710: That New Mouse Pad Feeling
24 Sep 2026Impressions of our new Apple hardware so far, plans for iPhone Duo development, and an update on the Mac Mini fleet.
Episode Description:
- 🗣️ It’s St. Jude time! 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- New treats
- John
- iPhone 18 Pro
- AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case
- IP57
- Dust protected
- Immersion, up to 1m, for 30 minutes
- Oddities
- Volume control
- IP57
- Marco
- Apple Watch S12 Ceramic
- Mac mini
- Casey: Apple Watch S12 Aluminum
- John
- How should Apple have handled iPhone Duo dev tools? (via Oscar Echeverri)
- Photos libraries on external drives (via Larry Fieman)
- Preliminary M5 Ultra GPU Geekbench scores
- Apple watch “Readiness Score” seem to be mostly bunk? (via Michael Katz)
- New treats
- iPhone Duo dev tools released
- Post-show: Marco’s Mac mini update
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Ubiquiti’s new home Wi-Fi that does “full-duplex MLO
- Previously discussed on ATP #672: Wi Hyphen Fi
- The Disappointing Truth about Wi-Fi 7
- Introductory video
Sponsored by:
- Daft Music: Made for Apple Music.
- Clic for Sonos: A premium Sonos companion. No lag. No hassle. Just music.
- Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Pre-show 🖼️
- Donate to St. Jude
- John’s iPhone 18 Pro
- John’s AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case
- Sponsor: Daft Music
- John’s Mac Studio
- Sponsor: Clic for Sonos
- Marco’s Apple Watch Series 12 🖼️
- Sponsor: Quince
- Marco’s Mac Mini M6
- Casey’s Apple Watch Series 12
- iPhone Duo SDK released
- Photo libraries on externals
- M5 Ultra Geekbench scores
- “Readiness” health score
- iPhone Duo dev plans
- Ending theme
- Mac Mini fleet update
Pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you talking to us through right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. So if you've noticed that the tone of my voice is colder
⏹️ ▶️ John and not as warm as it used to be. That's the sound of an ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU. Intel just had that extra…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That extra warmth?
⏹️ ▶️ John extra soul that's just missing from these modern ARM CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, I am I'm excited for you. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John on my new computer. If this recording goes wrong, you know, the last one, I just realized the
⏹️ ▶️ John the Big Mac Pro that's still sitting next to me I had for more than half of the life of
⏹️ ▶️ John the show for like seven
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey years. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. I mean, that sounds right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has served me well during those seven years, but my microphone is now plugged into a new computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, we're going to talk about this more later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the saddest sound of you getting a new computer I've ever heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Just a tied-me-over computer. I know, but like, it's also a huge upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, like are you able are you able to like feel happy about this? Do you enjoy it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it feel fast? Does it feel
⏹️ ▶️ John good? Oh, yeah. No, I'm, I mean, the whole, I'll talk about it when we get to our all our new products, but the whole household
⏹️ ▶️ John is happy because now I no longer need to hog my wife's computer to do dev work.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So everybody, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is much happiness in the house about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She bought it for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I am very excited for you. When you had told us in Slack, I don't know, a day or two back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you were starting your migration, which we will talk about later in the show, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, our immediate reaction was, it's the end of an era. And again, as much as I poke fun at you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I know how much you love that computer. And it pains me to be serious and to be kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you about this because I love making fun of you for it so much. But I know how much you loved the Tower Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I know how sad you are that you do not have a spiritual replacement, or maybe at best, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do have a spiritual replacement, but certainly not a more literal replacement. And so it did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serve you well. It was very expensive, but you got a lot of use out of it. And I am sad. I am genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sad for your loss. Although I'm excited for you to join, what is it, five years ago, six years ago, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. So I'm happy for you, even if you sound slightly morose.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is still September as we record this. There's a bit of September left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, this month, believe it or not, or this year, September actually goes into October. And we're going to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in a second. But September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that means it is time for ATP to work in concert with Relay and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital to try to raise money for St. Jude.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude, I hope by now you're familiar, but like I said, they're a children's research hospital and they do incredible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible work to try to meet their mission of no child dying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the dawn of their life. And generally speaking, that relates to childhood cancer, but it's not exclusively cancer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They do all sorts of absolutely bananas stuff. And one of the many things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they offered for us to talk about, although we could say whatever we want, but one of the things they offered was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude has produced 18 of the world's most highly cited scientists in November 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The 2025 list of highly cited researchers recognized 18 St. Jude scientists as among the world's most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impactful, the most in St. Jude history. These researchers authored multiple scientific papers ranging in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top, excuse me, ranking in the top 1% by citations for their fields for roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10 years. This is a small example of how I know we have a very international audience, and I'm very glad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. But it would be a reasonable conclusion to say, oh, well, St. Jude is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in America and their healthcare system is barely a system, which yes and yes. But why does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that help me? says the person not in America. Well, it's for things like this. It's because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their research, the research done at St. Jude, really does have a worldwide impact. And we've talked in the past this month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how they have more concrete and explicit worldwide impacts with things like shipping medicine overseas and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff like that. But really, St. Jude is a tremendous, tremendous place. And to remind you, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we do this, or one of the many reasons we do this, is because our dear friend Stephen Hackett, his eldest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey child, was stricken with childhood cancer at something like six months old. That child is now 16, 17 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old or something like that. And that's all because of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will tell you, before Marco can explain the Marco offset, I will tell you that in just a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of weeks, actually a week and a half as I record this, on Friday, October
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2nd at noon one true time zone, I will be joining several other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relay hosts in doing our 12-hour telethon, which we call the podcast-a-thon. It will be broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Relay's YouTube channel. You can see me, if past years say anything about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can see me make a fool of myself for 12 straight hours. And who doesn't love that other than me? So check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out on Relay's YouTube channel. And if you're interested in donating, I will tell you this URL a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times. Let me start now. stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, we're going to talk in just one second about all the absolute consumerism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the three of us have participated in this year. I feel guilty about that. What can I do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, do I have the solution for you? If you're wondering, how much should I give to St.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jude? Or how can I make myself feel better about all these purchases that I just made or I'm about to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make? I have a solution for both of those simultaneously. So what you do is you calculate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Marco offset. This is your suggested minimum donation to St. Jude. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base price is of the family of products that you just bought or are going to buy. So for instance, an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. What's the base price? $10.99, $11.99, whatever it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Yeah. So whatever your total after everything is for that transaction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it, you know, sales tax, Apple Care, storage upgrades, case, any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of accessories, whatever it is. Suppose your total after everything is $1,500
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the base price of that family of device was $1,100. Your Marco offset is $400.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the suggested minimum donation to St. Jude if you can swing it. The theory is you kind of saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as like an add-on to this purchase that you maybe didn't necessarily need or maybe could have waited a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. That was just an add-on to that. So maybe you can spare another add-on to St. Jude.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann And if you do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are hereby absolved by the powers vested in me by the flying spaghetti monster. You are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hereby absolved. I actually do have that for all of these purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No more guilt for you. You can go on freely knowing that you've done the right thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though you bought something ridiculous. Now, also, if you want to hit level two of the Marco offset,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you take whatever money you spent on paid AI plans or API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs for this month and you add that on to the existing Marco offset to get level two. Level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three is instead of doing that for this month, you do it for the whole year of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your paid AI plan and API costs. So you can make yourself feel better about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying consumer devices that you might necessarily not need right this moment and for using AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your benefit. All of that guilt can be absolved by simply donating to saint jude in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these these amounts as your suggested minimum donations. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Feels like we're going, we're a little bit behind on fundraising this year. Maybe it's because the podcast-a-thon has been pushed out. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John we get a lot of fundraising during the podcast-a-thon because people just demand to see all the various relay hosts
⏹️ ▶️ John making fools of themselves. And that's a great time to donate. But uh yeah, don't wait. If it goes into October
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the podcast-a-thon, that's fine. But we really want to try to beat the total from last year. So please give if
⏹️ ▶️ John you can. Don't put it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Excellent. Thank you, John. All right. Again, one more time. St. Jude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dot org slash ATP.
John’s iPhone 18 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we all have gotten some amount of treats. I think this year, John, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the treat winner for the year. I'm very impressed. You have gotten a trio of treats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell us about all of them, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. I'll start with my iPhone 18 Pro. I'll start by saying goodbye to my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John 16 Pro because I'm on the every two year phone plan along with my wife. We alternate years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so my 16 Pro was my first experiment in babying my battery because the battery life was so good on the
⏹️ ▶️ John 16 Pro. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to set an 80% limit and see how long I can last on that. And it turns out I lasted
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe like 10 and a half months before I said, you know, at 80% battery
⏹️ ▶️ John towards the end of the first year, some days I feel like it's a little low. Um, So I cranked
⏹️ ▶️ John it back up to 90. And then eventually I just went to 100% because I'm like, oh, this thing's on its way out the door. I'm going to be replacing it soon. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John just put it on a hundred. Um, Anyway, just an update on that. The battery health at the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of two years, I guess more than 10 months. I said one year and 10 months. Sorry. At
⏹️ ▶️ John the end of two years, my iPhone 16 Pro's battery health is at 95% and that is after 451
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly impressive. I bet people have batteries, phones that they charge 100% on MagSafe all night that have
⏹️ ▶️ John the same stats, but I'm happy with how it went. I liked only charging to 80% during
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole year. My iPad is permanently on 80% limit because it never leaves my bedside, so it doesn't need to
⏹️ ▶️ John be. And when I went to 100%, it kind of felt like getting a whole new battery, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this phone still has amazing battery life because I'm using the last 20% for the last two months. So
⏹️ ▶️ John good job, iPhone 16 Pro. iPhone 18 Pro, battery-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did set it to 80% because I think it'll be fine with this phone as well. But first,
⏹️ ▶️ John the important stuff, the case situation shockingly resolved itself amazingly well
⏹️ ▶️ John this year. I guess over the past couple of years, there's just been, you know, a problem with like the camera control, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess maybe it was just the last time, two years ago with the camera control and getting cases with the big opening there and
⏹️ ▶️ John then the camera control, but the button passed through, but not having the open bottom, blah, blah, blah. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John for new listeners, my preference is to have a leather case for grip, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John with an open bottom, because when I swipe up from the bottom to unlock the phone, I don't like going over the lip of a case.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the last time I got Apple's Clear case, which has had an open bottom for many years now, I got the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Beats case, which also has an open bottom and is also from Apple and was fine. I've tried silicone cases
⏹️ ▶️ John without the open bottom and reconfirmed that I really wanted to have the open bottom. But this year, Bullstrap,
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as the iPhone 18 Pro was announced, Bullstrap had for order immediately the case. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is before you could even order the phone. So the first thing I ordered this year was my Bullstrap leather open bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John case with the camera control button. And it arrived before the phone. And I put it on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Problem solved. I mean, it's a very expensive case, but it is exactly what I want. uh And it's on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone now. So boy, this turned out to be a non-issue this year. I just bought the case they wanted. Oh, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ John the for the bra effect on the back, uh the bull strap case has a kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John curved lip, curved leather color lip around the camera plateau, but nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John is covering the camera plateau. So it protects the edges of the camera plateau, but it doesn't cover any portion of the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John plateau. And I think this is great. Like I really don't like the ones. Like Ryan London only has one with like a metal
⏹️ ▶️ John wall around the camera plateau, and I find that unpleasing on my fingers. So yeah, got it in one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bullstrap case. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Again, it is expensive, but it is exactly what I want. So thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing to note about my iPhone 18 Pro is the setup process. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John going to give myself a thumbs up this year for not having to call Verizon for the second phone in a row.
⏹️ ▶️ John Congratulations. Yeah. I mean, eSIM, maybe I'm going to chalk that up to eSIM
⏹️ ▶️ John making things better or whatever. But yeah, the number actually transferred successfully, even in my house on
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone day. That's usually the problem is I'm doing it on the day that everyone gets their iPhones. Phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John transferred over, fine. Then I had to do battle with Apple's setup process.
