647: You Get One Exclamation Point
07 Jul 2025Job advice for CS graduates, whether external drives should be USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire, and a draft of how we’d make the worst MacBook.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: John’s almost an empty-nester 😱
- Follow-up:
- FireWire now with Thunderbolt! (via Timo Hetzel)
- Tahoe without Xcode beta:
Device Support for macOS 26 Beta - Putting older OSes on newer hardware (via Gui Rambo)
- UPS VA ratings (via Marshall C)
- Apple’s LLM/LRM paper (from Overtime in ATP #643)
- Training data vs. distribution (via Deon Garrett)
- Rebuttal
- Rebuttal of the rebuttal
- More from Gary Marcus
- The original rebuttal was… a joke? 🤨
- HDR in 𝑥26
- iPadOS 26 window limits
- “Glass iPhone” demo
- That “natural language to CLI” app is Substage
- Apple plans to launch a low-cost MacBook powered by… an iPhone CPU‽
- Ask ATP:
- Is adding permanent NVMe storage a bad plan? (via Neil)
- What’s the best way to increase “internal” storage on a Mac? iSCSI? Mounted disc images? (via Patrick Harms)
- How does a new grad land a job?
- Post-show: Casey’s approach to ad-free YouTube must be dissected
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s App Store changes for the EU
Sponsored by:
- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
- Squarespace:
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Empty nest
- FireWire FollowUp
- Tahoe beta without Xcode
- Old macOS on new hardware
- Volt-amps (VA)
- HomePods and smoke alarms
- Limits of LRMs
- HDR in UI
- iPad window limit
- Glass-iPhone mockup
- Substage
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Low-cost MacBook rumor
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: USB/TB external SSDs
- #askatp: iSCSI
- #askatp: Job advice for CS grads
- Ending theme
- Casey’s YouTube situation
Empty nest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, something occurred to me. I was listening to Rectifs earlier today, and it was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny to me that you two talked about Das Boot, because there is a forthcoming and comparable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode that I was on, where we talked about it. I also had never seen Das Boot before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it occurred to me as you were talking about this and talking about your graduation results, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two are going to be empty nesters real freaking soon, which I think I knew, but I never really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought about it. it, that you are almost there. And how are we feeling about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it count as empty nester? If your kids are still living at home, they’re just at school. I thought it was like when they move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. I think strictly you are correct. I think that is the, it’s only when they move out permanently that you are officially an empty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nester, but you’re an effective empty nester in a couple of months and that’s wild. How are we feeling?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I don’t know. I feel like I just, I just haven’t, haven’t looked that far yet. Still trying to always get over like
⏹️ ▶️ John the next turtle and it’s just like getting the kids off to school, getting my daughter settled in her first
⏹️ ▶️ John college dorm, getting my son off for his senior year, figuring out what he’s going to do. It just feels like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still a lot of stuff to overcome. But once they’re settled in and I’ve stopped doing the 15 trips back and
⏹️ ▶️ John forth to ferry all the things they inevitably forgot, I don’t know, maybe ask me then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and see what it’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ John But mostly I think it’ll be good for everybody involved and it’ll be a fun change,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll just be bored.
FireWire FollowUp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow up. Uh, Tahoe is apparently dropping firewire support and we should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pour one out. Did we talk about this already?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We did. We sure did. Okay. Wow. I jogged your memory. I was waiting for the little gears to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was like three
⏹️ ▶️ John It was so long ago when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we recorded that episode. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing we’ve done, but we have more information about it. That’s why I brought it up. See, I’m a professional. I swear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Uh, Tim, that’s why it might
⏹️ ▶️ John be in follow-up, you know, cause it’s a thing we talked about on the previous show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, with you, you never know everything that’s ever been thought about in the last 30 years that somehow followed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, no. I mean, this was literally two days ago, so I’m going to say this one is pretty valid as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. It is. I’m trying to blame you, even though this is 100% on me. All right. So anyways, Timo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hetzel writes, I was shopping for audio interfaces about 10 years ago. I found a box in the store with a sticker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it that read, now with Thunderbolt. Turns out they just added a free FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the existing FireWire base model.
⏹️ ▶️ John The world of audio is one that came up when we were discussing Firewire support going
⏹️ ▶️ John away. They’re very conservative over there to the point where if they have a device that works,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna make a version of it with Thunderbolt, just put an adapter in the box. And it made me wonder, like if they do that though,
⏹️ ▶️ John does that get around the lack of Firewire support? Because as far as the computer is concerned, it’s not Firewire, it’s Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it does, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume, but you would be the one to know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t know. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, what Thunder, like the way Thunderbolt works is basically, it’s like PCI Express over a cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like the simplified version of how it works. And so it’s almost like you’re plugging in a PCI Express card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a FireWire controller on it, I think, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John logically for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer. So if the computer drops support for FireWire as a host
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protocol, I think any way you connect it through Thunderbolt would also not work because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all Thunderbolt is doing is exposing the FireWire controller to the computer saying, here, here’s a FireWire controller. And so if the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has no idea what to do with that-
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking that it would just expose the device as if it’s connected directly to the PCI bus, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but does Tahoe drop support? Like if you have a Mac Pro with card slots, and if you put a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FireWire card in one of those PCI slots, I bet that’ll also stop working.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t know. I mean, I guess, this is one of those things I feel like, well, someone obviously who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows the technical details could just tell us, but failing that, when
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe does actually ship with no FireWire support, I’m sure someone will
⏹️ ▶️ John either accidentally or on purpose get upgraded and realize that fireworks stuff doesn’t work and then try to find ways
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it work and then we’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We shall see. I’m sure someone will be kind enough to do an experiment for us.
Tahoe beta without Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you wanted to install Tahoe betas without installing Xcode beta, I feel like we’ve definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey covered this at least thrice at this point, but that’s all right. Anonymous writes, there’s a specific device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support package you can install that doesn’t require installing the entire Xcode beta. Device support for Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS 26 beta 2. You can install device support for Mac OS 26 beta if installing the Mac OS seed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a virtual machine fails on a host Mac. You can get this from developer.apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we will also put in a direct link, although I do believe you get challenged for login when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you click the direct link.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you need to be logged into developer account, but it’s interesting that like, so these requirements that I didn’t know because I’d never done this before,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you need the Xcode beta, but actually you don’t need the Xcode beta because you just need the device support and actually they distribute
⏹️ ▶️ John that separately. It’s one of the things that annoys me about Apple’s developer website. Finding anything
⏹️ ▶️ John on there in terms of downloads is just always such a puzzle because they don’t, they have this weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John they divide it up into like three different tabs. It’s like, oh, it says applications and other, or there’s like a more
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And then sometimes there’s an additional download section. And what if you want some older stuff? Is that still available somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why all these little websites pop up. Basically saving the URLs of where things were when
⏹️ ▶️ John they were first put up somewhere on some CDN that Apple controls. And even when it goes off their website, as in it’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John longer linked from a webpage, the download is still there and you can get it if you can. And if it’s not one of those things that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple needs to sign or something. Anyway, yeah, all things that could have benefited me. it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Many different ways to skin this cat. And apparently device support for Mac OS 26 beta
⏹️ ▶️ John two is one of them. I wonder if that’s going to be updated with device support for Mac OS 26 beta three
⏹️ ▶️ John or if it’s not beta specific. We’ll find out.
Old macOS on new hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, with regard to putting older OSs on newer Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you buy a Mac that comes with Tahoe in a couple of months and you wanted to put Sequoia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. So Guy writes, on the subject of running an older OS than the one that a given Apple Silicon Mac was originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipped with, the short answer is that it is effectively impossible. Even if you patch the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restore image by copying the missing components from a newer release, you’d end up with iBoot components that don’t match the kernel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cache or a kernel cache that doesn’t match the DYLD cache in the root file system, it would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mess. Regardless of the above issues, you wouldn’t be able to get such a restore image to be flashed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto a DFU Mac because Apple’s online signing service would refuse to sign the firmware components
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a board that’s not allow listed for that OS release. And that signing is mandatory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when restoring an Apple Silicon Mac from scratch, even with a lower security configuration. The only way I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can think of that could potentially be used to achieve such a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be to hand assemble the entire volume scheme that’s required by a Mac OS installation on Apple Silicon using the file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system components from the older OS and the firmware or kernel cache from the newer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS. Doing that is far from trivial and even then the result would likely be a machine that kernel panics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very often even if not before it even finishes booting up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so basically, if you’re thinking like, should I try, should I attempt some kind of Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hack to get something working? If Guy Rambeau says that’s going to be really difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t just it’s not going to happen for the rest of us. Basically, it’s impossible.
Volt-amps (VA)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then we talked last episode about uninterruptible power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supplies. I believe this was NASC ATP, and how they deal in volt amps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two or three of us, but particularly John and I probably should have known this or did know this at some point, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shrugged. Well, Marshall C. writes, I have my bachelor’s of science in electrical engineering, and I’m a licensed professional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineer in the EE power discipline. AC power is tricky, but here’s my layman’s explanation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real power or P, which is measured in Watts. This is the electric power used to run your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heat up your toaster and what your utility bill bills you for. Reactive power,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is represented by Q or VARs is often called fake power. This is the electric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power used to form the necessary magnetic fields for the transmission of AC power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally, there’s a parent power, which is represented by S and that’s volt amps, a combination of real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reactive power, imagine an X, Y axis where the real power is on the x-axis and the reactive power is on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey y-axis. Apparent power is the distance from the origin to the coordinate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Non-utility people will never need to think about reactive power, unless their job involves industrial equipment like electric arc furnaces,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large motors, etc., and they’re responsible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the engineering or bills to the power company. Apparent power is how devices that generate power have to be rated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they’re responsible for providing the real and reactive power for the system. For most consumer situations,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can assume that the watt rating will be roughly the same as your VA rating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, this is this. Look, AC power is insanely complicated. Like what I said last night, DC power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly simple to conceptualize AC power. It’s so complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I I went to a family member’s house once and they had plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the wall these like things that claim to be energy savers and they like lit up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was curious. So I looked it up and it’s basically like it’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird Amazon device from God knows where in China that bridges the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AC prongs with a capacitor. I think it was the gist of it. And at first I was like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way that could possibly work. And I was mostly right, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not entirely right. Like I looked up like, you know, how do these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purport to work and does it actually achieve some kind of power savings somehow magically. And the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically is like it plays a trick with the way those AC like phases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pulls and induction motor loads like it pulls some kind of trick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. That like if it did a really big version of it, it might slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save you some of your billing of your power. But of course, these little tiny things were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scams and didn’t actually do anything like notable, but like the principle upon which they claim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work was not entirely BS. It was just mostly BS. Uh, but yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were, they are regardless scams, but I thought that was interesting. It’s like, oh, there’s, there’s other weird complexity to AC power that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s sort of kind of might enable weird tricks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen on a, on a much larger scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, a tampering with your electrical meter will also save you money.
⏹️ ▶️ John probably counts this fraud and so does
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey modifying the
⏹️ ▶️ John electrical system at your house in some way
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to make the the
⏹️ ▶️ John electrical meter or read incorrectly. So yeah.
