646: On the Shelf With the Pickles
01 Jul 2025John made an important purchase.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: John has made an important purchase
- Follow-up:
- We’re doing good work here, folks
- YoLink leak sensors
- Leak sensor 4-pack with compulsory hub
- Travel insurance is more than you think it is (via Jason Poole and Levi Dalton)
- Window widget size in Tahoe
- Apple Intelligence is now allowed when booting from an external in Tahoe beta 2
- Floating tab bars in iOS 26
- Apple “Ducks”
- Maybe don’t yank out removable storage in Windows either (via Adrian Mester)
- It’s the world that’s wrong, not me: iPhone 16 Pro case edition
- Ads in YouTube
- Why not use uBlock Origin? (via Igor Kulman)
- …or perhaps Vinegar (App Store link) (via Michael Brown)
- We’re doing good work here, folks
- RIP FireWire
- Apple marketing continues to misfire
- Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri
- Ask ATP:
- Is it worth buying a laptop where Tahoe is preinstalled? (via François-Olivier Leblanc)
- How much faster will an M4 be than an M1 for Xcode Simulator launches? (via Alistair Logie)
- How do we choose a new UPS? (via David Levine)
- Post-show: Marco restaurant-tech MVPs… from his co-hosts!
- Tailscale (Tailscale is a prior sponsor)
- YoLink temperature sensors (even cheaper with a smaller temp. range)
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Should we pay developers like athletes?
Sponsored by:
- Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last.
- 1Password: Award-winning password manager trusted by millions of users.
- Factor: Healthy Eating, Made Easy. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Punt!
- John made an important purchase 🖼️
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- YoLink water-leak sensors
- Follow-up: Travel insurance
- Tahoe & iOS updates
- PCs need to “eject”, too
- John’s ideal iPhone case
- YouTube ad-blockers
- Sponsor: 1Password
- FareWell, FireWire
- Apple pulls another ad
- Anthropic/OpenAI for Siri?
- Sponsor: Quince
- #askatp: Avoiding Tahoe/iOS 26
- #askatp: M1 to M4
- #askatp: Choosing a UPS
- Ending theme
- Co-host tech MVPs
Punt!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you can obviously do whatever you want to do, but if you will permit me to punt to John, if I can do the punting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to John for the pre-show when you’re ready, please. Yeah. All right. Let’s go live.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hi, everybody. We’re live.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All right. I didn’t know if you had a preamble. Sorry. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know if there was a preamble. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know they say hike when they like, you know, snap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ball. Is there an equivalent command for punting? Over. Hold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. All right, let me start over and get us going.
John made an important purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A long time ago, when Marco and John and I first started talking about doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a podcast together, and I think we’ve told this story, but not in a long time. One of the things that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and John and I all said to each other was, look, we’re not going to stop being friends on account of any of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at the time that was hilarious because it was us talking about cars and that didn’t amount to all that much in the grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scheme of things until you get to ATP. I stand by that. I think you two stand by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I think we’ve done a great job of it, except now everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the show. And so in our internal show notes, we have a section for the pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sometimes there’ll be stuff there. A lot of times Marco will just make something up or sometimes the two of us will, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the last 48 hours, I’ve had to stare at pre-show colon, John made an important purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t know what it is and I’m dying. And this is why maybe this whole, maybe we should shut it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all down. Cause I don’t want to have to wait to know what your important purchase was, John. But finally, the time has come.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fill me in, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent so long trying to decide whether I should put anything there. Cause a lot of times I just don’t surprise you with
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I did want to like reserve the slot, but I didn’t want to make it seem that big of a deal. Right. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey overhype it. Important
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sounds like a big deal. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had like, uh, if I’d written like on your school paper, see me, like
⏹️ ▶️ John see me after class or like we need to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or something
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco terrible like that. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to tamp it down to be like, this is not, this is a pre-show. It’s not a big thing. issue with your performance. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did want to reserve the spot in the pre show. So no, it’s nothing that exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, everything we purchase can be exciting if we if we talk about it in the right way or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we care enough about
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this one is this one is significant in in stupid ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John So picture it. June 11th, 2011, San
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey got anything, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, Yeah, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. I was going to say WWDC and I thought that that was keynote day of WWDC of that year. And that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first time that I had met you in person. And we kind of sort of knew each other at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not well. But I don’t know if I would have jumped all the way to toasters. Well done, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m shocked that Marco had that in a nanosecond. I thought for sure you’d be like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Is that backward?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Take a look in the show in the in the chat room. Take a look at that image. You may remember this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I do. I might have even taken that photo. I was certainly there for it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you probably did take that photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, but yes, I do remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s advertising iOS 5 in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey background for WSJ. And iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John So fast forward 14 years, June 11th, 2025,
⏹️ ▶️ John I put in an order on amazon.com for a new toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an important purchase. Whoa. Now, is it the same toaster?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you buy a backup of the toaster?
⏹️ ▶️ John The real question is, why? Why did I put it in order for? And I didn’t plan this. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like I looked on the Amazon order history of like it was exactly 14 years to the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s amazing. 2011 to 2025 June
⏹️ ▶️ John 11th both times. I put an order for toaster. What’s your guess Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My guess is either the first one finally died and he put in an order for the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same one again because nothing better has been made since to his standards. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he is buying a toaster for somewhere that one of his kids will be living like for college.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know, do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need me at all for the show? Because I was absolutely going to say both of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably he probably would buy the toaster for that. He by the replacement toaster. Definitely the same one because nothing else is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as good for his standards. He probably the same toaster for himself and then give the kid the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would buy that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s good that you are both on the same page here. Oh, here’s what happened. And the toaster that I’ve had for 14
⏹️ ▶️ John years has served us well. But in recent months, it started doing a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where it would work almost all the time. But once in a blue moon, you would press
⏹️ ▶️ John the button to begin whatever toast thing that you’re doing. And the screen would change
⏹️ ▶️ John from blue to orange like it always does. And the timer would start counting down like
⏹️ ▶️ John it always does. But the heating elements would not get hot, which is an important function. Oh, no. For a toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’d be like, huh, like I put this bread in here and I pressed the button and it changed color and counted
⏹️ ▶️ John down and I came back and the bread was stone cold. And then a person will come up to it and said, what do you mean? And press the button and then it will
⏹️ ▶️ John work. But you can’t have that. It’s gotta work all the time. So unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John that toaster had to be retired. It’s interesting that you mentioned potential kid things. It’s like, what did
⏹️ ▶️ John you do with your retired toaster? Did you chuck it? Did you bring it to the single stream
⏹️ ▶️ John recycling center along with the air conditioner that also died this year and the dehumidifier that also died this year?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because it works like 92% of the time. Is that? I
⏹️ ▶️ John packed up and put it in the attic in case a kid wants it when they go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, what kid is gonna want a toaster that works most of the time?
⏹️ ▶️ John good toaster. It still works great almost all the time. Nothing is
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with it, except for the times when you press the button and nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, I cannot think of very many appliances that I could tolerate that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of failure in. Like, I would rather go to Target and get a toaster oven for 30 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works 100% of the time. Oh, have you tried a $30 Target toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John lately? Because I have, because we bought a toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John for my son for his like apartment style accommodations in his junior year,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s terrible. Like, I wouldn’t, I just, yeah, so maybe it turns on all the time, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco better? It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do a good job of making your food hot and toasting it. It’s all uneven and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it’s like, it’s unsatisfying to use. It doesn’t do its job well, like it’s bad. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this toaster, even if it only works one out of every, you know, 90 times or whatever, is still
⏹️ ▶️ John way better than that. So anyway, it may eventually end up getting chucked, but for now it is a mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John functional toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what did you replace it with? I mean the same toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, okay. There it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Luckily, they still sell this toaster. I’ve tried a lot of toasters since,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I haven’t found, like, the only one that I think bests it in some ways is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Panasonic Flash Express whatever thing, which is just so much faster than this toaster, but it is smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John oddly proportioned, and I don’t like the UI. And so I need something that’s, the size of this one is perfect for my kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s basically as big as it will fit. There is a much bigger one, which I literally can’t fit. Now honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John my friend has the other one, so I’m very familiar with it. I don’t think I would like that bigger one because it’s just too big. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the size for me. And by the way, my parents have the smaller one, so I have some experience with that when I’m over their place. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the Breville 650 XL, they still sell it. I just got another one, the same toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I wanted to salute this toaster that you gave me generously as a gift in 2011 that
⏹️ ▶️ John I did not ask for. That you got me this toaster, which we later learned through extensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, I’ll have to link to your page, extensive reviewing of other contemporary toasters that you basically
⏹️ ▶️ John stumbled upon by going into the rich person’s store, the best toaster that was available the time that you bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, where did you get it? Like Bloomingdale’s or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think so. No, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John Nordstrom, I thought. Nordstrom, there you go. You went into the rich person’s store, paid way too much money for a very fancy toaster, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John paid even more money to have it shipped back to my house, which was very nice of you, and I had it for 14 years. So that’s a good run
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey appliance. That’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John technically isn’t entirely dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s amazing. And by the way, I think it was Merlin who paid to have it shipped back to you, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but now here’s a review of the new toaster because although it is the same model number, they’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ John some stuff. Oh no. All for the
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, the toaster that I had, the place where I put it, the plug
⏹️ ▶️ John for the toaster is basically directly behind it, dead center, and because my house is ancient and weird, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is directly behind a dead center and very low in the wall. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the plug, like the thing that goes into the wall on the toaster that
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys got me is like Breville’s patented thing. Have you seen it where like the end of the plug has
⏹️ ▶️ John a hole in it where you could put your finger through the hole to yank it out? Have you seen that? Yep. Right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really bad when the plug for your toaster is directly behind the toaster because that thing sticks out really
⏹️ ▶️ John far. Like so much so that if I plugged in my toaster and then tried to slide my toaster towards
⏹️ ▶️ John the wall, it will hit the cord. And you can’t have the hot back of the toaster touching the cord.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You know what I mean? Have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you ever tried one of those like right angle adapters that has like a six inch cord on it that just like has like a flat right angle plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes on the wall and then just ends in like a three prong plug six inches later down a short cord.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, so I have a whole bunch of those when you, back in 2011 when I got this toaster, I knew this wouldn’t work. So I took about one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the right angle things and I connected the toaster to it, but now I have some extra cord to get rid of.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the right angle thing is flat, it’s in the wall. The toaster cord goes down into the right.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing in the wall, the flat thing goes down into the right. I just connect them all. But where do I put this loop
⏹️ ▶️ John of cord? I have very little counter space here. Zip ties. Right next to the toaster is our
⏹️ ▶️ John stove top slash oven. And so I was going to tuck the cord behind our stove
⏹️ ▶️ John top slash oven. I don’t know what you call that. We just call it an oven here, but on the top of it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a range with burners and then underneath it is an oven with a door that opens, that thing. I put the cord
⏹️ ▶️ John behind there. And it was, you know, I don’t know, maybe like two feet of cord or whatever, because again, the toaster is
⏹️ ▶️ John right next to that. But if I’m going to put some electrical cord behind a thing that gets really hot,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to try to protect it. So 14 years ago, I wrapped that cord
⏹️ ▶️ John in a whole bunch of aluminum foil and various other things to sort of make a giant sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John heat sink, muffler, heat shield thing
⏹️ ▶️ John cord that was behind there. To get it out, I realized I had to pull the oven out. I must’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled it out to put it in there. And so I was wondering, after 14 years, did that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John finally melt through? and that’s the problem with my toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Didn’t seem like it because the
⏹️ ▶️ John lights were all turning on and everything. But anyway, I pulled out the oven, did some cleaning. It’s pretty gross back there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pulled out the cords, unwrapped all the aluminum foil, looked as good as new, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John day I got it. So aluminum foil or tin foil, as you would call it, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John my age. Amazing as a heat shield, totally protected the cords. They were perfectly good.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new toaster has a flat right angle plug. Good job, Breville.
⏹️ ▶️ John They realized that that patented thing that they’re so proud of, it sucks for a toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So I didn’t have to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter for the new one. And it was only a tiny little bit of cord that I had to tuck behind the oven and I wrapped it in some
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum foil. So that’s great. The next thing is there are little offset pegs on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of the toaster. They’re trying to stop the hot back of the toaster from burning your wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so you have to put it like at least an inch away from the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like the little standout peg. So first of all, my house being terrible and old,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, essentially the backsplash or whatever you would call it on the countertop, uh, does not go up as high
⏹️ ▶️ John as the pegs. So the pegs basically are above it. And so if you, if on my old toaster,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to push it against the wall, setting aside the plug, you got the right angle plug in there. It’s all flesh and everything. If you were to push the toaster up
⏹️ ▶️ John against the wall, the pegs would go over the backslash, touch the wall, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John the hot back of the toaster is like a millimeters from the wall, which is bad. So I had like standoffs
⏹️ ▶️ John on there. Like I basically, I was using like, um, the things you put on on the bottom of chair legs to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep them from scuffing your floor, right? Those things, I had them, I was extending the standoff so
⏹️ ▶️ John it actually stayed far away from my wall. New toaster, longer standoffs.
