645: More Frosting
26 Jun 2025macOS Tahoe and iOS 26 beta 2 updates, the latest AI-training kerfuffles, life with CarKey, and flagship OLED TVs.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: Phish & Wabbit Dave Matthews Season
- Some Administrivia:
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s special: ATP Movie Club: Sneakers 🗣️
- ATP Performance Shirt Inventory Sale
- Follow-up:
- Persistent icon replacement helper apps
- Tahoe beta 2
- Finder icon updated!
- New menu bar background setting!
- Tahoe’s [Not-So-] Naked Robotic Menu Bar (via Vítor)
- Safari toolbars (via Lewis Dorigo)
Settings
→Advanced
→Show color in compact tab bar
<meta name="theme-color">
theme_color
- Yosemite Safari tabs
- From John’s review
- Installing betas and DFU mode
macvdmtool
(via Robert Sherry)- DFU Blaster (via Brian LaShomb)
InstallAssistant.pkg
(via Andy Beyer-Bowden)
- iOS 26 Beta 2
- Frost all the things!
- The case of Marco’s missing download/check buttons
- iPadOS 26 window limits (via Jon Edwards)
- “Apple Vision Pro 4K” (via Greg Kaplan)
- All your data are belong to AI companies
- Apple training models on Feedback attachments ಠ_ಠ
- Meta AI staffers take an interesting approach
- New York Times 🤝🏻 Amazon AI
- You can train AI models without copyrighted material… it’s just a pain in the 🍑
- Anthropic gets a W… maybe?
- Ask ATP:
- Does Marco use Apple CarKey? His car should support it. (via Samuel Polay)
- Why does macOS want USB mass storage ejected, but iPadOS doesn’t? (via David Campbell)
- Post-show: TV Update for Marco
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Overlap between appdev & gamedev
- Coyote time & jump buffering
- Secrets to a great platformer with Unity
- Destiny health
- Examples in our apps
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Chapters
- New Phish season
- Casey’s screen protector(s)
- ATP Movie Club: Sneakers
- ATP Store notes
- Tahoe updates
- Sponsor: Notion
- iOS 26 updates
- Vision Pro “4K” follow-up
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- AI-training kerfuffles
- #askatp: CarKey, iX update
- #askatp: Eject on Mac, not iPad?
- Ending theme
- Flagship-TV news
New Phish season
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s new fish season. I’m very happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also new Dave Matthews band season.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Didn’t I say isn’t fish coming to Richmond or something like that? If I recall correctly, we have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy new amphitheater. I will be seeing Dave Matthews there next month, but I believe fish is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for night if you wanted to drive into what is presently the seventh circle of hell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re really selling it well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is it new fish season and new Dave Matthews season? Is this when they, when they spawn or I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Summer tours, baby. Summer tours.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, then. Well, there you go. Fish season and Dave Matthews season doesn’t sound as good. It’s like rabbit
⏹️ ▶️ John season, duck season.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that’s annoying, John, because as you’re talking, the two of you are talking, I’m working on what will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey become the official show notes. And I’m trying to type fish and wabbit season.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you made the joke on the show. So now it doesn’t sound original. Great minds think alike, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, well, if you want to come to the new Allianz, Allions, I don’t know how to pronounce this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they’re like an insurance company or something like that. Isn’t that like the trip insurance company? Yes, I believe that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, let me, am I supposed to be buying trip insurance when I go on trips? Because I haven’t been.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s, I think the, are you talking about the thing where like, if your flight gets canceled, you can get a refund or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s what it purports. I’ve never actually tried to use it, but I don’t, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always like, do you want to check this box and spend even more money at the end for things that are reasonable to be covered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we really should cover without this thing, but we’re not reasonable. I kind of reject that on principle, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should I be doing that? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re booking a trip and you’re like, well, there’s a good chance I might have to change my mind on this trip, but it’s not a refundable ticket, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that you might want to get the trip insurance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but then it becomes squishy because a lot of trip insurance, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very specific about the ways in which you can cancel and what constitutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s like any insurance. They’re going to do everything they can not to pay it out. So you have to read the fine print. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s my understanding is always like, consider what do you think the odds are that
⏹️ ▶️ John you could change your mind about this trip or that you could be sick or that you could not have to go or that something could go wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that otherwise you would lose your money. If the odds of that seems low, then just roll the dice because it’s probably, and
⏹️ ▶️ John also if it’s, you know, they try to get you by saying, oh, it’s like 20 bucks. You’re like, ah, what’s 20 bucks? But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how they get there for 20 bucks from you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s usually like a few hundred bucks. Like it can be a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anything at that price, it’s like, oh, no, I’ll just take the risk. It’s like doing AppleCare. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna drop, you know your computer once every 15 years, but if you don’t pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John the AppleCare, you’ll probably make it up. But if you drop your phone every single year, Casey, then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John consider getting the AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also like, I don’t usually like involving a third-party company in these kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warranties. It’s like, if it’s through Apple, like if you’re buying an iPhone in the Apple Store and you’re getting a warranty through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, that at least tells you like, they’re probably not gonna screw me too badly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I actually try to make a claim. Whereas like, if it’s one of these third-party companies that you get at the end of an airline check-in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like, uh. Like, if I have to make a claim through them, is it gonna be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy pain in the butt because they are not the airline?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco absolutely, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. And also, I’ve occasionally had to cancel a flight near last minute or whatever. I usually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, will call the airline and just ask, hey, what can you do for me here? And oftentimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it wasn’t officially refundable, they’ll at least give me a credit that I can use within a year or something like that, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just ask. So I find, I don’t know, So far, I have never had a situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I got really screwed by not having travel insurance.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I’ve ever paid for it either, but I do consider it each time it goes by.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Someone is calling from inside John’s house to point out that travel insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can also be helpful for bigger trips, which is, I think we did it for our London trip last year, and covers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than just the plane tickets for international. It also covers medical costs, which is important because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re a backwards country and need to worry about these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there you go. I don’t do a lot of international traveling, as you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, and that’s also really important for people who fly to the US, who are not normally in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco US and therefore don’t have US medical insurance. Obviously that’s a different situation, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually we can go other places and their civilized systems will take care of us a little bit better than we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take care of them.
Casey’s screen protector(s)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, John just made a joke, which is completely fair, about me constantly dropping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phones. And I will tell you that I have not had a case on my 16 Pro since I bought it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have had a screen protector for the very first time. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I have had a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protector on this phone pretty much the entire time I’ve had it. I use the Belkin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra Glass 2 that you apply at the Apple Store, like the Apple people we’ll do it. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to be receiving my fourth, uh, this week because I keep breaking them. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, the phone itself is fine. The screen is fine as far as I can tell, but apparently the Belkin ultra glass two screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protectors are made of hopes and dreams. So just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the screen protector is doing its job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is in that regard, but I feel like I glance at this thing and the screen protector is like, screw it. I’m done, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is better than the screen saying that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John explains why your screen is always scratched up by by the way, like we’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you doing to your phone? You’re like, I don’t know. Now we put some, we put a sort of destructible layer on the screen and we see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re destroying it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I really want to argue with you, but I can’t. So fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So every time, every time the new iPhone is announced and they spend about 30 seconds talking about how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazingly strong the new glass is in the front. And every time we’re like, I guess that means something to some people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we know it means it’s for you. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey all for you. It’s 100% for me.
ATP Movie Club: Sneakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some administrative to take care of. So here’s the thing. Last month, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made an egregious error, and we forgot to point out a new member special on the immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey following episode after that member special. And we knew that as three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably intelligent human beings, we would 100%– three reasonably intelligent human beings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which two of us have a functioning memory. We knew without a doubt that we would not make that mistake again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet here I am saying to you, whoopsie-doopsies, We forgot to mention last week that there’s a new member
⏹️ ▶️ Casey special, HP Movie Club Sneakers, which is the 1992 movie, not about footwear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but about sneaking around. And it’s a really, really fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, caper movie, or how did you, what’s the word? It’s a heist movie. Heist movie, thank you. There we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Heist movie, and the three of us watched it and had a conversation about it, and I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really enjoyed it. I will tip my hat and say I freaking love this movie. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking for something pretty positive, I like to think, uh, we obviously did critique the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie from time to time, but overall, I think we all enjoyed it. Um, so you can check that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re not a member, you can go to atp.fm slash join. And I will remind you that you get not only this member special, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the other ones going back to the beginning, which at this point is something like 20 or 30 episodes, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and so there’s the bootleg and all the other goodies. So you should definitely check that
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Especially if you’re a younger person, I’ve never heard of this movie, let alone seen it, it’s worth watching
⏹️ ▶️ John the movie. Like obviously before you listen to the member special, because it’s, I’m not saying it’s a cult
⏹️ ▶️ John classic, but it is lesser known. Obviously nerds know about it because it’s a movie that actually focuses on computers
⏹️ ▶️ John and hacking a little bit and those are pretty narrow interests. But if you’ve never even heard of this movie, go find it,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sneakers, 1992, watch it and then listen to the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I gotta say, the movie was a lot better than I expected it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like you definitely do not think a movie from the 90s about computer hacking is, you think it’s gonna be like, go we’ll just laugh at
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s such a dumb movie. But this somehow manages to avoid all you’ll hear what we have to say about it.
ATP Store notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, we have one last piece of administrivia. John, would you tell me about what’s going on with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP store, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John So we had our ATP merch sale before WWDC. One of our items, unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John was discontinued by the manufacturer. That is our ATP Performance shirt, which is the shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t stick to your body when you sweat. That’s Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey description. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think of it as like Under Armour-esque. It’s not literally Under Armour, but very, very similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually made by Adidas. Anyway, they discontinued our shirt. And so we had a problem filling
⏹️ ▶️ John all of those orders. Everybody who ordered one of those performance shirts was given an option. They could either get a refund or they could pick
⏹️ ▶️ John the shirt in a different color. And so everyone who did order the shirt has now made that choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way we accommodated that, it was like, oh no, they’ve discontinued our shirt. We just bought
⏹️ ▶️ John like, not all the rest of the shirts they have, but we bought a whole bunch of shirts upfront
⏹️ ▶️ John so that when we went through the process of like, hey, you know, going back and forth with everybody who ordered that shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John to see what they wanted, we have lots of choices for them. Because if we didn’t, if we had just said, oh, you know, for each person,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll email them and say, hey, the shirt you ordered, we can’t give it to you. Do you want a refund or do you want it in a different color? And you go back and
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. And they say, oh, no, I’ll take a black one instead of a red one. Then we can’t then at that
⏹️ ▶️ John point go, okay, let’s have a black shirt because they might be out of stock. So as soon as we found out they’re discontinued, we ordered
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch of shirts in a whole bunch of colors and a whole bunch of sizes so that people had options.