⏹️ ▶️ John I once again chose the same thing I chose for the past several years, which is phone to phone transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John on the idea that it would potentially be the fastest and also um,
⏹️ ▶️ John have the most fidelity. Even though iCloud, restoring from iCloud a backup, the fidelity of
⏹️ ▶️ John that has gotten much better over the years. It may actually have parity with phone-to-phone transfer, but I always want
⏹️ ▶️ John to try phone-to-phone transfer first. This year, I also decided to try connecting them with a cable
⏹️ ▶️ John because I figured the iPhone 16 Pro has sufficient enough speed from its
⏹️ ▶️ John USB port. Maybe I didn't even bother looking at the specs. Maybe I'm wrong. But anyway, it's a thing I tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Wait, then hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. Which cable, though? Because obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there's like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a million different choices here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't know what to do with the cable. I ended up using a Thunderbolt three cable. Maybe that was the wrong choice, but
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I connected them butt to butt.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could put the, they're both MagSafe, so I could put them on MagSafe chargers. So they're also charging. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I'm doing phone to phone transfer. I'm doing the, you know, the whole procedure. makes the little fuzzy code,
⏹️ ▶️ John make the camera, see the picture of the little fuzzy circle. And they go through and it says finish on your
⏹️ ▶️ John other phone. And I got them on MagSafe chargers. And, you know, they're doing their thing. And they're, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John know if it's using the wire. It's, they're connected with the wire, but I have no idea if it's using it because it's not telling me. I don't know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just leave. I leave them there. I go off to do something else. Come back like an hour and a
⏹️ ▶️ John half later to an error on the screen that says, oh, the transfer failed. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John definitely using the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable then because I can tell you, I have, I did not buy any phones this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, not yet anyway. And so I didn't have this process in my house. But based on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my prior experiences and based on the handful of texts I got from random friends, some nerdy, some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, the iPhone transfer and then later setup process is such a dumpster fire. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my belief, based on no facts, it's just an assertion. But my assertion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and belief is that the only properly vetted way to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between iPhones is via iCloud. I don't think Apple ever tests anything else. They claim to support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I don't want to do an iCloud backup for the same reasons you cited, John, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that's the only one that Apple ever properly tests. And everything else, it's just a happy miracle if it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John And iCloud will get you back, quote unquote, up and running sooner, because if you're doing the phone-to-phone transfer, you have to leave both phones
⏹️ ▶️ John like alone and not touch them for a long time. Whereas the iCloud transfer, it will let you at least start using your new phone
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately, even though half your apps won't be there and stuff or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John that was attempt number one, which I was like, you know, all things considered, that wasn't that bad. Like, I don't know when it
⏹️ ▶️ John failed. Maybe it could have failed within the first 10 minutes, but I only looked at it an hour and a half later because I assumed it would succeed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, Then what followed that was a comedy of errors of me trying to, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like in a video game where you your first try on the level, you get pretty far, and then you try the level a bunch more times and you can't even get
⏹️ ▶️ John close to where you got the first try. That's what it felt like. Uh, And the basic problem is that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you're doing a phone to phone transfer, um, first of all, the two phones have to be near
⏹️ ▶️ John each other. I got rid of the cable at this point. I ditched the cable. Like, forget about the cable. We're just going to do phone-to-phone transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless. Okay. The phones have to be near each other. If they're not near each other, they get angry and the transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John won't work. Also, you have to do stuff on both phones. Phone will say, do
⏹️ ▶️ John this, do that. then you go to this phone and do that and type your code in on this phone and type the unlock code for that phone on this phone. like you're
⏹️ ▶️ John going back and forth between the two phones. You got to be juggling that as well. And the final thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John when you're essentially done with the old phone, when you no longer really have to interact
⏹️ ▶️ John with it anymore, you hope, um it puts up a sheet or whatever they call a little
⏹️ ▶️ John card, like a little, little white square from that takes up the bottom part of the screen and it says, finish
⏹️ ▶️ John on other phone or something like that. You've seen this, right? Yep. Yep. Yep. And it has a little X in
⏹️ ▶️ John the top of that sheet Uh, and it just, and it's like a spinner and says, finish another phone. I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, I'm perfectly happy to finish another phone. Now, you may be tempted to say, finish another phone. All right. Well, I can just, I guess I can just
⏹️ ▶️ John dismiss this, um, this white box here and just finish on the other phone. No, if you hit that
⏹️ ▶️ John X, the thing ends. And when I say the thing ends,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean is not only are you no longer transferring between the phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you have to start all the way from the beginning, as in it makes you erase. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the destination phone has to be restored. The new phone. Erase it. So no matter how far you
⏹️ ▶️ John think you were through the process, you have to erase it. And how far might you be? Well, there's a bunch of stuff you have to do. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh you know, set up Siri, set up all your Apple Pay cards, sign into your Apple ID. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can skip a lot of these, and I highly recommend skipping them because they take a long time. When you get up to that
⏹️ ▶️ John point where it's like, you know, finish another phone or whatever, you may have been there for five, 10 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John already going back and forth through card issuers, entering three digit codes from the back of your cards
⏹️ ▶️ John to set up Apple Pay, setting up the hey dingus stuff. Like there's a bunch of stuff that you're
⏹️ ▶️ John doing before, you know, you accidentally dismiss the thing or whatever. So the second time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe what happened is that that little white card on the old phone disappeared,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the new phone didn't know it disappeared. I was like, is this going to work? No, eventually it said, I don't know what's
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the other phone. I don't know what happened that time. It just didn't work. The third time really got me because the third
⏹️ ▶️ John time I'm like, all right, third time's a charm. I'm going to do it this time. I've been through the process twice already.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know exactly what all the steps are. I know which ones I can skip. So I'm doing it like a pro. I'm like, I can skip
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I can skip this. And by the way, I'm skipping them because I just want to get across the finish line. I can always set up the stuff later.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can set up Hey Dingus later. And by the way, last year, the Hey Dingus one is the one that really got me because
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, hey, set up Siri here. Say, how's the weather? Say, set a timer for three minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say all these things or whatever. But it makes you say, say, hey Dingus, set a timer for three minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you do that last year, and not last year, last phone, because the other phone was nearby, it would answer
⏹️ ▶️ John answered, set up process over, erase the new phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I swear to you, they don't test this. I swear to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, this year, I think they improved it, but I did do the thing where I took the new phone, what I felt like was a safe
⏹️ ▶️ John distance away, not out of the room, but away. And then I whispered to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I whispered to it. So the new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you whisper to it, then you're not doing the good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you're not doing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good job of like giving it sample material.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can skip that step anyway. So anyway, that's that. But the third try, I'm like, I know all the tricks.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm getting through on the third try. Everything went. I was did all the stuff, skipped all the things I could skip,
⏹️ ▶️ John was careful not to activate the elephant or whatever. And I'm like, now I just need to sit there. They're
⏹️ ▶️ John doing their transfer. I just need to connect them both to power. um Because that's the other thing. I would suggest not
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to have them on chargers when you do this for reasons I'll get to in a second. um
⏹️ ▶️ John But they need to be on chargers because at this point, on my third try, their batteries are drained a little bit from, you know, the hour
⏹️ ▶️ John long. Anyway, uh so I go over, they were plugged into it for the hour long thing. But anyway, just going through it,
⏹️ ▶️ John the batteries are a little bit drained. So I carry them both over to our little household charging station where I have tons of cables
⏹️ ▶️ John to plug in. And I plug the new phone into a cable and put it down. And I take the old phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to plug it into a cable. And, you know, these phones have buttons all over the outside of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess I squeezed a little bit too hard when I was plugging in the cable and I accidentally pressed in the camera control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Transfer over, erase new phone. Oh, my God. This is so bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John John. Erase. And I'm like, no, like adjusted the light. All I needed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John was plug it into power and then let it sit there. But because I pressed the camera control accidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ John that obviously means erase, you know, end it entirely. No confirmation,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. uh Erase and restore the phone. And every time you erase it, it's got anyway. Fourth
⏹️ ▶️ John time, I was super duper careful and I actually got it transferred and it went fine. But boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was just ridiculous. Like you would think that on, they would like make it more resilient.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they would make it a bit kind of like a, on the Macs, which I'll get to in a bit, like make it like a locked mode
⏹️ ▶️ John where the old phone, like none of the buttons do anything anymore and it's just locked in, but instead it's the most fragile state.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you do anything on the old phone, it's like, well, obviously whatever you're doing takes priority and screw that transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if that transfer had been running for an hour or whatever, it doesn't matter. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that set up um I guess the only thing I've done with my phone that's interesting is I took a picture, took one of my usual
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of my dog at the foot of my bed with most of the lights off in my room. And it's better at low-light
⏹️ ▶️ John photography with the big aperture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Because I've taken
⏹️ ▶️ John that same photo of my dog 100 times in various poses. So I have lots of history to compare to. And all
⏹️ ▶️ John I do is pick up my phone, point it at the dog, and press the, you know, the camera control, the shutter button. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see, yeah, noticeably better low light performance than my iPhone 16 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably due to the larger aperture. So thumbs up on the camera so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that's exciting. I mean, I'm sorry for the absolute disaster. That was the transfer process,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but at least the aperture or the variable aperture is showing some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey signs of improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could have gone worse. But the main thing I'm happy about is I like the color. I like the case. Everything's all settled. My
⏹️ ▶️ John new phone was like, other than the silly setup process, was the best thing. The best new phone setup
⏹️ ▶️ John process I've had in a couple of phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sorry. What color in what storage did you get?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I have 512 because I'm a little bit over 256. I'm like a 380 in my storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John got a 512 and it's black.
John’s AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless charging case, meaning the ones that have the um volume control
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy on them. um So, a couple things to know about these. I forget if we mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John this before, but apparently these are IP57 as compared to IP54.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a waterproofness and dust ingress rating. So, the old AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John 2 were IP54, but the AirPods Pro 3 are IP57 and IP57.
⏹️ ▶️ John The 5 stands for how much like dust can come into it. So, five is ingress of dust is not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John prevented, but it must not enter in sufficient quantity to interfere with the safe operation of the equipment. So, dust can get in, but it can't screw
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. And then the seven is the important part. The seven means immersion in water up to one meter
⏹️ ▶️ John for 30 minutes. The four means it can take like splashes of water, but the seven means you can put
⏹️ ▶️ John this in up to a meter of water for half an hour and it should in theory still work. So, that's impressive, and I'm excited to
⏹️ ▶️ John get even more waterproof AirPods, although I don't plan to test that. The
⏹️ ▶️ John other things to note about the AirPods 5, some odd behaviors. And unfortunately, two variables changed at
⏹️ ▶️ John once here. I got new AirPods and also I got a new phone, so I'm not sure if I should blame this on my new phone or on the new
⏹️ ▶️ John H3 chip in the AirPods or whatever. But here's the odd behavior. First,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I put these things in my ear and start playing music, it pretty much all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time does a thing with the sound that makes me think, did I accidentally enable head tracking?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know that? Like, you ever accidentally enable head tracking? And it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh, no, I don't want this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where is that? Turn it off. It always does like a thing where I hear sound like in one ear and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it transfers to the other ear before they even out. It's not head tracking. It's disabled, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have disabled head tracking everywhere, but it always does this weird thing where the sound travels usually from my
⏹️ ▶️ John left to my right for a second before they settle in and they even out. Really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John The volume control, I had to watch a YouTube video to figure out how to do it. I've seen it a million times. I said
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the Apple keynotes when they added it to the AirPods Pro years ago. Oh, it's a little area and you swipe it with your finger to change the volume. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I finally get a pair that has this and I try to swipe with my finger to change the volume and I cannot do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm like, what is the secret? Tell me the secret. And so I found a YouTube video where someone was like, listen, here's what you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. Grab it like this. Put your finger above the flat area. Swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John downward, starting above the flat area and then ending after the flat area and do that periodically.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you'll hear a little boop and it will go, you know, do the reverse up and down. So
⏹️ ▶️ John helped. Thank you to that nameless video that I did not save that taught me how to use the volume control. I am glad to
⏹️ ▶️ John have it. The other weird thing. So one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't use noise cancellation that much in my AirPods 4 and probably won't use it
⏹️ ▶️ John much in my AirPods 5 is noise cancellation means there's a little microphone that's listening to the outside world. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John knows how to cancel those sound signals. And if you're wearing a hood or a hat or something that rubs
⏹️ ▶️ John against the AirPods, the rubbing against them can make like noise
⏹️ ▶️ John on the microphones. I don't know if you've ever experienced this with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, but definitely with the regular AirPods. If you rub something on the microphones, you're like, shh,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don't want to do it by a microphone. But, you know, the sound of something rubbing up against a microphone, extremely unpleasant,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in the winter when I have like hats on and stuff that are like rubbing on the AirPods covering my ears.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I'm like, oh, I don't want that. So I turn off noise cancellation. The AirPods 5 with wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John charging case do this weird thing where when I'm taking them out, again, I have noise cancellation
⏹️ ▶️ John off. Take out the right AirPod. I always take out my right one first, put it in the case. Then when I go
⏹️ ▶️ John to take out my left AirPod, I get static-iness when my finger touches the little
⏹️ ▶️ John microphone thing. And the microphone thing is in the exact same place as it was on the AirPods 4. So it's not like I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, hitting a thing that wasn't there before. But now when I take off the left AirPod, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John as if it has turned on noise cancellation briefly because I hear that loud, you're rubbing your finger against a microphone
⏹️ ▶️ John and it's playing that rubbing into your ear
⏹️ ▶️ John Very weird. Minor issues. I'll see if they settle down, if there's a firmware update or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but some oddities. And as for the actual noise cancellation, it is better than the fours. My usual
⏹️ ▶️ John test is, can I wear them with noise cancellation enabled while vacuuming?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer with the fours is no, not unless I really crank the volume. Like the test, the real test is listen at a comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John volume, then take out the vacuum, turn it on, start vacuuming. Do not change the volume on your
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods Because if you crank them up enough, it'll work in any condition. But then when you turn off the vacuum cleaner, you're like, oh, this is way
⏹️ ▶️ John too loud. I've been blowing my ears out, right? The fives can have better noise cancellation, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John can just about listen to podcasts while vacuuming. So thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think I'll do this often. And it's not what I prefer. And it probably would be better if I raised the volume a little bit, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John can listen to podcasts while vacuuming. So believe the hype about the slightly better noise cancellation in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now, generally speaking, you don't use noise cancellation. Like if you were on a plane, which I know is your favorite place to be, would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use noise cancellation?
⏹️ ▶️ John I use the big over ear Sony like
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive noise cancellation headphones for that. I figure what they are with it. Whatever the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John highest MX number is. That's that's what I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But day to day, you don't use it generally. No, I don't use it at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John really. For that reason, because like in the wintertime, the hats rub on it in the house when I'm listening to, like
⏹️ ▶️ John watching a TV show on my iPad, on my bed, or whatever. Like I can hear the noise cancellation, if that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense, especially since they're, you know, they're not, they're open ear things. Like I can hear the effect
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And there's not noise that I really want to cancel anyway. So I don't use it. And it used to be for battery life too. But so
⏹️ ▶️ John far, the battery life on these has been great.
