614: Don't Puke for the Show
23 Nov 2024A new spatial video, iPhone security, why Apple doesn’t compete with NVIDIA’s highest-end GPUs, and anything else to avoid having to do more in-app-purchase testing.
Episode Description:
- 🗣️ New ATP Members’ Special: ATP Movie Club: Kiki’s Delivery Service
- Follow-up:
- The Weeknd: Open Hearts
- M4 vs. M4 Pro Mac mini SSD speed ∆s (via Thor Johansen)
- Quinn’s video on PC equivalents to the Mac mini
- Apple storage pricing
- Mac mini vs. PlayStation 5 Pro
- Apple vs. market SSD prices
- Retailers are also hamstrung
- M4 MacBook Pro uses quantum dot technology
- Alternative drag cancellation options
- iOS Inactivity Reboot
- Wes Davis at The Verge
- 404 Media (Paywalled)
- Demo video
- Reverse engineering
#askatp:- Post-show: Casey’s adventures in remote television
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Is complaining about Apple’s prices useful? Do we have any effect?
- Progressive vs. regressive taxation
(Apple is the former)
- Progressive vs. regressive taxation
Sponsored by:
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Chapters
- In a good mood NOW…
- Vision Pro standby
- Special: Kiki’s Delivery Service
- The Weeknd spatial music video
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Canceling drags on Mac
- Mac Mini follow-up
- Upgrade pricing
- QD in M4 MBP
- iPhone standby reboots
- Sponsor: Uncommon Goods
- #askatp: “M4 Ultra” vs. 4090
- #askatp: Long-term data integrity
- Ending theme
- Casey’s project
In a good mood NOW…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am in a good mood now. This has not been the case for the entire day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to tell you, you have been slightly more absent in Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last several months or at least in our little, you know, corner of Slack, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is fine. You’re a busy man with lots of things to do, but you were very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chatty this morning and if I may be so bold, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So what I had you this morning was work around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some Swift UI bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s never going to put anyone in a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mood. Right. And these bugs involved the handling of in-app purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a double whammy, as they say in the business. That’s no good at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any developers out there who’ve done in-app purchase testing, you know, like in-app purchase testing is painful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially testing subscriptions and the handling of those transactions, it just is very painful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very tedious. To do it reasonably well and in a reasonable amount of time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need a bunch of test devices. So my desk was covered in iPhones. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging them up, booting them up. I have all these lightning adapters everywhere, dealing with all that crap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then getting past all the different setup prompts and everything for some of them that needed to be updated and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Anyway, so dealing with all that because the way a lot of this testing works is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can like you know start a purchase and like test it out, but then if your app doesn’t process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that purchase correctly for you to be able to change something and rebuild it and try it again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to either wait like four hours for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fake renewals to go through for your annual purchase. Or try it again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a totally new device. Or erase the device and start over and reset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And there are tools to attempt to mitigate this in Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s like a store kit debugging thing, which I swear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to God. So I opened that. I didn’t know this was there. I discovered it this morning as I was searching for alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I opened it up. It’s like like a little window and you build and run your app, and this window has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it, it’s just empty list. And for a split second when I build and run, overcache
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows up in that list. And then a second later it disappears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had pretty good luck with that to be honest, not to say it’s perfect by any means, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically works all right for me. And if I recall correctly, because I haven’t looked at this code in a bit, nothing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that list to your point until you initiate some sort of purchase. So I’m a little surprised that you saw anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flash up for a moment. Oh, that’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, so this was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an active, like a currently still renewing test subscription though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know like if that counts. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure. You just gotta tap it when it appears. You wait for it to appear and the second it appears, you tap it, it’s a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John a race. I had the same thing recently when I was, I forget what I was trying to do. I was trying to do something where Apple sends you
⏹️ ▶️ John their own little notification that shows you the little map that says allow like Apple ID thing, you know that dialogue box?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was trying to do a thing, I was trying to do a thing on Windows. Oh, I know what I was doing. trying to get iCloud syncing on Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John with the iCloud thingamabob or does password sync now. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John would pop up on my phone for a split second. And I spent a while trying to tap that button. It was like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it was long enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that I could get the tap through. It wasn’t so fast that they’re like, oh, there’s no way I’m ever gonna tap it. It seems like I should be able to tap
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I never did tap it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve had a similar problem actually. If you have a modern Mac, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have multiple users on that Mac, when you plug in a new USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Thunderbolt device where like in recent OSs, you have to approve the prompt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have multiple users signed in, there’s a good chance you can’t approve that prompt. So, because what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens is you plug in your USB whatever, and it’s flashes up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the screen for a split second on whatever you’re logged in as and disappears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is true, I swear to you, this is true, even on a single user device. I swear to you the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing happens. Not to say you’re wrong, not to say that your explanation is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incorrect, but I have had USB keys die on me or other USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices and cables. I’m like, why did, I swear I just used this freaking yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I realized, oh, and now some of this is a self-created problem because I have way too many pixels in front of me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I will realize later that either there is a dialogue that I just did not see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to approve or it like flashed up and then disappeared immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like, I mean, for me, that happens every time when there’s multiple users logged in, no matter whether you’re in like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, your main admin user that you use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey all the time or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter which user you’re in, but as soon as you make one of them, when you log out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco others and leave only one left logged in, then you can just replug the thing and the dialogue shows up correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can approve it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure there’s only one person logged into my iPhone, so I don’t know what the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is there. Yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like the workaround for that is you just have it like, you say, I don’t have access to my devices, then it sends you an
⏹️ ▶️ John SMS essentially, which is janky, but that’s what I had to do. The moral,
⏹️ ▶️ John the upshot of my story was I never could get iCloud passwords syncing to work. I clicked
⏹️ ▶️ John the little approve thing in the Windows settings screen. It would send me the prompt. I would try to tap it. I would fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would tell it to send me an SMS. I would, I would enter the number. It would say, okay, great, thanks for the number. It would spin for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while. And then it would bring me back to the exact same screen that says you should approve passwords. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John was kind of a bummer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. May I derail us from our derailment very quickly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is still a pre-show. We have not yet railed. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyways, I have a request for a follow-up, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I had my Apple Watch Series 8, I had it set up in such a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if either my standard, my 99% of my use Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or my Apple ID for the business got one of those six-digit code challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my watch would receive it, and I could get the code from my watch. I did a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transfer, whatever, of series 8 to series 10. I didn’t start anew or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But something I’ve done, or something it has done, has taken that away so that I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the challenge, the two factor challenge, for my personal account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my watch every time, which is what I would expect. But I’m no longer getting it for my business account. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there is, there’s gotta be a way to add that like secondary account to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey log into iCloud or whatever, just for the purposes of these challenges. If anyone knows how to do that specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the watch, because I have it working on like my Mac and stuff, but specifically for the watch, I would love some feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you have it working on your Mac? Because I only have my personal, like the Apple ID that I’m logged into iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, the iCloud photos and iCloud notes, like that’s the only Apple ID that I get,
⏹️ ▶️ John apple branded notifications all my other apple ideas. I got to do it some other way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it works is so that if you like the way that like you know the system preferences has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concept of internet accounts. You can be logged into you can you can log into multiple iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accounts and you can then turn off like all of the other stuff about them on on on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS. You mean on Mac and iPhone, so I don’t know how it works in the others, but yeah, Mac and iPhone because that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know I have I have different accounts for my developer account versus my personal account. That’s how you do that exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John Where is it on the phone? I go to iCloud. I just see my main iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the phone, I believe it’s under Mail. You have to add an internet account or add another account. It’s something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It moves around every few years.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s another problem related to that, which is, I think I complained about it about a year ago, and Apple said they were aware of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It was on the Apple developer website. When you go to log in, if you try to log in with a passkey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will always try to use the passkey of the iCloud account you’re logged into and not one of your other accounts that
⏹️ ▶️ John you actually use for your developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you basically can’t use passkeys with Apple developer, as far as I can tell. like it just it never works correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, while we’re on the subject, please Apple, so when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are logging in to Safari with you know to App Store Connect or something with the developer account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sends you the 2FA code, it shows the 2FA box on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly centered in your screen. You know what else is exactly centered on your screen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The input boxes in Safari that you have to type it into. So every single time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to drag the little window out of the way so I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, because it’s always on top, of course. So I can type in the code. And it’s like, doesn’t this happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to everyone inside Apple? How has this not been fixed after all
⏹️ ▶️ John these years? Maybe everyone’s using their windows like I am. I’ve got a member special video you can watch so you can
⏹️ ▶️ John learn how to arrange your windows
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not always dead center on your giant screen.
Vision Pro standby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s rerail, I guess. So I think we were talking about you doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-app purchase testing and how that’s a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. So anyway, so I was a little annoyed at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I remembered, well, Casey had assigned us some Vision Pro homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I get out the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which in your defense, I assigned, I think I had it in the show notes days ago, but I didn’t call that to your attention until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this morning. So in your defense, I did kind of drop this on you last minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m already a little mad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s on me. All right. And then I have to get out my vision pro to watch the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to talk about the weekend weekend video. I put it on and of course it’s dead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like because I haven’t used it for two weeks. Now why would it possibly have a standby life? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, but it doesn’t totally dead. So I plug it in go go about my work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10 minutes later. I go back to it still totally dead. What what is going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I unplug it. I I replug it. There isn’t like the little orange light that lights up on the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pack when you plug it in. That’s really hard to see and really hard to decipher its signals. That orange light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not turning on at all. So there was like no LED on the battery. I’m like, what? I’m thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting so mad. And this is when I start chatting in Slack with you guys. I’m like, I hate this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like, you know, like a- With
⏹️ ▶️ Casey respect, I’m not sure it was as much chatting as it was venting, which is a service that we provide to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but- And it did sound a lot like my daughter venting about the same thing, but you have the knowledge that
⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter did not have and yet you were still angry.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey My understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John after the discussion, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, is that what you’re mostly angry about is that this device
⏹️ ▶️ John has bad standby power usage. You don’t use it for very while, it’s got a full battery, it’s sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John in your drawer. You feel like sitting in a drawer with a full battery for two weeks, when you pick it out, it should not be so dead
⏹️ ▶️ John that it needs to be charged for a while before it will boot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and more than 10 minutes, that’s before we’ll even start to boot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like to me, like the Vision Pro, like from day one, the Vision Pro has always had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrendous standby battery life. Like it basically is always on, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has like the two hours ish of battery life, like when you’re using it. As far as I can tell, it basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has two hours of standby life and every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey OS version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, it comes out and people are like, oh, it’s better now. And every single time I try, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe it and then I try to ever use it for anything and it’s dead always dead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually it’s so dead that I have to eventually Disconnect the power cord from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the headset Which is basically like unplugging a desktop like just disconnect it and reconnected it’s not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of times it won’t even boot even after it’s charged it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Let me do a PSA though by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way for the people who don’t know what you know I’m on my daughter now knows and will soon forget
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you have an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John device that has a battery and the battery discharges down to nothing, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John leave it in a drawer or you just let it, you know, you use it until the battery runs out or whatever and it’s been like that
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while and you really drain it, very often you will need to plug that device into its power
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter, into a charger, whatever kind of device it is, and still it will not
⏹️ ▶️ John turn on. If you’re lucky and it’s like an iPhone or an iPad, it will show a picture on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that shows like a little battery with like a little red progress bar kind of indicator in the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to indicate to you, hey, I don’t have enough battery power. But if you’re unlucky and it’s a Mac or apparently a Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other device, you will plug in your MacBook Air, which in my daughter’s case, and she’s like, I plugged it in,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is happening. Is the adapter broken? Is something wrong with it? Why won’t it turn on? It’s literally plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John in, why won’t it turn on? And the answer is it is doing something. Most of the time it is
