703: Part of a Healthy Breakfast
06 Aug 2026Overcast’s busy betas, SuperDuper 4, Apple Upgrade, the worst power cables ever devised, and some totally very patient car-shopping.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: The Overcast “kicking machine”
- Adam Wunn’s blog post
- Previously in ATP #324: Automatic Kicking Machine
- Follow-up:
- Marco gives John the gift of transcript search in build #1169 [The system works! — Ed.]
- Be wary of Sonos + Pi-hole or other ad blockers (via Will Smidlein)
- Ubiquiti High Availability
- “Odd” RAM amounts (via Joe Lion)
- Multiple Apple accounts (via TJ Usiyan)
- Some science about Sony’s axe of PlayStation discs
- SuperDuper 4
- Apple Upgrade Program
- macOS 26.4 adds Battery Charge Limit
- Ask ATP:
- What are good backup strategies? (via Todd Vaziri)
- What the heck is a Docker container? (also via Todd Vaziri)
- Post-show: Casey is car shopping again
- Members-only ATP Overtime: OpenAI hardware progress
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Chapters
- Automatic Kicking Machine is dead!
- Siracusa Mode 2?
- Overcast’s busy betas
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- SonosNet follow-up
- Ubiquiti high-availability gear 🖼️
- How do you get 9 GB of RAM?
- Phone numbers and Apple accounts
- Ditching PS discs
- SuperDuper 4
- Apple Upgrade
- macOS battery charge limits
- Sponsor: Zocdoc
- #askatp: Backup strategies
- #askatp: What’s a Docker container?
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Casey’s car-shopping
Automatic Kicking Machine is dead!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We get a lot of listener feedback. And generally speaking, it's wonderful. It's good to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read. Even if we don't reply to it, um, we, we see it and acknowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it internally anyway. And there are occasionally pieces of listener feedback that stand out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't have the gentleman's name in front of me, but the the long, uh, email that turned into a blog post was an Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One. I think that's right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, His name was Adam file maker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yep, exactly right. That was incredible. We had another incredible piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of feedback that was sent to all of us, but was really for you. Can you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell us about this? Because this was just chef's kiss. Amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this might be my favorite feedback I've ever received on a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my favorite piece of follow-up I ever heard on someone else's podcast was once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it was an old episode of Connected. Mike said his birthday on an episode and somebody wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next week to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you got your birthday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong. This is your actual birthday. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it was correct. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that's that, I think, is my favorite piece of podcast follow up ever. Somebody correcting Mike on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his own birthday and being right. So good. But I think this might be my second most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco favorite. So a million years ago, when Overcast first made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the clip sharing feature, I can't even remember how many years ago this was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me ask you, take a guess. What episode of ATP was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entitled Automatic Kicking Machine. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a guess. So we're currently in the low 700s. I'm going to say maybe it's somewhere in the 400s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have thought the same, Marco. Episode. Actually, John, do you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, you already spoiled it by saying it's probably less than 400. I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 34. Automatic. Oh, shoot, wait, wait. I'm a big liar. We're going to have to fix it and edit. 324
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what I meant to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, yeah, that's a pretty big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sorry. Price is right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, John wins. price is right rules. My apologies in my internal. So I take the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I generate the ones for public consumption. And I had a typographical error and I put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, I dropped the two in 324. I'm so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sorry. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to set you up for failure. That was a genuine whiff on my part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway, don't
⏹️ ▶️ John say generate because people are going to think you use AI to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, no, no. I create them by hand. But anyways, May 3, 2019 was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we last spoke about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So that was when Overcast, when I wrote clip sharing in Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was using this API, like this you know, AV asset writing kind of API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to generate video from a UI I was rendering. That's how those clips were created.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I dug through the docs at the time. And this was obviously many iOS versions ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many years ago. And I had the problem I had was that the system I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was using, which as far as I knew at the time, was the only way to do this with Apple's APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every so often it would just stall when exporting a video. And I realized that if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, if I detected that it wasn't progressing and I just canceled the task and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shifted the first time stamp like by like, you know, 0.1 in either direction and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just tried it again, oftentimes it would succeed the second time. Sometimes it would take two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times to succeed. And you would see this as you like, and this is actually still in the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store version of Overcast. As you export a clip, you would see like the little pie chart progress meter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get like most of the way through and then stop for a couple seconds and then start over at the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I had built was, as I described it, an automatic kicking machine that if you just if you kick it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it reset, it would often succeed. So I just built when I shipped the feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an automatic kicking machine that would just detect when it was stalled, kick it, and start it again until it succeeded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, David Watson wrote in a couple days ago to say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I plus ChatGPT and Claude figured out what was going wrong with your clip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation system in Overcast. I'm honestly quite frightened that it was possible for AI agents to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find this. Now, what David did was what it looks like he did was have AI decompile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my binary, which is a thing people do. I haven't gotten to that point with AI yet, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing that's happening and it's helping people find bugs and stuff. So it's great. And he said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're using this one API call to composite the graphic. And if you use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this other one, it works. What? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried it. It took you know, like one or two minor other lines of code changed around it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use this other function, this other API for compositing the image. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works. He was right. So David Watson wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a correction of my source code from decompiling my binary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with AI and fixed one of Overcast's longest standing most obscure bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I'm not mistaken, David provided a sample project to demonstrate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Yes, he did. Incredible. Just five stars.
⏹️ ▶️ John He's going to get a great reward from the Overcast bug bounty program, right? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How about this? On Marco's behalf, David, if you want to reach back out and if on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco's behalf, I'm happy to send you if you're interested in ATP sticker because Marco doesn't have any.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have them all. So, David, reach back out. And thanks for doing Marco such a solid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'll send you a couple stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was incredible. So yeah. Thank you, David Watson, for incredible feedback and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixing this bug in the most amazing way.
Siracusa Mode 2?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some follow-up, and since we're talking Overcast, let's continue. I would like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report, as I believe John has written in the show notes, the system works. John, what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John I complained about a feature that I wanted to have in overcast, then I went on vacation, then I came back, and it's in overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John system works. In overcast test light build 1169,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is now a basic transcript search, which is what I wanted. And I tried it, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John works. And yay, there have been many builds, or many builds, at least one build since then, but just FYI
⏹️ ▶️ John coming soon to the app store near you, whenever the heck Marco releases it, basic transcript search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you happen to see the build that I shipped about an hour ago? I did. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you happen to see something else there that you might be interested in?
⏹️ ▶️ John uh i I saw the priority, the the pre-selecting chapters, which I'm not interested in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that, John. I know what Marco's
⏹️ ▶️ John The deleting uh the priority things when you're sorting by duration or some crap. I don't know. There was a whole bunch of changes in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't see anything that stood out to me, though. there was The deleting, only keeping three episodes, no matter what you do. and
⏹️ ▶️ John There's a bunch of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, there is a bunch of stuff. And Marco's been going hot and heavy, which I want to ask you about in a second. But I believe it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play a podcast from the beginning mode. Is that what you're thinking?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of? Uh-huh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's correct. Replay podcast. Why do I care about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn't this what you've been asking about for years? Me? To replay old podcasts? I don't think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? Well, On behalf of others, absolutely. Maybe we've invented this memory together.
⏹️ ▶️ John but It's not a feature that I wanted. Maybe have people been telling me that they wanted it? I've been passing it on to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John We've been referring to it as Syracuse mode. Right. Maybe for people re-listening to hypercritical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were two things called Syracuse mode. One was the playlist priority groupings, like how priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was grouped. Yes. That's one. But this was the other thing that I think you have always wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe people just always do it for hypercriticals. Maybe that's why we…
⏹️ ▶️ John I think maybe it was just me conveying other people's wishes. I personally don't have a need for this, but I've definitely heard people request this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, anyway. So yeah, the build I shipped an hour ago includes a replay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast feature. Basically, I… this is something I have been wanting to do this for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, about six years. I even I wrote the server side code to do this years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so, OK, what it is, before I get into that, is I've had this episode limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature and I've always hated the episode limit. I don't even use it myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I have it in there because it's very popular. A lot of people use it. And I do. I use that one. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm glad you never got rid of it. So the problem with episode limit is that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never came up with, until I think tonight, or this week, I never came up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how some of the implementation details should work. Because if you say, all right, I'm limiting this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast to the last three episodes. Okay, well, what if you scroll back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add one that's past that? Should it be instantly deleted? No, of course not. You just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added it. Like that would be a terrible experience. But if you say, keep three,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you go back and add numbers four and five after, you know, from back forever ago, well, now the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode limit feature doesn't look like it's working because then you can look back at it tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, wait, there's five episodes here. I said limit three. Your feature is broken. And believe me, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get those reports. I have gotten those reports for many, many years. Now, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it would work that way before is I've kept a separate flag on like the user state on each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode on whether that episode was added manually by the user. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if it just comes in because it's new and eventually gets deleted, that's different. But if you go through the list and you tap download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or add on an old episode, it would set that flag that the user added this episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manually. And the episode limiter would never delete those. Problem is, if you go through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of stuff manually, now like you have a whole bunch of stuff there and the episode limiter just seems like it's not working at all. Now, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so hard to figure out what should the behavior be in all these edge cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, okay, well, if I'm limited to this, but I add this, what should happen? And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was ranting about this to Tiff a couple of weeks ago. And she was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don't you just not let people add more and just pop up a message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they try to add more saying, if you want to add more, turn off the episode limit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was like, it can't be that simple. And I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was like, how, what would be the downsides of that? And I've been thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it for like two weeks and I couldn't come up with one. I'm like, I think Tiff just solved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my biggest feature problem with Overcast ever of fixing the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You've fussed about this complexity and justifiably so. You've fussed about this several times over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several years on this very show. And it's a tricky thing to figure out because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might want to override, like you said, but John might be grumpy that it's past your limit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three, just like you were describing. So that's a very clever solution from Tiff, for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I never offer suggestions to this feature, but I can come up with lots of solutions that would satisfy me. But to Marco's point, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's easy to come up with something that will satisfy you. The problem is making a feature that satisfies the largest number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who all want different things. So I never suggested what I would want. But anyway, I think the main
⏹️ ▶️ John goal is to have a feature that is at least understandable. So even if it's not what people want,
⏹️ ▶️ John they understand how it works. The problem with the old system was it was not understandable to people. So
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what happened, they felt justified in complaining that it was broken in some way. Whereas if it is entirely understandable,
⏹️ ▶️ John really doesn't do what they want, then at least they know, well, this feature doesn't work for me and I understand why. They'll probably still complain.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, in your notes, I'm sure as you'll continue describing, you didn't just do this limit, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There is like a little nuance to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. So this limit, this was also, you know, this limit has always been imposed server-side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The server-side logic would, you know, when an episode came in and you'd sync to the server, it would calculate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which ones needed to be marked as deleted and delete them, you know. And it was, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, this is like part of one of like the hottest parts of the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code. Like this is like super high traffic. It deals with immense amounts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data with massive databases. And so editing that code over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been something I really do not like to do because it's just incredibly high stress,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly high stakes. And if I get it wrong, ridiculous things happen on the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, and some of which are very hard to undo, like huge explosions of data and things. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, I prototyped a different mode for the episode limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be in. Instead of keeping X of the newest episodes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted a mode that would keep X of the oldest episodes from wherever you currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were so that you could basically replay a podcast from the start or even just play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that way for the, you know, the first time through. Like if you, if you had never heard a podcast before and you wanted to start at the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you only want like, you know, one or two or three episodes downloaded at once, you don't want to download all 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their back catalog all at the beginning and slowly delete your way through it. You know, that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sucks. So like I wanted to do this with a different mode of instead of keep X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newest, keep X oldest. And trying to code this up on the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, I tried so many times over the last, you know, six or eight years to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that, and I could never get it quite right because there's all these optimization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service You know, because you're dealing with so much data when you're talking about per episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco status for for every user's podcast, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get that wrong or if you defeat an optimization somewhere, the database explodes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the stakes of it have been very, very high. And I've been, i I kind of just, I would put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some time into developing this and I'd test it out and I'd find some badge case and it would blow my whole thing up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would shelf it. because I just, I couldn't, it was never, I couldn't get it right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I had the idea recently, as I'm rewriting the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limit to, to be this hard and forced thing, why don't I just do it all client side? Why am I doing any of this server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side? No one uses the web app anymore. I don't care about the web app anymore. So like, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't think that's a surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to anybody who uses the web app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the web app looks like it was made in 1984. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying, you know, why don't I do this all client side? So when you sync with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new build of the app, the server from that point forward stops doing any limiting server-side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This build does it all client side. And that was, at first I was like, oh, this is this is the way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this episode limit being hard and forced, you know, with the UI warnings if you try to break through it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without causing weird behavior for old clients. But then I was like, well, now that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this client side, let's take another crack at doing the oldest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to newest sort, or the oldest limit instead of the newest limit. Because that when it's client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, the logic changes dramatically. And it's way simpler. And there's way less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk of blowing up my database if I do something slightly wrong. And it's way easier to validate what's happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco client side. It's way easier to test. And so I tried to do it. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some AI help, I'm not going to lie. And it turns out, and by the way, AI is super good at writing tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out it works great. And I had to, you know, there were a few like little edge cases to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, but way fewer than doing it server side. It's way easier because I can just store things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a much more straightforward way. So now, finally, Overcast can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep the latest X episodes or the oldest X episodes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even added a button called Replay Podcast. It's in a little ellipsis menu on a podcast. Right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below, mark all as played and delete all episodes. You can say your replay podcast. And it resets all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your play stats for that podcast. It marks them all as unplayed. And from the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloads the oldest X episodes. And as you play them, you know, if you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you play episode one, if you delete episode one and you have you know, three retained at once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it'll start downloading episode four immediately. And once you delete episode two, it'll start downloading episode five,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco et cetera. And so you can kind of listen through back again through a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe that's the origin of Syracuse mode. If I want to listen to something, I want to start from episode one and go in
⏹️ ▶️ John order. Yeah. I'm telling you, you wanted this. I don't know if you currently
⏹️ ▶️ John It sounds like me. It definitely sounds like me Cause I definitely do that with like television shows and stuff. Like I want to, I go back to season
⏹️ ▶️ John one, I want to start from the beginning, and I'm sure I've done it with podcasts too. Oh my God, John. I'm just saying
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't remember specifically. And it is confusing. There were two things you were calling Syracuse mode. But anyway, I'm saying that does sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can assure you, someone will go spelunking into like cat ATP. Dot FM or something, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John will come up with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you requesting this. Now, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in episode 34,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey In episode 34,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you're exactly right. Now, maybe it won't be this. Maybe we didn't refer to this as Syracuse mode, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we're getting our memory slightly wrong. Hi, have we met? But I really am on Team Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this one. I really feel like you've asked for this in some way, shape, or form.
