617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
13 Dec 2024A new adventure awaits.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Laundry tactics
- Follow-up:
- Last (?) batch of football (🏈) news
- Simon B. Støvring on the Festivitas holiday lights
- Casey’s phone could recognize his washing machine chime
- Apple has a self-service repair store (via Ricky Haase)
- FotS Jonathan Dietz Jr. on SSD performance
- M1-M3:
ioreg -lrw0 -d1 -c AppleANS3NVMeController - M4:
ioreg -lrw0 -d1 -c AppleANS3CGv2Controller
- M1-M3:
- M4 Extreme is allegedly canceled
- John’s adventures in saving space
- visionOS 2.2, macOS 15.2, and Mac Virtual Display
- Post-show: Should Casey delay a Callsheet launch in hope of an App Store feature?
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Macintosh emulator is forbidden from third party app stores 👎🏻
Sponsored by:
- Tailscale: A secure network that just works.
- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
- Aura Frames: The best digital photo frame. Use code ATP for $35 off the best-selling Carver Mat frame.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
🧦🧦
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just barely made it here. I had to, um, I had to rush, pair all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the socks and the laundry before I came in here. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought you were gonna say you had to, like, rush home from Manhattan, you know, you’re living the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy lad life or something like that. Nope. Just, nope. Imagine socks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the bed was a whole bunch of unsorted socks. And, you know, usually, as I’ve discussed on the show, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roles in the household are kitchen dog, wires, and puke. And Tiff is soft things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plants, school, and fun. Now, soft things would typically be her purview. So she does all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laundry. However, there are occasional exceptions that poke holes in those boundaries because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one person really hates something or doesn’t mind something. And one of the things is that Tiff does all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laundry but really hates pairing socks. So that is my job. And so I wanted to hurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John up. You can’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a hurry though.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you do it in a hurry, you’re not going to match them up right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You underestimate my skill, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John You underestimate the amount of stuff I think is involved in matching socks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you both underestimate the sneaky, sir. And that’s a reference that I bet John didn’t even get. No. What now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What now? All right. Let’s see if ATP references gets
⏹️ ▶️ John no. I mean, so the thing about matching socks is, uh, it’s not so much just
⏹️ ▶️ John finding the sock that is the same sock as that one you have to, they go
⏹️ ▶️ John in pairs in terms of wear and age, you know what I mean? And right and left. So you really want to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pair the ones that have always been together to be back together, even when you have, you know, 16
⏹️ ▶️ John of the same socks that came in a pack when you bought them all, you can’t just match them up willy nilly with their other socks when they
⏹️ ▶️ John come out. They have to go about it with their partner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I solve this in a different way.
⏹️ ▶️ John You only buy two of a sock ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, so that’s okay. Yeah. So one of them, yes, one of them is my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco socks are from former sponsor Marine Layer. And they’re one of those things where like, you know, they’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like five pairs of socks in stock at any given time. And they just rotate out all the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of have to buy them if you see them, if you like them. And so as a result, I have all sorts of different socks from Marine Lear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I try never to buy two of the same pair. So I actually don’t have two identical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sets of the same socks except for the summer short socks, which is just like some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big Adidas bulk pack of ankle socks I bought. So far, those are just so interchangeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it doesn’t really matter. They’re just all a bunch of gray socks.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m saying. You’re not as discerning. You’re like, ah, you’ve seen one Adidas athletic sock, you’ve seen them
⏹️ ▶️ John all. They can go with any of them. But no, there are pairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There aren’t. But the other thing is what really dramatically shrinks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time for any kind of laundry folding, especially with socks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I used to do the service to my family of turning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all the right way as part of this process.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that a service? That’s just called folding laundry. Are you putting socks in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your drawer inside out?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you ball the socks up it kind of doesn’t matter whether they’re inside or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided that so when I remove my clothing, not to get TMI listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when I remove my clothing, I leave it in the laundry the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side in or out or whatever. So my laundry does not have to be turned back because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am conscientious on the way into the machine. So I save, so all my laundry comes out, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right way. So my socks are all the right way and the rest of my family’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco socks, I left them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John A, that’s spiteful, and
⏹️ ▶️ John B, if you put them into the washing machine inside out and they have crap on them, the crap is going to stay stuck inside the socks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you get a bunch of little bits of leave or wood chips
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever stuck to the bottom of your sock and you take it off inside out and it goes in the washing machine, that stuff’s not coming out. It’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be right in there when you turn it the other way. So you’re not even getting your stuff clean. Hey, my stuff goes in the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Well, that’s, yeah. My stuff gets cleaned. Everyone should turn their clothes right side out before they put them in the hamper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree but not everyone does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well see one of the services you provide by doing laundry is turn them right side out before you put them in the washing machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes that’s what well what yeah when I’m when I take my own clothes off and put them in the laundry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I do but the rest of family hey that they can do what they want to do they’re people.
🏈📺🏴☠️
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. I know everyone is waiting with bated breath to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how football went this past Sunday. The Giants lost as they always do, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy to report that the system worked and I was able to watch a game on Fox that was not my local area and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much flawless and I’m very happy about that. So I know the two of you, especially Marco, the newfound football fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were deeply concerned and I’m happy to, you know, put your mind at rest. All worked according to plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, this is the VPN method or is this some kind of weird cable home run thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a combination of actually today’s sponsor, Tailscale. It legitimately is using that. This isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a clever plug for a sponsor. It really, truly is a legitimate, honest to goodness thing. But it’s Tailscale,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the channels app, and TV Everywhere. A combination of those three things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically got me where I needed to be. So happy to report it did work.
🎄💡💻💡🎄
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, moving on, it is holiday season, and so we are going to talk more about Festivitasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is Simon Stavring’s, I think, hopefully, holiday light app. And one of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was John, I’m not 100% sure, probably John, was wondering how does Simon figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to hang the lights on the dock? And I’m sorry, I should back up a half step. This is a thing, it’s just for fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s really cute where you can put holiday lights on like your menu bar on your dock and whatnot. And John, I believe it was you wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how Simon figured out where to hang the lights, especially during like magnification and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I understand that you have answers for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, Simon wrote in to say festivus, festivitas. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Festivitas, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think. Festivitas, okay. Anyway, his app is not using a private API.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s using the accessibility API to read the frames of every tile in the dock. And based on those
⏹️ ▶️ John frames, create a CG path. This requires sandboxing to be disabled. So the Mac app store
⏹️ ▶️ John is still a no-go. So this is one of the other unfortunate situations that I’ve talked about on the Mac before, where
⏹️ ▶️ John there is an API to do something. It’s a public API, but it’s old.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has deprecated it. And if you want to submit your app to the Mac App Store, you can’t use this API.
⏹️ ▶️ John And believe it or not, the accessibility APIs on Mac OS fall into that category. So
⏹️ ▶️ John no, they’re not private as in, you’re not supposed to use them, period. Although you could, but
⏹️ ▶️ John no, this is a public API, but Apple says, yeah, you can’t be on the Mac App Store if you use the accessibility APIs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically because they’re old and their permission level is not granular enough. I mean, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John old and creaky APIs to begin with, so you don’t really wanna use them, but they do what you need them to do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re too powerful, essentially. Like if you get accessibility permission for your app in the Mac App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could do all sorts of nefarious things, and Apple just says flat out, okay, well, unless you have one of these super secret
⏹️ ▶️ John private exceptions, quote unquote temporary exceptions, you can’t do that. And I understand all of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John except I feel like, okay, but how many years into Mac OS X or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to call it, do we need to be, before a modernized version of the accessibility API comes along
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can use and ship in the Mac App Store. So anyway, there you go. Not technically a private API,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still something that keeps the app out of the Mac App Store. The sad story on the Mac continues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey True words never spoken.
🧺☑️👂
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I have not tried this yet, but a handful of people have written in with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my forthcoming adventure in trying to figure out when my washing machine has finished
⏹️ ▶️ Casey washing. And a lot of people said, oh, you should use a power outlet thing that’ll read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much power the machines are using. And that’s reasonable, although for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal reasons, like I don’t love the idea of a big appliance going through one of these little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dinguses in the wall. And so I was thinking about using a vibration sensor to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out when the washing machine or the dryer is completed. And a few people wrote in to say, you know, another thing you can do potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is use an accessibility feature called Recognize Sounds using iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what this does is your iPhone can continually listen for certain sounds, such as a doorbell siren or crying baby, and notify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you when it recognizes these sounds. And there’s a knowledge-based article that we will put in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This all sounds well and good, and it very well may work. I had intended to try it before recording and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I apologize. I just didn’t have the chance. But the thing, the real crux of the issue is that our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laundry room is actually upstairs, which sounds kooky at first, but is really convenient because most of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laundry is generated so to speak or put in the hamper anyway, upstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s the way to go if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. So it’s one of those things where at first when we were looking at the house many, many years ago, we were like, what? And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once we had it, we were like, Oh, this is excellent. This or a laundry chute. Laundry chutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the best. But anyways, so the problem is often that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little siren you do dad, if it isn’t set loud enough, which is a user error, or if we’re just downstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the other side of the house, again, as I’ve said many times, our house is not that big, but it’s big enough and there’s enough activity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially with small kids, that oftentimes we just can’t hear it. And I’m skeptical that my phone would be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear it, but I am definitely going to give this a shot see what happens, but we’ll see.
🛠️💸
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some interesting feedback from Ricky Haas. Ricky writes, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s true that the Apple store only sells SSD modules for the Mac Pro. Apple also has a first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey party parts store, the self-service repair store for Apple products, which somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the domain self-service repair.com. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John how that happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d think Apple would be in there somewhere. We talked about this when, back when they first rolled this out and we were talking about the giant expensive set of tools that
⏹️ ▶️ John you get that you have to return and everything. But yeah, that same thing, it still exists. They continue to expand it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I think honestly, I think that was intentional. Like when Apple launched this, they did so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely quietly and kind of like holding their arm out all the way, like at arm’s length, like here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you guys just like, take this, like, I don’t think they want a ton of people to know about this and they certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want their brand associated with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so it’s very weird. It’s worth you loading the webpage just or website just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see how not Apple-y it is, but either way. So Ricky writes, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically takes some time after a product launch for parts to show up. so they don’t have components for the new Mac minis yet. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they sell the same components as those available for the Mac Studio, they should eventually offer storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrades. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t allow you to simply browse all available parts. You need to enter a serial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number. And so I saw this and I immediately said, okay, well, I’ve got a serial number for my MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a year ago MacBook Pro. It’s a M3 Max MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. And so I entered my serial number and I was just goofing off looking at different options. and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my MacBook Pro, it would appear that the SSD is soldered into the Logic Board or is certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not considered a separately removable and serviceable part. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked, okay, well, how much is a Logic Board for my MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A Logic Board for my MacBook Pro, they bill you $4,751.12.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is 64 gigs and eight terabytes, $4,700. Now wait, hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, you did just gloss over those two numbers pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey quickly. The eight terabytes part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair, but still, I mean, the whole machine, I think it was like $5,550 or something like that. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that eight terabytes thing is made of tiny diamonds. I’m not sure if you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this. Apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently, but in the defense of Apple, I then continued reading down a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it says replaced part return credit is $4,312. $312. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, according to Apple, if I understand this right, the price is at, and they list it right there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price after credit, $439.12, which for 8 terabytes and 64 gigs and an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M3 Max, that’s actually not that bad. But ooh, baby, you got to shell out five grand to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, and then they’ll eventually give you a whole pile back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to mention the process of replacing it would probably not be simple. Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if you could get a cheap 8 terabyte NAND that way, like if something goes
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you don’t, does it say that you have to have like a broken one? You know what I mean? I guess, I guess you have to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return the board. But like, yeah, I, I don’t know how you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you probably shouldn’t be defrauding their repair system by stealing the NAND off the motherboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow. Like I don’t think that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to work. No, you’d return your intact one, but you’d get a fresh one. Like you basically get a fresh logic
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, I see what you mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like just because it’s, it’s so cheap. Obviously, you don’t pay for your own labor, and probably you’re screwing up your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John every time you open it up and close it back up. But that’s what you get for having a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So anyway, so I went on a little side quest there. Let me get back to what Ricky was writing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ricky writes, and let me repeat, unfortunately, Apple doesn’t allow you to simply browse all available parts and need to enter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a serial number. So Ricky continues, I managed to find one from a Mac studio via a YouTube unboxing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video, which makes me so happy. But anyway, and voila, NAND
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modules are available directly from Apple. And so Ricky was kind enough to send some screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and various different modules are available. 512 gigs, 1, 2, 4, and 8 terabytes. The cheapest at 512 gigs is $395.12.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you get $44 back if you replace the return part. Or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you get, so that means the sum total is $351.12 for 512 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the flip side, 8 terabytes like yours truly, $2,464. then you get a measly $369.60 back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So your price after credit for an 8TB unit for a MacStudio, $2,094.40.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, this is a profit center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, this is like when you buy parts for an expensive car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the manufacturer. Like, if you’re gonna have some kind of high-end sports car, if you wanna go to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manufacturer to buy their brake pads, they’re gonna cost a heck of a lot more than everyone else’s brake pads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s kind of their privilege, and, you know, Some of it is like, well, we have very high specs for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our brake pads, but a lot of it is just their profit. That’s the business model, and that’s what this is too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And actually in the realm of expensive cars, the parts, when you buy them
⏹️ ▶️ John aftermarket from the manufacturer, like the original, actual genuine parts, cost
⏹️ ▶️ John way more, way more than you can possibly imagine. Like if you add up the price of all the parts that you would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to buy to build the car that you just bought, it would cost just many, many times more. Whereas these
⏹️ ▶️ John prices are merely pretty much exactly the same as the insane prices that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apple charges when you buy it, you know what I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean? I think the prices are very close. Like maybe they’re actually a little bit cheaper, but as we
⏹️ ▶️ John saw before with the Bugatti headlights, it just doesn’t make any sense if you look at the prices. And it’s because, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with very fancy, expensive cars, they don’t wanna keep a lot of parts in stock. And the few that they do keep
⏹️ ▶️ John in stock to make it worth their while to keep any in stock, they charge huge amounts of money for one little
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of plastic, one, you know, forget about like panels and body panels in the car, just any little thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car, there’s like seven of these in the world and if you want one you have to pay a huge amount of money. So
⏹️ ▶️ John be glad Apple merely charges normal Apple prices for its parts.