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something. You might have to leave it plugged in sometimes for hours before it resurrects itself
⏹️ ▶️ John and is ready to boot. And it was, maybe it was better in the days when there was more glowing lights all over the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So you could tell, oh, I can tell it is getting power based on the little LED, hardware LED
⏹️ ▶️ John changing by where you plug it in or the little glowing ring. Remember the ones that are kind of glowing ring around it for the old power
⏹️ ▶️ John box or whatever. Anyway, nowadays with USB-C, you plug it into a power adapter and nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if that happens to you and you’re sure that the power adapter works and the outlet it’s plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ John is powered, it may be that you just need to let it sit there. And how long do you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John let it sit there? 10 minutes, an hour. I’ve had sometimes had to have the thing sit there for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John hours before they’re ready to turn on. So be aware that’s a thing. It can save you a trip to the Apple store. You do have to
⏹️ ▶️ John find some way to check that the outlet and the adapter work. So find some other device so you can test that they work. And you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure the adapter is the correct wattage to actually power your device or whatever. But yeah, Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro apparently doesn’t show you anything when that’s happening. sits there until it’s good and ready, and then it boots up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and well, maybe it might boot up. You might have to unplug the thing from the thing. And to be fair, everything you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just said applies to almost everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with lithium ion battery. That’s just how batteries work. That’s just how when your battery gets very discharged,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes it’s actually just dead forever if it’s very discharged for a long time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this brand new device that has no cellular modem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be able to last in idle standby use for… For two weeks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I think you’re asking a lot. I don’t think it should be so dead after two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it literally can’t power on for like 15 minutes after you plug it in. Like that’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, remember before we were talking about like Adam’s laptop and working without a battery? I do wonder how that
⏹️ ▶️ John squares, because we got some feedback that said, oh yeah, Apple laptops can work without the battery as long as you plug them in.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I guess when there’s a battery in there, it doesn’t like bypass the battery and power the entire laptop off
⏹️ ▶️ John the adapter, or maybe it can’t power the laptop off the, that’s the whole point of the feedback. They said, oh yeah, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you take out the battery, they’ll work fine as long as you keep them plugged in. But when the battery’s in there, plugging it
⏹️ ▶️ John in does not let you boot immediately. So there’s some nuances there that I don’t understand yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the Vision Pro, I think, all bets are off on talking about the Vision Pro because it’s such a weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and obviously half-baked product. Like it’s just, it’s so like, okay, I know there are people out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who like it. We’ll get to this later, but it’s a crap product. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh God, I’m so mad that I own one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because it didn’t last for two weeks in the drawer, I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a harsh judgment based on. Yeah. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t just that, it’s like, it’s how it behaves in this, like iPhones and Macs behave so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this context. Well, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs don’t, the Macs just show a black screen and have your kid calling you on the phone saying, why isn’t my laptop turning on?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to explain to them that it really is doing something, I swear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The good thing is once I did get the Vision Pro actually powered on and booted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I told it to do a software update, because it was going from, you know, two point oh two point one or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just sat there and spun forever and then I came back. I you know I’m like okay, what do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do? I guess I’ll take it off, take it off, set it down, come back if you know a couple hours later, put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back on, check on it still spinning.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just you just mime control delete with your fingers and it will see the fingers doing that. I’ll reboot itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Literally, nothing I’ve ever tried to do on the Vision Pro has been like a huge success.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like this either this didn’t work or it sort of worked or this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the promise of or a demo of something that could be good later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do understand your frustration, especially since you were in a bad state of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m just mad from store kit testing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I totally get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that being said, I think you might be a little unnecessarily harsh on the vision pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s okay. I don’t blame you for your anger. I think even if it’s misplaced,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can kind of understand that too. But I think maybe it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so bad. So let’s let’s shelve that if you are content ish for
Special: Kiki’s Delivery Service
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some administrivia. We have a new ATP member special. Now, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are one of the people who joined as a member for the recently finished merchandise sale,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by the way, we got plenty of people reaching out saying, Oh, I missed it. This is why I make the announcements over and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco over again. It happens every time. It always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens every time. But anyways, thank you to those who did buy merch. We appreciate you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for all of you that are members, we have a new member special. John, would you tell us about it, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John We went back to ATP Movie Club. That’s actually how we kicked off the member specials for the series of three ATP Movie Club
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes. Haven’t done one in a long time. And we were trying to decide what kind of movie to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was Casey who actually suggested maybe we should do another Studio Ghibli movie. We’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John one so far and now we’ve done a second one. It’s Kiki’s Delivery Service. Quite
⏹️ ▶️ John a change of pace from our normal tech topics and other stuff, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe in line with our domestic workflows episode. If you’re familiar with Kiki’s Delivery Service, that makes some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John sense anyway. It’s just a much more chill, pleasant holiday
⏹️ ▶️ John experience for you, even though it’s just November. ATP Movie Club, Kiki’s Delivery Service,
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm slash join, and you can hear it too. And if you’re already, like Casey said, if you’re already a member because you joined to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the discount code, you can listen to this member special and all the other member specials.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and you can binge them all. I mean, you can download them all and stop being a member if you so desire. I don’t recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I wouldn’t encourage it, but you could do it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, there is a dedicated feed for the specials. If you are a member, you have, you have multiple feeds on your member page and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can go to atb.fm slash specials to see all of them, whether or not you’re a member, you just can’t play them.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re not a member.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The see, after I was, you know, upset by store kit testing and then by trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something with my vision pro, that would have been the wrong mood to watch that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. That is very true. Uh, yeah, you definitely want to be in a more chill mood for that. And we talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it quite a bit more after the fact, or in the special.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was good. Go listen to it.
The Weeknd spatial music video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s do some follow up. And I believe it was late last week. It seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rule that the day after we record is when Apple chooses to release new vision pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content. Not every week, of course, but it seems like most days it’s Thursday. Coincidentally, we’re recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this week on a on a Thursday, and there’s the concert for one thing premiering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Friday. So no matter what happens, it’s always like a day or two after we record in that that bums me out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But last week, The Weeknd released their first music video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from their, his, their, it’s, I don’t know, his new album, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this music video was done in immersive format. So as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like to do every time, I will recap. There’s 3D where you just get a rectangle that has depth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then there’s immersive when you can actually move your head around and the perspective of the camera moves with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was immersive. It’s about five and a half minutes. Uh, I tend to like the weekend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is almost frustrating because he actually did a performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at WWDC one year. And all of us were like, first of all, who the hell are you? Cause this was early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ish in his career and certainly before he exploded anyway. And secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is this space so goddamn loud? Because I don’t know I don’t know if you guys remember, this was in Moscone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it was loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was so loud. Now, granted, the fidelity was phenomenal, but it was so loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We needed our AirPods Pro, right, Marco? We didn’t have them at that point. Yeah, we didn’t have them. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tend to like the weekend’s music, and I think it’s been well-documented at this point that I’m a sucker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any immersive anything. And guess what? I thought this was pretty cool. Weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird as hell, but pretty cool. And I don’t have too much more to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it other than you should give it a shot. And if you have a Vision Pro or access to a Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my understanding is you can actually sign up for a Vision Pro demo again, or now if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never done one before. And one of the things you can elect to or perhaps they force upon you is watching this music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video, which I think is worth your time as if you happen to live near an Apple store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what were your thoughts? I hope you did do at least this much of your homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you know how long it took me to find this? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is true. I’m trying to stay positive here, but let’s just say that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information architecture on the Apple TV app is bad on every platform, but I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is uniquely bad on the Vision Pro because it should have like a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flashing, like what was the HTML tag that we all made fun of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was super popular? Blink or marquee?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, thank you, or blink or marquee, either one, doesn’t matter. It should be both of those in the Apple TV app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here is where you get immersive crap from Apple, right here, pointing, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be a thousand arrows at different like depths and whatnot, all pointing to the button you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposed to tap or pinch or what have you, in order to get to the immersive content. And it is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the small items front and center on the Apple TV app, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never where I expect it to be. So hard agree on that one, very frustrating. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so hopefully you did eventually find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple TV app on the Vision Pro is just the Apple TV app the same way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is everywhere else. But it’s native, they use the native frameworks, but informationally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you think people using the Vision Pro want? I mean, yes, obviously, if you’re really using it all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want access to everything, of course. It has one of those little sidebars on the left side where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has the five different things. Add a sixth one for all the immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content. Because, you know, news flash, there’s not that much of it. Like, so it’s not like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much content to fit in a section. Like, just add something on the side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can quickly, okay, so here’s what I did. So first, I opened up the TV app. This just came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently, right? Isn’t it like a week old or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think last Thursday or Friday, I forget exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a week old. It’s probably still the newest content available on Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I thought, how hard can it be? I’ll open up the TV app and look for it. Nope, nowhere. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even a thing, there’s a promo in the TV app for some kind of upcoming like concerts thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re gonna do. So I looked at that, of course it’s not there. Because I guess it’s not a concert, it’s a music video. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m like, all right, well that’s not it. Maybe I’ll just, I’ll go back and try to, I browsed through every section that I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find in the TV app, it’s nowhere I could find. So I’m like, okay. So then I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s in the music app, because it’s a music video. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I go over to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music app, and it’s of course, I can’t find, And there’s even like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going through all these different things. There’s even like some kind of like promo for some kind of big like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco featured station that they’re gonna do. So I’m like, oh, great, I’ll click on that. And all that’s showing me is like super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low resolution for some reason, live broadcast of some weird thing. I’m like, well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not right. Okay. So like I eventually back out. It takes me a good five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to find it. Eventually the way I found it was I searched the music app for The Weeknd,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went to his page and somewhere eventually in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it linked me back out over to the TV app. Where it deep linked me directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the right thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That is very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frustrating. For what it’s worth, I did eventually put in Slack the actual link to the video, but again, in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey defense, this was probably an hour or two after I had asked you to watch it. So I did not set you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up for success on this, and for that I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, you did send me the link, but I’m like, how am I gonna get this link in my Vision Pro? surely it should be easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just find it in the, because I don’t have Slack on there. I don’t even know if, is there a Slack app on Facebook? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even know. It’s not native, but you would have to run the iPad app, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, but I don’t have that set up, so that would be a whole thing, and setting up Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a whole thing, so it’s like, I don’t know, I’ll just, anyway. So I eventually found the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was very interesting. It’s a music video, so it has a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different style than like a TV show series thing or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nature documentary. You know, it’s a music video, so it’s very artistic, abstract. I did not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the motion of it, and I felt pretty motion sick afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because being a music video, there’s more cuts than the other stuff we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Vision Pro immersive formats. There’s more movement. Some of the things they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, like when there’s like a scene with the road, like the roads like bending in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is like straight out of inception. And it made me, it didn’t give me motion sickness,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it gave me some very weird vibes. Like I felt like not uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how to verbalize it, but it’s just like, Oh, I don’t know what’s going on here. And I’m not sure if I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was happy to see a different style of 3D content in the Vision Pro. And it showed me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there is a lot of promise for that still, because it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharp. very high res. They do the thing where they get like super close to, I guess, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guy, the Weeknd, is that his name? They get super close to Mr. Weeknd to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point where you’re like, again, like if you were that close to a person, you would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be like making out with them. And for you to be that close in front of somebody you don’t know feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little uncomfortable. It’s almost like I should, again, like I shouldn’t be here. Like I shouldn’t be this close to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this stranger, like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John being a creep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here by being this close to this person. But it did show off the format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Immersive Video well. Super high res, super good lighting effects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. And so one of the elements of the video is that they have these shadow people where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just shadow figures and bright lights for eyes, like starburst lights for eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was a really cool effect to see there. There were a couple of scenes where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like a first person view of what basically amounts to a car chase, but like with an ambulance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front of you. And so you’re like going back and forth in the road. And so it’s like, you’re like looking through this 3D car chase. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, and it’s almost like showing you like, here’s a demo of a bunch of different types of scenes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that immersive video can show you. And it’s really cool and it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realistic and it does feel like being there. The problem is it feels too much like being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and I felt very motion sick, which I don’t normally with watching other 3D content, but this one was, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was bad for me. Like this was like, I almost couldn’t finish watching it. Like I was almost gonna bail, but I’m like, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good of the show, I went through all this to find this thing. I’m gonna get through the five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually finish it. Yeah, John, you should never watch this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t puke for the show. Just if you need to stop, stop. That’s a perfectly legitimate experience because I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it, but I got so motion sick I had to stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say if you are motion sensitive, do not watch this. It’s, it’s, it would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a good idea. Um, but if you are usually not motion sensitive and don’t mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting a little motion sensitive, uh, it’s, it is something good to see. But what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows me is that there’s a lot of promise with immersive video, but we haven’t, we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. Nailed that format yet and more experimentation is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed, but it does show a big range. It shows everything from closeup shots to car chases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to weird abstract road warpings, like it shows you a bunch of different things. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that point of view, it’s a good demo. But I think they did not test this on enough people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if they did, they would have revealed some pretty significant motion sickness, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I didn’t have any issue with it, but I don’t tend to get motion sick. I definitely got like some heebie-jeebies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about some of the moments, like at one point, you’re up in the air contained in something, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave that container, I’m being vague on purpose, and you are like way up in the air, and it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t know if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this at all. But all in all, I do think it was very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know I’ve said this many times, but it just gives me an even stronger thirst for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of this kind of content. I just, I wish we could get more and they’re doing better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about getting more and the pace is improving, but golly, it’s just so neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so cool. And some like, so unlike anything else that I can or have experienced, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to say that equivalents don’t happen on other platforms. All I’m saying is for me personally, this is about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all I’ve got. And since I don’t have the occasion to use the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for many other things, this is one of the highlights of my use of the Vision Pro. I have not yet tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new Mac virtual display stuff, which universally has been deeply praised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the best possible way. Like everyone says it’s amazing, but I’m not putting a beta on my laptop. Just no. So I’ll wait until it’s all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, in the release. But anyways, I don’t have a lot of excuses to put on the Vision Pro and this gives me an excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m excited about that. But it was just really cool and I think it’s worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, it’s not worth driving an hour to the Apple Store or whatever to try this, but genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I’ve said many times, if you have an occasion that you’re near an Apple Store and you know you will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and can schedule one of these like try-ons or demos or whatever they call it, I can’t stress enough, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to experience it, I think it is well worth your time. And like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I think the last time we spoke about this, when I did it anyway, which admittedly was back in February, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were not salesy about it at all, or not pushy is maybe a better way of describing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They were just like, hey, you can do this, you can do that, you can do this, you can do that. And they were not like, okay, so you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy? Huh, huh, huh, huh. You know, they were very chill about it. So it’s worth giving it a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What this video shows me, it continues to show me that there are so many experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can only happen in immersive video and that’s a very good thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I am very sold on the idea of dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware that’s capable of giving us 3d experiences because when you see a really good one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like parts of the submarine one like parts of this like when you see a really good one it is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something it’s really amazing it’s hard to communicate this without experiencing it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t show somebody a screenshot. You can’t show somebody a video of it and have them view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular screen and and be able to convey what it’s like. Like so much of technology, so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the devices or or services or the media that we have available to us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of it you’re able to get a pretty good idea of what it’s like by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching a video of it or like a video review that somebody has or looking at a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that somebody shows you. There is no good equivalent to that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immersive 3D content that when you’re viewing it on a regular screen. Like nothing can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really convey what it’s like to experience that in 3D. And, you know, we say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be in there, to be in the vision pro, because it really feels like you’re going into a different world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I experience really good 3D immersive content, which is still, you know, we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not past the, you can get through everything the very first night you have it level of the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s still not enough content for that, but there is so much promise for the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of 3D content. So as much as I rail against a lot of this, a lot of the decisions Apple made with this product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the idea of more consumer availability and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adoption of hardware that can deliver us 3D experiences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This just, you know, this is still super early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a lot. This is like the vision pro is like Johnny Ive came back from the dead and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a fever dream and shipped it as a product with no editing. Like it’s just, oh, it’s such a weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product with so many bad decisions, but it’s compelling when you have these experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. You’re like, oh, this is a big deal. This is different. This is like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than I thought. This is more immersive than I thought. This is more immersive than I thought maybe, but like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so much promise to that type of experience. Part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think AR and VR are almost entirely different things, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the reason why I’m largely down on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing side of spatial computing as discussed previously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the content experience side of it is very strong and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a good future if the proper investments in the content are made. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope they are because it really like I would almost describe, you know, this video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the submarine one, I would almost describe them as amusement park rides. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really something to experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say the submarine one is closer to a real life play. This one was closer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what I would assume a very strong hallucinogenic drug trip might be like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Having never tried hallucinogenic drugs, I concur that this is how I expect it would feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it’s a different style, but it shows you like this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing that is possible if somebody makes content really made for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope more of that happens. And it’s good that Apple was able to push on an artist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is in with them already to make this happen. More please, like, because again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we still like, so useful to know in the chat, user Jared H said that apparently Lens Rentals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now rents the Vision Pro. you can rent one for a week for a couple hundred bucks, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to rent one for a week. I’d say you can rent a Vision Pro for three days and get a very good idea of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can do for you. The first day, you can go through all the content, and then the second day, you can actually, you can sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as yourself and put all your stuff in it and try out some apps and try to do some productivity, try the Mac mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do all of that in a three-day rental, I think, pretty easily if you wanna save some money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But eventually, if they step on the gas a little with the content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this could work. But we gotta see them step on the gas. And we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see the content get a little more refined in the techniques they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use to avoid things like emotional sickness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was looking at the, trying to find Lens Rentals link to put in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think they’ve ever sponsored the show, but I haven’t, and I haven’t been a patron of theirs in a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, but I have really, really liked their services in the years that I have used them, several years ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways. Yeah, me too. Q&A for Apple Vision Pro, 256 gig. First item,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is the battery life so short?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I just, no notes, no notes.
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Canceling drags on Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got a lot of feedback and appreciation for John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tip, which I was aware of, but Marco was not, about, hey, if you’re dragging something on macOS and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you say, oh, just kidding, you can actually hit escape in order to cancel that drag. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember how I stumbled upon this, but I did. It’s been something I do constantly. And Marco was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the lucky 10,000 that didn’t know that day, and now he knows, which is great. we had some feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about alternative methods to cancel drags. John, do you want to take us through this?
⏹️ ▶️ John If everyone wanted to tell us the thing that I already knew, because it’s also from classic Mac OS, you can also drag to the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar to cancel a drag, which is a big drag location. So you don’t have to be very precious about it. Although I will
⏹️ ▶️ John say that I think it’s possible to have like menu extras, like the little icons in the menu bar that do allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to drag things to them. So don’t drag it to one of those. You kind of just have to find a safe place in the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that’s another thing from classic Mac OS. It was like an easy to hit drag destination
⏹️ ▶️ John that will let you cancel a drag And yeah, I don’t know how many people still do that I still think escape is better
⏹️ ▶️ John because you don’t have to drag all the way to your menu bar if you have a big screen Or whatever if you’re near the bottom But I’ll give
⏹️ ▶️ John you one bonus tip here, which I alluded to in the last episode If if you’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John me and you like lists view windows in the finder and you turn down the little disclosure Triangles on the folders to
⏹️ ▶️ John show like a hierarchy of things in list view. I love that feature. I use it a lot If you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John want to drag something in the Finder into the folder that is represented
⏹️ ▶️ John by that window without mistakenly dragging it into one of the disclosed subfolders,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I mean? You can try to like drag it and see if the Finder is highlighting
⏹️ ▶️ John the top folder or not highlighting one of the subfolders or whatever. But the much easier thing that I still
⏹️ ▶️ John do to this day that I started doing in classic Mac OS is if you drag to the header bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that says like name, date, modified, size, that bar on top of ListView and you, if you drag
⏹️ ▶️ John your item onto that bar, it will always go into the window that is, the folder that
⏹️ ▶️ John is represented by that window and you will never mistakenly drag it into a subfolder. That one’s a little bit more nuanced than hitting escape
⏹️ ▶️ John or dragging to the menu bar, but it is very useful if you use ListView windows and you don’t want to be
Mac Mini follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M4 versus M4 Pro, the Mac Mini SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a little bit interesting. So Thor Johansson writes, while I don’t have access to two Mac Minis to compare them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the behavior from all previous Apple Silicon Macs would suggest that the M4 Mac Mini 512GB is using two 256GB chips,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while the M4 Pro Mac Mini 512GB uses four 128GB chips,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that the M4 Pro is also providing wider bandwidth to effectively utilize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the extra chips. So the M4 Pro might have far greater Read write speeds than the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah They’re trying to figure out why would two SSDs that are the same size in the same? You know Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John the only difference being the the the SOC Why would they be different speeds and apparently the Apple has done this in the
⏹️ ▶️ John past? I haven’t seen a tear down to confirm this but it seems plausible like basically if you have an M4 Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John and an M4 Pro Mac mini and they have the exact same size SSD Why should they be different speeds and the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro might just have twice as many chips on it and of course you can read and write those in parallel so it gives it a speed boost.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, the M4 Pro may have slightly better bandwidth to the SSDs as well. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the plausible and likely explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quinn, friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, did a video with regard to the Mac mini and Quinn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried to build a $600 PC to match the performance of the $600 Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta read his quote. That’s why I put it in there because I thought he did a good job of saying it in a zingy way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, Quinn says the following, which I’m being told in my ear that I should read.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quinn says, I tried to build a $599 PC to match the performance of the $599 Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Size and efficiency be damned. I could not do it. You cannot build a better PC for $600 using new parts, period.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the Mac mini is only a good deal if you leave it as is. And there’s a like 10, 15 minute video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it, which as with most, if not all of Quinn’s videos is very, very good and is worth your time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that middle sentence there, this is a moment in time worth noting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s Quinn saying, “‘You cannot build a better PC for $600 using new parts.’”