⏹️ ▶️ John What that means is we have a whole bunch of leftover shirts. So if you want an
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP performance shirt in one of the colors that we still have left
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of the sizes we still have left, they are priced to move. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to sell through the inventory that we bought to help people do exchanges. Everyone has now done their exchanges,
⏹️ ▶️ John so everyone has been taken care of. But we have at least one shirt in every size from
⏹️ ▶️ John small to 2X, because that is the range of the shirts that were ordered. And we have,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, at least one of every color. And like I said, they are available at a discount, atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash store, if you want an ATP performance shirt. If you already got one and want to get a second one for cheaper, you can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the mugs are still there, believe it or not. They’re also priced to move. We no longer care if we make any money
⏹️ ▶️ John on these mugs. We just want to get rid of them. They have been price reduced. It’s a fire sale,
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm slash store. Again, these are like the Adidas shirts, performance shirts and the mugs. These
⏹️ ▶️ John are exactly the same ones that we sell in like the time limited sales. Everything else on the store page is like the on demand
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff which print with printing was not as good that you shouldn’t buy unless you desperately want one of those things. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John mugs and the performance shirts, same quality you get in our regular sales, lower price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go, go, go now, now, now, go ahead and take care of it. Atp.fm slash store and again, the member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can check that out. membership at atp.fm join.
Tahoe updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up. As always, since we are in June, we have a lot. John, tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me if I really, really hated the squircle jail, what can I do about it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned these programs on a previous episode, many previous episodes, I think, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve even linked them before, that will replace icons of applications on your Mac persistently,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the keyword is persistently, because it’s easy to just, you know, get info on an icon and paste on an app
⏹️ ▶️ John in your Mac in the Finder and paste on a new icon. But then when the app runs an auto updater or it gets automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John updated from the Mac App Store, your custom icon is gone. And it’s annoying to have to repaste it over and over
⏹️ ▶️ John again. You make this little folder full of icons and every time it happens, you know, whatever. There are programs that will do this for you. They will
⏹️ ▶️ John watch the applications that you customize and when the applications are updated, they will swap back in the icon. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John do it so fast that when an app auto updates itself and relaunches, the custom icon will already be
⏹️ ▶️ John there. You won’t even have to like quit it and relaunch it one more time to get it. And I can never for the life of me remember what the heck the name of
⏹️ ▶️ John these programs are. So I once again, putting it in the show notes, The one that I use is called
⏹️ ▶️ John Pictogram by Neil Siddharthi. I have a note in my notes document with the
⏹️ ▶️ John title, change Mac icon persistently. Like I’m just putting keywords in so I can find it
⏹️ ▶️ John because I can never remember it. So much so that I found myself, the reason I made that note is when I found myself scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John through my applications folder, looking for an icon that’s gonna remind me of what’s the app that does that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to do it, show it up and I could not remember. Anyway, Pictogram. We’ll put a link to that one. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John second one that’s a little bit newer is called, you know, it’s like the word replace and the word icon
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck together with the e removed replacion, replace icon, replac icon. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t know how to pronounce it,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Replicacon, R E P L A C I O N dot Apple. Put a link to that one in the show notes as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have not used it, but two applications, two, two, two applications that you can use to jailbreak
⏹️ ▶️ John your icons. If squircle jail still exists when Tahoe ships.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. And tell me about, uh, Tahoe beta two, uh, icons, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so Tahoe Beta 2 is out. The big news is that they reversed the colors in the Finder icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John It still looks the same as it did before, but now the blue is on the left and the lighter color is on the right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still has the border. That’s bad. The Dark Mode one is a little baffling because in the Dark Mode one,
⏹️ ▶️ John they made the left eye blue and the right eye black and the smile is half blue and half black with
⏹️ ▶️ John a fade between it. Yeah, I really don’t like that. Not great. As we pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out in the last show and as more people keep doing, like LuiMantia did one, If you just take the existing finder icon and
⏹️ ▶️ John make it glass, like there’s nothing wrong with it Like it’s not like the old icon doesn’t fit with a new style. It
⏹️ ▶️ John fits perfectly It is literally like flat planes that you can make glossy like it it
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly fits the new style. Just take it Anyway, uh, so anyway finder icons getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, they still haven’t done the obvious thing It’s kind of like ipad os so we’ll have to wait for a few years Which is just take the existing icon and make
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of glass. It’s so easy to do You can do it yourself with icon composer I mean, Louis Mantegna, granted, is
⏹️ ▶️ John a designer who used to make icons for Apple, so maybe they’re, let’s say, overpowered for this particular task.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, anybody can do it. It looks perfectly fine. We’ll link to Louis’s example. Apple, just do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we’re going in the right direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something that has entered the List family lexicon, and specifically Declan’s lexicon, is OP, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something that happened after I stopped playing video games, and everything now is OP. It’s OP this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OP that. Oh, that’s so OP. It’s, it’s, I’m getting to that point where I’m starting to feel properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old. Like I already felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old cause I am, but now I’m starting to feel properly old and I’m not comfortable with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can refer to things as broken if you want to join in the lexicon there. I mean, obviously you know about buffs and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can give you a refresher
⏹️ ▶️ John course because I’m still in the video game world and I’m very familiar with these terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Well maybe we could, maybe that can be our member special next month. We’ll see. We got to talk about that privately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re going to hear all it because, because, you know, what, where kids get all their info now is just YouTube and what’s all over YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people talking about games. So like that’s, that’s just like all the vocabulary is YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vocabulary now. But what you can do though, because we are the dads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is our job to be uncool to them. If we try to use their,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their terminology, they hate it. So the best thing we can do is go all the way ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and intentionally misuse it. Like you can be like, man, that salad is so op.
⏹️ ▶️ John could tell them one of the another dad thing you can do is say, you know, back in my day before OPM and overpowered,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it used to be an original poster when you refer back to the person who originally
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote something that you’re responding to. They love hearing about that history. It’s fascinating to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please tell me more ancient history about when you were young.
⏹️ ▶️ John history of the web, which for us is like two years
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ago. Yeah, it seems like it’s two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Well, let me tell you, john, there, there are some new settings that are in Tahoe beta two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are definitely op. You want to tell me about them?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they are op. Actually, kind of, they’re kind of mid.
⏹️ ▶️ John new setting in settings in Tahoe, Tahoe beta two in the menu bar. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what we call them. He’s called them preference panes, whatever in the menu bar setting, which is surprising to me, first because
⏹️ ▶️ John settings is so, system settings is so weirdly organized that I fully expected to find this not, I expected
⏹️ ▶️ John to find it like either in accessibility or in like appearance or in desktop and documents,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was actually in the menu bar system settings thing. And that item is show menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar background and it’s a toggle switch. It’s off by default. If you turn it on, it gives the menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John a background. Is that background opaque? Oh, it’s not it’s tinted but
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know progress now. There’s an option to show something there I feel like if for people who want
⏹️ ▶️ John that option They probably want like a full-fledged stronger background instead of this tinted one But
⏹️ ▶️ John so far again moving in the right direction option for a menu bar background, even if it is still
⏹️ ▶️ John Not particularly opaque.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very happy about that
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh and one more thing about beta 2 when we all got it and installed it and launched Safari there was like
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly black underlines underneath all the tabs. That’s a bug. It’s mentioned in the release notes. Don’t flip out.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how tabs are supposed to look. Tabs are still low contrast and terrible. They haven’t fixed them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in Safari, they have fully black underlines under the inactive tabs, which is just a plain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, on the other hand, it does help me find the active tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John more because there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no contrast, even like on a MacBook Pro, like HDR, perfectly calibrated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen the difference in color between the current tab and the inactive tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is It’s like 1% RGB value like it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s visible if you have really good vision But it’s invisible as invisible on the MacBook Air screen
⏹️ ▶️ John It is visible on a very expensive screen, but just because it’s visible if you concentrate doesn’t mean it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s definitely like a stretch at best and like the only way to tell what tab is active is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has text next to the icon. But if you have a lot going on on your screen, that’s a little that takes a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second to scan for like it’s, it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, terminals real bad too, because they’re like the there’s not this hex doesn’t even help. So yeah, the black for now
⏹️ ▶️ John that black underline bug will actually help you differentiate which is the active. It’s the one without the underline. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about Tahoe’s not so naked robotic and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey robotic menu bar core, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, not a naked robotic menu bar. The idea is if they draw nothing there, then you can just make your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John background have a white stripe at the top and look you got a white solid white menu bar isn’t that great
⏹️ ▶️ John and we went back and forth about this you saying it was like translucent I’m like it’s not translucent it’s just plain not there as in it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John draw anything behind it and Vitor on mastodon noted that
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s true some of the times but not always so I got curious because every time I tried it it had drawn nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John so I did a bunch of different backgrounds like solid colored backgrounds to see what the menu area would
⏹️ ▶️ John do the non-bar. So if you make the background black or white, it draws nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Like, and the way I determined this is you could just do like a digital color meter to measure
⏹️ ▶️ John the color between the words file and edit, and then one inch below the words file and edit, it’s 100% white. In between,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 100% white. Underneath, same thing with black, it draws nothing, okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John So then I did red, green, and blue. And I did red, I’m like, oh, it’s still drawing nothing. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ John did green and blue, and I’m like, hmm, with 100% green and 100% blue, it is drawing something. Talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John an eye test. Both of you can look in the show and it’s had these things. The
⏹️ ▶️ John red, I’m pretty, I forget the details of this, but the red, I believe the red I measured as, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, R255, zero G, zero B, everywhere. But the blue and the green,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a subtle gradient. Can you see the gradient in the green? Nope, not
⏹️ ▶️ John a bit. It’s there. I assure you, if you take out a measuring device, You can measure it and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like G255 and like R2 and B2.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s, there’s a fade to it. And so then I changed it to teal and gray. And now you can see with the naked eye,
⏹️ ▶️ John see what it’s doing with the teal and the gray, especially the gray you can see. And I tell you, these backgrounds are solid
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. We’ll put the gray one in the show notes and like the red one or the white ones you can see. On the gray, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see, oh, when the background is gray, it does draw a gradient under
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar. The gradient goes farther than the bar, mind you. It’s like twice or three times as long before
⏹️ ▶️ John it fades into the color, but this is a solid color background and it’s putting a gradient on it. So Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS Tahoe is baffling. By the way, all these screenshots are from beta one. I don’t think beta two behaves particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John differently, but it might make slightly different decisions about when it draws something and when it draws nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So its ways are mysterious. Sometimes the menu bar is not there and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John something is there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m using Xscope by friends of the show, Icon Factory. And sure enough, the images
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you put in the show notes, it goes from hex 28FF11 to 25FF0E.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the green one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. Yeah, the green one. For the life of me, even hyper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mega zoomed in in the Xscope like palette or whatever you wanna call it, still can’t tell the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John nothing. Yeah, that’s why I
⏹️ ▶️ John measured the black and the white one to make sure I wasn’t not seeing it there. And they are, there’s nothing there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it works in mysterious ways. Bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, do you want to talk more about the Safari toolbars, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Luis D’Origio wrote in to say, to remind us that in Sequoia and earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John OSs, Safari will do exactly the same thing that we were complaining about, which is basically like pick up color
⏹️ ▶️ John from the web page and put it into the toolbar area. So the example screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John from his email was like the Guardian website, which has this like
⏹️ ▶️ John navy blue color and the whole toolbar is navy blue. It’s not quite the same as
⏹️ ▶️ John what Tahoe does because I think the Guardian is setting it with like
⏹️ ▶️ John a setting in the page. Like for web developers, if you set the
⏹️ ▶️ John theme color in the meta tag, you can control what the top bar says. Or if you have like a web
⏹️ ▶️ John app, you know, what do you call it? PWA, progressive web app. You can set it in the theme color property in
⏹️ ▶️ John the web app manifest. And when you use Chrome, if you install a website as an
⏹️ ▶️ John application, it uses the same color for the menu bar. So there’s this whole system where websites can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell the title bar of either the window it’s in or the Safari browser that it’s in to color
⏹️ ▶️ John itself. It’s not quite the same as Tahoe in that it picks up the color of any
⏹️ ▶️ John webpage you scroll underneath it. I did a bunch of different webpages and scrolled them behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it wasn’t as flashy, like literally, like flashing as the one in Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you will only see this. The reason I think we all forgot about it, you only see this is if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have the option in Safari to show color and compact tab bar in the advanced
⏹️ ▶️ John setting. And I think we all turn that off as soon as this feature was released and have
⏹️ ▶️ John never turned it back on. So that’s why we just have a more or less solid gray
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar and Safari. But it’s a reminder that still exists. And I was further reminded when I was doing some digging for some other screenshots today
⏹️ ▶️ John that way back in Yosemite, Mac OS 10 10.10, I think is when
⏹️ ▶️ John they first rolled this out where they would color the tabs and the toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ John in Safari based on the content of the web page. In a way they look, I mean it was very frosted
⏹️ ▶️ John and very kind of opaque but it would still add colors to it. I put this very pretty screenshot into my Yosemite review
⏹️ ▶️ John that will link in the show notes to show what it looked like. But this is another one of the options that I immediately turned off. I think this was influenced
⏹️ ▶️ John by the like, um, uh, allow window backgrounds, allow