💰: 🖼️
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of my favorite kinds of product is one where there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just generally trash and someone comes in and says, no, no, no, we’re going to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. We saw this with the iPod as a great example. You know what another example of this is?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really mean it. They didn’t ask me to say this. It’s Aura frames. That’s Aura, A-U-R-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frames. What these are, are a really great, well-designed version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those really chintzy photo frames we got like five, 10 years ago that would play, that would show digital photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’re all trash back then, right? Aura has done it and done it right. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so incredibly good. And there’s several different options to choose from. And they’ve done everything so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right that one of the things you can do is like crack open a little cover on the box for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a frame. And there’s a QR code or something like that, that that’s in there that lets you pre
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like hydrate the frame so that the moment it is opened by the person you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving it to, It will automatically connect to their Wi-Fi network and start downloading photos. They have thought of darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near everything. It really truly is extremely well done. We have one of these in the house. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking love it. Every time I go into our living room where it’s mounted on the wall, I look up at it and I see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a delightful picture of Aaron or the kids, and it makes me so genuinely happy. We sent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one to my parents, and you think I’m happy about these things. Oh boy, my parents love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing pictures of their grandkids and their friends, and I guess their kids too, scrolling through their living room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. It really is incredible, incredible stuff. They have a bespoke iPhone and Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app where you can beam things to the frames from afar. It really, really truly is excellent. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can save on the perfect gift by going to AuraFrames.com to get up to $35 off Aura’s best-selling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Carver matte frames by using the promo code, guess what, ATP at checkout. That’s A-U-R-A-F-R-A-M-E-S.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey promo code ATP. This deal is exclusive to listeners, So get yours now in time for the holidays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you act real quick, terms and conditions apply. Thank you to Aura for sponsoring the show.
💾💨⏱️📊
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, more from our friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr. with regard to SSD performance. Here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, there’s a lot here and I’m going to read pretty much all of it, so bear with me but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really fascinating. So Jonathan writes, the state of SSD benchmarking on the Mac is pretty sad. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be making buying decisions or even be particularly concerned about the sequential read and write speeds of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me pause that for a second because, thank you, Jonathan, for saying what I always try to say whenever we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks and what used to be one of the main activities that I participated in online, which was technical
⏹️ ▶️ John people complaining about how benchmarks are not representative. We’d argue about Mac versus
⏹️ ▶️ John PC and CPU benchmarks and Altevec versus MMX, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was all about like, well, you know, ByteMarks versus SpecInt versus this. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John people arguing that benchmark is not a good one. It can be gamed,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be cheated, it’s is not representative of real performance, or okay, well, I’m playing a game, I get better frame rates than
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Well, that has a good port on this platform, but a bad port on that platform, so that’s not good a benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ John either. All we did was argue about how benchmarks didn’t mean anything, and now, in the modern age, go
⏹️ ▶️ John to any YouTube video, listen to any podcast, and you’re just like, oh, well, this is what Geekbench says, and this is what the benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John say, and nobody argues about it anymore. They’re just like, yeah, the benchmark says this is faster, so I guess it must be faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s so much to be argued about these benchmarks, especially with things like Geekbench, which we really don’t have. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have some knowledge of it, you can get kind of into technicality of it, but it’s nothing like the open source spec benchmarks were back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John day, or like, you know, running games that are open source that you can compile for any platform, and then it becomes like a compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmark. So kudos to Jonathan for doing what
⏹️ ▶️ John was once a great pastime and has now fallen by the wayside, which is complaining about benchmarks. They’re no good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gracious. The results of the two most popular benchmarking tools, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to comparing quarter mile times for a car. Amorphous disk mark is better, but still miles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the type of in-depth testing that a non-tech used to conduct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of them appear to report optimistic write speeds, probably due to the effects of write caching by the system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perhaps the biggest problem with these numbers, though, is the inability to identify the actual hardware being tested.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the specific Mac model and disk size being tested is the bare minimum for making these results comparable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ideally, you’d also want the IOReg entry for the Controller Characteristics property
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Apple ANS3 NVMe Controller or Apple ANS3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CGV2 Controller object. Man, I don’t really miss Objective-C naming. That is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something I miss in my life. Anyway, the property provides many details about the underlying architecture of the SSD. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular, the DICE per bus key reveals the total number of NAND dyes in channels, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we can infer the number of NAND packages. And the NAND marketing name key tells us the type
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of NAND used, number of planes, and density. All you have to do is pop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open the terminal and run the following command, no teardown necessary. For M1 through M3, IOReg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I’ll just put in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s a bunch of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t need to read commands
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco strings online. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John an IOReg command with some flags with those two names that were read earlier. This is like reading a URL out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I caught myself. I call myself, don’t worry. So anyways, Jonathan continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only thing that people should be concerned about storage-wise when buying a Mac is selecting the right SSD, the right size,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, SSD for their needs. In most cases, selecting the next higher capacity drive will double the endurance and improve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance, but there’s no underlying problem with the speed or endurance of any of the SSDs found in any of the M-series Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at any capacity. However, if you fill the drive, performance can be severely impacted, so you really do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to avoid that. For those planning on using their Mac for eight or more years, as I generally do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 256 gigs may become a pain point even for casual users. Fortunately, Apple will likely transition to one terabit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NAND dies as soon as next year, and the 256 gig capacity will go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way of the Dodo, just like the eight gig as the entry level RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level did as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, we can’t wait for that to happen. Although I still feel like a 512 might be small, but I think this is generally, the ring’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true to me in all of our, over a decade now doing this show or whatever, You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hear a lot about people’s SSDs going bad. I mean, they do, it does happen. Everything goes bad, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John fails, but Apple has not historically had, as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, any Macs that they’ve, especially in the ARM Mac era, any Apple Silicon Macs where the SSD was
⏹️ ▶️ John like really bad. I remember there was a big kerfuffle that we talked about on the show back when I think the M1s were first out,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they were like, oh, you buy it with too little RAM and it’s swapping to it. And there was some thing that tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to show how much life is left on, how much endurance is left on the flash memory based on how many
⏹️ ▶️ John writes it’s getting and some tools reporting really huge numbers and like at this rate, your SSD will be dead
⏹️ ▶️ John in a year and a half. And that turned out mostly, I think, to be a problem with the tool reporting bad numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem with interpreting the numbers it did return. And in the end, people with M1 Macs didn’t all have their SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John fail after the first year, right? I mean, we’re still using one right now and it’s fine. But I also
⏹️ ▶️ John agree that one of the things, well, macOS doesn’t like this Add
⏹️ ▶️ John to the pile now NAND flash drives don’t like this don’t get close to the disk
⏹️ ▶️ John storage limit bad things happen Think bad upsetting terrible things happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John The operating system doesn’t like it flash memory doesn’t like it It’s just you’re just asking for trouble Which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John it really is important to get as big as an SSD as you can or be very studious about getting stuff stopped
⏹️ ▶️ John off of that SSD because unfortunately MacOS is not great about
⏹️ ▶️ John helping you when you start pressing up against your disc limit. It will just sort of like complain feebly
⏹️ ▶️ John for a few seconds until it’s too late and then just keel over and it’ll be a sad situation.
🖥️🍀❌
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got some repeated news, as it turns out, over the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last 24-ish hours. M4 Extreme’s chip, or the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Extreme chip, is unlikely after Apple quote-unquote cancels the high-performance chip, reading from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacRumors, who is in turn quoting from the information. Apple is working on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI chip with Broadcom, is the title, the headline of the post on the information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s Silicon Design team in Israel is leading development of the AI chip. That team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was instrumental in designing the processes Apple introduced in 2020 to replace Intel chips in Macs. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this past summer cancelled the development of a high-performance chip for Macs consisting of four smaller chips stitched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together to free up some of its engineers in Israel to work on the AI chip, one of the people said, highlighting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the company’s shifting priorities. To make the chip, Apple is planning to use one of TSMC’s most advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manufacturing processes known as N3P. Apple plans to manufacture at least one of its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone chips next year using N3P. The other upcoming AI chips designed by OpenAI and NVIDIA are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected to use the process as well to improve performance. For its AI chip, Apple plans to utilize a chiplet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey design that AMD pioneered more than a decade ago. Rather than build a single chip with sections for different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey functions, Apple will break up the chip and functions into smaller pieces or chiplets and then stitch them back together as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. The design reduces the chip’s manufacturing complexity and potential for defects.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was a kind of, I don’t know if this is a separate story or just confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ John of the vague rumor we got, I think multiple years ago, which was, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this was back when the M1 extreme, the, the big M1, the quad M1 chip was canceled.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and that, that was just an anonymous tip from, I don’t even remember where the sourcing, but it wasn’t any particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable source, but just something we were told. And it was, uh, Hey, if you’re waiting for something on that size,
⏹️ ▶️ John the earliest it could possibly appear as the M7. And that was back when I think the M2 was just
⏹️ ▶️ John on the horizon or coming out. So M7, no chance of any chip like that until the M7 given the lead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To jump in really quickly, that I believe, the original source of that was actually Upgrade, if I’m not mistaken, because someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had anonymously ran into Upgrade. Because this was covered in Gruber’s coverage of all this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he reminded me of, in his post, it reminded me of the feedback that Upgrade got, wherein
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone allegedly with inside knowledge said, hey, this isn’t going to happen until the M7 at the earliest.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking maybe this team in Israel was the team working on the M7 thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they just got pulled off. And here’s the thing. Many things are thwarting
⏹️ ▶️ John this chip. The fact that it’s very expensive. The fact that Apple doesn’t want to do it for such low volumes. You know, like this, you
⏹️ ▶️ John really need to believe in something like this to make it happen. It’s you know, as my blog post said, like the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John cars like the LFA happening at a company like Lexus is a bunch of people really, really want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it happen because it just does not make economic sense. It makes sense for the company and you need to have enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John who believe in that. That’s the whole point of the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which will be coming back someday because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John its job is still not done. Mac Pro Believe shirt will be back next year in WWDC. Well, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John once again, Apple has found a reason not to make this chip, which it’s pretty easy to do. And in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes some sense. Like, obviously, Apple, you know, AI is a big thing. Apple doesn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to just pay Amazon to use all of its chips. So Apple recently, I think someone from Apple spoke at like the AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John re-invent to talk about how they’re using all of Amazon’s AI training chips and they’re loving it and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. So Apple’s doing what it has to do, but we also know from past stories we’ve discussed in the show that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John its own Apple Silicon and its own data centers running its own AI workloads with the private cloud computing thing that they made,
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly a bunch of M2 Ultras, so on and so forth. Makes perfect sense that Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John decide and to use its own Silicon in its data center to run AI workloads. The M2 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a chip that was really designed for that. It’s designed to be in Macs. Making
⏹️ ▶️ John a purpose-built AI training inference, whatever, purpose-built
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon for the data center for AI workloads makes sense, and I think Apple will do a good job at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The rumors are that Apple’s going to make that chip, Broadcom is helping them, yada, yada. They’re not, as usual, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will not sell this chip to other people. It will just be a thing that Apple makes for its own data center. So no customer will ever
⏹️ ▶️ John see this. They’re not gonna sell access to it like Amazon and Google and stuff do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna be for them. It’ll probably be big and complicated and expensive, but what it won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John is a Mac Pro type chip, because obviously a lot of things that the Mac Pro needs to do, a chip
⏹️ ▶️ John inside a data center doing AI workloads does not need to do. And if you want people to make a big
⏹️ ▶️ John monster chip that can do this, probably the team that was working on the Mac Pro chip has the people that you need, and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can just leave them there and hire a bunch of new people. So I understand from a business perspective why
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing this. And yet, if you’re ever gonna make a chip that makes sense in that gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John case, you gotta actually make one someday, or is it just gonna be a series of
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studios in a giant case for the next five years? Stay tuned and find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there are also, in all fairness to them, this might not be purely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco economic. This might also be, you know, maybe they made these prototypes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they weren’t as good as they thought. because if you look at the Ultra chip, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the two maxes, you know, talking to each other over the Silicon interposer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not scale perfectly in all useful ways. There is some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree of overhead, the scaling is not complete, you don’t get 2X of everything when you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get close to 2X in certain ways, but sometimes more like 1.5X in other ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So obviously they’re not actually achieving perfect scaling, there’s other bottlenecks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere or the limitations. Maybe when they tried a 4X design, it just wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it because maybe a 4X design, rather than reaching 4X performance, maybe it only reached