HomePods and smoke alarms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jared Nichols writes with regard to smoke alarm remote notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Marco, I believe you were talking last episode about how you’ve got your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey temperature sensors, and we were talking about leak sensors, but then what about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smoke detecting? And so Jared writes, listen to Overtime, and Marco mentioned Smart Smoke Alarms by YoLink.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’ve got HomePods in the house, you’ve effectively now got smart smoke alarms. I’ve got regular residential smoke alarms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when my son, home from college, burns bacon while my partner and I are not home, we get a Home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey App alert about the smoke alarms going off. Burn the bacon again? Yeah. And then back to normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I thought this was interesting. So I actually, I have gotten one of these alerts before because I do have HomePods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one time the smoke alarms did go off and I was not home, but my wife and son
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were. And it comes in as one of those like high priority alerts that breaks through Do Not Disturb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it will sound no matter what. Like it’s one of those kind of urgent alerts on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it sounds like an urgent alert. It’s like a very alarming sound, like, oh God. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look and it’s like, it gives you a notification saying like, oh yeah, it sounds like a smoke alarm’s going off in your house. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh my God. And in that case, it turned out they had burned something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the oven. But I have seen these notifications. And so it is better than nothing in the sense that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to be remotely notified of your smoke alarm going off, that’s good. That’s one way to do it. Another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way is to just get a smoke alarm like Nest’s or these Yeolink ones, or there’s a bunch of weird Amazon brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones now. And the reason why I kind of smiled when I got this, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got this feedback email, is like, yes, the HomePod can do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you trust your HomePod to do anything important reliably?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I’m glad I had it, and it did indeed work for me once, but my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod does not reliably do literally any of the things that it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketed as doing. Like it doesn’t do a single one reliably. I would say I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a 60% success rate with the things I try to have happen on my HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it kind of points out like, if Apple wants these features to be taken more seriously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much work to do with the reputation and the reliability of Siri, of these products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their backing services. it has to be way better than this. Like right now, the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would rely solely on this, it literally made me laugh out loud earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I saw the email. So it’s nice to have it as a backup, like, oh, that’s cute, Apple, nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job, you know, that’s nice, but I’m not going to rely on this. I would rather also have smart smoke alarms that notify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me through literally any other means besides hoping a HomePod will do one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its many accessory jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had the same thought when I saw this email. I got the original HomePod when it was first
⏹️ ▶️ John released and had it for a long time. Recently, Marco sent me two of
⏹️ ▶️ John his original HomePods, like the big ones, the original big HomePods, because he just didn’t want them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And around that time, my original HomePod started being a little bit wonky. Like it wouldn’t do OS
⏹️ ▶️ John updates. If you saw in the Home app on the phone, it would show a little spinner for an OS update, but then it would just disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it kept saying, we’re having trouble signing into your Apple ID. Bring your phone close to the HomePod and do blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. And I factory reset it and reset it up a million times, did all sorts of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and it just wasn’t working. And eventually it stopped showing up
⏹️ ▶️ John as an AirPlay target. I was like, well, whatever, I’ll swap it down for as the other two were in the basement. I’ll swap
⏹️ ▶️ John it down for one of Marco’s ones in the basement. So I put mine down into the basement. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John in like a stereo pair, but mine was like just dead. So I just put it there, brought one up from the basement, put it upstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ John It started doing the same thing, Swapped it again for the third one. And now the situation I’m in is
⏹️ ▶️ John the third and last one that still somewhat functions and somewhat does something like you
⏹️ ▶️ John can talk to it and turn the lights off. Still tells me that I was having trouble shining to my Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still won’t do an OS update. I think sometimes it appears as an AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John target for audio, sometimes it doesn’t. And then my original HomePod, now when you plug
⏹️ ▶️ John it in, doesn’t do anything. Doesn’t turn on, nothing lights up. Like, you know, that’s all you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do of these home pods is plug them in. There’s no on and off switch, right? So my original home pod is dead dead because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that whole issue that you can find YouTube’s videos about where there’s some component on the board that burns out because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have these people who just repair them anyway. So what I’m saying is I have three first generation home pods
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re all sort of on their way out. I feel like that was just a flawed hardware product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I considered, you know, like maybe I should just get a home pod mini if I just want to use it to turn the lights on and off and
⏹️ ▶️ John use it for my testing against other things or whatever. but reading this thing of like using it as a smoke alarm, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I have that feature enabled on all of these things just because why not? But I absolutely would not use
⏹️ ▶️ John it as my primary means of anything. I don’t even use it as my primary means of turning the lights on and off because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a Google device in the same room and most of the family uses that one because it works every time.
Limits of LRMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ay, ay, ay. All right, so Dion Garrett writes with regard to the limits of LLMs and LRMs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The AP paper discussed in the overtime segment of ATP-643 mentioned LRMs’ complete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collapse on out of distribution problems. This is not the same as outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the training data, which is what we had said a few times. Neural nets generalize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really well on inputs that are not in the training data but are drawn from the same distribution as the training data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you know this already, but there’s a huge body of people who believe that LLMs cannot reproduce anything that wasn’t literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the training data. That’s certainly not true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So that, that is a fine distinction and it’s worth making. Although the fact that, uh, LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John can reproduce things that were not in the training data, but just are in the distribution of the training data, that’s where hallucinations,
⏹️ ▶️ John so-called hallucinations come from, like all of it is just statistical stuff based on the training
⏹️ ▶️ John data. So there’s the distribution of the stuff in the training data and there’s the things that can be reproduced. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’ll put, if it looks like something would fall naturally within the distribution, it will produce
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Is that valid or true? Or are the things in the training
⏹️ ▶️ John data true? Or are the things that like it synthesizes because they’re within the realm of the stuff that’s in the training
⏹️ ▶️ John data? That may not necessarily be true either. And that’s why you will get LLMs to say things that you said this
⏹️ ▶️ John information, this fact, this answer was not in the training data. No, it wasn’t in the training data, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently in the quote unquote distribution of the training data. And that’s why it got spat out of the machine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, important distinction. This is a follow-up from many episodes ago. So we’re sorry for the delay, but WWE
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sidetracked it. And speaking of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so we talked about that paper that Apple had put up, The Illusion of Thinking, Understanding the Strengths and Limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity. And there was a rebuttal about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that made a bunch of waves. And again, we just didn’t have the chance to talk about it. The rebuttal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was called The Illusion of Thinking. And it was by Alex Lawson and Claude from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anthropic. Reading from their Apple’s paper says that large reasoning models, or LRMs, exhibit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accuracy collapse on planning puzzles beyond certain complexity thresholds. We demonstrate that their findings primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reflect experimental design limitations rather than fundamental reasoning failures. Then there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whole bunch of talk about that. There was a rebuttal to that rebuttal by Victor Martinez. Victor writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting aside the stunt of having Claude Opus as a co-author, yes, I’m not kidding, The paper is in itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a poor rebuttal for many reasons, which we shall explore, but mainly for missing the entire point of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paper in prior research by AI researchers, such as Professor some K-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name. I’m not going to try to pronounce it, because I’ll butcher it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you got to attempt it. You got to attempt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Com-bah-hampty. Com-bah-hampty. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say Com-pom-potty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you’re closer. Then Gary Marcus chimed in again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper why they fall short. And we’re going to link all these in the show notes, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course. And then finally, it turns out that Alex Lawson’s rebuttal was a quote unquote joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So reading from Alex, people were treating my elaborate poopoo post as real science.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And while I’d aimed to point out some real issues with the post, I hadn’t really expected anyone to take it seriously. Look,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have been more careful. The original version I uploaded had some genuinely terrible sections, stuff Claude had written that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hadn’t bothered to check properly. I had vibe coded, if you will, the whole thing and quite frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked for for an entire rewrite if I wanted a small section to be different. There was a computational complexity analysis that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just complete nonsense. If I’d been doing my actual job or if I’d been working on an actual paper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d have been more careful. My thinking was that the whole point was to show that even Claude could find problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original paper. I wasn’t trying to write something good. I’ve updated the paper to fix the biggest mistakes from the first version, but the lesson’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been learned. Once something’s out there, it’s out of your hands.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s kind of a reaction of like, boy, my thing kind of went viral, but you know, ha ha, it wasn’t serious.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, okay, I guess lesson learned. But anyway, all that drama essentially happened in the time between when
⏹️ ▶️ John this rebuttal of the paper was put into our show notes and then WWDC happened. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we looped around to find it, and there’s Apple’s paper, then there was this thing rebutting
⏹️ ▶️ John it that turned out to just be, I love how we’re using vibe coding for things that are not coding. A
⏹️ ▶️ John vibe coded, quote unquote, joke response that was kind of serious, because it was like, I do think there’s problems, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll have Claude help me write it, and won’t that be fun? Turns out not so fun.
HDR in UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Listener Perriato wrote with regard to HDR on the 26 OS’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve noticed that Apple is using way brighter HDR effects on interface elements in the betas for iOS 26
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I haven’t read or heard anyone discussing that including Apple. I Think that they started playing with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the new Siri animations on iOS 18 and now 26 It’s sort of everywhere Is this available for developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to play around with? Well, it scratches my nerdy itch for novelty more chroma more luma more power I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see it risks getting old and gauche gauches. I don’t know. Gosh. Thank you At least I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to know it was wrong Anyway old and gauche very fast. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s designers thread carefully It could be used the same way the game developers use lights to guide players attention Or it could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up blinding them out of their train of thought
⏹️ ▶️ John Although that we did mention this when we were discussing the x86 OS’s or I keep running it
⏹️ ▶️ John xOS the OS 26 is Um, yeah, I think Marco noted
⏹️ ▶️ John it and I think maybe I did it when we were talking about in the past But yeah, i’ve been noticing it more and more. It’s a thing they’re doing. Um
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, so they did it with siri with the if you’ve noticed on your phone when the new siri animation came
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the reasons you might have noticed it is that it literally is brighter if you have an hdr screen on your phone Which
⏹️ ▶️ John most of us do these days? Uh, and they’re using it In all sorts of places like uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think like in tool tips and pop overs on macOS They’ll they’re briefly
⏹️ ▶️ John in and when we say HDR We just mean brighter than the brightest white that your screen is set
⏹️ ▶️ John to display. So As we discussed before if you have a Mac with HDR There
⏹️ ▶️ John is the maximum brightness that Mac OS will let you set the screen So if you just make like a window like a text
⏹️ ▶️ John edit window How bright will the white in that window get and it used to be like three or four hundred minutes and
⏹️ ▶️ John now I think they’ll Let you go up to 700 or whatever but Macs with HDR screens often go up to as high as 1600 nits
⏹️ ▶️ John But they don’t draw the text edit window at 1600 nits because a they would draw a lot of power and B would be blinding in many
⏹️ ▶️ John environments so that’s what we say by HDR brightness something that is brighter than
⏹️ ▶️ John the Cap on the brightness of plain white in just like part of the user
⏹️ ▶️ John interface something It’s not an HDR photo or whatever and what they’re doing in Tahoe and a bunch of places
⏹️ ▶️ John is making things like popovers briefly appear when they first like pop over
⏹️ ▶️ John when they first pop up, briefly appear at a much higher brightness and then fade back down to like the full
⏹️ ▶️ John white level brightness. And it’s an interesting effect, but I’m not sure it fits
⏹️ ▶️ John in because it’s so it’s not ubiquitous. It’s just a few elements do this and they do
⏹️ ▶️ John it briefly so much so that you might think, am I seeing something? You’re not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a real thing that’s happening, but you could go hours without seeing this effect and then have it appear.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the phone, obviously the Siri animation does it every single time. So you kind of get used to it there. But on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, you might think you’re seeing things. You’re not, it’s not a ghost inhabiting your computer. Those things really are
⏹️ ▶️ John briefly a little bit brighter than you would expect them to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m noticing this all over the iPhone beta as well. Even mostly in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edges of things, like when, you know, with part of the glass effects here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of controls have like little glints, you know, on the edges of like, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reflecting light. And it’s hard to tell whether it’s passing that HDR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threshold or not, but I’m pretty sure it is. And it’s doing it right now. It is doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of occasionally and subtly and in small areas of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bitmaps and stuff, small areas of the screen. But it’s definitely there. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure looks like it’s there. And I think this is, on one hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of feels like cheating because apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t really do their own UI very easily this way, like in a custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. Like for apps to use the HDR range would require, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requires a lot of hacks and has a lot of limits and it’s not easy for apps to do. So basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this will do is it will make Apple’s stock controls and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in system apps that use this kind of technique or system features, it’ll make them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look way brighter and bolder and better and easier to notice than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what most apps are displaying most of the time. So this can be used to a useful effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I do think the Siri animation being brighter than 100%, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that helps it jump and show like, okay, this is a different level of the system that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is above what everything else is going on in my screen. I also think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet another way though, like as they’re expanding it now into a lot of these like glass effects that we can use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we can’t really necessarily customize or make our own. That,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that will do is that will make apps that use the stock controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand out even more than using custom controls. Now, as talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the introduction of this stuff, the developer ecosystem around custom designs right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is basically like putting a shot out there that says like, look, we’re gonna make some really cool stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you use our stock controls, mostly unmodified, your stuff will look like our stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll look cool, and it’ll look different. And now, it’ll look even better with these little specular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highlights on the edges of the glass and stuff that are even brighter than what you can do in your app very easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s not what most apps do. Most apps are made by big companies who want all their apps to look the same and they use something like Electron
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some kind of cross-platform toolkits and stuff so that all their apps look the same everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the same on the web and everything is flat and everything will look old forever after this. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ecosystem they’re playing into. So I think it’s a bold move and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be a little bit of hubris, but I think it’s kind of in the best way that Apple is going to be like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want to do your own custom thing, good. It’s going to look drab and flat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to what we are doing. It’s an interesting carrot to bring people over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to using stock controls. I don’t think it will work for big companies at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the big companies care. I don’t even know how much Apple cares about them caring. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the built-in apps and for developers who use the built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI widgets in a less customized way, I think it’ll be a nice little polish and it’ll make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our apps stand out even more for those of us who do, you know, stick to the stock stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I feel like it’s kind of like using exclamation point important in a CSS document.