⏹️ ▶️ John two in Breville’s comp, great. And then the final thing, I can’t tell if this is an improvement or just the fact that my old toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John was 14 years old. The screen is way brighter. Maybe it’s LED and the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John was like the cold cathode things, because it was so old, I don’t know, but the screen is so bright, I’m actually hoping it fades
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit, is incredibly bright. It’s blue when you turn it on and orange when it’s going. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John toaster works amazingly. Best toaster ever. Breville 650 XL. Salute to the 14 year old one
⏹️ ▶️ John that you guys got me. But now I’ve moved on to another toaster, which is the same
⏹️ ▶️ John toaster, but better. Pour one out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John. All right. I’m curious. I mean, I’m pretty sure this will be a predictable answer, but I’m curious,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, why you didn’t consider other things that are now more popular than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were 14 years ago. So we now have all sorts of like smart ovens. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have combination steam ovens. Obviously everything says it’s an air fryer now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s like, you know, different brands that have taken on like, you know, Ninja is really well liked among
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rich people. There’s the Anova precision oven, which I’ve been lusting after, but it sadly is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one inch too deep to fit on my countertop. You know, there’s all sorts of like smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more functional countertop ovens now. Did you look at any of those or consider any of those.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m aware of all of those and I’ve seen them as they’ve been introduced and flown
⏹️ ▶️ John by. But like, first of all, space considerations exclude a lot of bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John fancier things. Even something as simple as like the there is a Breville and that has a convection or whatever those
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t fit or smaller models that have like room for a convection fan. Convection is honestly the only feature that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would even be remotely be interested in. But the space available, it’s just not going to happen. Any of the smart things
⏹️ ▶️ John that They’re like, we look at your food with the camera and figure out, nope, nope, no thanks, absolutely not. Can you imagine any of those lasting 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years? Yeah, 14 years,
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like, I just, this thing does what I need it to do. It has adjustable temperature and
⏹️ ▶️ John time and you press a button and it gets hot and it evenly heats and it gets hot pretty quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is durable and all the places, the parts on it that could potentially like get gross or easy to replace.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did replace the wire tray once in 14 years to tell you how sturdy this is. Still have all the
⏹️ ▶️ John original trays. It’s a workhorse. Like I just, this is, and this is a situation where I can get it again. They
⏹️ ▶️ John still, they still make it. In fact, they make a better version. So I’m not interested in any of the fancier stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have room for like convection. And even then I would be at a problem because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John those convection ones are much more interested in being ovens. And honestly, most of the time I’m using my toaster for
⏹️ ▶️ John toast type things like toasting bread or toasting bagels, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even like reading pizza, which is not on the toast setting, but still. And then occasionally we use it as a small oven,
⏹️ ▶️ John it mostly serves as a toaster that can also serve as a small oven. Or when I’m toasting like on for Thanksgiving,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can toast like six slices of bread at the same time for stuffing which saves a lot of time. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing else out there interests me. This one does the job. If someday I get a better different kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s larger, I’ll probably still go with this just because I would probably get a convection
⏹️ ▶️ John like regular oven because my regular oven doesn’t have convection. I would get a convection regular oven and stick with this for the toasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just to get ahead of all the feedback, half of which has probably already been sent, we all agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that slot toasters are very, very interesting in their own right, but pretty much useless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in our personal opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t agree to that first half at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. You don’t, you think they’re completely useless in every way. They’re really,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re really not good for reading pizza. I’ll tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, that’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, I think there are very few things that they are better at than toaster ovens and there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of things they are worse at.
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with you. Yeah, I mean, the only slot toaster that would have any interest in me is if I was
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly making breakfast for huge numbers of people, I’d get one of those ones that has like 12 slots, because you can make a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of toast. At that point, just get one of those roller toasters. No, like those are faster, the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can cook a huge amount of toast very quickly, because the slot toasters are faster. The heating elements are closer to the bread.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just plain faster. And if I had to make a lot of toast fast all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant slot toaster without a huge number of slots is the way to go. but any other situation, I’m not interested.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was trying to provide a little bit of an olive branch because the people who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are fans of slot toasters, while being wrong, they are extremely dedicated to their wrongness. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to be nice about it, but since we’re all in agreement, yeah, slot toasters are silly. So.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, as part of the problem is, we’ve been saying, oh, you got a new toaster. John’s toaster. Toaster this, toaster that. And everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John is hearing this. And in their head, they’re picturing the flying toasters from the after dark screensaver. They’re picturing
⏹️ ▶️ John slot toasters. Every time I say toaster, what I meant was toaster oven. That’s what I grew up with,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I have, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want. If you could find a slot toaster that was flying though, that would be a pretty good feature. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hard to get the toast though, Because it jumps from one toaster to the other, you know?
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YoLink water-leak sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, let’s do some follow up. And hey, here’s the thing. We’re not really saving lives like the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch. Well, maybe. But Tim wrote to say, I want to thank you for turning my spouse and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I onto the Yolink Lora, L-O-R-A, family of smart home stuff, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your advice to get water leak detectors. Today, that advice paid off. We were away for three weeks visiting family for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first time since we bought our old New England home a year ago. Beyond a friend checking daily, we’d put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your advice into action and install the detectors around the house. We left yesterday. This evening, I got a notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one had tripped. A neighbor with a key was able to drop by and discover that the water line to the fridge for the ice maker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we never use, please John, focus, had burst and was pouring water on the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey floor and down to the basement. Our friend had last checked our house at 4.45 PM. We got the leak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice at 8 PM. If not for your advice, the fridge would have been pouring water into the house for close to 24 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Leak detectors. If you’ve got an old New England house and you unwisely got a water feature on your refrigerator,
⏹️ ▶️ John leak detectors. They’re cheap. They’re so cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re so cheap. They’re like 15, 20 bucks each, I think, for the lower ones. I’ve sprinkled them all around our house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am not looking forward to the time that they eventually get set off, but it gives me incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey peace of mind to know that they’re there.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of mine tripped recently, by the way. One of my in-wall ones that’s underneath my bathtub trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John detect leaks from the wall, it tripped. the wall’s leaking, I opened it up, I looked inside,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was like one tiny drop of water
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that had fallen on
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. And I still don’t know where that water came from. So I’m like, all right, well, I’m gonna keep an
⏹️ ▶️ John eye on this. I’m gonna put, I’ll wipe off the thing of water, put it back, wait, but it never came
⏹️ ▶️ John back. So I know they work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But how do you have an in-wall? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m genuinely-
⏹️ ▶️ John like a, well, if you had an old New England home, you’d know very often there was like a panel.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, there’s like a panel on the wall
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can unscrew and remove to get access to the plumbing that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John raised edge panel and painted and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey blah. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the way I get into the walls that are underneath and behind my tub to see if it’s leaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gotcha. I mean, it’s a good thing it’s working.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ John You always want to have a test, you know, to see if it’s working. I’ve got them, I recently bought a couple extra ones for like the basement near the
⏹️ ▶️ John lines that go to the washing machine too. So keeping an eye
Follow-up: Travel insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then speaking of saving lives, we talked last episode, why did we talk about this? About trip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insurance, travel insurance, what was the reason for that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You were telling me about Allianz Theater.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, that’s what it was. Thank you. Yep, Allianz, Allianz, whatever it’s called. So Jason Poole writes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never expected my profession to be applicable to ATP feedback, yet here we are. Quick aside, that is like one of my favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve heard that same statement made many times over the course of the show. One of my favorite things to read, it really is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, Jason writes, as a travel advisor, I talk about travel insurance every day. Travel insurance has two components. Pre-trip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cancellation, which is what everyone thinks insurance is, and during the trip, emergency coverage. Nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all United States-based health insurance policies do not work outside of the country. And this is where travel insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is critical. Allianz is my preferred company, and the policy I sell serves as a primary source of payment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hospitals outside the country. I rarely purchase travel insurance for domestic trips, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never leave the country without travel insurance. I could write a small book about my clients that have declined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey travel insurance and have been in tough situations outside America. More positively, I could write a book about Allions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saving the day for clients that have purchased it.” Additionally, Levi Dalton writes, in reference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the travel insurance discussion in episode 645, I’d like to note that many credit cards offer some form of travel insurance when trip purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been made using the card. This can either be the primary, as in you don’t have other travel insurance, or secondary. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other travel insurance, but this acts as an additional coverage. For someone traveling a fair amount, it is worth looking into which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cards provide travel insurance automatically and what specifically is covered. I’d also like to note that Allianz and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably other companies sell yearly all trips insurance if you go to them directly. This can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price out to be a better deal than purchasing individual trip insurance each time if you’re taking multiple trips a year. For example, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yearly coverage for my entire family and if any of us goes anywhere we have coverage. For our plan it works out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to $150 a year a person and it is a set it and forget it option where I don’t have to wonder about whether a certain trip is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey covered or not. Allianz plans also include a travel concierge which can help with dinner reservations in a foreign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey city and so forth. which I mean, the concierge can assist with trip planning, not just with insurance related issues. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some credit cards offer something similar, but not everybody knows that they don’t have to personally fire up a translation app and make calls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at weird hours because of time differences to restaurants in Greece or France to make a reservation. A concierge can do that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but I didn’t know most of this, so I thought it was worth sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t know most of it. I do though think like it’s probably not as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of a like, You should always do this, as they say. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it certainly seems like when traveling internationally and therefore health insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or health coverage becomes more of a thing, that’s obviously a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor to consider. But I still am not convinced about its value for most people most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the people responding on Mastodon. They were saying the same thing, basically. You should definitely get
⏹️ ▶️ John it if you travel overseas from the US because your US insurance won’t work here. And the health insurance in our country,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have universal coverage. But it’s not for you because you’re from America. So we’d have to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John you. And then they would show us the amount that they would charge. And we’d laugh at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three days in the hospital, we’ll charge you $5,000. You’re like, ha, ha, ha. No one can even look at us for 30
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds for $5,000 in this country. So
⏹️ ▶️ John paying out of pocket for coverage overseas, no, you don’t want to do it. You want insurance to cover it. but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t scare us with healthcare costs. At
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a pocket healthcare cost
⏹️ ▶️ John in France or whatever, you’ve got that tooth looked at in a dentist, that’ll be 50 bucks. Ooh. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, yeah, all right.
Tahoe & iOS updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you want to tell me about this next item, please? Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Avi Drissin writes in about a window widget size in Tahoe. He says, in episode 644,
⏹️ ▶️ John you quoted my toot about how window control size on Mac OS 26 is gated on the SDK linked against.
⏹️ ▶️ John You thought that the size might be connected to toolbar visibility. It is not. As I said, if you link to an SDK less than 26,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get compatibility size window controls. And if you link to the Mac OS 26 SDK, you get window controls
⏹️ ▶️ John with the new size. This is the the sole determining factor. So there you have it, big window controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter whether the toolbar is visible or not. Toolbar controls the corner radius and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe also the position of those things because they got to have concentricity, but the size
⏹️ ▶️ John is always big with 26, which honestly I think is a reasonable thing to do. Like the window widgets have changed
⏹️ ▶️ John size a little bit over the course of macOS all these many years, making them a little bit bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe it’s just because I have a huge screen now and I’m getting old, but yeah, they can stand to be a little bit bigger. So I kind of like the new size
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tahoe. So any app that links against the new SDK, which that whole concept, I know if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not a developer and you’re like, what are they talking about? Does that mean when I get Tahoe, they’ll all be bigger? Like, it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you would otherwise have to know or care about. But if you’re wondering when you get Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John some apps have the big window widnows and some apps don’t. It’s mostly the ones that do were
⏹️ ▶️ John built using the API set that comes with the new OS. And the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that have the old one are built with a different API set from an earlier OS. So there you have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple intelligence is now allowed when booting from an external drive in Tahoe beta two. And John Val writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike on Sequoia, which required a hack to activate Apple intelligence while booting from an external drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Tahoe that hack is no longer needed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even know about that hack and I would have liked to know about that hack, but it’s good that it’s no longer necessary. Whatever the deal was with the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Apple intelligence can only be on the internal drive, I’m glad to see that go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ian writes, you’ve been complaining about the new liquid glass tab bar on iOS because it can obscure the content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been playing around with it, and I’m finding that when I scroll to the bottom of a view, the content scrolls above the tab bar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even on websites. It seems to me like they were well aware of this potential folly when designing, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they do some view magic to make sure you don’t end up with content stuck under the bar when you scroll to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bottom. Am I missing something?