Sponsor: Daft Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Daft Music, a native Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music playing app for Mac and iPhone, custom designed for each and built for the liquid glass
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple Music client, it uses Apple Music as a streaming back end, but it does things its own way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, there's all sorts of wonderful features in Daft Music that are opinionated and designed for Apple nerds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. So, they have a library for your favorite songs, albums, artists, playlists, and you can pin everything within
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco humans, not AI. In fact, they even have a new feature that you can check any track for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI that will flag recordings that have AI fingerprints left behind by the music generators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can tell, like, you know, if you want to listen to AI or not, you can easily tell what's AI inside
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is very lightweight on your machine because it's written with native code, SwiftUI and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppKit. And they have features always powered by the latest Apple tech, such as Core AI. They're
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco A wonderful feature called instrument isolation that you can actually mute the vocals or drums or bass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or everything but those things live during playback, all done on device. There's a 10-band
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store. So, daftmusic.app. Thank you so much to Daft Music for Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iPhone for sponsoring our show.
John’s Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the real deal. All right, tell me about the Mac Studio. Can you first remind us what are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basic specs of this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an M5 Max Mac Studio with 64 gigs of RAM and a 4 terabyte SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's the Max with all the cores working. I think those are the only options. And then I have an external
⏹️ ▶️ John 4 terabyte SSD. We linked all these things in a past episode, but that's the setup. What color did you get?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So the setup process, like I had prepared the way pretty well. The setup process was
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly easy. It does fit on the corner of my desk where I wanted it to go, although
⏹️ ▶️ John the hole that's underneath it means that the foot doesn't have as much
⏹️ ▶️ John contact friction with everything else. So I'm not sure what I'll do there. Like It's a little bit easy to move, although people shouldn't be reaching
⏹️ ▶️ John back there to touch it anyway. I basically have almost every port
⏹️ ▶️ John filled in in the back of it, which doesn't feel great. But when you're coming from a Mac Pro with a million ports, like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John just the way it is. uh obviously I'm glad I didn't need an additional port. I don't have anything in the HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John port, uh but I think that's it. Every other port on the back of this machine has something plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But yeah, all the wires, uh you know, reached and everything. i didn't I haven't yet done the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where I'm going to uh connect all of my external SSD cases to the back of my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're currently sitting on my desk. I was deferring that until I got done with the setup process. I only got the computer two days ago, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it hasn't happened yet. But I will probably do that in time for next week. But maybe not in time for the next
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, which we're recording early. Anyway, the transfer process, the migration assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven't done this in seven years. I'm usually a big fan of migration assistants. I don't start fresh. I use migration
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant. But here's the thing with migration assistant. I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ John app, for all its amazing capabilities, has not kept up with
⏹️ ▶️ John the advancement in storage size. When this thing was
⏹️ ▶️ John made, how much data was migration assistant moving? How many files was it moving? The numbers must have gone
⏹️ ▶️ John up at least by an order of magnitude since then. And so a lot of things in the app
⏹️ ▶️ John don't give you any feedback that would let you distinguish, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck or is this just taking a long
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey time to do a thing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be done? Now for this one, I had, I mean, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of overkill since my 2019 Mac Pro just has Thunderbolt 3, I think, right? But the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio has the Thunderbolt 5. So
⏹️ ▶️ John a Thunderbolt 5 cable, certified real Thunderbolt 5 cable. And I'm going to connect my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro to my Mac Studio with a Thunderbolt 5 cable while I do migration assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of the things migration assistant has done for past many years is it'll like test your connection and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John this connection has been tested to support these speeds. So I know it found my cable. I know it tested it and it tested
⏹️ ▶️ John it at really high speeds. So I'm like, great, this will help because I'm transferring four terabytes. My Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John had a four terabyte SSD. Mac Studio has a four terabyte SSD. I'm going through my migration assistant,
⏹️ ▶️ John go through the stuff, type these numbers in this computer, blah, blah, blah. I was basically just screen sharing to my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro from another Mac so I could see its screen and, you know, doing all the stuff. And it says, what do you want to transfer?
⏹️ ▶️ John It defaults to everything being checked off. I'm like, yep, transfer everything, go to the next thing. And then you get an indeterminate
⏹️ ▶️ John progress bar, like the progress bar where the filling goes back and forth, left, right, left, right, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it says like starting up or something like that. And it stayed on starting up for a
⏹️ ▶️ John really long time. So long that I had time to start Googling
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant stuck on starting up, you know, these type of questions. And if you Google that,
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, will you find years and years of people who said, hey, I tried to use migration assistant
⏹️ ▶️ John between two Macs and it showed a progress bar going back and forth and it says starting up and
⏹️ ▶️ John it's not making any progress. What's the deal? Years of it. Like, I'm not going to say decades because I think the longest
⏹️ ▶️ John one, oldest one I saw was maybe six or seven years old or whatever. But this is not a new thing. It's not a good feeling when
⏹️ ▶️ John you do a query like that and you get that answer. Then I start going through some of them. I'm going through like Reddit posts from
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple years ago and it's like, yeah, I've let it run for 20 hours and it still says starting up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh no, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John 20 hours. And people are saying, should I just let it go? People are saying they called Apple Care
⏹️ ▶️ John and here's what Apple Care told me to do or whatever. Then you start getting this sort of received wisdom,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, folklore stuff where a couple of people said, here's
⏹️ ▶️ John what you have to do. Start over. Okay. And then when you get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen where it tells you, like, what do you want to transfer? It's got little checkboxes next to like, do you want to transfer the apps? You want to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John this user account? You want to transfer system settings. Like the screen where it comes where everything is checked off by default. said,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, when you get to that screen, do not leave that screen until it calculates the sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John of all those things because they all just say calculating, like for the sizes, right? You have to stay
⏹️ ▶️ John there until it calculates all the sizes. So this is slightly complicated by the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that next to each item, it says calculating, but then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John the word calculating disappears and it's replaced by a number, like let's say 10 gigabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn't mean it's done calculating because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey keep watching,
⏹️ ▶️ John that 10 will change to 12, then to 15, then to 30. And you're like, how do I know
⏹️ ▶️ John when it's done calculating? I guess I have to wait until none of the numbers are changed anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the calculating process takes a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John A long time. Because I guess it's counting up every file and every side. I don't know what it's doing. It's a four terabyte drive
⏹️ ▶️ John with literally millions of files on it. But here, the thing I came up with is like, look, the
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes should total about four terabytes because my disk is full.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I'll wait until the, I'll wait until the first I'll wait until nothing says calculated.
⏹️ ▶️ John It says, you know, nothing says calculated anymore because it does just like one or two of them and then eventually it'll start on the
⏹️ ▶️ John third or whatever. It doesn't do them in order. I don't know, but some of them just say calculating for a long time. I'll wait until all the numbers add up
⏹️ ▶️ John to roughly four terabytes and they're not changing anymore. And then I'll hit the continue button. So I did that
⏹️ ▶️ John because many things on the internet said you should do this. Of course, in that same thread, there's a bunch of angry
⏹️ ▶️ John people years later coming back to the same Reddit thread saying, after doing that, how long do you have to wait?
⏹️ ▶️ John How long did it take to finish? Please tell me. But they're long gone because this is years ago, right? You know, this is the sad people
⏹️ ▶️ John coming back. Wait, I found your thread. How long did it take after that? So I waited for all the calculating to be
⏹️ ▶️ John done. I hit continue and then it says starting up and it shows an indeterminate progress bar going back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it stays there for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can you give me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an order of magnitude? Are we talking minutes, hours? I mean, I'm just trying to remain
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do something
⏹️ ▶️ John else for a while. And I look back at it and it's like, all right, it's been 30 minutes. I'm doing some more
⏹️ ▶️ John Googling. I'm not finding any more folklore or wisdom except for a bunch of people. A bunch of people from back in the day are
⏹️ ▶️ John like learning that you should never do this over Wi-Fi. I'm like way ahead of you. Like, I know, I know, I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it over Wi-Fi. I'm not even doing it over Ethernet. I'm doing it over Thunderbolt. And by the way, the uh, the migration
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant app is not reassuring. And at the bottom, it says like what your current connection is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That's great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you click on it, when you click on it or go see like the connection test thing, it will tell you what it tested all the connections
⏹️ ▶️ John for. So it's like, obviously, this is not none because you said this connection has been tested and it just gave this data
⏹️ ▶️ John rate or whatever. it It tests all of them. It says you've got an Ethernet connection. I tested that and it gave this data rate and you've got a Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John connection. like But the thing just says none. All right. So I just let it sit there for a while. I figured,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, I will give this, let's say, three hours to
⏹️ ▶️ John be on the screen that says starting up or preparing, whatever the hell it says. It is not a progress bar that's
⏹️ ▶️ John going anywhere. It is a back and forth progress bar. And there is no other visibility into this. There's no log
⏹️ ▶️ John window to bring up. There's nothing else that you can see to let you know that this is making progress or not. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John before I waited for all to calculate, it would have also completed if I had waited the same amount of time. Who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows? But I just found something else to do and put it out of my mind. And probably… probably
⏹️ ▶️ John about an hour in, maybe 50 minutes in to the starting up thing, I glanced over from
⏹️ ▶️ John what I was doing on my wife's computer and looked back at my computer and I said, it's not going back
⏹️ ▶️ John and forth anymore. Now there's an actual progress bar. all right And that's when I sent you guys screenshots with my
⏹️ ▶️ John fingers crossed emoji where it's just like, it's it's going and it's giving me a data rate and the data rate
⏹️ ▶️ John kept climbing. I think it was topping out at like over a gigabyte per second, uh which is
⏹️ ▶️ John great. Uh, And it took maybe four hours to finish
⏹️ ▶️ John and it did finish and the computer rebooted and it had pretty much all my stuff in it. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John once again amazed at the thoroughness of migration assistant. I think it let
⏹️ ▶️ John me inherit all of my time machine backups, including the network ones on the new computer, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is amazing. Like I didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey take it up on that
⏹️ ▶️ John offer. I wiped the time machine backup because I just wanted to start fresh because I know from experience that the network ones
⏹️ ▶️ John get corrupted easily. But I think it let me do all that. All my settings were there. All my
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff from user local was there. Just like everything was in there. It was really amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Backblaze was a little bit angry and I had to corral that back into a reasonable state. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. After getting over that hurdle, but this is the flaw in migration
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant. They need some way like for phases that previously were like, well, this isn't
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be that long. We can show an indeterminate progress thing here. They can't do that anymore. Like, what if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have millions and millions of files like I do? What if you have four terabytes of data spread over millions and millions of files? There's no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to tell whether this is ever going to complete. And most people won't have the patience to wait an hour for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to get to the part where the progress bar begins, right? Before you start seeing it. Once it begins,
⏹️ ▶️ John it gives you a time estimate and you can see it progressing. As long as that progress bar is moving, you think things are happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John But wow, a little bit scary. I'm not sure what I was going to do. Like I could have tried restoring
⏹️ ▶️ John from time machine backup or something else like that, but I really wanted to do the machine to machine transfer. So I'm glad it
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually worked. And then after that, I've just been on an Intel Purge, which is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John go to system report, go to like, you know, about this Mac, blah, blah, blah. You eventually get to this, what used to be called system profiler.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that will list every app that it knows about on your system, including what architecture the app is using. Although it lists a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of them as either unknown or other or something. But anyway, I went through every Intel app I had and either deleted it
⏹️ ▶️ John and updated it to an ARM version. I cleaned out user local, rebuilt everything for ARM. Didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John rebuild everything. Some things I didn't rebuild eventually will, like when I need them. But the stuff I knew I needed, I rebuilt
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, for arm, build new versions of uh, things that I wanted new versions of. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's going pretty well. Um, did a network time machine backup. it's still running to my Synology
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. Um, Did a Super Duper clone. Oh, the enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ John with my two SATA SSDs. Working okay, but
⏹️ ▶️ John one time, I think yesterday, both drives,
⏹️ ▶️ John which were both mounted, just disappeared entirely from my computer. And Disk
⏹️ ▶️ John Utility could not see the enclosure, which is what everybody says. Oh, don't get external enclosures. They just, you know, your drives disconnect.
⏹️ ▶️ John When that happened, Disk Utility couldn't even see the enclosure anymore. And my solution was to turn off the enclosure and back
⏹️ ▶️ John on because it's got a power switch. Hasn't happened since then. I have no idea what caused it. Maybe I'll
⏹️ ▶️ John try plugging it into power instead of making it bus powered, but I've got my eye on that one. uh But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John did do a super duper clone, did two super duper clones too because now I'm cloning my Photos drive and my, um
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you call it? uh And my main drive to two separate volumes on there. uh And I did
⏹️ ▶️ John a time machine backup to it, and that worked. And now the Synology time machine backup is taking forever because it's way slower.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I'm almost completely up and running. And during that, while all that stuff was going on, I was doing dev work on my computer instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of my wife's. And she loved that. And I loved it. And it's nice and fast. And so far, I haven't missed the RAM that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro had. This is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so sounds like a little bit of a troublesome journey for both the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the computer, but ultimately sounds successful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it could have been worse. Oh, an update on photo searching. My photos library did success. This is another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Copying your photos library following Apple's instructions in their support note that we put in a past episode. Copying
⏹️ ▶️ John my two terabyte-ish photos library to an external drive, following the instructions.
⏹️ ▶️ John The copy went really fast because, hey, I bought a fast Thunderbolt 5 SSD and I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a fast, you know, copy went surprisingly fast for two terabytes worth of library. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then following the Apple's instructions for how to open it. And then it says, and then you want to designate it
⏹️ ▶️ John your system photos library. So go to, you know, settings general and there's a button that says user systems photo
⏹️ ▶️ John system photo library. And I clicked that button and photos beach ball.