Overcast’s busy betas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, before we move on, I have a question for you. I have been seeing, and we were briefly talking about this privately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the show started. I've been seeing so much activity on Overcast over the last,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know, month, if I'm very courteous, maybe a couple of weeks, more realistically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like you are in what is it, a peak or a valley? I guess you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a peak. I was going to say fit or spurred. I never get, I can never remember which one's right. But you're really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making progress here. What is happening? Are you just in one of those times when you're super duper productive?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you just the world's best AI dictator director person? What is happening?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kind of maybe all of that or some of all of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So, okay. So here's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what's going on. So as I described, I was having Fable help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me tackle some of Overcast's longest standing bugs. These were things that were just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stumping me for months or years. And it was just such a burden.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very discouraged because it was so difficult for me to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on Overcast like mentally, because no matter what I did, there were these, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this relatively small number of just very difficult bugs I couldn't figure out. And all the reviews, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stars, all of the emails, all the posts, they would all be dominated by people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah, that thing you did, that's nice, but why haven't you fixed this? And honestly, I couldn't blame them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because many of those bugs were pretty annoying or pretty, pretty, you know, interfering with people's workflows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. So I get it, but that just made it so hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motivate myself to work on Overcast at all because it just felt I was just had this boulder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resting on me that I just couldn't get off and I couldn't move forward at all. Meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these years, I've had my own wish list of things that I would love to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what people request because I read them. So I know what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want. I know what I want. And all this time, you know, I just I just told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the story about how I've been trying to build KeepX oldest episodes for like six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. There's lots of features like that. There's lots of things that I have tried to build for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, some of which I have even started to build or built most of, and then just couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it past, couldn't get it, you know, to ship. I couldn't get it good enough to ship, or I couldn't finish it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn't account for some kind of edge cases, and therefore it was kind of unshippable until I did, or that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I would shelve it or whatever. There are so many of those features. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Claude helped me get, by the way, Claude is a past and probably future sponsor of our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now that using AI, in this case, Claude Fable, but I'm sure it doesn't really matter which one I'm using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now that that's helped me find and fix some of these big, nasty bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has lifted this burden off of me. And now I am free and empowered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go start working on these other things that I've been wanting to work on. And it's delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because everything you've seen me do in the last few weeks, like in all these, this crazy barrage of beta builds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of these are like brand new ideas that I just had today. This is stuff I've been waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years to ship. And with the help of AI to get me past the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy bugs, the test suites, like some of the really boring implementation details,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can now do it. And I think I am a pretty good director of AI. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I write the spec to a prompt to find some kind of class of bug or investigate something or do an audit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or generate tests, I think I'm pretty good at writing those. It's proving to be a strength
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mine. And then I look at the code it writes and see, there's a couple of things that I think really work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my favor. Like I've seen when you have AI write like a whole app from scratch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's kind of a mess. Like it works, but the code organization is a mess. The performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of ways is a mess. Like it's not good when it's totally inventing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything from nothing and totally unbounded. But when you have it work in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an existing code base and you're just having it like, hey, this feature that I wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three quarters of six years ago, please finish it. It can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your code and with your code style and in your architecture that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed and built over years. When it's focused like that, when when it's kind of bounded into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a smaller problem set, it isn't inventing a whole app or a whole feature by itself. It's like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking what you already did and just adding a couple of things or fixing a couple of bugs. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at like the total number of lines of code it's writing is very small. So that makes it easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to review as the human. So I'm able to say, hey, fix this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or fix or finish this feature that I wrote. And then I see what it did. And I'm like, I can review line by line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, oh yeah, that's, of course, that's obvious. That's fine. That's fine. then, you know, occasionally I catch something like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's editing these episodes one by one. I have a batch update function. I'm going to rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to use that. So I do. You know, it's stuff like, you know, I'll catch stuff like that, catch some, you know, performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues or unforeseen bugs or just kind of bad styles of code. Like if it's recomputing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a property over and over again that I know I can just store and cache, like I'll store and cache it, you know, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, what I am doing is I'm mining all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my past half-done efforts and having Claude like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help me finish them and test them and prove them and write the boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of the UI code so I don't have to write them and then I can go edit them to make them good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm having it do that kind of thing. And because I have banked up over a decade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of features that I have mostly done or that I have started doing or that I've or that I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to do, but I didn't quite know how to do them, I can have it help me really a lot. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, um, the, in the current test flight builds, probably probably shipping in the next couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of weeks, Um, App Store review is very, very slow, but we're working on that. I'm trying to Hopefully shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon. Um, One of the major feature sets that I'm shipping is premium audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects, a mono mixdown, a full genuine parametric EQ,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customizable volume normalization, a de-esser, and background noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduction and isolation. Now, all of those things except the background noise reduction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote those whenever I wrote Voice Boost 2, I don't know, that's six years ago, whatever it was, those have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there that whole time. When I edit this podcast, I have a Voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boost command line utility that allows me to configure all those audio effects, and I pipe each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our tracks through that every time for the last, I don't know, six years, whatever it's been, however, I forget when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote Voice Boost 2. I have been piping our audio through basically a channel strip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have customizable presets for each of the three of us to make this show. Because I wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole audio engine, but none of it was exposed in the UI. Voice Boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app has just been basically a preset configuration of this channel strip engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I built. And my plan was someday I will write the UI to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people actually change this and customize it. That's a lot of work. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was never important enough. It never rose above like the threshold of being more important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than all the bugs I had to keep fixing. And now that all those bugs got easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix, I can go back to this and I say, all these features that I wrote years ago that I just needed a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI for, have Claude help me make a UI for God's sake, and then I can polish it and make it good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I can finally launch these features. And the background noise reduction is a browser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tab I've had open for three years for one of Apple's audio units. I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it would take to integrate that into my audio engine, and I knew it was going to be a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was just, again, there was never like a two-week span that I had where that was a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use my time to do that. But now it takes less time because now I can have Claude sketch it out for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first and build the structure around it. And then I can look at it and tweak a few things and make it good and release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. All of these features that I'm doing now, you know, chapter pre-selection. My
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little detail about how like if you uncheck a chapter and that same chapter appears next week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that show, it skips it automatically. I've been thinking about this. That was my like clever idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had for chapter pre-selection again, like three years ago. It never rose to the top. There was always more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important stuff. The sleep timer fade out. People have been requesting that for, since the beginning of time, since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we invented sleep. And that I knew, again, like I know, you know, okay, do the V ramp mole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the array. Like I knew how to do it. But again, like getting it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right would have taken a few hours probably of my time and getting it exactly right, making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure like I covered all the edge cases. But now I have some help. So now it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier to do all these features that I brainstormed six years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or half wrote five years ago or almost finished four years ago. And like I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally do them. So what you're seeing now is me just plowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through my backlog of all of this technical credit. It's you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposite of technical debt. Like I've been, I've half written so much, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've so many features. I have I've been thinking about and planning mentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many features. I've been listening to other people's reports of what they want and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try and planning how I would do that someday. Now today is that day. That day has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally come. I'm actually able to do these things. So that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why this is all happening. It is a combination of it is, number one, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's enabled by Fable and high-end AI models. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm not ashamed to say that because this is a game changer for indie app developers. Like to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to have that level of bug finding and that level of like, you know, framework
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation for UIs and stuff, like it just is such a difference of what we're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to accomplish and the quality of what we're able to ship because we have basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world-class bug fixing abilities at our disposal now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I have definitely had similar experiences with Call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sheet. I got myself wrapped around the axle about something over the last week or so. Somebody wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and asked, hey, instead of just picking one Plex server to get now playing off of, why can't we use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of our Plex servers? Which was completely fair. And it was one of those things where it was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn't realize that some fundamental architectural decisions I made way back when were going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make this extremely difficult. But I was able to slog through it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of it on my own, some with help of AI. But especially when Fable was cheaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I, I fixed a ton of bugs in Call She. This is like four or five test light fields ago. It'll be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store similarly in a couple of weeks, I think. I fixed a ton of bugs, some of which I knew about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of which I wasn't even aware of. But you know, as, as Fable or whatever is introducing these bugs to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and saying, oh, this is wrong because this, that, and the other thing. And then I'll take a look and try to convince myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, I see what it's saying, I can, or I can reproduce it myself, whatever the case may be, and figure out, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's right. And in that sense, I echo what you're saying entirely. Like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get through some of that like rote work and to do so so quickly and easily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without feeling like you're back in the mines is so refreshing and so wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had a feeling this was, you know, a little of you, a little of, you know, your AI du jour, but it's been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very impressive to watch all this stuff fly by. And I mean, as a daily overcast user, I can't say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've noticed anything going wrong or, you know, any more bugs than I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever seen in any app, you know, including my own. So it seems like it's all coming up Milhouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And like, and a lot of the stuff, like, for instance, like the, like I had Claude sketch out the first version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the transcript, you know, the find in page functionality on transcripts. I keep not wanting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it search because it's find in page. I feel like search, if you say transcript search, it kind of sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like searching across different transcripts to find like what episode did I say this in? And that's not that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm hoping to do that sometime soon, but it's not that. But you know, to do the transcript find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in page thing, that's a web view. And as I've discussed previously on the show, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't know what is the web API to highlight, to show a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of highlights of text. I probably would have you know, defined a CSS class that's like, you know, puts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a square background on the text and everything. But I wrote this giant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, two paragraph long uh prompt to have Claude code sketch out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first version of it for me. And it knows what the new web AIs or APIs are to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. I don't know that. I haven't been a web developer for 20 years. But like it knows all the web development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs now. So it's like, oh, I use this new API to create you know changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know highlights that don't change the DOM and you know whatever. And I don't even know what it is. But then I saw it and I looked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, oh, well, that's pretty clever. And I've read its JavaScript. I'm like, whoa, I didn't know you could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, like it is enabling me to be the director. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these years, I have thought, I'm a decent programmer. I'm not like an amazing programmer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm a decent programmer. I might even say good, but I wouldn't say amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now it's like I have the power of an amazing programmer at my fingertips that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can just direct. And I think I'm a better director than I am a programmer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my experience being a programmer and being an app developer and listening to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers over all these years, plus I think I have decent product sense to begin with, or at least now at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least. And so I think I'm able to be a really effective AI director.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because again, like when you give AI not much to work with, it'll make some really hideous apps. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible at design. The only thing it's worse at than design is naming things, but it's really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad at design, but it's really good at writing code that works. And it can tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like there's this web API to highlight things without disrupting the DOM. Like, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had no idea. That's awesome. And then, and that kind of works both ways. I can tell it too. Like when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found the audio unit to do the sound isolation or the background noise reduction, I told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, use this API. And first I had it tell me, like, you know, what would it take to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this API? The complexity, the tradeoffs, the power concerns, you know, what would it take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use this API? And it did all the research and did the whole breakdown and it sketched out what it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take. And there are things about it that like when you pipe in this API, you have to consider latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And no part of my audio engine was built yet to consider latency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming from one of the effects. I would have had to do all of that manually. First of all, I wouldn't have even realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that at first. It would have taken me half a day to realize there was latency because I would just find weird bugs and not know why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I would have figured out, oh my God, I have to account for latency. And that would have blown up voice boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity the way I would do it so much. And then I saw how Claude did it. I'm like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never have thought to do that. But that's really elegant and way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and faster and better than what I would have done. And then meanwhile, sometimes I get really, I get a win
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. Like I wrote the DSer again, like probably five, six years ago, whenever I wrote Voice Boost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And today I had Claude look at it and I said, investigate how I wrote the DSer. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't know how de-essers are implemented in audio software. I just guessed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the tools I had at my disposal how one might work. How did I do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Evaluate how I did. Tell me what other alternatives exist. And it turns out I guessed right that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the DSer I wrote years ago, that actually is how they work. Like, oh, great. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it suggested a couple of minor tweaks, which I did. But it was like, I had it mostly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that's good to know sometimes too. So like, it is such… such a game changer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to have this now. And this is like, this is as bad as the coding AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models are ever going to be. They're getting better. It's just, it's remarkable to me what we can do now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and I am very comfortable taking more of a like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half director, half coder role because I am still writing the code. I'm just not writing all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code. And I'm looking at the code that Claude writes. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's, you nailed it. I'm not going to edit that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's good. You know, the parts that aren't good, as I mentioned earlier, then I'll edit those. You know, the parts that need performance improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or need, God, they need UI tweaks. But, you know, I tweak the UI. Like I have Claude write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first UI. I don't have to write the massive amount of like Swift UI boilerplate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tie things together. Have Claude do that. And then I go in and make it actually a good UI. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go in and make it you know, attractive, more functional, line everything up right, add the right margins, add the right fonts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, do all that stuff. Like I do, you know, the polishing work that I'm good at. And Claude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does all of the like templating and you know, rote work that it's good at. I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really, really, really important time in coding. And I'm very, very happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be finally embracing something as it happens rather than like five years later.
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SonosNet follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to me talking about, I want to say it was last episode, maybe it was the episode before, SonosNet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where Sonos would make like an ad hoc network, or not ad hoc, like its own private network between devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I'd said, oh, you can turn that off now. Well, Will Smidline writes, I have been dutifully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checking my Sonos app weekly since Casey first mentioned the disable SonosNet beta, but the option never appeared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. I just discovered that Unify's built-in ad blocking prevents the feature flag service they are using for the rollout from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working. I disabled that filter and it immediately showed up. So if you're a pie hole person like me, or if you use Unify's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad blocking or perhaps other ones, you might want to flip that off just for a moment.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like my own personal nightmare of ad blocking and why I'm so paranoid about it. Like, I would never think that ad
⏹️ ▶️ John blocking would stop like a feature from appearing in a beta, you know, like just wild. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I mean, I don't really like ads, but I, I hate things not working because of something that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that's totally fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, can I, before, sorry, I.
Ubiquiti high-availability gear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally forgot that, like, also in the intervening time since we last recorded, because there was a bit of a vacation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break here. In the intervening time, I also got all of the Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-availability stuff. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how's that working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out? Oh, man, it's cool. There was only one snag. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I got, so this was for the Overcast Mac Minis data center. You know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting redundant router, redundant switch, and the power backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. So that way I can just plug in all the Ubiquiti stuff into both sides of the power in the data center and not have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the transfer switch for that. And it's really cool. Like configuring the shadow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode for the two dream routers was really fun. And the WAN switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, having stuff like that is like, I feel really cool. The only weird thing about the Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redundancy setups that I've had so far is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ubiquiti redundant power thing. So as I described last time, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know most server gear has two power supplies and two power inputs because it has to plug into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two different power sources in a data center for redundancy. Okay. Ubiquiti stuff doesn't quite have that. it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of it has one regular power input, and then it has this big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DC connector that's like custom proprietary DC connector on the other side of the, of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the switch or the router or whatever. And they sell basically a giant power supply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that you can plug into your other power source and then connect a whole bunch of these DC cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all the Ubiquiti devices that support it. Why they do it this way? I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever. A second power input would have been fine. But I got that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these have to be the worst computer cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have ever worked with. So the Ubiquiti DC power cables that run from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the redundant power system, I think it's like, you know, the UI RPS or something like that, um to each device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are basically the thickness and flexibility of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly flat garden hose. It is the thickest power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable I think I've ever seen for something that is that is like, you know, not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a piece of industrial equipment. Like it's these super thick power cables that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are flat. They sell it only in one length of like, you know, I think it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like six feet long. So it's massive and heavy. And it comes in this massive box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like 30 bucks each. It's the thickest, giantest thing ever. And then on the ends of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it are what look like giant IDE connectors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They're like, they're these like huge rows of two, like two rows of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black pins on each one. And it's it's gotta be like three or four inches wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they plug into these giant DC ports on the back of the router, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said. So I'm like, I plug everything in and I connect it all up to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DC thing and I shove these giant cables into these giant connectors and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like shove in. I'm like, I think it's in. It looks like I can't get it in any further. So I guess it's in, but what direction does it go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows? Like I put it in one way and it didn't quite go in all the way. And I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's probably wrong. Flipped it over, put it in like a little harder and it went in further. I'm like, okay, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's right. Who knows? So I plug everything in, connect everything up. I'm like, all right, let's test it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I unplug everything from the main power and I walk back around to this side of the rack and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's all off. well, that's fun. Didn't do it right this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So walk back in, plug it back in, see how it goes. It's got to see how the shadow mode does failover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it considered it a failure. so like, okay, great. Awesome. At least that works. Yeah, right. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did work. Anyways, so I'm like doing like, you know, AI research and YouTube lookups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how to figure out like, how do I, how do I connect all these things? And it turns out the cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like directionally. They can only go in one direction, but you wouldn't know it unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look really closely that across those two rows of pins,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two of them are rounded instead of square.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so here I am in like the back of my server rack, like shining my phone flashlight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, like trying to like see what direction is what on here, like looking in the ports. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I learned, oh, if you get it right, you can shove it in even harder and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like you're going to break the thing. But if you really shove it, you can get it all the way in. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little light lights up next to it. I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it's. on. so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to put a round peg in a square hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Or the other way. I don't know. But, oh, man, what a giant pain those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things were. And I'm like tearing up my hands. Like my fingers are hurting, like trying to get these things in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did eventually get them all in. And it does work. And it does work great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea why the cables are designed the way they are. I don't know why they need so many pins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because there is some communication over them, which is kind of nice. Like the the ubiquity RPS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing will tell you when it's powering something via power. It'll tell you what it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powering, like which device it's powering. So they're like, they are communicating over these pins to tell it, you know, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Switch 48 or whatever. So that is kind of nice. I, But I still don't know why it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs so many pins and why the cable needs to be so incredibly thick Cause it's not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's delivering, I don't know, a couple hundred watts at most. Like it's not, we're not talking about like 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp cables or anything. So I don't know what Ubiquiti was thinking with this cable design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the functionality of it, once you get them actually plugged in correctly, is quite nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I'm glad to hear it's working out well, even though it sounds like getting there was a bit of a nightmare. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you going to do?