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s been true of Mac versus PC for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John and when it has happened, it has been brief and fleeting, because that’s always the thing with Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some tech nerd is gonna say, “‘Oh, you use a Mac? “‘I could build a better PC for that than that “‘for
⏹️ ▶️ John half the price.’” That’s always the thing and usually it’s true. Usually you can build a faster
⏹️ ▶️ John more capable uh, you know Oh, I wouldn’t necessarily say better But spec
⏹️ ▶️ John wise you can build something that performs better that finishes work faster than the mac that plays games
⏹️ ▶️ John at higher frame rates That has more storage that has more ram for less money than the mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just The order of the universe and yet here we are in this brief moment in time
⏹️ ▶️ John Where if you get the base mac mini for 600 you literally cannot build yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John A computer at any size any appearance now forget about trying to make a tiny little you know You can make it
⏹️ ▶️ John as big as you want as noisy as you want to the Quinn even said forget about Thunderbolt I’m throwing
⏹️ ▶️ John that out the window to none of those fancy Mac buses that no one cares about just Just a plain PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about the iO $600 can you make something that beats the Mac Mini in GPU and
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and multicore anything the answer is you cannot Which is pretty amazing and
⏹️ ▶️ John shows how amazing Apple silicon is But as Quinn points out the second he emphasizes
⏹️ ▶️ John this with the same word in the video the second you touch any Options on that Mac mini configuration
⏹️ ▶️ John page you totally lose the price advantage It goes touch anything add more RAM and
⏹️ ▶️ John more storage like maybe not not add 10 gig ethernet But maybe even adding 10 gig ethernet blows it Yeah The
⏹️ ▶️ John second you add anything to it and go up to a non base model then the PC you can get something much cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John and faster Which is a shame, but it is worth noting that for this brief moment in time
⏹️ ▶️ John time there is a Mac that is the best buy in terms of performance, not in terms of aesthetics,
⏹️ ▶️ John not in terms of size, not in terms of power usage, nothing in performance. It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What a day to be alive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and this just shows like a lot of times Apple’s base models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty good values compared to almost anything compared to their own products or other or other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitors products. Like the base models can be great values. It just is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the case once you upgrade anything. Like that is a very common failure mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because also the base models, like this is the brief moment in time, but like five
⏹️ ▶️ John years from now when it still comes with 16 gigs of RAM and it starts to seem a little bit constrained because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Intelligence 2.0 or whatever can barely run in 16 gigs of RAM, like that’s what the problem with the base
⏹️ ▶️ John models. They’re like, they’re a great buy when they’ve just recently been bumped
⏹️ ▶️ John in their specs, but then they stagnate for years and years and years and they become a worse and worse buy. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the SoC maybe is a good buy, like the computer is a good buy, but the storage and memory just get
⏹️ ▶️ John more and more anemic. And eventually it stops being a good buy because you’re like, if you buy this, you won’t be able to fit your stuff on it because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a 16 gig iPhone or whatever, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think part of Apple’s whole revenue and profit margin strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, they are willing to eat into their margins a little bit when the product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first launches. And then they’ll sit on those specs as long as possible so that yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good competitive deal and they might get less margin for the first few months that something’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, but then over time, throughout the life cycle of that product, when it’s not getting updated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it becomes a worse and worse deal for us and a better and better deal for them. And so if you pay attention,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get pretty decent deals when you do things like jump on something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right after an update where some important spec has been updated well, like the RAM has here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get better deals, but the availability of them goes in cycles with the product
Upgrade pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of good and bad deals John it looked like you wanted to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about storage pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s not the same topic We were just touching on with Quinn, you know as soon as you touch those options It becomes a bad deal and we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been harping on it But there was two good reddit posts that I thought were funny on that topic First one is what do you get for your money
⏹️ ▶️ John option a upgrade your Mac mini to two terabytes of storage Option B
⏹️ ▶️ John for the exact same amount of money. You can get a PlayStation 5 Pro which
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with two terabytes of storage and also $100 cash. And let me tell you, the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey terabytes of storage
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes with the PlayStation, first of all, with the Mac Mini upgrade, you’re only upgrading 1.3 quarters of a terabyte, right? Because it
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with 256 and you’re upgrading to two terabytes, so you’re adding 1.75 terabytes, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? So you’re not even buying a full two terabytes and that
⏹️ ▶️ John costs $800. For that same $800, you can get two terabytes of storage in the PlayStation 5 Pro And PlayStation 5 has fairly strict requirements
⏹️ ▶️ John for the SSDs you have to put in it. The minimum spec is 5,500 megabytes per second,
⏹️ ▶️ John read, write, for the PlayStation storage. So this is not crappy, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the same storage as in the Mac Mini. It’s probably as fast or as faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than what you have in the Mac Mini. Of course, you get an entire PlayStation 5 Pro, not PlayStation 5, the
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 5 Pro, the $700 one that just came out. And then you get $100 cash back. So yeah, Apple’s prices make no sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you could buy a PlayStation 5 Pro with two terabytes of storage and get the $100 cash
⏹️ ▶️ John and well, I guess you have to desolder the chips and nevermind. And by the way, the PlayStation 5 Pro does
⏹️ ▶️ John have an M.2 expansion port in it as well. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then the second item, this is also from Reddit. It is a fairly confusing chart that somebody made, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it does show some interesting stuff here. So it’s showing Apple versus market SSD prices. And here I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they did a little bit of a cheat by not considering the quality and speed of SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John chips that Apple uses versus like market prices. Because when people try to compare market prices, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is how much a terabyte costs. Well, what terabyte? A terabyte that gets how much read-write speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can buy a slow terabyte for less money than a fast terabyte. But setting that aside, what it’s basically showing
⏹️ ▶️ John here is, this is a chart from 2013 to 2025, and it shows storage
⏹️ ▶️ John prices going down over time, which we’ve all experienced. SSD storage prices since 2013 have gone
⏹️ ▶️ John down over time. You can get more storage for less money. It’s a fairly sharp curve.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then on the same graph, there are a bunch of lines for Apple’s products and the storage pricing associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with them. Starting with the 2011 Mac mini, which was $300 for 256 gigabytes or $1,200 per terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Apple product lines, like Marco was alluding to before, are completely horizontal. Their
⏹️ ▶️ John price never goes down. they just go, it’s just a horizontal line on the
⏹️ ▶️ John graph. So the Mac mini was a terrible deal. And then came the 2014 Mac mini at $800 per terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a horizontal line that extends from 2014 to 2024. Does not dip. The
⏹️ ▶️ John actual storage line is going down, down, down, down. The Mac mini line is just straight across, never changing, $800 per terabyte,
⏹️ ▶️ John $800 per terabyte for 10 years. For 10 years, they did not change the storage
⏹️ ▶️ John price. And now finally, the new, the M1 Mac mini in 2020 is its own horizontal
⏹️ ▶️ John line at $400 per terabyte, still above the market prices. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the Apple strategy. Introduce a thing at an expensive price and never change it, sometimes for a decade,
⏹️ ▶️ John while the entire pricing, commodity, parts environment around it changes radically,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is, you know, frozen in time with prices fixed in place
⏹️ ▶️ John as of the introduction of that computer. And presumably that will happen with the M4 one as well. It’s just that right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John that computer in terms of its capabilities is a good deal at the base model. But yeah, once you add any storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John you jump off of this market line and you go up into Apple fantasy land and you just stay there forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so frustrating because I’m so happy that we finally got the increased RAM, but it’s just shining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a gigantic, like what is this bat signal sized light on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how egregious the storage pricing is. It’s just, it’s not good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we can move slightly forward. Anonymous writes, the ridiculous RAM and SSD upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prices Apple charges look even worse when you notice that Apple only lets its retailers sell the lower end versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Want to future proof your MacBook Pro by getting a two terabyte SSD? That’s only available from Apple directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Apple keeps 100% of those ridiculous upgrade charges, making their margins even higher compared to the versions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are also sold by third parties. I did not know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is something I didn’t think about, but like, I mean, we all know the whole deal, like Marco experienced this, because he very often needs a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John in a hurry, because he’s Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you go to the Apple store, They have a
⏹️ ▶️ John certain a certain fixed number of like, oh here like the fixed configs we have in stock And there’s usually like the base
⏹️ ▶️ John one and then like a better one But if you were to go to like Best Buy or like any other random place They
⏹️ ▶️ John have a limited number of configurations and I didn’t realize that they just don’t have Like the very
⏹️ ▶️ John upgraded configurations at all And so yeah It seems like Apple is just saving the highest margin
⏹️ ▶️ John products only for its channels either Watering through Apple’s website or you know their store or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever And then everyone else gets, I guess the base model, maybe one bump up. I haven’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have extensive experience looking for Macs sold by companies other than
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, but this is just another way that Apple is making sure that they keep most of the fattest part of the margin curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, this isn’t entirely an absolute truth. There are like certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retailers that seem to have really good relationship with Apple and maybe sell a bunch of stuff to high end customers. Like B&H
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe? Yes, I was gonna say B&H is a good example. B&H usually has, so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even, you know, when you go to Apple stores, there’s always like, you know, whatever base configurations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have on the Apple website. Like there’s usually like, you know, three per computer family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or two. It used to be good, better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best. Right, like, you know, so whatever base configurations they have, every retailer that does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of volume will have those configurations. But usually, like, if you ask an Apple store, if you go to an Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, I need something today, what else do you have that’s higher than these? they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock other configurations, usually, but you know, not every configuration possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like, all right, well, if you want the, you know, the four terabyte SSD, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to upgrade to 64 gigs of RAM to get it that same day in that store or whatever. You know, like, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they do stock, usually a couple of higher end configurations that are not listed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the website in Apple stores. Well, if you go to a retailer like Best Buy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually they will have those, or Best Buy or B&H, usually they will have some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those in stock. And if they are running any kind of discount or special, oftentimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’ll take like 100 bucks off for some kind of sale they’re running, oftentimes that will apply to those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end configurations also. So I have seen high-end configurations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discounted by resellers before. It’s not as common, and you can’t get every configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want, but they do exist.
QD in M4 MBP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we got some news, I think around the time we actually recorded last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, but allegedly the M4 MacBook Pro just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started quietly using Quantum Dot Display Tech, which I was not aware of. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading from MacRumors, the M4 MacBook Pro models feature Quantum Dot Display technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to display analyst Ross Young. Apple used a Quantum Dot film instead of a red KSF
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Phosphor film, a change that provides more vibrant, accurate color results. And apparently, and John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interrupt me whenever you’re ready, but apparently quantum dot was a thing for a long time and Apple was aware of it, but refused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use it because there was an element in there. I forget which one now that apparently is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not easy to recycle or not easy to come by without you, you know, really do it, getting it from really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible places. And so they said, yeah, no thanks. But now you can do this quantum dot stuff without that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever element it was. And so they’re like, hell yeah, let’s do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if the environmental reason was the main motivation. since
⏹️ ▶️ John very far behind in a lot of display stuff. But just to clarify on the quantum dot thing, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link in the notes to Ross Young’s post about this. And he’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John little spectrograph images showing the red, green, and blue wavelengths of light emitted
⏹️ ▶️ John by the subpixels in a display. These graphs are something that’s very familiar if you watch a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of TV reviews or any kind of monitor with RGB pixels. And you would think, if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John real close on a monitor, It’s got a little red subpixel, a little green subpixel, a little blue subpixel. Some TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John have white subpixels as well, but computer monitors don’t. You would think that if you expose that to one of these spectrum
⏹️ ▶️ John analyzers, you’d see like a spike in the blue, a spike in the green, and a spike in the red. But
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly, especially on televisions, you will see some very misshapen lumps with like kind of a plateau
⏹️ ▶️ John between blue and green, and then one spike is higher than the others, and other spikes are wider. You’re like, why
⏹️ ▶️ John are these so like unevenly distributed? Why isn’t this just pure red, pure green, and pure blue?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the way non-quantum dot LCD displays work is
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a backlight that shines usually white light through a filter, and the filter,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a red filter, a green filter, and a blue filter, and the filter blocks all the wavelengths that are not blue,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the green one blocks all the wavelengths that are not green, and the red one blocks all the wavelengths that are not red. It’s like when you take one of those red, like, film
⏹️ ▶️ John things, or like 3D glasses, but they’re red and they’re green. They’re little things that go over your eyes, and they work by blocking wavelengths
⏹️ ▶️ John that that are not red or green, red or blue from getting to your eyes. So the bottom line is they block
⏹️ ▶️ John light. So you have to turn the backlight up even higher because some of the light from that white backlight is being
⏹️ ▶️ John blocked. In fact, like a third of the light or whatever, depending on the spectrum of the white backlight is being blocked by each sub-pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not good for brightness. The way quantum’s dots work, that’s not actually how they work, but you can think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it as instead of blocking the wavelengths that are not red or green or blue, they take whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John light hits them and essentially change it into what light of the wavelength that is desired. It doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the light hits the quantum dot, then the quantum dot emits light in a particular wavelength. So you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lose as much light by blocking wavelengths. It says, I’ll take your light, whatever color it is, and by the way, most quantum dot displays
⏹️ ▶️ John have like a blue backlight because that is the highest energy and you can downgrade that to green and red,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So they’ll have a blue backlight and the blue backlight will go straight through the blue pixel, so no filter whatsoever
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And then the blue backlight will hit the green quantum dot. And rather than blocking
⏹️ ▶️ John wavelengths, I mean, there is no green wavelength there. It will change the wavelength of the light by emitting
⏹️ ▶️ John a green wavelength after it’s being excited. Anyway, that’s what quantum dots do. They eventually change the color
⏹️ ▶️ John of light in a more efficient manner. So you can run the backlight lower, so you can get higher brightness, all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And the MacBook Pros with the 1000-nit thing, I mean, that’s not that big of a deal because the old ones went up to 1600 nits
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, and it’s really just a software setting. But I think the reason they unlock that with a software setting without the
⏹️ ▶️ John fear of them destroying battery life is because the quantum dot display lets them get 1000 nits
⏹️ ▶️ John on that display with a less bright backlight because the quantum dots are more efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John What this isn’t is anything like OLED. OLEDs, there are things such as a quantum dot OLED, which is what I
⏹️ ▶️ John have on my TV, but OLEDs emit light in an entirely different way and are a different technology and
⏹️ ▶️ John are much better than what Apple is doing with the mini LED, but the rumor is that the OLED MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pros will have to wait until late 2025 or 2026. So keep holding your breath for those.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for now, we get to enjoy brighter, more vibrant, more pure color with less energy
⏹️ ▶️ John on these new MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is cool and I’m jealous. So there we go.