⏹️ ▶️ John ball stayed there for 20, 25 minutes. Jeez.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then eventually wasn't there anymore. And it was successful. That is another instance
⏹️ ▶️ John of no regular user is going to tolerate that amount of waiting. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, what's my alternative? I've
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey learned that
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it's just going to blow. I mean, the rest of the computer was fine, but photos was 100% beach
⏹️ ▶️ John balling for 20 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I have a big photos library. There are a lot of photos. Like, I get it. I don't know what it was doing, but it did eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John succeed. And my photos library did move there. And then I deleted my photos library from the internal
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD, freeing up half of my space. And then once it was all said and done, and once it had done
⏹️ ▶️ John all iCloud syncing and everything, I did search inside photos on my photos library
⏹️ ▶️ John that's on an external drive. And I searched for pictures of cats and pictures of fences. And both of those things worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you did this within photos? Within photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know or care anything about spotlight finding photos, but within the photos app, when I search for some
⏹️ ▶️ John word that, you know, it works. It works. It worked fast. I'm satisfied with
⏹️ ▶️ John that experience. I think I'll be okay with my photos library on an external drive. And that drive enclosure has
⏹️ ▶️ John not spontaneously disconnected so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So far. I thought that we were of the understanding that searching within photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was never really up for grabs. It was searching outside of photos in spotlight that was the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there's a follow-up item in a second where we'll see what Apple's intelligent agent has to
⏹️ ▶️ John say about this. But just experimental evidence. I did not try any kind of spotlight search for photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John like as in Command-F in the Finder, because I don't care. All I care about is that search inside the photos app works,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good deal. So all in all, sounds like success all around.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so far, so good. I mean, yeah, it's nice to have everything all in one place. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that time on my wife's computer has really made me appreciate this more. Made her appreciate it more, obviously, too. But just being back
⏹️ ▶️ John on my own computer with my bigger screen, my own keyboard and mouse. Oh, that's another nice thing I got to treat myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I gave myself a new mouse pad. Wow. The old
⏹️ ▶️ John one was fine, but you know, there's that new, nice new mouse pad feeling, right? So I have a new mouse pad.
⏹️ ▶️ John course, my keyboard that I bought on eBay turned out not to be a scam. It was, in fact, a new sealed in
⏹️ ▶️ John box Apple extended keyboard with a full-size control key in the lower left corner and no
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid globe thing there and touch ID. So here I am. New keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John new mouse pad. Not a new mouse, although I do have plenty of spares up of those up in there as well. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's got that it's got that new Mac feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's awesome. Congratulations. You really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you've earned this over a very, very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully I won't have this computer for seven years, but tune in seven years from now to see how that goes. Good gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does the new computer feel appreciably faster than the Mac Pro did? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes. Okay. All right, good deal. Remember, my computer was slower than a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and it showed up
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. Every, Everything is a lot faster.
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Marco’s Apple Watch Series 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, you also got some treats. What's going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I went to the Apple store for my pickup of my new Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 12, and I got to see all the other products. Very briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone Pro colors, I think, are fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually, I went today. I needed to go to the mall anyway, and so I just popped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in briefly to look at the two new colors. Actually, I didn't even look at black, come to think of it, I should have, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw Glacier and Burgundy, and they clearly are not as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool as orange was, but I actually really like both of them quite a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit. I find, at least from seeing it in the store for a few minutes, I find that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glacier, which is that light blue color, the Glacier is lighter than I expected it to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Burgundy is darker than I expected it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that's fair. Yeah, seeing YouTubers with the Burgundy, like Apple's videos made it seem so much lighter than the spy
⏹️ ▶️ John shots, but now that I see other YouTubers doing it in different lighting conditions, it looks more like the spy shots. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the burgundy is pleasingly darker than it appeared to be in Apple's videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it's very dark. Like in moderate to low light, it could be confused for black.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very dark. And I think that is fine. I mean, that is kind of like, you know, the style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year is a lot of like reds and purples and stuff. So yeah, that makes sense. I think honestly, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went even darker than maybe the style would suggest, but I'm not a style expert. um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I'm actually very happy sticking with my 17 Pro for one more year for lots of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um As the various reviews have come out of the 18 Pro, it does seem like it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really that necessary to upgrade every year, uh even for idiots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like us. And so I, for the moment, I'm going to stick with my 17 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, that being said, part of the reason is that I'm waiting for the duo, so I know I have to get one of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least for development and everything. So that's going to throw a wrench in the plans. But for the moment, happy with my 17 Pro. 18
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro does not really do it for me. And in the same way, I also didn't ever get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch Series 11. I'm coming from a Series 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually, for various developing and testing reasons, I ended up having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 10 in both of its sizes. One of them came refurbished later on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just got a Series 12. I decided to go with the smaller size Series 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. I've spent a good amount of time wearing both sizes on the Series 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would wear one for a few months and switch the other one for a few months. What really got me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Series 10 is about a month ago, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was out with some friends and they took a picture and I saw the picture of myself afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all I could see was this giant screen on my wrist. I'm like, hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann I think I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start reducing that. And so I went with the smaller size Series 12.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the white ceramic, which I think is awesome. I'll get to that in a moment, but just a little bit more on sizing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ceramic is actually a little bit bigger, especially, I think it's like one millimeter wider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the other materials. And also, there's been a change in the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proportions with Series 12, which we're going to get to a little bit in the follow-up. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, in my opinion, I think the small size looks way better on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me than the bigger one in this model of watch. And also, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even like it to be a little bit smaller. I think it could even go like maybe two millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and still look great on my wrist, which I think, I mean, I forget. I should know as a watch nerd. I think my wrist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like 6.75 inches, something like that. I don't know. Something in that ballpark.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, hold on. So since you've brought this up, we do have some follow-up we were going to get to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later, but let's just do it now. And so Sebastien writes, the Apple Watch Series 12 display is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smaller than the Series 10 display. I got mine yesterday and I noticed it immediately. Also, the speaker grille is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey linear again, while on the S10 and S11, there's Series 10, Series 11, the speaker grills,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were speaker grills with small holes. Both of those are very disappointing changes, in my opinion, according to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sebastian. The Series 10 was a regression from the 789 with thicker bezels, and they made it even thicker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the 12. So this has been a common refrain, and there's a picture that Sebastian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took that makes it fairly clear. Like, I'm not trying to argue that this is incorrect. This did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even register to me. Maybe I'm just not observant enough, but did not even register.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there are some changes. Oh, and by the way, before I follow up, I just took out one of those little flexible tape measure things. I have a six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half inch wrist, and and I think that I think the small size is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right size for that. Um, Anyway, that being said, there are a few changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, to the, like little, some little tweaks to the design. Oh, my Series 12 just rebooted itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. Uh, version, Version 1.0 of the software. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, as it reboots, I'll tell you, um, the black part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the crystal of the watch, is a bigger proportion of the watch's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco height. So it has gotten thicker, and the watch body below it has gotten thinner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as you look from the side, you see more of the height is black than it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think that that might be contributing to part of the difference in the look. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that makes it look better, but that's just me maybe. Now, that being said, people have taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side-by-side pictures, and indeed the screen bezels are a little thicker on the 12 than they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on at least the 10, and I think the 11 as well. To me, I actually prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Now, part of it is because I don't use a watch face with a solid color background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black backgrounds, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even notice this. But when the Series 10 first came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we noticed as we used it, and we talked about it, that the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by being pushed closer to the edges, it actually warped a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content in the corners and edges of the screen to slightly be in the curvature of the crystal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually didn't like that. Like, it looked kind of cool for a second, but it made it a little harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read because a little bit of the screen content was actually on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the slope. And I didn't think that was a very good idea. It was great that they could brag about thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bezels, but it actually worked worse. That's why even though the outgoing, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if the current ones do, but the outgoing large size, the 46 millimeter Series 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 11, actually has a bigger screen than the Apple Watch Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But because of that curvature around its edges, where the Apple Watch Ultra is flat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge to edge, I actually preferred for large screen use, the Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far. Now, I think the Series 12, by having it pull the margins a little bit in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually have thicker bezels a little bit, I think it's actually better because it helps pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that content away from those curved edges. And more of it is on the flat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face of the watch. That, to me, makes it more useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John This definitely does seem like a conscious change because Apple was bragging so much when they got the bezels smaller and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John on the series 10 and 11. They just loved it so much. But it seems like they also learned
⏹️ ▶️ John that there are usability issues. It also makes me think about the 20th anniversary phone that is rumored that is going to take
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen and wrap it
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same way. Have they unlearned that lesson for the phone? Are they going to use that setting that pulls
⏹️ ▶️ John in the screen image? Tune in next September to see how that goes. But for now, it seems like the watch team at least
⏹️ ▶️ John has made a conscious decision on the series, the series series of phones
⏹️ ▶️ John with that have curved top glass things to pull in the screen image. So yes, it does mean that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you take a head-on picture of them, there is more black border around the new phone than the old phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but uh, that may provide better usability and also better readability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Um, the, um, as Sebastian, uh, wrote, the speaker grills
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, on the Series 10 and I think 11 um, are like a bunch of tiny holes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Previous and now Series 12 models, it's two slots. This, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a Series 10 owner, I prefer the slots because the little holes on my Series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10 have had a little bit of sunscreen in them for a year and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann half.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have not been able to get it out. So like the top speaker grill on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 10 just has these little tiny white dots. Like nothing I have done can get that out of there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So hopefully the switch back to the slot might make it easier to clean. Plus now my watch body is white anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I might not notice as much. Oh, also my outbound Series 10, I had the gold Series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10. It significantly changed color throughout its life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh. The gold DLC coating tarnishes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you do some searches on Reddit, you'll find this. And if I flip it over, I could see the parts that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rub against my skin are actually a different color than the rest of the case. I tried, never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. I tried polishing cloths, never do this. And they tell you, never do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And AI will tell you, never do this. But I tried it and it helped. But it still did not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restore the original color. Never do this. That is something that if you want a partial restore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jewelry polishing cloths, never do this. Might maybe help you, but don't.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you saying never to do it? That it will damage the finish or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what polishing is, is abrasion. You don't mean like the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John microfiber polishing cloth. Explain what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean like a jewelry, like a fine metals polishing cloth from Amazon, like a jewelry
⏹️ ▶️ John They have like tiny abrasive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, It's a very, very fine abrasive compound. And if you rub metal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it gets it shinier, but it does that by removing a layer of metal. Now, a DLC coating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is what Apple uses to color these watches, is very thin. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do too much of any kind of abrasion on it, you will rub off the coating and you will just expose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the metal color underneath it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thus the admonition to never do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that's why everything will tell you never to do this. I did not find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to happen on mine, but that's, hey, all bets are off if you try this yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, that is something to be aware of. If you pick like the gold, like anything that's not the natural color of titanium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or steel, the coatings they use can tarnish. And in this case, it absolutely did. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of turned me off the gold now, anyway. But going back to the white ceramic, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, love it. I was a little concerned that it would be a little bit too much of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cream color because in Apple's pictures and stuff, it's kind of hard to tell. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it white or is it cream? Well, I can tell you, having the actual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, ceramic watch, and then I have their version of the white sport band, which they, I believe, call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand is the color. I have it right here next to the white sport band from the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generations. And it is not that different. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more of a warm tone, but it's a very subtle difference. They call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch Pearl White and they call the band Sand. I think those are pretty accurate color names. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not, like, I was afraid it would be more like Starlight. Like, they're, you know, like they're kind of warmer versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this. It's not. It is closer to white than Starlight. And so I like it a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it looks very, like, fresh and cool. It will restrict what band choices will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look good with it, but because, you know, because there's no metal to match, like nothing with metal lugs will match