How do you get 9 GB of RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we talked a little while ago about how there is rumored to be nine gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of RAM on some upcoming iPhones. And Joe Lyon, friend of the show, wrote in to say: nine gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM is achieved with three 24 gigabit chips, which have been in production for quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some time. 24 gigabits times three is 72 gigabits, 72 gigabits divided by eight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bits per byte equals, guess what? Nine gigs. 24 gigabit chips are also used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make configurations like 48 gigabytes and 96 gigabytes DDR5 server modules,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whereas the more traditional 8, 16, 32, 64, et cetera, are made with things like 8, 16, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it's kind of like the math on TV refresh rates and knowing which ones
⏹️ ▶️ John divide evenly by, you know, or multiply out to work for 120
⏹️ ▶️ John and 96 and 24 and 30 and you know, and it gets complicated for multiples
⏹️ ▶️ John that are not the easy doubling that we're expecting for like powers of 2, 8, 16, 32, 64. But 9 gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it works if you remember that 8 bits are in each byte.
Phone numbers and Apple accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TJ Usian wrote with regard to multiple Apple accounts:
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am pretty sure that the email address is what needs to be different for an Apple ID, but the phone number can be the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Employer email address, but I still get verification texts on my phone, for example. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is some awkwardness to actually setting this up, but it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't know what those rules are. I believe that this has been successful for some people, but in
⏹️ ▶️ John my experience, trying to make new Apple IDs, it has varying degrees of insistence
⏹️ ▶️ John that a new phone number be used. But it changes so much with like the two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John versus two-step, and now with passkeys and everything. So, who knows what the current rules are? So, I guess just keep trying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just make an automatic kicking machine for your
⏹️ ▶️ John Keep trying to make that Apple ID until you get through.
Ditching PS discs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to ditching PlayStation discs, Jess Weatherbed at The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge writes: Sony's latest quarterly earnings report shows that physical games earned the company just over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $781 million in the 2025 fiscal year. So discs earned a little less than 800
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million bucks. A fraction of what it brought in for digital game sales, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was about $6.5 billion, and in-game purchases, which was about $8.5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion over the same period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So if you're wondering why they're getting rid of discs, just the numbers alone, the writing
⏹️ ▶️ John has been on the wall for a while. If I had to guess how lopsided it was, I wouldn't have even guessed this because, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's a big difference.
SuperDuper 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have a bit of news from a friend of ours. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to talk about Superduper 4, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, first I want to talk about Superduper, which is a program for making a
⏹️ ▶️ John bootable clone of your disk that I have been using for a long time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John disclaimer, I am friends with the developer, and I was on the beta for the old version and the new version of Super Duper.
⏹️ ▶️ John So keep that in mind. But anyway, I've been using it for years. It's part of my backup strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm sure we won't get to it this week, but it's an Ask ATV question revisiting backup strategies. And suffice it to say that I still think a
⏹️ ▶️ John bootable clone of your drive is part of a healthy breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's part of a good backup program. In addition to all the other kinds of backups you can have,
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps the thing that will get you back up and running the fastest is a recently
⏹️ ▶️ John created bootable clone of your boot drive. So if your boot drive fails, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could restore from a time machine backup. You could restore from a network
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine or a local time machine. You could restore from a cloud backup. But if you want to get back up and running as fast
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible, just rebooting from a different drive, which is the same as your current drive as of less than
⏹️ ▶️ John 24 hours ago, nothing can beat that. And so I always make that an ingredient in
⏹️ ▶️ John my backup thing. And there's a bunch of programs that do that. Carbon Copy Cloner is one. Superduper is the other. Superduper,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, was the first one to sort of pioneer this problem space. And if you've
⏹️ ▶️ John used the app in recent years, you can see it shows its age. I believe it was at one point brush
⏹️ ▶️ John metal to give you an idea how old it is or how old it was. And it doesn't particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John look, you know, bad or anything, but it did look dated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the plain fact is it hadn't changed much over the years in terms of the user experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, under the covers, it's had to change a tremendous amount because Apple keeps changing how, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John SuperDuper's been around for so long. When it started, you could make bootable volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John just by copying files. There was no sealed system volume. There was no read-only partition for the
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system. Like everything was so incredibly different. There was no booting into recovery. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it predates all of that. So obviously, SuperDuper has had to change tremendously over the years just
⏹️ ▶️ John to continue to do the one thing that it does, which is, hey, make a bootable copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of my main drive for me. um And it had a bunch of nice features where
⏹️ ▶️ John you could set up schedules and it would, you know, I always had my computer scheduled to like wake up in the middle of the night,
⏹️ ▶️ John mount the drive that I want to clone to, clone the drive, unmount it, and go back to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, So not only did I have to make sure to run it, I didn't even have to make sure my computer was awake. I didn't even have to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John the drive was mounted. It would do all of it for me while I was asleep and I would just come back and I would always know my Super Duper
⏹️ ▶️ John clone is up to date. Uh, And if there was a problem, it would show me a log message and I would know I had to redo it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's Super Duper. And unfortunately, the product has an exclamation point in the name. I was hoping that the new version
⏹️ ▶️ John would not have an exclamation point because the beta didn't, but unfortunately, the new one also has an exclamation point. I protest
⏹️ ▶️ John the exclamation point. I think it's bad. But, you know, there you have it. So, Super Duper
⏹️ ▶️ John 4 is out. And it kind of reminds me of Marco's Overcast rewrite.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe people aren't excited about backup software. I'm excited about backup software. You? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. But this is, so you'll have to put yourself in my mindset of like, imagine there's a program
⏹️ ▶️ John that you're super. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could not survive your
⏹️ ▶️ John mindset. Yeah. Imagine that there's some kind of program that you really into this program and you
⏹️ ▶️ John really like it and it's great and everything. And then imagine they come out with like a brand new version of this, just
⏹️ ▶️ John rewritten from top to bottom, just an entirely new app. And not just
⏹️ ▶️ John new app, like it looks different, but like it's architected differently. It has features the old one didn't have. It's just like
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely new. You're like, wow, that seems to be what has happened here. We'll link
⏹️ ▶️ John to Dave Nanian's blog post about it and he'll explain it. And I'll actually have
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey read the snippets that I pulled out here. But suffice it to say that Superduper 4 is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John an entirely new app in the spirit of the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So Dave Nanian writes, Superduper has had an impressive run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has lasted in its original form for 22 years, longer than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any other product I've ever been involved with over the so far 43 years of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working career. Let me let me remind you right now as, hi, this is Casey. uh Let me remind you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I are 44 years old. Continuing from from dave nanian the new version of Superduper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a ground up rewrite, a tip-to-tail reinvention of what Superduper looks like, how it works, what it can do, and where I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take it in the future. Superduper 4 is much faster than before. Smart updates are between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two times and with the new Turbo feature in order of magnitude faster. As an example, my two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a half terabyte test volume used to take around 40 minutes to run. Without Turbo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it now takes… I think that should read with Turbo, right? It now takes… Without. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. You're right. Without Turbo, it now takes about 20 minutes. With Turbo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it takes about a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like, this is, talk about the dream update. Yes, it's totally overhauled. And developers, you get a special thrill
⏹️ ▶️ John as a developer of an app of like, finally, I'm rewriting all that crufty old code and it's nice and everything. Like, but what does this
⏹️ ▶️ John even mean for the user? Well, this is a very simple program, you know, in concept.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was going to say, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John In execution, no, but in
⏹️ ▶️ John concept, it makes a bootable clone of your thing. What along what axes can this program improve? Well, it can improve
⏹️ ▶️ John in usability and aesthetics or whatever, but mainly how fast can it do the thing I want it to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is not just like we made it 15% faster. Like just twice as fast, just like
⏹️ ▶️ John almost all the time, two X's. Even that you'd say, wow, double the speed. But then this new mode where it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how about way more than double the speed? And I have tried this and I asked Dave how TurboMode works and he
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn't told me yet, but I have some ideas about how it works. probably just my guess is that it's
⏹️ ▶️ John keeping track of where it is in the FS events ID log and then saying if the
⏹️ ▶️ John system has not dropped any events since then, I know exactly where I have to leave off and so I can save myself a huge amount of work. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John something I always wanted when Apple was talking about adopting ZFS. ZFS has
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to do block level diffs between two volumes so that you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John two volumes that are kept in sync with each other by periodic sync jobs. And the sync job doesn't iterate over files
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. It knows at the block level which individual disk blocks have changed
⏹️ ▶️ John since the last time it did this. So it doesn't have to do any work to say, oh, I got to crawl this whole disk and see what
⏹️ ▶️ John has changed since the last time I did a sync. That takes such a long time. Instead, it's like, no, I know exactly where we left
⏹️ ▶️ John off. I know these seven blocks have changed I don't have to do any work. I just go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and I'm done.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's the dream. macOS doesn't quite have that level of stuff, but it does have a log of file system events
⏹️ ▶️ John and super duper looks like in turbo mode if it is able to take advantage of it. At the very least, it knows which files
⏹️ ▶️ John it needs to look at, I think. Again, I don't have technical details, but I can tell you, practically speaking, having been on the beta
⏹️ ▶️ John and using the released version of it right now, I've seen a clone update of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they call smart update of my clone drive happen in speeds that I've never seen
⏹️ ▶️ John before, like a minute, two minutes for 10, literally 10 million files. It's fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, like just if you don't care about like, okay, someone rewrote their app, their old crufty code is gone and maybe the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John looks nicer. What do I care? Twice as fast at minimum and way faster sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pretty good stuff. All right. So switching over to pricing related stuff. In all the years Superduper has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the market, we've never charged for updates, never even raised the price. That's 22
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years of free updates, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I'm going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey push back on this a little bit because I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn't there that time you charged for the Apple Silicon version? And he said, yes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn't have to pay for that because the Intel version continues to work on Apple Silicon. So I'll give him that on a technicality.
⏹️ ▶️ John But either way, I'm not endorsing this as a as a software model. This is not subscription software. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ John pay-once, use it forever thing. And he's never charged for an upgrade in 22 years, except for the Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John version, which you didn't even have to buy. So that is, this is not a great business plan, but it is very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument. All right, so continuing on, Dave writes, Superduper 4 is a totally new version,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far more capable than before. And as such, I've decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade. I've also adjusted the price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for inflation since 2004. So it's still the same bargain it was back when it was first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released, but in today's dollars. Superduper 4 is free for qualifying recent purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Other Superduper 3 customers who purchased after July 31st of 2020,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind you, that's six years ago, receive an upgrade discount of up to 30% based on purchase date.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As before, even without a license, you can make a full bootable backups for free. And I, yes, it's really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I work too much, provide support for both registered and unregistered users.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Dave has been doing support just like seemingly 24 hours a day, seven days a week for just decades.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't understand how he does it. Because as you can imagine, this program has a presumably a high support burden
⏹️ ▶️ John because people are trying to do backups and it's a complicated thing and they're and they're fraud and people are in situations, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they want their backups to work or they're trying to restore what it's just again. This is not a subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John program. This is a pay once program. So it's amazing. But I encourage you, we'll link to the blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ John I encourage you to read it. We cut out all the parts about how this thing is different, but a couple of highlights.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the program is like split up into basically a faceless server that does the work and then like a UI
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, may or may not be trying to reflect what's happening with the thing, which means that
⏹️ ▶️ John it can work when you're logged out and it can work when the app isn't running. It's an entirely new,
⏹️ ▶️ John cleaner architecture that's based on an idea that Dave had in 2007, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they just didn't have time to do it then because, I mean, this will be a familiar story for people listening to ADP. Just trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep up with the stuff that Apple was doing to macOS over the past 20 years or so has been so much
⏹️ ▶️ John like that they just, you know, this design of like, we should re-architect it to be like a client server model with a faceless thing or whatever. It's like, we
⏹️ ▶️ John don't have time for that now. We just need to, we need to keep the current program so it continues to function. Otherwise, this program
⏹️ ▶️ John just becomes a dead product. Like, well, now it can't do the thing you buy it to do. It can't do it anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple made changes. That wasn't acceptable. So they had to keep it working and they did heroically. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now they got the breathing room to do this. And I'm here to tell you that it is fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and And honestly, the beta, the only thing, the only feedback I had to give on the beta was like
⏹️ ▶️ John all UI stuff. Like functionally, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven't had any problems with it. It works better than the old version. So I know this sounds like an ad for Super Duke before, but
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, this is one of my favorite programs ever for the Mac. I was just i had no idea this was coming. I'm just
⏹️ ▶️ John so excited to see a brand new version of this. And i if you have used the old version, I encourage you to check out
⏹️ ▶️ John the new one. It's a brand new program from top to bottom. It's amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, congrats to Dave, genuinely. uh This is a really impressive effort and it's really great. And I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Dave sells a trillion copies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like like when John said earlier, like you would think this would be an easy thing, just clone this disk to this disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that's kind of like saying, you know, Dropbox was just sync this folder to all of my computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that's like you can, there's a lot of very complex problems that you can boil down to one sentence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, that's what the user should see. Yes, that is true. But the actual implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and details of that are a very different level of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what it sounds like. And yeah, and I can't even imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the level of patience that Dave Nanian must have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with Apple's changes over the years with this because they have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have not been small. And certainly Apple has not been particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helpful to people who want to clone disks with all their changes. So yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is a remarkable feat to have an app like this that lasts so long and keeps up with all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those different things, all those different waves and new requirements coming all the time. And you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, I don't think Apple is intentionally so, but Apple could not be more hostile towards this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of use case with their development in the last, I don't know, decade or so. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was kept up and it's a really, really good app that solves a surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complex problem very well.
⏹️ ▶️ John At various times, Apple has probably unintentionally basically broke the functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John that SuperDuper needs to do its job because at a certain point when they started doing like the sealed system volume and
⏹️ ▶️ John cryptographically sealed stuff, the only tools that could actually
⏹️ ▶️ John make a bootable volume were tools provided by Apple. And if Apple provided broken versions of those tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John you were screwed because you they had to be signed by Apple to do the thing. Like, you know, the whole chain of trust of like a bootable
⏹️ ▶️ John system is starting from a known good image or whatever. Eventually, over the years, necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John involved using tools and APIs that Apple provided. And there's no, there was no alternative. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so Apple would ship versions of those that were broken. And Dave would be like, ah, you broke my program.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, are you going to fix it before you release version, macOS version, whatever? And it was always just
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly fraught. And like, yeah, they don't care about these kind of programs. like, oh, this isn't a thing you should need or whatever. It's like, well, great,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Why don't you make iCloud backup for Macs like you have for phones? But they're not doing that. And that wouldn't provide bootable backups
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. So I'm glad that this app continues to work. And it does still use Apple tools behind the scenes, which are a major source of
⏹️ ▶️ John its limitations. Like I was talking about one recently where like there's a nice feature in SuperTuber that it
⏹️ ▶️ John has to let you know about these nuances that you would rather not think about, but you have to. When you're cloning your drive, your
⏹️ ▶️ John boot drive, the system, the operating system is on a separate volume from
⏹️ ▶️ John your stuff. I mean, that's been that way for many years now. But just to remind you, it's an illusion
⏹️ ▶️ John provided. You're like, oh, there's my bootable hard drive. And when I open it up, I see all my stuff. Those are multiple things merged
⏹️ ▶️ John together. One of them is the bootable version of macOS. And when you do
⏹️ ▶️ John the syncing thing with it, you're like, oh, it's just like copying your data files over there. But what if you update macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John on your main boot drive? The next time in the old days, when you did a super duper clone, it would also then clone that
⏹️ ▶️ John new operating system onto your clone. But it can't do that anymore because of the sealed system volume. So it detects,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, your main disk and your clone are now running different versions of macOS. Do you want to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John that? Whereas before you might not think to do that and not realize when you boot it from your clone, you're using an older version of macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John which would work fine. It would continue to work. It's just, you know, anyway, now it says, oh, do you want me to fix it? And if you say
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, guess what? It has to wipe the whole thing because that's the only way Apple will allow you to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is fine. It just takes longer and everything. But like, I asked, can you just update the macOS part?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer was no. You just literally can't. Apple says no. So things
⏹️ ▶️ John could definitely be improved here. But this, this program is going to great lengths to try to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John A, seem simple and B, give you every possible option for achieving
⏹️ ▶️ John what you want to achieve. Yep. That's great work.