⏹️ ▶️ John See, I’m still not able to figure out whether I should make a blog post about this because it does kind of require visual
⏹️ ▶️ John aid, but I’ll try expressing again why this whole design draws me up
⏹️ ▶️ John a wall. Um, what we’re talking about is the little lozenge that floats over the top of your content
⏹️ ▶️ John at the bottom of the screen. People don’t even like that. I call it lozenge because technically lodging is like a hexagon, but anyway, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John capsule round ended rectangle toolbar thing floating at the bottom of the screen, which
⏹️ ▶️ John means there is a margin on the left, on the right, and on the bottom where you can see the stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John behind it. And I was complaining about things getting stuck behind there and things being obscured by it, and he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, well, I’ve been trying these various apps, and what happens instead is they let you scroll the content
⏹️ ▶️ John so it goes up, so it’s above that thing. When you have the content so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s scrolled above that, now you have the problem of what do I show in the
⏹️ ▶️ John empty region that is below the end of the content? Say the web page, the very bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the web page is a word, you scroll, that word is up above the little floating toolbar. Great, I can read the word.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the toolbar is still floating. What is it floating over? Should they draw the
⏹️ ▶️ John checkered pattern there from back in early versions of iOS or early versions of iPhone OS?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That would have been amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Scrolling couldn’t keep up. It would show the gray and white checkerboard pattern. Should they detect
⏹️ ▶️ John the main color of the body of the page and extend it down there? What if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a photo that you’ve scrolled up and they’ll let you scroll it so the photo is visible and the photo
⏹️ ▶️ John ends before the toolbar begins? Do they say, let’s say, reflect
⏹️ ▶️ John and blur the photo like they do with the sidebar thing? These are all problems of their own making.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you’re not going to show the content behind there but always scroll it up above
⏹️ ▶️ John there, what then is the function of leaving that space around the edges? Because you can’t see anything there of
⏹️ ▶️ John consequence when you’re scrolling through the content. And when you get to the end of it, if they’re pushing that content
⏹️ ▶️ John above the toolbar, hey, how about just make the toolbar cover the bottom of the screen at that point? Which is the design we
⏹️ ▶️ John had before, which is so much more straightforward doesn’t have any of these problems of Apple’s own creation. That is what I find
⏹️ ▶️ John so frustrating about this control. That it serves no purpose, it introduces problems that they must solve
⏹️ ▶️ John for no reason, for no benefit. Anyway, I don’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good talk. All right, Tim writes, do you think that Apple includes ducks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so to speak, in their beta releases to make the tech press feel like they’ve achieved some victories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that they don’t make as big of a deal about the things that didn’t change? The left-aligned image on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS dialog boxes comes to mind as a candidate. And so, a duck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can define, or this started on, what is it, Jeff Atwood, right? His blog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is a feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product. And John also pointed out, see also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Architects Lions, which is by a friend of the show, Anthony Johnson, or a story retold by a friend of the show, Anthony
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnson, which we will also link to in the show notes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea is put something in there so the people in charge have something to focus on and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know you’re going to let it’s something that they’re going to say, what’s that doing there? I want to get rid of that. And you fight them on and fight them
⏹️ ▶️ John on and eventually let them have their way. And the whole time you’re fighting about that, they’re not paying attention to anything else. The
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about the duck slash architects lines theory for Apple’s OSS is they don’t need to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John no power, not their manager. They have no reason to put
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb things in the OS to allow the community to notice them get angry about them and fix
⏹️ ▶️ John them because they don’t they don’t care that we’re that stuff like they honestly don’t like they’ll accept our feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John that that works but they’re they’re not intentionally releasing things that they know will get negative feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John to make us feel like we’re affecting things. That’s not how they work. They would never do that because they
⏹️ ▶️ John not because they’re so good and kind but because they were not not their man. They have no reason to. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John motivation for them to do that. We’re not their boss. What we do and say is
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t need to be corralled in that way. And interestingly, I meant to mention this one of the shows after W.A.
⏹️ ▶️ John received if you watch a lot of the W.D. sessions and especially when I know you were in some of these Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John the I figure what they were called the like the group live over those things called like the labs
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s a bunch of people and like at the Webex call. Oh yeah the group labs group labs. Yeah. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John Those were live where there was some number of WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John attendees slash developers. They’re all at home on our computers going to a WebEx. And then in the WebEx, hosting
⏹️ ▶️ John the WebEx, were like five or six Apple engineers and managers or whoever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the topic happened to be. And the audience gets to submit questions through text
⏹️ ▶️ John in the WebEx submit your questions thing. And then there’s no other speaking or you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t see any of the audience. You just see the Apple people. Anyway, during those things, very often there would
⏹️ ▶️ John be questions that would ask some question about liquid glass or whatever. And all of the people in all the
⏹️ ▶️ John sessions would say, say whatever you have to say about liquid glass, and then they’d say, if you have any feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, please submit your feedback to whatever. They’d tell you, we’re interested in hearing what you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you think about this? What are the areas where it can be improved? Or they were basically soliciting feedback about the UI. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all so disciplined, but my little radar was up the whole time going,
⏹️ ▶️ John which one of these people is desperately hoping that you send feedback because they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey also hate the thing that you’re just complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about, right? And they’re so disciplined about like, you know, here’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, and here’s what we’re doing, or whatever, do you have any feedback about it? And like, I have a feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the people and a lot of the Apple employees in a lot of those sessions were
⏹️ ▶️ John carefully, kindly, and gently suggesting to you that if you have feedback about the new UI,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d love to hear it because they’re like, please, please send this feedback. Because believe me, there are people at Apple that have all
⏹️ ▶️ John the same complaints that you hear in the community or whatever. So that’s another reason I think, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John reason to put out ducks because there’s plenty of people, Apple employees, who are expressing this feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple. Cause you keep, you know, never let anyone outside the family know what you’re thinking. That’s a reference, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they did solicit feedback in all these sessions. And so if you, if there’s something about this UI that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like, please send it to Apple. I’m sure Apple employees would say the same thing, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they are desperate for you to send that feedback so it counts more than their internal opinion, or whether they’re just saying that because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they’re supposed to say.
PCs need to “eject”, too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adrian Mester writes with regard to SD cards, you said on PCs, you can just yank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out a memory card. That’s not true. You should still eject it first. By PC, I assume you meant Windows, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same on Linux. And Adrian provided a link to the Windows knowledge base, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t find it surprising that these features exist. I do wonder how many people use them in Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that’s fair. I mean, I know I, when I was a Windows user, I pretty much always just yanked whatever out pretty much immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I know is not the right answer, but I don’t believe I ever got burned by it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s pretty much what I always
⏹️ ▶️ John did. I mean, the new versions of Windows might complain about it. That’s what maybe make people do it. They do. If you yank it out and it throws
⏹️ ▶️ John a dialogue in your face. I haven’t actually tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do complain about it, but I think everyone still just does it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it throws up a dialogue, don’t you think that would make people like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. The experience of using every computing device ever these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is being constantly nagged by the system for stuff that you just have to say, OK, OK, cancel, cancel, dismiss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Like that’s even, even Apple stuff. Like this is just, this is the reality that most, how most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see computers is a series of interruptions to their work that they just have to quote cancel out of. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if some box comes up that says you got to eject first, like, okay, whatever. And there’s a click, okay. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even read it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t run windows 11 on my Mac, unfortunately, because it doesn’t, it’s not compliant with the trusted compute,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever thing, but I can run, I do run windows 10. So next time I’m in windows 10, I’ll try to
John’s ideal iPhone case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, it’s not everyone else there. It’s not all of us that are writing you that is wrong. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are right. And everyone else in the world is wrong, but it’s okay because you have an answer
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, I got an iPhone 16 pro when it launched. Uh, it was the,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the introduction of the camera control. Lots of people, uh, case manufacturers just put a big hole
⏹️ ▶️ John in the case for the camera control. So I got, uh, my preferred open bottom leather case
⏹️ ▶️ John for my iPhone and as a giant where the camera control is and I didn’t like it and I said, boy, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John some of these third-party case manufacturers produce cases that are like the one I have, but that have
⏹️ ▶️ John the pass-through button that Apple had on lots of its launch cases, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like another button that presses the actual camera control button below it so that you won’t have a giant hole
⏹️ ▶️ John in your case. What you instead will have is a camera control on your iPhone case that works
⏹️ ▶️ John and feels just like the camera control that’s under your iPhone case, just like the volume buttons and the power buttons where there’s a button that
⏹️ ▶️ John hits the button that’s underneath. Here we are a year later and they finally did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John A little while ago Ryan London did a case that had a camera control button on it
⏹️ ▶️ John that I believe had an open bottom but it had a metal ring on the back around the camera mesa
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t like that. But finally Bullstrap came out with essentially the same case that I had because my previous
⏹️ ▶️ John one was a Bullstrap case. The only difference is instead of a giant hole for the of the camera control, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John a little pass-through button thingy. And I found this out because I got an admin
⏹️ ▶️ John at an Instagram that said, we messed up with a broken heart emoji. The text says, for
⏹️ ▶️ John months you asked, where’s the button? Or I would buy this if it had a camera control button. And for months we gave you a cutout.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we know. But now we finally got it right. A year later, a year later,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have introduced the case with the button on it. For me, better late than never because I keep my phones
⏹️ ▶️ John for two years. So halfway through the life of this phone, I swapped out the Bullstrap case
⏹️ ▶️ John for another Bullstrap case with the camera control and immediately realized how often
⏹️ ▶️ John I accidentally hit the camera control button now that it has surfaced. I mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John got over it and now it is way better in all ways, but I was shocked to learn, boy, I guess I put my finger in that
⏹️ ▶️ John hole a lot when I pick up my phone and now that there’s a button there, I can’t press it as much. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s way better. Now last year, I also changed cases a year into my phone simply because I had
⏹️ ▶️ John bought multiples and I just swapped an old case for a new case because the old one was a little beat up. But anyway, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got a brand spanking new Bullstrap case. It is leather, it is black, it has an open bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has a pass-through camera control button. Only took a year. Our long national
⏹️ ▶️ John nightmare is over. And it’s an incredibly expensive case and I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks really nice. Like, and I’ve had this case before, like, you know, before this generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of phone. If you’re gonna, if you want a leather case on your phone, This is the best option I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $100 is not cheap, but it looks very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, and it is, I believe, if you care about the specific things that I care about, I believe this is the only
⏹️ ▶️ John leather, black, open bottom, no metal ring around the camera mesa, camera control button case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m happy you found it. you
YouTube ad-blockers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, for follow-up, ads in YouTube. Igor Kulman writes, why not just use Ublock Origin?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you also add SponsorBlock, you get a much better experience than paid YouTube. And additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael Brown writes, just use the Vinegar app on iOS and macOS, which not only gets rid of YouTube ads, but also gives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you the system video player instead of the YouTube one. I can’t speak to Ublock Origin. I can speak to Vinegar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have bounced in and out of Vinegar over the last couple of years. I feel like when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works, it works incredibly well, and I really, really like it. But then oftentimes I have weird little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hiccups with it, especially if you increase the playback speed. And I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have had weird problems with it from time to time. And the way I solve this problem, which I forgot to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring to the show, is that like a week or two ago, I finally signed up for YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Premium Lite or whatever it is we talked about, where it’s like eight bucks a month for ad-free YouTube in most cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I gotta tell you, my life has dramatically improved on account of this. and you were both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John needle me and tell me I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an idiot for not having done this sooner. What’s annoying though, is that nobody else in the family has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noticed. Now, Aaron doesn’t typically watch YouTube, but Declan loves a couple of like Minecraft YouTubers, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little annoyed that he hasn’t commented on the fact that he hasn’t seen an ad
⏹️ ▶️ John in a while. It’s too late, his brain has already been poisoned by ads. You waited too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, people don’t really notice the absence of ads nearly as much as they notice the addition of ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, we got a lot of feedback about Ublock Origin. maybe one of you can, I can’t speak to it one way or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other. I think Vinegar is worth giving a shot. It is not a bad app by any means. It’s very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just, like I said, especially on macOS, I’ve had problems from time to time that, maybe I’m holding it wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. But we’ll put a link to both in the show notes. You should check at least Vinegar out and potentially Ublock.
