’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe most MacBook Pro buyers buy the Max or they buy the base and a lot of people don’t buy the pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I find this more fascinating because of the new chip tech and how this might affect things. If, you know, Vadim’s
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of saying, oh, it’s the same chip or whatever. I think they would just call them by different names. Even if they mix and match a different CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and GPU combo, that’s basically an M5 Pro. Or it could just be that this build didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the code name in it because the other two leaked and there was an if def that got missed somewhere. Like, who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows, but this is making me even more interested in what these chips are gonna look like. If there really is no pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John I personally would be fine with that because all I care about is like the high-end and low-end chips, but I wonder if like Mac mini owners and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like, hey, I kind of liked the pro because it was a nice happy medium between paying through the nose for the Macs or getting the base chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found like, you know, as I’ve looked at different, you know, Macs over the, you know, since the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon transition and as I’ve been making buying decisions, I have never found the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be quite what I’m looking for, because it does end up costing a significant amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than the base chip, but it doesn’t have all of the high capacity support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the highest performance of the Max. And I have found that like with the Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least in the current lineup, like in the M4 lineup, which I know we’re kind of split now, we have some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M5 lineup, but in the M4 lineup, the base M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got so good that I think it left very little reason for the pro to exist. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually look at like performance per dollar, the base m4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really great value and the pro really is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It like it does not scale up that well to to you know performance per dollar as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go up that list. And the max serves the role of like I need big resource
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support, I need all the ports, all the bandwidth, you know, whatever it, you know, whatever that is. The Max serves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that role. Big GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Pro, it kind of sits in the middle of those and you end up paying a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more for only some of those benefits. And I don’t think that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a strong selling proposition with the current lineup. But as you mentioned though, past generations of Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the M4 have been very different from each other. Like the M1 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very different from the M2 Pro and they’ve had different core counts and different balances
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Pro was basically an M1 Max with a little bit cut off, like literally.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They just went
⏹️ ▶️ John snip, snip, snip, snip, cut off some GPU cores, M1 Pro. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so close to the Max. Yeah, and then was it the M3 Pro that had the really weird proportion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of P to E cores that was unlike everything else? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it had more efficiency cores and it was this whole big custom design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems like they’re doing, It doesn’t seem like making a custom design for the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is necessarily worth it. And I think by having the base chips,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular M chips get pushed up in performance so much, again, like look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M4 compared to the M4 Pro and M4 Max. The M4 really stands out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a really great bang for the buck compared to the other two. And also I wonder if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might play in a little bit to the rumored upcoming less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook that is rumored to have an A series phone chip as its CPU. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder if maybe the regular M chip, the M4, M5, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be actually being elevated upwards in the product line too, that maybe we’re gonna start seeing more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very low-end products using the A series chips from the phone, even in the Mac line. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M chip is actually more of a mid-range thing. And then you have the M Max chip as the high-end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the M Ultra for the one that they very occasionally make for the products they forgot about.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should just rename the plain old M6 chip to just be M6 Pro and there is no no suffix M6. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, who knows, they might. From a marketing perspective, like why not? Cause I agree with you. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John the low end laptop is successful with the phone chip in it, they’re gonna do more of that. And it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. Like I think it’s a good idea, right? I think that’s a product is a good idea. And I think that strategy is a good idea. I think the naming is a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit weird with it being an A series chip and confusing people. So they might need to work that out, but like you can fix
⏹️ ▶️ John naming, right? So if they don’t wanna make the Pro anymore, just call the base M6, M6 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like just do it. Like- Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think that’s necessarily neat. I mean, the reality is these M chips have gotten a reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well-deserved for being really strong performers. So maybe the M chip doesn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same M naming line to cover the entire product line anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Aren’t you glad that they didn’t do a BMW thing when they first laid out this line and just have like year after
⏹️ ▶️ John year, they would have, you know, the M3, the M5, the M7, occasionally the
⏹️ ▶️ John M8, like every year they would have that and we had to put year suffixes on them. Like I’m proud of them for
⏹️ ▶️ John sticking with a letter and a number and then each time they make a new line of chips increasing the number, like good job Apple. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was hard to figure that out after a few decades, but they figured it out. But I do wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re gonna, they can’t help stop sabotaging with the A-series chips and Macs, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John M-series chips and iPads, right? We had it, it was all clean, everything was worked out, but now what does What does the
⏹️ ▶️ John M stand for my pad?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean it’s also possible that you know if this if the rumored you know less expensive MacBook using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone class chip is true. It’s also possible they might not call it the A17 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be they might call it maybe they’d call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it like the M0. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe it’d be like you know the the M5 Express. You know who knows like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They would just call it the M5 Air and then that would be confusing with the M powered iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air and the MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SE hasn’t been used for chips either. I don’t know. Oh, SE is good. The M5 SE.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like, you know, they didn’t want to call the ultra wideband chip the U2. They did like once or twice, but now they’re back to not calling it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway, they, I think they have a lot of options here for naming, but regardless, I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the base M series chip is no longer a low end chip. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of never was performance wise, but it’s really a very solid mid-range chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by most measures. And so for them to elevate that, I think that that’s actually reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a lot of these recent reviews I’ve been reading of the latest releases from Intel and AMD for their laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, Panther Lake or whatever thing, they come up with like, it’s finally, they
⏹️ ▶️ John got a good chip, it’s made on a good process or whatever, and here are the benchmarks and they show all these graphs or whatever, and you’re watching like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel’s really doing well. Until you realize every single one of the graphs against the base M4. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple makes other chips
⏹️ ▶️ John like other chips that are in laptops. Like it’s not like it’s it’s not a fair fight. You can’t put it up
⏹️ ▶️ John against an M5 Ultra or something like no, just just, you know, the other laptop chips like so that
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the industry is so proud when they have a chip that performs better
⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple’s base M4. They’re like so happy. It’s like victory lap,
⏹️ ▶️ John parade, you know, party parades down the streets. and it’s like you beat their lowest end membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because the base M4 is awesome. Like that’s what I have in my travel laptop and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s amazing. Like I have never really needed more grunt out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that for those needs. And that includes oftentimes using Xcode and making apps. I mean, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see what’s the thing that we’re not talking about, if that ends up ramping up the demand for local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources. But actually if you do a lot of cloud-based things which we’re not talking about, which most of them are so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually might reduce the need for local processing power. So we’ll see how this all shakes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, the M4 is awesome. And I haven’t had any time to play with the M5, but it is probably awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M5 is great as well. Solidly a middle class chip. It is not a low end chip at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I imagine the M6, once it gets the process transition to the 2 nanometer, is going to be even more impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John So look forward to that for your OLED laptop sometime supposedly within this calendar year, if the rumors are to be believed.