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop to tint window backgrounds or something like that. I don’t remember what it was that turned this one off. It was a long time ago, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, all this is to say that Apple has been obsessed with making
⏹️ ▶️ John safaris toolbar and tabs be colored by the thing that’s in them since at least 2014, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is when Yosemite rolled out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. There are some ways that one can install macOS Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey betas. I think you had said that this conversation started by you saying that your installation procedure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not fun. I said as a VM using Virtual Buddy was really worked really well for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Robert Sherry writes, in order to DFU restore to macOS betas, you need to install
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the beta version of Xcode on the device doing the restoration. This is also required to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey create a VM as that is effectively also a DFU restore. It will fail with some esoteric message
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I was experiencing this because I did not install the Xcode beta because I did not know that
⏹️ ▶️ John you needed to do this to install a beta version of an OS with DFU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t need Apple configurator. Finder can do a DFU restore. And I think it does mention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not having quote, device support quote, when you don’t have the beta Xcode installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For restoring to a physical device, I use the wonderful Asahi Mac VDM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tool to boot the other device into DFU mode because the key combination sucks. We’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link in the show notes. I hope my last pain, my past pain, excuse me, can help some people out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Brian Lecham writes, with regard to John trying to DFU restore Mac with an IPSW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file, I couldn’t live without DFU Blaster. Again, link in the show notes. With DFU Blaster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, you can put a Mac system into DFU mode with the press of a single button and restore any version of Mac OS that the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system supports. plug in a Mac via the DFU port, press a button, and the Apple Silicon Mac goes
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that there’s multiple tools to do this tells me that Apple should probably just build this into their OSs,
⏹️ ▶️ John since apparently you can do it with software somehow, instead of making us do the incantation that
⏹️ ▶️ John is very weird and complicated and not particularly satisfying and easy to get wrong, that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to look up every single time. So I’m keeping these items in mind, and I’ll probably do
⏹️ ▶️ John what I often do, which is use our show notes to remind myself of something next time I need to do this. So like we talked about an
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP, do a site colon ATP.fm query and look for this, look for DFU and I’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally, and finally in this regard, Andy Byer Bowden writes, John installed Tahoe by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installing Sequoia first, but this isn’t necessary. I did it by downloading Apple’s install assistant dot package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Tahoe, opening the installer and selecting the desired external drive within the installers GUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the install destination. Worked like a charm for a clean external install for my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Silicon Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this Mr. Macintosh site that we’ll link always finds these installer things. Why Apple makes
⏹️ ▶️ John these so hard to find that a website’s, part of a website’s reputation is they find
⏹️ ▶️ John these things and link them for every single OS. It’s like, Apple, if you’re gonna make these things, make them available to
⏹️ ▶️ John us. It’s great that you do the IPSW, like that’s probably useful to a lot of people. They used
⏹️ ▶️ John to put them on the Mac App Store, I think, and you’d get the installer there. But yeah, this installassistant.pkg
⏹️ ▶️ John really would have helped out. I think they don’t appear, like the second the beta is available on like developer.apple.com, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the installassistant.pkg things, they either take a while to appear, or it takes a while
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mr. Macintosh website to find them, but either way, this is definitely the easiest option. No DFU
⏹️ ▶️ John restore, it’s just a.pkg file that you run, point it in an external disk, and it installs. for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but hopefully this helps other people.
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iOS 26 updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk iOS 26. There’s apparently more frosting. Anilian writes, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me like they’ve turned up the opacity and the frostiness in beta 2 on the liquid glass toolbars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seems especially improved in cases where the toolbars hover over images like in Safari, podcasts, or music. These
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were completely unreadable in beta 1.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s two screenshots here. I hope these are in the post by Anilian showing Control Center
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS. yeah, iOS beta one and beta two. And you can see the difference,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So in beta one, the background shows through more strongly, less blurred, it’s less frosted, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John beta two is an improvement. But I was looking at this and I was thinking, okay, we’re looking at this, first of all, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at beta one versus beta two and we can see, okay, we’re going in the right direction. Things are improving, like they’re adjusting stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And we’re also looking at this from a perspective where we know that liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John glass is a redesign and we know what it’s supposed to be doing and we know what control center looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I looked at the beta two screenshot a little bit longer and I said, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John If they ship something like beta two and someone who doesn’t know anything about liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John glass or any of this stuff, saw that screen, someone in my life, let’s say, someone I’m related to and
⏹️ ▶️ John do you know what they would say to me? They would say to me, why is that button red?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is that one green? Does that mean it’s on? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of the buttons in Control Center now look like they are colored. And they’d be saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like, imagine it’s a control that they knew, because they don’t know that’s a screen recording button, they don’t know that’s a dark mode or whatever. They’d say
⏹️ ▶️ John like, my whatever button is red for some reason. I’m like, what do you mean it’s red? Like in the pull down
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, the button is red and I can’t make it not red, but some of them are green. Why? And it’s like, the answer is behind
⏹️ ▶️ John that is an icon on your home screen that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is fully making these buttons look like they are colored buttons. I’m not saying it’s not an improvement because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the Beta 1 one, It’s like half red, but at least that looks more like something is showing
⏹️ ▶️ John through. This just looks like, hey, something behind me is red, so I’m going to fully show myself as red, but then battery’s going to show itself
⏹️ ▶️ John as yellow. So they still got some work to do, and honestly, I’m not sure what the solution is other than
⏹️ ▶️ John just essentially drain more of the color out of this, but this, for all the world, looks like some
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons in Control Center are colored.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think when people actually use it, I think the motion of everything will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get people very quickly accustomed to the idea that this is a layer on top of stuff and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I don’t actually expect that color effect to be like a big confusing thing for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the legibility of things that’s gonna be a problem you know because like as as I keep mentioning like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when when you scroll content under the liquid glass material of various colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is jarring and it’s it it is hard to read in many conditions the shifts from light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dark are still pretty jarring and don’t really help things. But this particular concern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the control center being confusing to people, I don’t think it’ll be confusing. I think they’ll figure it out very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that these are just the things behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so the advantage of things like scrolling behind is that they scroll and move so
⏹️ ▶️ John you see that it’s changing. But if you pull down control center on the home screen, nothing is changing behind it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it will stop them from using it, but I think a lot of people might be wondering, I wonder why that button is always red
⏹️ ▶️ John in control center or has never read before, especially if like they only have one home screen or they’re mainly on a particular home
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, they pull it down a lot, they’ll just think the button turned red for some reason. It’s not gonna be that big of a deal, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John fully, I can just hear people in my life saying to me, why is that button, like my mom makes a list of like
⏹️ ▶️ John things that she wants me to look at on her devices when she comes visit
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and stuff. This would be on the
⏹️ ▶️ John list fully. She’d be like, this button turned red recently, why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what, when this comes out to the public, report back on this, because I actually, I think it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna happen. I think the motion of it coming in and out demonstrates well enough to people. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just clear like again. There’s other issues with the design, but I don’t think that’s going to be one of them and this is beta 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we don’t know what beta 3 is going to look like so on and so forth. So there the point is they are they are making adjustments and it
⏹️ ▶️ John is going in the right direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean because like I obviously like, you know, they want things to look fresh and new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think there’s a lot of room between looking old like what we had before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you the new design all the way to one side and in the middle is all these like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well, yes, you want, we need some compromises here because full transparency is hard to read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of contexts because it’s still a computer interface. So we still need to like, you know, put text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of buttons sometimes and have things be legible and have stuff go under it sometimes because scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists and, you know, uncontrolled content exists. So there is a wide range between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the extreme of it has to be perfectly transparent and it has to to look just like the old material.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we had in iOS 18 and earlier is, as we mentioned before, like a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of very heavily frosted glass looks. And what we have here is a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of almost not at all frosted glass looks. Somewhere in the middle, I think they can achieve a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fresh, nice, new look that has enough frosting and blurring to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be legible enough in most conditions. They are getting closer to that with these tweaks, but a lot of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still not tweaked. like the tab bar, which I think is one of the most egregious examples. This is like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls at the bottom of the music app. Um, anything with like the different sectioned, uh, buttons at the bottom, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still pretty, as far as I could tell, it’s unchanged in beta two. I, I at least didn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any difference. Like I screenshotted back to back and I couldn’t tell any difference. Tab bars are still, and the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini players and music. Um, those are still pretty hard to read and still flash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot when stuff scrolls, but they are making little improvements to other things. So I have some faith that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they will come upon that as well and tweak it a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you’ve been on an adventure. You’ve been on a treasure hunt to try to find some missing buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you talk us through what the ailment is, then we’ll talk about some potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So, listener Walter Hemme wrote in, because I complained last episode that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a couple of places that things that previously had toolbar buttons were now replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with nothing. I went on a whole rant about things being replaced by nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of the examples I gave was in the music app. When you’re in an album view in the music app, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the upper right corner there’ll be a plus icon if the album is not in your library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be a checkmark icon if it’s downloaded or it’ll be like a down arrow download button if it’s in your library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not downloaded. And that was a quick way to tell, is this album downloaded? And the quick way then to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, which I very much use all the time. And I was complaining that button was just gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Beta 1. Well it turns out, so Walter Hemingway wrote in to say that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still have the arrow button and gave a screenshot. And I wrote back, I’m like wait, but here’s a screenshot of mine, it’s clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not here. What it turned out to be is in Beta 1, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your album title was wide, that button would be hidden all the time. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s some mechanic of like when you scroll up when the title appears in the title bar when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolling, I guess when you’re scrolling down, the title moves from where it is in the content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that sticks in the top bar. And apparently there wasn’t room for it or something. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long story short, they fixed this bug in beta 2. So in beta 2, now across all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my screens in Apple Music, the checkmark slash download slash add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button is now back in the upper right corner where it belongs. So thank you whoever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed that at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John By looking at the screenshot, by the way, there’s room for way more buttons up there. I’m not saying they should fill the top of the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with a million buttons, but yeah, it looks even more egregious knowing that they took what used
⏹️ ▶️ John to what was one little ellipsis menu and now it’s a little ellipsis menu connected
⏹️ ▶️ John in the capsule with the button that you’re just referring to. Still plenty of room on the top there. Not a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John going on. This is not a busy interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Using beta 2 now for, I guess, what, a day? It’s been out two days. These
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements, they also tweaked the Safari buttons a little bit more, made them a little bit less terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s getting less bad in some of these very frustrating areas. There is still a long way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go, but this is only beta 2. We have all summer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Apple keep iterating on this and for us to keep complaining about it so they do the right thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say also Beta 2 does not so far seem to be overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more stable in most ways than Beta 1. It certainly doesn’t seem to perform any better. My
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone is still very hot all the time. I started bringing around my little fan cooler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the back when I’m like out and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it because it’s just so, it runs so hot. Performance is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reboot the phone yesterday because just system-wide, all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sudden I was getting like four frames a second for everything, scrolling, even the home screen. Like everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, I don’t know what was going on. So reboot of the phone, it was fine. I keep the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to have a problem where in the middle of typing like a paragraph into like a message or something, the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will just lock up the whole app and you’ll have to force quit whatever you’re typing in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then of course you lose what you were typing. So that’s been fun. I did lose the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to charge via MagSafe until a reboot yesterday. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, it’s that kind of build still. This is still very early.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So- Which to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear, we’re not faulting anyone for that. This is what beta season is about. This is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Marco knew what he was getting into.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. This is why they tell you like, you must only install those on test devices, even though they don’t know one does. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, but what I’m saying is if you’re, if you were, you know, out there, if you’re being responsible-ish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you were like, I’m not gonna install beta one, maybe I’ll install beta two. It’s not to that point yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you have that level of cautiousness that you wouldn’t install beta one, don’t install beta two either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see how beta three turns out in a couple of weeks.