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside the convenience versus like futziness of trying to block
⏹️ ▶️ John ads with a program versus just paying the fee to get the ads. If you can afford it, paying is always much more convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ John but especially in the case with YouTube, where I feel like part of the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John that Casey’s going for and that definitely I was going for is let’s get it so my whole family
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t see ads in YouTube. And in that situation, trying to use some kind of ad blocking thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is the worst idea ever. Because that means on everybody’s device, every device that every person in your
⏹️ ▶️ John family uses, you now have to carefully maintain, configure all of these different
⏹️ ▶️ John things to make sure they work right. And by the way, when those ad blocking things mess up in some way or cause some other
⏹️ ▶️ John site not to work, now you’re on the hook to fix that. And once they find out that it’s the weird ad blocking thing that blocks ads
⏹️ ▶️ John and YouTube is making it so they can’t use their favorite website or whatever, they’re gonna ask you to uninstall it, just pay for the thing. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you can afford it, just pay for YouTube without ads. It is so cheap in the grand scheme of things to not
⏹️ ▶️ John be bombarded by those ads. And once you do that, as long as everybody is signed in to their
⏹️ ▶️ John Google accounts for YouTube, and unlike many other sites, YouTube will keep you signed
⏹️ ▶️ John in essentially forever. Like you won’t have to constantly be signing them in. then you’re done. It doesn’t matter what devices they get, doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re on their computer, on their iPad, or on their phone, or whatever. So much better
⏹️ ▶️ John than trying to maintain a fragile fleet of ad blockers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s very telling that both of these commenters included the word just in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggestion. Why not just use UBlock Oregon? Just use the Vinegar app. And ad blockers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are never a just. There’s always more complexity than that. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always gonna mess up certain things, and then you have to troubleshoot, oh, we turn the ad blocker off, see, you know, reload, see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it fixes the thing you’re blocking. I mean, obviously in the case of trying to block specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behavior on a specific site, YouTube in this case, you know, the service area for it messing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up pages is much narrower, obviously. So you have a lot less of that drama to deal with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you still don’t have zero. And it’s a cat and mouse game. You know, YouTube keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to block all these different things. Then these things develop new, you know, heuristics and new strategies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to unblock themselves and get working again, and then YouTube blocks it again. Like, there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations in which it is worth people saving the eight bucks a month to do this. But if you have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight bucks a month, just spend it on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can move on with your life and not spend so much time playing this cat and mouse game.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I don’t like the system video player versus the YouTube one, because the YouTube one has features that the system
⏹️ ▶️ John video player does not. I like the little graph that shows you like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John The lump where like most people watched that type of thing. If you’re watching like a how-to video to find out the good part where they actually show
⏹️ ▶️ John you what they’re supposed to be doing. Like that’s not, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s not visible
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use the system player. Similarly, I’m not even sure if chapters are visible
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use the system player. And I, you know, the keyboard controls might be different as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John for YouTube’s player, it’s not made with Flash anymore, you know. I prefer it because
⏹️ ▶️ John it has more features and whenever YouTube adds a feature, they add it to their player. So my personal preference
⏹️ ▶️ John is not to actually switch it to the system video player. We’re just separate from ad blocking. You can do that without blocking ads, I believe.
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FareWell, FireWire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, please feel free in the edit to insert taps right here because apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tahoe has finally dropped Firewire support. John, what even is Firewire anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is kind of like dropping x86 support. So Firewire is an old interconnect standard
⏹️ ▶️ John that was used for personal digital video cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John that used to record digital video on tiny little tapes at home. And it was also on Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just for video, but also for peripherals like hard drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was expensive. It was fancy. It had lots of important features to reliably
⏹️ ▶️ John carry things like audio that are latency sensitive while making sure that things arrive on time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It didn’t require the host computer to do as much sort of traffic
⏹️ ▶️ John control and computation. So if your computer was slower or your computer bogged down, FireWire
⏹️ ▶️ John would keep chugging along because it wasn’t dependent on your computer to shuffle the bits like USB was.
⏹️ ▶️ John That made it more expensive because USB could be cheaper because it made your computer do a lot of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess the reason most people even know this exists is if they got one of the early iPods, which if you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a digital video camera, maybe the first time you ever saw FireWire port, the original iPod came with a FireWire
⏹️ ▶️ John port. That ended pretty quickly once they started putting like 30-pin connectors on them or whatever. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I came in 400 was that megabits per second
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco megabit 400 and 800 transfer speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John You can listen to our member special about connectors to learn about the firewire 400 connector versus the 800 connector But the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line is the 800 connector was terrible mostly and eventually it faded away
⏹️ ▶️ John and USB remained and went through several iterations and got faster and Thunderbolt basically
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced firewire as the big expensive really fast bus but Macs have
⏹️ ▶️ John still had support for it. So if you found a way to get an adapter somehow to plug in
⏹️ ▶️ John FireWire to your modern computer or you were able to run a semi-modern OS on a computer that had a FireWire
⏹️ ▶️ John port, you could still plug something in like a FireWire hard drive or even an iPod, I would imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John and macOS would recognize it and still do all the old stuff. But apparently they are ripping out that software
⏹️ ▶️ John from macOS, which kind of like the x86 support, it’s like, well, was that hurting anybody? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, we don’t have to keep maintaining that and making sure it works and making it part of our potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John non-existent QA process. Can’t we just remove that code? Nobody has firewall protocols anyway. And if they do, they can choose an
⏹️ ▶️ John old Mac with an old version of the OS. So it seems like, I mean, this may change. We’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Mac rumor story that links to a Reddit post that has some qualifiers. Like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, you know, Apple hasn’t said one way or the other, maybe a later release of Tahoe will have firewire back,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it just seems like they’ve removed that code so they don’t have to maintain it anymore, and it’s gone. And you’ll have to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that for people like in the retro computing world, like, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this Mac can run Tahoe, but if you wanna do any FireWire stuff, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John put an older version of that OS on it. So yeah, poor one out for FireWire. It was weird, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was expensive, most people didn’t have it, but it did an important job for when it existed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have heard, I don’t know how true this is. I guess maybe listeners can write in and tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. I have heard that a surprising number of audio interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in production studios still are Firewire and people have just been daisy-chaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt adapters to them over the years to keep them working with modern Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that is still the case, I can imagine this being a pretty big deal to them because what that would basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean is you have to buy a new audio board or whatever is outputting Firewire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that could be a significant deal to those people. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know how many of those there still are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, Firewire was ideal for that because it was really good about delivering data on
⏹️ ▶️ John time all the time without hiccups or glitches, which is really important for audio in like a studio environment. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of the reason you’d still see those things around because they were big and expensive. And if they’re still doing the job, why should you
⏹️ ▶️ John ever need to replace them? And the answer is, well, if you upgrade all your Macs in the studio to Tahoe and they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t talk to it anymore, it’s time to upgrade or downgrade your computers.
Apple pulls another ad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple has done another thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they put up some marketing material and then almost immediately say, just kidding. And in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they put together a PowerPoint and keynote, I think one of the, Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey present or whatever it’s called, I forget what it’s called, presentation about convincing your parents to get you a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they also put together like a 10 minute video of a guy, a comedian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who was on some movie that everyone loved recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What was that movie? Is that from
⏹️ ▶️ John Sinead Live? It’s Martin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John something? Yeah, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. Anyways, uh, I, they, they put up this video. It was like 10 minutes long. He’s going through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this presentation and teaching the kids how to give the presentation. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t care for it. Like, I didn’t think it was a problem, but I just didn’t think it was clever or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny. And I think they were trying for both and they pulled the video. I think the presentation is still available, but they pulled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video after like 24, 48 hours, something like that. Um, oh, here we go. Let me just read from the the show notes. One day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after publishing it, Apple has taken down its parent presentation video on YouTube. Apple has also moved the parent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presentation slides to the bottom of its college students page, effectively burying it. Just one day earlier, the presentation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was prominently featured at the top of the page and the YouTube video comedian, Martin Haley showed a group of high school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey students how to effectively use the parent presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this is, there’s two stories here. One is it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple’s been pulling a lot of ads lately. I think some other people talking about this counted up four of them. There was like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Crush ad where they smushed all those musical instruments in a hydraulic press thing that was ill-considered
⏹️ ▶️ John and they kind of pulled that. There’s the Bella Ramsey Siri ad thing that never shipped and they pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John that. There’s the Parent ad and then there’s a fourth one that I cannot remember. Oh, it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a vacation ad where like a family was like flying to Thailand and it was like super racist. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled that one. So I think it’s something, within the past 12 months or so, they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, distributed and then pulled four different ads for four different reasons. So there is the question
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, what’s going on over there with advertising? Maybe they should have people with more
⏹️ ▶️ John taste to take a look at the ads before they go out into the world. Ideally, more taste to look at the ads before they decide to pay all
⏹️ ▶️ John this money to make them. But, you know, they do a lot of advertising and I don’t you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it is potentially a thing. The case where there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John cracks in their their system where people with taste are not in the right place to
⏹️ ▶️ John make these decisions, unfortunately, but you know, it’s not the end of the world. They make the right decision, you know, a day later,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, as opposed to just leaving it up, right? The second story is, and the reason I put this in here,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d like the idea of them trying to convince people to buy Macs. I know that sounds so dumb. Like, aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they always trying to convince people to buy Macs? Don’t they advertise Macs all the time? Isn’t that part of their business? But time
⏹️ ▶️ John was when the whole company was focused on trying to get people who don’t use Macs to try a Mac because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re a better kind of personal computer. and that is not the focus of the company anymore. Obviously there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ John products that are so much more important, make so much more money. And it seemed like they basically gave up
⏹️ ▶️ John on, yeah, we also sell Macs and the people who like them, like them, but we don’t need to actually try to expand a Mac market
⏹️ ▶️ John share. Like the hell, we just have these statistics like, you know, 50% of the people buy a Mac, it’s their first Mac. And they would say that, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does that because of any advertising you’re doing? Like they became uninterested
⏹️ ▶️ John in trying to convince the world that Macs are a better PC, that Macs are better than Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you should buy a Mac instead of a PC. It’s like, people who want one will buy one. And it’s fancy,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if people can’t afford one, they’ll get one. We don’t have to do much advertising. This ad seemed like it
⏹️ ▶️ John was from another era. Seemed like it was from an era when kids would go off to college, and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the kid would say, maybe I should try one of those Apple computers. And the parents would say, you can’t use an Apple computer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not compatible with the world. You have to use Windows. That’s not the world we live in today. Go look in a college
⏹️ ▶️ John classroom and count up how many Macs you see versus how many non-Macs you see.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is so lopsided. Macs are everywhere in higher education, and yet this ad is out there saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s a bad ad, I agree with you, Casey. It didn’t do the job, it’s not funny, it was ill-considered in a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John different ways. But the concept of Apple trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John convince college students to get a Mac because a Mac is better for their purposes than a Windows PC
⏹️ ▶️ John is just like, it’s blowing my hair back. I’m like, wow, remember that? Remember when Apple had
⏹️ ▶️ John this confidence in its computers? Remember when we would have, I mean, I still have confidence in the computers that you should, if you’re gonna get a laptop for school,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should get a Mac. But I just don’t see ads like this anymore. So it’s a shame that
⏹️ ▶️ John them actually doing this, it’s a sort of throwback head on, Macs are better than PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John and you should buy one because they’re good ad turned out to be such a stinker.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even like the Apple parent presentation, like it was like, it doesn’t reflect
⏹️ ▶️ John the reality of parents or kids or anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the idea. Like, I mean, I mentioned this in one of my posts that I was writing about how like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple seems to have given up on trying to gain market share from Android and just like the deciding that it is what it is and we’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John sell iPhones to iPhone people and Android can still have 70% of the worldwide market share, right? Why should
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows still have as much market share as it does? Apple’s hardware is amazing and it’s a West for all our complaints.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like it better than Windows. And at the very least, it’s probably a wash for most people who don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, but this should be an easy thing to convince people to buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially once you’ve got things like the M4 MacBook Air for under $1,000, barely. That comes in 60 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John that is perfect for any college student, right? It is expensive. It’s more expensive than a $400 PC. Like, I get
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But within the realm of people who are buying $1,000 laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John for college, Apple should be able to win a lot of those sales by doing good ads. And I know they have ads on TV and sports and back
⏹️ ▶️ John of catalogs or whatever, but there are always so much like modern Apple ads, which is like, Apple, we’re wonderful,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy our stuff. And not just like coming out punching and saying, Windows sucks, Macs are
⏹️ ▶️ John great. Look at all, like for crying
⏹️ ▶️ John loud, this ad had like a blue screen of death thing. And I was like, all right, all right, come on. Like what century is this? But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it delightful that Apple still seems to have a little bit fight in
⏹️ ▶️ John it about Mac versus PC. And I find it depressing that they’re not able to make a good ad about it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you going to do? But I mean, I agree with you. At least they’re trying to be aggressive. That’s kind of fun.