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#askatp: Generators, solar/batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Want to do some Ask ATP? We haven’t done that in a while. Yeah, it’s built up. We have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alan Scholl writes, the recent winter storm has me seriously thinking about whole house generators and batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I remember correctly, Casey uses a gas generator and Marco has installed rooftop solar recently, so what’s best?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would it make sense to have a whole house battery backup without a solar installation? So let me talk about what I’ve got going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. For short outages, which let me back up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, it’s very rare for us to lose power here. Very, very rare used to happen all the time. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think there were some overground power lines that were running through some trees and the power company cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the trees back a lot. And now it’s been very unusual for us to lose power. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we were to lose power, and if it was only for a few hours, especially if it’s a like a weather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey event, so I know that it’s coming, then I’ll take that tailgate battery that we use. So this is something that I got inspired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy from Jason Snell. It’s a, I don’t know, like 15 pound battery pack that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of AC outlets on it, a couple of USB-C outlets on it, et cetera. And that’s enough to run the fridge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never tried it, but based on like power draw specifications, I expect I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could run the fridge for probably a better part of a day, maybe even two on that thing. And I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also be a plug in a lamp or something like that. So for a short thing, if you only ever lose power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a little I’d say a portable battery pack might just do the trick. And this thing is like 200 or 300 bucks, maybe 400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the most right now. It’s, it’s reasonably, I mean, it’s a lot of money, but it’s reasonably affordable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but then on top of that, we have a very physically large, physically heavy, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerful, uh, gas generator that was figuratively speaking bequeathed to us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my parents. Um, what had happened was they live in an area where they do lose power a lot. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had this something like 5,000 Watts of stain, 7,000, 7,000 peak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gasoline generator. It’s a Honda inverter generator. So it produces like a near perfect sine wave, et cetera, et
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cetera. I would never have spent the like five grand that they spent on this thing 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago when it was new. But if they’re offering it to me for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell yeah. So that is in the garage and we have a generator interlock in the fuse box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth. So I haven’t ever tried this. And in fact, just this Monday when I went and drove the Tycon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost did a little experiment since I was the only one in the house. And I really want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try figuring out how much of the house I can run off that generator, because I think I can do darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near everything in the house. And maybe, maybe even one of the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HVAC systems in the house, if I turn on the natural gas heat, you know, we wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run AC, but if in the cold weather, I wonder if I forced the furnace to natural gas because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the heat pump I wonder if I might be able to run the furnace in emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heat mode, um, if we really got in a pinch, but worst case scenario, we could use like, uh, we could use a space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heater or something like that, but that’s my situation to answer Alan’s question. My personal opinion is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you can do rooftop solar with like a powerwall or equivalent or something like that, that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bestest answer because it, it, it serves you the most time, you know, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use that pretty much all year that pretty much all year round, but that is incredibly expensive, incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive. If you lose power constantly, then a generac, like a whole home generac or equivalent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is a really good idea. But if you just lose power occasionally, I would really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure out, you know, what is it you absolutely need to survive, a fridge or two, a couple of lights, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, and figure out if a small, like, tailgate generator or portable tailgate-style battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I have, would that be enough to sustain you for a day or two? Because doing a Generac, doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole home solar, even buying one of these large gasoline powered generators is a lot. And in the case of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the generator, like I have to start it every few months, I have to check the oil, you know, I have to make sure when I do start it, I run all the gas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of it, et cetera, et cetera. So it is a lot of work for something that I only ever use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once every few years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow. That was a really good answer. I’m going to… Hey, go team. you just said is very important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A generator is a lifestyle. Yeah. It like, like my, my in-laws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a generator. Whenever, whenever we’re visiting them, you know, if we happen to be visiting, I believe it’s like Wednesday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at noon, you know, like once a week it has to turn on and test itself. And so you want, it makes a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey noise. You’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a whole home generator, like a generac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Yes. Sorry. Yeah, exactly. Yes. It’s a whole thing. Like it’s a very physically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large thing. It’s a very loud thing if it’s ever needed to be running and it needs to run itself to test itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every so often. As Casey said, it’s a gas engine, you’ve got to maintain it like a gas engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a whole thing. Generators do have the advantage over solar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and batteries that, first of all, if you happen to have a gas pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your house from your town, if you have natural gas service, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that connected to that and then you kind of have an infinite supply. or asterisks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, but you effectively have an infinite supply so you don’t have to go buy fuel and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep a fuel tank and go refill it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, let me jump in really quickly. Something I didn’t consider about the freestanding gasoline generator that I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we had this real bad snowstorm, I got a burr up my butt that we were gonna lose power for 17 weeks. And so I filled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like, I think we have a five-gallon gas can and a two- or three-gallon gas can. I filled both those bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boys, because I’m like, I am going to be okay during this storm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be fine. to turn my garage into even more of a bomb. Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the thing of it is, though, in a normal summer season, we’ll go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe like three or four gallons of gas, and I now have like eight gallons of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gas sitting in my garage. So what am I going to do with the rest of it? I can stabilize it, I can run it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the generator for funsies or whatever. Like now I have a different problem. I mean, can you pour it into Aaron’s car?