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But so far, I'm very happy with it. And that's it so far. I haven't tested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the spying on people features yet because those aren't released yet. For what I have right now, it is wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you compare the new Ceramic Series 12 with your old Ceramic Series 5 or do you not have that anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should dig around in my kind of archive. I don't think I have it anymore. I think I sold it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, there was one other saga.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trying to pair this watch for developer mode. This has changed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I don't know if this is a Series 12 thing, if it's a watchOS 27 thing, maybe some combination thereof.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it's an Xcode 27 thing, trying to get this watch to show up in Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be usable for development was ridiculous. The way developer mode works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Apple devices in the modern way is there's a secret setting called developer mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have to enable. This setting will not even show up until you try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue a build to the watch from Xcode. Then Xcode will error out and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer mode isn't enabled on this device. Then you have to, at that point, go to the device, go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the bottom of the security screen, hit find the developer mode, turn it on, and it'll say, all right, we got to reboot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it reboots. Then after it reboots, it asks you, you sure you want to turn this on? Then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the passcode thing. And then finally, you have developer mode on. Then you can go back to Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and issue a build after it downloads all the symbols. It will eventually work for that device. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The watch, previously, you would have the little dance where you know, you'd plug the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the computer and the phone would say, trust this computer question mark. And you have to, you know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the watch at that point paired to the phone, then the watch would also have its own tap, tap, trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this computer. And you have to, you know, type in the code and everything. Well, no matter what I did, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could not even get that to happen with the new watch. I couldn't get it to even say trust this computer. I'm like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I doing here? Tried searching, tried AIing, tried finding any kind of documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I rebooted everything under the sun. I installed both of their day one security updates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like everything. I did everything, all of the usual dances. Could not figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eventually, I don't know how I found this, but somehow I figured out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there is, maybe I eventually found like a K-Base article. In the new Xcode Device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hub, there's a, like in the device list where normally it would show the devices that were waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for pairing or that needed developer mode or whatever. It's not even there. You had to hit the little plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say pair nearby device. Now, the screen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows up when you say that has three pictures, like a kind of multi-device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icon, Apple TV and Vision Pro. Now, if you look at this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might miss the tiny little Apple watch that's in the multi-device icon. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of looks like this is not the right pairing screen for anything that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not an Apple TV or a Vision Pro or maybe you know, an iPad or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows? But it kind of looks like this is not the right screen. It is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then, only then, with your Mac saying waiting to pair on this weird screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only then will the developer mode option magically show up on the watch. Will it tell you this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. No, it will not. You have to just know that when you're looking at the waiting to pair screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you go into the watch and find the developer mode thing and then turn it on. Then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, we have to reboot. Blah, blah, blah. Go to the pairing screen. Okay. You reboot. It says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you sure you want to developer mode. Yes. By the way, the Series 12, I think, reboots faster than previous Apple watches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not saying a lot, but it is useful. Okay. You finally reboot. The watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is finally in developer mode. And you plug in the phone and you're waiting for that tap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap trust this computer. And it just doesn't happen. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hell? You know where it is? Not that it's going to tell you this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you plug in the phone, then the time that you would normally find the trust this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prompt on the watch, it's not ever going to tell you. You just have to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go back to the security screen, to go to the developer mode screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scroll to the bottom of the developer mode screen where nothing has ever been before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nothing has told you anything is there, but you just have to know to scroll there. And then at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, it says Marco Pro or your computer name here. And then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap that to pull up the Trust This Computer screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly Only then can you finally use your watch for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development. Oh my God. Sounds fun. It took
⏹️ ▶️ John me hours. You mentioned the the icon leading you to to believe that like that button
⏹️ ▶️ John is only if you have like an Apple TV or whatever, because it doesn't look anything like a watch. I had a similar experience when
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to set up Apple Apple Care on my Mac Studio and I was doing it through system settings
⏹️ ▶️ John because it bugs you to do it there. I'm like, oh yeah, I have to do that. And I go through it all and it's like, yeah, do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it says, okay, like on the Apple Pay screen where it wants you to fingerprint authenticate
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever to Apple Pay for your Apple Care Plus. It says, okay, so here you go. This is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Care for an M slix M6 slash M5 Pro Mac Mini, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, no. And so I back out. I go back through it again. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, all right. I'm doing this on the Mac Studio through its own system settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's leading me to say, so you've got a Mac Studio. It's going to cost you this much for this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like it knows it's a Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John You go through the Apple screen. Okay, so here's that Apple Care for the M6 slash M5 Pro Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I just went through with the payment. And when it was done, my Mac Studio has
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Care. But like, yeah, just a couple of missing string constants
⏹️ ▶️ John here and there, an icon that doesn't make you think this is for watches because they can only put so many devices on it can
Sponsor: Quince
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Quince. Let me tell you, today in Richmond,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Virginia, it has been cold, it has been rainy, and it has been gross. And today was the first time since,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know, March that I wore jeans. I didn't wear shorts because, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, that's all I need around Richmond. And so when I put on my jeans, I thought to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, maybe it's time to take a look through my closet and kind of take an assessment of my wardrobe. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the seasons change and it starts to get cool, that's a great time to do it. And let me tell you, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to refresh your wardrobe, Quince is a great way you can do that. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey was given a little bit of money to spend at Quince over the last few months. And one of the things I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got was the Comfort Stretch Traveler five pocket pants. And these are a really great in between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they're more formal than like jeans, but I wouldn't say they're quite as formal as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like slacks or something like that. They're this very nice in-between. And this is a very true story. Earlier today, I was starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think about what I was going to pack for the podcast-a-thon next week. And it occurred to me that my Comfort Stretch Traveler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five-pocket pants would be the perfect thing to wear during the podcast-a-thon. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit more formal than jeans, but not so formal that I feel like I've gone overboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you want to get yourself some of these or some of the many, many, many other things that Quince
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offers, including stuff for your house, stuff to travel with, stuff for women and for babies, all
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Marco’s Mac Mini M6
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of M6 max Minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, I got a new Mac Mini. um Got my M6 Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I'm happy to say it is fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say. I haven't done like formal benchmarks. i'm i just like installed my transcriber consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and just saw like how fast can it go? like How many transcription minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per real minute can it do? Like what is its X speed of like, you know, it's transcribing at 200x, 300x?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, I've seen it peak at like 380x
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real-time transcription. I didn't see it sustain that, though. I've seen it sustain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like the low to mid 300Xs, whereas the M4 Mac minis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it would usually sustain more like 240x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I've gone from like 240-ish to like 320 to 330-ish, you know, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, these are not like formal numbers yet. I haven't done controlled testing yet. I haven't had time because I've only had it set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for a few hours. But so far, it seems like the M6 is a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump over the M4 in the area of transcription, which makes sense. Like if you look at Apple's quoted numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some of their own performance claims and what they've focused on and what has changed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does make sense. The only thing that I would really wish for, if anybody is listening to this at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple who has any input in this, the 27 OSs have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new advanced dictation model that Apple has touted that runs on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest end hardware. This is like that new form of model where it's like the sparse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mixture of experts or whatever it was, this new advanced architecture of these models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's supported only on the iPhone 16 Pro and up and the M3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, and up. Well, I have that. I have a bunch of them. All of my Mac minis are M4s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or M6. So I can run it, but there appears to be no API for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that model on Mac or iOS. I have tried, I have run tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have this amazing new transcription model on this hardware. And there's apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell, no way for apps to use it. And that's unfortunate. So I really hope Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives us an API for that. And even if it's as simple as like a flag to the speech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcription API that on those supported devices can use the higher-end model, please,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, since you're running this on your own Mac Minis, like forget about, I know you run transcription on the phone too, but
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about the phone for a second and just think about your Mac Mini farm where you're doing transcription. Private
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey agent to find
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They're in there somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can use them. That's a really
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco good point. No one can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never thought about that. Thank you. That's actually
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good idea. I am the devil on your shoulder telling you to use an agent to reverse engineer Apple's OSs
⏹️ ▶️ John and find those damn APIs because it will find them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that's really good. Oh, I like that a lot. Thank you. Okay, I will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You'll like that
⏹️ ▶️ John until you're in private API hell
⏹️ ▶️ John where nothing is documented and things don't work. You're like, what the hell? Private APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm just going to walk away whistling like a cartoon character right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, the good thing is when the disaster happens, it won't be on everybody's phones. It'll just be on your Mac mini farm.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you'll reap what you sow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it'll all crash at once. Foreshadowing for the after-show, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John 50% of the Mac minis use private APIs and 50% don't. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time, it works every time. All right. So you good with your treats?
Casey’s Apple Watch Series 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so for me, Aaron and I upgraded from Series 10 aluminum watches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Series 12. I had gone for a few years with the small watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I'm back on the big watch, which seems fine to me. I think when it got less tall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it made a big difference to how I perceive it on my wrist, which isn't to say that Marco's wrong about him or me for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that matter. I think our wrists are roughly the same size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to be clear, like all three, like the 42, is it now? The 42,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 46, and the Apple Watch Ultra all look fine on us. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, it's just a matter of like what's your current style. Like I like a bigger watch in the summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a smaller watch in the winter. Why? I don't know, but that's just what I like. So all summer I wore the 46.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All winter last year, I wore the 42. And a lot of the summer I switched to the ultra because it was even bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that's just, it's, it's just personal style.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, so both of us got Series 12 aluminums and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got. I mean, I'm not trying to be like, you know, snarky. It's just, it's a two-year newer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch. Seems faster. Battery life is way better. Seems good. I really just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't have that much more to say other than the bezel difference. I think, Marco, you nailed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in saying that because I have a black background like you do, did not even register that the bezels are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different. It's fine. It's good. I shouldn't say it's fine. It's good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's no complaints. It's good. That's about all I got.
iPhone Duo SDK released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so back to follow up. I don't know what that was, but back to follow up now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPhone Duo dev tools, there was a delay and there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much consternation, including for Marco and myself. And we're going to cover the actual tools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey themselves a little bit later in this very episode, or at least that's the plan. But Oscar Echeverry wrote:
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm genuinely curious what Marco and Casey would have Apple do differently with regards to the dev tools for the iPhone Duo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are your opinions around how Apple would be able to both protect its product secrecy while simultaneously providing more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lead time for third-party developers to have access to dev tools before the duo's release? I'm very curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear what Marco's thoughts are. We did not confer in advance. For me, 27.1,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Xcode 27.1 beta, should have been released that day. Like, I'm not clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I'm not clear why that is impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, obviously, it's not what they did, but what precludes that from happening? I don't really get why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can't happen. The other thing I'll say, and I just recently, in the last like 48 hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just found out that this is at least slightly a thing. But the other thing I'll say is they should give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us access to hardware. Now, in a perfect world, that means give us some hardware. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your reaction is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco correct. There's no way that's happening. in a perfect world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a perfect world, it would be great, but it's not happening. So what's the next best thing? And Marco and I were talking about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit privately, but they are doing, I don't think they're officially called labs. I forget what the official name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. Marco, do you remember?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Like, I don't know. I don't even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn't matter, but they're basically doing labs, like the one that Marco and I did together for the Vision Pro a couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, now, three years ago, something like that. And um, what they are doing is in Cupertino,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in New York, and in a, in Battersea, and one, and I think one in India, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think one in in like, um, Japan ish area. I don't have the list in front of me. They're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing these things where you can come in for a day or sometimes two and presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get time with a physical iPhone duo. And I really, really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really support this approach genuinely. I love this approach. I wish there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was more, particularly in America, than literally one in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New York. And that is the only one the East Coast gets. And I'm sorry if you live anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between, I don't know, San Francisco and New York, because you're screwed. You're going to have to find a way to get to either San
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Francisco or New York. I don't love that. I get that this is complicated. I get it's hard. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple wants the particular, well, I was going to say indie developers, but if Apple wants developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have this thing, to have their apps ready to go on day one, you got to put in the work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. And yes, I think a lot of us will recompile and it'll be passable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on day one. For all I know, that may be where I end up because I'm gone next week doing other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. But maybe it'll be passable for a lot of these apps on day one, but it won't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be great. And I really wish they had more offerings, even just in New York,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because selfishly, the one and only time they offered, I just, I can't make that day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two days happen. And so I really wish they took that more seriously. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still don't really understand why we couldn't have gotten Xcode 27.1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on day one. But Marco, convince me I'm wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, I'm pretty much with you. You nailed it. Like, I'm not asking for Apple to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers access to this kind of stuff at scale before they've announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And they don't. Like, Apple, they follow a very predictable pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where when they're launching new hardware like this, they bring a very small number of select
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers like Netflix, you know, or maybe a couple of game developers. Like they'll bring them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and show them the hardware before they've even announced it. And that way they can have something to demo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the keynote. But that's a very, you're talking like, you know, you can count them on one hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually, like how many developers would have access to that before the keynote. Then the keynote happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The thing is announced to the public. And at that point, usually like an hour after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keynote, that same day, developers get an SDK that gives us a simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the new hardware. And for all the new abilities, any new APIs that are enabled by the new hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get an SDK that day. That's the part that didn't happen here. Now, I'm glad that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did give it to us. I mean, what was it, a week and a half later? Something like that? Something like that. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. But this is already like, this is a very compressed timeline for developers because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Duo has all these different screen sizes and aspect ratios and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco positions it can be in and changes so much about the layout of common system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls and system interaction patterns that it's a lot of work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we have one month before they're in customers' hands. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing, I mean, at the time it was, you know, six weeks. Losing one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half of those six weeks felt like a needless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delay for developers. Now, it wasn't arbitrary. I'm sure the answer was it wasn't ready yet. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact, when they did give us the SDK on Friday, there were some things about it that were kind of rough that it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah, it isn't ready yet. Or at least like you can tell they really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushed it out hard. And even then, they couldn't get it out more than, you know, a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or less than a week and a half after the event. So it's not that they were artificially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding it back, but they obviously weren't prioritizing it enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it out there on day one. It wasn't ready yet on day one was the problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, this stuff happens. I understand. It's software. None of my stuff's ever ready when I want it to be ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Preach. But I'm not the biggest company in the world. That's not my job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be that and to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, and you are not relying on a bunch, like thousands,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of other people to leverage your work product,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann it'd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be one thing if Apple just you know, wanted to be late for something that only affects Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the Apple wants all of us developers to be ready on day one. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want us to be ready on day one, help us be ready on day one, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's, it's very frustrating and demoralizing is dramatic, but I can't think of a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word. It's just frustrating that we're begging for table scraps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so we can get a not embarrassing version of our apps ready for day one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because here's the thing. On day one, we will have one star reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from people who say that our apps aren't ready or don't look good or don't work well or the touch targets aren't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reachable or something. We will get one star reviews every single day from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day one until we fix those problems. Every day counts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now. But Marco, there's no way that actually happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assure you it happens. And the thing is, every part of this is an Apple-created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. Why don't we have time with the hardware? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception of some of these labs that fortunately are happening, I mean, we'll see how many people can actually get into them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. But that helps. But developers don't have early access to hardware for the most part. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don't have earlier access to software than four and a half weeks before the release. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why can people rate apps on a brand new phone that developers haven't had access to, but yet our apps are still available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that phone? Good question. That's an Apple problem. Why do app ratings matter so much to developers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's an Apple problem. Why is it a five-star system when no one ever does anything but one or five?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's an Apple problem. Like every single one of the, like these are all Apple-created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. So there are some things that Apple could do differently here. They could give us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could prioritize the release of the SDK on day one every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. They could make one-star reviews not possible on a brand new platform for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month or two or whatever. Or they could make them matter less. Or they could do a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system that isn't just one star or five stars. There are so many ways they could solve this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And we just don't question them because this has just been how it's, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it's been for 20 years almost. Like this is just how it's been. And so we just assume this is the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to be. But every single part of this can be improved. Every part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an Apple-created situation and it is within their control to improve it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oscar didn't ask me to answer this question, but the reason I put it in here is because you two are all angry about