Apple Upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk Apple Upgrade Program. So if you recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was the iPhone upgrade program, which let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you finance a phone and you could upgrade like every year, or you could just do it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you own the phone outright after every two years. And now that's been sunset, and there's an Apple Upgrade Program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Apple Upgrade offers 12 and 24 month leasing options for iPhone and Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 24 and 36 month leasing options for Mac and iPad. So our friend John Voorhees over at Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stories writes, for iPads, the starting prices range from $13 a month to $25 a month. Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey range from starting prices of $25 to $49 a month. And the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ranges from $12 to $47 a month. But again, these are just the starting prices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can configure a fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro that is just under $230
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month. And it won't include AppleCare. Back to the newsroom post.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When customers first enroll in Apple Upgrade, they can further lower their monthly lease payments by trading in their currently owned device through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Trade-In. Customers can also earn 3% daily cash back when making their lease payments with Apple Card.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All applicants will be subject to a soft credit inquiry that will not impact their credit score. At the end of the lease term,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customers can upgrade their device to the latest generation, purchase it with a one-time payment, or simply return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and exit the program. In the Klarna app, because guess what? Klarna is what's doing the back end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all this, they can stay on top of all their lease information, including their billing schedule and remaining payouts. Customers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can add an Apple Care subscription to protect their products, making the return of their current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device and upgrade to a new one even easier. With the launch of Apple Upgrade, Apple will no longer offer the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone upgrade program and iPhone payments in the United States. When eligible, customers currently enrolled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the iPhone upgrade program will have the option of leasing a new device with Apple Upgrade, financing with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Card monthly installments, purchasing the product outright, or choosing carrier financing. So The Verge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a table where they go through some example price breakdowns and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John the important part in this table is how much is left to pay, because that is really the big difference between, I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they'll start with you, the upgrade program and what was the old one? Update?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that's right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, this new one is a lease, which kind of like leasing a car, you make a bunch of monthly payments
⏹️ ▶️ John and at the end of the payments, you have not paid for the thing. You don't own the thing. There is still
⏹️ ▶️ John some amount that you haven't paid yet. And you can choose to, at that point, pay whatever is left
⏹️ ▶️ John and buy it outright or return the product and have it end the lease or get a
⏹️ ▶️ John different product and start a new lease. And so how much is left? You know, so obviously you have lower monthly
⏹️ ▶️ John payments because when you add up all your monthly payments, it adds up to less than the price of the product. So when the lease ends,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much is left? And I was interested in the numbers they had in this diagram here, looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ John buyout amount, the rightmost column to say, because you would love to see the buyout amount and you see like, how much is left
⏹️ ▶️ John on my new iPhone? $1,000 is left. That means I paid $100 over
⏹️ ▶️ John 24 months to have an iPhone. That would be great. Anyway, how much is left? And as you
⏹️ ▶️ John noted, these are like starting prices for the monthly thing. So I'm scrolling all the way down to the Mac thing. Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John $49 a month. Over the course of the entire lease,
⏹️ ▶️ John you end up paying about $1,700 and you have $700 left over. But that's for like a base Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio that costs $2,500. What if you want the 8 terabyte SSD and
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM? What is your monthly payment then? And how much is left on that? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John end the lease with 10 grand left to buy the thing out? I'm definitely going to be looking at these numbers to
⏹️ ▶️ John see how they work out because as lots of people noted, like there's no like interest payments or anything here. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John The main catch is that compared to the old program is that there's Apple Care is not included.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to add that into the price if you want to have it or whatever. But the bottom line is
⏹️ ▶️ John it's not like you don't own it at the end. You're just leasing it. It's just like a leased car. And like a lease car,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your goal is to never have a car that's more than two years old, like you always want to have like a one or two
⏹️ ▶️ John year old car and you're okay with always having a car payment, you lease the car for two years
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you give it back and then you lease a new car and then you give it back and then you lease a new car and you give it back and you get in that way, you will
⏹️ ▶️ John always have a newish car in exchange for always paying a car payment. As opposed to if you just bought that one
⏹️ ▶️ John car and then paid it off over five years, you would have that same car for five years. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John the good thing is at the end of those five years, you own the car outright and you can continue to drive it for another five
⏹️ ▶️ John years and so on and so forth. So this is the computer version of that, leasing computers, which for most
⏹️ ▶️ John people doesn't make sense because most people don't need a new computer every two years or every three years. Like, I got to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a new computer. I got to have a new computer. But if you, if you find yourself always buying a new computer every two or every
⏹️ ▶️ John three years, this program may make sense depending on how much is left that you didn't pay for during
⏹️ ▶️ John that time and how much you really, really want a new computer every two to three years. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not sure how this is going to work for Apple. I know they're always innovating in the financial space of finding
⏹️ ▶️ John ways that people can give them money. um But yeah, this is not, you know, this is not a radical
⏹️ ▶️ John innovation. Car leasing has been around for a long time. I'm just wondering how many customers want this. The old program, the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who like the old one, it was like a cheaper, easier way to get a new iPhone every
⏹️ ▶️ John X years. But the good thing about that was at the end of you going through one of those set of payments,
⏹️ ▶️ John you owned the phone. And that's not the case here. So I guess take it or leave it if it's what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I really, really want to see what the lease payments are and the buyout amount is for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio that I'm going to configure by the end of this year, hopefully.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God help you. Real-time follow-up. They were both the upgrade program. It's just iPhone upgrade program
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Apple upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John we'll get to the differences and more of the differences in a second. But yeah, definitely check out the Verge table to see what the
⏹️ ▶️ John monthly costs are and the buyout amounts
⏹️ ▶️ John It's actually not bad for the phones, too. Like $35 a month and at the end, you have $360 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John left. So yeah, like if you want a new iPhone every two years, you don't
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay the full cost of an iPhone for two years worth of iPhone usage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So Ryan Christoffel over at 9to5Mac has a really good summary of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically the old versus the new, if you will. So the major differences that Ryan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points out are, first of all, it's leasing versus financing, as we spoke about. Apple Upgrade, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, has lower monthly payments, but that's, again, because at the end, you don't own the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You own a portion. Well, you don't really own anything, but you sort of kind of figuratively speaking own a portion of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have the option to pay the rest or give it back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Third, AppleCare is optional instead of mandatory, though if you're planning on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving it back, I personally would strongly suggest opting into it. And then Apple Upgrade also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is obviously not limited to the iPhone. You can do it with a Mac, an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an Apple Watch as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, there was some rumblings, I don't know, a week or two ago, that somebody had found some evidence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of some shenanigans that Apple might pull. So there was evidence that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple would potentially restrict the use of a phone to only a small series of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps. And there was some reporting about that by Emma Roth at The Verge, who writes, Apple says it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won't limit the capabilities of devices leased through its new upgrade program if you miss a payment. In an emailed statement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to The Verge, Apple spokesperson Brian Bumbery says, there will be no restricted mode and or there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be no limitations put on device functionality due to missed payments or default with the Apple upgrade program. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confirmation comes after 9to5Mac uncovered code in iOS 27 beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a new, quote, app managed features, quote, system. This would reportedly allow financial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey partners to perform ongoing status checks on a device, as well as have Apple System
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Services put a device in restricted mode if its owner isn't in good financial standing. Restricted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode would prevent users from accessing most apps on their phone, except for the basic ones like phone, the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store, clock, settings, and wallet. I love that App Store is one of them, but what are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I'm not quite sure. I think there was some other stories like, oh, this restricted mode could be used by other things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like let's say carriers or other companies or whatever, but it's a pretty clear messaging from Apple. They're saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John though this feature may exist, we will not use it if you miss payments in the Apple upgrade program.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess they're not saying what anyone else will use this for or if anyone else will use it, but it's nice to know that if you miss payments,
⏹️ ▶️ John they won't like disable your phone. But if you do miss payments, they will repossess your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beware of that. This whole system kind of like, I don't love that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they built this, you know, because even though they say now, oh, don't worry, we're not going to use it for this. Well, yeah, but somebody's going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it for that. It's just, it's kind of a weird, gross system. i I do not like that they built this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like I said, I mean, in the end, they will send you to collections if you stop you stop paying the payments
⏹️ ▶️ John on your lease, just like they will with the car. And that in general will not end well with you. But these systems
⏹️ ▶️ John are worse than that like getting sent to collections and going through all that at least takes some amount of time and there's some recovery
⏹️ ▶️ John from it. Whereas an electronic off switch like a you know kill switch for your device, would be immediate and
⏹️ ▶️ John much more severe. And it's good that Apple's saying that they will not do this in no uncertain terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, you know, imagine what a government could compel Apple to do, for instance. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there's all sorts of ways this can go very badly. I just, I don't like this at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, MDM already does all this stuff. So it's not like this functionality is not already in iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the user can choose whether to enroll in MDM or
⏹️ ▶️ John not. Yeah, the user can choose whether or not to enroll in this program. Like that's what it comes down to. Although it's not clear whether this functionality is
⏹️ ▶️ John only for Apple offgrade phones or it's available on all phones. Like I mean, MDM is built into every phone, but if you're not enrolled
⏹️ ▶️ John in an MDM program for your workplace, it doesn't affect you. So that's a question that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has not answered. is like this. This functionality is unreleased OS. Is it like MDM
⏹️ ▶️ John where you have to like opt into it and you know you're getting into it? Or is it just on everybody's phone and we just
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know it and it's sleeping there? That I don't know the answer to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Joe Rosignol at MacRumors answers the question, is it worth it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe writes, we'll use the iPhone 17 Pro with 256 gigs of storage on a one-year lease as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an example. In the U.S., the device costs $1,100 upfront, but through Apple Upgrade, you can lease it for $46
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month for a year. For a year-long lease, your payments would total $551.88,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is lower than the $1,100 that you would have spent upfront. $552
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is approximately half of the iPhone 17 Pro's price, so Apple is essentially betting that the device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will retain more than 50% of its value after one year in order to ensure that the Apple upgrade program is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey profitable. If you simply want to spend the least amount of money on iPhones over time, buying them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up front and reselling them privately is very likely the best option. I didn't take a poll quote out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Joe makes a very right point, broadly speaking, that while that is the best option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey financially speaking, that is also way more involved and way more complicated than just handing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone back to Apple and walking away with a new one or just returning it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this is emphasizing the point of like, why would they do this? How do they make money? They make money
⏹️ ▶️ John because when you give back the phone, you're giving back something that is more valuable to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John than the amount that you paid for. It's like they said, if you paid half the price of the phone and you give it back after a year,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that phone hasn't dropped in value by at least half, Apple now can make a profit
⏹️ ▶️ John on it because they can sell it refurbished or they can do, you know, like that's, that's the whole idea with this is you're, you're,
⏹️ ▶️ John don't make money on like, there's no interest payments. They're not hoping that you'll default on your payments and they'll
⏹️ ▶️ John collect interest. That's not how the system works. System works is that they end up with more than they gave you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get the phone for a year for a certain amount of money and then Apple gets the phone back and that phone is more
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable to them than than the amount of money that you like, you haven't paid off that much of the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I'm assuming this program will work out for them because again, car leases work on the same principle,
⏹️ ▶️ John although I think they probably have interest payments. But anyway, I'm sure this will all work out financially for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just a question I have of among potential iPhone buyers,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people find this type of system attractive? I think it is understandable
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is, you know, something people are familiar with, but is it something that people look at and say, yes, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John how I want to pay for my phone? And I don't know what the answer to that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it will attract a new set of customers to iPhones who previously didn't want to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John the big upfront costs. But I think everybody kind of understands leases as a, again, like
⏹️ ▶️ John with leasing cars, it's not a bargain way to get into a car. It's a way for people who always
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have a nice new car to always have a nice new car with less hassle and basically
⏹️ ▶️ John less money because you're, you know, you you could pay less money overall, but eventually you would have an older than two-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ John car, right? Eventually you have a five-year-old car. And if you just can't stand having a five-year-old car, leases are for
⏹️ ▶️ John you, right? But are those customers the type of ones who, I can't stand having a five-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ John car, but I wasn't going to buy an iPhone because it's too expensive? I don't know if there's a market fit here, but I guess we'll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think there's, I mean, I think the world has shown that there is very much market for something like this. So, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, so first of all, on you know i I lease cars. I've leased cars for a while. I haven't leased all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my cars, but I've leased many of them. And the main reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lease is that it is predictable. There is no spike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in cost anywhere along the way, and there is no surprise in cost or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade in value or resale value down the road. Everything with the lease is preset. So when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for a lease for a car, and the iPhone is going to work the same way, when you sign up for a lease, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what you're going to pay up front, you know what you're going to pay every month, and you know at the end what's going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know when that's going to be. And, you know, I've had, I've bought used cars, I've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought new cars, and I've leased. And the lease is really nice because of how predictable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all is. It's way better for cash flow if you know, if you don't have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suddenly lay out you know, $30,000 is like all at once or something. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make things a lot easier on people. It can make things affordable that otherwise wouldn't be affordable or would be more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be affordable. And in a low interest rate environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can be very beneficial for the buyer. And oftentimes car manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will offer lease incentives where they are kind of eating some of the long-term interest to juice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their sales today. And oftentimes lease specials or lease incentives from the manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are oftentimes some of the best deals in new cars Um, if you, if you happen to want what they happen to need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get rid of. So it can be quite nice. Um, In this case, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, when you bring it down to like phone level, I see why people would do this uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it does similar things. It levels out the you know, capex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this giant outlay of money up, up front to just pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it every month. And in fact, if you look around the cell phone industry, many people have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying phones through monthly payments for a long time. All the carriers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have things like this, and many people buy phones this way to help absorb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cost of phones. In those cases, though, they usually own the phones at the end. In this case, they don't. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also the trade-off here is that, well, it's also cheaper. And when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for a lease, like what what you are gaining, as I mentioned, you're gaining predictability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of a level cost over time What you are losing is flexibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, and again, same thing with a car. Like with a car, if you know that you're going to want this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exact car for at least three years and you're going to put in no more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than this number of miles per year on this car, then you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a good fit. I will have exactly this car for exactly this time. I won't have to think about my car. I won't think about service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything like that because it's all going to be included. I'm not going to have to worry about If I'm going to need some kind of big expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco repair, you can just kind of not think about it. And that's it. This will do that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple products. There is a market for that. It is not everybody. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you, again, like flexibility is key, timeline flexibility, usage flexibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In this case, I don't I don't have any kind of usage limits, but there certainly are time time flexibility,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, trade-offs. So if you want to buy a phone or, you know, maybe a phone is a bad example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you want to buy like, you know, a MacBook Pro and you want to always have the newest MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I mean, I don't even do that. That's kind of ridiculous. But if suppose you wanted to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lease ties you to a timeline. So if you buy one now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say, all right, I'll get a two-year lease or a three-year lease, and then in three years or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'll upgrade to the, you know, the M7 or eight or whatever. You don't actually know when that's coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And so you might, you know, it might come out and you still have six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more months on your lease, or it might come out and your lease ended six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago and you had to figure out something else to do. So it does introduce limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trade-offs like that. But for many people, they just don't care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they just want to know that I'm going to buy a phone. I'm going to maybe give it a three-year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lease. And then at the end of three years, I'm going to bring it to Apple. And I don't have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-in prices. I don't have to worry about resale sites. I just bring it into Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I swap it for a new one. That's pretty appealing, especially if the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is right, which in this case, I think Apple's doing everything they can to make the price right because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no interest. Now, they're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Neither is their partner, Klarna.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, Klarna is a big buy-now-pay-later company. Those companies make money in various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. It seems like, oh, you're giving an interest-free loan for X months or years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but a lot of people will be a little bit late on a payment and incur huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fees. So it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. Like they do make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money off people being imperfect. They also will find ways, you know, with Buy Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pay Later, they'll usually find ways to like, you know, charge the retailers more or something like that. In the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple and Klarna, I don't know how that's worked out between the two of them for this deal, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest assured, they're going to make money. Like Klarna is going to make money. Apple's going to make money. But Apple's going to also just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make money on the sale of the device, however it happens. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if Apple gives a couple of percent to Klarna for their service part of this, and then Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hands are clean and they're out of it, they made their money on the device sale. So that's fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it makes sense for them. And again, I think it makes sense for a lot of people. I even would consider it for like things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like laptops, where like I'm not buying a new laptop that often. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting usually about three years out of them these days. So maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would make sense for that. But the other thing is businesses, this is huge. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has done business leasing for a lot of their products for a while. You have to go through the business reps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Off the top of my head, I've never done it. So I don't know what products it covers. I think it has covered Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least. And I think even iPhones, if you were like a big enough business. But businesses love leasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it makes things more predictable. And again, a business does not want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with trading in 19 phones every couple years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They want to just have this be taken care of. That's why business leasing is such an attractive option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's a lot of small businesses too that would have that same need that were just never big enough to, you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Apple's business rep program or like that. And when you think about like those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just families where that's true for like if you have a few, if you, you know, a couple with a few kids,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might have four or five devices that you replace every few years. Do you want to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with sending four or five box kits in to trade them in to see like, oh, I I sent it in a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later and they changed the price and now it's worth less money? or, you know, Leasing saves a lot of hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a lot of people, it's not worth it. For a lot of people, it is. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's really good to have this option. It seems like they're doing it in what looks like a pretty straightforward way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you always have the option to buy it at the end. So that kind of takes care of a lot of risks there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, I think what you're mainly giving up is timing flexibility. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know, okay, I'm really going to keep this for two years or three or three years or whatever. Other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like a pretty good option as long as they don't pull any of this remote disabling crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mentioned something dealing with car leases, and I haven't ever done one, but I'm vaguely aware that
⏹️ ▶️ John there are usually clauses in a car
⏹️ ▶️ John about maximum mileage they expect you to put on it. And if you go over it, maybe there's some penalties.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also often there's stuff about like cosmetics and wear and tear. Like you can't just like cut up all the seats
⏹️ ▶️ John and spill milk inside it or whatever. Like I'm sure, you know, automobile leases have
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that in them because if they didn't, you know, they would probably lose money, especially based on how people
⏹️ ▶️ John treat their cars. And then you mentioned like you probably think there's not a usage limit on the phones, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes me wonder if there is something in there about the condition
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone that you turn back in. And not just like, oh, it can't have a shattered screen or whatever, but I'm thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the way people drive rental cars. Hey, this is just a leased phone. I'm going to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John it to a hundred percent all the time. I'm going to leave it in the hot sun. I'm going
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to do everything through MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I'm going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm going to abuse this battery. So by the time I give it back, it's going to be like redlining on like, you know, maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John battery capacity, 52% after two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know fast charge it every day to 100.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Is there something in the lease about that? Or is that like, hey, the lease didn't say anything about the
⏹️ ▶️ John condition of the battery. I just used it like an iPhone. that, You know, it's not cracked. It's not broken. It's fully functional.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just used it. I used Apple chargers. Like, you know, I do wonder about the fine print and the leases there
⏹️ ▶️ John and if they're going to get burned on that, because if it's your phone and you're trying to like, oh, I paid so much for this phone, you're inclined
⏹️ ▶️ John to like at least think about maybe I should baby the battery a little bit. But if you know this phone is going back
⏹️ ▶️ John in two years, you're just going to, you know, just ride it hard. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm I this occurs to me now because I'd mentioned that with my 16 Pro, I set an 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John battery limit when I bought the phone two years ago-ish. And I recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm like, look, I'm in the home stretch now. And actually at 80% battery limit, a couple of days I was, I
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like the battery is getting a little bit low. So I cranked it up to 90%. And then recently when I went on vacation, I pushed it up to 100.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm just going to leave it on 100 because I'm getting a new phone in September
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I'm just like, even me, like at the end of this phone's life, you get 100% battery. I mean, it's great.