⏹️ ▶️ John car never uses the gas engine. Put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in the golf.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, well, first of all, both our cars take premium. Second of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all, I’m too nerdy about-
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t get premium for the generator? No! Well, you should have thought about reusing it. Your car, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though your cars require premium, they’ll run on regular, right? Yeah, like trash. Also- Knock
⏹️ ▶️ John sensors, they’ll figure it out. Engine computers are smart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, and on top of that, I’m too much of a nerd with regard to mileage tracking and things like that. So that’s a non-answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or non-star.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re not gonna, all right, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I guess you could just
⏹️ ▶️ John let it sit in your garage, which is a better choice than putting it in your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, coincidentally, what I’ve decided is I told some friends of ours, some local friends of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ours, that I was going to put the excess gas into the wife’s Ford Explorer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they are good to their cars, but they don’t care like I do. So
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll take your filthy gas. You should have just been like a lemonade stand out at the end of your driveway. It’s free gas.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Car to drive
⏹️ ▶️ John by. You just put it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in the tank.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just put it in the tank. Here’s a dollar. Here’s a dollar. But anyways, I apologize for interrupting, Marco, I’d love you to continue, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just another thing to think about with a freestanding generator. This is not what you’re talking about with like a natural gas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generac sort of situation, but for mine, I now have too much gasoline and have to do something with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So that’s, that’s, you know, the generator lifestyle, it’s, it’s involved. It’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very like, you know, imposing into your physical space and into the noise and into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintenance and fuel needs and everything. The advantage of generators over solar is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again you tend to have like you know if you can get a natural gas pipeline you can run it 24-7 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you won’t run out and also you tend to be able to power larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger amounts of wattage for less money. The main downside of solar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panels with batteries is that if you like you have to what Casey was saying was important you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out what exactly you’re trying to replace what level of power are you trying to run your entire house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if that does Does that include things like a water heater? And most importantly, does that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco include heating and air conditioning? If you’re running your heat and air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are electric or heat pump, you’re going to need a lot of power for that. That’s going to be way more power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than your fridge, your outlets, your lights, you know, like if all you need is fridge outlets and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lights, you can get, you can get away with a much smaller setup. But if you’re trying to power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your thermal control of the house, your HVAC system, and If you live somewhere that has very hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or very cold weather and you want it to work enough for that, you need a lot of power to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for that, if that is your setup, I haven’t looked at prices recently, I’ll get to that in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second, but that might be too much power to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reasonably affordable setup with batteries. If you have to run it from solar and you have to run it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overnight and it’s really cold that night and you have to make a lot of heat, that just might be too much power to do that with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reasonable number of batteries in your garage or whatever. So that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might not be what you need. You might not need all of that. When I bought my system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was 2019 when I ordered and bought my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solar system. So my solar system at the beach is something like, I think like 90 kilowatts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On a good day it produces like 95 or 100 kilowatts of power. So whatever the wattage for the solar panels is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s that. So on a good summer sunny day, I’m gonna run a hundred or 90 kilowatt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco production or kilowatt hour production, I think. And I have two Tesla Powerwall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2s before they were known to be a horrible company run by horrible people. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s two Powerwall 2s, which I think are 11 kilowatts hours of storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each, something like that. But that was in 2019. And that got the cost of decent amount of money. Today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, the cost of all of that stuff have gone way, way down since then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what they cost today because I haven’t priced it out recently, but it’s way cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now you do run into limits with how much battery storage you are allowed to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on local building codes, fire codes, electrical codes. So there are other limits to consider.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I can’t tell you what your limit is. It’s different in different places. It’s different depending on what kind of space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the batteries are in, Are they inside or the outside? Are they in conditioned space? Are they in a garage? There’s all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules and regulations of how much, basically how much of a lithium ion bomb you can have in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s what energy storage is, it’s a bomb. Various types of gas in the same way. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s all these different limits of how much battery storage you can have. The solar panels themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really inexpensive for what you get now. And I can strongly recommend having solar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power for lots of reasons. Climate is a really good, Like, you know, climate change reduction is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. Just general like energy renewability. It’s, it’s a great thing to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solar panels on your house. If you have a situation where that’s where that’s reasonably possible. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it’s a great thing to do it. Mine do not cover my entire electric electricity need, but that’s because we use a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of, a lot of electricity, especially like, you know, if we’re running like the hot tub heater, that, that uses a ton of power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like there’s, you know, but it offsets it all and it’s great. Um, One of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great advantages of the battery system though, for backup power in some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation where you have a storm or you have a power outage. The great thing about that system is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you don’t need the entire power plus of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the batteries every day, which you won’t because you wouldn’t size it that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you effectively then have infinite recharging because you can use the power from the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all night and all day your solar panels are topping them off. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my setup at the beach is that like having just the two power walls is not enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run our HVAC and hot water heater and everything. So we don’t have those connected to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have them connected to a whole bunch of lights, outlets, fridge, ice maker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, you know, that, that like, uh, all my networking equipment, you know, all the, the wifi gear, the, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stuff. And a few kind of like critical appliances and stuff. We’ve never run out of power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we’ve had a few days long power outages and we use the power at night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then by like 9am the batteries are back at 100% from just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solar input. And unlike generators, you never really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to think about the system. There’s no moving parts, it produces no noise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they need no maintenance. I have never touched the system since it was installed in 2019.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco From a like reliability, simplicity, elegance perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solar plus batteries is awesome. It’s way better than a generator. The only problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, again, can you get enough battery capacity to power what you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to power overnight? That’s the big challenge. But if you can get past that, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can get away with powering not your entire house, and maybe you don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your entire AC system to be running at full blast all night long and then there somehow to be no sun all day. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get away, if you can get away with the budgeting of that, it’s an amazing setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I strongly recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have had a shorter answer to this question, which is, does it make sense to have a whole house battery without a solar installation? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t make sense. Because if you’re looking at whole house battery backup, you’re already spending a huge amount of money. Get the solar panels,
⏹️ ▶️ John just get them. Like I know they’ll be cheaper next year and cheaper the next year still, but they’re pretty cheap now,
⏹️ ▶️ John get the solar. 100%, like if you’re even considering a, whatever you consider a quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote, whole house battery backup, subject to the caveats that Margot has put in about what you’ll actually be allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ John install, yes, absolutely get the solar. I don’t think it makes sense without it. Unless you have the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John bury a giant hypersonic vacuum sealed flywheel in your yard and use that for energy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco storage. Which also has problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is less of a bomb than batteries or gasoline, but I bet you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Oh no, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a kinetic bomb. No, because it’s underground. So when it explodes, it just the dirt protects you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t, it spins sideways, not vertically. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco In any case, there’s other issues. It goes
⏹️ ▶️ John out sideways, you see? It just hits the dirt, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, I haven’t priced this out recently, but I would expect that the solar panels part of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably cheaper than the batteries part of it these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John and boy, what a better investment. For sure a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investment. I mean, ideally, you know, if you can get both components, get both components, they work very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together and it’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, exactly. But you know, yeah, because if you’re, just thinking about like what Casey was saying, like a battery that like can power
⏹️ ▶️ John some of your appliances that you can roll around or whatever, then I would say like, oh, well, solar panels are going to be a lot of money. But if you’re even considering
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that you call a whole house battery, get some solar panels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Absolutely. Yeah, I would agree with that. And again, I think I said this earlier, but just to reiterate, if you’re in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you’ve lost power, you shouldn’t likely think of this as how can I get my normal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life back to me? What you should think about is What are the bare essentials to keep you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and your family functioning? Right. And generally speaking, I would say that includes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HVAC, but in this scenario, I would say it doesn’t, but that probably does potentially, potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey includes hot water, depending on if it’s electric or not. And certainly includes like a few lights, maybe a space heater,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that your refrigerators, things of that nature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And, and also, and you know, one other thing too, like if you’re deciding between solar and generators, keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mind that all the rest of the time. When you are not having this rare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco event of this you know having like a power cut shortage or storm or whatever All the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time your solar panels are producing power that is saving you money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is saving the world and Meanwhile your generator is sitting there doing nothing except losing value and slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needing maintenance So that that does also probably sway the decision a little bit like solar panels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provide Constant value whether you need that value at that moment or not. They’re always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco providing that value
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would say the the the infinite source of power that you have going through a natural gas line to your house
⏹️ ▶️ John is substantially less infinite than the light of the sun. Exactly. Like cloudy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raining. Yeah, because like even when it’s cloudy and raining in January, I’m still making like 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 30 kilowatt hours a day. Like there’s a lot of power generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be had by pointing things at the sun. Like when when the incremental cost of having them on your roof every day is nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can gain a lot of value over time. It’s wonderful. So yeah, definitely like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can install solar on your house, you should do it for lots of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, whether you need to power your entire life as Casey was saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you know, indefinitely or not, that’s up to you. I would also just merely suggest like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the context is like, well, we shouldn’t get solar because we might someday need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the heat in the winter on some awful outage and my family needs it to survive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco survive. Like well, for the cost of that incremental gain of power, you can buy a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So how often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would that actually be necessary? Like you’ll be fine. But anyway, yeah, get solar.