⏹️ ▶️ John In style sheets, that’s a way for you to get a property to take precedence over one that would otherwise override
⏹️ ▶️ John it due to like selector specificity or something. But you only get one of those. You get one exclamation
⏹️ ▶️ John point important. There’s no like exclamation point important X two X three X four. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure there’s CSS hacks to get that. So the analogy may not be perfect, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many chances do you get to say, now there’s a new layer of the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re gonna make that one brighter? Probably only the one or maybe two because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s only so much of a brightness delta that eyes can comfortably tolerate. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great that screens are getting brighter but there’s still kind of like the regular brightness and then the maximum brightness.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, maybe you can go with the regular brightness, a medium one, and then the highest one if we get something and do like 4,000 nits
⏹️ ▶️ John on a phone or something. But I’m not sure that’s the best way to
⏹️ ▶️ John add emphasis to a user interface. It is possible to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a visual and functional and conceptual hierarchy without relying
⏹️ ▶️ John on large brightness deltas as a differentiator. And I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I am saying that Apple should, you know, think twice about making
⏹️ ▶️ John this a foundation of its visual hierarchy. I think it’s fine for like, oh, we have a new design and this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John flourish that we can add to it. But you really don’t like, this is why I keep going back to dollar sign and port, and you really
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of only get to do this once. And you should, maybe for the next big redesign,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you could keep doing this, but maybe it’s better to think of another way to
⏹️ ▶️ John show this layering. Again, we’ve done it in computer interfaces for years and years without HDR. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, now that we have HDR, this is another tool that we can put in the tool belt. But I feel kind of like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John an exuberant explosion based on like, well, now we have this new tool in our Quiver, we’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John had this before. We can use HDR to differentiate things in the interface. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John great for battery life. It is sometimes a little bit jarring. I think it will be fun in the short term, but I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John this does not last more than 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is the mindset I’m in now. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably we’ll only have to worry about this for like 10 years, it will be okay. Yeah. If Apple’s still around then, which it probably will be. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a giant fan of this. I think it will be fun for a short period of time, but I think there are better
⏹️ ▶️ John ways to do what it’s trying to do.
iPad window limit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to iPadOS 26, John Edwards write, my hypothesis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 12 window limit in iPadOS 26 is that it is a safeguard against unresponsiveness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the Mac, if the Windows server stops responding, you can still move the mouse cursor itself around, even if it’s beach-balling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is an indicator that the system isn’t completely hosed. If window drag is slow, like John encountered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when more than one user was logged in a few months back, too soon, too soon, the cursor stays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locked to the drag. It just feels like pulling the window through molasses. On a touch-first device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s no guaranteed analogous affordance. If the windows on screen aren’t responsive to touch, the system feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken. As Marco pointed out, even on the latest and greatest iPhone hardware, liquid glass and the overall performance of the current beta feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow. Beginning with the last few releases of iOS 18, my iPhone mini locks up in Apple’s own apps and becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unresponsive to touch. I can tell you from firsthand experience that this behavior sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an answer that Federighi and others actually gave when asked the same question. I forgot the timing on this one. whether John Edwards
⏹️ ▶️ John said this before those interviews were released or after or if he’d seen them or not. But either way, we’re like, they
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t talking about 12 window limit, which they didn’t talk about too much where they were mostly talking about, like, why is it taking so long to get
⏹️ ▶️ John windowing on iOS and they gave the power as a possible thing. And then we talked about 12 in a limit
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, well, maybe that’s why they’re doing it. Because as Federico said in his interviews, like, we want it to always be responsive to touch,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if it isn’t, it feels broken. And I’m here to say that the Mac also feels
⏹️ ▶️ John broken when stuff stops working. I know what he’s saying about like oh But like if the drag is slow both the cursor
⏹️ ▶️ John that the mouse is controlling and the place where it is on the title bar Will stay together so it’ll be slow together
⏹️ ▶️ John It still feels awful first of all and second of all there are plenty of ways that the Mac OS can and
⏹️ ▶️ John has Locked up such that you can’t drag windows or the mouse doesn’t move
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore If you look back to the classic Mac OS days And even if that’s not true, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if like oh, I’m as long as the the cursor stays on the thing I’m dragging I’m fine that it’s updating it
⏹️ ▶️ John three frames every 10 seconds. No, you’re not fine It feels totally broken like there are just so many ways or like the beach
⏹️ ▶️ John ball the beach ball appears and now you can’t click Anything you’re like, well, at least the beach ball is still spinning. I guess the computer is alright
⏹️ ▶️ John No, so this notion that like and fairy was pointing out It’s like well these touch devices they always have to feel
⏹️ ▶️ John responsive. The Mac should also always be responsive Why is the bar lower from the Mac like when terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John things happen to the Mac user interface? It also feels terrible It’s not like we’re fooled by like well, it’s just a Mac. It’s fine. If
⏹️ ▶️ John this was an iPad, I’d be annoyed And so I you know, there’s I don’t think this is a You
⏹️ ▶️ John know We discussed in past episodes about exactly how much power modern iPads have compared to max that
⏹️ ▶️ John ran Mac OS 10 with no window Limit on them. I still feel like the main reason for the limit has to be either
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM limits and their refusal to go to swap without a Again, I don’t know the details of what the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John is like or just the plain fact is it’s a small screen They’re trying to keep it simple I do wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John if this limit will increase as time marches on but you know ten years from now when
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads come with 64 gigs Of RAM standard to be like well They can’t handle more than 12 windows and to be like really Mac OS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John ran on 128 megabytes, but this 32 gig RAM iPad Pro can’t have more than 12 windows on screen at
⏹️ ▶️ John once so That’s iPad OS for you. It’s moved by leaps and bounds this
⏹️ ▶️ John year, but it is still still holding itself back from being the unlimited bonanza that
⏹️ ▶️ John is Mac OS for some good reasons because again, that’s the selling proposition. It is simpler. It has, it
⏹️ ▶️ John gives you less ability to get yourself into trouble and making lots of one windows is one way
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that. But 12 feels weird and somewhat arbitrary. Maybe in a iPad, I was 27.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll get a bigger Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Glass-iPhone mockup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Then, John, you had asked for, or not really asked for, but had talked about the idea of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glass iPhone. Can you recap what that was about, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a listener actually sent this in. We were talking about the rumors of liquid glass and the rumors of using the
⏹️ ▶️ John light sensors or the camera to figure out what the glint should be on the UI. This is back when we just had the rumors of what it was supposed to look like.
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t know yet. And the listener wrote it and said, well, you know, also talking about making
⏹️ ▶️ John an OS that would fit for the rumored all-glass iPhone and the rumors, the patent they had for making a thing literally entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John out of glass, including the case, the front, the back, everything, just all glass. Um, and Alyssa
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote in and say, well, you could have a, the equivalent of that today. If you just turned on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John camera and had the back camera show what was behind the phone on the phone screen. So when you were
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at your phone, any area that wasn’t content, you’d see quote unquote through the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever’s behind it. And guess what? Somebody did it. Artisanal asparagus water
⏹️ ▶️ John on on Mastodon has a cool demo movie of they just mocked up
⏹️ ▶️ John an app doing this exact thing, which is turn on the back camera and show the image, but then put some UI on
⏹️ ▶️ John top of it. It’s really hard to do this. You know, this makes you appreciate Vision Pro, but also understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro has to strap itself to your face. You can’t actually do this in a perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John correct way without knowing where your eyes are all the time. So the illusion is broken if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not lined up. It’s kind of like the, what do you call it? The volume, that big LED
⏹️ ▶️ John screen that wraps around actors that they use at ILM to do like the Mandalorian and a bunch of other shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John That only looks good from the perspective of the camera. If you’re standing not where the camera is, the background
⏹️ ▶️ John looks all wonky, same deal with this. Like it’s not perspective correct. But anyway, if you wanna see what that looks like, there’s a video
⏹️ ▶️ John we will link it in the show notes. Kudos to Artisanal Asparagus Water for mocking this up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like, isn’t it weird if you’re simulating the idea of the phone being transparent, Isn’t it weird that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t see your hand?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, well, they don’t have a camera that can show that, but they could do a 3D model of the hand like they do, like the, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are you, the personas?
⏹️ ▶️ John go! You can’t see your face, but you just put your hand in front of it, it’ll model your hand, and then, yeah, it’ll show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we scanned your hand, and now here is a hand that looks almost like your hand. Nobody will notice, probably, asterisk.
Substage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally for tonight, Joseph Humphrey writes, the name of the app you mentioned in an earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode that can translate natural language to terminal commands is Substage, and it’s made by me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who Joseph self-proclaims himself as friend of the show, Joseph Humphrey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be honest, that’s not really how that works, but I appreciate the hustle. To be honest, I get where you’re coming from when you express
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubts about using it. As I was saying to my wife the other day, if someone else other than myself had made the app, I genuinely don’t know if I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trust it and want to install it either. The thing that makes the difference for me is that 1. I made it so I know exactly what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing and 2. I added risk assessment as a feature so it assesses commands instead of blindly running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them and 3. you can inspect and edit the commands before running them too. I’m also always finding new use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cases daily that let me do things that I’m not sure I’d even think to do with chat GPT just because sub stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is right there. For example, my most recently quote trim the sides of this video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make it 16 by 10 instead of 16 by 9 quote. Something like that would be a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faff and I guess this is a Brit in After Effects and I’m not sure how long I’d have to poke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around in Handbrake to figure out whether it’s even possible or not there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I did actually. Like I said, I have this app in Sol. I couldn’t remember the name of it at the time, so I wanted to put this in here. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell people what it was called, and I have actually used it recently. I don’t use it much because like I said in the show, I’m a little nervous
⏹️ ▶️ John about even assessing the commands myself by looking at them. Like it’s just, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I had occasion. I forget what I was using it for, but it was something very straightforward that I trusted it to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I, you know, it was, it was faster than going to my web browser window that or it was already open
⏹️ ▶️ John to Gemini or chat GPT or something and asking it the FFmpeg command and then copying and pasting it. Substage
⏹️ ▶️ John does what you want it to do, which is let me just do all that for you right here,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in the finder, right click the thing or, you know, invoke the command or whatever, and then just
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me what you want. I’ll do it right here. So it’s, It’s cutting out steps in the same way that a lot of these LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John save you time by doing something that you would have to do a bunch of web searches for first. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just do it right in the window. You can get even faster by having it integrated directly and the chat GPT app
⏹️ ▶️ John for macOS does very similar things, but it unfortunately does not run on Intel Macs. so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not running it on my main machine so I don’t get a chance to use it.
Sponsor: Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you’re just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from your products to your content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your time, all in one place and all on your terms. There are so many great features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Squarespace for businesses these days. I’ve highlighted before the design intelligence, the Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco payment system that lets you take payments from all sorts of sources and new methods as they come up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also they have a great invoicing product. This is an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. Invoice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simplify your workflow and manage your service business all on one platform. They also have great analytics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can measure your end-to-end online performance with powerful website and seller analytics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get insights on top traffic sources, understand how your reach is growing, track sales metrics, learn where to focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new engagement. It’s all the data you need to scale your brand or business, fully integrated and clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco displayed. And they even have domains now. Every dream meets a domain. Squarespace domains makes it easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invest in your dream confidently with premium privacy and security features included in every purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Squarespace is just a great all in one platform. Anybody can use it. There’s no coding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco required. There’s no expertise, no technical knowledge required. So if somebody comes to you in your life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hey, can you help me make a website for me or my business, you can say I don’t need my help, go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, and it empowers them to do it themselves, which is way better than the help you could possibly provide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a nerd. So have them or have you go to Squarespace calm and build the site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in trial mode, you get a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash ATP. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet you will because I bet after the trial, you’re going to see how great it is. You’ll save 10% off your first purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website or domain with that link. So once again, squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your first purchase. Thank you so much to Squarespace for for sponsoring our show.