Vision Pro “4K” follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we had a brief conversation last week about the new clause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showing up in simulators, I believe, Apple Vision Pro 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we theorized that maybe that’s hinting that there will, in the future, be a not 4K. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were dead wrong, because Greg Kaplan writes, the Apple Vision Pro simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not support 4K before. Now it does. Apple is advertising a new feature, not hinting at future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey products. And Greg continues, imagine Apple releasing a new iPhone that’s not retina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to hit a price point with a thinking face emoji. Apple Vision Pro’s issue is value. Lowering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the price to meet a perceived value is one solution. Apple generally increases value. The Apple Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs to get better in every way for many years before splitting the line makes sense. Old models will hit lower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prices in the meantime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. For the record, whatever the 4K thing, okay, fine. But this thing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like imagine Apple releasing a new iPhone that’s not retina to hit a price point, it’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different when you’re talking about a product family that effectively no one is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying because it is way too expensive for most people. Like that’s, that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone. The iPhone, yes, it’s expensive compared to like inexpensive Android phones in a lot of the world. It’s too expensive for a lot of people, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in Apple’s target markets in like, you know, the, the big rich countries that Apple sells most of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products in, the iPhone sells great. Nowhere does the vision pro sell great to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no market, nobody anywhere, No one is buying the Vision Pro. And the price is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one reason. And it isn’t that it’s like 10% too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like 200% too expensive. Like you would need to cut it way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way down to be even in a range that most people would consider for the kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. So yes, I can indeed envision Apple releasing a cheaper one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product line is failing hard until they can get it a lot cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s a very different situation than the iPhone. Also, again, we can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like the Quest series of headsets that are a few hundred bucks and way lower resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of people love them and use them just fine. And there’s a lot of advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have. And so I think we can see like, it is possible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create a good headset for lots of purposes with lower resolution screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, it’s not ideal, but right now, with the tech we have today, and with how much it costs today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the realities of the market, the reality is, yeah, if they want this product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to continue to exist, they’re gonna need to bring that price down very quickly, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t wait around for these particular resolution screens and specs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to somehow get so cheap that they can release one of these at a third or a quarter of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its current price.
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to hope that they don’t lower the resolution. I’m not predicting what they will do, just my hope. I think they can wait. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they can wait it out and just continue to sell not a lot of these until the prices come down where they can get the current resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John or better in a lower price thing. That’s gonna be years maybe, but that is my preferred strategy. We’ll see what Apple actually does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then just a little bit of final follow-up with regard, well, both in general and with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to this topic. Allegedly in the second betas that were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released a couple of days ago as we record this, the two options are now Apple Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apple Vision Pro at resolution, which is basically, you know, the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until now simulator, which reads as Apple Vision Pro, or this fancy new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simulator, which will now read instead of 4K, it will now read Apple Vision Pro at 2732 by 2048.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there you go. Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely makes it much clearer that this is not a product designation, but is in fact just a readout of statistics
⏹️ ▶️ John about the way the simulator is running.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, but it prevents people
⏹️ ▶️ John us- Even Microsoft would not make a product called Microsoft something 2732x2040. You sure about that? Speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of 2048, I heard some kid recently say that their favorite game is 2048 and I just died a little inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, that was the Threes clone, wasn’t it? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, that one, yes. People,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I felt like saying, you know, I thought I’m not gonna say it. You know, you know what 2048 is? You know
⏹️ ▶️ John where that comes from?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now those were the days.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Have you heard
⏹️ ▶️ John of a little game called Threes? I guess not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, look, that’s like the reality. That was such a sobering story to so many developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the reality is, like, yeah, things, like ideas get copied and free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually wins over paid. Like, that’s, believe me, in a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era, I had a paid app with big free competition. And I learned that lesson too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sucked, but that’s the market, you know? And in the market of ideas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one cares who did it first. No one cares who ripped off who.
⏹️ ▶️ John And no one cares who’s doing it better because ThreeZ is a better app, but that doesn’t matter either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Totally, but yeah, exactly. Like that doesn’t matter. Like no one cares if you invented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something first, except you. No one cares if you do something better, except you. Look, I mean, I do the same thing now, like with Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lot of my audio features, I was like the first one to do something, or I was one of the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, or I did it in a new way or something. And who even knows that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one. And who cares? Well I do, but no one else does. So you gotta do that stuff for yourself, not
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AI-training kerfuffles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to get cranky for a second, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John if that’s not your bag, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I’m trying to be more positive in general. Sometimes I’m succeeding, sometimes I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ John predicting all of our responses to this. You don’t know what we’re going to say about this first item.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, John. OK, sure. Apparently, from Joaquim, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgive me if I’m pronouncing that incorrectly, but they write, when uploading a cyst diagnose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or probably any other attachments to feedback, You get the usual privacy notice that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is likely a lot of private and other sensitive info in those log files. So you’re making a bug report to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, it’ll capture what they call sysdiagnose, which is a bunch of information about the system that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were using, and you might have attachments or whatever, and you’re uploading this to Apple as part of a bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report. It’s not a great feeling, but I mostly trust the folks at Apple to treat it with respect, and I trust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the logging system to redact the most serious bits. However, when filing a feedback today, this was a couple of weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, I think, I noticed a new addition to the privacy notice quote, by submitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you blah, blah, blah, blah, agree that Apple may use your submission to train Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models and other machine learning models. I’m sorry. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I love this. I’m really trying to be positive, but I don’t think I love this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I, my one complaint is that there is no way to opt out of the training part, because basically if
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t agree to this, then you just don’t get to submit of feedback, which seems pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John harsh because this is a new addition that before again, since I know it captures tons of stuff about
⏹️ ▶️ John your system, every app that you’re running, everything that’s installed, like just tons of stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what this is referring to about like the logging system has a way to redact private information. programmers have to
⏹️ ▶️ John use it correctly in their apps not to leak private information, but presumably Apple does a good job with that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re already sending a bunch of private information, but you’re doing it like as a part of a bug report. Like you have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to send up like here’s the system that I’m running, here’s all the apps that are running, here’s all the kernel extensions, here’s the versions of all
⏹️ ▶️ John my things. Like you’re trying to help them solve whatever bug you’re having. So that’s part of the bug report.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now it’s like, also, we might train Apple intelligence models and other machine learning
⏹️ ▶️ John models on the stuff that you submit. And there’s no way to say, okay, I’ll do the submission,
⏹️ ▶️ John but please don’t train your models on it. Because I feel like training the models doesn’t really have anything to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John addressing whatever bug. You know, the system stuff does have to do with the bug. It’s telling, you know, Apple potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John how to reproduce the bug or what’s involved in, you know, crash reports, logs, stuff like that, right? But the training the models, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole separate thing. It’s like, okay, maybe that’s the thing they want to do and it’s great that they’re telling us about it. But they should be asking us,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, do you want to submit the thing anyway? But also tell us not to train and that’s not an option and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s crappy. And that I think is actually my only complaint about this, that it’s basically like don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John submit feedback at all or allow us to train. I understand why people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like it and like I think Like, this is one of those things where I think a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people will blindly click through this and not think about it, but I’ll try to give people something to think about. A lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ John ongoing court cases, some of which we’re about to touch on, involve people saying, oh, you trained on,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, uh, my book or New York times as you trained on our articles. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that is if I ask a question in a certain way, I see paragraphs from my book spit back at me. I see
⏹️ ▶️ John paragraphs from a New York times article spit back at me either almost verbatim or a hundred percent verbatim.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s like, so I can tell you trained on my stuff because look, I can get it out of your thing if I ask the right question.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is true of your source code too. If you submit stuff in a feedback and they train their model on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, first of all, we don’t have no idea what they’re training because they don’t say, but let’s say they’re training Swift assist or one of those things that helps you
⏹️ ▶️ John in Xcode. It could be that someone somewhere type something and like auto-completes
⏹️ ▶️ John to a paragraph of code that you wrote. And you might not think about that. Maybe that paragraph of
⏹️ ▶️ John code that you wrote has like a snarky comment or a variable name or like things that are personal
⏹️ ▶️ John to you that you wouldn’t want being out there in the world. Like when you’re submitting a feedback report, you’re not thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John someone somewhere someday will ask some Apple LLM for something
⏹️ ▶️ John and my code will come back with my comments and my variable names. And also obviously the proprietary stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you have some secret algorithm in your app that does some fancy thing, now people can auto-complete that without knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John where it came from, without giving any credit to you or whatever. So maybe you wanna think twice about that. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m personally not concerned about it is because I never upload my real source code to Feedback. I’m always making
⏹️ ▶️ John sample apps and the sample apps have nothing that I care about in them. They’re just bare bones sample apps
⏹️ ▶️ John with code that is, as far as I’m concerned, could be public. And if Radar slash Feedback had a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to market as public, I would do that. But that’s not true of everybody. If you’re like Adobe and you’re like, we’re having a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in some part of Photoshop and you upload that portion of Photoshop, I don’t think Adobe wants someone auto-completing They’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John filter kernel in some Xcode project a year from now because Apple trained on it. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John final thing that I’ll notice, and a lot of these like, oh, by the way, we might train your stuff, we might train machine learning on your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John This cycle has happened multiple times already with other companies. And a lot of the time it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, lawyers getting in there and saying, just write this language so that we can do anything we want. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ John company swears up and down, oh, we didn’t mean it to be that broad. We just wanted to use it for this very narrow thing, but the lawyers made us put this broad
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in, so we’ll change it to make it more narrow thing. That works if a company is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say like, is employs humans who are responsive to feedback in real
⏹️ ▶️ John time. I would say that does not characterize Apple in the most part when it comes to this type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not optimistic that Apple is going to remedy this language to clarify what they mean. In fact, this story is weeks old and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think I’ve heard anything about it. But just FYI, this is the thing Apple wants you to agree to
⏹️ ▶️ John which you may or may not care about. I personally don’t because of the way I use feedback but