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2.5X performance or something like that. Like maybe it just wasn’t technically compelling and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would you pay four times as much or whatever, I’m sure the cost would be absurdly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive. Would you pay that much for quote, only two or three times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the performance? Maybe not. And maybe they decided the better way to go was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe to wait for something like a chiplet design where they could do things like the parts that scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well offer more of those, like the GPU cores maybe, and maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco duplicate the entire chip design and all the other ways in order to achieve more GPU cores. Because when you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU performance, we’re pretty, the CPU performance I think is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what scales the worst as you add more cores here because of various limits and stuff. What the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro needs to be more competitive with its previous market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as the current market, what it needs is more neural
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engine cores and or more GPU cores for certain configurations. So if they’re moving to a system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of chiplets, which sounds very promising, where they’re able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isolate these components a bit more and to be able to say, make a chip that keeps the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU core count as an Ultra, but gives you twice the GPU core count, for instance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to make that somewhat economically, you know, it’s all relative, of course, but you know, somewhat economically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be more compelling than if you doubled everything and didn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get, you know, all of that performance. So anyway, I think, I’m guessing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason they canned the first quad was not purely economic. I’m guessing the reason it hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come back is also not purely economic. And if they are going to bring something like that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market, I bet it’s going to take a very different strategy than just give us two ultras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glued together. I think it’ll be more customized.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was talking to Gruber about this. I’m way behind on Twitter, but, or Twitter, sorry. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John way behind on Mastodon, for reasons we’ll get into in a little bit. But I was talking to Gruber about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I didn’t read his article about it. But anyway, one of the things I was saying was that, like, and we’ve discussed it in past episodes, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John I could see what the M4 Max die looks like because if it doesn’t have an interposer
⏹️ ▶️ John that means they’re not going to stick two of them together to make an ultra. And yeah the nonlinear scaling
⏹️ ▶️ John of the ultras versus the maxes has been a problem. I think the M1 ultra was the one that had
⏹️ ▶️ John really bad GPU scaling. Like the GPU was the one thing that should scale close to linearly and it wasn’t because of interconnect issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what I’ve always been hoping was that the M3 or M4 ultra will not be
⏹️ ▶️ John two maxes stuck together but instead will be a dedicated custom chip that just has
⏹️ ▶️ John more stuff in the right things. Single die, you know, single massive super expensive die but
⏹️ ▶️ John not two maxes stuck together because the two maxes stuck together approach made some sense economically
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was worth a try but I think with two tries at it with the M1 and M2 Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit wasteful, it doesn’t have the greatest performance benefits and that’s not always
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst thing though by the way because when you’re shopping for high-end stuff, very often you are paying much
⏹️ ▶️ John much more for just a little bit more performance. That’s why it’s so important to essentially make the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that you can make because you can say well look it is five times more expensive for only two
⏹️ ▶️ John times the speed but is literally the fastest thing that you can get. So if you want to spend money and get the fastest thing if that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes a difference to your business or to your job or whatever but you just want the fastest you don’t care that the price doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John scale linearly with performance you just want the fastest. But you do want something that you know performs
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as possible and part of that is not Wasting performance and money on overhead. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you better performance. So You know one of the things I was hoping before reading the story Was
⏹️ ▶️ John that the m4 ultra would appear and it would not be to m4 max is stuck together But would be its own dedicated chip and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be really powerful and then the extreme would be two of those stuck together You know what? I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that they could design them in that way so that that gives you a more economical Extreme because you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John taking two ultras, but the two ultras have their parts arrange such that it makes a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ John sense to put them together. Yeah, and the chiplet design, once you get to a certain size, like the ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John with the interposer, that’s basically pushing the limit. We talked about this before, the radical limit, like how big can you even make things?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not just economically, but practically speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John Physically. Yeah, so everyone’s doing a chiplet type design. And yeah, when I, when I,
⏹️ ▶️ John we keep referring to it at the quad because we’re basically trying to say something twice as big as an ultra, but it doesn’t mean four of anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just means count up all the stuff, count up all the transistors, all the die area, something that is
⏹️ ▶️ John twice as big as an Ultra. That’s what we’re doing all the back of the envelope math like how many GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores and what it would be competitive with, assuming the GPU scale is close to linearly. So I’m not holding
⏹️ ▶️ John out for four of anything stuck together. I just want something that is roughly sized like four
⏹️ ▶️ John of those things with a much better arrangement of parts, less used and overhead. I don’t need four copies
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Thunderbolt controllers. I don’t need four different media encoders and only one of which is used at a time. You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can do better, but anyway, it just seems like this is not going to be in the cards for a long time. So now, the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing I have left to hope for is that the Ultra will be better than the previous Ultras,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully by not being two Maxis stuck together, but just being a dedicated Ultra that is its own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if it is two Maxis stuck together, that they’ve resolved the issues. Because again, my memory is failing me on this, but I seem to recall the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Ultra, the GPU scaling was really terrible because of some, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, thing that they didn’t do right in the some some under something some buffer or something was under resourced somewhere and
⏹️ ▶️ John it really killed the performance and that’s just a shame because The GPU transistors were there they had enough of them if they
⏹️ ▶️ John were all in the same die They would have worked great But because they were separated and because there was a problem with the interconnect you lost
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of performance. So We’ll see but yeah, this is you know Not
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was ever likely that I was gonna get the next Mac Pro, but it’s definitely looking more like Mac Studio for
⏹️ ▶️ John me Hopefully the M4 ultra will be good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’ll be weird for you not to have a Mac Pro. I mean, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the record, but it’ll be weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I probably will just keep it here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because the studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can continue to be here like a piece of furniture and the studio will just be on the desk. It’s so small. It doesn’t take up any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, if you get a second one, you can make them into a desk. Just take, you know, those are the two legs, get a tabletop or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a door and just stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it across the top and there you go. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John people do with the old cheese graters, but they’re a little low and I would never do that. This beautiful computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for benches. Yeah.
💰: 🥸
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Delete.me. Now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really fast and easy to a creepy and scary level to just do a quick web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search and find your personal information out there on the web. Because there’s all these data broker sites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gather your information often without your consent. They trade it, they sell it, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publish it. And so anybody can just do a quick web search and find your home address, your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, your relatives’ names and addresses and phone numbers and emails and all this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is both creepy and even could be used to scam people and do other bad stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is not great. Delete.me is a service that removes your personal information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from hundreds of data broker websites. So it gets much harder to find your info out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They go in there and get your details removed. They do the hard work for you, ensuring that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your family’s information is much more private. So this holiday season, you actually might want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give this to your relatives as a gift because their information is out there too. That can be out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there sold online without you even knowing it. So again, home address, phone numbers, email addresses, those are all floating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around for you and your relatives. And so you can actually give delete me as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gift of privacy and peace of mind with believe me, of course. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is actually available as a special discount for our listeners. Today, you get 20% off your Delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash ATP and use promo code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP and enter ATP at checkout. That’s joindeleteme.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code ATP. Thank you so much to Delete.me for sponsoring our show.
🗄️🗄️➡️🗄️
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John. So potentially in preparation for you getting a Mac studio, you’ve been doing some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house cleaning. What’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this. Yeah, I know. Seriously,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t remember. I think we were talking about like, maybe we were talking about our photos workflows or something on
⏹️ ▶️ John the member special. But anyway, to refresh everyone’s memory, we have a shared iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library thing. I love it. My wife and I are both in the same shared library.
⏹️ ▶️ John Essentially, all of our photos are in the shared library. I think pretty much all of her
⏹️ ▶️ John photos are in there. I keep some photos out of the shared library. They’re mostly screenshots of videos about destiny stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John My wife doesn’t need to see that. So it’s like, yeah, so those are my but I have a very
⏹️ ▶️ John small and also the pictures of the backs of appliances and stuff like that, those are in my personal library. But for
⏹️ ▶️ John basically everything else is in a massive 200,000 plus photo shared library, right? Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple hasn’t really finished the fight in halo parlance on the
⏹️ ▶️ John shared photo library, some things are still not shared like albums and people. And so I still need
⏹️ ▶️ John to switch to my wife’s account on my Mac, uh, sometimes to do photo stuff, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if I were to do them in my account, it wouldn’t have any effect because they’re not shared in the shared photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, she has an account on my Mac. I switch to it. Her account
⏹️ ▶️ John is set to download originals. So our full photo library is on my Mac through
⏹️ ▶️ John her account because it’s set to download originals. It gets backed up with the whole rest of my Mac, right? But also
⏹️ ▶️ John on my account is my photo library and when I launch photos I’m essentially looking at the same photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library that she’s looking at, the shared library, right? She’s set to download originals. My account is set to the
⏹️ ▶️ John optimized storage thing. But practically speaking, there’s 200,000 photos. And when you go to her account, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can see those 200,000 photos. When you go to my account, you can see those 200,000 photos. And somebody wrote in a while back, and I think we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John on ask ATP or something asking, does Mac OS do or just photos do anything smart
⏹️ ▶️ John with the fact that it’s the same shared library and two accounts on the same Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if I set my account to download originals, to download two complete copies of my library.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I told this person, I think it will download two complete copies of your library and it’s incredibly wasteful that it does that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s a pretty tricky scenario, right? Anyway, we had that discussion a while back,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it had been sticking in my mind going, you know, I wonder, especially as my disk fills
⏹️ ▶️ John and I get close to my storage limit and I’m always like fighting against that, how much space am I wasting
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac by having the same photo libraries hers downloading originals and mine not, but like how much
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is it downloaded? So, you know, I’ve got Pearl, I can find the answer to this question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word, of course you turned to Pearl. Why would you, why wouldn’t you just use Finder?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, Pearl exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’ll use Pearl. Well, I can’t use Finder because it’s in her account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why not use PHP? I mean, you now know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gouged my eyes out. Using PHP for an extended amount has made me hate it more if that’s even
⏹️ ▶️ John possible to imagine, but it’s true. But it has
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so I wrote a little Pearl script and it ran it as root.
⏹️ ▶️ John What could possibly go wrong? Right. I’ve been running Perl as root since before you were out of high school.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, ran my script, and it crawled over
⏹️ ▶️ John her photo library, my photo library, and found all the files that are identical. And I was actually, well, first, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the file count. Any guesses?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, if you include, like, are we including all the little previews it generates and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John everything like that? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John excluding any files.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like, there’s a directory called, like whatever.photo library, like.photo library is the extension, but it’s a directory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in there is a bunch of stuff that Photos uses to keep track of your files. So obviously the originals are in there in my wife’s account,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also all the other crap of like the thumbnails and previews and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John million. No, identical files, not files total. Oh, okay. Oh, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. I think hundreds of thousands. Yeah, I mean, I’ll say like 200K. 73,000 files were identical.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, which is not bad. Fewer than I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But now keep in
⏹️ ▶️ John mind, My photo library is, how big is it? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John like two and a half terabytes, three terabytes, 200,000 photos, that’s how big it is. So I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I gotta see some major savings here. Turns out there’s only 8.6 gigs duplicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I don’t know if that’s because I kind of stay away from my photo library, don’t like scroll back in time and like load the full resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John images and stuff or whatever, I mostly just look at the pictures that have just come in. You know, I’m not really going back in time and doing stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but only 8.6 gigs. But I was like, you know what? I want
⏹️ ▶️ John those 8.6 gigs back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, here we go. You couldn’t just leave well enough alone.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because that’s the whole point of this. The person was asking like, does the OS do something smart about this? Like, does it share
⏹️ ▶️ John them and only have one copy or whatever? And I was like, I can get those 8.6 gigs back. Can I guess how? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should know how, because we’ve talked about it on the show before, but yeah, go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead. Are you gonna use the special CP copy command that does the APFS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deduplication thing for the same file?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not gonna use the CP command like an animal, But yeah, APFS, the file system that Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and phone and iOS and all the other devices use, Apple’s file system, has a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets you make a quote, clone of a file, where you get a complete independent
⏹️ ▶️ John copy of that file, essentially for free, because it shares the storage with
⏹️ ▶️ John the other file. And not like a hard link or a SIM link or an alias, not like that, not like where when you
⏹️ ▶️ John edit one file, the other one gets edited. They are two completely distinct files. They do not affect
⏹️ ▶️ John each other in any way, but while they are identical, they share the same storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you duplicate a file in the finder, go to your finder now, find a 10 gig file and make a thousand duplicates.