Anthropic/OpenAI for Siri?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we had some late-breaking news as we record this on Monday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 30th of June Apple weighs using anthropic or open AI to power Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is from Bloomberg Apple is considering using artificial intelligence technology from anthropic PVC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or open AI to power a new version of Siri sidelining its own in-house models Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri according to people familiar with the discussions and its discussions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with both anthropic and open AI, the iPhone maker requested a custom version of Clawed and ChatGPT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could run on Apple’s private cloud compute servers. Apple’s investigation into third-party models is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at an early stage, and the company hasn’t made a final decision on using them. A competing project internally dubbed LLM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri that uses in-house models remains in active development. The project to evaluate external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models was started by Siri chief Mike Rockwell and software engineering head Craig Federighi. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given oversight of Siri after the duties were removed from the command of John and Andrea, the company’s AI chief.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropic’s technology is the most promising for Ceres needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That led Adrian Perica, the company’s vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropic about using Clawed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s models were developed by a roughly 100-person team run by Ru-Ming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pang, an Apple distinguished engineer who joined from Google in 2021 to lead this work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The proposed shift has weighed on the team, which has some of the AI industry’s most and demand talents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some members have signaled internally that they are unhappy that the company is considering technology from a third party,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey creating the perception that they are to blame, at least partially, for the company’s AI shortcomings. They have said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they could leave for multi-million dollar packages being floated by MetaPlatforms, Inc. and OpenAI. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this month also nearly lost the team behind MLX, its key open-source system for developing machine learning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models on the latest Apple chips. After the engineers threatened to leave, Apple made counter offers to retain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them and they’re staying for now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tune into overtime for more on this particular issue about poaching people. But, uh, this fits with
⏹️ ▶️ John what we had been hearing and rumors from German about what’s going on now that there’s new leadership for the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole Siri thing, which is, uh, no more, not invented here, syndrome, willing to look
⏹️ ▶️ John outside the company going so far as to say, Hey, we’ve got a team working on that LLM Siri thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Shouldn’t we also, shouldn’t we also talk to the people who already have chat bot type
⏹️ ▶️ John models and see if their technology might be farther ahead than our technology is. And I kind of feel
⏹️ ▶️ John for the whatever 100 person team working on this stuff, because like from the
⏹️ ▶️ John reports that we’ve heard, it is entirely plausible to believe that those teams were not
⏹️ ▶️ John adequately resourced to make products that are competitive with, uh, with Claude and chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s totally reasonable to think of it because we know how much money like open AI I spent on chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Claude has been around for a long time and has been out there in the world and they’ve been iterating on it. And this is Apple trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do their version 1.0 of anything remotely close to that. And they’ve been flailing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that team maybe hasn’t been resourced to do a good enough job,
⏹️ ▶️ John but certainly they probably started later than their competitors. And so I think it is the right thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John do for Rockwell and Federighi to say, we shouldn’t just assume we’re gonna use our internal
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. let’s at least look at the external things. It does really highlight
⏹️ ▶️ John the not great position they’re in because regardless of whether
⏹️ ▶️ John having a particular LLM is a competitive advantage, it’s the type of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John every big player in the tech space has felt the need to have. Facebook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got their own model. Microsoft has basically got open AI by having that big investment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s got their own models. Apple, in theory, has their own models, but nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John like Gemini, nothing like Claude, nothing even like the llama stuff, nothing like chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re behind. And if they come out and say, well, it turns out the most expedient thing we
⏹️ ▶️ John could do to make Serenet suck in the fastest time possible was to license Claude or something, you know, all right, well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you had to do. But now you are beholden to another company for a key technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John which to the extent that you believe that the cook doctrine is a reasonable thing to do, does fly in the
⏹️ ▶️ John face of it, owning and controlling the primary technologies behind your most important products, blah, blah, blah, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no moat, even if LLMs are commodity, if you don’t have one of those commodities, but instead
⏹️ ▶️ John have to buy it from some other vendor, other vendor that may compete with you once they come out with an egg that sweeps the world
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, that’s not a good position to be in. So I’m not saying they shouldn’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is good news. I think hearing this makes me optimistic. They’re doing what they need to do
⏹️ ▶️ John to make Siri not bad anymore. And if that means paying someone
⏹️ ▶️ John to use their model because it’s better than our model, then by all means they should do it. But I also hope they retain
⏹️ ▶️ John their own team because I think in the longterm, it is important for Apple to have its own model, not because every company needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to have its own model, but because A, Apple has the money to do that, and B, like any other thing that Apple does,
⏹️ ▶️ John them being able to make exactly the thing that they need is part of their competitive advantage. I don’t think their model’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be better than their competitors in some significant way. I think it’ll just be, could be competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John and in the ballpark if they put enough money and time into it and eventually catch up with their competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John In which case they could swap it out. Like so if they go with like Claude or something, they shouldn’t can this team. I hope they
⏹️ ▶️ John can retain them because they should still be working to say, hey, your goal is now to replace Claude. Get something
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as, as better than Claude so we can end this contract and have our own internal thing. Kind of like how we used
⏹️ ▶️ John to process this from other companies until we eventually could make some of our own that were better and it took a really long time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, that’s my take on this article. I think I’m actually optimistic about it, but it does really,
⏹️ ▶️ John does really highlight, uh, the corner that Apple’s painted itself into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing is it is possible for more than one thing to be true. It’s possible for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internal team to have not delivered. And it’s also possible that it wasn’t the internal team’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault, but in the end of the day, Siri sucks. Like everyone agrees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Siri sucks. How many different times over the last 10 years, 15 years, whatever it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have we seen jokes on national television about how bad Siri sucks? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sucks. And no matter whose fault it is, they’ve got to fix it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 10 plus years, they haven’t. And I couldn’t agree with you more, John, that this is showing at least a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fire, a little bit of urgency, a little bit of enthusiasm about finally fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I am 100% excited about this. this. And to build on another thing you said, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they might be doing this soon doesn’t mean they’re doing it forever. There is no reason they couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use like Claude or whatever for the next couple of years, two, three, four, five years, and then eventually swoop in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have their own internal thing that maybe would be even better. So yeah, I agree 100%. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am all in for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that is tricky though. Like, Oh, we’re going to do our own thing. You have to retain the team. They can’t all leave. And it’s going to be super
⏹️ ▶️ John demotivating for that team. That’s it’s worked since 2021 on Apple’s own internal models, probably being frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole time by like the Siri team and they’re not being funded or whatever their issues are internally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I wouldn’t actually blame the team that was developing the models. I don’t think that’s where the problem was. But the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John is they work for years on this. And then what happens is Apple just goes and use Claude instead. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be so demotivated. So it’s gonna be a difficult challenge to convince them to
⏹️ ▶️ John stay at Apple and continue their work, right? Cause it’s just, it’s demoralizing, right? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if Apple wants to keep them, they could go and get much more money elsewhere, again, see this week’s overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I feel for, but that’s the situation that Apple’s in. It’s difficult. And I do like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they, that Apple is going to, apparently, according to this German rumor,
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to run these models on private cloud compute. Cause I think that is Apple’s, one of Apple’s key competitive advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John is the privacy angle, that they have a way to run server-side models in a privacy-preserving way, which
⏹️ ▶️ John their competitors don’t seem to care about because it’s not part of their, it’s not part of the value proposition,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They’re just like, oh, send us your stuff for Facebook, whatever, like open AI, yeah, send it all over, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s whole thing is we can’t even look at the stuff that you are conversing with the models
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s the way they like it and that’s part of their whole deal. And so having a third party model,
⏹️ ▶️ John but saying, okay, we’ll license this from you, but we’re not going to send, like what they’re doing now, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John is when we use chat GPT through Siri, it’s going to open AI servers. And yeah, Apple has this thing about, well, we do
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a more privacy preserving way. We anonymize you or bounce off a proxy or whatever. But I don’t think, and someone
⏹️ ▶️ John can correct me, who knows if you’re listening, if I’m wrong about this, I don’t think when you send
⏹️ ▶️ John a query to chat GPT through Siri today, that chat GPT is running on
⏹️ ▶️ John a private cloud compute
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on Apple servers. It’s absolutely not.
⏹️ ▶️ John This story is that they’re trying to do that. And so like, bring it on, man. Like bring on
⏹️ ▶️ John chat GPT or, I’m not saying you just like, you just replace Siri with those. No, they have, like, there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John work to do. Siri is not just a chatbot, as Jaws will tell us a million times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very much like a chatbot, but not just a chatbot. So it’s still like, they need an LLM engine that
⏹️ ▶️ John can do good things for them, that they can build on top of. And this would just be a piece of what would be the
⏹️ ▶️ John new Siri, which allows them to swap it out, because you’re never like, there’s certainly no branding, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even like you’re talking to Claude or a chatty computer, you’re talking to Siri, which does all the Siri things,
⏹️ ▶️ John only now it just does them competently and faster and better, hopefully. Like, that’s the dream.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this is all good news. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it plays into the narrative that we heard about, you know, over the rumor mill over the last few months that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that basically that Apple’s high-ups are taking the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the poor state of Siri and their AI efforts seriously. And they’re making big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes in order to turn this ship around. And, you know, it started out like, obviously, like the restructuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the gene Andrea and going over to Rockwell, like, you know, you know, the staff restructuring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we heard reports of Federico, you know, issuing directives now of like, you know, look, if somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else does a better job of it, use it. We’ve seen now from what they did at WBC, from what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re releasing, that they have more integration than ever within these new OS and products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with third party LLM and AI So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. This is showing us that like the not invented here syndrome is finally being like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit turned down for AI stuff and it needs to be because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the obvious reality to everyone in the entire market is that these companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are dramatically outpacing Apple in this area. And so Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know look they they fumbled the ball really badly early on in AI stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their next option is spend a bunch of money and buy some stuff from some people. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the or buy the people completely by the company or have a big partnership with the company with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some huge investment so that you have rights to stuff the way Microsoft did with open AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, on the financial front. I saw earlier today on the news that Apple is doing this on
⏹️ ▶️ John this story that’s in Bloomberg, German or whatever. Apple stock price went up the equivalent of two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like, and it was only, it was like 3%, like as a percentage, like that’s not like, it isn’t like the double or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like that should show you even all, like the stock market, I mean we know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly fickle that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is and how… Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying this means anything, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just funny. It is funny, but it’s also like the stock market, upon news that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be spending a whole bunch of money soon, jumped in value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple. Like that’s significant because that shows you like the confidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the investing world has in Apple doing its own AI stuff is very low.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And once the news came that Apple is going to be, you know, probably doing even more with a third party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company to, you know, for AI stuff, the value of Apple in their minds jumped.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That tells you a lot about what they think about Syrian and Apple intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, if Apple’s worried about the price, their stock price just went up enough to essentially fund probably a purchase of Anthropocene.
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming they’re willing to sell. You don’t know what these things would actually sell for because people have Zuckerberg disease,
⏹️ ▶️ John which one of the stories about Zuckerberg that I forget if it was in the original
⏹️ ▶️ John social network, and if not, it will surely be in the now planned sequel. But his whole deal is
⏹️ ▶️ John he started Facebook. And at various times, other companies wanted to buy Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John because they could see it was being successful. And he turned down what was at the time big offers that would have made him
⏹️ ▶️ John very wealthy, or millions and millions of dollars, he turned it down. And why did he turn it down? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John he said, I don’t wanna be somebody who starts a company and then becomes a multimillionaire by selling it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Like, don’t sell the company, stay with the company. You
⏹️ ▶️ John are the company, the company is defined by you. That’s why he still has control of Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like a lot of these AI companies fancy themselves the next Mark Zuckerberg
⏹️ ▶️ John or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, setting aside Steve Jobs gets kicked out of the company and came back. Anyway, that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re already wealthy. And they’re like, you know what’s cool? It was cool than a million dollars. You know what’s cooler
⏹️ ▶️ John than a billion dollars? A trillion dollars. Or like, actually it’s not even the money. It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John the power, like to be, to have this company, this like world conquering force be a personification of you
⏹️ ▶️ John and be under your sole control is so much more attractive than any of the money. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when you say, oh, Apple’s stock price went up the price of two Anthropics, like twice
⏹️ ▶️ John Anthropics market cap, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people behind Anthropics would be willing to sell it for
⏹️ ▶️ John their current market cap according to the stock market or their private valuation or whatever. If
⏹️ ▶️ John those people decide, no, I’m never selling because I’m the next Mark Zuckerberg, God forbid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but you know what, the reality is, there’s multiple companies that Apple could partner with or buy that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be substantially better than what they are doing internally right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’re willing to do the deal, so I saw some article saying, let’s go through all the companies and see who would
⏹️ ▶️ John entertain an offer from Apple. It’s like open AI, no, because of the Microsoft antagonist, Google, no, uh, llama,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, because it’s Facebook. I think it’s steel llamas, open source things that are not steel, but take
⏹️ ▶️ John llamas open way to things or whatever. Um, the, the one in China, not a great idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, uh, and then you get anthropic and I forget what their reason was that anthropic probably wouldn’t, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they have Amazon ties. Like it’s like, uh, everyone’s already, it’s like the dance and everyone’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John all coupled up and Apple’s just like on the wall and has no one to dance with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Apple walked in two hours late. Oh, there’s a dance.