iPhone standby reboots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So sometime in the last week or so, a couple of weeks actually, there was a bit of a kerfuffle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about iOS devices starting to just randomly reboot themselves and hear me out before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you grab your pitchforks. So this started on, I guess, the 9th of November with a report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the Verge. Reading from there, there’s apparently a new iOS 18
⏹️ ▶️ Casey security feature that reboots iPhones that haven’t been unlocked in a few days, frustrating police by making it harder to break into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suspects’ phones. This apparently was all kicked off by a 404 media post, which we will also link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again reading from the Verge. 404 media, which first reported police warnings about the reboots on Thursday, writes that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restarted iPhones enter a more secure quote before first unlock or BFU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state. Now it seems Apple added inactivity reboot code in 18.1 that triggers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhones to restart after they’ve been locked for four days. Which is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of wild. So there’s a demo video put up by Jiska Klasin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully I’m pronouncing that somewhat right, who is a researcher at the Hasso-Plattner Institute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and one of the first security experts to spot this new feature. And their video demonstrating this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shows that an iPhone left alone without being unlocked reboots itself after about 72 hours. And I watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this video. Of course, they accelerated most of it, so you don’t have to sit there for 72 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a long, long video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It shows that almost exactly at 72 hours, sure enough, the thing reboots. And then this same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jessica Klasson did a fascinating deep dive in reverse engineering into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how this exactly works. Before I get there, do we have any commentary so far?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want me to read this next
⏹️ ▶️ John section? There was a little bit of scaremongering when this came out. It’s like, well, first of all, the police are complaining, oh, police,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to make it harder to break into criminals’ phones, any kind of security feature. Law enforcement is like, we don’t like it. We
⏹️ ▶️ John want back doors. We don’t want to be able to hack things. hack things we want things to be, you know, because they need to find out things about criminals.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as individuals, we want to protect our privacy. So this is like, oh, Apple’s doing this thing. Are they thwarting
⏹️ ▶️ John law enforcement? Or is this a bug? Or is it some there was also some rumors about like, the phones are
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to each other in the evidence room and telling each other to reboot. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the bet. I love the crazy crap cops come up with. And they say it with the most with the utmost
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Or like it’s when there were some other theories like it’s when they’re not on a network because is in like in the evidence room,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no wifi they can connect to or they can’t get cellular or whatever. But anyway, yeah, this reverse engineering. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conspiracy between the iPhones to lock us out. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so this reverse engineering does a good job of discovering exactly what it is. But I think the most interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John part about this that Casey is about to read is the background on why doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ John why do this? What’s the point? Like why, so what, your phone reboots if no one touches it for 72 hours. How
⏹️ ▶️ John does that stop someone from breaking into your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry to derail us just a little bit, but Tom H. in the chat said, they don’t need to bring this to the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it already has another way to reboot long before 72 hours. I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was too good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John couldn’t help
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, Marco had it in his drawer for two weeks, not three days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, it won’t last three days. Yeah, well, probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can run that experiment, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So going back to Jyska Klassen, this is a bit of a long passage, but it is worth reading. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that entering your passcode for the first time after your phone starts is something very different than entering it later to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlock your phone. When initially entering your passcode, this unlocks a key store in the Secure Enclave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Processor, or SEP, that encrypts your data on an iPhone. The state before entering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your passcode for the first time is also called before first unlock. Due to the encrypted user data, your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone behaves slightly differently to later unlocks. You’ll see that Face ID and Touch ID won’t work and that the passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is required. But there’s more subtle things you might notice. Since Wi-Fi passwords are encrypted, your iPhone won’t connect to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi networks. If your SIM is not pin protected, your iPhone will still connect to cellular networks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That means technically you can still receive phone calls. Yet if you receive a phone call, even if that number’s in your contacts, the contact name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t be shown as the contacts haven’t been decrypted yet. Similarly, when you receive notifications about new messages, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see that you got messages, but you won’t see any message previews. In the after first unlock state,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or AFU, user data is decrypted. You can imagine this is like a key safe that is kept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open while iOS is running. Even when you see a lock screen, certain keys remain available to the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This way you can stay connected to Wi-Fi networks and receive message notification previews even when your phone is locked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While it’s more convenient, the AFU state is more susceptible to attacks. An attacker who can somehow bypass the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lock screen can get access to the decrypted data on the iPhone. To bypass the lock screen, an attacker does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not necessarily need to know the passcode. Security vulnerabilities within iOS can allow attackers to get code execution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and extract from an iPhone even while it appears to be quote unquote locked.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just to summarize what they’re describing here. So we’ve all seen this, like when you boot
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone for the first time, you have to type in your passcode to unlock it. And all these sort of side
⏹️ ▶️ John effects of like in the before unlock state that like, yeah, your phone’s on and it’s booted.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if your SMS doesn’t have a ping, you can receive SMS messages, but none of your
⏹️ ▶️ John data is accessible yet. It’s all, I mean, everything is encrypted, what they call encrypted at rest on
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone. Like the bits on the disk are just scrambled garbage, right? They make no sense if you look at them, they’re encrypted.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need the secret decryption key to decrypt them into something sensible. When you boot your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it hasn’t decrypted any of that stuff yet. It hasn’t decrypted it and put it into memory until you unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? Once you unlock it, the keys to the kingdom are in the memory of the phone. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been retrieved from the secure enclave thanks to you entering your passcode. It’s unlocked the key safe that has the
⏹️ ▶️ John keys in them. And now your phone’s busy reading stuff. It’s reading your contacts, it’s putting them into memory. It’s reading your
⏹️ ▶️ John messages as they come in. and it’s reading everything, right? In the running memory of your turned on phone
⏹️ ▶️ John is all your valuable information, just sitting in memory somewhere, right? Obviously it’s hard to get to, you’d have to crack
⏹️ ▶️ John into the phone and find a way to read memory, which you usually can’t do, blah, blah, blah, but it’s there. It’s unencrypted in the memory
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. Like you can imagine if you could crack the thing open and somehow access the memory chips, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you have physical access to the phones, all sorts of weird stuff that you could do, right? It’s very much like, is
⏹️ ▶️ John people think like when I lock my computer, like when I turn the screen saver on and it requires a password to get in,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like everything is secured, but think of it more like just taking a very thin curtain and putting
⏹️ ▶️ John it over the front of all your secret stuff. And if they can like tear a tiny hole in that curtain, or
⏹️ ▶️ John a breeze can blow that curtain aside, or the curtain becomes a little transparent, or the curtain crashes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do torture the analogy here, and disappears. That was like one of the early security
⏹️ ▶️ John flaws in the early version of Mac OS X, the password dialogue for when the screen separate locks your screen. If you just held down
⏹️ ▶️ John a key and just entered like a really long password just by repeating the letter A a thousand times, it would crash
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen lock application, up and the curtain would go away. And guess what? There’s all your stuff, totally
⏹️ ▶️ John decrypted, sitting right underneath the curtain. So the after first unlock state
⏹️ ▶️ John is all your stuff with a thin veneer curtain hiding in front of it that hopefully stops
⏹️ ▶️ John people, but it’s so easy to get around the curtain. The before unlock state is everything is
⏹️ ▶️ John still entirely encrypted and it’s of no use to anybody. It is locked up. it is fully, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John almost like your phone is off, right? It is just encrypted at rest. And so even though from
⏹️ ▶️ John our perspective, so what’s the difference? I enter my passcode all the time. I do face ID. Isn’t it just as locked when I lock
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone? No, it’s totally different. Before unlock is way, way, way more
⏹️ ▶️ John secure than after unlock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I love that Apple takes iOS security so seriously and it’s so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced and has all these different protections. But I also, I think even more than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that they are constantly in motion and constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tightening things down even further and they actually would care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You all know what I think of Tim Cook, but when he does his shameless government
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooperation, usually it’s opportunistic ways that he can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure that he keeps making a whole bunch of money, as we’re going to see him play very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Trump over the next few years. That’s what happened last time, it’s going to happen again this time. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be sure that anything that, you know, if there’s like tariffs on goods from China you’re going to see that, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just mysteriously don’t apply to Apple. There’s going to be a lot of that kind of stuff going on. He’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play very nice with government and with the ** bag on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top to make sure that Apple continues to make a whole bunch of money with its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operations in China. more. Apple also does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like cooperating with law enforcement more than it has to legally, and they especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not like things that try to get around their phone’s privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and security measures. So Apple is constantly closing loopholes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding more protections, fighting against different hacks, and that’s, you know, whatever you think of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether law enforcement should be able to hack phones that somehow would only be used for good purposes. Ha ha ha.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever you think about that, this type of security affects everybody. Like this is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple making sure that our phones are secure for everybody. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco total overkill for most of us. But I’d rather they err on the side of overkill when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes to basic device security than, you know, under kill, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that word would be. I’m glad that they take these ridiculous measures. I’m glad that somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some, you know, one of these various hacks from Celebrite or whatever, you know, one of these various hacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that these law enforcement agencies and foreign governments and other kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bad actors, one of the exploits Apple realized, hey, you know what? If we just make the phones reboot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after three days of not being unlocked, it’ll erase this whole category of whatever from being used in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that kind of stuff. And I’m so glad that they keep fighting that fight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes their products safer and more secure for all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, that’s why, like when the police have a phone that they wanna break into, that’s why they keep it plugged in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause they don’t want it to like run out of battery and die and go into the before or first unlock state again. They keep, they wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John keep all that stuff that’s in memory, all the decrypted data that’s in memory, they wanna keep it there. They wanna keep it in the mode where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the goodies with a thin curtain in front of it, just so they can figure out how to get around that curtain or get through it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But once it reboots, it just becomes a bucket of garbage data that they have a very difficult time getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of. Yeah. And because a lot of times there’s like processes. Like, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have this phone. Keep it alive. Keep it booted. Keep it powered on until we can get, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they get warrants? Really? Probably not. But it’s probably more like until we can get the hack machine from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Celebrite or whatever to plug this thing into that maybe the entire agency and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire state owns one, and they to like wait for it a few days. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll put some pressure on their tactics that probably should be and maybe are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco illegal. Again, it protects all of us and this is a good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So a whole bunch of reverse engineering happened and then there were some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey takeaways and reading from Jessica’s post.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Turns out the inactivity reboot triggers exactly after three days or 72 hours. The iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would do so despite being connected to Wi-Fi. This confirms my suspicion that this feature had nothing to do with wireless connectivity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Law enforcement’s conclusion that the reboot is due to phones wirelessly communicating with each other is implausible. The older iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before iOS 18 likely rebooted due to another reason, such as a software bug. Security-wise, this is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerful mitigation. An attacker must have kernel code execution to prevent an inactivity reboot. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means that a forensic analysis must be able to delay the reboot for the actual data extraction, but the initial exploit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey must be run within the first three days. Inactivity reboot will change the threat landscape for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both thieves, and forensic, and analysts, but asymmetrically so. While law enforcement is under more time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pressure, it likely completely locks out criminals from accessing your data to get into your bank accounts and other valuable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information stored on your iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John McLaughlin It’s not just law enforcement that wants to break into your phone. If someone steals your iPhone, it is much less valuable to them
⏹️ ▶️ John if this thing is locked and they can’t resell it. If they can somehow figure out an exploit to get into your phone in an unlock state.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can harvest all your information, try to get to your passwords, get access to your email account, reset your passwords, drain your
⏹️ ▶️ John bank account, all that good stuff, which is another reason if you’re worried about your phone being stolen or taken
⏹️ ▶️ John or hacked into, don’t just lock it, you can shut it down and put it into the before
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock state. So yeah, this is a good feature. And this is the type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple does without really announcing, but it’s just one more
⏹️ ▶️ John move in the cat and mouse game. This is another reason if you care about this stuff at all, to always update to the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, because the cat in this case, the hackers are always finding exploits, but then Apple closes
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They find more than Apple closes them and on and on and on. And so if you have a phone that’s like, oh, you’re running
⏹️ ▶️ John the latest version of iOS 17, well, that has 25 known exploits, but the very latest version of iOS 18, all 25 of those has been patched.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and that’s the game. Not that there’s none out there, there’s always new ones being discovered, but they are patched pretty quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John after they’re discovered in the best case. And any older
⏹️ ▶️ John phone running an older OS probably has a laundry list of hacks that work on it. Whereas the newer
⏹️ ▶️ John you get, the shorter that list of known hacks gets. And then, you know, that it’s, you know, a clock
⏹️ ▶️ John on the thieves, they have three days, whether they keep your phone plugged in or not, they have three days to figure out how to get
⏹️ ▶️ John inside it and get your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I mean, you know, not to make this too dark, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is important to think about because it’s a realistic threat. Keep in mind the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction that the US government is going in. There’s a lot of data that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on our phones that the government might start wanting to look at more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance, if you are in a state that has made abortion illegal, especially like the really hardcore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, that like any form of abortion is illegal, well, information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’ve had a period or not and what happened after you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have one. That information could get you thrown in jail or worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way we’re going politically in the US,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna have to really start taking a lot more of the data security stuff seriously and privacy data seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the government’s going in some weird directions and it can get a lot worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think what we see with some of these political directions that things are heading in, Like we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that far from things getting a lot more threatening in areas like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of data is on our phones, a lot of data is in these services that we use on our phones, a lot like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to start building the infrastructure if we don’t already have it to be a lot more careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot more guarded and a lot more private about this stuff and a lot more secure. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know you might think today you might you know be in a place or be a kind person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you don’t feel particularly at risk for, you know, government intrusion into your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that can change quickly. And I think we are in for some of those changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those directions, unfortunately. So there’s never a better time than now to start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting your security in order and reviewing some of these options and some of these practices and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulking things up where you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re in that paranoid mindset, keep in mind that in the US, at least the current
⏹️ ▶️ John precedent law is that the police can force you to put your finger on Touch ID. They can force you to use
⏹️ ▶️ John Face ID, but they can’t force you to enter your passcode. So if you care about that type of thing, another advantage of before
⏹️ ▶️ John on lock state, because Face ID and Touch ID don’t work in that state, and they cannot compel
⏹️ ▶️ John you to tell them your passcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yet. You know, brief question, which I don’t expect you guys know the answer to, you know how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s the trick of where on modern iPhones, you hold the volume up button and the the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lock button for a few seconds, and that will disable Touch ID. Does that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get you into the before first unlock? I mean, strictly speaking, it’s gotta be different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that does lock out Touch ID and Face ID, but it does not get you into before-forth unlock.