#askatp: Why Ternus optimism?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Kevin B. writes, Why are you feeling positive about John Ternus potentially taking over CEO of Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You all very much disapprove of what Tim Cook has been doing lately, and I don’t disagree. By all accounts, John Ternus is Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cook’s choice to replace him one day. If you disagree so strongly with Tim Cook’s decisions, why are you okay with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one? I have nothing against John Ternus. It just seems like there’s a disconnect between Tim Cook is making awful decisions and needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go, and Tim Cook’s decision to select John Ternus to replace him is good and exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s that big of a disconnect. Like just because Tim Cook has selected him doesn’t mean the person he’s selecting
⏹️ ▶️ John agrees with everything Tim Cook does and will do exactly what Tim Cook did. I mean, Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook and
⏹️ ▶️ John they were very different CEOs. So our expectation, our hope is that John Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ John will be different than him. Cook in the same way that Tim Cook was different, Steve Jobs. Now he could be worse, could be better, could be worse. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re hopeful because the things we hear are good. You know, like we we want to be hopeful. Like but the real point is.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve I think we’ve all basically resigned ourselves to the fact that nothing, nothing about what we dislike
⏹️ ▶️ John about what Tim Cook is doing is ever going to change until he leaves. So he has to leave. So it’s if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to think of it this way, you can say it’s not so much that we’re excited about John Ternus coming as we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about Tim Cook leaving.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And yeah, we
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like anything’s got to be like, it’s the only chance we have for improvement. And I think it’s a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John both because again, we have very little info on John Turner. So that is we’ve said that before, like we don’t actually know he’s been in.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s been in presentations for years. We see him on on stage talking, but like, he’s more of a
⏹️ ▶️ John cipher. We don’t have, he doesn’t have a track record that we know of other than he was in charge of hardware and hardware is great, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m personally optimistic, mostly because a transition, a departure, a
⏹️ ▶️ John change in leadership is the best opportunity for things to potentially get better.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m currently choosing to believe that they won’t get worse. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know, and we can’t know, what kind of CEO John Ternus will be. Again, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he is the next CEO, That’s a big disclaimer, but it does seem fairly likely. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. But I think we are ready for change in so many ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Tim Cook. I think Tim Cook has shown us everything he can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, positive and negative. He’s shown us what he’s really good at. He’s shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us what he’s not so good at. And I think Apple’s in a bit of a tough spot right now. Like, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s gonna have a very good year. I think Tim Cook has made a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategic decisions over time that are coming home to roost. The over-reliance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on China is really bad. The cozying up to Trump is really bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the recent Apple News bias thing, not really helping,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really buying anything, just more, just giving in to the bully more and more. So you have those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two problems. You have the under-investment in AI, Which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still… sorry we were supposed to talk about that. But it’s like, that’s a huge deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been saying for a while now, this is Steve Ballmer missing mobile. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s version of that. Like Tim Cook blew AI instead making a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a VR helmet. And the car never shipped, thank God. And the VR helmet is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, limping. And it turns out not where the next big thing was. and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally blew the actual next big thing, which is AI. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple really would benefit in this moment from a significant change in leadership. So I am very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to that happening for so many reasons. I mean, look, the regulatory stuff with the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control and anti-competitive behavior, I mean, there’s so much that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been squeezing the wrong way or blowing the wrong way. Oh God, this is going badly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of things that the Tim Cook era is not good at handling or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has squeezed every ounce of life out of that are really hurting the company’s long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prospects. And I think this is going to be a really bad year for them in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they have a lot of humble pie that they’re going to be eating. And I think by the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook actually goes, if it happens in the next year or two, I think a lot more people than me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to be saying, yeah, it’s time. This is a welcome change. So whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Ternus will be a great successor, we don’t know yet. Um, but Steve jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who was pretty good in this role, pick Tim cook, who is, you know, pretty mixed in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco role. Steve jobs and Tim cook are nothing alike. They’re very different people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve jobs did not have an amazing ability to, to pick successors for himself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also like when you look at the pool of people that they have to choose from at that level It’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short list when Steve Jobs realized he had to you know hand off the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many people was he gonna choose from? Tim Cook was the obvious choice We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all knew it at the time even before we knew how bad Steve’s condition was and how little time he had left We all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were all saying at the time of course It’s gonna be Tim Cook like that was very obvious and there weren’t that many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other clearly good options at that time. Well now Tim Cook looking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a successor like there’s not that many good choices. There’s not many that many plausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realistic choices that would actually be good and aren’t as old as Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who would want the job and who would be good at the job. So the fact that Tim is picking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly John Ternus doesn’t necessarily say that you know that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were 20 people on the list and Tim thought Ternus was going to be the most like him, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that at all. I think the list is much smaller than that of practical options. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think when people choose a successor, I don’t think they are necessarily that good at finding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone just like them or that that would be what they would be looking for necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, I think implicit in this question is an assertion or an assumption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we disagree with everything, every single thing that Tim Cook does. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s true. We certainly lately have disagreed with a lot, but I wouldn’t say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I at least disagree with literally everything that Tim Cook does. It is possible. It is very possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us to simultaneously say decision A is bad and decision B was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t think this is incongruous at all personally. Bro.
#askatp: Save As… vs. Duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Author writes, on episode 675, John was talking about the confusion that would be caused if common menu
⏹️ ▶️ Casey items had inconsistent names. I’m a lifelong Windows user that came to the Mac five years ago. Recently, I was working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an image in preview and I wanted to rename the image to separate it from the original image instead of save as.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Duplicate is the default menu item with save as available as an alt click. It is worth noting, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is also option. You can hit option and click as well. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is duplicate the default Mac workflow? The workflow I’m used to is to use save as to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey create a new file, which is a copy of the old one, but with the new name, keeping the same window I was working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in keeping inside the same window I was working in. John, what’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John The menu item is duplicate, not duplicate.