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s got a partner already, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. I mean it and I think one of the biggest problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here that that got them to this point and will hinder them going forward is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, certainly one of the things that got them here is that as mentioned many times in the past, I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fundamentally underestimated the value and importance of this kind of technology and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they and then the biggest thing is they under invested in it early on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the root causes of that besides Tim Cook being a terrible product person not seeing the value anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple is really cheap and they’re cheap in a lot of ways one of the ways they are cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they didn’t want to you know give their teams GPUs and stuff to you know to start developing these things another way they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap is they just don’t pay good salaries necessarily and in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of areas in a lot of you know competitive markets. Their attitude, from what I’ve gathered from people, has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always kind of been, it’s an honor to work for us. You should be so happy to work for us that you don’t need necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest salary you could get in the market. And certainly with the AI story, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to talk about this in overtime, about there’s a lot of high value going on in the AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market because there’s a lot of hype, a lot of value is being created, a lot of potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value is being seen. And so to really be a big player in AI, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to spend a bunch of money somehow. Whether you are developing your own stuff, spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of money on various computing resources and GPUs to get that done,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or spending, and or, hiring a huge team of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very talented, very in-demand people right now, or buying one of these companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has, or very heavily partnering with one of these companies that has all of those things already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all gonna take a lot of money, and Apple’s cheap. Even though they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the money. Like Apple, it isn’t that they can’t afford it. They have all the money to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they want, but they are really, really stingy with it. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if they are going to value this stuff enough yet. I mean, over the past few years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is they haven’t. So we don’t know how much has their mind changed on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How much are they going to value this? Are they going to value it enough to pay what it takes to actually get competitive?
⏹️ ▶️ John From the time J’Andre came, though, the story was that the reason there was resentment in his group is because he came
⏹️ ▶️ John and hired a bunch of people, and they all of a sudden immediately start getting paid more than everybody else. Which you
⏹️ ▶️ John can imagine bringing resentment to the rest of the employees who are like, we work on the products that pay the bills around here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we don’t get the money that these new people in the AI group do. And that is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John just a reflection of the market, but it is also like it is a culture clash with the established culture at Apple, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John pay vaguely competitive, but not like super high salaries. But when it
⏹️ ▶️ John came time to staff the AI people, they’re paying them super high salaries because you got to, if you want to hire any of these people,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to. And, but now you have a problem in the company because you’ve got one
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the company, this new shiny part that’s getting paid more than you. And you’ve been working there for 10 years and you’re making the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, what the heck? And so that’s, you know, it’s either you can’t, it’s very difficult to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John that off. You really have to say, okay, well, we’re not going to do what we’ve historically done, which is pay competitive salaries.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, uh, most of it is made up with the fact that our stock price keeps going up so we can pay you a little bit less. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like if all of a sudden you need to hire people who are in high demand and
⏹️ ▶️ John pay them more money, you, if you don’t do that for the rest of your company, it makes people
⏹️ ▶️ John sad. And, and even then I’m not even sure they were paying the people in their AI group as much as
⏹️ ▶️ John the other companies are and certainly not as much as the new things. Again, we’ll talk about it over time. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve, they’ve got themselves in a difficult situation and they’re, they’re under investment in this, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John under investment or they didn’t have enough time or they didn’t have enough people or like, or maybe, maybe it’s entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John on, it’s not even the LMS, but it’s entirely on the Siri team. Maybe they have models that could potentially have been used and were
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive when they were ready, but Siri wasn’t ready to integrate them. And now they’ve fallen behind. Like it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell what kind of mess they have over there, but it’s clear that they have a mess. Um, and we can see the results.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just don’t have anything. Uh, Siri’s not competitive. Siri’s was bad before LLMs arrived. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the worst part about it. It was before LLMs even existed. Siri was terrible. So it was starting at a deficit and they just
⏹️ ▶️ John have not caught up. Um, and yeah, so I, I hope they, I hope they figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to retain their existing team and to hire more of them. And they’re probably going to have to continue paying
⏹️ ▶️ John higher salaries. And I don’t know what what you do with the rest of the people like they can get themselves into a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where They are kind of already there and have been in the past where The people who
⏹️ ▶️ John have the skills that Apple needs are not actually that Common it used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be you had to find people who knew objective C Which wasn’t that many people and the iPhone came out and it made a lot more of those
⏹️ ▶️ John people But still especially if Apple’s weird about working remotely Like many more people
⏹️ ▶️ John can make a website with react then can make an app with Swift forget and let alone a Mac Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John switch or something like that. So it’s kind of getting into the situation. Not that Apple is filled with cobalt engineers or something, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John at the skills need because native apps are a bit of a native native
⏹️ ▶️ John apps on Apple’s platforms are a bit of a niche thing. Like at least Android has like basically caught in them, which is basically Java, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Java skills are way more common than swift at this point. Certainly they were more common than objective C. So I kind of feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the people who are really good at the skills Apple needs for its bread and butter platforms are
⏹️ ▶️ John underpaid simply based on how rare they are in the market, as evidenced by our
⏹️ ▶️ John perennial complaint that it seems like there’s nobody left at Apple who knows how to make a good Mac app. I guess they’ve all retired.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so highly in-demand skills. AI people, or anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John knows about how to make a decent app on an Apple platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a tough nut to crack, and I don’t know what the right answer is, But I agree with both of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that the fact that they’re willing to change the modus operandi from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything being trashed and that’s just the way it is, I’m really excited about that. And so I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to see the results of these efforts sometime before we all die.
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#askatp: Avoiding Tahoe/iOS 26
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Francois Olivier LeBlanc writes, I was planning on purchasing a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, but I got some unexpected bills recently, so I had to put it off. I was going to wait for the M5 models, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just realized that these come with macOS Tahoe. I think Tahoe is ugly and I strongly disagree with its design principles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My main iPhone will be on iOS 18 for a very long time as well. Should I stretch my wallet and buy an M4-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro now so I can stay on Sequoia for as long as possible? before we answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I get what, what Francois is saying, Francois Olivier saying, and I, there was somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wrote us the email that had a pretty much identical question. Let me just say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t throw out iOS 19 or 26, excuse me. I was 26. Don’t throw out Tahoe yet. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it’s a little bit rough now, but I really think it’s not going to be as bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as pretty much everyone says it’s going to be. I really think it’ll be okay. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it were me, and I guess because I’m more optimistic, I would say just get the M5 when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available and just be happy with that. And don’t worry about Tahoe so much. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guessing I’m the most optimistic of the three of us in this regard. So I don’t know, Marco, do you have any thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever Apple does something that radically changes things about their OSs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people say I’m going to hold on to the old version for either for a long time or for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as I can or for forever. I mean, it’s hardware too. I mean, look at how long I held on to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that 2015 MacBook Pro. It’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the, before the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar. You know, we, we do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are times when you can do it and it’s fine. But the moment you say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to not update to the latest version, I’m going to not buy new products that come with the latest version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m going to stand here as long as possible. The moment you start that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you start feeling resistance from all sides in various ways. This is obviously this takes the form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in hardware of like well if you need to buy new hardware you have to buy something old somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s one problem and then of course in software you know the world moves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. So you are saying I’m going to stand right here I’m standing still. But the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world is not. The whole world is running past you. And one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the aspects about the redesigns, like any other major system redesign, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it triggers a lot of redesigns and rewrites of software, of application software, and it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really difficult to support old OSes and the new OS with the same app. So many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps raise their deployment minimum, their minimum OS target to the new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it makes it a lot easier. Now, I don’t expect that to happen on day one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There will be some apps, mostly indie apps, on day one that will be like iOS 26 slash Tahoe only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get away with it for a while without most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your apps switching to that. But I bet within a year, almost everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will require the new OSes. So again, you can keep the old versions of those apps going, but you’ll stop getting updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re gonna see all this friction fighting against you to do this. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it, you can do it for a while. Eventually there’s gonna be some compelling new feature of something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will require you to update. And at that point, it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that fight worth it? Maybe for a little while, maybe give them a chance to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iron out all the 1.0 bugs, But it’s probably like I bet you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to keep this strategy going for more than a year and So you might as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if if new you know updates to the you know The m5 models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might might be compelling for you. I’d say just just suck it up and just do it You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also don’t know like are our future iPhones gonna be compelling for you the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we’ve heard it’s rumored sometime in the next two years, I believe, to probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to an OLED screen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have a- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the next one, but the one after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like the M6 generation, right? Yeah, I think so. That the rumors were for, so you’re probably not gonna get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by waiting for the M5, but at some point, you’re gonna be forced to make this transition. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t expect to hold onto it for too long, and it’s probably gonna be harder than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think within about a year, because all those apps are gonna start requiring it just to make the redesigns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all tackleable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this question is slightly different than the similar sounding question, which is, hey, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer, should I buy a new one or should I just keep using my old one?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have an old one that’s still serving your needs, like if you have an M4 or you have an M3, and you’re like, oh, should I use this for
⏹️ ▶️ John another year? Sure, you keep using it. But if the question is, I’m gonna buy a new computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John should I buy an M4-based one now? Should I buy the last one that can run pre-Tahoe?
⏹️ ▶️ John Should I, especially if you’re in a situation where you’re like, I can’t afford to do it, I have to wait a little bit, but should I stretch just,
⏹️ ▶️ John and should I buy one now so I’ll have something that doesn’t have to run Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that I can plan on using that for years and years and avoiding Tahoe? That doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. My
⏹️ ▶️ John advice is to save your money, buy the M5 when it comes out. If you have something
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use now until the M5 comes out, because that seems like you do, you may use it a little bit longer. When
⏹️ ▶️ John the M5 comes out, wait six months. Like you can wait for the bumps to be ironed out, but like there’s no holding back
⏹️ ▶️ John the tide. If you don’t like Tahoe and never will, change platforms. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is what macOS is gonna be for a while. Like if you didn’t like macOS 10, you’re like, I’m gonna stay
⏹️ ▶️ John with classic macOS. Well, like, well, you’re not a Mac customer anymore because guess what? The Mac moved to macOS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can use classic for a real long time, but eventually that’s not what the Mac is anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t like what the Mac is, you should be on a different platform. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s why, you know, if you don’t have the money for an M4 right now, wait, save your money,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy an M5. If you can wait for an M6, buy an M6. But like, and like I said, my personal experience with
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe is, despite of my complaints about the UI, actually using it day to day
⏹️ ▶️ John is not shocking. Like, it’s fine. Like you will be fine. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I can’t use this. It’s just totally unusable. Like there’s things that annoy me that I feel like are regressions from
⏹️ ▶️ John a UI perspective, but you get used to just plain sitting in front of the OS and using
⏹️ ▶️ John it pretty fast. It still works like a Mac. It’s not that radically different. Yes, things look different and things
⏹️ ▶️ John are too light and high contra or whatever, but like, it’s fine. So my advice
⏹️ ▶️ John is get that M5. I think you’ll be happy with it. And if not, get an M5 and a half or an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the email question we got, which I don’t have in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Asked something. Might’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been the same person. No, I don’t think it was. also has something about downgrading. So could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you buy an M5 that comes with Tahoe and then put on an older version of the OS? And to the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recall, that’s not possible, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s possible with hacks, but I don’t think that’s a supported configuration for Apple, which is why I would not
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend. If that’s your plan, if you need to run pre-Tahoe, don’t get a machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t support pre-Tahoe. Cause yeah, if you can get it to work fine, but like you’re just asking for trouble.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you’re that desperate for something and you have to buy something and you can’t afford it by selling, buy a new M4 now
⏹️ ▶️ John or later on buy a used M4. It’s much better to do that than to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John force an older OS on hardware that doesn’t support it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because whenever, when Apple releases new hardware, that hardware is only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supported by the OS that was current when it shipped, and then all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OSes forward. So right now, the M4 MacBook Air, say that’s the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M4, that’s the current MacBook Air. Right now we have Sequoia. This fall, when Tahoe ships, they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still probably be selling that same M4 MacBook Air. If you buy one, and it comes with Tahoe, you can probably easily downgrade it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Sequoia, because that exact hardware shipped with Sequoia at some point. But then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later on in the fall, if an M5 series of MacBooks comes out, and that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out after Tahoe, then Sequoia will never be updated to get hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support for that hardware. so you won’t be able to downgrade it in any way.