Low-cost MacBook rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, there was a rumor that broke a few days ago. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is planning to launch a low-cost MacBook powered by an iPhone chip, according to Apple analyst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ming-Chi Kuo. In an article published on Axe, Kuo explained that the device will feature a 13-inch display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the A18 Pro chip, making it the first Mac powered by an iPhone chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The A18 Pro chip debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro last year. The more affordable MacBook could come in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey silver, blue, pink, and yellow finishes. The new MacBook is expected to enter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mass production late in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early in the first quarter of 2026. Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoping that it will drive MacBook purchases and account for 20 to 28 percent of sales next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, a different post on MacRumors, MacRumors has spotted evidence of such a device in backend code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related to Apple Intelligence last summer and subsequently confirmed its use of the A18 Pro chip. The machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features the identifier Mac 17, one. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John will talk about this rumor for in more detail in a second, but the headline here, I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe this is straight from Mac rumors and also from the story. Yeah, it’s straight from the Ming-Chi Kuo. Low cost is
⏹️ ▶️ John the adjective modifier on this MacBook. Apple is planning to launch a low
⏹️ ▶️ John cost MacBook. And the only thing we know about this other than the size of the screen, which is the same as the current 13
⏹️ ▶️ John inch MacBook Air And some colors is that it comes with a phone chip
⏹️ ▶️ John How much cheaper do you think the a18 pro is than the m4?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm not that much. I can’t imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s cheap I agree that it’s probably cheaper not the least of which is because they make a bazillion of them because it’s a phone chip
⏹️ ▶️ John and it Is physically smaller So just by going by the math of like die Area like the bigger you make
⏹️ ▶️ John the chip the more expensive it is it makes sense to me that it would be cheaper But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, especially on low end devices, I don’t think the SoC
⏹️ ▶️ John is usually the most expensive component in the machine. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the prices involved here, especially since Apple isn’t paying somebody else’s profit margins other than TSMCs
⏹️ ▶️ John on these chips. Like I’m thinking like maybe like 50
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks, 30 bucks less expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, do you think that’s the ballpark?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m guessing it is, I’m guessing the price difference is less than $100. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this rumor is that it’s a low cost MacBook. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John you, you know, we’ll get to what Marco has here in a second. You save money in lots of different places, but I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seen anyone really mention this as like, wow, a low cost, you know, a cheaper computer would be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John idea and you could use a phone chip in it and that would make it cheaper. And this is great. I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if that was the only difference, if it’s the M4 MacBook Air with the M4 swapped
⏹️ ▶️ John out for the A18 Pro. I’m thinking best case scenario, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a hundred dollar cheaper computer, which is not nothing, because the thing is a thousand dollars. So if you have one for $900, like that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But is that enough to justify this thing’s existence or does this replace the M4 MacBook Air?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think the, even if it is only 50 or a hundred dollars different cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple, when you multiply that a million times, 2 million times, 5 million times, that adds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up real quick. And so I don’t think you’re wrong, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they wanted to go after what seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a not very large Delta, just because on the scale in which they operate, that can make a
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So that leads to, to Marco’s idea for a game here. What could be removed
⏹️ ▶️ John or limited to make this cheaper than a MacBook air? Other than obviously the 18 pro versus
⏹️ ▶️ John the M four. So let’s just, let’s just take that as a given because all the rumors seem to agree that that’s, that’s the deal with this,
⏹️ ▶️ John including a Mac rumor is finding a the thing that seemed to identify that chip number. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve swapped out the M4 for the A18 Pro. How else do you get money out of this machine?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s do a round robin and everyone, and you gotta pick like a giraffe, like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Until we run out of things that we can pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have a list here of like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Remove the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them are pretty crazy. And you know, and just for context, all right, the MacBook Air currently starts at $1,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John in like a 900 for education or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something? Yes, something like that. And then there’s the Walmart M1 MacBook Air still for sale for $650.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also for reference, the cheapest iPad they sell is $350, and it has a $250 keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option. So combined, if you want the cheapest iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their keyboard and trackpad that go with it, it’s $600. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what chip does that one come with?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the A17, I believe. So the base model iPad currently for sale does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not run Apple Intelligence. iPad mini has the 17 pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it can but that’s more expensive but so just the cheapest iPad they make and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can look at some of the things they do with that cheap iPad to get that iPad down to 350 without the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think we’re looking at a similar likely product here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now obviously a laptop requires a keyboard and a trackpad so I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing this laptop includes, you know, it, the rumor already says a 13 inch screen. So a 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen keyboard and trackpad. Now the details on those can matter. So who’d like to go first?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll go first. And this is the thing that I hope they don’t do. I seriously hope they don’t do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t rule it out. Uh, remove Ram. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple just bumped all of its max 16 gigs and we celebrated. How can Apple screw that up? You know how,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, our new low cost model. And of course, because it’s the lowest cost model when it comes to the eight gigs. I really hope they don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but that would save them at least $5. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, when you’re trying to hit a low price, like, cause, again, like, you know, you look at the, maybe they’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace the Walmart MacBook Air, like, and to, with like a newer product that can actually run Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that they can, you know, keep making new models of over time. But still, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if they’re trying to come in around, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know, 650, 600, 700 range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna have to cut a decent amount of stuff. Cause here’s the one thing they will never cut is margin. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple will never cut margin. So they’re gonna make the same margins they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that $1,000 MacBook Air. So how, how do they get there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do they shave off like a third of the price?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one of you guys, I did RAM. What’s the next one? Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about the fidelity of the display? And I don’t just mean going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it worse? No, I’m serious. Like not even just non-retina, but what if the backlight gets worse
⏹️ ▶️ John It only does R and G, not B.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, that’s it. You got it. Savings of one third. No, like a crummier backlight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or again, maybe non-retina. I would be stunned if they went non-retina, but it is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John possibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you have to pick one. I wouldn’t go with non-retina, but a cheaper screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I’m specifically thinking about like, you know, one of the things they tout in the MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, oh, it’s 11 billion nits. Well, what if this is three nits, so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know? Well, the current MacBook Air screen and the M1 MacBook Air screen are also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse. This could be, you know, one thing to consider is that that cheap iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lacks P3 wide color and an AR coating, anti-reflective coating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when you get down to these low-end screens, it’s difficult to like, but yeah, cheaper screen is, is reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the way they would do that would not be resolution, because resolution is not that expensive these days. is like I think it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be no display P3, but should probably save them on some, you know, calibration also. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some certain like, you know, chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So no P3 and then, you know, different coatings or enclosure. So maybe it doesn’t have the AR coating. Cause again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s what they did to make that cheap iPad screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing about screens and a cheaper screen is that given the age of, like let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just say again, the M1 MacBook Air, given the age of that machine at a certain point, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even just the M4 one, Like the cost of the screen that’s in the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air is going down all the time because it is so old and just like so far away
⏹️ ▶️ John from the cutting edge. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, this shows a name for this parts curve, but like we’ve joked about it many times in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a real thing. Something that’s like older technology gets cheaper and cheaper as it’s supplanted
⏹️ ▶️ John by newer technologies, but then all of a sudden it starts getting more expensive again because it’s so old that nobody wants it and people stop
⏹️ ▶️ John making it. And I do wonder if Apple walks that line with their screens, but like, yeah, they get cheap because
⏹️ ▶️ John the machine they sell doesn’t get cheaper and cheaper over time, but the parts that go into it do. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John do wonder if when the A18 Pro, MacBook whatever comes out, it
⏹️ ▶️ John might have a better screen than the M1 MacBook Air, simply because you can’t buy screens that are as bad
⏹️ ▶️ John as the MacBook Air anymore, and it will still be cheaper. Just like Casey’s saying, it will actually be a cheaper screen
⏹️ ▶️ John than the M1 MacBook Air screen was when that machine was introduced, but now a cheaper screen actually ends up
⏹️ ▶️ John better. So that I could see them saving costs there. Marco, what’s your pick?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I have a lot of others, but my first pick is you gotta think like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to using the low-end iPad as inspiration for some of these changes, you also gotta think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do they keep people who just want the cheapest MacBook from buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this instead of like, they wanna preserve MacBook Air sales too. No SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how do they, most importantly, How do they keep businesses from buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one? They want businesses to keep buying the Airs and the Pros. So my number one pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no external monitor support. And also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about it, the A18 Pro probably doesn’t support external monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might, but yeah, that’s a good call. I’d just be part of the, if it’s just part of the SOC, then
⏹️ ▶️ John they kind of get that for free and it’s not really a cost savings, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that would save them that much money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if it would save them money, but I could see them doing it in software because the 18 Pro absolutely does support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an external monitor, because you can do that with your phone, right? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m almost sure I’ve done this. Yeah, I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m pretty darn sure you can. And so I don’t think that that would be a savings, but I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with you. They would absolutely, I could see them doing this as a feature gate just to get people to upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you had said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because they want no businesses to buy this computer. They want businesses to keep buying the Airs and the Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t, this is kind of in the same spirit is what you were saying with your thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but use an existing, like use the M1 case design. Like I’m assuming the M1 case design is
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper than the M4 one, but like use a case design that they’ve been doing for so long that it’s just incredibly cheap for them to do that they
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the machines to do it. You know, so no new case design. And it would also differentiate
⏹️ ▶️ John it from the M5 MacBook Air because it would literally still be the wedge shape, like that older thing. So yeah, use
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 case design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you think they would do that instead of making a new cheap case?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, but it’s like, there’s no such thing as that. When it comes to cheap, like a new, cheaper to make case, yeah, it may
⏹️ ▶️ John be cheaper to make, but the cost of developing that new thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would take a while to recoup that. The Tim Cook way is take some existing thing that we’ve already been making for,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s part of the reason the Walmart one still uses the wedge. It’s like, look, we already know how to make that case. We’ve mastered
⏹️ ▶️ John it. We have the machines for it. And presumably it is cheaper to make than the newest and latest and greatest
⏹️ ▶️ John case. So yeah, I think they would just keep using that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what if like, you know, there are cases of all in, you know, for a decade or more, they’ve all been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unibody case designs, where you basically have like, you know, big blocks of aluminum and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these machines that like carve out sections of it. A cheaper way to make metal cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to have them be in different like flat sheets that are like screwed together or something. What if, like, if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually designing a case from scratch to be inexpensive, I would think that maybe that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have some significant savings of going like a multi-part case.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, I know what you’re talking about because they used to make that before the original MacBook Air came out. Yeah. I think that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive to manufacture due to the fastening issue. Like I really do feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 MacBook Air case, given how slim it is and how long they’ve been making it, may actually
⏹️ ▶️ John be the cheaper option. Cheaper in terms of repairs, even cheaper in terms of manufacturability for all the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t have to be aligned and connected and precision made. It’s just one top and one bottom, you know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there are pieces to it, but there’s far fewer pieces and far fewer fasteners. So I do
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if that would actually be a cost savings. And I think, honestly, I think they would never do that. They’ve been, they’ve had unibody
⏹️ ▶️ John again since the original MacBook Air. I don’t think they’re ever going back until there’s a new materials breakthrough and they start making them out of like
⏹️ ▶️ John transparent aluminum or graphite or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, Casey, what’s next? Back on the chopping block, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, this might be silly, but it’s one of the first things that jumps to mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what about crappier radios, crappier Bluetooth radios, older Bluetooth radios, older wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John They already do that for all their computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? But you know, where the MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the newest MacBook Pro maybe has Wi-Fi 7. I don’t even know if that’s true anymore. I can’t keep up, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t. Yeah, I think we’re still on 6E, although, funny you mentioned this, Casey, the base model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad does not have Wi-Fi 6E. It has Wi-Fi 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. And so, you know, could you go even older? Would that be an advantage? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, but you know, some sort of crippled Bluetooth radio, Wi-Fi radio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something along those lines where it’s just not a modern chip. It’s sufficient,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stellar. All right. My next pick the ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one USB-C port and a headphone jack. And that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So no Thunderbolt support, no mag safe, no HDMI. Cause again, we have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external monitor support in my theory here. So one USB-C port and a headphone jack, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the old MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, actually, jumping slightly ahead here, Stephen Hackett wrote about this, and he was musing
⏹️ ▶️ John about the possibility of an A18 Pro and a Mac, and he says the immediate downside to the A18 Pro is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it only supports USB 3 at 10 gigabits per second, not Thunderbolt. That would make any Mac with an A18 at its
⏹️ ▶️ John heart only capable of USB-C, and that’s fine. That’s just, that’s what they used to do with their low-end computers all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I think- Then there. Yeah, I think, I mean, yeah, having one port is crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but having no Thunderbolt, I think is a given. And so the A18 is not a limiting factor there. My next
⏹️ ▶️ John pick, and I thought you were gonna steal this from me, is a pretty easy one, smaller battery. Smaller batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. You’re stealing
⏹️ ▶️ John all mine, y’all. Think of the iPad, the iPad has a smaller battery and
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone certainly has a smaller battery. Like, how small a battery can you get away with and still have accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life? Because for every amount that you make that battery smaller, first of all, makes the laptop lighter, but second of all, it makes it cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John because smaller batteries cost less money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s pretty good. All right, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m out of any of the ones that I brainstormed when we started the game, but I think, did we already talk about a teeny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Did somebody take that? No, we did not. I don’t think we did. I said remove the SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think a teeny tiny SSD, define that as you will. I think, you know, 128 gigs or something like that. I don’t even know what
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just making the world’s most terrible computer here
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because this is what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John if your job is to remove costs. You can remove costs, but then it’s like, we’re rapidly getting to the point now where
⏹️ ▶️ John we would not recommend this computer. I think we’ve maybe passed the point where we would not recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and actually come to think of it, a corollary to what I just said is whether or not the SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is smaller in terms of capacity, what about making it considerably slower?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, where SSDs are still lightning fast, even crappy SSDs by and large are lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John It might cost them more money to get a slower SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s fair, but I mean, again, I’m just brainstorming. What if it’s either smaller or slower?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that low-end iPad does start with a 128 gig model. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, like, and I did, I looked for instance, though, like as a point of comparison,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what are the cheapest PC laptops like in this price range? Like, you know, in like the 600-ish dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price range, what do you get on a PC laptop these days? And you get 16 and 512. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pretty, pretty universal
⏹️ ▶️ John across the board. Yeah, I know. Apple lives in a different universe. That’s the other thing about this cheap laptop. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re like talking about it in the context of the Walmart one, which I think has no configuration options, but like, can you
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine them making a low cost MacBook? Like, it’s like you said with the minis, the lower cost of Apple makes a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll double the price when you try to add RAM to it, if that’s even an option. Like if there are any options to configure
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM or the SSD, and this thing is cheaper than any existing Mac, you will literally double, you almost
⏹️ ▶️ John double it on the Mac mini, you said it’s like a $600 computer, add RAM, it adds $400 to a $600 thing. So if there was a $400 Mac mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John adding any amount of additional RAM that Apple offers you with double the price of this. So it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re getting real close there with their obsession with, you know, ridiculous margins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so one idea I had is what if they don’t offer any options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except color? I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two keep stealing all my ideas. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the nature of the nature of a draft. Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say, no options, but like the colors are in the rumor, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re saying no options except for color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like no storage, no RAM options, just like here, here’s the MacBook. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. That, and you know, that’s it’s, you can pick yellow or blue or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, again, I think maybe the M1 Walmart one is already like that. Is that the case?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, yeah, you can’t pick storage. I don’t think on it. It’s just like, there’s one configuration and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you pick color. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Well, I’m glad you didn’t pick my one. Cause this last legitimate one that I could think of.