⏹️ ▶️ John whole duo dev tool situation worked out. And uh, I, I thought it was worthwhile thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about, okay, well, if you're mad about this, what would you what would you rather have happened? What would have made you happy?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, And my answer to that is something that is difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the reasons that you've mentioned, but is still the actual answer, which is uh, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is releasing, whatever product they're releasing that they've held secret, because we assume they're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to continue to do that. And honestly, I think that's fine. It's fine to have something secret for a long time. But whatever your secret thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you're revealing that requires developer support, Casey's point, like it's not just a thing that you put out
⏹️ ▶️ John there. You actually want developers to do something in response to it. However big that changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it just like, oh, make the screen a little bit taller? Or is it like it has two screens and it bends? Like however
⏹️ ▶️ John big that changes, you need to scale the amount of time developers have to update
⏹️ ▶️ John their apps based on how big a change you just made, which means the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John solution is not, oh, make sure you have the dev tools on day one because that just frustrates people who are impatient like Casey. The
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn't just me, Dad. The real, and Marco, the real
⏹️ ▶️ John I want credit for my impatience. The real answer is people should not be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy and have in their hands a duo for another whole month. And Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, we can't do that. The holiday season and this and iPhone time is always here and blah, blah, blah. And that gets back to,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, these are all choices that you made, Apple. Like, I understand why it's difficult, but that's the actual solution, not the
⏹️ ▶️ John day or week and a half or whatever. It's you have to give a longer time between the time that
⏹️ ▶️ John you announce the product and the time when consumers are allowed to buy it to give your developers
⏹️ ▶️ John more time if the change requires more work. If it's a small change, then give them a few weeks or a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it's a duo size change, I feel like two months would be more appropriate. And you're like, well, they can't give two months. They're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to miss the holiday season. The things are ready to manufacture. But like, I understand, but that is the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. You have to give developers time enough to make their changes. It doesn't actually matter
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you have the dev tools on day one and stuff like Like whenever they have them, they have them. The only thing that matters is
⏹️ ▶️ John how long from the time developers get the dev tools to when they have to have their app updated for
⏹️ ▶️ John your new device. And if Apple cares about that, they have to give developers a sufficient amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of time, which runs afoul of all the other things I said. And I will add, by the way, that the secrecy screws them here too,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you're not following the minutia of Xcode releases, which you're probably not if you're a developer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple walls off the people who are working on secret projects, even within Apple, this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John compartmentalization. They've always done it. They continue to do it, which means the team that is working
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPhone Duo dev tools, like the simulator with the Bendy phone and all the new APIs or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, they are actually walled off from the rest of the Xcode team. A subset of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are disclosed on the Bendy phone, right? And a bunch of other ones aren't disclosed
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Bendy phone. And so they're working on the version of Xcode that's going to have the dev tools that know
⏹️ ▶️ John about the iPhone Duo. And the other Xcode people are working on Xcode that doesn't know about the
⏹️ ▶️ John Duo because they don't know about it. And so on day one, the main Xcode team was like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's the latest version of Xcode. And then the iPhone Duo team comes out and says, surprise, we've been working on one with the Bendy
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. And they're like, okay, well, we have the real Xcode that we're shipping to consumers here. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to like merge your changes. And they say, well, don't worry about it. We'll ship 27.1 and
⏹️ ▶️ John that's our version. You just ship 27.0. We're going to ship 27.1. That's got the Bendy phone in it. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then they're like, but we're about to release 27 another version of 27. It's like, okay, you call that one
⏹️ ▶️ John 27.2 and you can release that one, but 27.1 isn't ready yet. And so you end up with the
⏹️ ▶️ John 27.2 beta that comes out before 27.1 because the team that was working on it in secret
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn't had time to merge their, you know what I mean? Like this is, this is part of the fallout of secrecy. And I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying they can't do that, but they just have to add that to their timeline of like, all right, well, that just delays
⏹️ ▶️ John how long it's going to take before developers have tools to do this. And now how much time do you think it should take the average development
⏹️ ▶️ John team to adapt their app for this Bendy phone with three screens? And the amount of time they're giving,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like is maybe a little bit tight. And in the end, that's the root problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not going to be solved by always making sure you have the SDK available on day one. It's solved by pushing
⏹️ ▶️ John out the date that consumers get the product. And that brings its own whole host of other problems. So I got to
⏹️ ▶️ John move the whole iPhone date up out of September because now I need more time. Like this is the situation they're in. Like in
⏹️ ▶️ John the end, it'll, you know, Apple will, again, reap what they sow. They'll have fewer apps ready on day one. And all
⏹️ ▶️ John the bad things that happen to developers with one star reviews will happen. And we'll all get through it together. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the solution, I feel like, is to actually give adequate time for things to happen, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm going to say one of the hardest problems in computer science. One of the hardest problems in management period is providing those timelines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does a pretty good job of having timelines and keeping things on them, but there is some
⏹️ ▶️ John collateral damage. And the duo and app readiness is going to be one of those collateral
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces of collateral damage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Now, that is annoyingly the rightest answer of the three of us, which I shouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be surprised, but you're exactly right.
Photo libraries on externals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Photos libraries on external drives. Larry Feynman writes, I was so happy to hear you address this issue again on ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was even happier to hear Jason Snell help solve this longstanding problem regarding photos library on an external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive. I spent countless hours on the phone with Apple Geniuses trying to solve this to no avail. I really hope I'm wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that the new enhanced Siri is wrong too. Here's a summary of what macOS 27 Siri has to say on the matter: quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you move your Apple Photos library to an external hard drive, you will lose the ability to search for specific people, pets, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey objects. This happens because modern Mac OS uses a system wide spotlight spotlight indexing for these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advanced searches, which only works if the library is stored on your Mac's internal drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, swing and a miss, new Siri. Sorry. I tested it on your latest OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and it works just fine inside the Photos app. If they mean you will lose the ability to search
⏹️ ▶️ John for specific people or objects when you're searching through Command F in the Finder or through Spotlight,
⏹️ ▶️ John then that is correct, but that's not what they said. So I would continue to caution people. They're like, well, surely if
⏹️ ▶️ John I ask Siri, it will have this knowledge base of Apple's product knowledge and it will give me the right answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That continues not to be the case. It will very often give you answers that lead you to settings that do
⏹️ ▶️ John not exist or do exist, but at a different path. And no, it's not because it has outdated knowledge, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they move things around. Sometimes it just makes up stuff like, oh, go to this and that. And it's like, no, there's nothing. There's no setting
⏹️ ▶️ John called that in system settings. There never has been and there never will be. Um, In this case, it gives what I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is on its face an incorrect answer about how this works. Maybe the kernel of truth
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is, that is feeding this plausible LLM generated text is the fact that spotlight
⏹️ ▶️ John searching won't work. And maybe it is also true that macOS uses the system-wide spotlight indexing system
⏹️ ▶️ John for these advanced searches. But the combined answer makes this person think that they won't
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to launch photos and search for cats. And you will. It does work.
M5 Ultra Geekbench scores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along. Preliminary M5 Ultra GPU geekbench
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scores have come in. We didn't have these last episode. All right, so looking at the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deltas, the increases through different generations, M1 to M2 is about 34%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. M2 to M3, 15% better. M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to M3 is a 53% change. And then M3 to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5 Ultra, about a 60% change. Gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 to M3 comparison in there is because we skipped a generation. So if you're just looking at 1 to 2 and 2
⏹️ ▶️ John to 3, you're like, oh, 34%, 15%. But then look, M3 to M5 is 60. Well, you're
⏹️ ▶️ John jumping, you know, there's a delta of two there. So the one to three comparison is the closest
⏹️ ▶️ John one. And that was a 53% gain, and this is 60. So still, this is the best
⏹️ ▶️ John M whatever ultra increase, two generation any rease chump, I think. Although I didn't actually do
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 to M3. But anyway, look at the chart. We'll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. The M5 Ultra has good GPU gains, but a lot of that goodness has to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with the fact that there never was an M4 Ultra. So its comparison is to the M3 Ultra. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in that comparison, it looks pretty good.
“Readiness” health score
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then let's talk readiness score. This is a new thing in the Apple Watch. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have slept with my watch on like three or four nights, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get, hey, hey, baby. Hey, girl. But, anyways, I haven't slept with it enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a readiness score because I think you need to have it on overnight seven times or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But cardiologist Michael Katz pointed us to an article by physician scientist Eric Topol
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that says readiness scores on devices like the Apple Watch are proprietary scores that integrate different metrics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for each of the wearables. No algorithms have been disclosed. They are unvalidated against health outcomes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there's a whole sub stack about that. Then back to Michael Katz. It is infuriating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear about new sensors, the marketing, and wellness in the absence of any meaningful evidence.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doctors are mad that this is just made up stuff. But I mean, I do feel like it's mostly for entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John value. And I'm sure Apple has a million disclaimers saying this is not real health advice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is worth pointing out that a lot of these things that these sensors do is just like, this might be a fun thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell people. Setting aside, like, you know, heart arrhythmia and, you know, dangerous conditions
⏹️ ▶️ John where your blood oxygen is too low or whatever, things like readiness scores and even the sleep tracking,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just take a bunch of numbers and grind them up and they give you some kind of score. And you should mostly just view that as like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, whatever they're doing to, I can move this number around. Whatever they're doing to calculate the number, presumably me moving the
⏹️ ▶️ John number around does something. But the readiness scores and stuff, cardiologists are saying that's
⏹️ ▶️ John not really a thing. Just enjoy it for entertainment value, but don't put too much stake in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this is, I mean, this is honestly true of every device that offers this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you have whoop bands and aura rings and Fitbits and all these different health
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearable things that also do similar things. And they all do stuff like this. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all have some kind of metrics or stats in their apps that try to tell you like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this is your energy for the day. Even like my my Suunto watch and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Garmin watches, like they all, they all do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they're all using their own algorithms with their own data that they don't tell you. So there's no way to like even
⏹️ ▶️ John judge it or like, oh, this one is accurate and this one is not. Like there's, this is not, this is not a scientific
⏹️ ▶️ John endeavor. It is merely a consumer-facing product with some fun numbers for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And as always, um, these are, you know, as drama saying, like, it's not really medical advice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, It's something that can like maybe direct you to seek medical advice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it detects some kind of problem or detects something that might be a problem. But they're not medical devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, also, it's less about like, oh, the Apple Watch gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me a seven and the Whoop Band gave me a six and more about that device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measuring things relative to itself and your own experience with that device over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last X days or months. Getting a baseline for each device and having it measure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative measurements to itself on you in the past, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually potentially useful for certain things, but you can't compare them or treat them as absolute values. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's the same thing with like when the Apple Watch tells you the amount of calories you burned in a workout. These are estimates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on stats and heuristics and things. It's not actually measuring how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calories your body is burning. It can't. But what it is measuring is some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of heart rate or movement or some combination thereof. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can compare that today to what you did at your workout two days ago or last week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And you can say, oh, this was a harder workout than the last one. Or this was an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier workout. Like that relative to the same device measuring the same kinds of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few days earlier, that could be a helpful thing to give you a relative idea. These just aren't absolutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can't compare them between devices, but you don't usually need to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the problem with even those measures is like, well, how are they calculating that number? Are they weighting something in there that I've, I've
⏹️ ▶️ John massively changed a number that turns out to be heavily weighted in their algorithm? So it's changed my score a lot, but in the end, I haven't
⏹️ ▶️ John actually changed the thing they're trying to tell me about. Like if you read the, this article by Eric Topol,
⏹️ ▶️ John he spends some time railing on heart rate variability and how that, like these, a lot of these things incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ John heart rate variability into the algorithms to try to give you some score. And he's saying there's no evidence that heart
⏹️ ▶️ John rate variability should be a factor at all in this algorithm and could lead to misleading results because it's now
⏹️ ▶️ John weighted in to give you whatever your score is. But no one has, no one has shown in a scientific study that measuring
⏹️ ▶️ John heart rate variability is a useful thing to do with respect to the thing they're trying to show. So yeah, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to take it all with a big grain of salt. And even for things like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the calorie burn one, again, because it's got to give some kind of estimate. Because they don't tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ John here are the numbers we're incorporating into the algorithm that derives the calorie burned thing. You don't know if it's
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, well, you know, if it's some particular sensor is like measuring your body heat or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think this is the case, but like, and it happens to be like a hot day or you're running a fever or something and it
⏹️ ▶️ John skews your score. Like if you don't know what it's incorporated into the algorithm, first of all, you can't, no scientists can validate
⏹️ ▶️ John that, yes, this algorithm is giving you actionable data. And second, you don't know if even
⏹️ ▶️ John just the relative thing, like you may be changing a variable that actually is unrelated to the thing it's trying to measure,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you change that variable a lot and it makes your score yo-yo up and down. But in reality, you're not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John changing the number of calories burned because of the way they calculated. Anyway, it's it's tricky. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John do feel like the main um, the main purpose, the main value of
⏹️ ▶️ John things like this is simply getting people to take notice of some aspect of their health or activity
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that they weren't before. Like that's the gamification. Like even just like closing the rings. That's just, that's basically
⏹️ ▶️ John just a video game. It's like a Tamagotchi. Like you got to close your
⏹️ ▶️ John What does closing the rings do? I don't know. I just like them to be closed. In the end, it is making you be slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more physically active than you were before. And there is a foundation for being slightly more physically active than you
⏹️ ▶️ John were before is good. And that's the level these things are working at. It's like herded you towards what
⏹️ ▶️ John we hope are outcomes that are scientifically proven, as in doing more physical activity instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John less is better if you're doing very, very little activity. Adding a little bit more can help your health.