⏹️ ▶️ John The battery's doing great. You know, the 80% thing I fully endorsed if you could possibly do it. But that's because, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John this, this device is, my phone is going to the Pokemon mines, obviously. It's not
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to be resold. It's going to my wife who will add it to her fleet and she will bump down one of her phones. We have a strange
⏹️ ▶️ John system going on here. But when it is your phone or when it's going to be passed on to play
⏹️ ▶️ John Pokemon, go for somebody like you do care about the battery. But if this was going back to Apple, I would have had it a hundred percent
⏹️ ▶️ John from day one because I wouldn't have cared. So that's something to watch for as this program rolls out and if it does
⏹️ ▶️ John get adopted to see if we start seeing stories about like, I returned my perfectly pristine phone, but the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John was a little bit wonky and Apple wouldn't give me the, you know, the, Apple made me pay something for it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in one of the pieces of documentation I read, and I don't think I can put my hands on it right this second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said kind of in a wink, wink, nudge, nudge way that, hey, you're probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to want to get AppleCare because that'll make, didn't I read that earlier? That it'll make turn in way easier?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I forget what I read that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John actually said. I mean, it's just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a leased car and having car insurance. If you get a leased car and you crash it, I mean, you have to have car insurance
⏹️ ▶️ John on a car in most states anyway, but like that's Apple Care is the car insurance of your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And if you, if you get a leased car and you, and something damages it more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their allowable damage. Like, you know, leased cars usually they will allow some degree of minor wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tear. Like if you get like a little scratch in the clear coat, it's fine. You know, they they have if you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if a pebble hits it, like they have thresholds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, okay, well, if it's
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, not that kind of pebble. Not that kind of pebble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But like, you know, but they'll have thresholds like, oh, a scratch can be shorter than a couple of inches or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dent can be, you know, shallower than this and smaller than this. and Or they'll have like a dollar amount. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to have less than fifteen hundred dollars worth of minor scrapes and scuffs. and And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go over that, they'll charge you fees. Or what you're supposed to do is if your car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your leased car gets that much damage, you're supposed to actually go through insurance and go to a body
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shop and have it fixed before you turn it in. And that's that's what this is the equivalent of with Apple Care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the leased phones. It's like the lease is not going to cover if you shatter the screen. So if you have Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Care, you know, they maybe maybe they will just do it for you when you turn it in if it's if like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Store isn't involved, or maybe they'll make you like do an Apple Care repair first and then turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in. But whatever it is, like that's all under one roof.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't know if they would combine it, but for sure, they what they want back is a phone in
⏹️ ▶️ John pristine working condition, plus or minus, whatever allowable nicks and scratches are. So if you do have Apple Care and you
⏹️ ▶️ John come with a cracked screen, they're going to be like, oh yeah, use your Apple Care to fix that screen and then we'll take it. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they'll do that in a single transaction. But the point is, it's not going to save you. Whatever it would cost you to get your screen fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple Care, it will still cost you that same amount to get your screen fixed with Apple Care, just like it would cost you the same amount to go through your insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I can tell you when we leased the Volvo, one of the things they offered, well, they offered several add-ons, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course they did. But one of the things that we actually did do was, because we didn't know if we, and we still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't know, actually, and we'll talk about this later probably, but we don't know if we're going to keep the car, turn in the car, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things they offered was, for not a terrible amount of money, some program,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't remember the name of it, that basically said, hey, if you've curbed the snot out of your wheels, which coincidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I curbed Aaron's wheels. She didn't do it. I did it. But anyway, or one of the wheels. But anyways, if you curb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the snot out of one of the wheels, we'll forgive you. You know, you pay us something like a thousand bucks up front or whatever the case may be. And if you curb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a wheel, it's fine. There are a few other things that are part of that. So generally speaking, if you, if we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were to turn in the car with one of the wheels the way it is, then we would have to pay presumably to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole wheel or at the very least, like not resurface it, you know, repair it. But because we did check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the box on this whatever program, that will be forgiven and it's not the end of the earth. And it's like Marco was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, there's a small, there's a small amount of wear and tear that I consider completely reasonable. But anything more than that, there's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be some sort of like penalty or something like that at the end of our lease that, and this is our first lease, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't really know what I'm talking about, but there'll be some sort of figuring out time where we need to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out with Volvo, you know, okay, what do we need to fund or pay for and what are they just going to eat?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that flies in the face of the way people use phones, which is the expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that you get a phone and then use it until it literally disintegrates in your hands. We've all
⏹️ ▶️ John out there with phones like, how how is that still running? And that's something people do because they don't,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it still works and they don't want to buy a new phone and it's expensive. But if you're on this lease, that's not an option for
⏹️ ▶️ John you. I mean, you can do that as long as you want, but when the time comes and the lease ends, you can't turn that thing back in with
⏹️ ▶️ John like a a shattered screen and a huge nick off the bottom and like the, the thing separating. Like they,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will not take that back. So you need to have Apple Care and have Apple Care repair it probably a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John large expense because Apple Care doesn't make all your repairs free and the worse it is, the more it costs, or
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to pay the remaining balance on that phone that is destroyed. And so it's just
⏹️ ▶️ John like you had bought it up front, only in smaller pieces at 0% interest, which may still be attractive to people.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, that's the one place where the lump sum gets you. Yes, it's even steady payments. But when the even steady payments
⏹️ ▶️ John are over, you know, you've been paying 20-something bucks a month. Now it's $300 lump sum, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or pay to have the phone repaired. And with AppleCare, it may be around $300 to get it repaired. When
⏹️ ▶️ John it's that condition. because people just use their phones for way longer than you would think they would,
⏹️ ▶️ John because like if it still functions and is not actively slicing skin off their fingers as they use the touchscreen,
⏹️ ▶️ John they'll just keep using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are describing my youngest brother 100%. The phones that I've seen him, and he refuses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use a case, despite having an even worse history than I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones. But they can be shattered to smithereens. And as long as they still function and do not, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your point, actively cut him, he's going to still use them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the screen protector, my sister has a screen protector on her phone because it covers up the gigantic crack going from one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco screen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco now you can't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So do either of you plan to
⏹️ ▶️ John lease anything as you know it today? I mean, I'm going to look at the Mac, the lease prices for the Mac. I'm definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John going to look at it. I'm not sure that I'm going to do it because, as you've seen, I'm not the type of person who gets a new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John But I'll look at it, especially because we're in this weird, I wouldn't consider it at all if we weren't currently in this very weird
⏹️ ▶️ John time where everything is super expensive. And, you know, so I will look at it. I don't think it's attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John to me for phones because, again, I use them for two years and they go to the Pokemon mines and it's a system that works well for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for me, I don't particularly care for having leased. I don't disagree with anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you're saying, Marco. And you can make a very strong argument that, hey, instead of paying, you know, $1,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a phone, you can pay $50 for the first month and invest most of the rest of that $1,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, and have that $900 or $950, whatever work for you rather than just handing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to Apple. And intellectually, I 100% understand that. But I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't like owing people money. so for me. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you shouldn't have a house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, tell me about it. Um, for me, I don't, I don't think that there's any chance I would do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this for, for, excuse me, for an iPhone or a watch or an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was, I had told myself prior to Ramageddon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this was probably going to be the year that I would upgrade my Mac. I love my Mac. I have an M3 Max, MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the M3 Max MacBook Pro that I do not want to go backwards from has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 64 gigs of RAM, which is bad. But as I've mentioned many times on the show, it has an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means this is like a $90,000 computer now. And because of that, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I choose to upgrade this year, there is a very good chance that I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lease rather than buy because I'm going to look at the sticker price for whatever it is that I'd be potentially buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and vomit all over myself. So I don't know. That's kind of where I sit today. Ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me again in 10 minutes. I'll change my mind. What about you, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also don't like owing people money. I don't think I would do it for something like an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think the timeline is pretty short on that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I buy a new iPhone almost every year. I have bought one every year. And so I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if I'm going to do that forever, but I am currently doing that. And so to split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it across 12 payments and then have to deal with it at the end, maybe that might be worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's not quite as much of a slam dunk for me. But when I look at something like my main Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you were just saying, this is like, I think when I bought this Mac, it was something like $6,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think mine, again, M3 Max, was roughly $5,000, give or take a little bit. I don't remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly, but it's similar you know order of magnitude.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like mine's also an M3 Max. You know, It's now, what is it, three years old now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, your desktop laptop is also an M3 Max? I'm sure I knew that, but I'd forgotten.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my laptop laptop is a regular M4, No Pro, no Max, just a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann M4.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my, yeah, my desktop laptop is an M3 Max. The first one was an M1 Max. I got an M3 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I'm probably going to get the M, whatever they do with the M6 line that is rumored or the M7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever like the next big boom is. I'm probably going to jump to that. But we'll see pricing and performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything like that. But when I do replace that, like you said, it's specced up. It's probably going to be like $8,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or $9,000. It's probably going to be a big purchase. And I'm going to use it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than the lease term, probably. If I do, say, a two-year lease,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gives me a two-year interest-free loan on an $8,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase. That's interesting, especially since I know I will use it for that time. And then at the end of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I would probably just buy it out, right? You know, and because it's either way, like it's the same amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money at the end. I just get an interest free loan for, for half of it for most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that time. That is compelling, especially like, you know, if if the business pays for it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that kind of helps like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it helps you know, cashflow in the business be like up this month-to-month cost. So that honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for something like a, like a Mac or like a monitor where like it's going to be a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money, but I expect to use it for longer than the lease term and just buy it out at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end, that actually makes a lot of sense financially as long as you don't mind the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco debt angle of it. But it's if there's no fees and no interest, it's kind of
macOS battery charge limits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, in macOS 26.4, there are battery charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limits for the Mac. And you can use this in shortcuts, I guess. So, reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from 9to5Mac, in the first beta of macOS 26.4, Mac users can now specify a charge limit between 80 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 100%. The charge limit feature was previously only available on iPhone and iPad. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new iOS 26.4 and macOS 26.4 betas bring charge limit to the shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. Now you can automate setting your charge limit. That is pretty neat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here we are on 26.6 It just came out. So this thing has been in the notes for a long time, but I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep it here because I am a huge fan of charge limit. I just talked about it on my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John preserving my phone battery. But especially, especially, especially if you have a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop. Do you have a laptop that spends most of its time on your desk plugged into power? You need to
⏹️ ▶️ John use this feature because it will so extend the life of your laptop's battery instead of having,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I know they have the optimized charging where like it'll try to do something smart, but like just take the slider and slam it to 80%.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of all, the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John are so good now that even 80% of these laptops is plenty. And second of all, you know what you're doing with
⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop. If it really is on your desk plugged into power almost all the time, there's no
⏹️ ▶️ John reason to keep it at 100%. I wish you could even go lower, like 40%, which is, I think, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly more on the optimal limit. But anyway, use this feature on your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Turn it down to 80%. If it spends most of its time plugged in, your battery will thank you. Resale
⏹️ ▶️ John value will thank you, even if you're selling it to a private person because they might want to know the battery health if they're technically savvy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this was two point versions of macOS ago. And you could automate it with shortcuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm sure you could write some shortcut that's like, when I'm not in my house, change the limit to 100 or what, like, I'm sure you
⏹️ ▶️ John could do all sorts of fancy automations, but even just control this manually like I do on my phone. I mean, they can't bite you if you
⏹️ ▶️ John forget, oh, I forgot I'm going. I'm going to be traveling today. I should have put it 100%, percent. but it doesn't take too much to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And again, if you're clever with shortcuts, you can automate it in interesting ways, but it will just
⏹️ ▶️ John do so much for the life of your battery for when you do travel that every Mac users
⏹️ ▶️ John use this. And I almost kind of wish that they would default it to 80% percent or at least put it down to 80% percent when it
⏹️ ▶️ John sees, hey, you've had this laptop for a month and it's always been plugging into the charger. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna turn
⏹️ ▶️ John that down to 80% for you. Is that okay? Yes, no, right? Throw the dialogue up. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John use this feature. I highly recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, I agree. Uh, I definitely am in a situation where I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost always see my battery at 80 or below because of the optimized battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging thing. So I'm right there with you for a desktop laptop. That is the perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way or reason to do this. So, yep, completely agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, there's been tons of third-party utilities that have done this for years. This is an example of something where you just assume that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually built it into macOS, and they have, and it is much more limited than the third-party options, but it's great that it's built
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#askatp: Backup strategies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And we have a twofer from friend of the show, Todd Vaziri. The first of which reads:
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perhaps it's a good time to revisit backup strategies. Given our talk about SuperDuper, I couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree more. What are some good strategies for different situations? Like, I'm going to read them all, and then I'll ask you, particularly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, to go through your thoughts. So the three situations Todd provides are casual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer folks, you know, one to two computers like your proverbial parents, advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users, three or more computers in a single household, or mega advanced users, Syracusa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level, NAS folks, et cetera. So Marco, feel free to pop in whenever you want. But John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you recommend for casual computer folks specifically? And then we'll go to the others later.