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people legitimately could because of the way they need to use feedback. And like I said, the only option is to not use feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John So congratulations, Apple, you put up one more barrier to discourage people from sending feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the disclaimer that I know this is gonna make people mad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, Casey, you’re 0 for 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I’m shooketh over here. I cannot believe my ears, my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think John is right about, for the most part, what you should submit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want your feedback report to actually get fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, you’re rolling the dice anyway, good luck. Odds are you’re wasting your time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if any human being ever actually looks at it, which is again, very unlikely, what you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attach to it is a very, very simple sample project that doesn’t really contain any of your code. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, here is me using this API in this way, and when I do these four lines of code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t work. Like that’s the kind of thing they will actually respond to. It should fit on one screen. Yeah, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like uploading your actual source code to your actual functioning app of thousands of lines, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least, of code, like that’s probably not going to even get your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug fixed because it’s too complex. And if you can’t figure out a very small amount of code that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows the problem, they won’t even bother looking at it either. Ideally, you’re not really submitting anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of significant value or exclusive knowledge to you. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, I think broadly speaking, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please forgive me everyone, I think no one’s gonna care about this kind of stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, define this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Training AIs on quote, my content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think people are largely not going to care about this in the long term. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AI tools provide a huge amount of value and we’re all starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use them in all sorts of ways. And so as that value goes up, first of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, I do think it weakens the argument that a lot of people make that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you ripped off my content and you’re creating value just for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the reality is most of us over the next few years, if we aren’t already using AI tools to help us out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be in everything, in everywhere, we’re all gonna use AI tools in some way. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just do Google searches now, You’re using AI, whether you like to or not, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere and it’s getting everywhere, even more so because these tools are so useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have very high utility to so many different contexts. Like you’re using AI everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you intend to or not, it’s just getting everywhere. There are always going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be people who like resist it and who are against it for various reasons. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the numbers of those people are going to dwindle over time and it’s going to become marginalized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The same way that people freaked out about a lot about the internet when the internet was new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and over time, for the most part, most people have gotten past that, or those people just got more and more marginalized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wouldn’t let go of those objections because there was so much value being created in so many other ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s helped so many other people in so many ways, everyone kind of moved on. I think that’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with AI. I think that will continue to happen over time. And so people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who were super against AI on principle are just going to keep getting more and more marginalized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you are one of those people, this probably sucks to hear, and you’re probably really mad at me and I’m sorry, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not, it isn’t super clear cut. I can’t say this is a universal good with no downsides. It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is creating a ton of value for a ton of people and it’s just going everywhere now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no fight against it. When technology develops a way to do something that is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco valuable, it goes everywhere. You can’t stop it. And this is one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco techniques. So I think in the long term, people will stop caring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what AI trained on and why. Because it’s just being trained on everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere, all the time. The same way web search engines crawl everything everywhere as much as they can. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they index that data for you to make use of it later. That’s where we are now. That’s where we are headed. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of AI ubiquity and all the different products that we use and most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not caring. Young people already don’t care. Young people who are coming into the workforce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now or in college now, they’ve been using ChatGPT for a few years now and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just what they have, it’s just available to them, that’s their technology world. You can be a part of it and you can embrace it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now or you can wait for it to be forced upon you by all of your platform vendors over the next few years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think embracing it now is probably the way to go. So I think this is largely a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco temporary objection of it even mattering at any meaningful scale,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in the longterm, it won’t. And again, if you are on the other side of this, you’re probably really mad at me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t disagree with you about why you should be mad at me, but I think this is the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of where this is going. You know, there’s only so much we can fight it. And I think once you are using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI tools, even if you didn’t mean to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, you know what, oh, there’s now, there’s new button in Google Apps or whatever, like even if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using AI tools, I do think it then becomes a little bit problematic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, well, I’m gonna happily take the value of this tool, but I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to allow it to train on anything that I make. That’s a little bit of a tricky place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be. So I just think about that. Again, I don’t think I’m gonna change anybody’s mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any of this, but I think just this is what’s happening. Like this wave is crashing over all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff on all of our tech world. It’s only going to keep increasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because again, there is a lot of value being created and a lot of utility being created. And whether you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it or not, everyone else is using it. So I don’t think it’s a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s a tricky position to be in to say, I’ll use this thing, but I don’t want it to drain on my data. That’s, there’s plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ John other analogous situations in the world where you will accept a service made by somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John else, but you don’t want to contribute to that service for whatever reason. I feel like that should still be your option, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to contribute to this thing. So don’t contribute to the thing, But you can still use it because it’s filled with other people who
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably consented to their contributions, let’s say, in the most ideal scenario. So I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big deal at all. But as to your other points, I think we will touch on them as we go down the line of
⏹️ ▶️ John other items in this very long topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m stunned. And I think I mostly agree with you guys. But I think the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chaps my bottom the most is that basically, hey, you’ve done all this free work for us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we would like to use the things you send us to do more free labor. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, there’s lots of reasons to be mad at Apple for the terrible feedback system that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just at every possible, in every possible way, they dump the entire cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on us in every way. And they expect us to do all sorts of free work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that one of their bug filter people, three months later, can mass close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands of bugs by saying, does it still work in the current beta? and they never even bothered running your sample project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s the reality of the system. The reality of the system is, it’s wasting our time for lots of other reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a small slap in the face in that context. But when taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in absolute terms, do I object to this particular behavior? Eh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not great, but there are worse things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I think I agree with that. And I also wholeheartedly agree with what John said at the beginning of the segment. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be a way to say, Yeah, I understand you’re getting sensitive data, and that’s fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not want to use it to feed your never satiated LLM. But here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, speaking of LLMs and AIs and things like that, Meta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has some thoughts on the value of AI training data. This is reading from an article in Vanity Fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is how Meta AI staffers deemed more than 7 million books to have no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, economic value. reading from the Post, lawyers for Meta are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey invoking a fair use defense in a copyright suit that’s been winding, winding, I think it says winding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that a word? Winding is a word, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so today I learned. Wending its way, not winding, folks. I didn’t know either. See, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. OK. Wending its way through the Northern District of California legal system for nearly two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reams of confidential Meta communications newly in the public record as exhibits for the plaintiffs offers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an unprecedented look at the internal maneuverings behind the company’s decision to train its model on a database
⏹️ ▶️ Casey containing more than 7 million pirated books. Meta’s attorneys argue that under precedent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does not matter whether Meta downloaded data sets containing pirated books from a third party who lacked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey authorization to distribute them or borrowed used books from the library and scan them by hand to achieve the same result.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But their defense also hinges on the argument that the individual books themselves are essentially worthless. One expert witness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Meta describes the influence of a single book in LLM pertaining, quote, adjusted its performance by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than 0.06% on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, first of all, that actually sounds kind of high. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John OK, so you only need a few hundred books
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your entire model to be amazing. Well, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of the type of thing of like, you know, you change one bit in something and like the MD5 changes radically, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe even just omitting one book can change it by 0.06%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from Vandy Fair, Furthermore Meta says that while the company has invested hundreds of millions of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars in LLM development, they see no market in paying authors to license their books because, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange. But none of the plaintiff’s works has economic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey value individually as training data, end quote. An argument essential to fair use, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also sounds like a scaled up version of a scenario in which the New York Philharmonic Board argues against paying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual members of the orchestra because the organization spent a lot of money on the upkeep of the David Geffen Hall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also, a solo bassoon cannot play every part in the rite of spring.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love this quote that I bolded in here in the notes. It’s saying, in order for there to be a market, there must
⏹️ ▶️ John be something of value to exchange. But none of the plaintiff’s works has economic value individually as training did. They’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, all the books in the world are worth billions of dollars to our company. But your one book
⏹️ ▶️ John is worth zero. So if we add up billions of zeros, we get billions of dollars of
⏹️ ▶️ John value? It’s an interesting math trick to say, Well, our product is worthless without
⏹️ ▶️ John your data, but your data is also worthless. But if we add up all the worthless data in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John it equals billions and billions of dollars worth of value. So good luck to their lawyers about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I get what they’re saying. They’re like, well, what is one book? Like what they’re basically making the argument is like, look, if we had to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for all these books, it would cost us so much money. There’s lots of other articles you’ll find here of similar things to basically saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we had to pay for the data that we train AI’s on, it would bankrupt us and you couldn’t have AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So obviously we can’t do that. If I had to pay for all the Ferraris
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world, I couldn’t have all these Ferraris. So obviously we can’t do that. You should just give them to me for free.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, they’re literally making the argument in court, your one book is worth $0. I’m just rounding now.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s worth $0. And it’s like, OK, great. Well, so if these things are worthless, we’ll just take
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them away. It’s like, well, if you take them all away, we don’t have a product. So we can’t have that. But we’re just saying your one book is worth $0.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s any kind of collective bargaining. Any individual worker is worthless. But if you unionize, suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John the workers en masse have value, and now you have to negotiate with them. So I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John people will make all sorts of arguments in court cases. This one I don’t think has wrapped up yet, although this is an older article.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, this is one way to go, which is to say, we need your stuff, but we don’t want to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for it because we had to pay for it to be expensive, and your stuff is worthless anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What a crazy argument. Like, despite what I just said about defending the value of AI, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, Meta’s a terrible company. They just do ridiculously unethical, terrible things all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is a terrible argument. This is like saying, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think that. I mean, it’s basically the Napster argument. It’s like, we think you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overpriced. Therefore, we will take it for free, and that is reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great that you brought that up, because that is the first thing that sprung to mind when you were saying before how it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no fighting this, because it’s just going to happen. I feel like it’s very much like the Napster days,
⏹️ ▶️ John where It’s like suddenly we have the technology to copy music everywhere for free. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, there’s no fighting that. You can’t stop this technology. Everyone’s going to be able to do it. And I think all these
⏹️ ▶️ John court cases, as terrible as they may be as a way to get to this, all these court cases and thoughts around it, it
⏹️ ▶️ John gets back to what I said very early on on this topic months ago. We need to come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of economic system that incorporates the new technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John like acknowledges its existence and that it’s going to be there, but nevertheless gives us some kind of path forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the advent of Napster and MP3s or whatever essentially decimated the recording industry
⏹️ ▶️ John as it existed. But today, people still pay money for music.