⏹️ ▶️ John You will not take up any more space except for the space required to store the filenames of those files. That’s why duplicates
⏹️ ▶️ John in the finder are instant. Go to find a 300 gig file, hit duplicate, and it’ll be like, why was there no progress file
⏹️ ▶️ John bar? You know why? Because it’s just cloning the file. It’s saying, those blocks on disk,
⏹️ ▶️ John now there’s another way to get at them. And again, it doesn’t tie them together like a symlink or an alias or a hardlink.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not linked in a way when you edit one file it will edit all the other copies. They’re completely independent. They will diverge
⏹️ ▶️ John as you edit them. It’s the magic of copy-on-write. It’s one of the advantages of having a modern file system. And most people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even think about it, but the cp command from the command line will do this. There’s a flag to tell it to do it. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t even pass the flag, it does it all the time anyway. The finder will do it when you duplicate. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why your file copies are instant. I do it all the time for podcast recordings. when I record a podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever folder I ended up in, Audio Hijack for this show or whatever, I copy it into a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John folder, which is just like all the shows I’ve recorded, like from going back in time. That doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take up any more space. I just copy it. I also copy it into Dropbox. I’m not sure how Dropbox handles that, but it gets deleted
⏹️ ▶️ John on Dropbox pretty soon. But anyway, I can get the space back. Take those 73,000
⏹️ ▶️ John files, and every one of them that I find where there’s identical content in my
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library, clone the one from her photo library
⏹️ ▶️ John into my photo library and throw out the one that was in my photo library. Because they have identical content and you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John do it carefully because just because they have identical content, they’re still different files. They have different creation dates, different modification
⏹️ ▶️ John dates, different owners, different permissions, different finder labels, different comments, different access control
⏹️ ▶️ John lists, different extended attributes. Tons of stuff about these files is different, but not the data.
⏹️ ▶️ John Different resource works maybe, but not the data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that you’re going through all of this on a computer. This isn’t on her computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? This is on your computer? Yep. Why? You could put another frigging hard drive in your machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why are you going through all this
⏹️ ▶️ John pain? Well, I mean, it’s not pain. The first Perl script to find out how many files were the same, real quick,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, 10 minutes, right? I mean, I think it’s overkill, but I’m behind it in principle. But doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, you know, swapping in place within the photos library, mega mega air quotes database.
⏹️ ▶️ John you. That’s one of the things is like, okay, well how can I do this in a way where I feel like I’m not hosing myself, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Aside from just being a good careful programmer with experience with Perl. One of the ways I decided to
⏹️ ▶️ John tackle this was I will choose her library as the source and mine as the target.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I will only read from hers and only write to mine because hers is like the canonical good one where it’s downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John originals, blah, blah, blah. and mine is not. Worst case scenario, I just delete my photo library
⏹️ ▶️ John and re-icloud it because there’s so little that’s actually in my photo library proper, it’s all in the shared library,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s what I did. I used hers as a source, mine as a destination to copy the files.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did it in a couple of different steps. One is I needed to be able to find out if the files were already
⏹️ ▶️ John clones of each other. I forgot to mention this, but I did that as part of the Perl script. I couldn’t find a good way to do that, except
⏹️ ▶️ John someone eventually, I eventually found someone on GitHub who had a tool that did
⏹️ ▶️ John a best effort at it. And as far as I could tell it worked, they did a bunch of test cases and always got the right answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It essentially walks the entire extents tree for each of the files and sees if they’re identical, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not great, but it’s the only way that you can do it. There’s a bunch of little flags and stuff about, there’s even one called like
⏹️ ▶️ John may share content or may share blocks, like may, well, that’s not really helpful to me. I need
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to know if they do share
⏹️ ▶️ John blocks, right? So you basically just have to walk the whole extents tree. So I use, that was written in C. I have my
⏹️ ▶️ John thing written in Perl. There’s a command on the Mac called ditto that will copy a file with all of its metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. And then I wrote in Swift, I think to do the extended attributes,
⏹️ ▶️ John creation dates, blah, blah, blah. Some things you can’t restore because I think there’s a thing called like access,
⏹️ ▶️ John access time or attribute modification time that you can’t actually update. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John gets updated by the file system and you have no way to, there’s no APIs for updating it, but I don’t think anything really uses that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I was comfortable that it would be safe I did a test on one or two files. I looked at before and afters.
⏹️ ▶️ John I examined them with every tool I had and said the before and the after file really do look identical in every way that I can determine
⏹️ ▶️ John that I care about. And so I just ran it. I got 8.6 gigs back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so happy for you. And then I thought, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disk space. Oh no, John. John, John,
⏹️ ▶️ John My computer has not lost anything. Obviously there are fewer redundant
⏹️ ▶️ John copies of bits on the SSD, but I’m not relying on the redundancy of the bits on my SSD to save those things. That’s what backups
⏹️ ▶️ John are for. Oh God. RAID is not a backup, neither is having multiple guys, but anyway, free disk space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like free opium. What could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John go wrong? Free real
⏹️ ▶️ John estate. I’m not doing free opium. Free real estate, free disk real estate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought to myself, most people don’t know about this APFS cloning thing. It’s too nerdy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But everyone likes free disk space, right? Like literally free. If you go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac App Store, you’ll find tons of like file deduplicators that will find duplicate files, but it wants you to delete
⏹️ ▶️ John the other ones. Like they all offer like, and I will delete them. I’ll save the newest one. We’ll save this, you know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, cloning doesn’t make you make that choice. You don’t lose any files.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the files stay exactly the way they were.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, are you about to launch an app? Don’t do this. Don’t do this to yourself. The support burden will be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can have all sorts of like, you know, creepy marketing about it. Like you can free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get free resources from your computer. Just give me $40. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a technical, it’s a technical ability that people aren’t leveraging on their own because it’s too onerous to do it. Like you can’t, I
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t find 73,000 files by myself. So anyway, I thought this would be a good idea for a Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I wrote it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. Are you launching it like right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Well here, so I, because I, I’ve written the Perl scripts. I’m like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t be that hard to make as a Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t use the Perl scripts in the app, for God’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sake. Oh, absolutely. The whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point of making it as an app is no more Perl scripts. Like a real, real honest to goodness app. I made,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because I like doing Mac development and my apps are essentially feature complete, although I do have a couple ideas for one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. But anyway, it was exciting to start a new app. I made a SwiftUI lifecycle app,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, started from scratch, wrote it up. I did the programmers UI that you’re all familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with, which is a giant window with a bunch of text and buttons on it. No UI and no styling, just
⏹️ ▶️ John text buttons and rapidly changing numbers, right? Nice, love it, love the programmer UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, no, it worked. And while I was doing this, I was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably someone already wrote this program and I should just like stop what I’m doing and use theirs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually I remembered, someone did write the program. We talked about it on the show. I feel like Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John now. We talked about it on the show. I already had it installed in my applications folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John I literally, it’s a pay app that I bought years ago. It already
⏹️ ▶️ John exists. So I will put a link in the show notes. It’s called Disk De Dupe by
⏹️ ▶️ John Frank Schroeder. I’m not sure how many years old it is, but it is, it
⏹️ ▶️ John does exactly what my app is trying to do. It’s not the most polished app in the world, but it’s been developed for
⏹️ ▶️ John a little while. It’s on like version 1.3 or something. It’s available on the Mac App Store. You can get it right
⏹️ ▶️ John now if you feel like it. But I’m still making my app. Other people made podcast players
⏹️ ▶️ John too, but Mark didn’t stop Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s true. He still
⏹️ ▶️ John made Overcast. And the reason I’m making, well, so I’m making the app just because I like doing Mac development,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fun. And I think there is a place in the market for a slightly more polished version of this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing it for a couple other reasons as well. One is after I’d gotten like, you know, a thousand lines into this app,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was basically working, but with an ugly UI, I thought, you know, let me not make the same mistake that everyone else always makes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should turn on Swift 6 language mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because I hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point. And so that, you know, burned a day. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you do it when there’s a thousand lines, it’s better than doing it when there’s a hundred thousand. Right there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot I don’t know about concurrency, but I figured it out, right? The other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m concerned about is, this is an incredibly dangerous app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, if I’m not careful, right? It essentially deletes
⏹️ ▶️ John and then reincarnates arbitrary files that it knows nothing about. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it does. Like it doesn’t, it doesn’t, if you point it at a directory, it doesn’t know what those files are. It just knows these two
⏹️ ▶️ John files have the same content and I’m going to magically do some magic with cloning. And when I’m done, you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John notice anything has changed. But while I’m doing it, I hope no one’s looking at those files. Unfortunately, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS being a Unix derivative does not have a really great way to tell if someone else is messing with a file. You wanna run LSOF on every
⏹️ ▶️ John file, it will take a year and a day and the kernel will get angry at you. And even that is not gonna tell you anything because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a million race conditions that you only have advisory locking, you don’t have mandatory locking like on Windows, yada, yada, yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John The point is it’s a potentially dangerous app. But then on the other hand, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John a polished version of this that is very cautious and careful maybe has a place in the market because no, people are never gonna do this on their own.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not gonna run a Perl script. Like I, they’re not gonna run a Perl script as root like I did that calls out to
⏹️ ▶️ John a Swift program that they wrote in a C program that they downloaded from GitHub. Like no one’s gonna do that. They just want
⏹️ ▶️ John a polished single Mac app that does all the stuff. So anyway, I am going to
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually make that up. It is essentially working now. It just has half a UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m noodling with the UI to try to make it not heinously ugly, but I’m having fun. And the other thing I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do with it is, so the existing app that does this is a paid up front app. I’m gonna make mine free, but within that
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase, because it’s so ideal. Like you get the app for free, you try it, it tells you how much
⏹️ ▶️ John space you can save. If you can’t save any space, you don’t find, whatever. But if it turns out you can save 10 gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you get the in-app purchase. And that gives me an opportunity to play with in-app purchase, which I’ve literally never written in
⏹️ ▶️ John any app before. So I want to do in-app purchase in a Mac app this time, just see what that experience
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, cause it could be fun. Yeah, I mean- Here’s where you tell me a store kit testing is never
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fun. I understand, but you know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, it’s not. It’s gotten better, but it’s real rough.