iPhone Duo dev plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's get to topics. And let's start with, as we talked about earlier, the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Duo DevTools are released. John, you took us through a kind of overview as to all the different versions of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xcode that are currently out right now. But yes, 27.1 landed, I believe, Friday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record this. And it's interesting. I think Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had said earlier, or one of you had said, that it's a very stripped down version of Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the Device Hub simulator, whatever you want to call it for the duo only includes Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and nothing else, or maybe settings, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it's definitely, it's coming in hot. But I did add a 3D model of the phone, which is the thing I suggested last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, like when we were talking about iPhone mirroring. I'm like, how are they going to do the phone and iPhone mirroring? Oh, they should have do a 3D model that you can fold.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they do have a 3D model. I think this is from Device Hub. Aaron Vey posted a video of it. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently, if you hold on the option key, you can control the folding state and it even does the effect or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John These Just follow the link to Aaron Vey's post to see the pictures of it, but I put some things in the notes here.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at the bottom one with the thing closing, notice how the screen is disconnecting from the frame a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit. So yeah, coming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in hot. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like for people who aren't looking at the exact image, and this is from a video. So like they, they show a 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John model of the phone folding, but it's clear that the, the screen portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 3D model is not connected to the frame of the phone portion because the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is folding faster than the frame portion, leaving gaps between them. A little bit of jank, but it does look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I've been using this a fair bit. Um, what I have discovered, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't want to go on too long about this because I don't think that's the purpose here, but what I've discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I saved myself. Past Casey is both wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an apple. And the reason I say that is because um, just a few months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really took a hard look at my iPad design and really revamped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and made it no longer actively embarrassing. I wouldn't say it's perfect, but it's it's efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when you open up the internal screen, I can never remember what the official names for these are. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you open up the internal screen, it shows, for Call Sheet anyway, it shows the iPad version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. And it looks mostly good. It's a little cramped compared to an iPad because of course it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but mostly pretty good, mostly okay with it. And on the outer screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some fiddling to do with like toolbars and stuff, but by and large, it mostly looks like the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version. Mostly pretty good. However, where past Casey is a jerk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I kept kicking the can around some of the, I'll say esoteric, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone will probably disagree with me here, but some of the esoteric stuff around iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For example, I never really use windowing in iPad. I'm genuinely incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glad it exists, but I almost never use it. I almost never use Stage Manager or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so having multiple instances of Call Sheet running concurrently was never really a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did, and thus I never really made it work. It does work out of the box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way the released version of Call Sheet is on the Duo simulator. However, if you navigate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one of the two side-by-side call sheets that you have running concurrently, if you navigate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the left-hand side, the right-hand side does it too. And so I need to properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support, um, uh, well, shoot, I forget the, what is it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco six seats rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than just lumping that everything into a, like one macro window.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not call that working, by the way, for two side-by-side instances. I would say that is in the realm of not working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, sure. I just mean it's not crashing or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would also say you might be the first person to ever actually try to run your app this way. Like it's this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not something that a lot of people are doing. And you might do it in Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes accidentally, because you tear a tab off the window or something. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a style of multitasking that people frequently do intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iPads for most apps. So I I think while I, while John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is technically correct that this is not like the right behavior and it's not acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior. It'd be like if you had two Safari instances and wherever you wanted one Safari window, the other one went there too. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, what's the point of this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But I would also say like fixing that should not take priority over almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other need for your app, for your customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree, but what it boils down to is at this point, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I need to make that work, at least for the most part. And as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit here tonight, it's mostly there. It's not 100% there, but it's mostly there. I think as long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I have another couple of days to work on it, I'll get it there. But with regard to most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other stuff, I actually am sitting far prettier than I expected. And I think that's because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and large, I am using out of the box controls, not a hundred percent, but for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that means that this is not the absolutely ruinous experience that I worried it was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. Now, I think my kind of minimum viable product is just, does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it work appropriately or reasonably in you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the modes that the duo supports, of which there's like 312 of them? Um, does it, does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it actively, Does it actively embarrass me or not? And right now, it does actively embarrass me, but I think I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty close. I'm within striking distance of not active embarrassment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have any plans for tent mode?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Not really. I haven't thought too much about that because the lower stake stuff is front of mind at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moment. If you or listeners have suggestions, I'm all ears. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John Here's my suggestion Cause I keep thinking of Apple's demo of like, yeah, there's tent mode, but then like you put it on like your nightstand
⏹️ ▶️ John and it shows like a nice like clock or whatever, like an alarm thing. If you put call sheet in tent mode as
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little nightstand thing, it should have like a little screensaver of floating heads of like the last 10 people you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that is one way you could do it. Another thing I am considering is if you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actively watching a movie, now maybe that's because you've told call sheet you're watching a movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or show or whatever. And and call sheet has for a long time supported live activities where you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into call sheet and say, start a live activity, and it will put something in the dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey island so you can always get to it lickety split. um, Even better, if you're integrating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Plex or Jellyfin or channels, I believe has duration as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I know the duration, then in tent mode, I could show like the poster art in a status
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar, not a back and forth status bar, mind you, John, but an actual status bar or a progress meter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me. I keep saying status bar, progress meter, showing how far you are through the movie or show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you. Like I could do something like that. I haven't thought too much about that. Like I said, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MVP for now, and I think I'm going to get there before launch day. And then inevitably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have a feeling Marco's going to say the same, once we get the hardware or perhaps spend time with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hardware, one or both of us can make it to New York, we'll see that all of our assumptions are wrong and we're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to need to rejigger everything. But I just want it to be not actively embarrassing and I'm within striking distance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And while this simulator is not perfect, it has been sufficient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough for me to get my work done as opposed to like, I think it was Greg Pierce was fussing on the internet, which is not his style,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, about how rough it's been for him. So I don't know what he's hitting that I'm not. Uh, But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's been fine for me. And I'm glad it's here. I'm glad it was only a week and a half late
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not later. Uh, And I am trying furiously to get work done as quickly as I possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what do you got going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically that I had a I had a busy family weekend. So I didn't actually, I wasn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expecting it to drop on a Friday afternoon. So I thought I'd have another week. So I've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only I've only just started like over the last couple of days. But so far it's fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not doing anything very like deluxe for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this adaptation until I have the hardware. I'm doing a normal job. Make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure controls look decent, get stuff away from the edges whenever it's possible without causing a lot more bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's what I'm doing. I'm not doing any kind of redesigns yet, just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic adaptation so my apps don't look broken. And for now, that's it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I actually have the hardware and start to use it, and by the way, start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see how it sells, then I will start evaluating whether to do deeper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimization for it. But I think it's probably going to sell very well, as I've said before, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though very well for a kind of a specialty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the iPhone. That's only going to maybe be 3% to 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iPhones that are sold. I'm trying to avoid the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro scenario, where the Vision Pro was just a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distraction for all of us for months in various ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for Apple, it was a massive distraction for years. But it ended up that, you know, any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work I did trying to make Overcast work on the Vision Pro was a waste of time. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate to say it so bluntly, but it was a waste of time. It was a huge distraction. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish I would have spent that time working on the app for everybody else, all my other customers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of the literally like 35 that ended up using the Vision Pro. And I don't think, I'm not saying the Duo is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. It's not. But I don't know how much of my time the Duo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worth. It's not worth zero. The Vision Pro is worth zero. The Duo, I'm sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be worth more than zero. I'm sure it will sell and people will like it and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably stick around as a form factor indefinitely into the future. So it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimizing my app for the duo. But is it worth an entire month?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe? Hopefully not. Is it worth multiple months? Almost certainly not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So try to do something like, you know, make like a tent version of Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann No one's going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like what I was saying with Casey with your multi-window on your iPad, no one's going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with our apps or close enough to no one that we shouldn't spend almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of our time doing stuff like that when there are needs that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our iPhone customers can benefit from when we work on the regular rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the app, you know, like whatever we're going to call, like the regular iPhone screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like all the work that we do on the duo has to be put in context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this is going to benefit less than 10% of our iPhone customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly a lot less than 10% of our iPhone customers for a while and maybe forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I'm going to accommodate the Duo, but I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really going to focus my design efforts on the Duo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the left and right safe area insets are going to benefit probably a larger number of people when the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge-to-edge screen iPhone 20th anniversary phone comes out next year, because presumably a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John more people will buy that than bought the Duo. And so just basically having your apps understand non-zero
⏹️ ▶️ John values left and right will go a long way to getting ready for that a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, definitely. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Daft Music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Click for Sonos and Quince. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about a new Ubiquiti home Wi-Fi product that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does full duplex MLO. This is some pretty advanced stuff. Covering that in Overtime. You can join and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen at ATP.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and 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-N-T.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Marco Arment. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Syracuse. It's accidental, accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Mac Mini fleet update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I run a bunch of Mac minis. You do? When I first launched the Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcription, when I first announced rather, the Overcast transcription cluster in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data center, my 48 Mac Minis, I had mentioned that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I had set these up was literally just setting up 48 Mac Minis, like manually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I enabled remote desktop to eventually govern them all, but the setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was literally just clicking through the setup screens 48 times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In some in some of them, like installing the betas as they came out for the first summer, like over and over again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manually. like It was ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we had some follow up about like MDM and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. Like people, like, of course, all of the like Mac admins out there who run fleets of Macs, they're like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God, you're not running an MDM. This is crazy. What has also happened, and now one of the reasons I hadn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been running an MDM service before is that the cheapest ones I could find were like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven or eight bucks per month per device. So this would be a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of money to manage my fleet of Mac Minis. And when you looked at the features they offered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was more geared at like managing employee devices for a whole team of employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a business. They weren't really solving a lot of needs I had, and it was going to cost a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money. So I just did it all without that. In the meantime, this past spring, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched a new Apple Business platform that included kind of a basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free MDM service right from Apple. So I signed up for that. And so I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give an update on where the Mac minis stand and my experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the Apple Business MDM. And this is being my first MDM experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever. So first of all, a small update on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Ubiquiti high availability setup. I mentioned briefly a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few episodes back that I had gotten a second router and was running it in Ubiquiti's high availability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shadow mode, where you basically have like a hot spare router effectively. And I was splitting the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connection between the two of them with the Ubiquiti WAN switch. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn't work. Oh, cool. My Ubiquiti WAN switch just doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work reliably. Like it works for a while and then doesn't. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't know what the problem is. So I'm currently investigating alternatives. Apparently, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use any switch if you configure it right to like isolate the, you know, the level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever and the subnets and VLANs and stuff. So I have to figure all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. But not pleased with the WAN switch so far. But anyway, that's… And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, try to find any documentation on the Ubiquiti WAN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch on the internet. I challenge you. There is none. And as far as I can tell, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only person who ever bought one. Not recommended. Anyway, all right. A few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months back, there was a remote desktop security vulnerability that was patched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple Remote Desktop. And this vulnerability allowed access to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the public IP address. If the machine was open to the public internet, anybody could perform this exploit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it was, and gain access to the machine and install whatever they want and run it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had Mac minis at a hosting company that had public IP addresses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not many. I had four of them there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And right as all of this was happening, I'm like, you know, I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably take those back in-house, put them with the rest of the data center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Minis. I should probably just get those out of there. And that way I can centrally manage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all. Because having these on these public IP addresses was always a bit of a pain because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like out of my management system. Like if I had to reboot them or log in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a KVM or screen share to them, it was always a little bit clunky or would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require me to go through their UI or submit like a support ticket or something. And it was a big pain. So I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm just going to bring these in-house. So I ended things with them and I started to realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that exploit came out, I'm like, I need to patch all these machines. I need to make sure they all are running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least 26.2, I believe it was. How do I do that with 48 machines?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do I actually have to go on 48 machines and go and click, click, click and type in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the password and do all like the software update steps 48 times? So I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, all right, I'm going to get these all on MDMs. I got Apple Business going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not an easy system to understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can't say I find that surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Fortunately, we have AI now. Back then, it was not as good and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as available and didn't know as much. Now it's better. So a lot of my questions I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to find better answers to, and a lot of them I was able to have AI like generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me config profiles or generate me shell scripts to run that would fix problems or that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set things up a little bit better. But it is incredibly complicated and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly clunky. There's two different ways you can enroll a Mac in MDM management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One is like if you physically have access to it and you're like restoring it from scratch or setting it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from scratch, you can use the iPhone configurator app to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up a special mode where like your profile kind of gets locked to it. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it's already set up and you don't want to like restore or you don't have physical access like in a data center,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just like, from the macOS control panel, you can like add, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco log in that way and add the configuration that way. And it's like, there's some difference between those two modes. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my purposes, they don't matter that much. But anyway, you can do it. But it is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cumbersome and time consuming because there are so many steps that need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be done individually and can't be automated or skipped. And there's so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many manually typed logins and passwords.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so many 2FA codes that have to be sent to my phone and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typed in through a physical keyboard or a screen share or something. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you how much I hate that of the like three different Apple accounts that are required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this kind of setup, they all require 2FA. And there's no as far as I can tell, there's no way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them not have 2FA.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just be glad those Apple accounts weren't getting locked every 24 to 12 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That's fair to deal with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I will say, people probably write in with this. If you had done this in the other order and gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple business thing before you bought the Mac Minis, isn't there a way that you could buy the Mac Minis from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John so they come out of the box like pre-enrolled or like primed to enroll themselves?