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#askatp: “M4 Ultra” vs. 4090
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP and MR writes, can you guys explain how an M4 Ultra is expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to outperform or compete against an NVIDIA 4090 when an M4 is just a tiny chip with a small heatsink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while a 4090 is a triple slot GPU, weighs over a kilogram and consumes around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 400 watts of power. I know Apple’s good at making chips, but surely we’re missing something here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is an NVIDIA 4090, which is I think their current top end GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is really big, really expensive, it’s 400 watts of power, has a huge heatsink. And he’s saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John comparing to this, you know, with these, M4 is just a tiny chip. Yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 is a tiny chip. The M4 Ultra, which doesn’t exist yet, but when it does exist, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John not be a tiny chip. It will also be a very big, very hot chip that requires a very
⏹️ ▶️ John big heatsink. Take a look at the M2 Ultra and the size of the heatsink that it has. Now it’s not 400 watts,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just to level set here. to try to compete with an NVIDIA 4090, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to take a chip that is substantially larger and hotter than the M4 that’s in the Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna have a big heat sink on it. It’s gonna cost a lot of money. But still, the question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John how can they even be in the ballpark? I did this calculation back before the M1 was coming out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it possible for Apple to make an Apple Silicon chip with a quote unquote integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, as in a GPU that is on the SoC, on the die with all the CPUs and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That competes with the best video card that you can get, best single video card that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get. And the math that I did back then was based on the rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Jade 4C die, the thing that would be like two ultras or four maxes
⏹️ ▶️ John put together. The math on that worked out, that would have been competitive with the best single
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU video card available at the time. But Apple never made that chip. they
⏹️ ▶️ John only made the M1 Ultra, which was two M1 Maxes stuck together. They never made the Quad
⏹️ ▶️ John with four of them. And that’s why no single Apple Silicon chip has ever competed
⏹️ ▶️ John with a single best top tier PC video card. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John why are we having this discussion again? Because Apple’s been doing so well with their GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John work that now when you look at the M4 Pro and the M4 Max and you start doing back of the envelope math, you can be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, all right, well, If they just made an ultra one of these, if they took two M4 Maxes
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuck them together, which again, I don’t know if they’re gonna do this. I still haven’t seen a die shot of the M4 Max and see if it has the interposer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, assuming the M4 Ultra has essentially twice the number of GPU cores as the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, that starts to plausibly be within shooting distance of NVIDIA 4090.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here’s the other thing to consider. The NVIDIA 4090 is, I think, the best GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get today. It’s an old card. It’s about to be replaced. But the Nvidia 5
⏹️ ▶️ John series, it’s kind of like when all the competitors were comparing their new, like the Qualcomm ARM chip and everything and Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John chips with the M3 just before the M4 came out. Yeah, that’s the time you want to do that comparison
⏹️ ▶️ John because when the Nvidia 5000 series comes out, they’re going to be way faster and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they will maintain that lead. How can they be even in the ballpark? I’m not sure what process
⏹️ ▶️ John Nvidia is using. At various times, Apple may have had a better process like three nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John versus five nanometer. The other thing is the Nvidia chips have lots of specialized stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in them for applications that Apple does not care about. Like, I don’t know, cryptocurrency stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or like AI model training. Oh, Apple does care about that at this point or whatever. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re in this moment in time where you could fantasize about a non-existent M4 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not gonna come out until WWDC next year could plausibly be somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in the neighborhood of the NVIDIA 4090, which by the time the M4 Ultra is out will be
⏹️ ▶️ John last year’s old news and will be replaced by better GPUs. That’s what it comes down to. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great that Apple is getting closer and their GPUs are really good and they are amazing performance
⏹️ ▶️ John per watt, like the whole rest of Apple Silicon, but don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John a single, single Apple SoC to
⏹️ ▶️ John trounce the best single PC GPU available.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we can get in the ballpark, that will be amazing, but even that is going to be quite a challenge. So when you get down
⏹️ ▶️ John to the lower ends, like if you start doing the people did comparison tests, like you can watch the Quinn’s video that we talked about before, where he’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 is not like a beefy GPU, but it’s pretty good for
⏹️ ▶️ John its size and power. And when you try to compete on pricing, you get like the cheapest Nvidia GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John or like a really low end PC GPU, The M4 GPU holds its own against it, amazingly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is pretty amazing. And remember the Nvidia thing, it’s on its own separate card, it’s got its own separate memory that it has to power,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got all its own separate circuitry, and now it’s got to communicate to the CPU through PCIe bus and all that stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s lots of extra overhead that you don’t have when the GPU is literally on the dive with the rest of the stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there are advantages to that arrangement. And of course, the unified memory architectures, you don’t have to have a separate set of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But yeah, I too wish that Apple would at least
⏹️ ▶️ John try to compete with a single one of the PC video cards. When the M1 was coming out, I was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Mac Pro, you can put more than one of those video cards in it, and it’ll be, you know, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple could do to compete with that. And we were speculating if Apple would produce Apple Silicon video cards,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so far they haven’t done that either, so yeah. This is the question for my
⏹️ ▶️ John next Mac. Am I gonna try to get something with a big giant GPU, speculatively, so I can play the
⏹️ ▶️ John masterpiece edition of Control, a game that was introduced three years ago or whatever? Whenever I see an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John game announced, I’m like, oh, it’s cool. These vendors are porting their games to the Mac and they’re doing a good job
⏹️ ▶️ John on the ports and they have good performance. Then I look at the game, it’s like, yeah, I remember that game from a few years ago when it came out.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not really, it’s good that it’s happening, but that is not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to turn the Mac around as a gaming platform. But anyway, Apple’s GPUs are really good and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting better, but I don’t think it’s a fair comparison to compare the non-existent M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, speculative non-existent M4 Ultra to the Nvidia 4090 that’s about to be replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A couple of other things on that too, you know, when you’re comparing, you know, Apple’s highest-end GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco configuration of an SoC versus a dedicated PC GPU’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highest-end model, there’s a couple of factors that are also worth considering. So number one, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy of making these SoCs and making the larger ones, you know, when you go from M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max to M4 Ultra, presumably, they’re gonna do a similar strategy they’ve done with M1 and M2 Ultra, they skipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3, where they just copy everything. You just get two Maxes
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know, because we haven’t seen if there’s an interposer on the M4 Max yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still up in the air. Right, like that is how they did the M1 and M2 Ultras, so presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is likely to be one of the ways they might do this. It’s probably the most likely way they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. So if they do, keep in mind that as you try to scale up this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, you’re also doubling a whole bunch of other stuff on that chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not just the GPU cores. If they were to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a higher end configuration for GPU purposes specifically, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of having two M4 Macs next to each other, if they just extended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M4 Macs to have just a huge amount more GPU cores, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doubling the neural engine, the CPU cores, media engines like all the other stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the die, they could fit way more GPU cores than they could by doubling the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip. So if they did that kind of thing, maybe that would be like that would be closer to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 4090 and those kind of GPUs are because those are just GPUs. So like those are spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that die space and all of that wattage and all that power and all those terrible manufacturing yields. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are spending all those resources only for more GPU bandwidth and cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one of the reasons the rumor is that they might not be taking two M4 Maxes and sticking them together is because
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the Downside historical downsides of taking two Maxes and sticking them together is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hasn’t gotten linear scaling on doubling the GPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and Presumably because of like essentially overhead of the interposer and and signaling across that
⏹️ ▶️ John barrier and cross-communication So even though you double the number of GPU cores, you don’t get straight-up doubling
⏹️ ▶️ John of the speed which is what you would expect for something like a GPU with massively parallel loads.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it could be that it’s the interconnect, like they’re too far apart from each other, they have to communicate across the interposer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is impeding their ability to scale the way you’d want to. So again, no, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what they’re actually going to do. I haven’t seen any rumors about it. That’s why I want to see the
⏹️ ▶️ John eyeshot of the M4 Macs, because there’s no interposer, we know they’re definitely not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the other thing to consider is like when you’re when you’re looking at when you’re comparing against the highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end version, the highest end GPU for the current high-end family of NVIDIA whatever’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the way these GPUs work, similar to how CPUs work, but I think to to an even amped up degree these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this market, is, you know, when you have like the the low-end and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-range configurations of the of these GPU families, and they take much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more reasonable balances of power and heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus performance. When you try to scale up performance of a computer chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally you’re just doing that like you have a certain family and you do it by either making more of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores, you know, making the chip bigger, or you ramp up the clock speed of those cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or both. When you ramp up clock speeds, the relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between performance and and heat is not linear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Heat goes up way faster than performance. So there’s always like a sweet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot where like the mainstream GPUs, the mainstream chips, those will be tuned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a certain sweet spot where like they’re getting pretty good performance for a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable amount of heat and efficiency that they can get. All of Apple’s chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this family, all of the M-series chips, they stay in that envelope. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push, so the M4 Ultra is in all likelihood probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be cranked up to 400 watts. They could, if they wanted to design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips to do that, they could design chips in that direction, but they don’t. They keep these chips within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the sweet spots of heat to performance. But when NVIDIA releases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs, they have chips that are in those sweet spots, but they also will sell you a high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model that is way outside of that sweet spot, where it might use four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times the power of a lower end model. To
⏹️ ▶️ John get that extra 5% of performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and maybe get twice the performance or something. Not twice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually not. Yeah, so when you compare it to one of those chips, those chips are designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with completely different trade-offs in mind to achieve, the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the 4090 and the whatever 90 series GPUs, the whole point is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just give us the most performance you possibly can, power, size, and cost be damped.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right up to the point where the card crashes and then back it off a little.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but Apple does not design their chips that way because they don’t design their machines that way and they don’t want, and especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about carbon neutrality, that’s the last thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John want. And the only machine they have that could handle that is the Mac Pro because every other computer that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have is so tiny and has limited cooling or whatever. So the only, you can’t put a 400 watt anything
⏹️ ▶️ John into any Mac except for the Mac Pro. Every other one will just melt, like the coolers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when you look at like the what PC cases have to accommodate in order to have one of these GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it, it’s ridiculous like and there are markets for that, but those are not markets Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares at all. Like Apple doesn’t care about the super high-end gamer market, you know, that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy these GPUs. Obviously, Apple doesn’t care about that market. They, I mean, I could argue whether they should or not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t. So you’re comparing very different things when you’re when you’re comparing when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to say Apple should match the performance or should be in the ballpark of the performance of this super high Nvidia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC gaming GPU. Like there’s a lot of reasons why that’s a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that’s why I like the the the M1 Extreme that never came. The four Maxis together, that
⏹️ ▶️ John one would have been in the ballpark. Now, I think people are thinking maybe the M4 Ultra will be in the ballpark of the 498
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re at the end of an Nvidia generation because of the rumors about the M4 Ultra being so vague that people can just
⏹️ ▶️ John fantasize about. Well, imagine if the M4 Ultra had this number, of course. And it’s like, I mean, you can just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John multiplying number of cores by, you know, number of, you know, floating point operations or whatever thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re you’re choosing to judge it by. But yeah, like the hope is, again, for the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John that they will ship a chip that actually requires this case because they didn’t do that before. They gave the same
⏹️ ▶️ John chip that works just fine in a Mac studio. And that is entirely a waste of the massive cooling capacity of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. So we’ll see how that goes. Probably next summer, WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keep up alive, John. keep hope alive.