⏹️ ▶️ John So with casual people, which to be clear is most people in this parlance, people who aren't
⏹️ ▶️ John listening to ATP, the main struggle there is
⏹️ ▶️ John having any kind of backup at all. Like that is, I continue to believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that most people do not have backups, including people, by the way, on their phones. I mean, this doesn't, I'm thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is in the Mac context, but doesn't say that in the question. But like phones, we all know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, backing up your phone is just a matter of hitting that little iCloud backup thing, but it's not because you have to pay for iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ John that can fit your backup and blah, blah, blah. And the plain fact is people just don't do it because they don't want to pay for iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever. Even if they do pay for iCloud, they don't hit the toggle switch because they just don't think about it. And with desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John computers or laptops or whatever, it's even worse. The entire concept of backups is entirely foreign.
⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine is the greatest advance ever made to casual computer use backups. And still,
⏹️ ▶️ John it only moved the needle a little bit, I'm sure. So the main strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John I recommend for casual users of technology is to get them to use literally
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of backup. Now, ideally, as a tech nerd friend who's helping them out or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you'd be like, okay, on the Mac, you should use Time Machine. On your phone, you should use iCloud backup, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the default, simplest, cheapest option is that doesn't involve third parties, that you're sure is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be supported. that's not going to be a hassle or whatever. And even that, it's going to be a struggle because you know what it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like with the Macs. They're going to be like, well, Time Machine backup. Well, how do I do that? Well, you need another hard drive. What? What
⏹️ ▶️ John do I do? Just, it's the end of the world. I got to pay a monthly fee for something
⏹️ ▶️ John in some cloud. What? It's going to be hard. But that's my casual advice. And that's that's
⏹️ ▶️ John not a great backup, but it's better than nothing. So the choices are nothing or something in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Something in a fight
⏹️ ▶️ John is what you have to do. That's the casual computer user solution I recommend. Anyone have any
⏹️ ▶️ John better, brilliant ideas? Because that's kind of my defeatist position right now. No, I think I'm with you. Yeah. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for advanced and mega advanced, I think they're similar. It's just a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John when you stop uh wanting to spend money or care. um And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I recommend is, I mean, and even I have my limits there because I stop having money and care sooner
⏹️ ▶️ John than if I had unlimited funds. I would do different, better backup things. But you'd basically just go through the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that we talk about. I hasn't, It hasn't changed for me in terms of the bullet points that
⏹️ ▶️ John you're going to hit and the order that you're going to hit them, but the specific technologies have changed a little bit. So
⏹️ ▶️ John um, for phone backups and iPad backups, I mean, there's honestly not a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of options. Pay for iCloud storage enough to back up all your devices. Turn iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John backups on. That's it. I wish it was that simple on other devices. It's that simple mostly because Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly friendly to third-party backup services for phones, despite the EU's advice
⏹️ ▶️ John there. But I mean, that's the answer to the devices that support that. On the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just go down the list. Number one, Time Machine. That means, yes, you have to get a hard drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John local time machine, a hard drive connected to your local thing. It's the simplest version of time machine. It's the most reliable version
⏹️ ▶️ John of time machine. It does mean you have to have an external drive. What external drive do I buy? If I have a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I keep it detected? I got it mounted and unmounted. And now it says it was unmounted and properly and blah, blah, Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's what you're signing up for. That's time machine, but that's got to be your step one, local time machine backup. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would say number two is cloud backup. Get some data that's not in your house. So when your house burns
⏹️ ▶️ John down, you have some kind of backup. uh Past sponsor Backblaze is still my go-to recommendation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I recently learned from somebody, maybe my brother, that
⏹️ ▶️ John Crash Plan somehow still exists. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey god gone out of business. but maybe no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought they were enterprise only or something, or if not, went out of business.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought maybe someone bought them. Anyway, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very bad. Very, very bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't know what state they're in now, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, you know what's worse? Carbonite. Oh, man. I had to deal with that once for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody I was doing a favor for. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was real bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, again, like, we talked about some of the stories of Backblaze, like not blocking up cloud drives or whatever. But like I still
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they are the best in the industry. Night and day. Again, they sponsored us a long time ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I used them before they sponsored. I continue to use them after they sponsored us. They're not perfect, but I believe they are the best for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac. But if you have other solutions that you like, like Arc backup or any kind of tech nerdy, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John go super tech nerd, all I'm saying is that step one is time machine, local time machine. Step two is off-site
⏹️ ▶️ John backup, by which I mean cloud backup. right. Step three, then you go into
⏹️ ▶️ John network time machine backup. Because sometimes doing a local time machine backup, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if it involves a laptop that's on the move a lot. Oh, I forgot to plug in the drive. I didn't plug into my docking
⏹️ ▶️ John station, whatever. You have all sorts of excuses why you didn't do your local time machine backup. But if you have network time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine backup, then every time you're on your network, that can happen. And yes, you can have multiple time machine backup
⏹️ ▶️ John destinations on a Mac. I know a lot of people don't think about this, but it's been my mode that I've operated in all the time. Time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine can back up to more than one place and it will back up to all of them whenever they're available. So if the
⏹️ ▶️ John local drive isn't attached, it will do to the network one. If they're both attached, it will do them each in turn. You can have as many backup destinations
⏹️ ▶️ John as you want. So yeah, local time machine, cloud backup, network time machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now we start getting into the more exotic stuff, which is like, okay, bootable clone, super duper carbon copy cloner.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could swap that maybe with network time machine, depending, but a clone is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a backup. A clone is get you back up and running as fast as possible. But if you deleted a file a week ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John your clone that you made last night is not going to save you. So a clone is not a backup. A clone is my hard drive just blew up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to get back to work ASAP. A time machine restoration is going to take literally eight hours, reboot
⏹️ ▶️ John from your carbon copy corner backup. So you can swap that priority depending on what your needs are. But yeah, a clone
⏹️ ▶️ John backup. Then you start getting to the more exotic stuff, which is like, I'm going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John my own bespoke backup system involving rsync just for my particular files targeted at my
⏹️ ▶️ John NAS and also pushing them up to S3. Like that's, I don't, even I don't go that hardcore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to, but I don't have the money or time to push that. And I'll have some
⏹️ ▶️ John news on my backup struggles related to bespoke solutions
⏹️ ▶️ John that push my files up to various storage systems coming in probably a couple of months
⏹️ ▶️ John because I'm still working some things out here. But anyway, I don't go that hard
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on this because it just
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually starts to cost
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco real money. because like
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the beautiful things about Backblaze is they will back up everything that's directly attached to your Mac and you can game it
⏹️ ▶️ John with iSCSI and stuff like that, but they'll do it for a flat fee, which is incredibly good compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to when you have to pay per byte. And no matter how you price stuff out, Backblaze ends up being cheaper pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly if you have a lot of data. um And beyond that, Um, then you get into like
⏹️ ▶️ John not using a Mac anymore and instead using some kind of like, you know, Linux computer or ZFS with real time,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, multiple redundant block clones happening in real time and block though this being
⏹️ ▶️ John sprayed all over the internet and stuff. Uh, Again, I don't do that either Cause I don't use Linux and that's outside the realm
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple stuff. So that's that's what I recommend for people. And during that list of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will come a point where you're like, this is too much. It's too annoying. It's too expensive. Do I have to buy a NAS now? Do I have to pay for this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I have to pay for that? So stop when you can't bear it anymore. Um, There are things I left out like, oh, I'm going
⏹️ ▶️ John to periodically clone my hard drive and drive my hard drive over to my friend's house. You feel
⏹️ ▶️ John free to mix that in, but in my experience, it's just too much of a hassle and people forget to do it. Same thing with like, I'm going to burn
⏹️ ▶️ John my photo library to M disks that'll last for a hundred years. How often are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that? I mean, it's better than nothing and you should do that. If that's like, This is like the long tail of like things I
⏹️ ▶️ John might remember to do when I'm enthusiastic about it, but then forget about for a few years. Almost guaranteed
⏹️ ▶️ John that if some disaster happens, you'll think back, oh, I haven't brought my hard drive over to my
⏹️ ▶️ John parents' house in six months because I just forgot about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It's not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen the day after you bring it over there. So yeah, that's that's my backup advice.
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn't really changed much. Like I said, the only thing that's changed is the specific technologies and companies involved,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the main strategy is the same. You want to have your data in more than one place and more than one medium and more than one
⏹️ ▶️ John company. You know, you're diversifying. So Backblaze is different than Time Machine is different than iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John is different than you know, network time machine to a Synology is different than you know, the whole nine
⏹️ ▶️ John yards is different than a Super Duper clone is different than a carbon copy clone that you bring to your friend's house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One addition, I don't disagree with anything you said. One addition, you had said, you know, bringing a hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive over to your parents, whatever. Just a thought. What I have done for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the the small bits of data, which are, well, it's a lot of data, but only a couple of contexts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And photos is the number one example. So for like my photos, for example, Um, I have a hard drive at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my parents. It's, I think it's a spinning hard drive, if I'm not mistaken. Um, And what I do is whenever I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there for more than like 20 minutes, which is almost every time I go, I bring my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more often than not, and I'll hook it up to this hard drive. And thanks to the beauty of past and future for sponsor Tailscale,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can do an rsync between this hard drive and the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my house. and since it's symmetric gigabit at both houses, it's reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick. And so every time I'm at their house, I have this off-site backup that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never leaves their house of the thing that is most valuable to me in the entire world, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my photos. Now, I have my photos strewn across like literally six other places. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the reserve, reserve, reserve, reserve, reserve parachute, so to speak. But it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually not particularly burdensome. And in my case, I tend to see my parents about once a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it's a nice, at least monthly backup of of my photos. Again, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disagree with anything you said. And I do have to remember and I do have to bring a laptop and so on and so forth. But it actually works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out really nicely and it's not particularly burdensome, especially thanks to the beauty of Tailscale.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should automate that though, because you're doing a manually like, this is definitely in the mega advanced thing of like have a NAS at someone else's
⏹️ ▶️ John house and make sure they have gigabit and set up a VPN between your houses. And yeah, like definitely in the mega advanced
⏹️ ▶️ John know, again, tailing off. But I would just say for you, the thing that you're doing, it just seems like everything you've described could be automated.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don't need to be physically there to make this happen. You could set up a little thing in their house that just does this periodically, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if you're doing some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like version to rsync type of thing. I mean, anyway, again, everyone has the limit of where they stop, but just the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that every time you go over there, you're sitting in your laptop and run a command and hit return, like that could be happening without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. But what I didn't mention is I have also deployed a Synology there that gets nightly backups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of everything as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, So that's what I'm saying. Like, yeah, if you happen to have a relative with gigabit fiber who would let you install a NAS
⏹️ ▶️ John in their house, all sorts of new options can be, you know, become open to you. But still, it's, it's the type of thing of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just said, like, where your photos are strewn all over the place. Like, it's one of the reasons I'm wanting to get an eight
⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte hard drive on my next Mac. It's just having stuff in separate places is just more
⏹️ ▶️ John things to keep track of. If you can, you know, keep all your eggs in one basket and really watch
⏹️ ▶️ John that basket. But in this is the version, keep all your eggs in one basket and back up that basket basket to 17 different places.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's so much easier to keep track of like my stuff is this eight terabytes. And yes, I could have it on three
⏹️ ▶️ John different volumes and some of it is only on the NAS and some of it is only on my Mac and some of it is only on the external hard
⏹️ ▶️ John drive. But it becomes difficult to make to be to assure yourself that you have backed up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and not just,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I'm backing up my Mac to three places, but where is your NAS backed up to? Well, is anything only on your NAS?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which things are only on your NAS? And you back up your NAS to some other thing like B2 or something, but how much of that stuff is there? And
⏹️ ▶️ John it's just, it's so much easier when you can reduce it to a smaller number of buckets. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by all means, like you said, spray those buckets everywhere in various things. You know, I also have like my photos being backed up
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google Photos, although Google is fighting me on that because Google Drive is going to stop doing that. So I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But like, if you pay for cloud storage, like we do, I have Google One. I have the big plan
⏹️ ▶️ John in iCloud. If you pay, you know, I think I have OneDrive as part of like Microsoft 365.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they're giving you this cloud storage and it's enough to store some stuff, it's tempting to just put a little bit here, a little bit there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it's really easy to lose track of that. And if you just think about like, what would I what would I do if I needed to restore from
⏹️ ▶️ John my computer now? Your mind will immediately go to the things that are simpler. Super duper.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I, if it's not a backup scenario, I just want to get up and running. I understand how that works conceptually. It's simple to
⏹️ ▶️ John use. I just reboot. It goes into it. I'm fine. And the expense is now you have to have an SSD that's
⏹️ ▶️ John the same size as your boot drive to be your clone drive that you just sits there with you not using it. You're like, oh, I'm going to spend so much
⏹️ ▶️ John money for another eight terabyte SSD and its sole purpose is to sit there waiting for disaster
⏹️ ▶️ John and I'm never going to use it. Yes, that's what a backup is. It's painful for people. They don't want to do it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And time machine, like I know how time machine works. I'll do that. That's the other thing people think of because when you boot your Mac in
⏹️ ▶️ John recovery, it says, hey, do you want to restore from a time machine backup? You're like, yes, that's exactly what I want to do. And then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait eight hours and it will hopefully eventually work fingers crossed, which is why it's good to have two time machine backups
⏹️ ▶️ John because if one of them is hosed, maybe the other one is good. Backups are way, but all this to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John backups are way more complicated than they should be on the Mac. uh Backups on the phone are simpler,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if anything goes wrong, oh, sorry, couldn't restore from that backup. Or for some reason, your backup is three days ago instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of two days ago. You have very few options. So pick your poison.
#askatp: What’s a Docker container?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then to wrap up, Ask ATP for today, Todd Vaziri also wrote, can you explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what a Docker container is? I feel like I could take a stab at this, but I think, John, you would, or you are far more qualified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to explain this. Uh, So could you take a stab, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I'm going to link to the uh, WizardZines site again. There is a Wizard Zine,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like a comic book style uh, sort of capsule summary of
⏹️ ▶️ John technology written for nerds, but that doesn't go super deep on things, but also isn't super shallow. It's like an
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting mix. Anyway, uh check that one out, uh buy it, and it will give you a good overview.