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. And I can't, I had, I didn't do that when I bought them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You can do that when you… time travel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. if you buy new ones like through your business reps, they can auto-enroll them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they auto-configure as soon as you plug them into the internet. But the process that I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the ones that I've restored from in-person use, I've currently done, I think, about 12 of them this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ones when you restore it and use Configurator on your phone like during setup to like do that, it ends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with the same result as that. It just takes more steps. But, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, there's so many steps. And if you get anything slightly wrong, restore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds familiar from earlier this episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. It's so cumbersome. And I'm telling you, all these stupid logins and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passwords and 2FA codes. And the other thing is, like, almost every step that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or every, every few steps when you're setting up a new Mac shows a spinner. And you just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wait. Why can't we batch some of these things so that you can ask me all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions you need to ask me and then do all the slow stuff as one batch?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't like i know that's not always possible, but it seems like it's not even considered at this point. There's also like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onboarding slash setup screens in macOS. There are so many times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you click a button and the button does not change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state, but it is waiting. So the button does not get disabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it doesn't become a spinner. The button pops back up and is still enabled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there might even be a spinner on the other side of the window, but you can still click the button again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's unclear whether are you, should I be waiting right now? Like John was saying earlier, like there's so many cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you need to be waiting, but the interface does not fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support that mental model because some button is enabled again or it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silently spinning somewhere else, but not displaying a spinner to you. It's so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sloppy. And this is the first experience for new Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers. Like when they get a new Mac, it needs a lot more attention from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly. It's very sloppy and it's full of rudimentary, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, level 101 interface bugs and shortcomings that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above that in every other way. And yet here we are, like the very first experience you get when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting up macOS is just amateur hour. But anyway, so many long spinners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much waiting for Apple or the system to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's unclear. Like, why does agreeing to the terms and conditions have a spinner that sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lasts 15 or 20 seconds? I have no idea. Why does creating a user account take so long? I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. There's probably a reason, but why? I don't know. It's a long time. Why does activating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac take so long? And then after it's activated, why does it take a full minute to reboot? It can't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything else. Why not reboot immediately? Like there's so many of these steps. And every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, it's just like, why am I waiting right now? And maybe I'm sure there's a good reason for some of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like it's so slow. It's so cumbersome. And then you just have to like wait for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while, stare at it, and then like click another button and then wait some more because they didn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batch those two things. Also, MDM has the capability to skip certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup screens, which is great. I love that. That's a very common need. If you're setting up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, reimaging or whatever a whole bunch of Macs, a lot of those setup screens, you either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't want to face or you don't want your users to face, or you've already set a policy in place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes that decision for you. So for instance, on these Macs, I don't use FileVault
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it's a lot easier not to in various ways. So I just don't use FileVault. There's no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensitive data on them. There's no customer data on them. There's no personal data on them. The only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them is a binary of my transcriber app. And there's nothing sensitive in it. There's no credentials.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's nothing in it. Every single time there's a software update, why do I have to keep saying no thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to FileVault? It's like, because MDM, at least this version of MDM, can't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skip it. Every version of Mac OS, every even point updates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when these machines install them and reboot, I have to say something like, you know, adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the liquid glass slider or choose my age range. I'm an adult. There's always something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Welcome to Apple intelligence. Welcome to the new image playgrounds. Do I want to use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new image playground training feature? No, I don't want to be presented with any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things. Aren't there defaults for admins? And the answer to some of them is yes, but not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. Because it seems like Apple, not only, I've played with this before, not only does Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not respect users at all during that setup process by showing us so much crap over and over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, and there's so many steps. This is like, you know, when people say like the org chart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is showing, you can see this with like whatever decision makers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple are are in charge of like keeping the prompts to the user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during setup to a minimum, they don't have enough power in the company. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are being overruled or something like it's awful. There's so many prompts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with everything. Every single version of something new is more prompts. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is adding them faster than the MDM team can give you ways to skip them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, that sucks. So many unskippable screens. you have to click through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and click through and click through. Macs are so not made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this. And Apple never lets you forget it. They are not made for automated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management. They are not made for bulk deployment. They're not made for bulk management. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so incredibly cumbersome. But once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get through all of that, once you have MDM configured, enrolled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the things are deployed properly, and all that stuff is done, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have automated software updates, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you're running a bunch of servers, is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful. Or so I thought. Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this morning, I was riding the train from the city. I opened up my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the first time in the morning, and I'm checking my transcript progress for and all my other vital stats that are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like super urgent. And I see all of my transcript machines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are down. Oh, gosh. Hmm. They haven't reported anything since 2 in the morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that's suspicious. That sounds like a software update time. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last night, all of my transcription machines at the same time upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Mac OS 27 Golden Gate. Oh, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's stupendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably shouldn't have allowed that. Like I, I admit that was on me. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, I probably should configure these so that, first of all, it doesn't do major updates automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should probably also configure these so that it doesn't do them all at the same time. Maybe do them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batches. Maybe have some test ones that I do first. I admit I should probably, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is MDM newbie having newbie problems. I fully admit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So why did the Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Golden Gate upgrade take all of them down? Because every single one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those machines was waiting on the screen that says software update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complete. Your Mac has been updated to Mac OS 27 Golden Gate. Continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are so not made for this. Again, when I say that Macs are so not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed for this and actively fight this kind of use, this is the kind of crap I'm talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every single machine was stuck with this. Now, also, whatever state they're in to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuck on this, my background Tailscale demon wasn't running either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I couldn't reach them by any of their Tailscale IPs, which means I couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reach most of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is why you need a KVM in your life. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny that you mentioned that. Oh. A friend of ours at GLINET
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently sent me a couple of their remote KVM products, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Comet Q and the new POE one. I forget the its exact name. And it just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened that last week, I installed both of them in the data center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on two different Mac Minis. And so that is how I was able to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start fixing this, because I was able to, on the train,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over tethering, log into the GLINET CometQ interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what this is, it's basically it's a KVM device. It plugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the USB-C slash Thunderbolt port on the back of a Mac Mini, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it fully emulates to the Mac Mini, a screen, keyboard, and mouse, but it projects it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you over a web browser. And it has built-in Tailscale client support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Comet Q, KVM, shows up as a Tailscale hostname.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as long as I'm logged into Tailscale on any of my devices or whatever, I can access its IP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco address in a web browser, log in directly, and have KVM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from anywhere to that machine. So that worked because that's not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote desktop to the Mac. It shows up as hardware devices. So I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco log into that, proceed through the software update complete screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that Mac, get through like the set the liquid glass slider, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this all this BS that I do not care and I wish I could skip. Another welcome,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the little animation of the little tubular glass. Oh my God. But so I get through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and then I enable. And once I'm through that software update complete screen, then Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs again. So then I can use regular remote desktop after that, which is a little bit faster. So then I close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I go to remote desktop to that machine. Then I remote desktop from that machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I was going to say, I see where this is going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. If I had seen the movie Inception, I would probably make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John an Inception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joke here. But like, so through remote desktop to the machine that I had unlocked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I then made a sub remote desktop from that one to the other machines on its local network.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you go from that machine back to the original machine again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably, yeah. I didn't try that. And I'm doing all this on a moving
⏹️ ▶️ John over tethering. I saw that in that AT&T commercial in the 80s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It felt glorious because the truth is, it was fine. Like, yeah, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of cursor jumps here and there, like, you know, a couple of minor moments of lag, but I was on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a moving train over cellular doing remote desktop to remote desktop. Like, come on. Like, that was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it actually worked. So I had to log into each one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the Mac minis and proceed it past the software update complete screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so then I could start administering it again and it can start running its software again
⏹️ ▶️ John you know speak speaking of uh your ai buddies uh one thing you might want to consider doing
⏹️ ▶️ John in this scenario is um use computer control on a spare home mac mini and tell
⏹️ ▶️ John it to do 48 machines worth of clicking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah that would be wise
⏹️ ▶️ John i'm not sure how well it does with screen reading that Cause like it obviously won't be able to use like its accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John views of the stuff but i'm i it i don't know if it'll work i'm just saying like when i think of you manually
⏹️ ▶️ John doing anything on these 48 machines that are enrolled in mdm it makes me think well if they're already not
⏹️ ▶️ John working and there's nothing and they're all disposable they're all they're all you know, cattle's not not
⏹️ ▶️ John throw a computer control mac mini at them and say yeah go finish all these software updates and if it hoses
⏹️ ▶️ John all the machines how much worse off are you i don't know worth considering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah i mean at this point so i'll tell you i actually have never used any of those features of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ai apps yet i'm trying to keep that kind of thing a little bit contained and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my to do list is to designate one of these mac minis as my agent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine and give it like you know only the credentials it needs and only the access to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things it needs and have it be able to do that kind of stuff like so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like an ideal scenario like i said there's no data there's no personal anything on any of these machines and
⏹️ ▶️ John to the degree that you can isolate them you can like oh you know go nuts like the worst you can do is hose the mac mini i've given
⏹️ ▶️ John you access to right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly and you know and it's funny like everyone else is like man i wish i could have a mac mini to run ai
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and i'm like i have some
⏹️ ▶️ John but what you needed to do is to you need the ai to manage the other mac minis you have
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is what MDM is supposed to do this makes me think like um maybe in an upcoming episode this will come
⏹️ ▶️ John up in my long queue of stuff to add in but
⏹️ ▶️ John been some recent rumors about apple potentially getting back into the server game and if you're wondering like
⏹️ ▶️ John well who cares about apple servers why would anyone bother with that i'm like well if apple's hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out to be good for various tasks for various reasons like transcribing audio or bang for
⏹️ ▶️ John the buck for getting m4 mac minis or whatever what the server of hardware would bring is presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John that hardware would actually be tailored to uh the things that these mac minis
⏹️ ▶️ John are not which is hey can i run a software update on XServe and not have to click through a uh a welcome
⏹️ ▶️ John screen i'm assuming the answer would be yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and well the thing is like if apple does get into the the server game like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they really selling to us or are they selling to like you know google and aws like i it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn't we'll see like if that rumor ends up being a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John we'll sell to anyone who will buy them if the xserve is any lesson
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right but like basically are they running mac os or are they going to run like the private cloud compute os
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like mac os 10 server
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah right i know what was it what was the name of the os it was like they had it was some name for these their server os but
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like some ios based thing i forget what it was but someone told us at some point but yeah like this is all just rumors but it just
⏹️ ▶️ John it all i'm pointing out is that the it's like you said the mac minis mac minis are not made for this
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use them for it but they're not made for it and i think you're totally right about
⏹️ ▶️ John the team that makes the os is always going to be outrunning the mdm team's ability to skip those
⏹️ ▶️ John things because yeah like just think of every new version of macOS has some new bs in there they remove old
⏹️ ▶️ John bs sometimes but there's always something new and do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann the mdm
⏹️ ▶️ John team gets a heads up so they have time to update all the mdm stuff so it knows how to skip all the new screens
⏹️ ▶️ John hell no they probably don't even see those screens until two days before the keynote because they weren't disclosed on whatever features they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they even see it before the keynote like that's it's it's very obvious that like you know all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enterprise and business and iT admin support stuff within apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a high priority they don't get the resources they need they don't get told about stuff ahead of time enough like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that's very clear and I think that's been true for a while I hope that like you know as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Apple figures out its role in the AI age I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we're already seeing is like there is there is a role for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have computers that they can carefully designate as AI running computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and give it only stuff it needs and everything like that and you know obviously this is this is going to stay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly a nerds and businesses thing like it's not going to really be a thing you know consumers will just install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the meta thing and give it access to everything
⏹️ ▶️ John consumers will have the the home hub screen device or whatever where it will be the same type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny home device running AI answering your questions but not anything like a server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and and when it comes to like running the chat GPT or meta or cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps to automate your computer doing things most people are just not going to care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about security and access and are just going to give it access to everything but nerds and businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care and so there is a market as we see right now that's why Mac minis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were so hard to get last year because it were for the past year rather because everybody was wanting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run open claw and stuff on them and and and do exactly this like give them an always-on connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you don't have to worry it's not like running on your laptop and you close it and it can't do stuff but also be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to kind of isolate it to only some of your data only some of your credentials things like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple can lean into this like Apple's role in AI so far is they make really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips that run AI really well and they make really they have a really capable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS in macOS that all of the AI apps launch great features like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day one on macOS, in their macOS apps and when it comes to like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want an AI to automate tasks that involve different apps on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my system possibly through MCP possibly through accessibility APIs or like scraping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else and I want to be able to have a web browser that's also being directed by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI and all this stuff the fact is Apple's other platforms that are iOS based are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too locked down for any AI to have access to that except Apple see also the EU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BS but anyway not for today the Mac is the one platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they can all use and that people actually want to use like obviously Windows and Linux can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this too but nobody wants to do that so the Mac is like Mac OS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through no help from Apple it is like the best platform to run most AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff on that people are actually wanting to run and Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embrace this and one way they could embrace this is by making some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like mode for the OS maybe it requires MDM I hope not maybe it's just like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode maybe it could be like developer mode you gotta like you know wave some wands near your Mac and maybe know where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting is then um but some kind of mode that macOS can be in that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't have all of these stupid prompts you don't have all these you know like after it reboots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a software update you have to click this button before any of your software runs like have a mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run like agent mode for macOS or something automated mode whatever they want to call it call it agent mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take advantage of the AI hype agent mode for macOS that's a that would be a great feature for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco macOS 28 agent mode would skip all this crap it would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of the stuff that my setup script does for me now like removing all of the icons from the dock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides the apps I actually use having like you know a launch D configuration that makes make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure this one app is always running and if it ever quits restart it like there's so much stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that you can do now manually but would be so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple just gave it some thought and some time and what a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great OS 28 feature that would be so maybe think about it Apple like make all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid hacks I'm doing unnecessary make it so that other people can do this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the IT admins save them so much time because if they don't do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running Macs as servers just sucks like I'm doing it because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware and software like the applications I'm running and the hardware running them on are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great but Mac OS is just fighting me at every turn trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run this not like somebody setting up a new iPhone for the first time like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please let me use my computer like a computer and optimize it for that a little bit please