⏹️ ▶️ John No charger in the box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a real good one. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking like Tim Cook now. What can we remove? No box! Some assembly required.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just comes shrink wrapped, loose. It’s just wrapped in a piece of paper. It’s biodegradable.
⏹️ ▶️ John but no charger. They’ve been ripping that out of a lot of products. Like everyone’s got like a deal. Charge with any phone charger, like no
⏹️ ▶️ John charger in the box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I got a couple of the miscellaneous ones and then a big one. So my miscellaneous ones are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the keyboard and trackpad, The base iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that $250 keyboard folio that it has, it advertises, it’s first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, non-backlit keyboard. I think that’s a given. This thing will not have a backlit keyboard. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, it says there in the keyboard folio thing for the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they call the trackpad a quote, click anywhere trackpad. But if you do the tech compare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with other iPad stuff, it does not list it as saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haptic feedback. So like, I’m thinking it’s actually not a Taptic Engine trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they have somehow engineered the mechanics such that you can push anywhere and the whole thing does indeed click down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, actually, I’ve never used this keyboard before, so I don’t know that, but that’s how it reads in the tech specs. So I’m guessing non-backlit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard and a non-force touch trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that makes sense. Sounds terrible. It does sound kind of terrible, but it makes sense. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, what are your other ones? Only two speakers, the MacBook Air has four, with no spatial audio support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s probably somewhat of a given. And now the big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey The piece de resistance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said they probably really don’t want businesses to buy these. What if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only runs App Store apps?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’ll do that. I don’t think so either. And I don’t think that would, honestly, I don’t think that would actually make it any cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, businesses might like that more. They’ll only run App Store apps and they love distributing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John from their own enterprise app stores, you know what I mean? Like that solves problems for businesses maybe. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if they did all this, first of all, I think iBook has gotta be the name. Like that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be such a great name,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, whenever you try to think of something obvious and good regarding naming, it’s probably not what Apple will do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yes, iBook has come up a lot. People have fondness for the name. It would make sense. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of things make sense. Especially when it comes to naming. I mean, I remember when Apple made the iBook store.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was not a store that sold laptop computers. No. So yeah, we’ll see what
⏹️ ▶️ John they do with that. I mean, one of their past
⏹️ ▶️ John not so great naming things required us to give a name to the MacBook Adorable because what was his actual
⏹️ ▶️ John name? MacBook. That didn’t catch on. The computer didn’t catch on and the name didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco All right, slow
⏹️ ▶️ John down. No, the computer did sort of catch on. That’s the problem. So that’s part of the dream of this one is like, oh, it could be a really
⏹️ ▶️ John thin like that one. But like if they’re going to reuse the M1 case so much for that dream, you know what I mean? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know. Well, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John see. I guess they can reuse that really thin case of that if they still have the like the machining
⏹️ ▶️ John tools and everything for making that. But yeah, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like people are attaching their hopes and dreams to this. They’re like, oh, thinner, lighter, cheaper,
⏹️ ▶️ John lower power. Like, that’s great. And they just start envisioning the MacBook one or the MacBook adorable as we used to call
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Because the thing we described is actually kind of like that. Like that was so old that the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John probably is worse. Right? And I did have a backlit keyboard, I think, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I’m pretty darn sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that wasn’t like, that wasn’t a Walmart special machine. It was actually, you know, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John priced about what you would think it would be priced at. It wasn’t like the cheapest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it was priced quite a bit more than what you would think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it would be priced at. Well, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John think, because it was so slim and, you know, it’s like the thinnest computer ever made. Like it was a breakthrough at the time from Apple. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was it was outside the realm of normalcy in Apple’s product lines. Whereas I feel like this one will be well within
⏹️ ▶️ John the realm of normalcy in Apple’s product line to hit a cheaper price point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the final question, what do we think that if they if they do this, like, you know, this like really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decontented laptop, what do we think that price point is?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ll just sell it for exactly the same price as they’re selling the M1 MacBook Air. So 650 ish.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think that’s I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of how much it costs to make. I think that’s what they’ll sell it for. Like it will slot into that. And honestly, as the years
⏹️ ▶️ John go on, 650 is worth less now than it was when the M1 MacBook Air was first introduced.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I think they’ll hold the line. Maybe 599, you know, if we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John lucky, but I feel like it’s going to replace that computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I would go again, like the base iPad plus its keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trackpad case is 600. The Walmart MacBook Air is 650. The real MacBook Air is a thousand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it should be around 600, but it will be like 750. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re not gonna go as far down as we all want them to, cause they never do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s gonna be closer to the MacBook Air’s price than we feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that what they end up doing is they basically replace the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Walmart one and say, sorry, Walmart, you’re cut off. And this is the new quote unquote Walmart,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, MacBook or MacBook, iBook, MacBook Air, whatever they call it. And then they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting all of the proceeds from it rather than Walmart taking a little cut and I think 650
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks or very, very close to.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s my other angle on this, the rumor of this computer and the idea of this computer. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John link to Jason Stel’s graphs in six colors about the speed of the A18 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and how it compares to the M1. summary is that the A18 Pro is 46%
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the M1 in single core tasks, and pretty much the same in multi-core, but single core
⏹️ ▶️ John is all that really matters for just like sort of day-to-day tasks or whatever. And this highlights the
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting fact, and this is just one of my hobby horses that I’m always bouncing on
⏹️ ▶️ John on this show. Usually I’m talking about it in the realm of media catching up
⏹️ ▶️ John to the limits of human perception, which audio has and video is always racing towards.
⏹️ ▶️ John As computational power becomes cheaper and as it increases, the maximum computational power available
⏹️ ▶️ John for a given number of watts increases over time, it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John to race past the needs for doing some basic stuff. Long
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, computing power raced past the point where if you want to type words into a document,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be handled. It used to be that you needed a good computer to do that, to like one word star or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John on DOS. Like you needed, you couldn’t buy a bargain basement one. You needed a computer that
⏹️ ▶️ John could keep your whole document in memory and maybe one that could have proportional fonts. So you need even a bigger, fancier
⏹️ ▶️ John computer like a Mac, which costs so much money. But now, you know, a little
⏹️ ▶️ John kid’s toy that comes in a cereal box has more computing power than the early PCs. Like typing, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John passed by. Web browsing is a surprisingly complex and computationally intensive
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and seemingly only getting more so as web apps become more complex.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think an A18 Pro has no problem browsing
⏹️ ▶️ John the web or doing spreadsheet stuff or anything like or doing word processing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that level of computation is now satisfied by essentially phone chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John We do it on our phone. People use their phones as their main computers. They do incredibly complicated things on their phone. You basically
⏹️ ▶️ John run Photoshop on your phone. Your phone has so much more computing power than whole swaths of computers that we
⏹️ ▶️ John use as the highest of the high end thing. So as this continues to happen, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the things people, regular people need to use their computer for, like going to a webpage,
⏹️ ▶️ John using a couple of simple apps and doing word processing, only become easier and easier to accomplish.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it makes perfect sense to me for phone chips to make their ways to the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t know the right word for this, but like the available computing power
⏹️ ▶️ John is now more than sufficient to do the things that most people need to do with their computers. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it couldn’t be faster. People do occasionally have to wait for their computers in particular storage speed and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it will continue to get better over time. But this machine makes so much sense to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just as a way to save money, but recognizing
⏹️ ▶️ John that most people don’t need this much power out of their Macs. That the baseline power, especially with
⏹️ ▶️ John the advent of Apple Silicon, is so massive that it’s like an M1 is actually overkill for a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is actually faster, 46% faster than an M1 in the ways that counts. Which brings me
⏹️ ▶️ John to my other idea about this computer, which the rumors don’t support, but I think would be valid is, what if
⏹️ ▶️ John this wasn’t a low cost machine? What if instead this was just the bottom of the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John range, but they didn’t take every ounce of cost out of it? And instead just
⏹️ ▶️ John added it as essentially the get way more battery life option. It would have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size battery as like the M5 and M6 MacBook Air in the same case with all the same features, the same
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, like everything that the MacBook Air gets, this gets. The only difference is, hey, do you not need
⏹️ ▶️ John an M5 for what you do with your MacBook Air? Get the one with the
⏹️ ▶️ John A20, whatever, processor or A18 Pro in it, same size battery, but boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll get even more battery life. And no, it’s not that much cheaper, but like instead of thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of this as like, oh, this is the way we’re gonna get cost out of it. Think of it as just a different trade-off between computational
⏹️ ▶️ John power and battery life, essentially. I could see that being a perfectly valid product.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not what’s rumored here, to be clear. But I think the day may come when we see
⏹️ ▶️ John that as an option, because if Apple keeps doing the whole thing where it’s like M something,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then M something pro, M something max, and something else, or whatever, the M something I feel like already with the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 is more power than like a student needs to use web apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and word processing and spreadsheets for their college stuff. Like it’s overkill.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you could get something that is less powerful, but also uses less battery power,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that would be great. And so I hope that either they
⏹️ ▶️ John stop doing the M4 import, like that they add something below that. And I don’t think, obviously the answer isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just do M4 and then M5, M5 Pro, M5 Max or whatever. something like, you know, using a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. Maybe they’ve got the unified design, maybe they unify the naming between the A chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M chips and just have a line of chips that they use throughout their products and
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow name them in a sensible way where it’s a scale up from the smallest and least powerful to the biggest and
⏹️ ▶️ John most expensive and they just are most powerful and just distribute that across their
⏹️ ▶️ John line of products without this artificial bifurcation between well, the A series are for iPads and phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M series are for Macs, unless it’s for a Vision Pro, but also some iPads have M’s. You see what I’m getting out there? So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not today, but that’s just something I’m thinking about, that a time may come when the M5, M6,
⏹️ ▶️ John or M7 is too powerful. The power of it is wasted
⏹️ ▶️ John on a MacBook Air, and you can make that a better computer for people by putting in a quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John phone chip and giving it way more battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm. This has got me thinking of a dark possibility here. what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is not really that much cheaper, like you were saying, what if this is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new MacBook Air, maybe it goes from $1,000 to $900,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they just push the price of the Air up. Because here’s the thing, if you look right now, in the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup, they sell the Air M4 for $1,000. You know, there’s like disabled cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, but like there’s $1,000. Then they sell the Pro, the 14-inch Pro, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same chip, the M4, but with some MacBook Pro niceties, you know, the screen, the speakers and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $1,600. That’s the cheapest Pro with the same chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John The screen is so much more expensive than the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is true, but it’s not $600 more expensive. Like, and there’s other changes too, but like, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air to the MacBook Pro with the same M4 chip is a $600 difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although again, there’s probably a binning thing. Yeah, there’s a binning thing going on. With, without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco binning, it’s a $400 difference. So I wonder if this is really just a way for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to close that gap and Apple never closes gaps by making things cheaper. I’m guessing maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cheap laptop is really only $900 and then they push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the air up to like $1,200. Yeah, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s kind of a shame that these rumors seem so concretely set on the A18 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John because that chip does not have a unified name. Like they’ve unified the name of their OSes but their chips
⏹️ ▶️ John are still weirdly bifurcated between A and M’s and one R.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and a C for a different thing. And speaking of C. Don’t forget
⏹️ ▶️ John the H’s. Yeah, that’s right. Speaking of C, Lima Lum asks, do you think the new phone app in Tahoe might
⏹️ ▶️ John mean cellular functionality will be coming to Macs? And I would say putting an A18 Pro into
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac also makes people think that, lots of things make people think about perhaps cellular being in Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly, there is so much in common between Mac and phone hardware and has been since the advent of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon that there is nothing new that they do, including adding the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John app or making their own C1 chip or putting a literal phone chip inside a Mac that to
⏹️ ▶️ John me makes it any more or less likely because it has been so far over the edge of a thing they should
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, obviously do for so long. Nothing else needs to change. Nothing else needs to happen. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, previously I didn’t think it would or should happen, but now that they put the phone app in Tahoe, they’re definitely gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Apple, you need to do it no matter what. It’s like, there’s so much. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the scales are like a million pounds on one side and a feather on the other, and we’re all just sitting with our arms slowly going,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, and again, I will remind everyone, every iPad since the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first iPad, including all of the cheap models of the lowest end models of iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single one has had a cellular option since day one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Including the ones with an M chip in them, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Surprisingly, yes, including the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John with the- I didn’t think anything with an M chip could do cellular. That’s impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of this Mac hardware is in all the iPad pros now. And yet, or maybe it’s the way around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still all this, all this, I bet it’s all in max now. And yet we still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like the, yeah, it is not a hardware consideration. And it I’m guessing realistically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it never has been like the reason we don’t have a cellular max, you know, whatever their reasons are, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, because yeah. So I, I don’t think the phone app makes it any more likely. I think that is just a
⏹️ ▶️ John continuing thing where they take apps that previously were on the phone and bring them to the Mac and the phone app is just one more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Great. I like it. It’s a good thing. It doesn’t make me think that selling on the Mac is any more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John than it should have been before because I feel like the likeliness is already pressing up to 80, 90% and holding steady there. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a fun game. I have no idea what the heck is going to happen, but that was a fun game. I appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, this is, I think this is a very fun rumor. Like I love thinking about the idea of like, well, why did they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take this other combination of hardware and make an even smaller or lower end Mac with it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or with way more battery power, cheaper, it gets people excited. More battery power gets people excited. I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about the whole concept of computing power surpassing the needs of very
⏹️ ▶️ John common applications and I think that’s just about to happen to web browsing, which is pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree 100%. A couple other quick thoughts. I was on Clockwise this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. briefly talked about this and let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me tell you if this portends, if this is, if this is leading to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reincarnation of the MacBook adorable, holy mother, I’m so in, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you remember the MacBook adorable leaving aside the fact that it only had one port, which kind of sucked, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the worst parts about it was that the processor was just dog slow, even on a good day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that process processor was dog slow. And the idea of having something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was that thin and that light, but not utterly crippled by a crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel CPU. Oh man, does that sound good? Oh, and also no, no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butterfly keyboard. Sorry, trigger warning, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but no butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds incredible. So I mean, I don’t expect that’s what’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen, but man, that would get me really, really interested.