⏹️ ▶️ John all just a Windows user and they think it’s all I know it says alt on the key. It’s addressing that’s an alt tab,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is command tab, not option tab. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, it should be the Windows key. Because if you look over by consistent placement, you should be remapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Windows keyboard, which is one of the ones I use. So the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John key added years later than it should have been when Microsoft finally got around to
⏹️ ▶️ John copying Apple in one more regard, and they still managed to screw it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there was just a weird gap there before in PC keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and so they, anyway. So this change,
⏹️ ▶️ John like going from a world where you had save and save as in the file menu to
⏹️ ▶️ John the world where you have duplicate in that menu item and all these option, you know, all these
⏹️ ▶️ John key combinations that you can press to change those menu items and other things. This happened in 2012. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John put a link in the show notes to my Mac OS 10 10.8 Mountain Lion review from 2012. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John when this was rolled out. And the idea behind it is hopefully still explained clearly in that article.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that, hey, iPhones and iPads and other things, people love those. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a different model for dealing with documents than the Mac does. And people seem to really like it. And if you’re wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John what that model is, take out your phone, open the notes app and use it. How does that work? Is there a save menu
⏹️ ▶️ John in there anyway? Do you have to remember to save in notes? Are your changes unsaved and you can decide
⏹️ ▶️ John now, nevermind, I’m just gonna close this note and not save those changes. No, that’s not how the notes app work.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how any apps on iOS or iPad have ever really worked. They’ve always been like, it’s just a live
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. You don’t have to worry about files or saving. And that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John in line with what people expect if it’s what you’re used to. and that was on the phone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the bright idea around this era of 10.7 and 10.9 is like, things people love about the phone and the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, we should bring them to the Mac. The problem is the Mac is not the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or the iPad, but they did, they brought it. They said, we’re gonna have a new paradigm for a document model on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re gonna have a bunch of new APIs, and we’re gonna have new conventions, and we’re gonna show you how it’s done by like, here’s text edit, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no more save or save as option or whatever. We’re gonna have documents that automatically save, we’re gonna automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John save versions in this janky SQLite databases off to the side and you’ll be able to roll back versions. So
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry, it’s not like you’re gonna lose your changes. You can always go back from one version to the other, but you don’t have to worry about saving
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. And they pitched this real hard, they had WWDC sessions
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. They did it to their own apps to demonstrate here’s how it’s done. Here’s what we think the future is. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, just don’t worry if you have unsaved documents, just quit the app and relaunch it. Your documents will be back right where they were. Don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John saving. We’re always saving. Don’t worry about getting back past versions. We can always show you the past versions. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, that was 2012. Here we are in 2026 and I can tell you, it did not
⏹️ ▶️ John stick. Mac users did not universally laud
⏹️ ▶️ John and adopt this new model. Independent Mac developers did not universally adopt it and say it’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John and never look back at that old crappy model. And this is despite the fact that everybody still loves their phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and everybody still loves their iPads. And there are Mac apps that work this way that people really like.
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was not universally adopted. And maybe it’s just because people are older and then we all need to die,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, you know, like the habits that were formed in the stone age of
⏹️ ▶️ John the PC, which is that you open a document in your document-based application
⏹️ ▶️ John and you do stuff in it. And if you change your mind, you can just close that window and say, don’t save
⏹️ ▶️ John these changes. And you know, you haven’t modified the document on disk. The capabilities I just
⏹️ ▶️ John described are still there in the model Apple introduced. They’re just presented differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my impression is that not just developers, not just old people, but the general
⏹️ ▶️ John public kind of rejected them for certain classes of applications on the Mac. For other classes
⏹️ ▶️ John of applications, they work. Notes on the Mac works just like it does on the phone. There’s no saving, there’s no documents, no reverting,
⏹️ ▶️ John and people love it and it works fine. But for things like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word or all
⏹️ ▶️ John these other applications, they’ve been always like dabbling in that area. Well, we’ll work that
⏹️ ▶️ John way because Apple says we want to work that way, but we do have some cranky users who don’t want it to work that way. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we’ll give you options on what should the defaults be. And we’re not going to use Apple’s versions thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you even familiar with this feature? It’s so like poorly adopted on the Mac. I’m always
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering if it’s even still there. Do you know what I’m talking about? The versions thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s there. I’ve never successfully used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t it like a mini time machine presentation for just the document you’re working on or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like it’s, the problem with that feature has kind of been Like the whole idea is if you have autosave,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to be saving it, it’ll always be saving in the background, you don’t have to worry about it. And if you wanna get back a change before, like you open a document,
⏹️ ▶️ John you make some changes, you’re like, oh no, I changed my mind, I don’t want any of this. I can’t get back to the old version because
⏹️ ▶️ John those were all autosaved and I deleted a bunch of stuff and I could hold down command Z for a long time, but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the undo buffer is gone because I opened and closed the document or something. Like I changed my mind, how can
⏹️ ▶️ John I get that back? The idea is that while the app is autosaving, every old
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the document, like version control style is saved somewhere and you can just go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to earlier. This is not time machine. This is literally saving like the diffs and chunks in this weird SQLite
⏹️ ▶️ John database. I think it’s SQLite. Off to the side somewhere like this. This is, was, and I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John still is built into macOS and you would access it either through the menus or you could do a modifier
⏹️ ▶️ John click on the title of the thing in the title bar. But again, it never really caught on. The
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation was janky and not great and the UI for presenting it was inconsistent. it changed a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John and just people never really latched onto it. It’s like, look, there’s two worlds. There’s the iPhone world,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. And lots of apps in the Mac do that these days. And there’s the old world, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like PCs where you have file, open, save, blah, blah, blah. The only thing this change really did was teach
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole swath of the public, the weird finger modifier combos to get save as back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause that’s what everybody wanted. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just Google for
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I get save as back on the Mac? You’ll find a million results. Like this is a widely shared
⏹️ ▶️ John tip since 2012. Because people were like, I just, I used to know how computers worked and I just want that
⏹️ ▶️ John back. And again, maybe it’s just the stubbornness and all these people just need to like live out their lives
⏹️ ▶️ John and die and then we’ll enter the brave new world where everything auto-saves. But I just feel like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John heart hasn’t really been in it. Like they haven’t advanced and continued pushing this despite the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go to text edit today, I believe this is still the default of how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I still get it in preview. That’s where I see it the most.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, preview drives me nuts with that. There’s a bunch of other things that preview does that drive me off the wall too. But yeah, no, text
⏹️ ▶️ John edit. You’ve got save, duplicate, rename, move to, revert. I believe you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John versioning thing still in the accessible somewhere. I forget where that is hiding. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, you don’t hear much about it. Like Apple isn’t like hammering on it like they were back in like 2012, 2013, 2014 of saying, you need
⏹️ ▶️ John to adopt this. This is the modern way. Forget about that old open save,
⏹️ ▶️ John close documents out save. That’s not it. want all the apps in the Mac to work like they do on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just been like unevenly adopted. And what has resulted in is people like Carl seeing this and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going on on the Mac? Like, is this how everything is in the Mac? Or just some
⏹️ ▶️ John things? And why are some things like this and why are they not? And why do I have to learn the modifier clicks to get save
⏹️ ▶️ John as back? I think it’s actually like, it’s just option. Yeah. But the changes duplicate,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then other options. And it’s just, it’s inconsistent in a way that it wasn’t before
⏹️ ▶️ John because they weren’t able to transition the Mac platform from the old model to the new one, so now we just
⏹️ ▶️ John have both of them, which might sound familiar if you have tracked the history of window management on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John either. Just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John introduce a new system, but the old one doesn’t go away, and now you have both, which in some ways is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John useful, but the problem is with every app that you use now on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not doing what you expect, you’ll be startled. Because again, stickies and notes do what people expect
⏹️ ▶️ John and they never have to think about it, But text edit maybe doesn’t work the way you expect because you expect it to work the
⏹️ ▶️ John old way because it’s just a simple text editor, but it doesn’t. It works the new way. And the same thing with preview where you’re like, wait, is
⏹️ ▶️ John this saved? Do I wanna duplicate? And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I made a change, but like I just saw the preview icon change on the desktop, but I didn’t hit save. I guess preview
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work like I thought it did. I guess it just auto saves. Or what if I want the old version back? I guess I should have duplicated
⏹️ ▶️ John first. And is there a version feature in preview and how do I access it?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a great situation. Like I understand what Apple was trying to do, but I think their transition
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially failed and then they lost interest in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this has bitten me constantly. Preview is by far the most common time I run into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Oftentimes it’ll be like, I’m opening an image, I want to resize it and save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often, yeah, I open it up, I resize it, oh, I just overwrote the original with a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of itself. Thanks, thanks so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you didn’t save, but you’re like, surely nothing happened until I save. Nope, that’s not the way preview works.