⏹️ ▶️ John Spotify is terrible. Record labels are terrible. Artists get paid less. They have to go on tour and sell t-shirts, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. But what didn’t happen is now all music is free forever for everybody. That’s not a thing that happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is more free than it used to be. But still, we have come up with models,
⏹️ ▶️ John business models and markets, however imperfect and however impoverished compared to the old ones that have lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of downsides versus the old ones, but also some upsides that we’re trying to find a way forward. And that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John through lawsuits and through new laws being passed and through new business models being created. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people who like the old record system will tell you that the new one is bad, but there are good aspects to it as well. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like we need that for AI training. And we are at the very
⏹️ ▶️ John early stages. We’re at the Metallica suing like people in their basement stage
⏹️ ▶️ John AI training. It’s like you can’t fight the technology. There’s no going back from like, oh, it’s trivial to distribute
⏹️ ▶️ John music online. It’s it’s oh, it’s still trivial to distribute music. And it’s always going to be. But the innovation
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, you know, iTunes, what we will we will compete with piracy by being more convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ John We will let you pay a monthly fee for essentially all the music in the world. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, how does that work? How can artists make money like? well, it’s better than everyone getting
⏹️ ▶️ John all the music for free, so let’s try to work something out. And I feel like, you know, I’m not saying we’ve reached
⏹️ ▶️ John a successful end point and that the music industry should be the model for the rest of the world, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of gatekeepers in the record labels still manage to somehow cling to power and be a thorn in our
⏹️ ▶️ John side to this day. And Spotify is trying to become the new version, modern version of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not saying it’s all roses. What I am saying is that this whole thing looks familiar. And I feel like what you
⏹️ ▶️ John said, Marco, about like, there is no way to fight this is true. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ John what we should trying to do is figure out a way forward without sort of like holding
⏹️ ▶️ John back the tide or boiling the ocean or whatever analogy you want to say is like, you can’t, you’re not going to stop this by refusing to
⏹️ ▶️ John use AI, you’re not going to outlaw AI, you’re not going to do any of the things that they tried to do to stop Napster.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we should also not say, it’s a free for all all data is free for anybody at all
⏹️ ▶️ John times, We have to figure out something in the middle. And as this meta case emphasizes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can’t be like, OK, we’ll pay everybody a dollar for their book, because that
⏹️ ▶️ John also seems like it wouldn’t work, because it would be a lot of dollars. And even so, that’s not an ongoing thing. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the answer is. But that’s what these cases are hopefully moving
⏹️ ▶️ John us toward is some kind of market for creative work that allows
⏹️ ▶️ John AI to exist and be useful, but also allows people to still somehow make
⏹️ ▶️ John money for creating things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s tough because there’s no clear answer. And I don’t know where to go from here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Related, but a new topic, The New York Times’ first generative AI deal is with Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from The Verge, The New York Times has struck a multi-year AI licensing deal with Amazon that will bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences, the outlet announced on some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent Thursday. Under the agreement, Amazon will include summaries and short excerpts of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Times content and products like Alexa, and will also use Times articles to help train its AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models. The deal comes over a year after the Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accusing the companies of copying and using millions of its articles to train their AI models, while depriving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the publication of subscription licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue. Several other outlets have sued OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on similar grounds, including The Intercept, Raw Story, CBC, Radio Canada, the owner of IGN and CNET.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Other publishers like the Atlantic News Corp and the Verge parent company Vox Media have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey struck AI licensing deals. In addition to using content from the Times, Amazon will also draw from the outlet’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sports-focused outlet, The Athletic, and its recipe hub, New York Times Cooking. Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launched its AI-upgraded Alexa Plus in early access earlier this year and claims hundreds of thousands of customers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have tried the assistant. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this has been going on for a while. This is like rallying off a list of people who have cut deals, this is New York Times
⏹️ ▶️ John is cutting a deal, this is, it makes sense that this is happening. And in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John it certainly makes sense for the AI companies, they’re like, we really want that New York Times data. We have a lot of money,
⏹️ ▶️ John can we just give you a deal that like we give you this amount of money or whatever the financial terms are, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John let us train on your data because we’re doing it anyway, and you’re trying to sue us and let’s work
⏹️ ▶️ John something out, right? But this is not, I think, a system that we,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a good system because what it means is big, rich companies, they’re going to afford to sue open AI like
⏹️ ▶️ John Disney and the New York Times and like, you know, the Atlantic and news Corp and Vox media,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will strike deals where they get paid to allow, you know, there’ll be paid by everyone who wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John train in our data. They’ll strike a deal, whatever those deals are. They’ll figure out the terms like this makes sense to us. You can train our data
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange. We get some part of the riches that you’re getting from our content. But the only people who
⏹️ ▶️ John can do that are these big companies with lots of money and lawyers who can strike these deals. And it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John what that basically means is, if you’re a peon, all these AI companies get your content for free and you have no recourse.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re a big company, you get paid. And that doesn’t seem to be to be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John system, at least in the Napster days, everyone’s music could be pirated. You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t just some people who got paid for it. And it does have some precedents of like the record companies staying around and still taking all
⏹️ ▶️ John the money and a few streaming companies, you know, dominating in the current era. But I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the shape of this. But on the other hand, I do like the idea of essentially setting a precedent
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you want to train our content, then pass something. And presumably the deal
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like you pass a dollar per word, like it’s obviously a deal that they can do. It’s I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like Spotify. It’s like, well, if you have to pay, you know, $250,000 for every infringement or whatever the hell it
⏹️ ▶️ John is for like each song, what what would it look like for a service where you can get access to all the songs in
⏹️ ▶️ John the world that must be like prohibitively expensive? It was like, no, it’s a couple of bucks a month and you can get access to all the songs in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, how does that make any sense? That’s like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent for each song. How does that make any
⏹️ ▶️ John sense? And it’s like, well, it’s not great, but it’s still better than zero and people still can get some
⏹️ ▶️ John money from it. So like, we’re still working that out, but I don’t like the idea of like, if you are a big company,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get paid and everyone else doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. Again, there’s no clear good answers, but it’ll work itself out one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way or the other. Reading from Engadget this time, It turns out you can train
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI models without copyrighted material. It’s just a pain in the tuchus. So reading from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article, AI companies claim their tools couldn’t exist without training on copyrighted material. It turns out they could.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just really hard. To prove it, AI researchers trained a new model that’s less powerful but much more ethical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s because the LLM’s data set uses only public domain and openly licensed material. The paper, via the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Washington Post, was a collaboration between 14 different institutions. The authors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey represent various universities and non-profits. The group built an 8 terabyte ethically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sourced dataset. Among the data was a set of 130,000 books in the Library of Congress. After inputting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the material, they trained a 7 billion parameter large language model, or LLM, on that data. The result?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It performed about as well as Meta’s similarly sized LLAMA27B from 2023. The team didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey publish benchmarks comparing its results to today’s top models. Performance comparable to a two-year-old model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t the only downside. The process of of putting it all together was also a grind. Much of the data couldn’t be read by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machines, so humans had to sift through it. Quote, we used automated tools, but all our stuff was manually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annotated and at the end of the day, at the end of the day and checked by people, quote. Co-author
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stella Biderman told the Washington Post. And that’s just really hard. Figuring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the legal details also made the process hard. The team had to determine which license applied to each website they scanned.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a lot of work. Yeah, so I mean, this is about, you know, text
⏹️ ▶️ John training on books and things that are probably available. I think Adobe has already shown that you can make a useful
⏹️ ▶️ John viable product because without training on essentially stolen data, because according to
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe, all of their Photoshop AI image generation features are trained on content
⏹️ ▶️ John that Adobe already owns or licensed. That is a very conservative
⏹️ ▶️ John safe way to do this. pay for or already own the content you want to train on and then train
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. And if it’s content you already own, fine, you’ve already paid for it. If it’s content you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay for and someone will license it to you knowing that you’re going to train your model on it, fine, like that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John make useful things out of that. The place where it gets like untenable is like, okay, but that’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John for a thing that makes images in Photoshop or some tiny model that with 7 billion parameters that it runs on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. But what about the big models, they need all the knowledge in the world, what are you going to do, pay everybody in the
⏹️ ▶️ John world for their stuff. You can’t even figure out who to pay or how much to pay. It’s like, it doesn’t make any sense. You either
⏹️ ▶️ John can have a model, like the biggest chat GPT for or whatever, or you can pay people, but you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do both. But it is worth pointing out that this doesn’t mean that, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, anybody who’s ever training a model, there’s no way you can do it without stealing everything. You can, you totally can. Yes, it is more
⏹️ ▶️ John hard, but also it is essentially insurance against like, depending on which way
⏹️ ▶️ John court cases go, like Adobe’s butt is covered. It’s like we’re training on stuff that we own or license for
⏹️ ▶️ John this purpose. What everyone is getting, you know, these are all legal agreements. They’re all sound. There’s nothing weird about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Licensing data is a thing that happens all the time. As long as you put the terms in the license, that’s we’re going to like.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re fine no matter what. It’s a great hedge for them to say we’re we’re putting out AI products. We’re telling you Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John can do image generation. Photoshop can do this AI stuff. And we don’t have to worry whatever happens in all the laws
⏹️ ▶️ John unless they try to like outlaw AI, which I don’t think anybody is going to successfully do at this point. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just putting it out there and more people trying to do it, it is possible to do this if you are very
⏹️ ▶️ John careful. And yes, it is a pain, but there are dividends for you doing this. There are dividends for you and there are dividends for your
⏹️ ▶️ John customers because it’s just, they don’t have to worry about something that your product becoming like useless because all of a sudden it becomes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it turns out it’s violating tons of laws that just got passed or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, uh, for tonight, and this was breaking as of just yesterday, I believe, Anthropic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wins a major fair use victory for AI, but it’s still in trouble for stealing books, A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey federal judge has sided with Anthropic in an AI copyright case ruling that training, and only training,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its AI models on legally purchased books without author’s permission is fair use. It’s a first-of-its-kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ruling in favor of the AI industry, but it’s importantly limited specifically to physical books Anthropic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchased and digitized. Judge William Alsip of the Northern District of California also says in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his decision that the company must face a separate trial for pirating millions of books from the Internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The decision also does not address whether the outputs of an AI model infringe copyrights, which is at issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in other related cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John So minor victory for Anthropic here, but I feel like not ruling on the outputs. Like I’m not a lawyer, but my
⏹️ ▶️ John brief understanding from the story that just broke yesterday is what they’re saying is like, okay, it’s fair use to essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you pay for a book and you scan it, it’s like taking it and like making an archive backup
⏹️ ▶️ John copy and compressing it into a model and yada, yada, yada. But it says nothing about the quote unquote outputs, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re saying is, okay, you can do that and it’s fine. But we’re not saying anything
⏹️ ▶️ John about you charging someone $20 a month to talk to your model. That’s an output. So now all of a sudden you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a product that you’re selling, whose value is derived from the books that you scan. So you can train
⏹️ ▶️ John it and you can talk to it yourself just like you can like the whole sort of quote unquote backup thing that people use like pirate
⏹️ ▶️ John ROMs or whatever. If you bought a game, you have a legal right to dump the ROM for your own personal
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote backup purposes because you own the ROM, you bought it, you paid for it, you can make a digital copy of it, stick it
⏹️ ▶️ John in your attic, whatever. Like it’s, you can do that. What you can’t do is probably, according
⏹️ ▶️ John to this type of analogy is, start a store where
⏹️ ▶️ John you rent out time on people paying you money so they can play your game or whatever, unless
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you have a, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like buying a VHS, I’m trying to think of an analogy that’s relevant to modern people.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you bought a VHS tape, you could watch it at your house, but Blockbuster did not pay
⏹️ ▶️ John the same price as you for that same VHS tape because they are going to run a business on it by renting it out again and again, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a very different price than you for that copy of Die Hard on VHS. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John not addressing the outputs is like, well, how useful is training a model if you’re not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John charge people money to use it? I guess, and even giving it away for free. It’s like, what if I did this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought your book, I scanned it, and now I’m letting the entire world talk to the LM that I trained, and oops,
⏹️ ▶️ John there goes passages from your book in the output. Um, for whatever reason, the lawyers
⏹️ ▶️ John in this case, like didn’t contest that angle, didn’t talk about it at all. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they were not trying to, you know, they basically conceded that like the training
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is all they’re concerned about. And so, yeah, they won that part. You are allowed to buy a book,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, and scan it and train a model on it. But then it’s like, okay, but they’re not just training a
⏹️ ▶️ John model out and putting into a drawer somewhere. Something happens after that that involves lots of money and people using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was not part of this case. So stay tuned, but I feel like this is at least one
⏹️ ▶️ John legal decision on the side of the AI people, which is like that one little piece because you paid for
⏹️ ▶️ John the book, like you literally bought the book. They bought copies of these individual books and then they cut the pages out of them and
⏹️ ▶️ John ran into a digital scanner because you did that. Yeah, it’s your book. You can train your AI model on it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, you know, again, buying a computer thing and taking it apart and dumping the ROMs. It’s your thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can do whatever you want with it. Tune in later to see whatever the all the court cases that talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, but can I charge people $20 a month to talk to the thing that I just made without paying the authors anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Do you want to do a little ask ATP? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t done it in ages.