⏹️ ▶️ John So proud of your pronunciation of dog, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would love to see that because like, ever since Apple Silicon, like we’ve been saying like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t wait for them to make, you know, a good version of the 12 inch MacBook with this, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new tech that they have. And they haven’t like, you know, the M2 and forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air is great. And you know, like with its newer case design and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is super slim, super light, but it’s still not the same portability class as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ancient 11 inch MacBook Air or the 12-inch MacBook. Like it’s still significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger and heavier for the modern day. The 12-inch MacBook was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, two pounds, right? Like 2.0 or like close to 2.0?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was it? I think it was around two pounds, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think we’re currently at 2.4, something for the 13-inch Air. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re still bigger and heavier. We still don’t have that magical like airplane tray table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer that we used to have. I know the rumor says a 13-inch screen, So it sounds like if that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer is coming, this probably isn’t it. But this does show maybe a path they can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Like if they if they decided for whatever reason that like that they can’t do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the full suite of M, you know, M chip series features, although they do it in the 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch iPad Pro and the 11 inch iPad Air. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why they couldn’t do it. But like a proper 11 or 12 inch laptop, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually Mac OS, not just an 11 inch iPad, I think would be so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in that two pound range, I really hope they make that. And I haven’t given up hope yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if this is it, as I said, but I haven’t given up hope yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just to be clear based on the game before, the price I was giving was for the price of the
⏹️ ▶️ John A18 based laptop computer that Apple would put out if it’s gonna be a low cost model. It is not the
⏹️ ▶️ John price of what I think after we removed everything in our game, the thing would cost, because I don’t think Apple would remove all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we listed. We really gutted this thing to the point where it’s a bad product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up, the weight of the MacBook Adorable, 2.03 pounds, or in sensible units, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a shade less than a kilogram.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and Jason wants us to point out the tariffs may throw a monkey wrench into this whole thing. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else is new? Oh, and by the way, and the 13-inch MacBook Air is 2.7 pounds. Oh, wow. So 2.7 versus 2.0 is a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really, really is. So like we are not in that same class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the new MacBook Air. The new MacBook Air is a wonderful machine in lots of ways, but we are not in that same class.
Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Delete.me. Right now, the headlines are chock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of data breaches and regulatory rollbacks making us all vulnerable. But you can do something about it. Delete.me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is here to make it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online. Delete.me knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your privacy is worth protecting. So here’s what they do. They go to hundreds of data broker websites,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they opt you out and file takedowns on your behalf so that the data brokers have to remove your data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from their databases. And they show you regular personalized privacy reports showing what they found where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what they were able to remove always working for you constantly monitoring and removing whatever you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to be in those data broker sites on the internet. And you know, there’s, there’s all sorts of news that shows data breaches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. There’s a recent coinbase data breach where a hacker obtained names, addresses, phone numbers, partial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco socials and bank account numbers. Data brokers can vacuum up a lot of that data from the hack, they can create a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco searchable profile about you and sell it to whoever wants it. So delete me helps keep you out of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sites. So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete me now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your delete me plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you go to join delete me.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only way to get 20% off is to go to join delete me.com slash ATP and enter code ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at checkout. That’s join delete me.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to delete me for sponsoring our show.
#askatp: USB/TB external SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP and Neil writes, with machines like the Mac mini having such expensive storage, many people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at adding external storage with an external NVMe drive via USB4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a Thunderbolt enclosure. Are there reliability issues with having something permanently attached like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? For example, do you regularly run into it randomly being unmounted?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there more risk to file corruption if you’re using it for a backup? Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more reliable than USB4? I don’t have any strong answers for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With a Mac Mini or something stationary, I suppose there’s no reason you couldn’t do something like this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, if it were me, I would try my darndest to find a storage solution that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal that works, both from a cost and space perspective. But I’d get why you wouldn’t want to do
⏹️ ▶️ John As I think the one of us who’s probably using, has used and probably still is using the most external storage
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m only using desktops and it’s convenient to use for desktops. I will give a Casey style intervention here
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, um, if you are using external storage connected to your
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and it’s randomly unmounting itself, that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to live. You need to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John either figure out how to fix it or get rid of that hardware. I know too many people
⏹️ ▶️ John who So like, oh, this happens all the time. It’s not a big deal. It just, you’ll plug it in and remount it or it’ll come back
⏹️ ▶️ John in a second. That’s not acceptable for storage that you plan on using. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, you can’t have that. And the reason people live with that is because the problem that Neil was getting at here is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not actually that easy to find reliable, inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ John external storage. Like it used to be easier when it was much more common for people to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But most of these days, most people get by with what’s inside their computers. So it becomes this narrower and narrower market.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you go on like Amazon or Newegg or whatever, you can find tons of really, really cheap external storage
⏹️ ▶️ John from name brands that is nevertheless incredibly unreliable and flaky. And so everyone always wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to know, what’s the good one? What’s the one that I should buy? And then you point out some Thunderbolt enclosure and you’re like, yeah, no, seriously, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John that much for that thing. And it’s like, ah. So to answer the other question, is Thunderbolt more reliable than USB4?
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually, but that may be because the Thunderbolt stuff costs seven times as much. and just
⏹️ ▶️ John the cost difference means they’re using more reliable components all around and the companies that make them cater to customers
⏹️ ▶️ John who demand more reliability. Like, it’s not just that you get what you pay for. It’s like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need Thunderbolt, you would like to not pay for it. But every time I tried to, and I have so
⏹️ ▶️ John many external enclosures here, I try to find like an enclosure to fit like an SSD or back in the day, a spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John drive or whatever. I always felt like I was rolling the dice. And if any of these external devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they come with a mechanism inside them or whether it’s a shell that I plug something into. If they have any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of reliability things or it’s like randomly unmounting, that’s the end of that thing in my life. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I stop you, but you can’t have it. You will corrupt your data. Best case, you’ll just lose some data. Worst
⏹️ ▶️ John case, you’ll corrupt the thing and you know, I didn’t lose some data. Like, oh, something didn’t get written completely. Worst case, you’ll corrupt
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire thing. So if you’re ever in that situation and the drive keeps unmounting,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to fix that ASAP, treat it as a five alarm fire. And I wish I had
⏹️ ▶️ John better advice on how to find something reliable, but the best you can do is
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive ones tend to be more reliable. In my experience, Thunderbolt things, both enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ John and drives, tend to be more reliable. They cost so much more money, but it’s painful, but I do it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, my one terabyte external drive that I currently have Tahoe on
⏹️ ▶️ John is a Thunderbolt drive, which makes no sense, because I don’t even know the speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John the internal storage can do. It’s so old, but it’s just so much more reliable for me than my
⏹️ ▶️ John other USB-based things that I have. But yeah, don’t, like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if it is reliable, yeah, you can use it as a backup, it’s fine. Like, especially if it’s on a desktop computer, it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged in, it’s always paired up, especially if it’s bus powered, because then it’s meant to run on the bus. Don’t put it through 17
⏹️ ▶️ John hubs, like directly connected if you can, or make sure, you know, like, if it is reliable, by
⏹️ ▶️ John all means, use it as backup, it’ll be fine. If it’s not reliable, you need to stop using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, definitely. I have, I use a bunch of external drives for things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Time Machine and occasionally an archive drive here and there, it obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is harder to make reliable when you are constantly moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the drives. So in the context of a laptop, it’s a lot harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that reliable over time because the cable will keep bending back and forth and maybe you might slowly wiggle it out of the port, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port might loosen, there’s all sorts of stuff like that. But in the context of a desktop where it’s just sitting around, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found for the most part, you’re fine getting any modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB thing and it’s fine. Now, I have found there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically no correlation between the reliability of USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices and their price, or their brand name for that matter. I have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rock solid USB hubs and cables and drive enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or external drives, external SSDs. I have some rock solid ones that are just like no name brands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve bought some great ones from like, you know, like there were like some, some high end brands,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like, you know, well-respected names in the business that were unreliable pieces of crap. And the main reason behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this is like, when you’re making like a drive enclosure or a USB hub or something, there’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many actual like controller chips that are manufactured that will power something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So almost any brand that you get is gonna be using the same, you know, one of a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of controller chips as every other brand is using. So I have found that like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you just luck out and you get a really good one. Sometimes you get a bad one like John. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it starts randomly unmounting, it is done. Like you got to replace it like that, that will never get better for that one. But again, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had, I’ve had most, most of the ones I’ve had are just fine and they last, you know, effectively
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, on the chip thing, one of the things you can do, if you do want to try to research this is certain chip sets
⏹️ ▶️ John get a reputation for reliability or unreliability. and if you can just look at the fleet of no-name
⏹️ ▶️ John brands or the fleet of name brands and find someplace that will list, oh, this one has this chip in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John All these have this chip and all these have that chip. Like even if there’s only three possible chips that are being sold on the market,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe one of those is the chip you don’t want and the two other ones are good. You can find that information out. It’s annoying, it’s hard to
⏹️ ▶️ John find because the manufacturers probably aren’t gonna tell you, but someone on YouTube will have cracked the thing open and said, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap enclosure uses the good chip and this cheap enclosure uses the bad chip and they’re exactly the same price.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wouldn’t know this unless you found the review. Like that’s why it just feels like rolling dice sometimes because you don’t know, like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John even a cost difference between these cheap controllers. Just sometimes there’s good ones and bad ones. Or sometimes there’s controllers that like
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS likes and has a good driver for, and ones where macOS has a credit controller, like it’s not even always the drive’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fault. So that’s one thing you can do if you really want to dig into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. One other thing about Thunderbolt though. Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a higher end spec. It has more requirements. A long time ago at some media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefing, I was talking to Greg Joswiak, Jos, about, I believe I was complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about USB-C back in like, you know, the bad old days of the MacBook Pros with the touch bars and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one thing that Jos said has stuck with me, he said, he said like, Thunderbolt hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Thunderbolt devices are held to a way higher standard than USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices because every Thunderbolt device has to be certified and it goes through a more rigorous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process than most USB devices do. Now, again, that was many years ago. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what degree that is still true, but I have so far, like in my computing life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had some flaky USB devices. I’ve never had a flaky Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device. They’ve all been rock solid. Now, there are downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In addition to them costing usually at least three times as much as the USB equivalent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they also, you know, they tend to use more power. They, you know, there’s almost nothing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt bus powered. Like it’s, you know, you’re looking at external, you know, external power supplies much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time, usually Thunderbolt chips are bigger and hotter. So the Thunderbolt, even something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as simple as like a drive enclosure, that’s gonna have a big hot Thunderbolt bridge chip in it probably. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whole thing is gonna be hotter and maybe it’ll need a fan, or at least it’ll just be sitting there like melting your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, my one terabyte external Thunderbolt drive is bus powered, does not
⏹️ ▶️ John have a fan. It does get hot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get hot. Anyway, so Thunderbolt stuff, it is better, but it is also so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive that for most people and most needs, it’s not worth it. I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt is best for hubs. Like if you wanna have a port expander that you’re plugging your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop into with one cable and you want a bunch of ports that are gonna be reliable, Thunderbolt’s great for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For just like an external SSD, my needs don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need external SSDs to be massively fast. I’m mostly using them again in like a time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an archive context. So I just need my external SSDs to be large in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacity. I need like the four terabyte, the eight terabyte. So space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is more important than performance. So I just go USB on those and it’s been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt would have been even more expensive than they already were and it’s just not worth it for me. But again, for hubs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my backup drive, like my eight terabyte SSD is connected with SATA.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco God. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s internal, but like somewhere in there is some crappy ancient old chip that is
⏹️ ▶️ John translating whatever that SSD is so it can speak SATA to the internal SATA bus on my Mac, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that most people have to worry about, but like, it drives home the point that for things like backup drives or like
⏹️ ▶️ John clone drives or time machine drives, if you want them to be SSDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry so much about the bus speed because it’s just running in the background at a low priority task and slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John siphoning bits over And the main advantage to it being SSD is the fact that it doesn’t make noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The, the, but the actual like protocol maximum speed for drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really matter to almost anyone, almost any of the time. Uh, so yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the USB one. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny. Um, you were talking about Thunderbolt hubs, uh, just earlier today, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cal digit TS five plus is in stock enough that they’re letting you order them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from CalDigit directly. And so I’ve placed my order for my $500 Thunderbolt hub.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my God. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John dock costs as much as your computer if you have a Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, seriously. But I’m excited to have it. So I have an M3 Mac, so I don’t have Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5. I don’t have Thunderbolt 5, but as far as I can tell, this should still work. It just won’t be as quick. And I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited to have an onboard 10 gigabit ethernet port because the the one on the TS4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have is two and a half gig. And honest to goodness, maybe this is not a placebo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe I’m convincing myself of something that really isn’t true. But I feel like when I’m moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video files like onto or off of the Synology, it is noticeably quicker. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two and a half times quicker to do that with the existing Thunderbolt 4 now that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware, my Ubiquiti hardware that supports faster than gigabit ethernet. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can only imagine how amazing it’s gonna be to have 10 gigabit ethernet, because I already put a daughter board, I think we talked about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a daughter board in the Synology to have a 10 gigabit ethernet port in that. And then now in a few weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the ships, I’ll have 10 gigabit ethernet on my desk. and I am very, very excited.