⏹️ ▶️ John store too Casey. It’s not just regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. No, no, that’s what I’m using.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trash. Like it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But anyway, yeah, you say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the final thing to say here is I have a Casey level
⏹️ ▶️ John naming dilemma going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yeah. Good
⏹️ ▶️ John luck. Good luck. Because here’s the thing with naming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have very particular opinions about app naming everything on the Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ John when you make a new project in Xcode, they make you pick a name for the project and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t know what your app is going to be named, you got to call it something. This is how Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John ends up with his stuff. I imagine it’s well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yep, it is exactly right. That is one of the reasons why I typically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot start a new project until I have the name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I just I can’t make myself do it with a placeholder name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll say here’s the other thing about names. Depending on which naming theme I’m going with,
⏹️ ▶️ John I very often have spaces between words. But if you put spaces between words in your Xcode project, it puts underscores
⏹️ ▶️ John and files, and it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, it messes it all up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then if you go, OK, we’ll put underscores in the file, I’ll just remove those underscores. But then your whole project is screwed up because you haven’t found
⏹️ ▶️ John every reference to that file, and it’s just like you got to. So obviously, I made a project, and I gave
⏹️ ▶️ John it a name. It’s not going to be the name of the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it Flisk Space?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as bad as a case in it, but it might as well be. My thinking on the name, I talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this briefly with Merlin on the rectifs that will come out in a little bit. My other apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are a little bit more fanciful in names, but this one I actually want people to find when they’re searching for something that does
⏹️ ▶️ John what it does. Yeah, this is like an SEO name. I can’t just call it like lemonade or something that’s just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, just nothing that has anything to do with anything, even though it might be good branding to come up with like a very unique,
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting name. No one will ever find it. I don’t know how I don’t trust the App Store search and my keywords and my description or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I want the name to at least give you a hint that it might have something to do with disks or storage
⏹️ ▶️ John or duplicate files or something like that. And that really puts you in squarely into the namespaces
⏹️ ▶️ John of the million other apps that delete duplicate files that are on the Mac App Store. I’m not quite sure
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s going to be called. As soon as I know, I will let you know. But the app’s not quite done yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you think about words that are like about finding free, finding resources out in the world, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mining, miner, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John do mining. Yeah, that’s like a Bitcoin thing. Any word like that, I would want to put like disk. But disk, people don’t have disks
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. They don’t even think of it as disks. It’s certainly not hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would use it, I would call it, if you’re going to refer to the medium, I would call it storage or space or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But ideally, you shouldn’t have to. But I don’t know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s a tough one. Any
⏹️ ▶️ John guesses at what my working title is? What the name of the Xcode project is? Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to guess, but I think it’s got to have been overdone a trillion times, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious answer for this is Highlander, because there can be only one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there already is an app called Highlander, obviously. One of the names I came up with, obviously it’s not a real
⏹️ ▶️ John name that I would use for reasons that you’ll understand in a second, SuperDDuper. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s pretty good, actually. Because Dave Nanyon would come to my house and beat me up. Yes, but it’s still pretty good, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s called Trade Dress, if I try to name my app after a well-known, beloved, multi-decade old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is also about storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John which is also, yeah, SuperDuper, in case people don’t know, is a Mac cloning app that I, in fact, use to clone my hard
⏹️ ▶️ John drive. So SuperDuper. There’s also Carbon Copy Cloner, but anyway, SuperDeeDooper would be a great name if we were at the same company, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Canonical? It’s a terrible name, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of- Isn’t that a whole software company? Yeah, people aren’t gonna guess that that’s a disc. I might have to give up on the people can guess that it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know, that’s tough. I mean, naming anything these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in tech is a very crowded market these days. And naming something that solves a common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem that has existed for a very long time, like freeing up disk space in your computer, that’s gonna be extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult because there’s gonna be so many.
⏹️ ▶️ John SpaceDoubler, oh wait. You guys don’t remember SpaceDoubler, but it was the name of a classic Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John utility. Didn’t do this, but it was another thing. I think it was like a compression, on-the-fly compression thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stacker is one of those too. And the funny thing is that name actually kind of makes sense here. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen. Real quick follow up. I knew I recognized Canonical from somewhere. They’re the people who do Ubuntu. I can’t believe I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that immediately. Oh, okay. Well, that’s out then. That’s why I knew it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John a few more things, like now that I have this program up and running, it’s obviously a two-phase thing. One, where you scan, where it tells you how many duplicates
⏹️ ▶️ John it found, and two is where you consolidate them. And so I’ve been doing a lot of scanning, especially when developing the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John I pointed it at my documents folder. Believe it or not, only 14,000 documents, but 12
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs, more duplicates in my own, just in my documents folder, my own documents folder only
⏹️ ▶️ John than there was when I was cross comparing the two photo libraries that ostensibly are both looking at the shared library.
⏹️ ▶️ John 12 gigs in my documents library. Dropbox, I’m probably just going to literally forbid
⏹️ ▶️ John in my app you ever pointing it at Google Drive Dropbox or anything because I have no freaking idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what Dropbox will do when I yank the file out from under it and replace it with a clone. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be like, nope, not, anything that’s running on a file provider
⏹️ ▶️ John type API thing, like Google Drive, OneDrive, my app is just gonna flat out refuse to do just for safety
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, probably. But anyway, I got a gig, 626 files in Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John My home slash library folder, which I will also forbid, for what I hope are obvious reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that’s in your library is like stuff that other apps are using that you have no idea when they’re touching it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are being touched by the CF prefs, demon, uh, containers, sandbox containers,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, 15 gigs in my library folder, 15
⏹️ ▶️ John of duplications. So that’s the type of situation where you shouldn’t run it, but I might run my Perl script on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I am in full support of you doing this for yourself. I am at best half hearted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support you selling this as a product because I feel I feel like the support burden would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just be awful. It will be ruinous. And then you’re, then you’re going to not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a bunch of work for ATP that I’ve been happy for you to have been doing recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the whole point of this program is like the, uh, the, the one I said, the disk, the thing or whatever, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John that has been on the Mac app store, it doesn’t really have any guardrails that will just do what you tell it to do
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part. Right. And I don’t think it’s a very popular program. And I don’t, I don’t really hear about it despite the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve apparently bought it years ago. even though I didn’t use it that often, I wanna make something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s more polished, that has enough guardrails, that it will prevent you
⏹️ ▶️ John from really hosing yourself, right? Like really cautious in what it does, just totally refusing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do anything that it knows is potentially dangerous, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know? And in terms of support burden, like, we’ll see. It could be like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the things that was preventing me from doing, it’s like, oh, you’re just making an app for people to hose themselves. And now they’re gonna be angry you’re not gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John one star reviews or whatever. But this app is already on the Mac App Store. It’s got great reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has no guardrails. People love it. So maybe like people find, those apps find their audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I am an expert in bad ideas. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think, this is not jumping out at me as a bad idea. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that you might be onto something here. This might be a good thing for you to do. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a risk. I think, like any new app, it will be way more time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consuming than you think it will. The support burden will be larger than you expect and predict,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will be difficult to market it, even though you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the best marketing channels in the indie Apple scene by your existing presence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the internet and on this podcast and on your blog and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you could do it, and I think you could do a good job of it, and some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would buy it. I don’t know how the heck you’re gonna price it. I don’t know anything about this market, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could make it happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing. Any competent, experienced Mac developer could bang this
⏹️ ▶️ John out between the time this podcast is released. Anyone who’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John at Mac development could do this so much faster than I will. Part of the reason I’m doing it is because I enjoy Mac development, which is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I discovered for my other two apps. I just enjoy doing it, period. And I’ll learn a lot during, I want, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things I enjoy is learning stuff, but like, I am by no means an experienced Mac developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am stumbling my way through this, so it’s gonna take me a long time. Anybody good, like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the many good Mac developers that are out there that make these things, like Guy Rambo probably made this app already
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey discussing it. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll do a better job than me too, but maybe they’re not interested in that market. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they know that this is a dangerous tool for it to be, I just don’t understand why more people haven’t made, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably not the only one, the one I found that, there’s probably other apps that also do this. When we discussed it on
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, I think I probably said, someone should totally make an app like that, and then someone said, here’s this app, and then I
⏹️ ▶️ John bought it, right? Like, so this is not a new idea, I just think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John an idea that more people should be implementing, and if people aren’t gonna do it, then I will do it, and
⏹️ ▶️ John again, even if they do do it, I’m still gonna do it anyway, because I’m having fun, and if it turns up a disaster, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just pulled the app from the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be absolutely clear, as your friend, I’m nervous for you and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it. As your co-host, oh hell yes, because we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much good stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John out of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John You say that until I want both of you to run it for the show. Okay, maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll give you the source code. You can look at it. You can step through the debugger to see that it’s not really doing anything terrible. Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly stepping through in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the debugger. I mean, I think there is, honestly, like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot to be said for taking something that yeah, anybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any programmer can write a script to do this in a couple hours at most. And there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to be said for wrapping that idea and functionality in a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice app. And there is a market for that. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot, when you look at like iOS, iOS because it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big. It’s, it’s, the entire world is iOS. And as a result,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is hyper competitive. It every, every dollar is squeezed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of everything there. You are like, you can’t get an iota of attention on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, without paying for it and you’re going to be competing with everyone else who’s paying for it with all the money they’re making from their scam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriptions and all that other crap that goes on an iOS. Like it’s a brutal market on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John but brutal and you can’t do apps like this on iOS at all anyway true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but just like just kind of like you know the dynamics of the market and iOS are just cutthroat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and brutal And it’s hard to to do something like nice there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an indie it honestly it really is hard on the Mac though I think part of the beauty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Mac Software ecosystem that I think really peaked a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like that you know the mid 2000 and maybe 2010s and we’ve kind of been going down since then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is people who were really just making nice versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of simple tasks. Like apps that did something that, yeah, anybody could write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to do that, but here’s a really nice version of it, and it’s 20 bucks or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, 40 bucks. Like that was a huge part of the Mac Indie software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scene, and that’s part of what drew a lot of us to the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that time span. And a lot of that has either faded or has been lost since then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I love the idea of you going into this and doing something like this, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at like, okay, how should you spend your money, how should you spend your time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maximize the amount of money you can make with Apple platform software? This probably is not the answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s not your goal. Your goal is to make something nice on the Mac. And I think that we need more of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I really miss the era of that being the thing we were all really paying attention to and doing and using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this could be great. And you know, selfishly, it’s easy for me to say this because I don’t have to handle the support load that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. But I think this could be this could be a very good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it could just fizzle out and do nothing and make you another, you know, 10 bucks. But it’s a I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think odds are if you finish this and release it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me pick your price, I think you’ll make more money from this than your other two apps combined.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this definitely has more potential customers, but also it’s much more potentially dangerous. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about being an indie developer is- Oh, price it per gig saved. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna be that. You’re thinking of iOS. This is the Mac. We don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a terrible idea. Don’t do that. You can compete with Apple’s storage prices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, right. That’s kind of what led me to this. I was told I was gonna do storage. But
⏹️ ▶️ John running like a company, you can think about like what kind of products should our company make in terms of product
⏹️ ▶️ John market fit and total addressable market and so on and so forth. But when you’re an indie developer, you’re in the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where essentially you can’t pick what you’re interested in building. Like, and if you’re lucky, you’re interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in building an app that has wide appeal. But if you’re unlucky like me, every app you wanna make
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have wide appeal, but that’s what you wanna make, right? Like even when I was thinking of doing a Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John client, which is a much more difficult task, and I started it and turned out I didn’t like iOS development that much, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John because I like doing Mac development. The apps that I want to, the apps that I’m interested in making
⏹️ ▶️ John are weird, right? And so it’s like, I mean, let’s just throw it out of my alley. I love file system
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I love like this actually, surprisingly large overlap between this app and the stuff I did
⏹️ ▶️ John in my web dev career. Cause I did a lot of, you know, high scale backend things. One of the biggest things
⏹️ ▶️ John I made was like an S3 like service that had to deal with all sorts of file system things in addition to being a
⏹️ ▶️ John web service type thing, right? So I do actually have relevant experience here. And you just don’t get to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re interested in. When you’re an indie, you’re interested in what you’re interested in. So you end
⏹️ ▶️ John up making what you wanna make. And if you’re lucky, you get something that overlaps with a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of customers. But if you’re unlucky, like you can’t force yourself to be like, I should make a to-do app. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna make a to-do app, right? Nevermind that market is saturated anyway, but whatever, like anything with wide appeal, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if you’re a very skilled developer, you can just do the underscore method and you have so many interests and so
⏹️ ▶️ John many apps and you can turn them out so quickly that you make lots of bets and eventually some of them pay off.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you have to be a really good experience a developer to do that. And B, I think underscore actually is legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in every app that he makes. He’s got a wide ranging interest. My interests are
⏹️ ▶️ John narrower and more obscure. And this is one of them, unfortunately for me and potentially unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, again, I am in full support of this as a co host, I am sort of in support of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a friend. I just, the support burden is what worries me so deeply. Like everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, I think, heck yeah, but I am deeply concerned about the support burden. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you say you’re comfortable with, you know, shouldering that, then power to you, let’s do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re definitely going to want the LLC protection on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John a very complicated app in terms of, you know, there’s not a lot of complicated UI that people are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to have trouble with. It’s just only going to be a question of, oh, you broke my computer and deleted all my files, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty, not as easy, But if you’re super cautious in your app, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John severely limit the damage. I mean, my evidence is the Disk Deduper
⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s on the Mac App Store now is not bombarded with terrible reviews. People like it. People like
⏹️ ▶️ John getting free disk space back and the operation it’s performing is not complicated. It’s officially supported.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can put it in the Mac App Store. It’s not using private APIs. It’s pretty straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think will full disk access be an annoying limitation?