#askatp: CarKey, iX update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Samuel Paule writes, I noticed that Marco’s car is one of the handful of models that works with Apple CarKey. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he or his wife use the feature or still carry around fobs for convenience sake? Are there any frustrations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with BMW’s implementation of CarKey that have caused him to stop using it? My partner and I are considering a new vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the key at Niro we’re considering also supports CarKey, so I’m curious if there’s any noteworthy limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should be aware of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do use CarKey. It is one of the reasons why I picked the iX, actually, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW is seemingly a pretty close partner whenever Apple deploys new stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the notable exception of CarPlay Ultra, which I don’t know if they’re going to ever do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allegedly not. That broke earlier today, actually. I don’t know if you saw that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I didn’t see that. No. But for the most part, like whenever Apple deploys some other kind of technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around cars, BMW is usually one of the first and often one of the best to implement it. So that’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the reasons I went back to that direction. So CarKey works great I use it most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I do have I can so most modern cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that support this kind of thing usually you also have some kind of key card like an RFID card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep that card in my wallet just in case I ever need it I think I had to use it once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve had my car for almost a year the only time I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like I will occasionally have like a glitch where like the Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone won’t actually unlock the door for like a couple of seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’m sitting there holding the handle waiting for it to you know open this only got me like kind of wet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the rain more than it had to be once in the again in a year that’s really not bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so and the convenience of just having my phone be the key and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having some giant key fob in my pocket all the time which sucks like that’s That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very nice. If I’m going on a trip, whenever I have my backpack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with me, my main backpack that I bring everywhere, I do keep one of the key fobs in the backpack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So just in case I’m out in the middle of nowhere somewhere and for some reason it’s not working,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can use the key fob. It’ll be fine. But I have not needed to yet in a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems like whatever the downside or slowness of it sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it sure seems like it’s Apple’s bug, not BMW’s. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iPhones and cars and Bluetooth works really well like 97%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time, but then there’s that 3% that it doesn’t. And it, because I’ve seen this across multiple cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from multiple brands, it seems like that’s an Apple thing, not a BMW thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, there is, there is that, you know, occasional unreliability. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I get into the car and start driving, it has wireless CarPlay. Sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CarPlay doesn’t connect for like the first 20 or 30 seconds of the drive. Again, not frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but sometimes. And again, that feels like an Apple bug, not a BMW bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, the rest of the integration really is quite solid. And I use it again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the main way I use my car is I walk near it with my phone in my pocket and it opens up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get in and I sit down just start driving. It’s great. And at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I would consider a car that didn’t have that functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now imagine this, but having a always updated central
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infotainment system, which you do have now, as you said, this is why people are such nutjobs, including me, hello,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about CarPlay. Like I don’t think I really need my phone to unlock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my car, although maybe I’m saying that, maybe I’m saying that only because I’m ignorant and I don’t realize how amazing it is. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tell you, I am not going to buy a car without CarPlay. I’m just not. It’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an interesting confluence of technology development related to getting into
⏹️ ▶️ John your car with the rise of the smartphone coinciding with
⏹️ ▶️ John car manufacturers having a primitive keyless entry and moving up the ladder.
⏹️ ▶️ John So very old sort of keyless entry, key fob thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John uses radio to unlock your car if you press a button and then eventually uses radio to unlock your car when you get close to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. In the beginning, those used tech that would like go off the like, what is it? The, I forgot the number
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but the battery that’s in an AirTag, what is that one?
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, like a little cell battery and it would last for like years and years. Like eventually your thing would die if you own
⏹️ ▶️ John your car for a long time. All right. And those, you know, they were cheap to make,
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t particularly technically sophisticated, they did the job, a lot of them were not particularly secure, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever. And then smartphones started rising. But then the
⏹️ ▶️ John car manufacturers like, well, this technology exists now. Like these new standards, Bluetooth, RFID,
⏹️ ▶️ John my car is like a little computer. All that stuff we were doing with those little coin batteries and those primitive
⏹️ ▶️ John like RF transmitter receivers, our key fob should become a little miniature computer
⏹️ ▶️ John now instead. And so what happened is key fob started to become gigantic because I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a little computer in there that has Bluetooth and other, like I don’t understand why they got so big.
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume it’s because they stopped being like a little RadioShack radio frequency things and started being tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little computers. And they just got so big that it would lead you to say, well, the
⏹️ ▶️ John second I don’t have to carry this rock in my pocket, I can just use my phone, which I’m carrying anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just gonna throw this thing away and not use it. And like key fob inflation, like it goes right alongside like
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of cars in America. Some of the key fobs I see in these car reviews, I’m like, that can’t be real.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that cannot be the size of the key fob. Like they’re the size of a submarine sandwich. Like who can
⏹️ ▶️ John even fit that in their pocket? What is in there? And then there are of course, they’re ugly ones. The Ionic series has
⏹️ ▶️ John a horrendous key fob that’s also kind of big. But anyway, this is leading people,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think to, well, eventually like once this sort of trickles down from the fancy BMWs to other cars, as soon
⏹️ ▶️ John as regular people can just use their phone as their car key, assuming this works in any way reliably,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be such a relief not to bring those giant key fobs along with you. In the same way that we had that brief period where it was a relief
⏹️ ▶️ John not to have to stick a metal key into a thing, they used to have the ones where the keys like closed down like a switchblade.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you needed it, it was there or whatever. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, ah, just abandon
⏹️ ▶️ John it. There’s no actual physical key. It’s just the fob. But then the fobs got giant. So now car makers
⏹️ ▶️ John are essentially driving people towards car key and other solutions. If those things become reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad the BMW one is reliable, but I’m not confident that every car brand will be as reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John but all I know is I don’t want my key fobs to get any bigger. And that’s been happening because I don’t yet have any
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy cars. But even just in the series of Honda’s, I buy the key fobs keep getting bigger. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John easy, guys, back off. My pockets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big. I mean, and for the for the record, I first of all, I think my favorite key fob of any car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ever had was actually the Tesla Model S key fob that it was basically a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little tiny black Tesla. Like it was like it was shaped like the Model S. And you’d like click the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front for the front to open the front, click the back to open the back and click the middle like the roof of it like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matchbox car to lock and unlock and it was like small and sleek and because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was curved like the car actually like didn’t you know make a huge bulge in your pocket like it was it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was nice but also for the record like the the car key situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian I don’t know if they support the actual car I think they might I think they I think their version 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supports car key better My R1S was like the first version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it had used Bluetooth in some different way to basically be a car key.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that also worked very reliably the vast majority of the time. The actual Apple car key does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work better. It’s more reliable more of the time than the Rivian one was. But the Rivian one was reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that that’s what I used again the vast majority of the time. I never used the key fob in that car. And I think, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recall correctly, I think even my Land Rover Defender before that also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had some kind of like app Bluetooth key thing and I think that also worked just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. But again, the car key and the BMW has been the best so far of all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also want to briefly address a listener Steve Stutz wrote in earlier yesterday to ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just generally how I’m liking the BMW so far and that I when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking for a replacement for the Rivian I’d mentioned that I didn’t want to go with like a Lucid or Fisker or some other EV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco startup. I wanted to go with like a big established company because I was tired of it and Steve wanted to know why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically and how that’s working out for me. So so far I love the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iX it’s great it is such a terrible looking car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With respect, Cam confirm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah it’s it is not attractive but it is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice to like once you are once you’re no longer outside of it and you once you get inside of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very nice vehicle. And so what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was tired of with the EV startups was with Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was tired of, I mean, first of all, the politics of the company pretty significantly changed over the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that was actually mostly after I was already off of it. With Tesla I was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco irritated by the software constantly redesigning and moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls in weird places and that was kind of annoying. But overall, it was a great ownership experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That really was not that big of a problem. I mainly moved off of Tesla’s because I needed something off-road when I was living on the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course now I wouldn’t go back because the politics, but if not for the politics, I might go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because their cars really were very nice to own. It is a different beast now that they’ve like scaled a lot of stuff up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think quality has suffered a little bit from what I’ve heard, but that’s not I I don’t follow it that closely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian, that was very much a version one car for a version one car company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the service situation was atrocious. That’s really what got me. It’s like it needed a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of service on minor things because it was a version one car, and the service situation was just terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like having to drive it very far away on a very unpleasant drive to even get service and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not being able to get service for literally 11 weeks when I needed it, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a poor experience. But when the car worked, it was great, but I was so tired of dealing with bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW, it’s really mature. It’s a very low drama
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ownership experience for a very nice car. And the car itself, the iX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the nicest EV I’ve ever driven in so many ways. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notably, what you notice in that car is that is a luxury car. When you are inside of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like a luxury car. It sounds like a luxury car. Like it’s so, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the smoothest, nicest ride I have ever felt in any car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it is so smooth. You feel like you’re just driving a cloud down the street
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s so quiet inside because they use like sound dampening well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to Rivian and Tesla were both horrendous at that. It’s a quiet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smooth, nice ride. It has infinite speed. I didn’t even get the super fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model, but very, very fast. The range is great. It’s way better than they advertise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice. It’s been amazing. So I’m very happy with it. And if I ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do need service, which so far in a year, I have not, because more than I can say about Rivian, but if I ever do need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service, the service, like Tiff has a BMW. She got service recently. She caught up like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the day before and got her car right in. Like, it’s so easy because they’re a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand with an established dealer network and established supply chain. and their service people know what they’re doing and have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it for years. And so it’s just a much nicer, easier experience. Buying the car was easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I drove to a dealership, test drove one, and started a lease. They have their paperwork game together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to do weird games with like, oh, they forgot to pay the sales tax or they forgot to cancel the lease, Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or there’s so many problems when you’re dealing with young car companies that have nothing to do with how well the car drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you have to deal with none of those when you’re at one of the big companies. So overall, I’m very, very happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And whenever this car, I have a three year lease, I have two years left on it. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years, I’ll look around again, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I buy the exact same car again, or lease
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. I’m glad it’s going well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Getting back to key fobs, by the way, the winner of the key fob game in the current generation of cars is Ferrari.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their key fob is big and ridiculous, but it is beautiful. And there’s a special place in the car where you put it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it looks like a little piece of art.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course. I’m surprised he didn’t say Honda, to be fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So points. The key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fobs are terrible.