⏹️ ▶️ John It works like notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the example of notes is a good one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why we don’t have save in notes, I think conceptually that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at odds with wanting the old file save behavior in preview because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes, you’re not operating on files. Notes is a kind of like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid data store. you are operating on a database inside the app. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are also some things called shoebox apps. Like when you are using notes, it does not work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like open a file, edit the file, save the file because you’re not operating on files. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why this new document model, new being 2012, is so confusing and has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since 2012 when they introduced it is because the entire history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of PCs, when you are operating on files, works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old way. When phones came around, with phone apps that inspired this new behavior,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone apps don’t work on files, at least most of them, and certainly now there’s a few, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we get into the iPad being a power user thing, but for the most part, phone apps don’t work on files. Phone apps work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on databases and services. It is consistent that you can say, you don’t have to save in notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because notes, you’re not dealing with files. But the workflow of people using PCs, Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac forever has been when you are operating on a file you can open that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file, you can edit it, and it shows a little unsaved indicator somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you know the dot on Mac I don’t know what the heck PCs do it doesn’t matter and you can save the file if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to close the file without saving it’ll ask you do you want to save what you did and you can save it or you can save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as or you can discard it and Apple said we’re going to change that. Now the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with changing that is that you’re taking a model that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has already learned and not only throwing it away, but replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with a model that looks the same until you’ve destroyed data. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks, and yeah, you can revert, and most people don’t know that, or it’s hard or it’s clunky. We already had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a model for this. And it’s kind of like, and I’m sorry, John, you’re gonna hate this. It’s kind of like the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extensions debate. I think you mean file name extensions. Yes, sorry. Where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac file names don’t natively need extensions, and the old Mac didn’t even have them, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then Windows PCs use file extensions to indicate types of files and provide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco associations to whatever app should open it. Over time, the pressure from the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world for Macs to work the same way as people who know how to use them, and they’d have good interoperability with PC files,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of required Macs, just by kind of market pressure, to adopt file name extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or that’s what the people who did it tell themselves so they can sleep at night. Wow. Gracious. And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most graceful thing in the world. And of course, Apple did it their Apple way, which is, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna have file extensions, but we’re gonna hide them sometimes. And just to confuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way things work, we’re just gonna have some file extensions that never show up, like bundles, the app and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. And we’re gonna have some file extensions that show up only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you typed them in when you save the file, but not if you didn’t. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to prompt you to change it, even when it’s not there visibly. It’s, again, like Apple tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something pretty and theoretically maybe a little bit uniform. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real world complexity of it is kind of annoying. Well, the document model introduced in 2012
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an even larger version of that problem, where they tried to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is different from the way PCs and previous Macs worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And no one really wanted it. None of the rest of the world works that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including the iPhone. Like it was one of the many features where the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco succeeds or the iPad succeeds and Apple’s like, we should unify the behavior between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS and Macs. And that hardly ever has been a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has hardly ever resulted in positive change. Sometimes it does, but overall, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time they’ve tried to unify the behavior by basically clobbering what was there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac before with a copy of what’s on iOS, it doesn’t usually work out that well because they’re different platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They work very differently. Their users have different expectations and different habits and different needs. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this is one of those things where like we had a model that worked that everyone was familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with and they tried to replace it. No one adopted it really, except Apple’s own built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, and even then only some of them. And so what we have now is this confusing mess, and Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably too proud to ever change it back in their apps, to ever go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this, or to, as far as I know, there’s still no system-wide option to change it back, is there?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but they added so many APIs for this, and so many systems, but I just feel like they lost interest in them, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John the versioning stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think the market just said, we don’t care, we don’t want that, because users said we don’t want that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, some apps do use it. Like, that’s the thing. Like, they can’t get rid of it now because some apps do
⏹️ ▶️ John actually use it and rely on it. They just painted themselves into a corner. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a great situation for anybody. I wish they had either successfully transitioned or not tried to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they didn’t. So we’re kind of stuck. And you mentioned like the apps not using documents.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t actually know the answer to this question, but I’m curious to what people, if other people don’t know the answer,
⏹️ ▶️ John think to yourself, have you ever even considered this and what you think the answer is? Does Final Cut Pro on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John auto-save everything as you do it, or is there an explicit save function?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it auto-saves, but I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It must, because on iPad iOS, you can be terminated at any time. The whole iOS apps basically have to auto-save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for practical reasons. I mean, the thing is, I’m basically
⏹️ ▶️ John adding what document model does it present. Yes, technically under the covers they have to be auto-saving, but they could be auto-saving off to the
⏹️ ▶️ John side, and still, when you relaunch the app, It shows is having essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote unsaved changes, even though it just reloaded it from disk. But like Final Cut Pro is an example, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John file based. Like you are working on project, even though the files are bundles or whatever. But like it is it is totally file based like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. No, it’s not a shoebox app. There’s not I know there’s a there’s probably some kind of library type structure,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the whole point with Final Cut is you’re trading these project files around. You can transfer them not losslessly between the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John version and version. Like it is the pro use of the pro app that has to deal with like media