#askatp: M1 to M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alistair Logy writes, I have a Mac Mini M1 with 16 gigs of RAM, which I primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use for Xcode. My only niggle is how long it takes to spin up new simulators. Will that be noticeably faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an M4 with 16 gigs of RAM? I don’t know, to be honest with you, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t imagine it’ll be that much faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Will it? I mean, the M4, so keep in mind, like, as you go from M1 to M4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of other things have also changed about these chips. You have various throughput
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements. I’m sure the memory has more bandwidth. I’m sure the SSD is probably faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s other things about it that have changed. And then of course, M1 to M4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as awesome as the M1 was, that was what, five years ago now? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve made a lot of very big progress since then. The M4 is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. The M1 was amazing for its time, but you know it is like four or five years old now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The M4 is very very fast. It is substantially faster than the M1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would say if you’re going from M1 16 gig to M4 16 gig,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will probably notice generally faster performance with almost everything that is a taxing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operation on the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also suggest though, if you’re using this for Xcode, that 16 gigs is starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look a little skimpy these days. So if you can at all afford, if you’re gonna replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and if you can at all afford more RAM than that, I would suggest get more RAM than that. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re doing Xcode, if you’ve been living with 16, and you’re doing Xcode, I’d say at least go to 32,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can. That’s, that would be a great setup. An M4, a family chip, whichever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one it is, with 32 gigs of RAM can last you a very long time, I think, in today’s software.
⏹️ ▶️ John John? I don’t have experience doing simulators, that’s why that’s a question for you too,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the place where you’d probably notice it for starting up a simulator is probably gonna be SSD speed
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t actually know what the bottleneck is for simulator startups. And I think you could get by with 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM. Simulators are simulating phones, right? It’s kind of like phone backups. We used
⏹️ ▶️ John to do our local backups and finder to our phones, But then like phones would come with like a terabyte and it’s like, I don’t wanna do
⏹️ ▶️ John local backup of a terabyte phone on my Mac and eat all that disk space, right? Simulators
⏹️ ▶️ John are simulating iPhones which used to come with a piddling amount of RAM, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John like there, I mean, there are iPhones with eight gigs of RAM, there’s iPads with 16 gigs of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, yeah, if you’re simulating a high RAM device and it is faithfully simulating the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM that device really has, that’s gonna eat up some of your max RAM. So maybe that makes a difference. But I felt like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re doing iPhone dev and you have a 16 gig Mac and the only thing you’re running is Xcode, I thought you’d be okay. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you two know better than I do about using simulators. So yeah, if you think three gigs will help, it will probably help. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John this just says M4. It doesn’t say like M4 Pro, M4 Max, or M4 Family. It just says plain M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s a mini, right? So I don’t know. I feel like if you have an M1 machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s reasonable to upgrade now anyway. If your M1 is feeling a little pokey, like you’re wondering if you get a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you waited a good amount of time. You got good mileage out of that M1. It
⏹️ ▶️ John lasted you reasonably, because it’s not like you’re just using it for casual web browsing. You keep using that M1 for casual web browsing for ages,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But you’re doing dev work in it, and you got a lot of years out of it, and the new Mac mini is cheap, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John in the base config. So I would say upgrade, and I think you will notice. The problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of thing like this, of noticing, is you’ll notice the day you get it, and then you’ll get used to it the next day.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco computers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, we get used to how fast it is. I guess you leave the old one around, And so after a month, you can go back to the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one and try building your app and going, oh yeah, I remember this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did just, by the way, I just went to the configurator to see like, okay, so a Mac mini base model is $600,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which for the computer that it is, it’s 16 gigs, 256, yeah, 256 sucks, but 16 gigs M4, $600.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s honestly a really good deal. If you want 32 gigs, the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumps by $400 more. No longer a good deal. So a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less of a good deal. It’s still in you that you’re at $1,000 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, which again, like when compared to Apple’s other desktop, like that’s a pretty good deal. But wow, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost double the price of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini. Look for a refurb, you know, save some money. Wow. David, thank
#askatp: Choosing a UPS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Levine asks, how do you recommend choosing a new UPS? How do I know how much, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VA, volts? Volt amps?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not understand VA. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever see it in UPSs. Like, I don’t quite understand this measure. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all I know is that AC power is really weird. And so there’s all sorts of little complexities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it that like, you think, you know, DC is much simpler. It’s like, oh, you got volts, you got amps, watts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of that makes so much sense with DC. AC is so insanely complicated. It’s like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phase are you pulling the load on? And is your motor pulling it this way or that way? Is it a motor or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a light? Like, it’s so complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s nuts. I did computer engineering in college. Is that what you did, John? Isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that right? I did computer engineering. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. So for me, it was basically EE and CS combined. And let me tell you, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EE side, I did not do well at at all. But anyways, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what, how do you choose a UPS? I don’t know, man, add up how many Watts I think you’re going to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how long do you think you want that to last and put your thumb in the wind? I’m sure there’s a better answer than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, John and I have each put our, uh, respective, uh, UPSs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. They’re basically the same model. John’s just has a little bit more power than me. Um, I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could stand for more. Um, they’re both cyber power, uh, tower style UPSs, which actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco might been the first of the three of us to have one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had these for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in fact, the rack-mount version, I have three of them at the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. I will say that mine, after only like three-ish years, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal batteries did go on them. However, it was astonishingly easy and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively inexpensive to replace them. They looked very similar to motorcycle batteries. I’m sure they’re not actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same, but looked very similar to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet they’re surprisingly similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, well, yeah, fair. But I ordered a couple of new batteries from Amazon, put them in myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And other than the slack on a couple of the cables being very, very taut,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was not enough slack in a couple of spots. It was actually very easy to do. But in terms of how to choose, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. Do either of you have a recommendation in this regard?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we get this question every few years. And the answer is always the unsatisfying,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, add up all the power in the devices you have and see how much you need. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John UPS seller will have something on their website that purports to do this for you, but those tools are motivated,
⏹️ ▶️ John their interests are not aligned with yours, let’s say, because they’ll let you enter a bunch of information and they’ll tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you what UPS you should buy from them if every one of your devices is pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John the maximum power it’s allowed to pull at the same time, which honestly, that’s the conservative answer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that will cost you a lot of money, which again is in their interest because they sell UPSs, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John For years, I bought, because I remember when I first got my, like, I guess, Power Mac G5,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe even when I got my G3, I did the calculations on the various websites, got
⏹️ ▶️ John a number that said I should buy this UPS that was more than I could afford, and I said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, how about I just get a much smaller one? And for just years and years, I had
⏹️ ▶️ John a series of UPSs that, yes, I would replace the batteries when they died, and it was like 30 bucks to replace the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was real cheap. Anyway, when the power went out,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had about two minutes and 30 seconds to shut down my computer. And they have a thing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the good ones have a thing where you can connect your Mac through USB to the UPS. So
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac will detect when it’s on UPS power and shut itself down. And even that was a race.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even if you’re not there to shut it down, the Mac will shut itself down based on knowing that it’s on UPS
⏹️ ▶️ John if you configure it. This is built into Mac OS. You don’t even need to use third party software, although that used to come with it back in the day. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS itself knows what a UPS is. And I think built into Mac OS as a thing that will shut itself down with
⏹️ ▶️ John X amount of time remaining on the thing or whatever. What I’m saying is you can get away with a UPS that is
⏹️ ▶️ John massively undersized for your uses. If you have, let’s say, a dual Power Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John G5 that could potentially use a huge amount of power with like an Nvidia graphics card in it and you buy a dinky
⏹️ ▶️ John UPS that could barely handle an iMac, it will protect you when the power goes out as long as you shut down within
⏹️ ▶️ John two to five minutes. And sometimes that’s enough, especially if the power like flickers
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, or you just want time to save your stuff and shut down. And in my experience, having experienced many blackouts
⏹️ ▶️ John and many flickers or whatever, I have never lost anything or had any problem due to having
⏹️ ▶️ John a massively undersized UPS. That said, once I got fancier computers and could afford a UPS
⏹️ ▶️ John that was closer to being sized correctly, that’s better. You should do that if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I linked to the CyberPowerOne in the show notes is I’ve had a series of APC UPSs
⏹️ ▶️ John and other brands that were more of like the horizontal kind that’s like a big giant flat thing that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John rests his feet on or whatever. Or maybe you rest your feet on the tower ones too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the tower ones aren’t, they’re too top heavy, they tip over. You gotta rest your feet on a subwoofer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an old big style UPS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or your feet can reach the ground, that’s another option. No, that’s terrible. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and those were fine, but when I got my 2019 Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John the place where I was putting it was on a little skinny table that is the proportions of a tower computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and a tower UPS fit perfectly under a tower computer
⏹️ ▶️ John on a tower shaped table. The danger that I have with all these UPSs is,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it gonna make noise? It doesn’t have a fan in it. A lot of the fancier ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that support a lot of power do in fact have fans in them. And you’re always
⏹️ ▶️ John like reading the comments, reading the help, say, okay, it’s got a fan. But does the fan run all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John or only when it’s on battery power? Because when it’s on battery power, I don’t care if the fan runs. And I can tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John that the model that I’m going to link in the show notes, I’m assuming Casey will say the same of his, does not make any noise
⏹️ ▶️ John in normal operation. When it switches to battery power, yes, it has a fan that turns on. But at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care because I’m just shutting down my computer. So my main criteria is, is it reliable?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can it keep my computer alive when the power is out long enough for me to save my work and shut down? and does it not make any
⏹️ ▶️ John noise? And this, I have two of these CyberPower ones. I think I have one of the ones that Casey’s gonna like and I have one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the newer ones. They’re both sitting in this room with me. They’re silent, they do their job. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all I can ask for them. And when their batteries die, I will pay and replace the batteries with a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so I have the CyberPower CP1350PFC LCD and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently has the CP1500PFC LCD. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have a whole bunch of these all over the place. They’re all good. The one thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we actually, back in episode 569, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned that I have Tesla Powerwall batteries as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solar backup battery at the beach. I had a UPS plugged into one of the outlets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is backed up by the solar panels, or by the batteries. And I had said, for some reason, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes on solar power, if there’s a blackout from the utility company, and it switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to the batteries providing the power to those outlets, then the UPS that I put into that, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard cyberpower UPS, would think it was like a blackout, even though there is power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to the outlet, and it would cut off the supply, and it would just use its battery until it died, and then everything would just die.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking I was like double backing things up, but I wasn’t. And there was some issue with like, the way that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Powerwall batteries, when supplying power, supply a different frequency of AC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like 62 and a half to 65 Hertz instead of 60 Hertz for a for the AC, um, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switching rate and that throws off UPSs. They think, oh, this is invalid. This is bad power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I better switch to my internal power supply. Um, and so you have to use certain UPSs that do it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a brand called eaten EATON, uh, that makes UPSs that cost about the same as everybody else’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a little bit more, um, that are compatible with Tesla power wall batteries. So if for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have power walls as backup power for your house, and you also want to use a UPS on those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outlets for extra protection for some reason, then consider the Eaton brand. My solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I just disconnected the UPS and just plugged directly into the wall and let the Tesla batteries do their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jobs. And this was before Elon Musk, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think we’re all good here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Factor, 1Password,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Quince. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re gonna kinda continue what we talked about earlier about the AI stuff by talking about our developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is any developer worth these like big, multi-million, even hundred million dollar pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco packages that AI developers are allegedly being offered or taking right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the open marketplace. We’re gonna talk about that in overtime this week. You can join us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen, atv.fm slash join. Thanks everybody and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re into Mastodon, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Co-host tech MVPs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I now love one each of Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and John’s previously talked about MVP technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have MVPs. MVP is a thing that you do for your restaurant. When did we ever do MVPs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am curious but fascinated and excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so these are two things that you guys have talked about in the past that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have recently come to need that I have really appreciated. I will start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Casey’s. I have recently come to finally install and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use and really appreciate Tailscale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, yes, indeed. One of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So and they have been a sponsor. I don’t know if they’re sponsoring again, but they have been a sponsor. So to disclose that, but I had never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really had a need for it before. But so what Tailscale does, as you’ve heard Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about in sponsor reads, is basically, it’s like a like like a network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco routing software, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that basically… Let me take a stab at this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, go ahead. So when you hear about Tailscale, and I didn’t know I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about this tonight, but hand to God, I love Tailscale so much that whether or not they’ve ever sponsored,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which they have, I would talk it up anyways, because I really do love it that much. But anyways, when you hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tailscale, you think VPN. And it works with VPN, the same kind of technology that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey runs VPNs, But that’s not the way you should think of it. The way you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think of tail scale is, what if all of my devices could talk to each other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey irrespective of how they’re actually connected to the internet? So what if I had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server at Linode, and I had my laptop here at my house, and I wanted them to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to talk to each other as though they’re on the same local network? That’s kind of what tail scale does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all of your devices that are on your tail net, which is what they call your account, if you will, network