⏹️ ▶️ John um I remember seeing a presentation from
⏹️ ▶️ John people, the docker the Docker company, whatever they were, a startup or whatever, talking about Docker,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know, many, many, many years ago when no one had
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann heard
⏹️ ▶️ John of it and they were going around to companies saying, hey, we have this idea for this technology. You should check it out. um
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the comic going around then, it might have been xkcd It might have been from the company. I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I think it was shown in the presentation was Um, the, the developer problem, especially for server
⏹️ ▶️ John side software, where you're writing something in your dev environment. Maybe the dev
⏹️ ▶️ John environment is running on your dev servers, which is you know, some server machine in your office. Maybe the dev environment is running
⏹️ ▶️ John on your laptop in more enlightened times. But very often back in these old days, you had dev servers that
⏹️ ▶️ John were server machines either in your office or in a data center set aside from your production
⏹️ ▶️ John machines. But these are just for development. And in theory, they were like the uh, the production machines. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would run in your software there. Maybe you'd be remotely SSH into them. You'd be developing on them or you'd be deploying
⏹️ ▶️ John to them or whatever. And you'd work on some product, some feature. And you'd be like, okay, it's good. It works. And
⏹️ ▶️ John people would QA it and stuff. And then you would release it to production and it wouldn't work. And you'd
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, I don't know. It worked when I tried it. It worked on my computer. It worked on the dev servers like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell? Like, I just like, what do you want me to do? I tested it. I debugged it. I had, we went through QA. People tried
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Everything was fine. I guess there's something different about production than my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John or the dev server. But it's like, this is not my problem. Like, it works on my computer. And the Docker
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to that problem was, fine, well, then we'll ship your computer. Get it to work on your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what we'll deploy is your computer. It's like, well, you're not going to deploy my computer. My computer's a laptop and I'm running everything locally. How are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to deploy my computer? It's like, well, if you do your development in a little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John private machine environment that thinks it's its own computer and you get it to work there
⏹️ ▶️ John and we can deploy that thing, it doesn't know that it's someplace different because it didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John know where it was before. It says, I am the only one and only process on this Linux machine. I am
⏹️ ▶️ John process ID one and I am this server and I see these files and these directories and this is a entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John reproducible artifact based on a recipe that says, here's how you build this machine. You start with this operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John You install these things. You put these files here. You do this. that like just an automated process that builds this little, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can think of it like as a virtual machine, but for technical reasons, it's not quite the same thing. Um, And
⏹️ ▶️ John that's what you're running in your laptop. And that's what you're running in your dev server. And that's what you're running in production.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all those places where it's running, it thinks it's running in its own little computer. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks your server process is the only process in that computer. And it thinks the user account that runs
⏹️ ▶️ John that server is the only user. Like it is its own little tiny kingdom where everything looks the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's what we ship. So there's no like, I got it to work on the dev server, but then it goes to production and it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John work. It's always the same everywhere. Now, how do they do that, technically speaking? Is it like virtual machines
⏹️ ▶️ John where like VMware, where you're like, OK, well, we're going to, you know, your CPU supports hypervisor
⏹️ ▶️ John and we're going to boot a whole other operating system right here. And it's going to have its own RAM and it's going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have its own access to the screen and the hardware. And is that what it is? No, virtual machines are a different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The technical details of what makes this different, you should check out the wizard zine, but basically it uses features of Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John that allow it to run one operating system, but fake out another,
⏹️ ▶️ John make a little fake world where it thinks that, you know, it's got its own process IDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and its own, you know, user accounts and its own directory structure or whatever. Really, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John just a subset of the things shared with the host thing. And same thing with networking. There's complications about
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it's sharing the networking with the top layer or having a proxy. Anyway, the whole point is it's a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of Linux that allows this to work in a more efficient way. So you don't have to literally boot a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John other operating system with all the complete repetition. It can use the resources of the main network system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, the technical nuances of how this is different from hypervisor and VMs are not that interesting, but it's the same type
⏹️ ▶️ John of idea. Think of it as a lighter weight version to do virtual machines. So
⏹️ ▶️ John lightweight, in fact, that the way you make one of these with Docker and various other tools is you
⏹️ ▶️ John literally do write a recipe, which is just a not very long text file that says, here is the recipe
⏹️ ▶️ John to build this little machine. Uh, And you run that recipe
⏹️ ▶️ John and it makes the container and you can deploy that container anywhere. There are many nuances to this that make it that make
⏹️ ▶️ John it much more complicated than the simple description. But the simple description was compelling enough. And the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the old adage of works on my computer, fine, we'll ship your computer turns out to be useful enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is actually caught on in various forms. Um, There's the official Docker thing for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has its own container system that looks like a Docker compatible type thing. This is, you know, This
⏹️ ▶️ John has been done many times over now because it is a genuinely good idea. And Casey's
⏹️ ▶️ John using it in the instance of like, so you want to run some software on your Synology. I don't know what your Synology setup is like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know how you have things configured. I don't know what your directory structure looks like. I don't know what your user IDs
⏹️ ▶️ John are. I don't know what your permissions are. I don't know any of that crap. How am I going to get this thing to work on your Synology and some other person's
⏹️ ▶️ John NAS and this? like how, Well, we'll just make a Docker container. This Docker container, if you get anything that can
⏹️ ▶️ John run Docker, the world inside the Docker container looks the same no matter where it is. If it's on your Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it's on someone's Linux computer, if it's running on someone's Mac, if it's running on a pie hole, inside the Docker
⏹️ ▶️ John container, it looks exactly the same because the world inside the Docker container is determined by that Docker file formula,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that Docker file is the same everywhere. That is the beauty of Docker containers. And that's why so much is distributed
⏹️ ▶️ John that way, because these stupid systems they have are like, well, you need to have this server
⏹️ ▶️ John running here on this port, and it talks to the server here running on that port and blah, blah, blah. And you can have, you know, mega
⏹️ ▶️ John recipes that were like, okay, I'm going to run seven Docker containers and they're all going to talk to each other in this way. And so there's
⏹️ ▶️ John a recipe that points to other recipes and you can build up from there. And in that way, you can get something
⏹️ ▶️ John that will run anywhere. And you're not debugging like, oh, I don't know how to get that to work on a pile. I only get to know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it to work on this specific version of Synology. No, it'll run everywhere. Anywhere that Docker runs, this will run
⏹️ ▶️ John because it's the same everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So for me, it's generally speaking, and I'm not for the record running it on my Synology anymore. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little NUC that runs almost all my Docker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John containers. You're proving
⏹️ ▶️ John the point. You used to run on Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and now you're running on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that is not Synology at all. That's a very good point. But basically, when I set up some new piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of server software, generally speaking, and obviously there's ifs, ands, buts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotchas, and so on. But generally speaking, if you'll allow me to oversimplify, I tell Docker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, this folder, this directory internal to the Docker container,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey map that to this other place in the host. So if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Docker container is looking for forward slash config, well, maybe the host is putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in slash home slash Casey slash Docker slash such and such slash config. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you're mapping between the container's world and the host's world. And usually there's a few like environment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey variables you need to specify, like maybe what time zone you're in, what user to use, and stuff like that. This is all very straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And obviously, Todd is a friend of ours. And I know that Todd is definitely capable of doing these sorts of things. And most people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. But you basically configure it in a text file, generally speaking, called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Docker Compose file. And then you say to Docker, okay, run this thing, or in some cases, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suite of things that is in this one file. And it's typically very, very little configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than mapping volumes from, or mapping folders, basically directories,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, between host and client. And that's about it. And that's how I can run so much server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software really, really, really easily. And it's really, really great. You kind of have to, it bends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your brain a bit. Even as a seasoned technologist, it bent my brain pretty fiercely at first. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can see the matrix. And I really like, particularly, as John said, server-style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software. I really, really like installing it this way because it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so easy, so reliable, and so repeatable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's so lightweight, just to give you an example of how this is different from VMs. It's so lightweight that people will distribute
⏹️ ▶️ John command line tools as Docker containers. Like imagine there's a fancy version of the LS
⏹️ ▶️ John command that has like animations and color or something. Someone makes a fancy version of LS. You're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I'm not going to boot a virtual machine just so I can run the fancy LS command
⏹️ ▶️ John from it. Why would I ever do that? But it is feasible with Docker because it's so lightweight because it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not booting an entire virtual machine. Again, see the Wizardzine thing about the various Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs that it uses to confine a process to a what it thinks is
⏹️ ▶️ John its own little fake out world. But it's just, it's running on the same Linux kernel that is already up and running.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's no booting an operating system happening. And so you can actually run a command line tool
⏹️ ▶️ John from inside a Docker container. It's not the speediest thing in the world. Like it's better to just have it out and run it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but uh it is it is feasible at least to do that. And it would never be feasible to like boot
⏹️ ▶️ John up a VM to do that. And as you noted, Casey, like you can map into and out of the world of
⏹️ ▶️ John the container with various you know configuration parameters of like which directories can see each other, which network ports
⏹️ ▶️ John connect to which other things, all sorts of stuff like that. That's all entirely configurable inside the Docker files
⏹️ ▶️ John and from the command line and hooking everything up. And it's very automatable because these are all just command line tools and text
⏹️ ▶️ John files. And so you can build up on top of that to make these big complicated things. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it's very useful. I think I said when I started taking over maintenance of the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John that I found website code and everything, the first thing I did was get a Docker container up. This is despite the fact that our production does not run Docker.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we are not doing the works on my machine, ship my machine. We're not doing that, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John made a reproduction inside Docker as close as I could to what we are running on our production servers
⏹️ ▶️ John because there's no way my Mac was ever going to look like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco our production
⏹️ ▶️ John servers, which are not running Mac OS. So I can make a little Linux machine that's running the same
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Linux as our production servers and so on and so forth in a Docker container. And same for all other backend services
⏹️ ▶️ John and making them talk to each other and yada yada. So it's extremely, it's an indispensable tool because
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, in the bad old days, I don't know what I would do. I would do what Marco was doing when he was writing this stuff, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is I run kind of the same software and kind of the same versions on my Mac and cross my fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John that when I deploy it on Linux,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it'll be remotely similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I'm still crossing my fingers because like we're not running Docker in production and
⏹️ ▶️ John it's not worth us changing to do that because it's working fine so far. Fingers crossed. But boy, is it a lot closer running
⏹️ ▶️ John of Linux and the same version of all the software in Docker versus not of Docker versus whatever the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John thing Homebrew is spewing out or whatever you built yourself for macOS and keeping up with that, every new version of macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and rebuilding all your world or making sure homebrew is up to date. Docker is a godsend. I don't know what I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace and ZocDoc. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to our members as well who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're going to be talking about OpenAI's hardware, both the announced hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the updates to their rumored hardware. Talking about that in Overtime, you can join to listen, at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Auntie Marco Arment. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Syracuse. It's accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Neutral: Casey’s car-shopping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some news. I have resumed car shopping. I have not finished car shopping,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I have resumed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you ever really stopped car shopping?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like me and TV shopping. Is there when
⏹️ ▶️ John shopping going on, or is there an intensity dial?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's, I guess, there's an intensity dial, and it is all the way up to 11. That's a reference, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when we last left our hero, I think it was roundabouts of February, I had gone and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had investigated the Porsche Taycan. I always forget if I'm pronouncing that right or not. I had convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself that was my next car, having never actually been in one. I sat in it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked through the rear view mirror, and decided the rear visibility is so god-awful, I don't think I can handle it. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's a two-speed transmission in the Taycan, and I decided I didn't like that either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I abandoned that plan. And some friends of mine recommended,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I understand your BMW experience was not stellar, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you considered the BMW i4? And I think, Marco, you were leading the charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this expedition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am constantly tempted to buy one myself. I really want one. Every time I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on the road, I'm like, oh, it looks so good. Well, except the pig nose. But other than that, I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it came in orange. I can get them on AutoTrader in orange.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, it's such, And it's a good orange. The I-4 Sedan came in orange? Yes. And it's a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sunset orange metallic. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good orange. I've, I've seen a couple in real life. Oh, my God. It's the, it's like the best orange BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has shipped in a very long time on a car that is almost perfect for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. I, oh, it drives me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So um, the conclusion I came to in February after having driven an I-4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically the M50 version, which is their hot rod version, Um, the conclusion I came to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, first of all, this feels like home, which is mildly alarming, but nevertheless, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like home. Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than my old BMW was in a lot of ways. And some of that is good and some of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not. um, It was incredibly fun to drive. I am a pure blood American when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes to straight line speed. A more refined individual would care more about cornering ability and so on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so forth. I do enjoy that, don't get me wrong, but the quickest way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a humongous smile on my face is is to just launch me like a rocket ship in a straight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line. And so I decided I really enjoy the i4 a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the one I was looking at at the time, to be clear, this was used. So it was a Porsche I also drove the Audi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey e-tron GT. He did that as well, which makes sense because it's basically a Taycan. All these are used cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I looked at one that was, I thought at the time anyway, optioned the way I wanted. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conclusion I came to was I don't have a problem with my Volkswagen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it's still, as I sit here today anyway, as I knock on wood, uh, it's still running great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Coincidentally, I'm taking it in tomorrow for routine maintenance. So hopefully they don't have any surprises for me. But uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's running great. I have no reason to believe it's about to die as I continue to knock on wood. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have time. And I thought, you know, why would I spend a whole pile of money on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car I don't really need? Just because I think it's fun. And that's all still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. But I think I'm just over gasoline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars. And I don't mean that in the dismissive way I think it came across. I think the gasoline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars are great. I will always love gasoline cars. But for my needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this particular time in my life, a gasoline car is just not the right fit. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just really isn't. Now, we're going to put aside, John Sarakisa, the fact that any fully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric car means my left leg is useless. And that pains me more than I can begin to tell you. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to go so far as to say it would pain me more than it would pain John, but it's close.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don't feel like I want a gasoline car anymore. Now, if you remember,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin has a plug-in hybrid. Her Volvo XC90 weighs as much as a house. It only gets about 30 miles of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey range on the battery. But for our needs, 30 miles of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey range has actually been really freaking great. And I don't have the numbers in front of me. I can call them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up if I get a chance. But I do know, I was looking at this just the other day. In the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years that we've owned the Volvo, we have put 220 gallons of gas in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in the eight years, just a couple of weeks, I have eight years we've owned the Volkswagen, we've put in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1,500 gallons of gas or something like that. Like a staggering amount more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gas. And it's just for my needs. I don't need a gasoline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. I really, really don't. Much less a gasoline car that takes premium. Now, admittedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Volvo also takes premium, but we almost never run the engine. So the other thing that complicates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things is that every time I go to go somewhere, Aaron says to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why are you taking your car? And she doesn't mean this to be a turd, but like, take my car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says Aaron. Why would we take yours? My car is quote unquote free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insofar as anywhere I'd be going without her. I'm almost certainly going to be within 30 miles round trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are occasions I go further, but they're few and far between. And so it's become,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this sounds more dramatic than I mean it, but it's become a point of contention between us because I like driving my car. I want to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to drive my car, but she's not wrong. Why the hell am I burning gasoline? Why am I burning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dead dinosaurs when her car is, again, air quotes, free to drive? Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. And so I think I'm at the point now, I am willing to trade my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left leg and sacrifice my left leg and get a battery electric vehicle. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the only battery electric vehicle that really fits my needs, wants, and desires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really closely anyway, is a BMW i4, most specifically an M50 trim.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since we talked about this in February, a lot of people have reached out and said, oh my God, I have one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it's incredible. What's the line from Seinfeld? They're real and they're fantastic or something like that. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. Thank you. A lot of people have reached out and said they're spectacular. And beyond that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allegedly, as I knock furiously on more wood, the BMW electric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars and Marco, jump in whenever you're ready,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposed to be considerably more reliable than my former 2011
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 335 with the N55 motor that was amazing for the 10 minutes it ran, but was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constantly broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they're amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think it's time. However, the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your boy has desires. And I really, really want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really well-optioned one. And let me tell you, not easy to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty well-loaded BMW i4 M50 on the used market. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not great, friends. It's not great. And I need someone, I need a listener to step out of the woodwork
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, I am a like car broker headhunter, whatever. I don't know what the term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I'm looking for, but I'm a car headhunter and I will find you this car. But I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been looking constantly for the last several days because I think I'm ready. I just, I want to do it. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love my Volkswagen, but it's time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this is not going to help you, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual solution to your problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey buying a new
⏹️ ▶️ John one. No, as Marco suggested earlier, is wait for the new i3 to come out and everyone gets all excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about the new, even uglier BMWs. And guess what happens? All of a sudden, there's a lot of the old
⏹️ ▶️ John i4s, more of those on
⏹️ ▶️ John than there used to be, including the well-optioned one, because everybody's upgrading to the new hotness, but you don't want the new hotness
⏹️ ▶️ John because it's even uglier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, I don't know that it is, actually. but I take your point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven't seen one in person, but I think they're too tall, and I hate the front end even more than the old one, if that's possible. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sedans are too tall? I'm not thinking the SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ John sedans are too tall. The i3 sedan is too tall. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. In photos, I haven't seen it in person yet, so I'll reserve judgment. But anyway, that's going to happen. Those are going to come out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the people who, those people who had leases, people who were like, who just got to have the latest and greatest, they're going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be better. Everyone's going to be excited about them. There's going to be all these reviews. But you're not interested in that. You're waiting. You're
⏹️ ▶️ John just there. You're waiting for people to get rid of those old, dowdy I-4. Who wants the old I-4 anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ John You do. That's your time. But unfortunately, you're Casey and you want a car now. So this advice is falling on deaf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I was talking, I did a guest spot on a podcast, which isn't out yet. And I was talking to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey host about how the three of us are basically work spouses at this point. And we've known each other so freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long that we could push each other's buttons so well. And you are so annoyingly right that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just simply do not have the patience for this. But that is an answer. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John unquestionable. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to be fair, I'll push my own buttons here. Sometimes patience leads you into my current situation