#askatp: Long-term data integrity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Yannick Boyson writes, with Marco’s recent switch from a NAS to a Mac Mini for his primary storage and my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plans to do the same in the near future, I was wondering about file integrity in macOS. Is Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worried about file integrity or bit rot on his external drives? While APFS is a modern file system,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as discussed on previous episodes, it lacks any functionality when it comes to file integrity, checking, or scrubbing. These
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features are available in BTRFS or ButterFS. On the Synology or ZFS, I’ve read a bit on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey topic, but I’m still not clear how big of a problem this could be, if at all. and if having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey redundancy or RAID and or backups changes anything in this equation. Apple seems to think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on internal SSDs in modern Macs, it isn’t a big concern, though others have a different view, especially when it comes to possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lower quality external hard drives or SSDs. And we will link to a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from 2016 from Adam H. Leventhal on APFS that talks about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yannick continues, so the second question is, in John’s opinion, should Marco and I be worried about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And is a dedicated NAS still the best option as the primary personal storage, or can it be demoted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to backup duties only without any problems even for storing data in the long term?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Mark, are you worried?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I figure John would tell me when to be worried.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, maybe that’s right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so we’ve discussed this before, especially when APFS was coming out. These data integrity
⏹️ ▶️ John features that they’re talking about, it’s basically like, is any part of the file
⏹️ ▶️ John system or the computer checking that the bits that were written to it are the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re reading back? if you write some bits to it and then wait two years and then read the bits back, is there any part of the system
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, hey, are these the bits that I wrote two years ago? Or have they changed since then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or does it just say, here are the bits on the disk, here you go, with no
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge, you can’t have any knowledge of like, have they changed since I wrote them there? Like did one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John bits flip because the cosmic ray hit it or something? Or is there some bug somewhere? Like that’s data integrity. ZFS
⏹️ ▶️ John was a real pioneer on this. It was a file system and a whole, you know, the whole stack
⏹️ ▶️ John for ZFS was designed with features that let it know when anything has gone
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. There’s a bad driver, there’s a bad disk, there’s a cosmic ray, there’s a software
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Any kind of thing that could go wrong in the entire stack between your storage device,
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer, your CPU, you know, bad memory, Casey, anything like that, ZFS
⏹️ ▶️ John would catch it because ZFS had checksums on all the data. And so if anything changed,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would say, hey, something about these bits is off. It could correct small errors.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had redundant storage of the same data, it could say, okay, well, the data off disk one is
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but I have some of that same data on disk two, and oh, it looks like it’s good on disk two, and I’ll write it back to disk
⏹️ ▶️ John one, so now it’s good in both places again. That is data integrity. I like that
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, and I really wished that Apple’s next generation file system wouldn’t have it. APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have it as part of the file system stack. So and when APFS writes some data
⏹️ ▶️ John and then reads it back two years later It has no way to know if that data has changed out from under it has
⏹️ ▶️ John no way to know if the data Was perfectly fine on the disk But then it hit a bad part of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it was Gave back to your program and it’s all scrambled because it came through a bad piece of RAM It has no way of knowing any
⏹️ ▶️ John of that because it doesn’t do these things So there are third-party utilities to say, okay if the faucet
⏹️ ▶️ John is not gonna be do it do it for me Is there something I can do can I like write a bunch of little checksum files
⏹️ ▶️ John in each? directory that has checksums of all the files that are in that directory so when I read them later I’ll also read the checksum
⏹️ ▶️ John file and I’ll sort of do the same thing the ZFS is doing under the covers but manually with a bunch of files yeah you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do that and there’s a bunch of utilities that do that. Why would you want to do this? Why do you care?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because in general if you have lots and lots of data stored somewhere you probably care about
⏹️ ▶️ John it like say your family photos or your family photo library. You don’t want to go and read those
⏹️ ▶️ John photos five years from now and pull up your favorite photo and it starts rendering and halfway through the image, it cuts off and then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just gray or snow for the rest of the image because the JPEG is corrupted or something. And how could that
⏹️ ▶️ John happen? Bit rot, cosmic rays, bugs, bad memory, bad disk, like so many
⏹️ ▶️ John things could cause that to happen. The detection of that happening is
⏹️ ▶️ John step one in fixing it. So obviously like if your data is gonna go bad, what you want is
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna know that it’s bad. And that’s important, for example, when you’re doing backups, because if you don’t know that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad and you’re doing backups, you’ve got a cloud backup, you’ve got a local backup, you’ve got the time machine, you’re doing backups everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John If things are going bad, you’re just backing up the bad data to 17 different places. And in fact, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the good data was in your time machine backup, but then you overwrote it with the bad data, and slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John it pushed off the good data off the end because you can only fit so much on your time machine disk before it pushes the old versions off the
⏹️ ▶️ John end. And now you have the good data, but you’ve since overwritten it with 17 new versions of the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John data. Because the file system and the operating system and everything have no way of knowing that they’re taking bad
⏹️ ▶️ John data and pushing it to the cloud, taking bad data and pushing it to your time machine backup. They just think, here’s the data,
⏹️ ▶️ John here it is. They don’t know if it’s good or it’s bad. It’s just, this is what came back from the disk, so here you go, right? That’s why you want
⏹️ ▶️ John this detection. And the second part of it is redundancy. If you have both detection and redundancy,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can detect when there’s a problem and fix the problem and warn you about it. So it can fix it with a redundant data
⏹️ ▶️ John and warn you about it, right? So this is a question about like RAID and everything. RAID is not a backup strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John RAID can help save you from disks going bad or not
⏹️ ▶️ John data going bad. Well, maybe it’ll know that there’s a difference between the two things, but it won’t know which one is right, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on which RAID level you’re using. If you’re using RAID 5 with checksums versus RAID 1 where it’s just duplicating stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John That can help a little bit, but a file system that enforces this is what you really want. I think ButterFS
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it for data and metadata separately, but you really want it for both. The metadata is
⏹️ ▶️ John what keeps track of where all your files are and then data is like, make sure the data is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, as for whether markets should be worried, probably not because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not really much point in worrying about something you can’t do anything about. That’s the bad part here. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no- I could get hit by a bus. Yeah, like what, like, it’s a shame that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John storage stack doesn’t have any data integrity features other than like, you know, the basics of like
⏹️ ▶️ John error correction in the SSDs and redundant storage and stuff like that, it’s all under the covers. Like in the end, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John end to end, like securely checking that your data is good. And there’s not much you can do about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John practically speaking. All the solutions that are like, write a bunch of checksum files or whatever, they
⏹️ ▶️ John are cumbersome, onerous, don’t work in all situations. Like they don’t work with Time Machine really. You’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John backing up the checksum files technically from the regular files. I don’t think you can be sure that they’d even be in sync with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re just gonna be adding more files. Like that system, it’s difficult to write a system
⏹️ ▶️ John like that reliably. the third party tools that do it can be good for targeted use, like just this folder, I want to be sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s secure. But for things like your iCloud photo library, you don’t even really have
⏹️ ▶️ John good access to the, I mean, they’re buried in there somewhere, all in the originals folder and those all UUID type
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but the Photos app manages those files. If you try to
⏹️ ▶️ John put something on top of that to try to keep track of all the files in your photo library and then write checksums to them and correlate
⏹️ ▶️ John them, you’re just gonna get so many false positives from your system not working right that there’s no, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John I can recommend that you do. That’s going to save you from this. I mean, one of the things is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, keep your data in motion, constantly be copying it from place to place to place so that when something goes bad or
⏹️ ▶️ John rots, you’ll have good copy somewhere. That’s kind of the best we can do, but it’s just a, it’s a race
⏹️ ▶️ John condition. Have you been moving your data around at the right time such that you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t just spread the corruption everywhere? Right? It’s not going to be the case where it goes bad here and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, but I got good copies here, here and here. Hey, you won’t even know it went bad and be by the time you do know it went bad. The bad
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is probably in all your places. So that argues for potentially doing what Marco did once. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done once, which is like, you know, write things out to a Blu-ray M disc and put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a drawer. If that happens to have the good copy of that data, then nothing’s ever going to
⏹️ ▶️ John change that data again. It’s not, it’s not going to get overwritten by subsequent backups. Right. But if that has the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John data, well then, you know, tough luck. So the question is we should
⏹️ ▶️ John all not be we should all know that this is a possibility But unfortunately for us
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not really anything we can reasonably do as an end-user to fix this which is why it’s on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John To eventually get its button gear and do it and fix this I was so happy they did APFS for
⏹️ ▶️ John years I’ve been hammering on them for like they need a modern file system. If you have us is
⏹️ ▶️ John a modern file system. It’s great I love it It’s just not everything that it could have been for
⏹️ ▶️ John some good reasons, because a lot of these data integrity features hinder performance and take more memory and there’s yada
⏹️ ▶️ John yada yada, right? But eventually, if I live long enough and we’re doing this podcast long enough,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna be hammering them to say, you know what, Apple? It’s time for you to have a modern file system. Maybe VESP was great back
⏹️ ▶️ John in 20-whatever, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s 2040-something,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s time for you to have a file system with data integrity,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll see. And again, it’s a shame that like BTRFS has it, ZFS
⏹️ ▶️ John has it, like there’s existing things that do have it. And as for NASs as
⏹️ ▶️ John primary personal storage, I wouldn’t use any network attached storage as primary personal storage. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John use directly attached internal or external SSDs for your personal
⏹️ ▶️ John storage and use the NAS more for backups. And for data
⏹️ ▶️ John integrity, yeah, if you can have a NAS that uses a file system that has data integrity
⏹️ ▶️ John checking on it, that can help you detect corruption and potentially correct it depending on which file system you’re using. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy a NAS that uses EFS that has all these features on it. You don’t really care about the performance because it’s just a big backup.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would recommend that. That’s one of the advantages of having a NAS is or just any kind of separate
⏹️ ▶️ John computer that’s not an Apple computer that is running a file system that has data integrity
⏹️ ▶️ John checking and using it to make backups. Keep in mind that if you carefully put
⏹️ ▶️ John your corrupted data there, it will carefully preserve your corrupted data because that was the data that it was written. It thinks that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John right data. So you have to be careful with your backups. If you push the old backups off the end periodically, you will
⏹️ ▶️ John always end up spreading your corruption everywhere before you find out that your favorite picture of your kid when they were two is
⏹️ ▶️ John half corrupted. Cool. Also make prints and print books because that’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John hedge against this. You know, if you lose all your data or your one favorite picture is corrupted, but you printed five eight by 10s and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in frames on your walls, even if they’re like UV bleached, it’s still better than nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Uncommon Goods. Thank you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, we’re gonna actually address the question, you know, earlier we were talking about Apple’s prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the storage upgrade prices and everything and in Overtime we’re gonna ask, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complaining about Apple’s prices actually useful? So we’ll get to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in overtime. If you want to hear that, adb.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, and we’ll talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re into Mastodon, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check podcast so long
Casey’s project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I decided I needed another project.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Many people know that I talked a couple of years ago about like putting fiber in the houses and nothing like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still want to do that at some point. I’m still kicking that can over and over and over again. I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that is far more cost-effective to work on and a far shorter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stretch of time to complete it. The problem statement is as follows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I hate myself, I’m a fan of the New York Giants. The New York Giants is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a football team, a NFL football team, an American football team. Their record is currently for the season,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two wins and eight losses. It has not been a good football season, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been a Giants fan since I remember. Although I’m not a super duper duper fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I generally prefer to be able to watch the Giants when I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The way the NFL works is that typically there’s only, you know, like three or four games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are happening concurrently Oftentimes maybe only one or two typically played, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday afternoons and if you live in the region
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near where the football team is based you will likely receive a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broadcast of the game If you are out of market like I am am, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is pretty unlikely you will receive a broadcast of the game unless they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing your local team. So for me, my local team is the Washington Commanders, once known
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the Washington Redskins, which thankfully was finally changed because that’s a very problematic name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so if the Giants play the Commanders, which does happen, then I will get the game. But otherwise it’s unusual for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to get a Giants game. The easy solution to this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the Marco solution, which is to throw piles of money at the problem and fix it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you do that by subscribing not only to YouTube TV, which is not an insignificant cost,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also NFL Sunday Ticket, which is hundreds and hundreds of dollars per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey season on top of the cost of YouTube TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t want to do that because I like the Giants. I don’t like them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much. And I thought there must be a way around this problem. There must be a way I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix this with technology and a smaller application of money. So, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far any questions and or theories about how I am attempting to solve this problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t know anything about sports. The only thing I know is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will do very ridiculous things to get their sports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the most common solution is usually just to pay a bunch of money for them somehow, through some kind of cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ben Thompson, who is not allergic to spending money, even he has to do a Byzantine solution to
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I believe, so he lives in Taiwan, but he wants to see his local team in Wisconsin. So I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John he has a residence in Wisconsin where he has a bunch of hardware running. That hardware gets
⏹️ ▶️ John the game because it’s in Wisconsin, and then he sends it over the internet to his home in Taiwan