⏹️ ▶️ John files and libraries of media files and project files and edit decision lists and all these other things
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And yet, on the iPad, I also assume that it auto saves
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. So it’s an example if that’s true, and I don’t even know if it is, like that’s a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John situation to be in because like the rule of like, well, if you’re a shoebox app that you do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you’re not a shoebox app, first of all, that distinction is makes sense to programmers, but not so much to users because like, how can I
⏹️ ▶️ John tell one way or the other, but second, It’s like, okay, so Final Cut Pro, surely that works this way, because it’s not a shoebox. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s on the iPad, it does. But, and here’s another question I don’t know the answer to. On the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it autosave? I don’t know that answer to that either. But it’s like the fact that we could just speculate
⏹️ ▶️ John and be like, I can see how that app could work one way or the other, and both would make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense from a certain perspective. That kind of confusion. That’s what they introduced to the Mac platform, that confusion, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is any given app, you’re not sure. And it’s, and this is the bad kind of confusion. I mentioned before when we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John window, you know, Mark was going on about like, who he wants the app to close when you close
⏹️ ▶️ John the last open window. That distinction I’m in favor of because I feel like most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time it does what people expect. Close the last window on calculator, the app quits. Close last window on dictionary,
⏹️ ▶️ John the app quits. Close the last window on Microsoft Word, the app doesn’t quit. Like, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though that is a quote unquote inconsistency, it’s, I think it’s fairly straightforward to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what your app should do and let the developers pick that. But autosave versus not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s incredibly fraught to the degree where I wonder if, you know, Apple making decisions about its highest
⏹️ ▶️ John end, most pro, most complicated product, even that the decision is not clear which way they should
⏹️ ▶️ John go. So this is kind of a failed, it’s a failed sociological experiment
⏹️ ▶️ John and also a failed technical experiment. I’m not sure when it’ll be resolved, but presumably I’ll be dead by then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, probably never. I mean, also in the case where you have the same app on iPadOS and Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they differ in their behavior in this way, I don’t think is that important because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s that many people bouncing between Final Cut on iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Final Cut on a Mac. Because as you mentioned, it’s not even a safe transfer, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people probably use one or the other. I could be wrong, I don’t have any data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this, but just kind of a gut feeling. I don’t hear a lot of people using both actively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and forth. So I think it makes sense, again, like so many things about unifying the platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it makes sense for the app to do what is the native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behavior on the platform it’s running on. And that is actually different between iOS and
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, that makes me wonder what those two apps actually do. I don’t necessarily think that they should be consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other, but it’s kind of mind-boggling to think that, you know, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John version, for example, might autosave like the iPad version, and it’s done it for years and we just don’t know because we’re not final
⏹️ ▶️ John cut pro users. But like, once you make a decision like this, you know, your
⏹️ ▶️ John users essentially get used to it and you should just basically stick with that, I guess. But it’s so, for new
⏹️ ▶️ John users, it’s so, like think of preview, right? It’s not like you don’t know that’s how preview works and yet it keeps catching
⏹️ ▶️ John you because you don’t expect it to work that way. And it’s not like you, preview is a rarely used application that you
⏹️ ▶️ John touch once a year or something. It’s still, it’s catching you by surprise when you crop. It’s like, there’s something stubborn
⏹️ ▶️ John about the way things should work again. It’s like if calculator didn’t quit when you
⏹️ ▶️ John close the little tiny calculator window. Even if you knew that and you’ve known it for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John every time you close that calculator window and then an hour later, so the calculator was still open, you’d be like, oh damn, I forgot about that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not what you expect. And yeah, it’s a problem of their own making. It would
⏹️ ▶️ John have been much more consistent if they just left it alone or they forcibly transitioned everybody, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to be clear, I have never used Final Cut Pro on the iPad, but on the Mac, as far as I know, every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move you make, every step you take, it saves it immediately. There’s no file save
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wonder if that was true in Final Cut 7. Maybe that’s just a cultural thing with video editors. I’m sure people
⏹️ ▶️ John write in and tell us. Obviously, none of us
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s not how logic works.
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they bought that from a different company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, 1Password, Zapier, and Gusto. And thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly. you can join us at atp.fm.com. One of the many perks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. There is more of the show to be had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you sign up as a member. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about how apparently everyone is stealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV now. This is pretty fun. So we’re talking about that in Overtime. Thanks everybody, you can join us at atp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear that and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long.
Casey’s status board
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a week or so ago, maybe a little more, I don’t know, sometime recently, the 2nd of February,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally got around to putting a post up on my website about my status
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board, which we’ve talked about on and off over the years over the last couple of years on this show. Um, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recap, uh, a few years ago, well, for a long time I was using home bridge, there’s nothing wrong with home bridge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but eventually I wanted to have a little more control over what was going on in the house. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey became one of those people, home assistant person. And, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so now that I’m a home assistant person, all I want to do is automate everything in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, uh, a few months ago we were talking on the show, maybe a year ago about how I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really wanted to have like a status board in the house, preferably somewhere downstairs where we spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of our time. That tells me the state of a few like critical systems in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you always call it status board or does that? I thought so. I am. I’m wondering if you’re calling it that now because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the recent panic status board thing that I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey about. I guess? Yeah, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not really a board, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway, continue.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. I’m just, I just, my memory is making me think, was it always status board? Is this like a Bernstein Bears thing? I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought so, but I’m not confident. It could be. I don’t know. Anyway, go on. It’s status and it’s on a board,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s not really on a board, to your point. It’s more of a series of status indicators.