#askatp: Eject on Mac, not iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Campbell writes, sometimes I import photos from my big camera to my Mac and sometimes to my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can John explain when Mac OS wants me to, why and when Mac OS wants me to eject the card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before removing it while iOS doesn’t care? It always feels wrong to just rip the SD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card out of the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the eternal struggle from Mac users versus PC users. Mac users need to unmount or reject
⏹️ ▶️ John their things and PC users just yank the thing out when the lights not on and hope for the best. It’s all the same
⏹️ ▶️ John technical situation under the covers, which is that operating systems do not write the data to your removable storage
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately. Instead, they build it up in buffers and dump those buffers on a schedule that they feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John as a complicated part of their I.O. system and a cache hierarchy. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the same, it’s like the computer is more complicated than you think. So we don’t have drive lights anymore. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell when the data has all been written. Even if we did have drive lights, oh there could be one more blink, you thought it was done writing that
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy, but you yanked it out. Or you open the or whatever. So yeah, Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to stop you from removing the disk before all the data that you think is written to it has been written to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John time you can do it and you’ll be fine because you’re probably not doing a lot of IO and that buffer probably did get flushed but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why iOS wants you to do it. And what could go wrong? If you have a fancy like journaling
⏹️ ▶️ John file system where it’s or any kind of file system that’s always in an inconsistent state, you
⏹️ ▶️ John may be missing some data, but you won’t like corrupt the data structures in the file system, making the entire thing unreadable.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s a crappy old file system that doesn’t have those safeguards, like is often used on a cheap removable
⏹️ ▶️ John media and you yank it out, not only may the data that you thought was supposed to be on the card not be there, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it was in the middle of updating some important data structure or directory entry, which will cause tons of other data
⏹️ ▶️ John on the drive to become gone or quote unquote unreadable. And you have to use one of those undelete programs to find
⏹️ ▶️ John the scavenge, the data and repair the damaged directory entry to pull your stuff back
⏹️ ▶️ John off, which is why there’s a million tools for recovering or quote unquote, undeleting data from SD cards and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So my advice is to unmount the stuff before you yank it out of your computer, if possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why does iOS not do that? Maybe they have a different buffering system. Maybe there’s just no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to tell iOS to unmount it. Maybe someday iPadOS will get one and will become a big boy computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for now, I mean, if there’s no way to unmount, then you just yank it out when you feel it’s safe. But
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, you do have an option, so don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, also on iOS, there are very few ways that you can write data to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an SD card in iOS. It’s almost always just reading it. So if it knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like, so, you know, if you are like importing a picture, which is the example David gives here, importing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a picture on iOS, that is a read-only operation. That is never going to write anything back to the card.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you mount that card on a Mac, it mounts as a removable volume. And you can, like, there could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be some app in the background that starts doing whatever it wants on that volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell you exactly what app is gonna be in the background doing whatever to it. We all know it too. MDS, MDS
⏹️ ▶️ John be indexing it, and it’s gonna tell you, oh, sorry, I couldn’t eject that because some other
⏹️ ▶️ John process is using it or because the device is busy, and if you know how to use PS or even Activity Monitor or LSLF, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John find out, oh, look, it’s MDS or MDS store that is now doing stuff, and it’s like, stop, stop, Spotlight,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanna eject my thing, and so you kill MDS and then you unmount your thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but iOS is not doing that. iOS knows what SD cards are and aren’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has very limited uses for them. Like it doesn’t let you, it doesn’t let any app just access them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freely. I think the only way to write to it from any app, I think would be probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Files app if you’re like manually dragging a file onto it. But for the most part, no apps
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that’s what I would imagine people would be doing. Like if you’re copying things in the Files app onto your SD card
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, well, I’m done and you yank it out, but it wasn’t really done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like if it’s just in there and some app is gonna read the photos off of it, probably Apple, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can control, Like they know exactly what is going to write to it and almost nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. So that way they can say like, all right, yeah, you can just pull it out. Obviously if you’re in the middle of a read operation and you pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out, that operation will fail, but it’s not going to corrupt the data on the card because no writes were taking place.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re lucky that operation will fail in a sensible way instead of giving you a half corrupted image that might crash
⏹️ ▶️ John the app every time you try to view it, hopefully it will just not write the image at all. But error handling is tricky
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s exactly where you find like edge cases and obligations It’s very like, what does happen if I’m importing
⏹️ ▶️ John photos from this SD card and I yank it out in the middle? Does it just like, okay, all the ones successfully written are there and all the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones not successfully written aren’t there? Or is there a half written thing that every time I scroll past it crashes the photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crossed. All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Notion and Delete.me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our listeners who support us directly as members. You can join us at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, weekly bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic. Every episode we do bonus content that only members get to hear. Plus, as we mentioned earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we do specials and all sorts of other fun stuff. To hear Overtime, go to atp.dev.com. This week on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, we’re talking about the overlap between app development and game development.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, thank you so much for listening. We’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long
Flagship-TV news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there’s been some TV related news to
⏹️ ▶️ John recap mark I was thinking about buying some new TVs I was giving him advice, but I said, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John in the during the course of the year It takes a while for all of the TVs to be released.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s hard to give a recommendation Maybe you should wait until everyone everyone has put their cards on the table
⏹️ ▶️ John for 2025 And so we could say finally all the 2020 25 TVs are out They’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John reviewed and now I can give better assessment So I gave some tentative recommendations last time without having all the information,
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular Sony’s Bravia 8 II, they stupidly named Bravia 8 II, was not out then, it had just
⏹️ ▶️ John been announced but not reviewed. And I’m like, well, let’s hedge our bets because maybe that’ll be great, maybe it’ll stink, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know, so let’s wait until that’s out. All the
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews on and off this TV, in particular my favorite reviewer has not yet reviewed this TV, but enough people have reviewed
⏹️ ▶️ John this TV that I trust that I’m ready to make a call on what I think Marco should do. So first of all, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John put some links in the show notes to reviews of the Bravia 8 II. In particular, there’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John one from RTINGS. They usually do a pretty good job and they continue to improve their methodology with each passing
⏹️ ▶️ John year. So I continue to recommend that site. They’re maybe not as in the weeds
⏹️ ▶️ John as my favorite reviewer, but they do, like I said, they do a good job. And the upshot is
⏹️ ▶️ John the Bravia 8 II fulfills its role as not being the top TV in
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony’s marketing lineup because its number is lower. like it’s probably 8.2 instead of 9 or X or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It is not as good as when their QD OLED was
⏹️ ▶️ John the top model, which in the previous naming scheme was the A95L.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it shows, it is not as carefully calibrated as the A95L was. It is not as
⏹️ ▶️ John good in some respects as the A95L. A95L, I believe is a three-year-old television now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony didn’t bother revising it because even in its second and third year, still one of the best TVs you
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy, guess what? The A95L, which you can still buy if you can find it somewhere and it’s real cheap because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, get them while they last, is still probably a better TV than the Bravia 8 II
⏹️ ▶️ John if what you care about is ultimate picture fidelity and you’re probably going to watch in a dark room. The Bravia 8 II
⏹️ ▶️ John is brighter in some ways, but in other ways it’s not brighter than the A95L, which is shocking because
⏹️ ▶️ John it uses a three year newer panel that supposedly is brighter. Watch the RTINGS video for more So,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, if you’re waiting to hear what the deal with the Bravia 82 is, yeah, the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s not great. Like, there’s a second video from our team
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, Bravia 82 versus the 895L, what should you get? And they basically just like, get the 895L.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of those two TVs, the 895L is still better. It’s amazing, this TV is like undefeatable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re making them anymore, except for maybe in 77 inch. So you can get them cheap, like not cheap, cheap, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like for half the price they originally sold for, you can get an A95L. So cheap that I was thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get an A95L? Because I have the predecessor of the A95L, the A95K, and I’m like, no, don’t buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John because don’t buy a three-year-old TV, just because I just wonder if they’ll ever make a TV as good as the A95L
⏹️ ▶️ John again. It’s depressing. But anyway, for your purposes, the LG G5
⏹️ ▶️ John is brighter than the Bravia A82. It’s brighter than the A95L. It is a true 2025 TV. The
⏹️ ▶️ John LG G5 did have a problem where they had some contouring issues
⏹️ ▶️ John with HDR 10 output, but they fixed that in a firmware update. While we were waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Provide V8 2 reviews, LG updated its firmware and they fixed that bug. So I’ll put a bunch of links in the show notes to
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews of the LG G5. That is my recommendation for you
⏹️ ▶️ John for all situations where you want an OLED in the year 2025, the LG G5, it’s very bright, even
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of its peak brightness, may not be as bright as you think, but like in whole, like we
⏹️ ▶️ John went over this last time, looking at the whole scene, a mini LED TVs, we’re gonna have to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John down their backlight to stop blooming, the LG G5 doesn’t have to. So there are situations where the G5 is even brighter
⏹️ ▶️ John than a mini LED TV, which is usually unheard of. It’s a great TV. The LG is good
⏹️ ▶️ John with their software. You’re used to LG, that’s your answer. 2025, it’s the LG G5 if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John an OLED television.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, the Broadway 82 is not a bad TV. The fact that it gets beat at all in anything by
⏹️ ▶️ John a three-year-old 895L is just embarrassing for Sony. Sony, get your act together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And why shouldn’t I just get the N85L?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as bright as the G5.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like you have for your bright
⏹️ ▶️ John room situation, like I feel like the N85L is still like the most accurate, best TV
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna watch in a dark room. So if you have that situation, fine. But for a sunny room, the G5 gets so much brighter
⏹️ ▶️ John than the N85L in so many different conditions. And it’s not that much worse. Like the LG’s
⏹️ ▶️ John processing is better this year. Their color volume, it’s not as good as the N85L,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’ll never notice it. Like the LG G5 is the better all around TV and it supports HDIG,
⏹️ ▶️ John which helps with the stupid switch to HDR brightness issue. Like I just think the G5 is gonna fit into your life
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot better. For the super duper video file, I would still recommend the 895L, but that’s not you. So if you really wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John get a smaller 895L at bargain prices to put in like a bedroom
⏹️ ▶️ John or someplace that doesn’t have bright sunlight for you want the absolute best in color fidelity and you’re never gonna game on it. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still a great TV. And for me, if I had to choose, I would pick the 895L over the G5,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for the scenarios that you described, I think the G5 is a better fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. John, I am deeply impressed. That was incredibly brisk. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, when the verdicts are in, there you go. Like I said, my favorite person hasn’t come out with his review yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s his HDTV test. I’m still waiting for Vincent to come out with his review. When he does, if he totally contradicts our things, I’ll let
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, but it seems like, yeah, the Bravia 8 II is living up to its number, which is 8,