⏹️ ▶️ John where he sees it. I think he uses a sling box or used to use a sling box. So Casey, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a relative who lives in the New York metro area where the Giants are local and you could put a box
⏹️ ▶️ John in their house that gets the game and then sends it to you? Is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be something where you’re like, you’re asking me to reach under my seat in a minute and I find like this all of a sudden.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what’s this? What Marco wants to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is nurse mating a piece of hardware that records football and sends it to Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that might be the end of the day. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely going outdoors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spoiler alert, that may be the end of this discussion, but that’s not where it’s going yet. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, let me, all snark and kidding aside, the remainder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this topic is probably going to sound like SpawnCon. It’s not. This is, hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to God, me trying to solve a problem for myself, and it just so happens that I’m going to use tools that I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and love in order to do it. But this is not sponsored. This is me just doing this because I want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, is SpawnCon something people say? Mm-hmm. Sadly, it is. That’s disgusting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sponsored content. That is not this. This is 100% my own thoughts. Nobody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compensated me in any way, shape, or form. So I apologize if it comes across as love letters to anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s not. If they are love letters, it’s because I really wrote them, so to speak. But anyways, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the solution to this problem is, yeah, taking a page out of Ben Thompson’s playbook. as far as I’m aware, is he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has one or perhaps more small PCs or perhaps Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minis or something that are physically installed in one or more places around the country. And I think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John, that that Wisconsin, if I’m not mistaken, God I hope I have that right, is the home base, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe he does have a residence there, where he has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a NUC, you know, a small like effectively the PC equivalent of a Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like it, and he has an HD Home Run. There’s several flavors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of HD Home Run, but all of them, the point is basically to convert a either cable TV feed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or an antenna feed into something that’s on the network. So it’s kind of a bridge between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either an antenna or cable to your network. And actually, we pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey television service with Verizon Fios here in Richmond, and I have an HD Home can,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I forget the name of the model, an HD Home Run Prime. And we’ve talked about this in the past, that I’ve put a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable card into, and that is as close as I come to a cable box. I have an HD Home Run with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cable card, and I use an app called Channels, which I think sponsored once, maybe twice in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past, but hand to God, I genuinely love this app. And I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal friends with one of the people who wrote it, so I’m predisposed to like this app, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really an incredible app. And so what channels does is it’s a DVR basically that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will slurp down all the stuff that the HD home run is sending it and it will either record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or display it live. You can do Plex style, like watch your TV from somewhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is the same software that Ben is using as far as I’m aware. This is very much in the spirit of a sling box, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much more modern tech top to bottom. So I have a friend that lives in Southwestern Connecticut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he is a, I would call him a network administrator by trade. He would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bristle at that description, but he does this sort of thing for a living. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has, you know, deeply over-over provisioned networking equipment at his house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this is what he does for a living. And so I bought a small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel NUC. I’ll try to put some links in the show notes. It’s a shoot. I don’t even remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what this thing’s called, but it was like $130 off Amazon. And it, it is more than overkill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for what I need. It’s a Beelink N95, Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 12th, 1-2-TH, mini PC, mini S. So this is 3.5 GHz, 8 GB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of RAM, 256 GB SSD. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I, it came with Windows on it, I immediately killed Windows, put Ubuntu on it, and then put channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. And so I have this, I I have an HD Home Run Connect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is one of the HD Home Runs that you can connect an antenna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, and I bought an over-the-air antenna. And I set all this up here in the house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve got it working so that, you know, the channels could see the HD Home Run, the HD Home Run could see local
⏹️ ▶️ Casey channels here in Richmond, everything’s working great. Thanks to some help from my friend John, who is, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that my solution is viewed as the throwing money at it problem. You’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hundreds of dollars worth of hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was like 200 bucks all
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you heard about how he opens and closes his garage door? Yeah, there’s that. I’m not even opening closes how
⏹️ ▶️ John he how he can tell whether the garage door which open and closes through a different mechanism is in fact open or closed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can confirm. So this is I mean, you’re as much as I’m getting a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grumbly Marco, your point is fair. It’s a one time fee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of roughly 200 bucks as as compared to paying like $400 every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single season for NFL Sunday ticket. So the theory is I solve this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once and that’s that and I never have to worry about it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s always, you will never have to worry about it again for sure. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how computers work. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John exactly. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only true of Lutron Caseta and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John not SponCon, but I should keep the timer running. When I got that thing and installed it in my house and put black tape over
⏹️ ▶️ John all the lights and threw it behind my TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. I’m telling you, it’s incredible. So, so yeah, so I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set all this up locally and then you have to do some kind of acrobatics to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the channels on the NUC, the N-U-C, the little PC, to get the channel server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there to basically broadcast to my primary channel server,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is running on my M1 Mac mini here at the house, in order to get those two to to communicate with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the idea is that the stuff that’s coming off the antenna would then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just be additional, now I’m using an overloaded term, additional television channels that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are available within the channels app. Hopefully that makes sense. So that all worked here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was on my same network. But then, of course, I need to be able to put this on somebody else’s network.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So enter former and recent sponsor, Tailscale. They have paid me to say nice things about them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not in this case. This is me just genuinely being excited about Tailscale. I got Tailscale set up. That all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked great. And so it all appears as though everything’s on the same land, even though it really isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All’s good. So I box everything up. I ship it to my friend Sean. It arrived today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sometime shortly before I shipped everything, I think Sean had said to me, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you looked at this? And he links me to, I think it’s an FTC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey database, that’s Like here’s the direct or the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV over the air digital TV maps here in the States, DTV reception maps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he says to me, I don’t think I get a lot of over the air stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you look at this map, it’s not good, Bob. So he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this may not go the way you think it’s going to go. And I said, ah, it’s fine. If nothing else, it’s a project in an academic exercise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So he gets all this stuff today. He, you know, He gave me my own private little VLAN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on top of his network, because again, this is the sort of thing he does for a living. And everything’s set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. He plugs in my NUC, and it boots up. It jumps right on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tail net. Everything’s good to go. It connects and communicates with the HD Home Run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m able to use some slightly advanced features of Tailscale that let me hop onto the HD Home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Run, even though it doesn’t have Tailscale on it. And so I’m able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell the HD home run, all right, go ahead and search for channels. And it does it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it comes up with like eight of them. And then I go to start tuning in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to these channels. And I see that one of them I think was ABC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it won’t actually play it because apparently the signal’s too weak. I think one of them might have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NBC, but it won’t actually play that because the signal’s too weak. There’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that channels thought was Fox, but it’s some like weird foreign affairs channel. And that comes in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great baby, but that’s useless for what I’m trying to accomplish. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are curious, this coming Sunday, the Giants are playing, I forget who, but they’re playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a game that will be broadcast on CBS. I will give you one guest, gentlemen, what channel wasn’t even offered as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week possibility at Sean’s house, CBS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what I’m going to do, But this academic exercise, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infrastructure of it worked perfectly. Chef’s kiss. Unfortunately, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need Sean to move because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be cheaper to just buy season of whatever on the whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, for sure. And it’ll be cheaper once you factor in your time. Although this is a fun little hobby, but like, but you’re getting, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting, trying to get CBS over the air. Doesn’t Sean get CBS not over the air in some capacity?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so it’s funny you bring that up because some of the things that we have been discussing up until the time we started recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were, you know, hey, Sean might decide to ditch his TiVos. Sean is younger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I am, but he has the spirit of an 80 year old. And so he is still clinging to his TiVos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. And, uh, he said, you know, maybe I will take, well, I think he has two of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said, maybe I’ll take the cable card out of one of those and put it in the HD home run, you know, the HD home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run that accepts a cable card, and maybe he’ll use channels for his own separate purposes, you know, cause he wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, he he was thinking about going down this path for his own reasons. And then I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my channel server could also find that same HD home run on the local network, VLAN notwithstanding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would only need one of the four tuners that it has available to it, and only on certain times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Sundays, and maybe everyone would be happy. Unfortunately, Silicon Dust, who is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the manufacturers of HD Home Run, stopped, or seemed to have stopped making the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HD Home Run that accepts a cable card. so you can only come up with them second hand, which is mildly
⏹️ ▶️ John companies aren’t giving out cable cards anymore either. And as they break, they’re probably not gonna replace them. I was actually thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of getting rid of one of my cable cards, but haven’t quite done it yet. But yeah, the writing’s on the wall for cable card.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, so one of the things we were talking about is if he can come up with his own, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HD Home Run Connect, which takes the cable card, and maybe he’ll do a channels installation of his own, and then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can just kind of occasionally borrow one of the tuners on his HD Home Run. Another thing he was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about is maybe if he could create like a secondary login on his cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provider just on their online systems, and either I could use their app to potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch his cable from here, which is actually made easier because of a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature of Tailscale where I can basically have my Internet egress be through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this knock that’s at his house. So from a geographic perspective, I’m entering the Internet in Connecticut.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s a possibility. That’s not my preference. I’m trying to do this on the up and up, well, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as I can be, because I shipped hardware to him. It’s getting it over the air, or that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hope, and so on and so forth. We’re also gonna look into TV Everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a thing, which is kind of like, sort of kind of spiritually like YouTube TV, but not at all YouTube TV, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can use your cable provider to get access to a bunch of channels. I don’t know if his cable provider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supports that, but maybe I could have him log in, or even have him log
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on channels that’s at his house, you know, so I don’t even need to see his credentials or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we might try that. But I will say, Marco, that I did, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for grins and gigs, look at what the reception would be like at the new place on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Long Island. And I gotta tell you, being very close to Manhattan means you got a lot of options, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of options. Although I don’t think that CBS was one of them, if I recall correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you do have quite a few options if you’re to believe the FTC’s little website thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so depending on how this works out with Sean, I might attempt to call in a favor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s to be determined. Fair enough. We’ll see. But I don’t know. I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if nothing else, it was a fun academic exercise in Little Baby Project to see could this be done. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m genuinely very pleased with the result from the perspective of I got everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up here in the house. I had him basically plug a few things into the wall and plug in a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things to Ethernet, and everything just worked no problem in that respect. The problem is I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him to move. And I don’t think he’s gonna be doing that. But it was a fun little project, if nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. So maybe he’ll ship this stuff back to me, maybe I’ll ship it to you if you let me, we’ll argue about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another time. But we’ll see what happens. There’s other alternatives and avenues to try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although it’s funny, normally speaking of all your ridiculous TV-ness, for many years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of my Thanksgiving celebration was messaging Casey the morning of Thanksgiving saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, my family’s trying to figure out how to watch the parade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey How do we do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of times the answer was, you would give me access to your whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV bouncing situation you had. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sling box for many years, but you haven’t asked in the last couple of years, if I recall correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because what’s happened in the meantime is that whatever network runs it just has an app that you run on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV and they just broadcast it to it. So it’s no longer necessary to use your crazy hacks for that. But thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all those years of serving us. Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it was that in the dog show, right? If I’m not mistaken?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. It’s the parade and then the dog show that follows it. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m happy to be of service. Yeah, you might be repaying that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We shall see. We shall see. Hopefully, I’ll find a different mechanism, but we shall see. I got a lot of room