⏹️ ▶️ John very thin. It’s a very thin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. It’s status indicators. And so, I had initially had the idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I remember talking about this on the show, house was built in the late nineties. So in the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at roughly eye level was a RJ11 jack, you know, a phone line jack,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was way up high. And the idea was you would mount your kitchen phone way up high as everyone did at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and plug it into that jack right there. And I’ve since pulled that face plate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off and kind of gotten rid of the jack. And so now it’s just a blank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face plate. And my initial cut on this was, Hey, I’m going to wire, like I’m going to drill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holes for like two or three LEDs and I’ll wire those to like a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. Now I’m not sure how it was getting power to that ESP32 but we’ll leave that aside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ll put a couple of LEDs on a blank, you know, wall plate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and call it a day. And I told Erin this plan and she told me in the most loving way possible over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her dead f***ing body. And so I had to rethink. And we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this on the show and an incredibly kind listener, Chris R. wrote to me and said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you heard of these home sear switches? And that’s H O M E S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey E E R. And the company, as far as I can tell, is still around, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these particular switches are discontinued. And so that’s a real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bummer. But in the midst of all the recommendations for a particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Inovelli switch, which I don’t remember specifically which one it is, so I’m not gonna link in the show notes, but everyone and their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mother recommended these Inovelli switches, which do a very similar thing to what I’m about to describe, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t work quite as well. And I’ll try to come back and explain why. But the way this home sear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch works is there’s seven LEDs on the left-hand side of a Decora-style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch, like a paddle-style switch. And by default, what happens is when you—it’s a dimmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so as you hold down on the up button, let’s say, each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the LEDs will start increasing over time as the light is getting brighter to indicate how dim or bright the light is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they will all, you know, be white or whatever. However, you have the option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of putting it in what they call status mode. And what that allows you to do is to control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each of those seven LEDs individually. Additionally, each of the LEDs has like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven or so preset colors that you can use. So Chris
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R was kind enough to send me an extra one of these that he had. It works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Z-Wave, which my understanding is, and we talked about this a few weeks ago, Thread
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of sort of Z-Wave, but over IPv6, whereas Z-Wave is not over IPv6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, it’s, it, it works via RF. And so I needed to get like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little dongle for my home assistant installation, like a physical USB-C or USB-A dongle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey B, whatever, I can’t remember the other ones. I had to get a USB dongle to hook up to the then Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now to a NUC, which we’ll talk about in another show, in order to be able to talk Z-Wave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was a little challenging, but worked out just fine. And it took a little back and forth for me to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out how the heck to get this all wired up, figuratively speaking, literally speaking, it was fairly straightforward,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but figuratively speaking, to get it all wired up and home assistant and so on and so forth, it’s a little bit clunky, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally got to the point that I have my quote unquote status board, which is really more of a status panel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or status lights. And I thought it was really fun to document
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, which is what I put on my website, and we can talk more about it here. But the general
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gist of it is that there are seven LEDs, like I said, and going from bottom to top,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I have is if there’s a red LED lit at the very bottom, the garage door is open.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it is extinguished, if it is not on, then the garage door is closed. Above that, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magenta LED that if it’s on, the shed doors open. Gentlemen, how do I know if the shed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doors open? A Yolink contact sensor. Additionally, immediately above
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, if there’s a white LED that’s lit, then the Volvo is actively charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I have a blank space because I don’t know what else I want to use for that particular spot. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey above that, this is now the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5th one up, the 3rd one down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If there’s a blue LED illuminated, then the male is waiting, which again, I know because of a Yolink contact sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Above that, if there is a green LED lit and solid, then there’s some amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laundry that needs attention, which I can dig into more if you want. And then if it’s flashing, that means that the laundry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actively running. And then finally, at the very top, there’s also a, figuratively speaking, blank spot, because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what to put there either. This is incredibly dorky, incredibly overkill,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and largely useless. And I got to tell you, gentlemen, it makes me so freaking happy. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John surprised you got clearance for a blinking LED when the laundry is running.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because she never pays attention to any of these LEDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it, but it’s blinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I could turn that off. That’s a, that’s a choice I made.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, my first question for this is, so you got this thing in here and I encourage people to go to Casey’s blog post to look at this,
⏹️ ▶️ John to get an idea of what he’s talking about here. Has the rest of your family
⏹️ ▶️ John acclimated to these lights and they know what they mean or do they ignore them as just visual noise?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More of the latter. I would say of the four of us, I far and away pay the most attention,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which tracks, uh, the kids are at least somewhat aware. I think particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the red and blue, which is garage door and mail. I don’t think they pay that much attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to whether or not the car, the car is charging, which is white.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why do they care about the garage door?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, because if they want to like run out and like get the mail or if they want to run outside and play basketball or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, I think they’re at least aware that the red means garage doors open. I need to get your
⏹️ ▶️ John kids in the show. I feel I feel like if they’re going to run out through the garage, they’re going to open the door to the garage from your house
⏹️ ▶️ John and see whether the door
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll open it. I’m not sure they’re, they’re consulting the led before they make that journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perhaps not, but they are at least aware of red. They are aware of blue. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they care about magenta, white or green, which would be in order the shed door, the Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the laundry. I don’t think Aaron pays any attention to any of this whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think she is lightly aware of what each of the colors means. I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a great quiz. You should do this. You should like
⏹️ ▶️ John casual like just like it’s not a big pressure thing. And just like see if you can casually figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John if, you know, quiz your family. What are the light colors mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should do that. And in fact, I should have done that before we recorded. Now I feel really dumb. I didn’t think about it, but I should have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, again, this is very dumb. This is not something that I think most human beings would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want in their house, particularly to John’s point, a flashing light. Oh, and the red light also flashes when the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garage door is actively going up or down. But anyways, I don’t think any human would want this except me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it makes me so incredibly happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s honestly, that’s great. I feel like a actual status board, like a panic-style status board
⏹️ ▶️ John would be, I mean, I think you would enjoy messing with that even more, because then you’d have like a little animated garage
⏹️ ▶️ John door going up, and you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have all sorts of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics, and like you could do charts and stuff and all sorts of things, but obviously that would be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A tremendous eyesore, no matter how good a job I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say that I kind of think this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is an eyesore, but no, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a smaller eyesore
⏹️ ▶️ John also has so much less information like everyone’s so used to screens like you know All these smart thermostats
⏹️ ▶️ John that most of us have they have screens that are much bigger than these tiny LEDs in them and people just accept
⏹️ ▶️ John them in their homes and they have all sorts of weird graphics on them and they change when You walk by because they have proximity sensors and all
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff So it’s like is it really that far and to go to like a you know an LCD?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the size of this entire panel that you could put some stuff on I mean, but anyway, if it’s working,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s working for you and it makes you happy and your family tolerates it, honestly, it’s not the best we can really hope for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. All of that is very accurate. Uh, I don’t know. So, I mean, it sounds like John, you are not at all interested in replicating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and honestly would be. Oh no, absolutely not. Uh, Marco, does this have any appeal to you whatsoever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, but I, I recognize like, I recognize the appeal for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people to do stuff like this. I personally, I, it’s, it’s not worth it enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. Like I have one of those terminals from the problematic guy, which we didn’t know at the time either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s fun for the family to see weather and stuff downstairs, but I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go a whole week forgetting to look at it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenery, because it isn’t reminding me in the corner of my screen every day, remind me this afternoon, what does that mean? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care. It’s not one of those things. It kind of becomes background. And so if I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these indicators in my house anywhere, I think the same thing would happen. It would just become background to me. I would stop seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and therefore it would stop showing its function.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I totally get that. But it makes me very happy, and there’s a little bit more detail on the website, or on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website, but it’s very cool. Oh, and then coming back to the Innoveli switch, there’s a flavor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Innoveli switch that has a bunch of LEDs that you can control, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a single diffuser that runs above all of the LEDs, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a lot more challenging to figure out what LED is lit and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s one of the reasons why the Inovelli stuff doesn’t really appeal to me. Also at the time, I don’t remember if they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing any Z-Wave switches. I don’t have Zigbee in the house, and if you don’t know what that means, congrats, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a normal human. But I don’t have any Zigbee stuff in the house, and I only have this one Z-Wave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device, but I didn’t want to go and have to get another dongle to have a different communications protocol
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and blah, blah, blah. And so that’s why I didn’t go Inovelli, even though people had very good things to say about it. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can actually buy one, which is an improvement over this home seer thing. So what are you going to do?