⏹️ ▶️ John Turns out you don’t need it because it’s very confusing on Mac OS. One of the things I discovered is it does not work
⏹️ ▶️ John the way you think it does. What? I was in one of the Mac development channels
⏹️ ▶️ John discussing like how does full disk access interact with sandboxing, interact with
⏹️ ▶️ John user expressed intent through the open save dialog box? I don’t need full disk access for this app.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe that. Yeah. You and me both. I couldn’t believe it either, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John literally don’t need it because everything that it does is user initiated. And once you
⏹️ ▶️ John get a user initiated permission through the OpenSave dialog box, I essentially have full
⏹️ ▶️ John access to the thing that they chose to open in the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So would you just have them open the root of the drive basically? And then you
⏹️ ▶️ John they just pick whatever folder they want to dedupe. So they pick their documents folder and that’s it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what if they want to dedupe everything, their whole system? they shouldn’t do that, my app will probably stop them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s bad. Now, one of the things I’m also looking into for a future version of this goes well is a privileged helper
⏹️ ▶️ John tool where you ask for admin permissions. You can do cross account, yada, yada, yada. But just version
⏹️ ▶️ John one is just files that you own in your home directory. There’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, there’s data, there’s space to be saved there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, of all the things I thought we were talking about tonight, this was not on the list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Saving space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Saving space, yeah. I mean, literally the show notes, our internal show notes read, John is saving space,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos iCloud shared library, multiple accounts on the same Mac. That’s all we had. That’s all we had
⏹️ ▶️ John When I wrote that in the show notes, I hadn’t done anything except for mused about it. In between the time I wrote that
⏹️ ▶️ John and now, I wrote a Perl script and wrote a Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very good stuff. This is why we love you. All right, well, I am looking forward to this corner of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast going forward. This is very exciting. Just send in your
💰: 🏠📡💻
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Tailscale. Tailscale is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimately one of my favorite discoveries, if not my favorite discovery of 2024. Now, they’ve been around a lot longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than just this year, but I only really, truly embraced Tailscale earlier this year, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, truly, genuinely, it has made my computing life that much better. They can’t pay me to say that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is absolutely true. So what is Tailscale? Imagine if you didn’t have to care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what network each of your devices was on, your home network, a work network, perhaps at Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or DigitalOcean or something like that, you just wanted to make sure that you could always talk to all your other devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey irrespective of what network they’re on, irrespective of what firewalls are between you and your other devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If that’s something that sounds good, and it should, then you need Tailscale. Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a super easy to deploy, zero configuration, no fuss VPN. VPN,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you say, whoa, I don’t know about that. Don’t hang your hat on the VPN thing. It is a WireGuard VPN under the hood,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Tailscale sprinkles all this incredible magic on top so that it just works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot tell you how amazing it is to watch Tailscale negotiate direct connections between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices regardless of the fact that I’m behind a hotel or work firewall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really incredible. You should check it out. And the best part is their personal plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is and always will be free. So you can try Tailscale for free today. You get up to 100
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices and you can share with up to 3 users total for free. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey F-R-E-E free at tailscale.com. So what are you going to do? You’re going to do yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a favor and you’re going to do me a favor and you’re going to go to tailscale.com slash A-T-P, T-A-I-L-S-C-A-L-E
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dot com slash A-T-P and you’re going to check it out and you’re going to try it and you’re going to install it on at least two devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you’re going to send me a tweet or whatever and say, holy cow Casey, you were so right. This stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is amazing. Thank you to Tailscale for sponsoring
🖥️🖥️🥽🖥️🖥️
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We have some light breaking news. I think it was yesterday afternoon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 18.2, Mac OS 15.2, Vision OS 2.2 all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launched and I was not on the beta train on anything for the.2 releases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have been very excited to try the.2 releases, the 15.2 and Vision OS 2.2 releases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS 15.2 and Vision OS 2.2, because this gives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us the new fancy Mac virtual display. So if you are not caught
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, the way it worked up until literally yesterday as we record this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you wanted to suck your Mac into the Vision OS world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could use either the Vision OS Control Center, or if you have a laptop, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at your laptop and a little button will appear over it. This is when you have your Vision Pro on. little button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will appear over your laptop that says connect. Then whatever laptop or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even desktop, if you go in through Vision OS’s control center, whatever computer you’re bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Vision OS, you get a 4K display in Vision OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can resize that display in so far as you can make it the equivalent of 10 feet in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your face, but it’s still only ever 4K. I’ve used this a handful of times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve used it a lot when traveling, but I don’t travel that often, So I’ve only used it a little bit here and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. And I’ve used it on the train and on the plane. And it’s very, very cool and really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that not only do you have a large display in a train or in a plane, but nobody can see what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening on your Mac. It’s not like screen sharing, where a lot of times your Mac will be displaying what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on screen and then some other computers also displaying it. When you do this Mac virtual display thing, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen or screens go dark. And so no passerby or bystander or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looky-look and see what’s going on. I always thought this was good. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t stellar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was good. I typically do this with the developer strap on my Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. If you recall, you can replace the right-hand side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio pod I think they call it, which in the strap that it’s a part of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can get one that has a little USB-C dongle on it. Then you can plug USB-C from the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into your computer, and it will actually do Mac virtual display over that, rather than like local Wi-Fi or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I always thought it was good, maybe even great, I don’t know, somewhere between good and great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, up until yesterday, if I recall correctly, you found the Mac virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display to be a little bit blurry and you didn’t really care for it very much. Is that accurate?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say that’s an understatement, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, fair enough. So yeah, so yesterday we got the new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtual display, which does a few things. I believe the the standard display is now 5K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead of 4K. Additionally, you have two other modes that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optionally choose between. You can choose between, what do they call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? Wide and ultra wide. Thank you, wide and ultra wide. Now I should also note that up until yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even the standard display was, well, that was the only option you had and it was flat. Whereas now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the displays are curved a little bit, which generally is not something I particularly care for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in this context, I think does make a fair bit of sense. God help me if I end up buying one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these 40 inch curved computer displays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk. In all fairness, I would say like based on the virtualized size of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wide and ultra wide, I think basically have to be curved. Especially the ultra wide, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes up like, I mean, I’m just estimating here, maybe like 90 degrees of your field of view. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that was just a big flat pane window in the view, the left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and right edges would be substantially further away from your eyes than the center would be. It would be a little weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So yeah, so they added wide and ultra wide and wide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, let’s see, so the standard, I think, what, I forget the resolutions. Oh, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when I was in ultra wide mode, it offered 5120 by 1440, which is the default and up to 10, 240 by 2880,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is bananas. But suffice it to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have tried this out. Holy freaking crap, this is amazing. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so in love with this. Now, if you recall, I’m the kind of lunatic, and this is partially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco’s fault for having sent me one, but I’m the kind of lunatic that runs three 5K displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home. I have my studio display directly in front of my face. Then I have at, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, like a 45 degree angle to either side, I have LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultrafine 5Ks. So I’m used to having an overabundance of real estate, and I’m used to having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to move my head in order to use my computer. I don’t mind that. I think the juice is worth the squeeze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me personally. The ultra-wide is so freaking big in the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro that I actually think it might even be too much. And I am so happy that that is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem I have, that this might be too much. It is unreal. I have many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more thoughts about this, but I’d like to pause myself and hear Marco. You were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assigned yet more homework, and listeners, I have to tell you, Marco’s been a very good sport about all the homework I’ve assigned,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you have done more homework, and I appreciate you, and I appreciate that. Rain on my parade,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I’ll go back to telling you about how amazing it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, if you try it and you like it, more power to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where I am with the Vision Pro is I have my feelings about it, I can tell you how well it works for me, but a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of other people, it works better for them. And so if it works better for you, who cares if it doesn’t work very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well for me? That’s my loss and your gain. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I did try this. It is substantially better than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco original version in terms of screen space and therefore, like the usability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that screen space. I found the ultra wide, the biggest setting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually be way too much space. I had to do so much head turning. I’m like, this is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually stuck with the middle setting, the wide. It was a lot of screen space, plenty of screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space on the middle setting for me without too much head turning. So that part was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the scale, the ability to use the space, that was all very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main problems I had with the original version were number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I could notice the foveated rendering, which is bad, because that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see kind of out of the corner of your eyes like which parts of the screen are blurry that you’re not quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at. And maybe it was a little slow to update when you would move your eye to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, I did not notice that this time. So I don’t know if they’ve actually improved that or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’ve stopped noticing, I think they might’ve actually improved it. So you don’t notice the foveated rendering blurriness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the stuff you’re not looking at anymore. At least I didn’t. I did still notice the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other major problems I had with it the first time, which are a lack of sharpness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and latency. One of the first things I tried when I first got the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried editing a podcast in it with Logic. The screen space was delightful, but the problem was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a little bit of latency. And when you’re like, if you’re just typing in a document, you won’t see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when you start moving stuff around, you do see it. You do feel that latency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it feels really bad and really wrong, and it makes certain types of work very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do in that environment without driving yourself nuts. So latency is still there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still notice it, and that alone would be enough for me to not really wanna use this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very often, if ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, quick interruption, are you using this via Wi-Fi, or are you plugging in via the developer strap?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The laptop it was connected to was connected to ethernet, but the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro was on wifi. That being said, the wifi router is like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feet away. And nothing else ever says this is a bad wifi connection right here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my seat at my desk. So anyway, and I would argue that, I would argue that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to actually judge it anyway is when using it on wifi, cause that’s how it’s really made. Cause the developer strap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives you a second cable down the other side of the Vision Pro. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did solve my Vision Pro standby issues. Quick aside here, I’ve decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m not using the Vision Pro, I just disconnect the battery cable from it. Which is, you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously like, it’s like unplugging the desktop. It powers off immediately and it does not do a clean shutdown,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t care. And when I disconnect the battery cable for storage, I did that last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I put it away. That was probably, what, two weeks ago? I got it out this time, perfect charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco booted up just fine the battery still showed green like everything was totally fine so if you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unplug it from its battery it does last substantially longer in standby mode anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so going back to the screen the Mac virtual display update the latency is still a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me the sharpness is still really poor when you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly at something and you kind of stabilize yourself I’ll get to that in a second you can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is it’s it’s not like you it’s not like the pixels are so blurred that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like can’t read lettering or you can’t see lines like it’s not that bad but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is blurred and when you look at the the optical pipeline of what is being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown on a vision Pro it has to be blurred you’re net you we are nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near the optical resolution or screen resolution required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually replicate the pixel density of a computer monitor at a regular distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside the Vision Pro. We’re nowhere near it. We are many generations away from that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realistically possible, if it ever comes. So it is substantially blurrier than looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a real monitor. It has substantial latency. And then one of the big killers for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Vision Pro has significant motion blur when you move your head or eyes very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you look at the design of Vision Pro native apps, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is huge. The control, the windows are huge, the buttons are huge, the text is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big. Everything about Vision Pro or Vision Native apps, everything is big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s simulated to be somewhat far away from you too. And so everything like, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice the motion blur as much. And then the best thing to do, in my opinion, with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro is watch 3D video content or immersive content. And with that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t really see it at all because of the type of viewing you’re doing in there, the small amount of motion blur when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move your head is kind of just blurred away and compensated for with everything else you’re seeing. But when you’re looking at a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, which has a very high pixel density, trying to make all these nice sharp windows and nice sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text in this window, the motion blur of the Vision Pro, of just moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own head, just even very slight movements as you operate your computer, you notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it constantly, at least I did. And so I found it very unpleasant to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have already been using the Vision Pro virtual display mode, like before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this update, and it was fine for you, then this is even better for you. So enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you had the problems with it that I had of latency, blurriness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and motion blur, those are not improved. And I don’t think it’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to meaningfully improve them with the current hardware. So basically, if you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a Vision Pro, this is the useful thing to try. and this might get you to use it more. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t already have a Vision Pro, this probably is not a good enough reason to go out and buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was with all of your summary until that very last line. So let me reiterate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that for me, and maybe it’s because my eyes are not great, and I know I’ve said this a thousand times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but just one more time to set the stage. I have a weird eye disease called keratoconus. That means I wear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard contact lenses. It’s actually been said on Apple’s documentation that you shouldn’t wear hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contact lenses with the Vision Pro, probably won’t work. I’ve never had a problem with that. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vision is actually pretty good with my contact lenses in. I’m like 20, 30 or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. I forget what I am, but it’s actually not bad. But without my contacts, I’m even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more blind than John and that’s saying something. So I think it is possible, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is certainly possible, if not probable, that maybe some visual wonkiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is really a shortcoming of the Vision Pro is actually my own eyes. I don’t know. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the only eyes I’ve got, so I can’t tell you one way or the other. But whatever the case may be, be it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of the Vision Pro, be it because of my eyes or whatever, I don’t find it to be that off-putting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really get the motion blur. Occasionally, I find it’s a little difficult to focus, but it usually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes away very, very quickly. That might have to do with maybe my eyes settling down and the foveated rendering calming down. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure. But generally speaking, I find this works really well. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning, I had the occasion to go to a local library, and I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be there to return something. I figured, well, I’ll just going to chill and work for a little bit. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am enough of that guy to use the Vision Pro at the library, but I’m not enough of that guy to do it in the middle of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the other people working at the library. So I want to say rented,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I reserved a study room at one of the local libraries. I sent this picture to Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I forget exactly what you said, But you said something along the lines of, holy crap, could you not have found a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place to work because it is effectively a closet. And that’s true. But I sat myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this little study room and I put on my Vision Pro and I looked like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a damned fool. But thankfully, I wasn’t in the middle of everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was using the Vision Pro and I was using Mac virtual display. And I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the ultra wide, while incredibly novel is generally speaking, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too much, especially since like the menu bar runs the entire width of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the display. You know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think about the way it is on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desktop, on my desktop at home or my laptop desktop at home, I have three different displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they each get a menu bar and I can use the dock on any of them, right? And it’ll be centered, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dock will be centered at the bottom of each individual display and the menu bars repeated across or well, effectively repeated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across each of these three displays. On the ultra wide, it’s just one freaking huge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display that like you said earlier, something like 90 or 120 degrees of your vision. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you need to find the menu bar, you got to crane your, turn your head all the way to the left to go find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I don’t mean to imply that it’s a burden, but it’s, it’s striking, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think the ultra wide is a bit too much, but the wide is incredible. And I got a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of work done with this on now, granted the comfort. I think I’ve actually, while I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was sitting there, I ordered one of the $50 Belkin headstrap things that I should have ordered a while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. And apparently my local store doesn’t have in stock, which was a bummer. I was literally going to drive home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the Apple store to grab one of them, but it was not in stock. So leaving the comfort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind or aside for a minute, it was so incredible to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have all of this real estate and it’s all right there. I’m in this little closet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a room and I have a what like effectively a Pro Display XDR, maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally, but effectively a Pro Display XDR right in front of me. It was phenomenal. And not only that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I could put music, the music app, like above the display. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the native Vision OS music app that’s in 3D space above
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my ultra wide display, or excuse me, my wide display or whatever. It was so amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So over the last few years, what I’ve really wanted to do, and this started especially during COVID, is I want to be able to work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherever I want to work, right? And leave aside the Vision Pro for a second. Just in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to work wherever I want to work. And when I entered the pandemic, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we all entered the pandemic in 2020, if I’m not mistaken, I still had an iMac Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very serviceable 13-inch MacBook Pro. And over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like like we are answering more and more or Apple is answering more and more questions. So I was thinking about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the first question is, can I take my, my computer with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s a solved problem, right? If you want to take your computer with you, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just get a laptop. That, that is not up for grabs. We’ve solved this problem for 30, 40 years now or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not a big deal. The second problem is can I power it? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that isn’t much of a problem, generally speaking, if you go to a library or something like that. Typically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can plug into power, but even if you can’t, you can always bring like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB-C battery or something like that to give you another hour or two. There’s plenty of ways that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can solve this problem. So neither of these are really new problems or really that terribly interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But where things got interesting, I think, was starting in around 2020 with Apple Silicon. And when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answered the question, Can I get my work done on it? And that started in 2020 with Apple Silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because now the computer that is portable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can pick up and walk away with is just as powerful, if not more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than that iMac Pro that was sitting on my desk. And part of the reason why I returned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the full-time laptop lifestyle was because my MacBook Pro, my M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max MacBook Pro at the time was considerably quicker than my iMac Pro. And my M3 Mac’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro is considerably quicker than a lot of Apple desktops. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have to really make any compromises. Like it was such an incredibly freeing feeling. If you’re still on Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is such an incredibly freeing feeling to know that you can take this incredibly powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer and just walk away with it. You can just buy a laptop and walk away with it. And you don’t need a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that. Like as we’ve said many times, the MacBook Airs are also incredibly powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computers that you can easily walk away with. It’s unreal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I get my work done on it? Hell yeah, I can because they are so darn powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then the other thing, and this is where the Vision Pro comes in, is do I have the space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get my work done on it? I mean, screen real estate. A 13-inch laptop is not a fun way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get work done, unless you’re doing very, very basic stuff. But typically, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last couple of years, and I’ve talked about this on the show, I bought a like 2K portable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, a bus-powered portable display. It is a piece of trash, but I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because that gives me a second display that I can set next to my MacBook Pro. It’s super thin, super light, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t need a power supply. Like I said, it’s bus-powered, it’s great. And that would get me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that I could do development work in a pinch on the go. Wasn’t fun, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could do it. With the Vision Pro, I can legitimately do my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey development work and it might be a little less convenient than having my full array
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of three 5K displays, but not that much. The compromise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even with that spare physical 2K display, the compromise was still quite large. But now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you can leave aside the fact that you look like a frigging idiot, the compromise is really not that much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. And in fact, for most people that don’t have 15Ks sitting in front of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s actually arguably better in the ultra wide display. Now I agree with Marco, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultra wide is actually too much, but that’s neither here nor there. My point is just that I am now able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to set up an entire workstation by way of a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro and a Vision Pro. And I just think that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so incredibly cool. That is so cool that one of the things I can do, which I haven’t done yet, but one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could do is during the workday, If I feel like I’m just a little uncomfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my desk chair or what have you, I can go down to my couch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I can sit on my couch with my nerd goggles on my head and I can be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work on my couch. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s almost as good as on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just think that is such an incredibly powerful, cool thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, there’s so many things I could say to poo-poo this. I’m talking about what $9,000 worth of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. It is an absolutely asinine amount of money that I’m talking about. I said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier the laptop was like five grand, the Vision Pro is $3,500 plus the $400 developer strap went out like nine grand. That is bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is so incredibly cool to have that future,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to say in my hands, but also on my face today. And I think that that’s so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerful. But here’s where I’m going to drag Marco back in. Oh, no. You know what else is missing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what the thing is that would really make this truly and incredibly, it just, it perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portable. I can figure out power. I can figure out my display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Marco, what do I not have yet? What is not internal to my MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Internet. Internet. I cannot imagine how cool it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be when Apple finally one day, when I’m 95 years old, decides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put a cellular modem in this MacBook Pro, because then, then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this literally could be used anywhere, anywhere there’s civilization. You know, I’m sure there’s an asterisk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, but you know what I’m saying. I could go to my beloved park bench slash picnic table. I could go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherever the hell, I could be in the car in the passenger seat. I could be wherever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I can have my MacBook Pro and my Vision Pro, and I can get work done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn near as well as I can do it on my desk. And whether or not you think that’s a wise use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my money, whether or not you think it’s a smart idea to put this nerd goggles on your face, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so powerful. I would say empowering, but I think that might be a little dramatic, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s powerful that I can get my work done in the same fidelity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for lack of a better word, as my desk. And I can do that almost anywhere. I can do it anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have internet. And that to me is so cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still mostly agree with Marco that, well, I 100% agree with Marco that if this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that didn’t work for you before, like the Mac virtual display thing didn’t work for you before, you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not gonna like it now, I concur. It is better, as Marco had said, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey night and day better. But if you’re like me, and this is something that worked before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but now you wanna see what it’s like now? Let me tell you, oh, it’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so good. And this is the sort of thing that if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the money to spend on this sort of thing and the desire to be able to work wherever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it’s only that you travel a lot. You wanna be able to work really efficiently in a hotel room or whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Suddenly this is becoming, and many other people have said this over the last few days, this is starting to become a killer feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And I genuinely think that this will make me want to use my Vision Pro more. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the house necessarily, I still think all the problems we’ve talked about many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times about not being enough content is still true in the house, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s gonna make me use it out of the house, especially on the occasions that I travel much, much more. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot say enough good things about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple really cared about this use case with the M5 powered successor to the Vision Pro or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should just let you plug a Thunderbolt cable from the headset into your Mac to get rid of the latency thing that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John was complaining about. Like just fully embrace the idea of it as an external monitor. And yeah, it’ll still have to do all the 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John and the tracking and the blah, blah, blah, but the latency should be gone thanks to whatever clever thing they do over Thunderbolt,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, essentially rendering into a virtual display somewhere inside the Vision Pro that it
⏹️ ▶️ John then puts into 3D space in front of you without having to do any wifi or compression shenanigans or stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But I’m not sure Apple cares that much about this use case. I know Casey, you love this use case, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple probably thinks the appropriate level of technological and cost, technological innovation
⏹️ ▶️ John and cost is what they’re doing now. pretty good, pretty good resolution, very big display,
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless, convenient, no cables. You don’t have to put all the extra hardware and memory inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro to support it and stuff like that. But yeah, you can see how if the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro was emphasizing this use case much more and de-emphasizing many other ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John you, first of all, would have to make the Vision Pro even more expensive just for the memory stuff, but you could do that. And if you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John go really expensive, you know, the Vision Pro with an M5 in it, you know what that could do? they
⏹️ ▶️ John could just fricking run Mac OS. In addition to Vision OS, you know what I mean? Like with virtualization,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. Like you could just run your Mac. Like, why do you need to have this laptop that you bring with? What is the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John of the laptop? It’s just sitting there over in the corner, right? Again, that would make it even more expensive, heavier,
⏹️ ▶️ John hotter. You’d have to have an external compute thing. The battery would have to be bigger, but like that’s not the use
⏹️ ▶️ John case that Apple is going for. So I don’t think they’re going to do any of that. But technologically speaking, because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, like Taco Bell, is using all the same different ingredients make lots of different things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Slightly different results. Yeah, but you look at the Vision Pro and you’re like, you know, all the pieces are there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you want, if you could arrange these Lego pieces to make Vision Pro, like Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John dream, like on the go Mac development thing, all the pieces are there except for Apple’s cell modem
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna put cellular into Mac someday, which we’ll have a story on in a future episode if we remember to do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But yeah, we’re still waiting for that day.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a race between a worthy Mac Pro chip and cellular and Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it looks like Casey might win this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you never know. I’m glad, actually, you brought up the plug-in to NVIDIA Thunderbolt thing, because I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that my experience, I believe I’ve only exclusively used it with the developer strap with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing plugged in, so that’s another reason why Marco’s experience might have been slightly worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than mine. And it does appear that, by default, it will try to hop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Wi-Fi between the computer and the Vision Pro, but then, and I think it negotiates this via Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I definitely noticed once I plugged it in, and I think I actually killed Bluetooth on my Mac, if I recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correctly, it clearly renegotiated the connection over the cord, over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cable. And then I pulled it out because I realized like a ding dong I had taken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cable that’s coming out my right ear and connected it to the left side of my computer. I don’t know what I was thinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I unplugged it and moved it to the right side of my computer and the screen immediately went black. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I plugged it back in, It took a few seconds before it renegotiated, but it did come back on its own. But I think that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly helped like latency and stuff like that. Some of the legitimate complaints that Marco had. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either way, it is so cool. And there’s no easy way for Apple to demo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this when they do like the Vision Pro demos or whatever, because it all is relying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on like your Apple ID or whatever, it’s Apple account now. And it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a lot to get this to work, but oh man, if you have a friend where you could just strap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their face computer on your face for a minute, it’s worth trying, because it is so freaking cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, TailScale, Delete.me, and Aura
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frames. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is ATP overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is our bonus topic every week. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about the story about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a Mac emulator called Mini V Mac that was being rejected by Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notarization even from third party app stores in the EU,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is quite a story. So we’re gonna be talking about the Mini V Mac notarization rejection from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EU app stores. Interesting story. Anyway, you can hear our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coverage of that in overtime this week by joining ATVJFM slash join. Thank you everybody for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening and we’ll talk to you next week.