#askatp: iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Patrick Harms writes, I remember Marco talking about block storage or iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for something similar he experimented with to increase the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal storage on his Mac. What I want to achieve is reliable protected storage on a NAS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unraid, or TrueNAS that can be used most efficiently by the Mac, single user only, for storing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the photo library or bigger files. The connection, speaking of, is 10 gigabit ethernet between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both devices. I found this post on Reddit describing a workaround with a mounted disk image on an SMB shard. share. Any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I used iSCSI for was to get around a limitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Backblaze or a feature of Backblaze. So Backblaze, you know, the online cloud backup that they’ve been a sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. They’re still my preferred cloud backup provider. And Backblaze will backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at no additional charge any external drives that are connected to the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had gotten this huge Synology NAS a million years ago with everybody else on the show. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was looking for a way to like, let me have cloud storage of what I think it was something like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight or 12 terabytes of archive data without having, you know, that be directly connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my computer in the form of an external drive. I wanted the, you know, the NAS to be doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I did. And I went through two, so iSCSI is not natively supported by Mac OS. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy an iSCSI initiator software. I went through two of them. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last one was the Atto Xtend SAN family. I think that’s still the only one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works. I could be wrong. This is terrible Mac software. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iSCSI initiating process is horrendous. And what you get is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you expect it to be. Like it behaves like a disk directly connected. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the NAS can’t see it. Because what you’re doing is you’re having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac have its own file system, its own block storage, abstraction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all those files that are on that giant share being hosted by the NAS, the NAS doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it as files. The NAS sees it as a volume of a format it doesn’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I don’t think I knew that. That’s fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically, it removes a lot of the reason to have a NAS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because its applications can’t really interact with the contents of that drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s fairly limiting. Again, the software on the Mac is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It did work and Backblaze did happily back it up as though it was an external drive. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like pretty much any other solution would be better. So in this case, having some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mounted disk image on what’s otherwise just a regular file share, that’s probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be as fast for the Mac. There might be more overhead in terms of shuffling those blocks back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the disk image. but that’s probably the better approach.
⏹️ ▶️ John I disagree with that. I think that would be much worse because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John any Mac application that sees your iSCSI initiated NAS storage
⏹️ ▶️ John thing as just a volume, like that’s going to work the way it expects because you formatted it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John time, probably HFS plus or whatever it was. Like it’s just treating it like a drive and it works
⏹️ ▶️ John like a drive. And any kind of thing that’s like, oh, you need to have, you boot
⏹️ ▶️ John it off your internal drive for Apple intelligence or photo libraries can only be on a volume of this type or whatever. It’s straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you can make a disc image format in any format you want, but it’s not like it’s, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a disc image. It has all sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes to make that work. That, especially when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John to things like file locking and the, uh, atomicity atomicness, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the word is of operations in the file system. All of that can potentially change when dealing with,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, disc images. So I would absolutely recommend against
⏹️ ▶️ John taking a disk image, putting it on a NAS and mounting that disk image on your Mac and then putting your photo library on it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that stack of things is not a good idea. If you’re not putting your photo library on it, you just wanna have
⏹️ ▶️ John a disk image on your NAS and put files in it, that should work, but it’s an incredibly inefficient use
⏹️ ▶️ John of your NAS. You know, as you break down the layers, it’s like, look, just
⏹️ ▶️ John mount your NAS and use it as a network attached storage. And unless you have some other need, like I want Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ John to back this up or I wanna put my photo library on it. And in either of those cases, you really have to look at what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re aiming for. If it’s just a bunch of archive data and you wanna get it backed up as part of your low
⏹️ ▶️ John one price thing, Backblaze iSCSI is probably the only solution. But if you wanna put your photo library
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, I would absolutely not put a disc image on your NAS and mount it. Even if it appears to work, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it’s too many layers, it’s too slow. And I don’t know if that’s even a supported configuration
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple Photos. And I wonder if Apple would even know is they would be asking you, well, what disk
⏹️ ▶️ John image format did you use? Did you use a sparse bundle? Did you use a read-write disk image? Did you use the new ASIF,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that format was that we talked about on the past show? And then how is it mounted? And what are the Samba
⏹️ ▶️ John options on the serving side and on the client side? And what version of Mac OS are you doing? Too many questions
⏹️ ▶️ John for something as important as the photo library.
#askatp: Job advice for CS grads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally for today, Matt Jorgensen writes, my son recently graduated with a degree in computer science. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend for new graduates looking for their first job? Well, first of all, congratulations. Second of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, I would say, and I think we’ve talked about this several times in the past, but it’s one of those things we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should do periodically, like John talks about. If you can get them involved in some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of open source, I think that that’s very healthy. Either that could be open sourcing their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own thing. It could be participating in bug fixes or features in some other open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source project that especially I think would be great because that teaches you a lot about working with other people, working with other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people’s code and so on and so forth. So I think the, the first thing I would look at is getting involved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in some sort of open source and trying to make a name for yourself within a project, you know, be, be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than just an anonymous lurker in some project and see if that can help.
⏹️ ▶️ John My advice is probably more general and not like a, as specific as Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John was. if you have, if you just graduated with a computer science degree and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have any interest whatsoever in being involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in any kind of like startup or, you know, leading
⏹️ ▶️ John edge technology or like be one of a few number of people in a small company with
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of responsibility, now’s the time to do it when you’re young. If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any interest in that, don’t do it. Like don’t do it just because you think it’s what people do. But if you’re like, oh, I always wanted to be like, one of five programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John working on a project or something. I always wanted to be involved in a startup or whatever. Assuming your son graduated
⏹️ ▶️ John with a degree and is like, you know, young, like in the
⏹️ ▶️ John mid twenties or whatever, the expected age someone graduates with that degree, now is the time to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it will only get harder to do that. And also having
⏹️ ▶️ John a job like that early in your career where you are one of a small number of people will force you
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn how to do a whole bunch of stuff. And that will make you a much more valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John employee when you get tired of the startup world or when you want to go in a company that’s not going to go under.
⏹️ ▶️ John Later, you will have so much more real world experience and
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge than people who went to work for IBM right out of school. Not to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey throw IBM under the bus, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John went to work for some big company. So when you go for a big company, you do learn things on the job, but it’s stable
⏹️ ▶️ John environment where what’s expected of you, you’re not, you don’t go in there and it’s like, now you have 17 jobs and you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John do all these things and you got to learn them all. Now they’re going to, it’s going to be more sustainably paced, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you will learn less. Uh, it will take you longer or your, your, your skills will be more narrow because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s 75,000 other people who do their own specialized jobs. This is not to say that like do
⏹️ ▶️ John startups when you’re young because that’s the time to burn you out. You shouldn’t have burnout even when you’re young. But what
⏹️ ▶️ John I am saying is that if you run a company with a small number of people, it can still be a healthy work environment, and also
⏹️ ▶️ John you will still be required to learn how to do way more jobs. This is just not enough people. So someone’s got to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John administer this Linux machine. Congratulations, you’re the sysadmin now. Someone’s got to learn this new API, or this new language,
⏹️ ▶️ John congratulations, it’s you and one other person. Like, you will learn so much, and you will
⏹️ ▶️ John be battle tested, and when your company inevitably goes under, because that’s what happens to most startups,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you apply for that job, let’s say at Apple or Google or whatever, you should look a lot better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the other candidates because you will actually literally know how to do more stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, just money wise, a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco career strategy is go work in the startup scene and get as many shares
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of as many companies as you can. Because over time, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those will end up being worth money. Not all of them, maybe not even most of them. Or in my case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of them. The way venture capital works is VCs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a whole bunch of very risky bets, and they tend to come out ahead because a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few of them pay off big. You can do that as an employee, getting shares along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way. You’re playing your own version of that game. So if you work for a startup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smaller and earlier the startup, the more shares that you will get and the more they will be worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time as a percentage of the entire company. And secondly, once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are in the startup scene, in your city or in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the industry, when one startup dissolves, you tend to get picked up by other ones, or it tends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be easier for you to stay in that community because startup founders and their investors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all talk to each other. And so they know like, oh, hey, this startup just collapsed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over there, but oh, they had a really good CTO, I’m gonna try to hire them or whatever. Like there’s this whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network that you get by being in the startup scene, that people in your city will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know you. And so even if a particular job ends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up going under or not working out that well, usually it’s easier for you to get more because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in that social click, really. And obviously it depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what city you are in, what region, what part of the industry are you in. That all matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s like so many other professions, it’s very much based on who you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what your track record is. And the startup scene is small and they talk a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their investors talk a lot. It worked out well for me, but a lot of that was luck, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I didn’t just have shares in Tumblr, I had shares in a few different things and not all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them worked, some of them I lost money, most of them I came out ahead. Or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like a push. So make a lot of bets. And I know a lot of, this isn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, I know a lot of people who have done this. work for startups, see what you can see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many, how much, little slices of equity you can get. And I’m not saying don’t also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for a salary. Everyone there is getting a salary. That’s what the investor’s money is for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, get your salary and also get as many shares as you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place a lot of bets on those tables, so to speak, and chances are one of them will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay off eventually, or more than one. And that’s a nice way to get a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus money. And that’s very much a good path when you are young. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like John was saying, you can take more risks when you’re young. Startup founders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also tend to be young, and there is insane ageism in this industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So by the time you’re in your 40s, startups won’t hire you anyway. That’s terrible, but it’s the reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It shouldn’t be that way, but it is that way. So while you’re young, go play that game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Collect your shares, and see what happens later in life as a result. You can always go work for the big tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, but the startups are very much a young person’s game. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally, I would say, for you to stand out when looking at employers, or when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having employers look at you, one way to do that is to be in their boys’ club. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you are also like a Stanford graduate or whatever, I don’t know, I was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of those things, so I couldn’t play that game. The version of the game I played was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cared a lot and I could program. Now I don’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was a great programmer, I wasn’t and I’m still not. I meant I could program,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period. You’d be surprised if you haven’t seen the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applicant pool for a programming job out there. And if you haven’t interviewed programming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job candidates, you may be surprised how relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few of them both care and can program.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now over time, this has gotten better. There’s more qualified programmers now than there used to be. And you’re entering right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s probably a pretty crappy job market because there were all these tech layoffs recently. And so there’s a lot of unemployed programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now who do know how to program. That’s temporary, you know, that will change. When you are applying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for jobs, if you show that you care, and if you can demonstrate, even it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be anything like massively impressive. if you can just point to any code you have written,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s like, here’s a GitHub project for a simple app I made, you will stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out from that. And again, it doesn’t have to be anything incredibly impressive or complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just if you can point to a GitHub repo that you made and say, I completed an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does a simple thing, I guarantee you, almost none of the competing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco candidates for that job will be able to point to any code they wrote that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of thing makes you stand out more than you think. And if you go into the interview and you show that you care,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re into programming, and that you are interested in this company, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some research about the company you’re going into and figure out what’s important to them, and you can show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, hey, this problem that it looks like you’re working on, this sounds really cool. Here are some thoughts I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have on it. Show that, and you’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, Marco, you’re overestimating the expected return on working for lots of companies in terms of equity, because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is it’s basically zero. Like it rounds very quickly to zero because it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John odds are so low and you’d have to have so many different jobs to try to increase those
⏹️ ▶️ John odds and having a lot of jobs is itself exhausting. I mean, even if only just dealing with the 401ks
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to roll over into each other and dealing with that hassle. Like I can tell you that all the
⏹️ ▶️ John companies that I had equity in in my startup years netted me either losses or $0.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only company that gave me any equity that was ever worth anything was my very last job before
⏹️ ▶️ John I quit to do this podcast. And that was a job that I got when I was in my 40s for a very established,
⏹️ ▶️ John very big non-startup company that, you know, and my equity wasn’t worth that much, but it was worth more
⏹️ ▶️ John than zero or more than negative. So I think that’s the expected experience. Not saying you shouldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like by all means do it, but like it can be exhausting to try to like, oh, I gotta put lots of bets down because then you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just having a lot of jobs. And on the flip side of this, on the non-startup side, that’s why I preface this by saying, if you’re interested in this, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not interested in that world and don’t want to be it at all. I just want to get a good established job. You can do
⏹️ ▶️ John that and it’s fine. And like, I would actually recommend that to a lot of people. It’s what I hope my children do. I hope they don’t go
⏹️ ▶️ John into the startup world. I hope they get a job with a big established company. Um, but if you do that, my advice to
⏹️ ▶️ John someone like applying to Apple or Amazon or Google or something is
⏹️ ▶️ John what your goal should be when getting that job. Especially if you just out of school is you need to learn
⏹️ ▶️ John how to be. A worker essentially learn how to be an employee.