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of devices. All of the devices on your tail net can pretty much always talk to each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey irrespective of how they’re connected to the internet and irrespective of where they are geographically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so where this became useful for me is I have my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini doing basically like file server type work in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garage over on Long Island. I’m now at the beach for the summer. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to access that Mac Mini. And I want to be able to do screen sharing and and stuff like that and access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the network volumes. How do I do that easily? Well, Tailscale lets me do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed it on both and now I can access it. And I installed it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my iPad for some testing things because I wanted to like, when I was on Long Island, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted access to the network at the restaurant. So at the restaurant, there’s an iMac that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use in the office. So I installed an exit node there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the regular, so the exit node is basically like a VPN host. you can basically say, sir,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whatever device I’m using right now, tunnel all the traffic so that it comes out of that device over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And so you’re basically using, you’re basically creating your own VPN. So now I have exit nodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at both houses and the restaurant. So anywhere I am in the world, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically treat it like a VPN. I can say, go, connect to my Long Island home Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini and route all traffic through that. And then I don’t have to use somebody else’s VPN or something. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, you know, you can like I can screen share right now to the Mac mini back at home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just works like it like you, you know, the tail scale menu like it copies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the IP address you need to use. And I just go into, you know, the finder, I hit command cake, you know, VNC colon slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash paste the IP address and boom, I’m in my Mac mini from anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s really cool. And like this is the kind of thing that like you, you, there have been ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this over time with like, all right, port forward things or dynamic DNS and like all these different things that were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pain in the butt and fragile. And this takes all of that pain, pain in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttery and fragility out of the situation. And he’s like, Oh, here’s here is an IP address that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use from your local device to connect to this thing over there. And it will behave as though it’s local. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it really is incredible. If you if you have devices that are not geographically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next to each other pretty much ever, tail scale really is incredible. And to build on what Marco said, the way it works is it kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sort of layers another network on top of all of the network that your device is currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. And so, like Marco said, you get a, I think, what is it called? A carrier grade network address translation?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You get a 100.xyz IP address for each of your devices. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while your device may have the 192.168.1.whatever IP address, Tailscale adds to that another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IP address that that device will answer to. That’s something like 100.75.whatever, whatever. So if you use that 100.IP address
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to access your other devices, that tells your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device and tells TailScale, I’m going to go through TailScale to get to this other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Then like Marco said, you can use exit nodes, which is what they consider like a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of egressing onto the Internet. So you can be in London but have an exit node in Long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Island, and you’re effectively getting on the Internet from Long Island. They also have the idea of subnet routers, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, what if I want to access a non-tail scale device on my in-home network?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I can set up one of my in-home tail scale devices to allow me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tunnel through that onto my local network. You can do some really crazy stuff where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my parents, for example, they have a 192.168.1.x network, and I want to occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to get on their network to do some maintenance things for them, and I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the standard subnet router thing where it just says, okay, anything that is 192.168.1.x,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s going to be served at Casey’s parents’ house. I don’t want that because that’s not necessarily the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can actually use IPv6 to get around this. I have a blog post about it, I’ll link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s complicated to talk about, so I’m not going to spend any more time on it now. But my point is just that you can use this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really cockamamie IPv6 address to get into this other network
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via IPv4. the stuff that Talescale does is bananas. It’s really, really worth your time looking into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. You probably already did after my incredible sponsor reads back in the day, but seriously, give it a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So very happy with Talescale. Thank you for that, Casey. And next,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s MVP. Well, at the restaurant, I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some ways to monitor the temperatures in the walk-in fridges.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, here we go. Oh, yo link.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it just by coincidence, we happen to have this yo link follow up this episode. The cheapest thing you bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your restaurant by far. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, you know, so we have three walk-in coolers, you know, to a freezer and two fridges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, as a restaurant, it’s very important to know the temperatures of those because you know for food safety. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to keep keep things within a certain range so that your food doesn’t spoil your frozen stuff doesn’t thaw, your cold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your frigerator stuff doesn’t freeze like there’s all sorts of you know bad things that happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to food and drinks if they are in the wrong temperature zone. So and for a restaurant for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health code compliance you have to keep things in certain ranges and it’s very important. Okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can go to my preferred brand ThermoWorks for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know high high quality thermometers and stuff and ThermoWorks will sell you a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know a Wi-Fi app enabled temperature logging kit for walk-in has a couple of sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know it has like a module that like connects to your network and you know you can then view the historical data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s $400 for one fridge and if you have three fridges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s $400 for each fridge. fridge. Yolink gives me that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for about $35 per fridge. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only weird thing about putting the Yolink thing in the fridge was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the… I was like, how do I attach this to the fridge wall? Or where do I place this in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fridge? It is basically like a three 3 by 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch by 1 inch, you know, rectangular solid-ish. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do I attach this to the wall? There is no… Nobody has made like brackets to stick them on the wall. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t come with one. And I could just use my trusty VHB tape, which I mentioned in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could just use that to stick it to the fridge wall. But on the back of the Yolinc sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a battery door and a few holes that are probably to let some of the air in to measure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the temperature. So you can’t really, I don’t want to like stick it to the wall and then the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t like take it off easily every probably, you know, six months or a year to replace those batteries. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I did was I actually, you know, we have an old 3D printer that mostly Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Tiff play with. I’m like, finally, I have a use for this thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom 3D printed my own bracket. Nice. That has a flat back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could, you know, use the VHB tape on that. I made little cutouts for all of the air holes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the sensor. And it perfectly, it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bench in a Catholic church. You know, that kind of shape, like a straight edge, like you know, back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little arms and little front lips so that it rests in there, but it’s mostly open on all sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I stuck those to the wall of the fridge with VHB tape. They’ve been there now for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three months. They are working perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The kitchen staff loves them. And now I have a complete history of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the temperature variations of the fridges. And I can see, I can get notified every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single time that something goes out of range. And I can see, oh, is it out of range right now because they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like loaded the freezer and so it went up by, you know, by a couple degrees for a few minutes? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I can see, oh wait a minute, on a regular day it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes up, down, up, down, up, down like this. pressure kicks on, kicks off, kicks on, kicks off. You can see the cycle that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it stays within. And then I noticed a couple of days ago, or about last week, I noticed, huh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it stopped that pattern, and now it’s like two degrees higher, and it’s kind of, it looks like it’s having trouble keeping up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I called the fridge repair guy, and it turns out, oh, there was, you know, some frost somewhere that shouldn’t have been frosted, and it couldn’t work the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s supposed to work. But we caught that because of Yolink,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of these sensors. If it was any other situation where we just like, you know, relied on like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people noticing, the fridge is warm, it would have taken a lot more of a temperature delta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before people noticed. This noticed it, you know, I noticed it within two degrees. So it was still within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the safe range, but I could tell something’s wrong or something’s different and get it fixed before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it becomes a bigger problem. So it’s actually keeping our food safer and it’s keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our butts better covered in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a lot of those ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like this is incredible and these are, they’re so cheap. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am now, I just a few days ago bought myself a second Yolink hub,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this time for my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put some of the temperature sensors here and various things. I got one to float in the hot tub.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have one of those cone shaped things that you can float in the hot tub and monitors. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed they have smoke alarms now, which that I would very much like. If we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, I want to know that the smoke alarm is going off. I have tried other solutions to this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are not very good. And so this, let’s see if this works. But they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole family of stuff. As we mentioned earlier, they have water leak sensors. They have door open sensors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have all sorts of custom things. You can like custom wire stuff to a relay to do things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I have found with their service is like, I mean, yeah, the app is what you would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app to be. It’s, but it works and it’s reliable. And those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications come in immediately, every time. They’re very reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s kind of low drama. Like, it just tells you when you need to know stuff. That’s it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given how inexpensive their stuff is and how low needs it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of you don’t need to hardwire everything, I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for temperature monitoring in my house, what I previously used is these little Eve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re called Eve Rooms, Eve Room Sensors. they’re like a hundred bucks each or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are power you have to like you have to power them by a micro USB with some kind of charger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty often or just leave them plugged in all the time and so I have one of those like there’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room in the basement that the water main runs through and so in the winter you want to make sure that doesn’t freeze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s like you know small heater things in there and I have one of these monitors to make sure like if it ever gets below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know 40 degrees alert me you know and I’ve been doing that through, you know, with Eve’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensors and through your home kit. And it’s just, uh, it’s very complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of unreliable and it’s pretty expensive. And then, you know, you go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yolink and it’s, you know, costs almost nothing. It’s like, it’s a third as much per sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have, you know, infinite battery life. They don’t need home kit complexity. They don’t need a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hub or anything. And yeah, they have a fairly ugly app to manage them. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At this point, who cares? Everything else about them is better and cheaper. So I’m into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they do need a hub. They need one hub per like, you know, location that you have them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco What I’m waiting for… Yeah, the hub’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also like 40 bucks. Yeah, it’s really not that expensive. The other thing I’m waiting for inevitably is for you to decide, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to do is have more control over exactly when this triggers and how it triggers and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so forth. Or, you know, maybe it should send an email to certain people when such and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such happens. So what I’m saying is the next time you bring up one of these that’s inspired by John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or me, it’s going to be Home Assistant because YoLink has a really solid—I don’t think it’s first party. I think somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else wrote a really good YoLink integration for Home Assistant. And then you can do all sorts of crazy crap like, oh, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been higher than such and such a temperature for such and such a time and it’s not whatever time of day when we know that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always opening the fridge and leaving it open for 10 minutes, you can get just utterly bananas with this stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that being said, I’m genuinely very glad that you found them and like them as much as John and I do. That is, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said, 100% John. So thank you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and again, the low drama. What am I going to put in a walk-in fridge? There’s no outlets in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And it’s a metal box.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t do Wi-Fi very well from there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. There’s not many options that you can do with wireless transmitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology that will work well inside of a metal box. But these work great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They work totally fine. Each one of them reports in to the base station on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regular basis. I’ve never had one drop out or miss one. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed them all in March or April. Their batteries are still totally fine here, almost in July.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s great. I’m very, very happy. And when you compare it to the stuff in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumer home kit ecosystem that connects directly to Wi-Fi or even Thread,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s night and day difference in range and battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Wi-Fi is the wrong tool for that job, as I think we discussed in the past. Although I think you overcomplicated it with these little church
⏹️ ▶️ John pews on the wall. My Yolink in my fridge and freezer, I just chuck them in there. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, yeah. Like, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John chuck them in the fridge like they’re any other thing that’s in the fridge. Like, I’m not treating them special in any way. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John on the shelf with the pickles, or like, somewhere in the-
⏹️ ▶️ John even know where it is in the freezer. I just chuck the thing in the freezer, and it’s just, you know, I have one in the downstairs for you. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, they’re not fragile. Like, you can just put them in there. I mean, I guess if you wanted to be really careful, like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put it in the hottest or the coldest part in your fridge. But they’re like $17 each. Buy two. Put
⏹️ ▶️ John them in two places in the fridge. They’re so cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did that. So our refrigerator repair guy, when I first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complained that the fridge was running a couple degrees warm and something must have been wrong, he looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at where I put it next to the door on the inside. And he was like, well, you shouldn’t put this here. So I said, OK. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I grabbed a second one because I bought a couple extras. I bought a five pack. I grabbed it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just grabbed another one. In three minutes, it was set up, paired, I put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the back bottom corner of the fridge, like as far from the door and down low, so it should be as cold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible. And then a few hours later, I’m like, look, here’s the data. It makes almost no difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatsoever. It was like a one degree difference. There is obviously no difference, but he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought there would be. And I was able to show with data, nope, look, disproven. And in two seconds,