🎵🎙️🏁🎵
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Accidental, check podcast
📱🛒🏆
⏹️ ▶️ John Before we get to Casey’s thing on the after show, can I do a quick, this is not an ad
⏹️ ▶️ John discussion of one of our sponsors this week? Yeah. Yeah. Go for it. This is not, legit not an
⏹️ ▶️ John ad. If you’re listening to the non-member version, you by now probably have already heard the ad for
⏹️ ▶️ John Aura Frames. This is not the ad. This is just me talking about Aura Frames, which yes, they did send us
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them for free. So take that with a grain of salt. I got mine for free. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have never bought a digital picture frame. Honestly, I thought they were like, why would anyone want that? It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John a really low quality screen in your house. I have plenty of actual pictures up on the wall or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever they sent it to me, it’s free. I guess I’ll set it up to see what it’s like. Love the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why, like, again, they’re inexpensive. It’s not like, it’s not a Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Display XDR, right? It’s not like, because you know, it can’t be. It’s not thousands of dollars, right? They’re inexpensive. It’s an inexpensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John small color screen. kind of like Casey’s like 2K monitor thing that he loves even though like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John super high quality. I didn’t, like who would care that you have like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John see my pictures, they’re on my phone, they’re on my Mac. Like, why do I wanna have a frame in my house that rotates through those pictures? Turns
⏹️ ▶️ John out I do want to have that. I can’t, like it’s so much enjoyment
⏹️ ▶️ John of looking at which picture it’s showing right now. I pointed it at my favorites library, which has like 30,000 photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and something. It was like, no problem. I love the thing like, oh, what was that picture? You just swipe on the top to go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the previous one. I know this sounds like an ad, honestly, like, I am probably, this is like a gift,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I would not have bought this for myself. I would not have ever bought a digital frame as evidenced by the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve literally never bought one I never bought one for someone else. I always thought they were dumb. Having been gifted
⏹️ ▶️ John this one essentially as part of a sponsorship made me realize I like digital picture frames.
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s not an ad that I just wanted to say that I’ve discovered that I like digital picture frames.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the Aura stuff is legitimately really, really good. You will hear me or some of you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard me do the sponsor read, but for, for real, and I, I’m now kind of regurgitating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sponsor read, but if you’ve had one of these in the past, this is not like that because the ones in the past, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put an SD card in and it’s just trash. And I’m not going to repeat the ad, but suffice to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is, this is all that, but done right. It’s really quite good. I
⏹️ ▶️ John took like, uh, you know, two minutes to set it up ages ago and have not touched it since.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. No, it’s, it’s, it’s genuinely good stuff. All right. So I have a conundrum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m probably making a mountain out of nothing because, hi, have we met? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am, I think at the point that I’m ready to release the briefly previously mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I guess not so briefly, actually previously mentioned update for CallSheet where you can have multiple lists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of pins. So effectively multiple batches of favorites, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think I’m ready to release. But then it occurred to me, you know what? Apple has said to developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a handful of times recently, you can tell us when you’re going to be doing a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app or a new feature or whatever, and maybe you’ll get a feature on the App Store, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ll get an editorial on the App Store, it’ll be great. I know full well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the likelihood of my little dinky app getting a feature on the App Store is not great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought, what’s it going to hurt to do what they ask you to do and report in and say, yeah, I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this big new feature, It’s the thing that almost all my users have asked for at some point or another. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t I just tell them? So I went down the path of telling Apple, hey, I’m going to be doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably in the next week or two. Completely fairly, especially given the time of year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very early on in Little Wizard, they have you go through to get the information that they want. They say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, we really prefer for you to give us three weeks before your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launch. Which in and of itself is fine, But that means I’m not hitting my self-imposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deadline of before the end of the year. And my question to the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you, and I think I’d like to start with Marco, if that’s okay, is knowing that there’s no real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey urgency to get this out other than a completely self-imposed deadline of wanting to be done with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it before the end of the year. Should I hold on to like the first full week of January?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like two or three weeks from where I guess three ish weeks from where we are now and give Apple the chance to feature me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I intellectually know that there’s almost no chance of it happening, like what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it going to hurt to delay and try, or should I just get this out the door now? What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John do you have a question for you? Casey, we get opinions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please. Is this, do you know if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John not insists, but if Apple wants, you won’t feature you if you launch
⏹️ ▶️ John without them, like is the, is the featuring contingent on you launching Coordinated in time with their feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John or are those two separate things?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is an excellent question, and I don’t know the answer, but I thought that, I think they want you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to release as they feature. I do not know if that’s accurate though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If only there’s someone on the show who has experience with iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so this is why I came to the show. So tell me, what am I doing? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What should I be doing? Help me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so first of all, I’ll answer the second question first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They want you to coordinate your other marketing with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t wanna be the only place promoting an app. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other marketing? They wanna jump on a bandwagon. And they want you to be doing a big push and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna be a part of the big push. That’s not always the case. That’s not the only way they’ll promote something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s why they wanna coordinate with your release.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, you should email ATP and tell them you have a new app that you’re launching.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey maybe you should offer the CEO of
⏹️ ▶️ John your company to be a guest on our show.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, I should do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. That’s such an inside joke, but yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, yeah, we get a lot of PR email. Anyway, that being said, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are trying to coordinate something like that, like by submitting it to them in advance with the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of weeks of notice and everything, that’s kind of what you’re going for. That is not guaranteed to actually happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What also happens is if they see another app that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, hey, the blogs are posting about this app, like, you know, hey, this thing got reviewed on Mac Stories, 9to5 and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they see that, the App Store editorial team, like they have people who like look for that kind of stuff. If they see that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will come to you and send you a message in App Store Connect saying, there’s a promotional opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just submit artwork of these specs by this date. And what that means is we might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature you in the App Store somewhere. Now, so that’s the other part of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you actually succeed in being featured, that’s what they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to you with. They’ll go to you with a promo art request. And so they’ll say, all right, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco link to some document somewhere on Apple site that says, we’re currently looking for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type of promo. And it’ll say in the request, like a home screen header or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s different names for the different positions in the app store, different formats and everything. And they’ll send you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a link to like a Photoshop template. And it’s like, you know, you have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design your artwork within these safe guides and have it, you know, feature these things, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things. And don’t include screenshots, don’t include words, don’t, you know, it’ll go through all these requirements with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So then that’s then placed on you. And they’ll say, give us the promo artwork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by, you know, so-and-so date. Usually, usually give you like, you know, a week or something, if you’re lucky. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like 48 hours. Anyway, as developers, we are given that chance and we say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well we can either rush to put this promo art together ourselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we even can, and if it will look any good, or we can hire a designer or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell, because they basically assume you have a designer ready to go, they assume you either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a designer or have one on staff, because they assume everyone’s a big company. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so as an indie though, then you’re stuck with, all right, I have to find the designer and pay them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this for me, and then you have to start weighing, like, is this going to be worth it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or should I try to do it myself, like do my own custom promo artwork, but I’m a programmer, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a designer, and it’ll look like crap? And the worse it looks, the less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely they are to actually use it and actually feature your app. Because when you submit that promo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork to them, they basically say, thanks, we might feature you. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So you’re kind of throwing it into a black hole and hoping someday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they may be used. They won’t tell you where they’re featuring you, they won’t tell you when they’re featuring you, they won’t tell you if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they choose to or not to. You just kind of have to watch for it. Although I think they’ve recently added a notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if they do feature you now it finally tells you. I mean, that was very, that was like two weeks ago, very recent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, the process of being featured in the App Store requires something of you. It requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to, if you’re gonna go through what you were asking about, about notifying them ahead of time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s one level. If it’s going to be like, you know, you having to make promo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork, which is usually required, that’s a different level. There is a certain amount of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cost that is going to be put on you. And so the question of whether all this is worth it or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worth asking. Sometimes it is, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually for Indies who already have marketing channels, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s not worth it to do to bend over backwards. Now, if you can address what they’re asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for without too much sweat off your back, without too much work, without too much cost, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure, do it. You might as well do it if it’s gonna be easy. But if what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking for is gonna cost you thousands of dollars in designer time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or heck, even hundreds, it probably won’t be worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the thing is, an app store feature used to be worth a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it’s worth now. because not a lot of people, it seems, are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casually browsing the App Store, looking around for new apps to install.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It used to be that way. When iOS was younger and less mature and less established,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when people were actually getting their first iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, there was a lot of just browsing around that happened. I remember back in my Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, Christmas Day used to be a huge sales day for me. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like one of my biggest sales days of the year because so many people, Instapaper had pretty good business on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so many people would get iPads for Christmas and that was often their first iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device or at least their first iPad. And so they would then immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go browsing around, hey, what can I do on this thing? Let me install a bunch of apps. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people with iOS devices, this is not their first iOS device. So how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new apps they need to browse around and install It goes down over time and now there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much out there, there’s so many apps that I don’t think a lot of people are just kind of browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the editorial sections of the iOS app store. So I occasionally do get featured,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is very nice, I’m very thankful for it, but I see like, when you look at the sales that happen as a result of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, it’s hard to see a bump anymore. I’m sure it helps, I’m sure, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any bit helps. And if you don’t already have a ton of exposure any other way, you gotta take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you can get. But the effect that it has, has gone down over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the point where now, I think it’s more of a vanity and honor thing than an actual thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that translates to sales. And so you should account for that in deciding how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to either spend accommodating their plans and or how much to change your plans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response to that. So my advice after all of that elaboration would be, don’t change your plans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release it when you want to release it. And if they want to feature it, they’ll come to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I guess what I’m wrestling with is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s it going to hurt to wait and see, like, what’s it going to hurt to throw this over the wall, give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself the remainder of the year to breathe in perhaps, you know, just make sure everything is good to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. And yeah, I have, I guess, failed in that. I haven’t released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that I’ve been working on, but it’s done. Like it’s ready. It’s released in test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flight and the only person that’s really going to be disappointed in the, in it not being out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is me. And I don’t feel like that’s enough of a reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rush it. Right. And especially if, you know, God forbid the rollout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ends up being a disaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s what I was going to say. Like, what does it hurt? I would want to get it out and make sure it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John works before I get featured. The worst thing you want to have happen is get featured dress as you launch. and there’s some fatal
⏹️ ▶️ John bug that causes problems with your app and now you’ve like drawn lots of attention to
⏹️ ▶️ John your mistake. Like that’s why I wanna get it out. And for the wisdom of releasing it
⏹️ ▶️ John just before the holidays aside, I would want to have my, be sure the app that was going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be featured was stable and working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is fair, but if I’m also coordinating the big release with Apple, I can’t have both, right? Unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John missing something. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I was asking, do they care if you coordinate the release or do they just wanna feature you? Because if they don’t care if you coordinate the release,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would want to have my new version out for three weeks, you know, maybe get a one or two bug fix
⏹️ ▶️ John updates out and then get featured if they don’t insist that you not release your app until and Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about they want to be coordinating with your marketing push. If you don’t have a marketing push, I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’ll feel about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing push Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. Yeah, I don’t know. I got a noodle on it. And certainly if App Store editorial wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to quietly whisper in my ear, not necessarily whether or not I’d be featured, but just you know what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you’ll never hear that. They’ll never tell you that. Trust me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ask any iOS developer, you know, ask underscore, like ask Ben McCarthy, ask everyone you know who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has apps in the store. They’re all gonna tell you the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I even submitted a PR artwork for some of my apps at one point. And they did actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not write about them, then at least like list them somewhere at some point in the past. But no, they did not
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me when they were doing this, I found out because other people told me, hey, I saw your app on this thing. I’m like, oh, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they did recently launch notifications for when your feature were, and you can also, like I’ve been notified through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app figures, like they have a thing, if you use app figures, they’ll tell you, but it is mostly just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of just rely on people telling you on social networks, hey, congrats, that’s why you’re apping this thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it’s nice, but it’s really hard to see much of a bump from those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore, just because, again, I think the number of people who are just casually browsing, looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for new apps to install, I think that number is very small these days. The reality is, because, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying earlier, because the iOS market is so full and so cutthroat and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically over-served with just huge amounts of apps, you usually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay to get people to install your app. Like, you have to buy search ads, you have to buy Facebook ads, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And paying for app installs is not cheap because there’s so much competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from everyone else trying to get people to install their apps. So the bids all get bid up. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually, it’s really hard to get installs of your app because no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is going out there and just looking organically unless they hear about it from your other marketing channels from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your podcast, from your blog. Like that’s where to promote your app and just talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it on here is worth way more than most types of app store features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that any of us would be likely to actually get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you happen to be like the app of the day on the front page of the app store, then you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about different numbers. That is more substantial and that is worth it, of course, if you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But this kind of smaller feature is like, oh, top apps to be cozy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this winter or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of stuff, you’re not gonna see much from that. It is a nice honor, again, like it’s an honor to be featured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s nice to have your work recognized by Apple and it feels good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in terms of translating to actual, really meaningful sales and downloads, it’s not much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your plans are more important. So launch your app when you wanna launch your app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can tell them afterwards, once it’s launched and once it’s settled, you can email that address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, hey, I got this new update out, and it’s being well-received, and here’s positive reviews, whatever. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can tell them afterwards, but don’t change your plans for them, because first of all, they wouldn’t do it for you, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second of all, you’re better off serving your customers directly in the best way you see fit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not bending over backwards trying to accommodate something that you might get from Apple that probably wouldn’t have a ton of value.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, I appreciate the conversation. I’ll noodle on it and see what I decide to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I don’t know. I gotta think on it, but this is very helpful and I appreciate it.