⏹️ ▶️ John learn how to be on a team, you’re going to be learning how to to interact with people and work as a
⏹️ ▶️ John team to accomplish a goal. And it sounds dumb. And you think you did it all you have we had group projects in school, it’s exactly the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. That’s the main skill that you should concentrate on learning. I know you’re thinking about all
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what kind of programming things don’t need to know to get past the interview. And that’s all true. And everything like what am I going to do in my job
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But the main thing you’re going to do in your job, I almost guarantee for the first five to 10 years is
⏹️ ▶️ John learn how to be an employee, learn how to be a coworker, learn how to work in a team,
⏹️ ▶️ John learn how to be successful in that environment. Success defined as learning how
⏹️ ▶️ John to accomplish the goals set before you as a team, which sounds so dumb and simple, but it is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardest thing. And they don’t teach you that in college, and they don’t teach you that in high school, really. They try to give you good projects,
⏹️ ▶️ John they try to have that one course about teaching you agile methodology or something. That’s not what the, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? It is a social skill that is integral to being successful
⏹️ ▶️ John in big companies with lots of people working as a team. In a startup, you can get away with being,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just a renegade lone wolf and doing your own thing and having 50 jobs and everything’s all crazy anyway and whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the environment where you can get away with that. That’s the environment where you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John flourish without those skills. But you go work for a big company, no one wants that person there. They
⏹️ ▶️ John need someone who can work as a team together on goals
⏹️ ▶️ John that are agreed upon. It’s a totally different environment. And as you get older, you’re not gonna wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John work in those chaotic startup type things. You’re gonna wanna work for one of those wealthy companies that can afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you a good salary and good vacation and good benefits and a stable job and everything. And those companies require
⏹️ ▶️ John you to be a good employee and worker. And again, in all these cases, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the main thing I’m gonna hammer home to all my children once they get up into the real job market. Do not let the job exploit
⏹️ ▶️ John you, don’t let it burn you out. There’s all sorts of things you have to be wary of because your employer is not there to take care of you or
⏹️ ▶️ John to love you or to make sure your life is great. So you have to be on lookout for this all the time, but also you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to learn how to be a worker in these big companies. And so, I mean, the ideal thing is if you really, really want to do startups,
⏹️ ▶️ John do them when you’re young and then transition over. But when you make that transition over to the big companies, you’re still gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have to learn all that stuff about how to work as a team, how to work together, how to work in a more professional environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve seen a lot of people have very long careers and really struggle with either with
⏹️ ▶️ John that transition to a big company, or maybe they started off in big companies and just never learned how to work with people and they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t succeed as much. So there you go. That’s a new computer science graduate
⏹️ ▶️ John employee advice 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One more rebuttal of John’s, you know, being down on getting a bunch of bets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I say place a bunch of bets, I’m not saying change jobs every six months. I’m saying change jobs every few years, like the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people in tech do.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not enough bets then. Well, I mean… To change the odds from zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but also it matters obviously what bets you take.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t necessarily know ahead of time what will pay off, but you can be in areas that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more or less likely to pay off. Typically, the way it has gone for the last 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years in tech is if you want a higher chance of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building meaningful wealth from stock shares and stuff in early companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the earlier you’re in the company, the better. The bigger role you have, the better, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, what area of the industry the company is in and what phase that’s in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in its maturity matters a lot. You wanna be in a part of the industry that is young
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and experiencing a whole bunch of growth and change and flux. So, you know, obviously, you know, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started with Tumblr in 2006, that was consumer web apps. Like, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much still a big thing then. You know, later on, like, you know, iPhone apps, mobile apps have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come in. Now that area is AI. If you wanna maximize your odds, try to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into an AI startup. That’s where all the action is. If you’re listening to this for some reason five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 10 years from now, that answer might be different. And you gotta look around, like where is the action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the industry right now? What is like new and growing and changing and lots of flux? Go there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get some bets placed on that table and your odds are not too bad that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but one of those could work out pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of zero, they’re 0.00001. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you’d be surprised. And again, place a few bets and see what happens. And the whole time get salaries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. And then you aren’t out any money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to speak, but it’s not a bad strategy. And again, those people will all then promote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to the other startups in that community. So if you show that you’re a great programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even just a good worker who does their job and is not causing problems for people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two or three years from now, you’re looking for a job and your old boss might be a good referral to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell some new company that they’re friends with, like, oh yeah, I know this person, they’re a really good programmer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That works in big companies too, by the way. That’s just the general advice and when you have any kind of job, your next
⏹️ ▶️ John job will probably come from somebody you knew at your first job or like one or two degrees separated. So even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John go work for a big company right out of school, it’s another reason to learn how to be a good worker is because some person that you work
⏹️ ▶️ John with is gonna be at some new company And that’s the way to get your foot in the door there. You decide you don’t like this company. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to a different one. You get laid off or whatever. You’re looking for another job. You need that leg up. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John who you know. And it’s what they think of you. If they know you but hate your guts, probably not going to hire you. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe don’t ask them for a reference. Also, authority is taken, not given. All right, thank you very much for listening, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our sponsors this episode were Squarespace and Delete.me. And you can, of course, sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly by becoming a member. Thank you to our members as well. One of the many perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in overtime, we’re gonna be talking about Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newest app store changes for the EU. If these are even still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current ones by the time this episode is released in a few days, we’ll find out. You can hear us talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that in overtime and many other member perks by joining us at ATP.fm. Slash join. Thanks everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
Casey’s YouTube situation
⏹️ ▶️ John So on a past episode, Casey mentioned that he had finally succumbed to our nagging and
⏹️ ▶️ John started paying for YouTube so that his family won’t see ads on YouTube, which is the thing that both Marco and I recommended
⏹️ ▶️ John as a no brainer thing that you should do, because kids watch so much YouTube and we don’t want our kids to see
⏹️ ▶️ John ads. And let’s stop that from happening by paying a small amount of money per month. It’s well worth it to protect your
⏹️ ▶️ John children from ads. Casey has already exposed his children to too many ads. So he’s better and better now than
⏹️ ▶️ John a better late than never. But then during some conversation that you had, like a master that I heard you say
⏹️ ▶️ John that you were, you mentioned on the show, you’re like, oh, I started paying for like YouTube light or something. I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John name of the product. So I’m like, well, whatever he found, whatever thing that he could pay for that was, gave him what he
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted and nothing else. But someone was, someone saying like, how do you get your, maybe your
⏹️ ▶️ John kids are still seeing ads. Maybe that’s why Declan didn’t mention to you that he thanks you for getting rid of ads is because
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s still seeing ads because the thing you paid for is not a family plan, but only
⏹️ ▶️ John allows one person, one account to not see ads. And your answer to this person was,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I just let Declan use my account on YouTube. Is this all correct so far? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m here to tell you not to do that. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, lots of reasons. First of all, you’re being cheap, but let’s set that aside. Yes. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John your son is logged into your Google account right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, this is only on the shared Apple TV, But yes, I mean, strictly speaking, that is correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not good. He can read your Gmail. He can delete your Google account. He can read everything in your Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive. He can’t accomplish any of that on the shared Apple TV. He
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t accomplish? Kids are very clever. Second
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, setting all of that aside, do you want your son’s videos and your video history
⏹️ ▶️ John mingling with each other? I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long since given up on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the recommendations affecting each other? Oh yeah, my recommendations are trash. I can tell you that pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John soon, Declan’s not going to want you to see what he’s looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at. That’s also fair, and then I’ll have a different problem, and then I’ll probably have to spring for the family plan. But for now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t want to pay for it at all, but it became unbearable, so I wanted to pay for the crappiest, cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I could to get away with it. And that’s YouTube Premium Lite, which is $8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month, and it gives you an ad-free experience with a couple of asterisks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will say that if you read, because somebody else that reached out on Mass Don was like, maybe it was email and said, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does this actually work? Cause if you read their documentation about YouTube premium light, it sounds as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though you’re getting one fewer ad as opposed to no ads. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I think the, the real brass tacks of it is, is that for watching music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos or music things, I believe I still do get subjected to ads, but for pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much anything else I don’t, or at least that seems to be what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, you need to pay for the better one. and second of all, you need to not let your son be logged into your, your Google account is the keys to everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long do you think it’ll be before he figures out exactly how much power he has now that he can get like password
⏹️ ▶️ John reset emails to your account? Like this is, this is just, I’m not saying he’s a bad person. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying kids and eventually teenagers. This
⏹️ ▶️ John an irresistible amount of power that you have given him and it’s a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, he doesn’t want all of your videos in his browsing history and recommendations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he’s not gonna want that pretty soon either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, yeah, that time will come, but it’s not here yet. And so I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. Don’t let your kids
⏹️ ▶️ John log into your Google account. Like it’s your main account for all like your stuff. Well, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because it logged into YouTube means logged into Gmail, which logs into Google drive being logged. He, he could be in our show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes right now and deleting everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. Um, well that’s true. Asterisk again, the only mechanism he has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this as the Apple TV and there’s only, but so much damage he can do on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you seen, haven’t you detailed how kids get past all the, Mark will ask how kids get past all the thing on the Chromebooks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kids will find a way. Life will find a way, Casey. They’re like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You cannot give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understood the reference, goddammit. No, I understand what you’re saying. Also consider though that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are all in on Google stuff and I am pretty much all out. I do have a Gmail account that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that where your Casey List stuff is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. Remember I’m on Fastmail, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John you have some protection, but still it just it’s not a good idea pay the extra $7 a month
⏹️ ▶️ John like give your whole family ad free YouTube on their own accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there are no other accounts, but mine at the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there will come a time I will be
⏹️ ▶️ John there rapidly will be declin should probably already have one someone asked about this like oh They don’t let you have a Google account unless you’re X years
⏹️ ▶️ John old or whatever If you have to lie about their age to give them account you probably should but I think there are kid accounts And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell the truth about their age do so and then eventually their kid accounts will transition to adult accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my son recently turned 23, according to Google, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has a like, because you know, we had the same idea like when we first I got the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube premium thing for the family and years ago and I created the account for him with his actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco birthday and actual age and then it’s like, oh, he can’t do anything on YouTube because he’s below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13. And so now he’s actually legally above 13. But for for all those intervening years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he like, you know, if I wanted him to have an ad for YouTube experience, I had to create a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco child who didn’t exist, who was above 13, and have him log into that account. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a mess. But I’m sure everybody knows that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I’m not necessarily arguing with anything that you’re saying. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the priorities that your family has both your families have, I suspect my family will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get there, but we aren’t there today. And when we get there, I’ll reevaluate. But for now it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when he’s watching YouTube on his iPad, he’s seeing it. He doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad. Well, he doesn’t have any kind of computing devices. No phone does on an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has currently he has, I forget which one it is, but he has an old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hand-me-down iPhone for me that doesn’t have any service. So it only works where there’s wifi, which for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him basically means it only works in the house. And he doesn’t watch YouTube on that. It’s not installed on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that day will come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m sure it will. I, again, I’m not trying to say that you’re wrong or that, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this isn’t my future, but it’s just not something that happens now. And honestly, our house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, again, I know this will change. I absolutely understand this will change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But today I have a handful of channels I watch on YouTube, but not many. And that’s about it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever typically just like, let the algorithm wash over me. I don’t watch very much. YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Declan will occasionally put on a Preston plays, which is a Minecraft YouTuber that he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adores. Oh yeah. We w we had a big Preston phase over here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. Uh, but I mean, he seems fairly innocuous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Um, yeah, it was fine. Does he
⏹️ ▶️ John shout all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, I mean, I don’t know, but suffice to say that he’ll, you know, dual screen playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Minecraft on the switch as he’s watching Preston sort of in the background and also sometimes watching whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Michaela is doing on her. Um, fire tablet thing. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, uh, right now Aaron never watches YouTube pretty much ever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, it’s, it’s not a priority for us today. I cannot stress enough because I can hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the feedback emails flooding in. I understand this is my future. I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, but it’s not my present.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, don’t make this like the, uh, glass of water repositioning episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I understand what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. It was a, it was a warning that was not relevant at the time, but became relevant. relevant. So very, very similar.