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I'm waiting for a new Mac. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John ah, it's not the right time to buy one yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What could happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, but then Bram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mageddon sneaks in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, you're exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Um, So, I mean, an answer to this question, especially given the earlier topic in the, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this very episode, is I could lease a new one. But again, for my personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, also true. um, For my personal wants, needs, and desires, I don't think it's a good fit for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's just more personal preference than anything else. And that's, I'm not here to litigate that. That's totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I 100% concede that the easiest way to get a car optioned exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you want, assuming they're still making new ones or a dealer can put their hands on a new one, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to lease it. But I'd prefer not to do that in no small part because I don't particularly want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spend pre-depreciation money. I'd rather spend post-depreciation money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I'd love to find a used one. But the problem is I want basically almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every package that it came with. In addition to Aaron's car has ruined me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why, you ask? Because Aaron's car has ventilated seats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, ventilated seats are my favorite thing in the whole wide world now. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't want to buy a car without ventilated seats. And I'll give you one guess. What is a single line item,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not part of a package, a single line item on the on the G6i4 that nobody ticks?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco guess, fellas?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm surprised they sold it separately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I don't know why it's separate, but it's separate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will say that ventilated sits reportedly, ventilated seats reportedly vary widely,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just between car makers, but between models of the same car. So be careful. You may love the ventilated
⏹️ ▶️ John seats in your Volvo and hate them in some other car. So maybe, I don't know, test drive the ventilated seats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I've had them in, I think, two cars ever, like one of mine and one of Tiff's.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, they vary a lot between cars. Like the ones, I forget which car I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had, but the ones that I had were really weak and like didn't cover much surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area either. Um, and the ones Tiff had were like amazing on this, like this ancient Lexus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sedan she had a million years ago. Um, But like they're, they're just very, very different, as John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said. So it it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not be. Don't ruin my moment. don't
⏹️ ▶️ John moment. I mean, are you going to turn down the car if the ventilated seats turn out to be bad or if you can't get them? Like, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John think that should be a deal breaker. But what I'm saying is maybe they just suck on that particular model.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the technology involved with them is way more primitive than you think. If you've seen car rebuilding channels and they show what the ventilated
⏹️ ▶️ John seats involved, it is incredibly primitive. But apparently some people just have better designs than others. And
⏹️ ▶️ John because they changed the seat, even within within the manufacturer, like for a generation, like you'll see the same steering wheel everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John to save money or whatever. But the seats will be different. Like car makers, like the, you know, your,
⏹️ ▶️ John your Golf might not have the same seats as like the contemporary
⏹️ ▶️ John Volkswagen SUV of whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whatever it was called back then,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they just make different seats for different cars. And that's how you end up with like the good ventilated seats in the, what is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Tiguan or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What the hell is
⏹️ ▶️ John the, anyway, the good ventilated seats in the Volkswagen SUV, the bad ventilated seats in the Golf. You're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how can the same manufacturer screw this up? But it happens. So, you know, check them out if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's fair. But what I want is a very, very specific car. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem is there is not a website that I have found that is reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at telling that website, I would like the following options. And I think the large part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that is because on the G6i4, there is driving assistance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and driving assistance pro. And so dealers are tagging their cars wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The website crawlers are emitting these options wrong. Like it's just a mess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top to bottom. And so I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on visor.vin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think our friend Matt Howey suggested, if I'm not mistaken. I've spent a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time on AutoTempest, which is like an aggregator of a lot of other websites. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently is my favorite at the time, or as I speak, but I have been looking at all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these. And then what I find myself doing is none of these none of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these websites are reliable about options. And maybe half the time after clicking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a million different ways, I can find a window sticker or a rough facsimile of a window sticker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which enumerates all these options. But it's very unreliable. And so what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've started doing, which is not a hundred percent reliable, but seems to be pretty close,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there's a website, bimmer.work, B-I-M-M-E-R.work. and you can plug in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a VIN and it will show you the options from that car. So what I was doing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for each of these cars, I go and I grab the VIN, I go to Bimmer.work, and then I go and plug in the VIN, and then I try to scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through and command F and see, okay, does ZDY exist? Does ZPK exist? Does ZPP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco exist? Does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does 4FH exist? And I can…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That sounds awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's awful. It sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco This is not a job for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a shell script.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so I need a car headhunter is what I really need. But in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that, while I'm still operating as my own car headhunter, I thought to myself, at the very least,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the very least, I should be able to have some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey script or Safari extension that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parse through the resulting page from Bimmer.work and at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put like insert a table at the top of the DOM, if you will, and just say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is what it does have and this is what it doesn't have. So me and my buddy Claude whipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together my very first Safari extension,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco which I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey planning on sharing because I looked at none of the code, did not give a crap if the code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was good. I just cared that it seemed to work. And so I will put a link in the show notes to an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example of this, of me using my little Safari extension to tell me whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particular car has the particular options I want. And in this particular example, the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly, but not all. And so the question becomes, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I cave on some of these options? And do, and what do I cave on if I do? This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first worldiest of first world problems. I am not suffering. Life is great. Don't get me wrong. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey golly, it occurred to me that I, left to my own disposition, left left to my own devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would buy a car every two to three years, be it lease, be it purchase whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I just really freaking love cars. I would do it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Except I've also started reaching out to a handful of dealers, about a handful of cars. Let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, you know what the worst possible thing you can do with your time for any reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you can go reach out to a car dealer who, by the way, every single f
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ⁇ ing one of these pieces of shit are all behind AI like triages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You'll email them and be like, hey, I was wondering if you could give me a window sticker for this or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hi, I'm Sophie, the assistant, or sometimes Sophie doesn't even identify herself as an assistant. Hi,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm Sophie. I would love to get that window sticker for you. I will have someone assist me and I'll get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to you. Okay. Then today, earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, I found a car that I really like that's at a dealer very far away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from me and it's optioned perfectly. I found this earlier today and I email them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I use their little online form and I say, hey, I noticed that you said you will only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sell to your own state and the states surrounding you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that really true?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like if I showed up with a check, would you really say no?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Sophie said to me, mind you, I've never emailed this dealer before. Sophie said to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something along the lines of, oh, hey again, Casey. Oh. I'm sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So clearly, Sophie is like some national f ⁇ ing thing that they're all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing. I mean, not literally, but you know what I'm saying? It's disgusting. Take how bad it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you to buy a car two to four years ago, and it's worse now. It's worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my guys. It's worse. Oh my gosh. So I'm currently in the midst of bickering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this dealer and they basically told me to kindly pound sand. If I want to get a car from them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is in the Midwest, I need to ship it. That's the only way they will let me buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would have to do it sight unseen. And the shipping cost from the Midwest of the United States
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the eastern United States is is $2,300.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I could get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direct flight to the airport nearest them. It's one of the like seven airports that I can get to from Richmond.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could get a direct flight for 500 bucks one way. $2,300 to ship this car.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's not that bad. If you consider how much it would cost to ship that car via UPS or FedEx,
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. just by weight and volume alone, it's actually not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but the thing of it is, leaving aside my own personal feelings about buying a car sight unseen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I think I could get over that. But woof, I don't love it, don't love it. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, you two especially, do you think Aaron's going to be particularly keen on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, oh, my wife is such a buzzkill. She's right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, she's right. She's right.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a purchase for this much money that you make without seeing the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so I'm bickering with them, but I think I'm going to I think I'm going to lose this fight. I said to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, I said to them, what if I came to you with someone from a surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state escorting me? Because we have a mutual friend that lives in a state adjacent. The three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us have a mutual friend that lives in the state adjacent to this particular state. And I thought, is it good enough for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to just show up with someone who can produce a driver's license that says they live in the state next door? And they said, thank you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no. If we're selling to you in Virginia, you have to go through, shoot, I forget the name of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website. I think it's driveway.com or something like that, which is the only way they'll do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I told them, hey, all right, if this is the way you're going to be fine, I would love to do that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really would like you to take $2,300 off the cost of the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking way. They've ghosted me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco since then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the problem is, is that this is the first car that I've found with every single option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want that hasn't been in an accident or had a completely dodgy like CarFax history.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's certified pre-owned, which is also nice because then you get an extended warranty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and so and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so forth. um It's just, I'm impatient, which is what John initially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, and I am not denying it at all. But I'm also searching for the world's tiniest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needle in a haystack that only has but so many pieces of hay in it. And granted, to John's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, there will be more and more over time. But golly, I'd love to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just find the car, fly there if I have to, pick it up and drive it home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will figure out the fine. I said to them, I'll figure out the financing. I'll figure out how to get a temporary tag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it. You don't have to do anything but hand me a title and keys. And they told me to kindly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I think, so a couple of things are going to work in your favor if you can be patient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, number one is that BMWs come up for sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time because BMW owners are car enthusiasts and they always want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change cars. And as John said, a new generation of BMW EV platforms is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And so maybe people want to upgrade to it. Number two, the i4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn't been around for that many years. Most of the leases of the i4s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren't expired yet. And the biggest source of used BMWs is ones that are exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years old because they're coming off lease. Because it turns out people who are rich enough to buy BMWs also tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lease pretty often because they also like to have new cars all the time. So it's a very well-leased
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand. So if you can wait until they are three years old, which most of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, most of them aren't yet, you're going to have a lot more inventory to choose from. So I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know when that is. Maybe like over the next year or two is when that's mostly going to roll through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you can be patient, if you just set up search alerts to find all the i4s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that go for sale, I bet you can find them when you want within six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think you're probably right. And for the record, the first year of the i4 was model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year 2023, which means these are cars bought in 2022. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been around longer than you think. It doesn't really negate anything you're saying, though. And I think if I could be patient,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably should be. But because I want such an esoteric, well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not esoteric, but particular set of options, I worry that I'm going to let one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slip through my fingers, which my knowledge of the one, actually, it was the one that Marco found that was in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just south of Richmond. At the time, not having really properly looked into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was options exactly right. And in retrospect, I really wish I had just pulled the trigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. But I think perhaps if I were to go back and look again, it wouldn't have had like ventilated seats, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But golly, it's, I'm so, I feel like I'm boxed. Even though I know intellectually that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not true, I feel like I'm boxed because I know I want something so specific and it's so rare to find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing that's kind of complicated is a lot of these cars seem to end up in Los Angeles and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey San Francisco, which I could ship from there. And that would be, I feel like that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be slightly less egregious, although I would still prefer to go and see it and drive it. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is, this car, particularly the M50 version, which is the hot rod version,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at best, it has 270 miles of range. And let me tell you, a 3,000-mile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey journey from San Francisco or LA to Virginia, 250 miles at a time, does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not strike me as a particularly fun or quick way to get across the country.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be clear, the charging stops are not going to be your problem with that kind of, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you'll quickly learn what it's like to have an EV on a long road trip. Spoiler, it's fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the the few hours of charging you'll do on that trip are going to pale in comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the tens of hours of driving that you'll be doing on that trip.
⏹️ ▶️ John mileage you'll be putting on your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I could get over, but yeah, it's the time. it's i mean i I genuinely would expect, I haven't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computed this because I'm not that serious, but I would expect that would be a roughly three to six day journey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, which is just a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I work for myself. If I really needed to, I could take my equipment with me and record from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the road. I've done it. I did it just a few weeks ago at the beach. Like, this is something that I can solve, but I don't want to be away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the family for that long. And if I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John cross-country trip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to do it everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don't buy a car in California. Just be just have a little bit of patience. I mean, you
⏹️ ▶️ John to, like, when I was trying to find my dog to adopt, I think I looked for an entire
⏹️ ▶️ John year on PetFinder.com looking every single night. You just got to be vigilant. When I got my wife's car, I'm pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure I got the only stick shift Honda Civic in this color and trim level in the entire region
⏹️ ▶️ John of New England. And I just sat there waiting. Is there one? Is there one? Is there one? Oh, there is. And you just got to snatch
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which means your new hobby is just being
⏹️ ▶️ John systems. You can, you know, you luckily you live in the age of vibe coding where you can automate this a lot easier than I could.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you'll just get an alert when one with some percentage of your options appears on
⏹️ ▶️ John the market and you just got to pounce on it. But it's not going to be today or tomorrow or the next day, probably. You just got to just got to
⏹️ ▶️ John be vigilant. You know, these things take time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But I mean, we'll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John longer you wait, the cheaper they get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's true. But I don't know. I do I genuinely, I don't disagree with anything you said, but I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like this one that I found in the Midwest could be the one, but the thought of just shipping it sight unseen. And apparently this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driveway place has a seven day money back guarantee. And I would, in this, in this hypothetical situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would presumably sell my car separately after I received
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this hypothetical I4 that I don't, I don't actually think this is going to end up working out. I think they're going to tell me to pound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sand. But um, I, you know, within the few days of getting this car, I would know, okay, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is good. Or, oh my gosh, this is a disaster. I need to return it. And as long as I haven't already sold my my Volkswagen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I'm good to go. But it's just, I don't I don't love the idea of buying a car site unseen. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did that sort of kind of with my BMW, but you know, I drove up to the dealership.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We did a pre-purchase inspection because we weren't buying from a BMW dealer. We took it to the local BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealer, did a PPI on it, and they said, no, it seems fine. Turns out they were wrong, but that's neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it seems fine. And then we finished the transaction and that was that. We drove two cars home. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, if you are a car headhunter, I know that's the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey term. If you're a car headhunter and you want to do this for me for less than a gazillion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars, please reach out. I would love to talk to you because this is so freaking frustrating. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the record, I did ask Claude to vibe code me a whole like situation that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple times a day, go to like Auto Tempest and a couple other sites and try to piece together what's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new and what's old. And it quickly became obvious that either I am not as good a director as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco is, or it was just too many moving parts to really get something that worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and worked reliably. But I did try.
⏹️ ▶️ John just got to break up the problem into pieces. I'm sure
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have a safe search on cars and bids?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not on cars and bids. Are these the sorts of cars that come up on cars and bids?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, definitely. Like I have a safe search on, I know this because I get these emails. I have a safe search on cars and bids for the
⏹️ ▶️ John last stick shift Honda Accord that they made.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And occasionally I
⏹️ ▶️ John see those come up and I just look at them. It's a good site for enthusiasts because there'll be a bazillion pictures and all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of info on it. And I mean, you still might have to travel somewhere and you still have to pay to trailer to you and yada
⏹️ ▶️ John yada yada. But anyway, it's add that to your mix of places you're looking. I would I would add that to the list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'll do that right away. Uh, One other quick note that I just thought was funny. Um, This is not designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be an advertisement for FastMail, but it's going to sound like an, I apologize. Uh, When I was setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up um, alerts for cars and like auto Tempest and other places, car max, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I wanted to use what uh, what fast mail calls a masked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email address, which is to say, instead of using my actual email address, it's, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it's like gobbledygook at, or it's two pronounceable words and a couple of numbers at my domain,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? And so this way, once I eventually find a car, which will either be tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or in 10 years, once I eventually find a car, I can just kill that email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey address and it all just goes away, which sounded all well and good until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was talking to one of the dealers and they're like, okay, your email is mouse.farts. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, it wasn't literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but you know what I'm saying? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse.farts at caseylist.com. Yes, yes, it is. And that was quite funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me because I did not expect that to be a complication of using FastMail's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise very delightful masked email feature, which was very funny. I don't know. Somebody find me a car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's basically what I'm saying to you. Find me a car, please. And thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think you'll find it just fine within a reasonable amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sure hope so. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, if you find a dealer that has an orange one next to your white one,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fly out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with you. And yeah, we'll see if they'll discount them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's the only one option Marco cares about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a very well-optioned one in orange that's available for sale right now. The only problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it's in Hawaii.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's going to be a little bit challenging. I don't know if that's going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. It might be a bit of a shipping charge on that one.